As the title of the last blog I made may have indicated...two entries today. (Well, two entries written today. Strictly speaking, it'd be 5-6 entries total depending on whether Saturday would've been one or two, but you know what I mean.)
I just wanted to write down some vampire trivia when it comes to Red Hood Rider.
-Vampires are classified as non-magical beings. This is in spite of them possessing such skills as turning into mist, shapeshifting, hypnotizing, illusions, and the dark arts they employ, among others. With the exception of the dark arts (which are definitely classified as magical), this is because the abilities are fundamentally a part of the vampire. While most vampires don't have the majority of these abilities fully developed, they are theoretically available to any vampire.
After all, if you took away vampires' ability to drain blood, which might not seem entirely natural, you'd be killing them. (Well, not quite, given as how vampires can ingest blood through their mouth, but you'd certainly be making their lives much harder, and leaving their victims/donors in a lot more pain and danger, since mouth bites are more prone to having things go wrong.)
-Vampires are also classified, more obviously, as creatures of the night. This is because, of course, they gain their strength during nights, and they're at their strongest on the new moon. Vampires are considered to be the rulers of the night, in fact, because among creatures classified as rulers of the night, vampires are overall one of the strongest. Stronger creatures of other races will still beat weaker vampires, but Lord-class vampires are indomitable. One reason they have an edge is that they're not even limited to the night; plenty of vampires are active during daylight hours. While there are other creatures of the night functioning this way, vampires are still generally among the strongest during the day.
-One unusual fact about vampires is that they are classified, by magical terms, as being undead, yet in a very, very weird way: if you try to cast something like an equivalent of 'turn undead', it won't do anything. If you blast them with traditional methods of dealing with undead, they'll be no more harmed than any flesh and blood person would be. What it mostly does is make healing difficult. If you're healing a minor wound on a vampire, it'll take more effort than it should. Major wounds are impossible to fully treat, with spells meant to cure merely being stopgap measures to allow the vampire's regeneration factor to kick in. And when it comes to reviving a vampire? It's virtually impossible. Dead vampires, for the most part, stay dead. While this is true of most beings, duh, when I say 'stay dead', I mean in the sense that most of the time when trying to revive undead, it doesn't work. The undead are already dead, so if their undeath ends, it's virtually impossible to revive them.
-In spite of this classification as undead, though...vampires are anything but. (At least, our main Rubyverse vampires. More on that in a bit.) They are very much alive, having basically everything a living being does. They breathe, they have a heartbeat, do not spontaneously combust when killed, bleed just as much as humans when injured, suffer from ailments like broken bones if hit hard enough, grow stronger by working out muscles, they get tired just like everyone else, basically...everything a human has, they have still. They can even eat real food and drink liquids...in fact, most vampires do, since by doing so, they need blood less often!
So while by some technicality nobody understands which makes them classified as undead for magic (yet only some kinds of magic, with the rest recognizing their humanity and livelihood), they may be in that category...they're not really following undead rules.
-It should be noted, however: like many mythological creatures, there are many creatures in the Rubyverse that could be called vampires. However, the creatures actually CALLED vampires in Red Hood Rider are the vampires I describe in my blog and my notes, like in the above. They are, by far, the most dominant species, having quite frankly out-lasted and out-competed other types for the most part. (Namely, more visible ones, more restricted ones, etc.)
Any other types of vampire still existing in the modern day go by other names (e.g. it'd be possible for 'Nosferatu' to actually be a name for a different type of vampire--I said "it'd be possible", because frankly, Red Hood Rider does not go into detail about this; there's only one or two types of vampires that are important), OR, if going by the moniker of vampire, have some prefix or suffix attached to it, an add-on to the name. For instance: chi vampires would be called...well, chi vampires.
-Our main vampires can and will adopt (and for that matter, adapt) any cousin kin that're biologically compatible, though only a few covens accept vampire-variants which are too different from their own selves. And even then, most of them treat said variations as the vampire equivalent to second-class citizens, making them highly subservient and not very well-treated.
None of these details are particularly new, but I felt like getting them all into one place anyway.
I just wanted to write down some vampire trivia when it comes to Red Hood Rider.
-Vampires are classified as non-magical beings. This is in spite of them possessing such skills as turning into mist, shapeshifting, hypnotizing, illusions, and the dark arts they employ, among others. With the exception of the dark arts (which are definitely classified as magical), this is because the abilities are fundamentally a part of the vampire. While most vampires don't have the majority of these abilities fully developed, they are theoretically available to any vampire.
After all, if you took away vampires' ability to drain blood, which might not seem entirely natural, you'd be killing them. (Well, not quite, given as how vampires can ingest blood through their mouth, but you'd certainly be making their lives much harder, and leaving their victims/donors in a lot more pain and danger, since mouth bites are more prone to having things go wrong.)
-Vampires are also classified, more obviously, as creatures of the night. This is because, of course, they gain their strength during nights, and they're at their strongest on the new moon. Vampires are considered to be the rulers of the night, in fact, because among creatures classified as rulers of the night, vampires are overall one of the strongest. Stronger creatures of other races will still beat weaker vampires, but Lord-class vampires are indomitable. One reason they have an edge is that they're not even limited to the night; plenty of vampires are active during daylight hours. While there are other creatures of the night functioning this way, vampires are still generally among the strongest during the day.
-One unusual fact about vampires is that they are classified, by magical terms, as being undead, yet in a very, very weird way: if you try to cast something like an equivalent of 'turn undead', it won't do anything. If you blast them with traditional methods of dealing with undead, they'll be no more harmed than any flesh and blood person would be. What it mostly does is make healing difficult. If you're healing a minor wound on a vampire, it'll take more effort than it should. Major wounds are impossible to fully treat, with spells meant to cure merely being stopgap measures to allow the vampire's regeneration factor to kick in. And when it comes to reviving a vampire? It's virtually impossible. Dead vampires, for the most part, stay dead. While this is true of most beings, duh, when I say 'stay dead', I mean in the sense that most of the time when trying to revive undead, it doesn't work. The undead are already dead, so if their undeath ends, it's virtually impossible to revive them.
-In spite of this classification as undead, though...vampires are anything but. (At least, our main Rubyverse vampires. More on that in a bit.) They are very much alive, having basically everything a living being does. They breathe, they have a heartbeat, do not spontaneously combust when killed, bleed just as much as humans when injured, suffer from ailments like broken bones if hit hard enough, grow stronger by working out muscles, they get tired just like everyone else, basically...everything a human has, they have still. They can even eat real food and drink liquids...in fact, most vampires do, since by doing so, they need blood less often!
So while by some technicality nobody understands which makes them classified as undead for magic (yet only some kinds of magic, with the rest recognizing their humanity and livelihood), they may be in that category...they're not really following undead rules.
-It should be noted, however: like many mythological creatures, there are many creatures in the Rubyverse that could be called vampires. However, the creatures actually CALLED vampires in Red Hood Rider are the vampires I describe in my blog and my notes, like in the above. They are, by far, the most dominant species, having quite frankly out-lasted and out-competed other types for the most part. (Namely, more visible ones, more restricted ones, etc.)
Any other types of vampire still existing in the modern day go by other names (e.g. it'd be possible for 'Nosferatu' to actually be a name for a different type of vampire--I said "it'd be possible", because frankly, Red Hood Rider does not go into detail about this; there's only one or two types of vampires that are important), OR, if going by the moniker of vampire, have some prefix or suffix attached to it, an add-on to the name. For instance: chi vampires would be called...well, chi vampires.
-Our main vampires can and will adopt (and for that matter, adapt) any cousin kin that're biologically compatible, though only a few covens accept vampire-variants which are too different from their own selves. And even then, most of them treat said variations as the vampire equivalent to second-class citizens, making them highly subservient and not very well-treated.
None of these details are particularly new, but I felt like getting them all into one place anyway.
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