Vampire

 



Habitat: These creatures prefer dark, lonely places like caves or windowless old homes no longer in use. They often live a few miles from the nearest human settlement.

Social Structure: Vampires often live alone, though some may have a mate or their young live with them. They tend to be loners due to their feeding style, and not wishing for competition.

Reproduction: Vampires reproduce sexually, but given their hidden population and long lifespans, they do not reproduce often. They must ingest a surplus of blood for this to be viable.

There is a ritual they can use to turn a human into a vampire, but it has a 90% failure rate because it drains first all blood from the human, and then must replace it before it can alter the physiology of the human. Lonely vampires may perform this in order to create a mate because they cannot find one of their own kind.

Appearance: These creatures are eternally youthful, and stop aging between sixteen and seventeen years of age. They are uniformly short, never reaching five feet tall, and have angular eyes that may be either bright blue, yellow-green, yellow, yellow-orange, and red-orange. They have eight inch-long tapered ears that have a large movement range for a humanoid, but not so large a range as an animal. Black bat-like wings sprout from every vampire's back, though they are not capable of flight in their natural form without the aid of magic. Vampires are uniformly pale, and burn easily in even indirect sunlight.

Silver is the dominant hair color for vampires, but pale yellow is not unheard of.

Magic Use: Vampires are naturally adept at casting morph and most other dark spells, and also instinctively know many rituals. They cast all but rituals passively, without needing to chant or otherwise make any movement save charging the spell in preparation to use it, which often takes between one and ten seconds, depending on the intended strength of the spell.

Additional: It should be specified that Saldeclan vampires differ from Earth's view on vampires, in that they can be killed much like a human can, the exception being that blood loss will not affect them quite as harshly. They suffer from massive heatstroke in direct warm sunlight, and get sunburned very easily.

To survive, they must injest blood, usually about sixteen ounces every 1-2 weeks if their prey is human. It takes more for animal blood, and they are incapable of digesting non-meat foods. They will not die from this, but their bodies will reject the meal by either vomitting it up, giving them explosive diarhea, or both. On the subject of food, vampires do not enjoy the smell or taste of garlic, but are not harmed by it any more than any other non-meat food.