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PLAYER
YOUR NAME: Mischa
18+?: Yes
CONTACT: crossfortune @ plurk
CHARACTERS IN GAME: N/A
RESERVATION LINK: http://recollecters.dreamwidth.org/2271.html?thread=2072287#cmt2072287
YOUR NAME: Mischa
18+?: Yes
CONTACT: crossfortune @ plurk
CHARACTERS IN GAME: N/A
RESERVATION LINK: http://recollecters.dreamwidth.org/2271.html?thread=2072287#cmt2072287
CHARACTER: CANON SECTION
NAME: Sascha Vykos
AGE: ~1040
CANON: Vampire: the Masquerade
NAME: Sascha Vykos
AGE: ~1040
CANON: Vampire: the Masquerade
CANON HISTORY:
note: the canon is inherently contradictory by nature due to 20+ years of supplements, quasi-canon now-lost forum posts by writers and 4 editions with a lot of different writers & their wiki page is just as bad and not updated to reflect the new changes in metaplot, so I’ll do my best to straighten it out here. I have also used material from Dark Ages: Vampire, which while technically a separate gameline is a companion canon as the historical setting for Vampire: the Masquerade.
CW: mentions of nonconsensual body and mind modification, emotional manipulation, rape, and torture.
The mortal who would eventually become Sascha Vykos was born in 976 AD in what eventually would be known as Transylvania in Romania, the oldest child of a minor noble/petty royal family. Myca (as they were known back then) was a clever, gifted child, who excelled at everything they were taught, easily living up to the high expectations that their father had of his heir. Until, that is, they took ill in early adolescence, and on top of their strange illness started having visions and hearing angels talk to them. No physician or wise woman could cure them - in fact, they were only getting more sick as time went by - until, believing that Myca’s illness was due to sorcery and desperate for a cure, their family consulted a wizard of the Order of Hermes for help.
As it turned out, Myca’s illness was caused by magic: namely, their own uncontrolled powers, as they had unknowingly Awakened as a mage. Relieved to have an answer, though saddened to lose his heir, their father sent them with the Hermetic wizard for training. Myca was not consulted in this decision, merely instructed to pack their things, and was resentful and reluctant at first until they actually arrived at Ceoris, the chantry of House Tremere. Once they began learning magic, however, and realized that the potential power they could wield as a mage far outstripped what they would have had as simply ruler of their family’s petty princedom, Myca’s resentment and resistance mostly faded. Mostly.
Myca took to learning magic as easily and well as they had learned their childhood lessons, and advanced to journeyman magus fairly rapidly, leaving apprenticeship by their early twenties. Promotions in House Tremere tended to be slow, even for the gifted, with apprentices remaining under their mentor’s care for years. The combination of Myca’s gifts, what looked to be a continued rapid rise, + their political importance to House Tremere due to their family connections utterly incensed Goratrix, a senior magus, who was really jealous. Really, really, really jealous, and who decided to get rid of his young rival permanently...by betraying them, while Myca was away from Ceoris, to the Tzimisce vampires whose domains they would have to travel through in order to come back to the chantry.
Fortunately (or unfortunately) for Myca, Goratrix’s efforts backfired. While they were captured by an angry Tzimisce intending on torturing an upstart mage to death for trespassing, the vampire’s plans changed once they found out Myca was nobility from Transylvania...and worth Embracing, rather than just murdering. However, Myca was instead Embraced by Symeon of Constantinople, descendant of the ancient Dracon, who had come north to Transylvania to carry on his grandsire’s blood feud: either way, Myca lost their powers as a mage with the death of their mortal body.
(Needless to say, once House Tremere also all ended up vampires in the not-too-distant future, Myca was not exactly happy. And resolved to claim in their own right the power of the blood magic that their former House had developed upon becoming vampires).
Afterward, Symeon took Myca back with him to Constantinople, whose vampiric society had been founded on the “Dream”, a high-minded utopic ideal created by three ancient vampires (and lovers). The Obertus Tzimisce, who lived in Constantinople and were a branch of the clan descended from the Dracon, were strange even by Tzimisce standards: their practices could best be described as Greek Orthodoxy mixed with Tzimisce Metamorphosist philosophy by way of an esoteric, ascetic, blood cult.
While Myca was used to to playing by the rules of others, the numerous restrictions that Gesu, head of the Obertus Order, placed on his descendants grated on their nerves. It didn’t help that while they adapted well to Byzantine customs and culture and had been Embraced into the Obertus, they were still considered somehow morally inferior due to their Transylvanian origins, suspiciously in common with the Carpathian branches of the clan. Myca kept silent about their discontent and lack of belief, especially their lack of belief in their grandsire’s delusions of divinity, and to all appearances bowed gracefully to what their elders asked of them.
Behind their backs, however, it was a different story: while Myca had always been manipulative, self-serving, and somewhat amoral during their life, those tendencies only got worse during their unlife. In addition to spending a great deal of time in the Library of the Forgotten, reading as much as they could get their hands on, and in the vampiric courts of Constantinople which only further honed their manipulative tendencies while also fulfilling whatever tasks Symeon set them with, they had a number of personal projects on the side. These personal projects included conducting forbidden studies of Vicissitude outside the very limited uses permitted by Gesu’s rules, joining the semi-secret “Dream Circle” solely out of desire to increase their thaumaturgical knowledge rather than any actual interest in enlightenment through dreams, writing to fellow Tzimisce from back “home” who they were firmly instructed not to contact, collecting a group of fellow intellectuals within the city who shared their interests, and cleverly, systematically wringing every bit of information they could out of basically everyone they met, building a very wide network of contacts as they did so.
Unfortunately, the halcyon nights in Constantinople were not to last. The Dream of Constantinople had always been unstable at its core, undercut by the collective personality disorders of its three ancient founders: Michael the Patriarch, Antonius, and the Dracon. After the final death of Antonius in 759, the Dream had begun to unravel along with what remained of Michael’s sanity, a process only accelerated by the self-imposed exile of the Dracon. Symeon and his brother-sire Gesu took shared leadership of the Obertus order, but strife between the brothers eroded their relationship - a division encouraged by Myca, who while loyal to their sire, really hated their grandsire.
By 1202, it became very clear that the situation could not stand for long as it was, between the disintegrating Dream and the disaster of mortal Byzantine politics culminating in the Latin crusaders laying siege to Constantinople, backed by the Inconnu, a sect of ancient vampires who held a grudge against the Dream for supplanting the power of Rome.. Myca secretly made preparations to leave the city and continued trying to break their sire’s relationship with his brother, knowing that Symeon would never leave as long as Gesu remained in the city - and Gesu himself had already made it clear that he would never leave.
Unknown to Myca, however, Symeon had his own plans to try to stave off the impending disaster for even a short time: as the departure of the Dracon had been what had precipitated Michael’s last decline, it was likely that only the Dracon could help slow down the inevitable- and finding the mysterious, mercurial ancient when he didn’t want to be found would have been impossible, necessitating a different solution on that problem. Symeon plotted together with Gregorius Dimities, another vampire who had been in the service of Michael the Patriarch, to reshape Myca both physically and mentally (albeit temporarily) into a false duplicate of the Dracon and sent them to Michael under the false pretense that they were his lover, returned at last, in the final nights of Constantinople.
Myca themself was not consulted in this decision, much less given a choice. Michael himself recognized that he had been sent a fake copy and that Myca Vykos was who what was beneath - but didn’t care. The ancient vampire had already had an eye on Myca for some time, encouraging their curiosity and hunger for knowledge: he recognized their similarities to their ancestor and wanted to make them into a (un)living record of Constantinople. As a “reward” for spending these last nights at his side, Michael “gave” Myca his Dream, made them into its inheritor without their consent or knowledge by laying a compulsion on them that would last for hundreds of years. On top of that, Symeon hid all those memories from his childe when Myca was returned to his custody, magically erasing and repressing them for the next several decades along with reversing the physical changes.
Within a relatively short time after Myca returned to themself, things went right to hell. In April of 1204, the Fourth Crusade sacked Constantinople: Myca, along with their sire, (barely) managed to flee the city by ship on the first night of the sack (perhaps predictably, Myca didn’t mourn their grandsire, who refused to leave and died when the crusaders set the monastery where the Obertus had made their haven on fire). For a time, the two of them traveled through the Balkans, staying with various Tzimisce lords who Myca had earlier bargained for sanctuary, including their longtime friend and correspondent, Velya the Flayer, until an opportunity presented itself.
An ambitious Ventrue lord, Jurgen of Magdeburg, pushed east in a bid to expand his territory: unfortunately, the Tzimisce voivode of voivodes, Vladimir Rustovitch, did not take kindly (as no Tzimisce did) to an upstart Ventrue pushing into his territory. Myca - knowing both that the war between the two sides would be costly and that Rustovitch, like many other Tzimisce lords, was already long-committed to war with the Tremere - stepped in, offering both sides a diplomatic solution (that, of course, benefitted the Obertus). Their solution? Create a buffer state between the two warlords that would be administered by a neutral party in the form of the Obertus order, with Symeon of Constantinople guaranteeing the treaty as head of the order. Neither Jurgen nor Rustovitch were blind to what actually Myca was proposing, but reluctantly conceded, agreeing to the tenuous peace and granting the Obertus order the landholdings in question, where a series of monasteries were established.
For the next two decades, Myca lived apart from their sire, in what amounted to nominal independence: while they continued to serve Symeon as his primary diplomat, were expected to travel to his court in Oradea if he had need of them as well as travel between different lords of their clan in order to strengthen diplomatic ties, and were (secretly) being spied on by their sire’s agents, it was still more physical independence than they’d had before, with the space and freedom to pursue some of their own interests as long as said interests did not conflict with the duty expected of them.
Among those interests was an exploration of the Road of Sin, a path of morality that emphasized self-knowledge, self-will, and sensual pleasure, and by nature a thorough rejection of the religious precepts that they were expected to follow as a member of the Obertus lineage. Myca had already begun to reject those teachings while still living in Constantinople, and a chance discovery of a lost text in the Library of the Forgotten had led them to the teachings of the Road of Sin. After they had fled to Transylvania, their old friend Velya had introduced them to Ilias cel Frumos, a fellow young Tzimisce and koldun Sinner-priest, to be tutored further in those teachings.
The two became lovers and companions, and Ilias began guiding Myca along the path to confront their self-doubts and the lingering questions and problems of identity that had always simply hung beneath the surface. Questions that Myca had never had the time or space to do more than simply accept, much less think about or try to put a name to, a slow process over the time that they lived together. It was a fairly happy period in their unlife - but unfortunately, it didn’t last.
In 1232, Myca received a very puzzling “gift” from Jurgen of Magdeburg: a box containing the torpid body of Nikita of Sredetz, one of their clanmates and the Archbishop of Nod, high-ranking member of the (failing) Cainite Heresy. Nikita, according to Jurgen’s letter, had been discovered in an Obertus monastery that the Ventrue had attacked in violation of the treaty for unclear reasons (that were, ultimately, not Myca’s problem to deal with). Though highly irritated at being sent this problem by a man that they hated, Myca soon grew obsessed with solving the various mysteries associated with Nikita. There was something familiar and powerful about him and while deeply unsettled, they were not going to simply let those questions go.
After completing (yet another) diplomatic assignment from their sire, Symeon granted Myca the freedom to investigate Nikita of Sredetz to their heart’s content. For the next two years, they investigated, while keeping Nikita locked up in torpor behind layers of wards in their basement. Their investigations took increasingly strange turns, and simultaneously Myca was haunted by terrifying dreams that they could only remember in pieces at best when they woke up, their long-repressed memories slowly reasserting themselves.
Both these apparently-unrelated things came to a head on what was likely to be the worst night of their entire unlife: Myca returned home on their sire’s orders intending to move Nikita’s body to Oradea, only to find the monastery deserted mysteriously, because everyone inside was dead, and Ilias’s wards on Nikita shattered. Unable to leave before the sunrise, Myca and their traveling companions were forced to remain in the monastery during the day.
Myca woke up remembering everything, every detail of the myriad violations of their bodily and mental integrity that had been committed against them by their sire, Gregorius Dimities, and Michael the Patriarch all those years before in Constantinople: that, alone, was terrible. And then everything got worse, when they woke up in their living room...with one additional vampire, who matched every description of their great-grandsire, and a stranger wearing their boyfriend’s clothes.
During the course of their investigations, Myca had learned that “Nikita of Sredetz” was not, in fact, Nikita of Sredetz: the real Nikita had been murdered by someone very powerful, his death too brutal for his ghost’s memory to hold onto. While they (reluctantly) suspected that “Nikita” was a childe or grandchilde of the Dracon, their ancestor, the truth was far more convoluted. The Dracon himself had murdered Nikita and taken his shape and identity solely to destroy the Cainite Heresy as revenge against its (now-dead) patron, Narses, who had helped to bring down Constantinople. Afterward, his revenge complete, the Dracon had nothing left to live for: he had outlived everyone he had ever loved, everything he had tried to build, and he was tired of living. And, unfortunately, Jurgen had not killed him as he had hoped, but instead sent him to Myca, staked in a box.
All of this would have been difficult revelations for Myca to have processed if they had read them in a letter: having their ancestor himself tell them all this while in their living room was beyond difficult. To make matters even worse, and impossibly terrifying, Ilias had been possessed - by the Eldest himself, the Tzimisce Antediluvian, the godlike progenitor of the Tzimisce clan, reuniting at last with his favorite childe. The Eldest didn’t care what the Dracon wanted: he would not allow his favorite childe to die. Not when there was a suitable vessel at hand.
[Tzimisce], acting through Ilias’s body, forced Myca to be the host for the Dracon’s essence in order to save his existence, the two of them essentially sharing one body. The moment the process (which...involved vivisection...) was done, Ilias (apparently) died, crumbling to ash, as his body couldn’t bear the strain of being an avatar for the Eldest.
Grieving and broken, Myca took their books and fled back to Constantinople. Fortunately for them - and unfortunately for everyone else - this did not impede them from plotting. Though they continued to play the dutiful childe, they knew just what their sire had done to them, and quietly nursed a slow, lingering hatred for the man who they had loved and once trusted almost as much as they trusted themselves, and the knowledge that someday, they would bring a reckoning against him.
At the same time, the order of the world that had held sway for so long was changing, as the Middle Ages drew towards a close. The Black Death was disastrous for maintaining Kindred society and population due to the population pressure caused by the deaths of so many mortals in such a short time. To make matters worse, the mortal Inquisition gained even more power, trying to ferret out evil in the world - especially supernatural evil, and with a particular focus on vampires. Elders threw their young childer as sacrifices to keep their unlives safe, on top of the myriad of abuses that elder vampires often inflicted on the young. And, finally, the young vampires had had enough.
The Anarch Revolt (or so this conflict was eventually called, which eventually became a Europe-wide war) began in the 15th century: Myca, who had kept in touch with their longtime contacts, conspirators,and friends back home, was a leader in the Tzimisce branch of the Anarch Revolt, which began with young Tzimisce rising up against their elders and attacking those who did not side with them.
Together with Velya the Flayer and Lugoj Blood-Breaker, Myca devised a ritual that would break the blood bonds that young Tzimisce had with their elders, which had compelled their obedience. In addition, Myca used their books and accumulated occult knowledge to pinpoint where the Eldest’s actual body was, allowing Lugoj to lead an attack on the Eldest (which Myca was not present for), culminating in him apparently diablerizing and killing [Tzimisce].
The fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453 forced Myca to flee back to Romania, at which point they took a more direct, active hand in the Anarch Revolt. Their means of assistance took the form of traveling with several wandering packs of anarchs, providing tactical and strategic support and, scholar to the bone, risking their unlife to save books from the libraries of elders who their comrades attacked. However, while the rebellion had done quite a lot of damage, they were outnumbered and outmatched, and the anarchs were ultimately forced to the bargaining table in 1493 by the new sect known as the Camarilla, formally formed in 1486 as a response to both the Inquisition and the Anarch Revolt and which sought to uphold the status quo of Kindred society (at least, as much as they could).
Myca was in attendance at the Convention of Thorns near Silchester, England, as one of the anarch delegates, in their capacity as diplomat, and they were not pleased, to say the least, with the terms given to the anarchs. While amnesty was offered to the anarchs for their crimes, with the exception of the most awful, absolutely none of the grievances that the anarchs had were addressed and they were not allowed to negotiate. Instead, the anarchs would have to return to their clans and sires, return to the status quo that they had fought to avoid.
Instead, Myca stood up, quietly and viciously insulted Hardestadt, the founder of the Camarilla, and walked out, followed by the other Tzimisce and Lasombra delegates, as well as the few anarchs from other clans that did not take the amnesty. As a further gesture to only further underscore the contempt that they felt for the surrender offered to them, as well as in defiance of the Camarilla’s “Masquerade” that demanded vampires hide among mortals and erase all evidence of their existence, they orchestrated the massacre of the mortal population of Thorns, a small village near Silchester, in as flagrant a display of supernatural power as possible, joined by several of the anarchs who had followed them (and who were all forced to flee the Camarilla’s retribution).
The Convention of Thorns represented a personal crossroads for them, in more ways than simply the political: first, they changed their name to Sascha Vykos, in honor of a fallen comrade. Second, while they had, over the years, finally realized and come to terms with their gender identity, aided by their time spent absorbing Tzimisce Metamorphist philosophy while completely out of the orbit of Obertus religion, it was not until after the Convention of Thorns that they slowly began to reshape their body truly to their liking.
That same year, Sascha was among the delegates present at a meeting in Mallorca, in which, after a series of negotiations, the nascent Sabbat was formed, consisting mainly of members of the Lasombra and Tzimisce clans as well as the anarchs from other clans who refused to surrender to the Camarilla. This sect’s primarily (ostensible) goal was warfare against the Antediluvians - and the Camarilla, who in their denial were seen as catspaws and pawns of those ancients.
After the Sabbat was formed, Vykos’s role as tactical support was formalized when they took on the office of priscus, one of the council of independent advisors to the various senior and regional leaders of the Sabbat, who also were responsible for coordinating strategic efforts whenever the sect went to war and dealing with whatever trouble that they were needed to deal with as they saw fit. The next several centuries were a busy time for Sascha, between their duties “advising” the various Sabbat leaders, using and manipulating mortal pirates as proxies to fight the interests of the Camarilla (who, typically, were much better at using mortals as proxies and far more interested in doing so than the Sabbat, granting them far more influence in the mundane world), and their own interests in furthering their occult and historical studies.
As busy as they were, Vykos still managed to take time out to finally bring down the reckoning on their sire that they had been quietly planning for three hundred years. In 1550, while Symeon was involved with peace negotiations to try to unify the non-Sabbat Tzimisce, Sascha showed up in their sire’s court, playing the penitent childe just long enough for Symeon to let his guard down. And then they struck, killing their sire through diablerie - and tortured him in the process, dragging it out.
Eventually, however, Sascha grew bored with involvement with Sabbat politics and went into seclusion, much more interested in their studies than interacting with the outside world. They spent over a hundred years with their books before reemerging in the late 1700s, during the infighting of the First Sabbat Civil War, leaving Europe for the New World (at least temporarily). Once they returned from sabbatical, Vykos began traveling the world, simultaneously to do their duty as wandering priscus and chase all the knowledge that they could, collecting a considerable amount of books and artifacts and setting up various (well-protected) personal libraries across the world. As a Noddist scholar, they studied the origins of vampire history as well as the eschatology associated with it, and were considered one of the foremost Noddist scholars in the vampire world (and their rivalries with the few other top Noddist scholars, most especially the Gangrel Beckett, often involved ‘attempted murder’.)
While Sascha was brutally effective in their service to the Sabbat as both scholar and warrior and infamous for their skill as a torturer (which was saying a lot, given that they were a member of a clan long infamous for brutality and for skill in torture) and for their treachery, they were also more than a little erratic in behavior. The larger picture of their schemes made very little sense to their enemies - and not much more to their own sect, at times. Their ultimate goal was to recreate the Dream of Constantinople, acting on the compulsion that had bound them for centuries as one of the inheritors of Michael’s Dream, though - Tzimisce to the core - they intend to build this incarnation of the Dream on a foundation of blood and bone, while diablerizing the few survivors from Constantinople in order to complete their knowledge of that vision.
In 2003, their duty as priscus brought them to the side of Polonia, the Lasombra Archbishop of New York City, in order to advise him during the Sabbat’s ambitious crusade to conquer the Camarilla-held cities of the East Coast as well as lead their own brutal raid against Washington, DC, and taking it for the Sabbat. Despite their critical role in the success of the offensive, Polonia was given most of the credit and promoted to Cardinal, while Sascha was made Archbishop of DC: though their own ambitions lay elsewhere, Vykos, who had a long-standing rivalry with Polonia, seethed.
Though they set up shop for a time in DC, Sascha did not stay long: they skipped town (without permission), leaving a power void in their wake. While their superiors were presumably not happy, there was little that they could do to them, both because of their own personal power and because they were an effective priscus.
Vykos resurfaced, some time later, in the aftermath of an averted cycle of Gehenna: while the apocalypse had been threatening for quite some time, with fulfilled signs and portents popping up all over the place, Gehenna was, ultimately, averted. They had heard rumors - as did their longtime rival and fellow Noddist scholar, Beckett - about the formation of a third Trinity in Istanbul, and had gone to investigate those rumors, the two rivals ending up independently in the same place, at the remains of Michael the Patriarch’s haven under the Hagia Sophia.
Matters nearly ended extremely badly for the two of them, as even Vykos, powerful as they were, was in well over their head. At the fall of Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade, Michael the Patriarch was diablerized and murdered by his ex-lover, Mary the Black, Baali and demon-priestess, but his spirit still existed inside her. By the time Sascha and Beckett came to Constantinople, the two had come to an accord and sought a third member for their new Trinity: Michael (acting through Mary) forced Vykos to mentally submit while he burned the Dracon free from their body, a compulsion impossible for the Tzimisce to resist. Beckett managed to rescue Sascha, saving their unlife (much to their mutual chagrin) and escape, though severely injured, with their torpored body in a body bag.
Sascha woke up several nights later: Beckett, in the meantime, had sought sanctuary with a powerful vampire known as Prospero, a friend of his (and acquaintance of Vykos) who was essentially Prince of the Cayman Islands and offered sanctuary on neutral ground. While not especially happy about being rescued - and even less happy that their rescuer had been Beckett of all people, their longtime rival- Vykos was furious that “Prospero”, who they had occasionally been sharing notes with (and vice-versa), was actually Amerin, a member of the Inconnu. And to make matters worse, with Mary pursuing the two of them, Vykos and Beckett were essentially stuck in the same place, in the Caymans, until they could come up with some kind of plan to deal with the situation and with a high possibility of having to at least temporarily work together.
On top of that, Vykos had to deal with several unpleasant facts: the first being that, with the Dracon now removed from their body, that they were free from their ancestor’s bitter, self-destructive consciousness seeping into them and tainting their thoughts for the first time in centuries. Basically, they were as close to sane again as it was possible for an elder Tzimisce to be. Second, they finally realized that the Dream they had fought to build, to complete, for so long, had been forced on them, instead of being a legacy that they had freely chosen to recreate. Now what?
At least things can’t possibly get much worse. Right?
CANON PERSONALITY:
Over the long course of their unlife, Sascha Vykos has undergone considerable changes in personality. Some things have remained constant: they have always been intelligent, logical and curious, wanting to know everything they could, hungry for knowledge and trying to use what they know to make the world make sense, an intellectual down to their bones who overthinks everything. They have also always been ambitious, manipulative, and selfish, though to what degree and how they express those traits vary depending on their age.
As a young vampire, when they were still Myca, they were soft-spoken (even when in thoroughly bad temper), polite, and often pleasant in manner, though simultaneously not-so-secretly prickly, sharp-tongued, and temperamental beneath their diplomatic, often charming (for as long as they could manage it) facade, as well as introverted, difficult to read, and withdrawn, a very private, guarded individual. They were also stubborn: described alternately as “headstrong” (by an acquaintance) and “strong in their own convictions” (more charitably, by their boyfriend), they were slow to change their mind - or accept a truth - without evidence given to them.
Though their manipulative, selfish, and amoral tendencies had been present in life, as they first were raised as nobility/minor royalty, then were an acolyte in a House of mages known for their lack of ethics in the practice of magic, they only got worse after they became a vampire, raised among the clan that reveled in their inhumanity and in Byzantium’s vampiric society, even more cutthroat and manipulative than the mortal society that it was founded on and among. While Myca was not as casually or as brutally sadistic as many of their clanmate the lives of mortals (beyond perhaps a few prized servitors) meant nothing, and though they could pretend to be kind and helpful as long as it benefitted them, they could best have been described as an amoral monster-in-waiting. In addition, they had that streak of cruelty lying beneath the surface, as they would quite thoroughly fuck someone up if they crossed them without blinking or remorse, remember their grudges and take vengeance as appropriate at the right moment...even if that “right moment” meant waiting a good long time. (see: what they did to Symeon).
Though Myca was an expert at playing by other people’s rules when necessary, doing so chafed on them as much as rampant ignorance, excessive religiosity, and people questioning their decisions when they were in a particularly stubborn mood did. Their selfish and amoral tendencies only compounded after they began practicing the tenets of the Road of Sin: though good for them in many ways, including the emphasis on self-knowledge and self-will, the Road also called for its practitioners to control their Beast (essentially the superpowered, bestial self all vampires have) by indulging in their whims and desires: essentially, do as they please without caring who they hurt.
In addition, Myca Vykos was surprisingly fragile beneath their calm, graceful control and apparent confidence. Though very aware of how gifted, talented, and skilled they were and quite confident in their own abilities, they also had considerable self-image problems born of roots that it would take them centuries to fully untangle and understand, self-image problems that bled into many aspects of their personal life. Uncomfortable in their own skin due to a combination of unknowing dysphoria and repressed trauma, and quietly unsure that they were worthy of their lover’s regard or that they were anything more than a hollow, pretty shell, empty on the inside and longing for something undefinable and out of reach, they held their doubts to themselves even when they needed the help. Even with how good they were at figuring out what other people wanted - and how to use that as leverage - they were absolutely uncomfortable with the idea of anyone besides their longtime lover wanting them, terrible at intimacy, and often oblivious to when someone did want them, which was difficult with their choice of Road.
Despite their emotional turmoil, however, Myca had the resolve to try to push past it: to refuse to reject themself, to come to terms. And then they got broken, and the amoral monster-in-waiting became just a monster.
“I am not what, or who I was before. I am not yet certain what, or who, I am becoming.”
Sascha Vykos changed quite a bit from their younger days: perhaps the only good change is that they fully understand and accept their personal identity, paring away their self-esteem and self-image problems and come to terms with it, being completely what they are and refusing to compromise on the matter.. Otherwise? Not so much. Their stubbornness has calcified, their manipulative tendencies honed to outright treachery, their ambition grand but monstrous.
First, they no longer play by the rules of others: as a powerful elder in their own right, Vykos no longer has to bow to the expectations of their “superiors”. Though their position as priscus carries with it certain unspoken expectations, such as any “advice” being couched in polite recommendations, they don’t even follow that as their advice is far more in the veins of strong “suggestions”. They are often best described as a “loose cannon”, a known rogue element, with how they often prioritize their own agendas above that of the sect they serve, most notably illustrated by how they left DC for their own reason, without permission, at quite possibly the worst possible time.
Second, though a certain cooling of the heart is inevitable with elder vampires, centuries and millennia distant from humanity, Sascha takes this to extremes. Detached and alien in outlook, Sascha regards much around them as subjects to study and no longer fears such mundane concerns as death or Gehenna. Though they conduct twisted experiments (...and make their furniture out of unfortunate ghouls), torture prisoners to their limits (and beyond) on behalf of the Sabbat and as part of their own studies, those activities are not undertaken out of simple sadism (which, while terrible, would at least be comprehensible), but out of careful calculation and cold cruelty that is widely infamous across sects. “Complete monster” might be putting it mildly.
In addition, strong displays of emotion are rare for them: “stoic” is, again, an understatement. Vykos follows a particularly strange path called “Death and the Soul” that controls the Beast through detachment and study of death, in order to understand how the irrational (such as emotions and supernatural phenomena) interact with the rational (the realm of the flesh). Practitioners of this path are expected to be callous and detached: Sascha usually follows these tenets quite well. Occasionally, however, in certain extraordinary situations, Vykos will (albeit briefly) actually feel something, be it anger or (even more rarely) surprise, revealing that their sharp tongue and irritable temperament from their younger days aren’t quite gone yet. They also sometimes display a sly sense of humor, or at least what passes for a sense of humor, anyway.
Beneath their stoicism and detachment, however, Sascha is not mentally stable: they never have been, even before the fact that all elder vampires generally are not sane by nature. Unfortunately, their mental degeneration began while they were still young, precipitated by being forced to share their body with the Dracon, their ancestor’s bitter self-hatred and self-destructive tendencies seeping into all their thoughts and everything that they did, pushing them to behave even more erratically. It remains to be seen, however, what removing the Dracon would ultimately do to - and for - Sascha’s mental state: while they were as close to sanity again as an elder Tzimisce could be (which...isn’t saying much, really), what that means for Sascha in the long run is still unknown.
SKILLS/ABILITIES:
Ridiculous. Absolutely ridiculous, between both their age and the fact that the canon has absolutely stupid scaling for ability scores. I’ll break down what they can do (and if need be, I can provide their character sheet for the canon backing for all this), but please let me nerf this stuff. Please. I really don’t want to deal with all that OP bullshit.
Supernatural Abilities: Is a vampire: cannot eat food, drinks blood to survive (and power many of their Disciplines, their supernatural powers), burns in sunlight and in fire. Exposure to sunlight and fire will not kill them immediately, though the longer they are exposed, the more seriously that they will be hurt: they have a leeway of several minutes before direct exposure will kill them. In addition, they can use the power of their blood to temporarily make themself stronger/faster/more resilient, but their normal baseline of physical capability, before the use of any of their supernatural powers, is strong enough to lift ~400 pounds, graceful and dextrous enough to be a professional acrobat, and with above-average stamina. .
In addition, the various clans of vampires in this canon all have a different weakness, supposedly due to their progenitors being cursed by Cain, the first vampire. Clan Tzimisce’s weakness is that unless they sleep with two handfuls of earth of a place important to them as a mortal - often, though not always, from their ritual graves when they were Embraced - that they weaken slowly until they can fulfill this requirement.
Vicissitude: one of the affinity Disciplines associated with the Tzimisce and their signature power, Vicissitude generally involves the shaping of flesh, either the user’s own or someone else’s, and the changes wrought by flesh and bone crafting are usually permanent (barring further use of Vicissitude to further change it). For most of these changes (barring the relatively fast transformation powers such as zulo form), it is usually necessary for the user to touch whoever they are working on and physically sculpt those changes, even in themself. Though possible for someone of sufficient power to mind control a skilled Tzimisce into subconsciously shaping themselves without touch (and only themself), it’s...never a good sign.
Vykos has mastered this Discipline to levels only reachable by elders of particularly strong blood.
Can alter height, build, facial structure, skin tone, eye color, hair color, and other elements of appearance
Can alter the skin itself, muscle, fat, and cartilage as desired
Can alter bone (and other hard material inside the body)
Can take on the zulo war form: essentially, temporarily transform into a horrible monster built for close combat. Claws, really tough hide, bone spurs, towering above normal people, etc. While the transformation is technically indefinite in length, it’s only suitable for fighting, and takes 12 seconds to complete. .
Can transform into a living pool of blood and manipulate body fluids to an exacting degree.
Can turn into a horrible bat monster with much the same properties as the zulo form, except a flying bat, as well as transform their own blood into corrosive acid.
Can cocoon themselves in a cocoon made of blood to protect themselves from sunlight and fire: while extremely resistant to both sunlight and fire, direct, prolonged exposure to either (or both) will eventually destroy the cocoon (still safer than direct contact without it, though).
* Since I mentioned wanting to nerf their powerset, I would prefer to not do anything with the powerset at 5th bullet point and higher. (Basically stop regains at the zulo form).
Animalism: another affinity Discipline for the Tzimisce, Animalism allows its users to communicate with and control animals as well as influence the Beast (oddly, all mortals - not just ghouls- have something of a Beast that can be influenced for purposes of this Discipline).
Vykos is fairly adept at use of this Discipline: not a master, and definitely nowhere near the potential they could have given their age and the strength of their blood as their interests and priorities lie elsewhere, but still extremely good.
Can speak to animals telepathically (with eye contact)
Can summon animals of a specific species (“all crows” or “all emperor penguins”) in an area in voice radius of them: in order to respond, the animals have to be able to hear them.
Can soothe a creature, making them docile: this also works to help pull vampires out of frenzy. In addition, can cow a mortal into a state of fear or apathy.
Possess the body of an animal: see through its eyes, control it, etc. If done very well, can also use their mental Disciplines through the animal.
Auspex: third and last affinity Discipline for the Tzimisce. Auspex grants its user supernatural senses and allows them to see through illusions (if they choose to).
Vykos is fairly adept at their use of this Discipline: not a master, and definitely nowhere near the heights that they could reach if they so chose given their age and the strength of their blood, but still extremely good.
Raise one of the 5 senses to superhuman levels.
Can read someone’s aura to figure out their emotional state and powers
Psychometry: can learn something about an object and its previous owner(s) from its resonance.
Telepathy: can read and project thoughts.
Celerity: Not an affinity Discipline of the Tzimisce, but fairly common. Allows the user to have superhuman bursts of speed and enhanced reflexes and dexterity for about six seconds at a time/per activation of the Discipline: in addition, this supernatural speed breaks the laws of physics in that the vampire doesn’t experience/cause any changes in momentum, friction, etc, and is obviously supernatural.. Vykos’s level of skill with this Discipline is about average: they’re competent, but not anything special, and with their current level of mastery, their bursts using this power are about twice that of their normal.
Fortitude: not an affinity Discipline of the Tzimisce. Unlike most Disciplines, it is not consciously activated, but it is instead a passive power. It gives the user resistance to all forms of damage and basically makes them immune to blunt trauma. This supernatural toughness does apply to sunlight and fire, and while Fortitude does not grant immunity from those weaknesses, it helps the vampire better able to stand up to them for longer.
Vykos is fairly competent with this Discipline: not a master, not an adept, but fairly above-average competent with it. So they’re fairly tough but not the toughest: as an equivalent, their level of competency with this Discipline basically gives them the equivalent of wearing a stab-proof kevlar vest with ceramic plating at all times, except that this protection weighs nothing and covers their whole body.
Presence: not an affinity Discipline of the Tzimisce, but a fairly common one, Presence is the Discipline of supernatural allure and emotional manipulation: unlike Dominate, it can be used on crowds, is subtle, and through certain forms of mass communication (such as video, voice recordings, or over the phone: it cannot be used in purely text-based mediums). The effects of this Discipline can be resisted by the strong-willed (aka “ignoring the user).
Vykos is also fairly adept at use of this Discipline: not a master, but fairly good.
Can make people want to approach them and listen to/agree with what they’re saying: essentially a spell of fascination. While immediate and intense, it is temporary: it’s not strong enough to make people forget about self-preservation (being in danger will break the effects), but even after the immediate effects are broken, those who had this used on them will remember how they felt while the power was active.
Terrify/intimidate others with a glance.
They can make people want to please and serve them through entrancement, out of false love and adoration.
Finally, they can call someone that they have met and and compel them to come to them immediately, no matter how far away they happen to be. (Obviously, they have to have some way of communicating with them to make this work).
*note that I would actually strongly prefer to not ever use the last two effects described here and would prefer to stop regains for Presence with the terrify-at-a-glance power.
Dominate: not an affinity Discipline of the Tzimisce, but again, a fairly common one. Unlike the more subtle Presence, Dominate allows its user to overwhelm another’s will, forcing them to think and act as the vampire wants. There are several important restrictions on the use of this Discipline: first, the user must maintain eye contact with who they’re using the power on. Second, they must either speak (or be heard, if they have telepathy) in a language that whoever they are using can hear and understand. The stronger-willed the user, the more difficult it is to affect them with this power and it is flatly impossible to use Dominate on vampires stronger in the blood. It is also impossible to issue commands to someone that either would force them to be physically self-harmful or suicidal, and 2) go against their inherent nature as a person.
Vykos - perhaps ironically given their own history - is a master of this Discipline.
Issue one-word simple commands that must be obeyed. (“run”, or “stop”, etc)
Impose post-hypnotic suggestions.
Alter memories: this includes erasing completely, simply changing, or restoring memories that have been tampered with. Note that in order to do any of these things, the user must narrate to the person whose memories that they are working on how they are changing those memories, essentially walking them through it like a hypnotist. The more complicated the changes to the target’s memory, with the exception of fixing any altered memories, the easier those changes are to unravel.
Able to wear someone down over time in order to make them susceptible to commands that they would normally be able to resist.
Possess a mortal’s body: see through their eyes, control their actions, etc. If done well enough, can use mental Disciplines through the mortal’s body.
*While I list these powers for completeness’s sake, I am not really comfortable with playing with Dominate outside of a tabletop environment where there are more concrete rules to govern its use. If possible, I would prefer to either stop regains for Dominate with the single-word command or to not have Dominate as a regain option at all.
Thaumaturgy: a system of blood magic developed by the Tremere that adapted Hermetic magical principles into magic usable by vampires. Thaumaturgy in general is extremely codified, extremely scientific (as far as magic goes), rigorous research, extremely reliable, repeatable effects.
Thaumaturgy itself is divided into two ways to express the blood magician’s will: paths and rituals.
Rituals are elaborate, organized instructions for magical effects: the complexity and difficulty of these rituals varies, but if performed correctly will always lead to the same result. Variance is error, and error leads to nowhere good: “not working at all” is the best outcome in that case. Rituals also require elaborate trappings and components: chalk circles, chanting, etc, take hours at the shortest and days, even months or possibly years, at the longest. Larger-scale, extremely powerful rituals might also require really rare things, like the heart of a seventh son of a seventh son and necessitate multiple thaumaturges working in concert (the most infamous ritual being the Tremere ritual, cast by the most senior members of the clan, that cursed the entire Assamite clan with an inability to drink vampire blood).
Paths are basically learned, instant applications and expressions of thaumaturgical principles distilled into reliable and repeatable effects, similarly to rituals. Unlike rituals, however, the use of paths is much faster, does not require components save the thaumaturge’s own blood and will, and, while powerful, are not as potentially powerful as rituals are. Successfully using a Path spell requires concentration: if the thaumaturge’s concentration is broken before the spell is cast, then it fails.
Vykos is a master of thaumaturgical knowledge, which is extremely rare for a non-Tremere vampire - and doubly rare for a Tzimisce, as the preferred tradition of blood magic among the Tzimisce is koldunic sorcery. Their knowledge came from several different places: first, from reverse-engineering the Hermetic magic that they knew as a former Tremere mage, second, from their obsessive chasing of knowledge over the years, third from browbeating members of the Tremere antitribu into teaching them before all the Sabbat-aligned Tremere mysteriously died, and fourth from torturing Tremere who fell into their hands into giving them their secrets and then taking their books once they died. While they know a significant number of rituals - excepting, of course, the Very Secret Tremere-only rituals - most of the really powerful ones are beyond their power to cast, given the very few thaumaturges among the Sabbat after the deaths of the Tremere antitribu. The rituals that they are seen using most often have to do with thaumaturgical wards, both undoing those cast by others and casting their own (such as wards on their study/library that will burst into flame if anyone not them - or their servitors - tries to steal a book).
They have knowledge of three Paths: the Path of Blood, Lure of Flames, and Movement of the Mind: while they have mastered the first two, their mastery of Movement of the Mind is only at apprentice level.
Path of Blood
Can determine information about someone’s history and lineage by drinking their blood.
Can force another vampire to use their blood in ways as they choose, but must be touching them in order to do so. (*obviously useless when dealing with non-vampires)
Can temporarily make themself stronger in the blood by concentrating their blood
Can magically steal blood from someone else - vampire, mortal, etc- without having to come into contact with them.
Can cause someone’s blood to boil in their veins.
Lure of Flames
Can create and control flames equivalent in size and strength to a raging forest fire and smaller.
Movement of the Mind
Can telekinetically lift and manipulate objects up to 20 pounds.
Mundane Skills:
Sascha Vykos is over a thousand years old, and has never spent extended periods in torpor, unlike many of their peers: they have had the time to cultivate a wide variety of skills during their unlife. While many of those skills are academic and knowledge-related, as Vykos was, is, and will always remain a complete bookworm, not all of them are, as they do occupy a fairly dangerous position in a sect prone to both internal and external war and strife.
By that same token, though they no longer serve as a diplomat, they still retain most of those social skills and put them into practice regularly, if not in the same capacity that they once did: Sascha still knows how to weave and manipulate a web of intrigue with a consummate skill, lie extremely well, and knows their way around fairly complicated etiquette gracefully. In addition, they have honed their intimidation and interrogation skills to a considerable mastery - the two social skills that they use most now. They also have about average skill with performance - singing, dancing, etc-, not that they have actually used that skill in years, and while they’re able to read people’s emotional state and understand them, is only barely adequate at best.
While they are a bookworm, and always have been, the luxury of not knowing how to fight has never been an option afforded them: and they are a very dangerous opponent. Between their upbringing as a noble in the early medieval period and then as an apprentice mage in a House devoted to dominance and conflict, they were already at least conversant in basic combat skills before they became a vampire, skills which only sharpened over the years. Vykos is decent with a bow (though that particular skill is more from their noble background than from any need in the years since) but is far better and much more dangerous to face in hand-to-hand combat, either unarmed or with a blade, especially a knife. An actual master at either of those will still beat the hell out of them - because while very, very good, they are no master - but it won’t be an easy fight, between keen alertness (they’re really good at noticing things and spotting ambushes) and the even-more-important ability at being stupidly good at dodging things, even before supernatural powers are taken into account.
Sascha is also reasonably athletic (“ talented amateur” level), somewhat stealthy (about comparative to the average teenager who makes a habit of sneaking out/doing things they shouldn’t), and is fairly competent at surviving in harsh environments. As a diplomat during the medieval period, they traveled extensively, regularly riding a horse and being perfectly comfortable doing so: they still have the skill, though it hasn’t been necessary or relevant in a long time.
However, their passion has always been in knowledge, and they have made it their business to Know Things, specifically a lot of things. First, they have a solid cross-disciplinary grounding in various humanities fields, with a depth of knowledge enough to earn several Ph.Ds, if they cared enough to do the legwork to set up identities to allow themself to do so. Their especial specialty is in history, and between their own firsthand experience of over a thousand years of history, the fact that they know people who have lived even longer, their obsessive research, and their access to accounts not available anymore to mortal scholars, the past is basically an open book to them. Whatever they don’t know, they In addition, they do not restrict their study simply to mortal history, but to vampiric history as well: in addition to their study of Noddist lore, they are also extremely well-informed about the inner workings and history of both the Camarilla and the Sabbat (the Sabbat more so than the Camarilla, due to being a founding member of the Sabbat). Their other main obsession is with the study of the occult: they know most of the basic hidden truths and secrets of the World of Darkness and are extremely well-versed in the eschatology surrounding the First City and Gehenna. In addition, given their experiments, fleshcrafting, and skill at torture, they know a lot about the human (and vampiric) body, anatomy, and the limits of both: if they actually turned their knowledge to good ends, they could be an amazing doctor, but that isn’t likely to actually happen.
Outside of their areas of expertise, Sascha has a smattering of other knowledge skills, including a considerable understanding of the fundamentals of political systems- in essence, how they work (and where to theoretically put pressure to get what they want)-, a fair bit of knowledge about folk tales and wise-women’s superstitions, enough financial knowledge to theoretically do their own finances, a basic understanding of mortal laws, and enough herbalism lore to be fairly good at the use of even rare plants (though definitely not a master or anywhere close).
Sascha has also ensured that they are able to find whatever piece of knowledge that they are looking for. First, they are fluent in 32 languages: while canon does not list most of them, languages that they are explicitly stated to have proficiency in include Latin, medieval and classical Greek, English, and Enochian (the language of the First City: fluency is a requirement for being a Noddist scholar). Second, they are superlatively skilled in how to research: if they don’t know something, it’s guaranteed that they know how and where to look and how to use the sources they have available to them (or know what books they don’t have to look for) to put them on the right track. Though most of their research is conducted in libraries, they are also able to investigate in the field, with about the same level of skill as a skilled private investigator: they definitely aren’t as good at that as more academic research, but they can get the job done.
That being said, Sascha - as befitting an elder vampire - is very bad at using modern devices and adapting to modern technology. They have no idea how to use a gun (why would they, when vampires are resistant to most bullets and they can either turn into a horrible clawed monster or light people on fire to fight?), can’t drive, and a computer is the one kind of magic that they have no idea about. While their superlative skill at research means that they could probably figure out what keywords are needed to find whatever they’re looking for if they couldn’t use their books for...some bizarre reason, but they would need to either order a ghoul servitor or some unfortunate young Sabbat vampire to operate the computer and put the keywords into Google for them because otherwise nothing is getting done.
note: the canon is inherently contradictory by nature due to 20+ years of supplements, quasi-canon now-lost forum posts by writers and 4 editions with a lot of different writers & their wiki page is just as bad and not updated to reflect the new changes in metaplot, so I’ll do my best to straighten it out here. I have also used material from Dark Ages: Vampire, which while technically a separate gameline is a companion canon as the historical setting for Vampire: the Masquerade.
CW: mentions of nonconsensual body and mind modification, emotional manipulation, rape, and torture.
The mortal who would eventually become Sascha Vykos was born in 976 AD in what eventually would be known as Transylvania in Romania, the oldest child of a minor noble/petty royal family. Myca (as they were known back then) was a clever, gifted child, who excelled at everything they were taught, easily living up to the high expectations that their father had of his heir. Until, that is, they took ill in early adolescence, and on top of their strange illness started having visions and hearing angels talk to them. No physician or wise woman could cure them - in fact, they were only getting more sick as time went by - until, believing that Myca’s illness was due to sorcery and desperate for a cure, their family consulted a wizard of the Order of Hermes for help.
As it turned out, Myca’s illness was caused by magic: namely, their own uncontrolled powers, as they had unknowingly Awakened as a mage. Relieved to have an answer, though saddened to lose his heir, their father sent them with the Hermetic wizard for training. Myca was not consulted in this decision, merely instructed to pack their things, and was resentful and reluctant at first until they actually arrived at Ceoris, the chantry of House Tremere. Once they began learning magic, however, and realized that the potential power they could wield as a mage far outstripped what they would have had as simply ruler of their family’s petty princedom, Myca’s resentment and resistance mostly faded. Mostly.
Myca took to learning magic as easily and well as they had learned their childhood lessons, and advanced to journeyman magus fairly rapidly, leaving apprenticeship by their early twenties. Promotions in House Tremere tended to be slow, even for the gifted, with apprentices remaining under their mentor’s care for years. The combination of Myca’s gifts, what looked to be a continued rapid rise, + their political importance to House Tremere due to their family connections utterly incensed Goratrix, a senior magus, who was really jealous. Really, really, really jealous, and who decided to get rid of his young rival permanently...by betraying them, while Myca was away from Ceoris, to the Tzimisce vampires whose domains they would have to travel through in order to come back to the chantry.
Fortunately (or unfortunately) for Myca, Goratrix’s efforts backfired. While they were captured by an angry Tzimisce intending on torturing an upstart mage to death for trespassing, the vampire’s plans changed once they found out Myca was nobility from Transylvania...and worth Embracing, rather than just murdering. However, Myca was instead Embraced by Symeon of Constantinople, descendant of the ancient Dracon, who had come north to Transylvania to carry on his grandsire’s blood feud: either way, Myca lost their powers as a mage with the death of their mortal body.
(Needless to say, once House Tremere also all ended up vampires in the not-too-distant future, Myca was not exactly happy. And resolved to claim in their own right the power of the blood magic that their former House had developed upon becoming vampires).
Afterward, Symeon took Myca back with him to Constantinople, whose vampiric society had been founded on the “Dream”, a high-minded utopic ideal created by three ancient vampires (and lovers). The Obertus Tzimisce, who lived in Constantinople and were a branch of the clan descended from the Dracon, were strange even by Tzimisce standards: their practices could best be described as Greek Orthodoxy mixed with Tzimisce Metamorphosist philosophy by way of an esoteric, ascetic, blood cult.
While Myca was used to to playing by the rules of others, the numerous restrictions that Gesu, head of the Obertus Order, placed on his descendants grated on their nerves. It didn’t help that while they adapted well to Byzantine customs and culture and had been Embraced into the Obertus, they were still considered somehow morally inferior due to their Transylvanian origins, suspiciously in common with the Carpathian branches of the clan. Myca kept silent about their discontent and lack of belief, especially their lack of belief in their grandsire’s delusions of divinity, and to all appearances bowed gracefully to what their elders asked of them.
Behind their backs, however, it was a different story: while Myca had always been manipulative, self-serving, and somewhat amoral during their life, those tendencies only got worse during their unlife. In addition to spending a great deal of time in the Library of the Forgotten, reading as much as they could get their hands on, and in the vampiric courts of Constantinople which only further honed their manipulative tendencies while also fulfilling whatever tasks Symeon set them with, they had a number of personal projects on the side. These personal projects included conducting forbidden studies of Vicissitude outside the very limited uses permitted by Gesu’s rules, joining the semi-secret “Dream Circle” solely out of desire to increase their thaumaturgical knowledge rather than any actual interest in enlightenment through dreams, writing to fellow Tzimisce from back “home” who they were firmly instructed not to contact, collecting a group of fellow intellectuals within the city who shared their interests, and cleverly, systematically wringing every bit of information they could out of basically everyone they met, building a very wide network of contacts as they did so.
Unfortunately, the halcyon nights in Constantinople were not to last. The Dream of Constantinople had always been unstable at its core, undercut by the collective personality disorders of its three ancient founders: Michael the Patriarch, Antonius, and the Dracon. After the final death of Antonius in 759, the Dream had begun to unravel along with what remained of Michael’s sanity, a process only accelerated by the self-imposed exile of the Dracon. Symeon and his brother-sire Gesu took shared leadership of the Obertus order, but strife between the brothers eroded their relationship - a division encouraged by Myca, who while loyal to their sire, really hated their grandsire.
By 1202, it became very clear that the situation could not stand for long as it was, between the disintegrating Dream and the disaster of mortal Byzantine politics culminating in the Latin crusaders laying siege to Constantinople, backed by the Inconnu, a sect of ancient vampires who held a grudge against the Dream for supplanting the power of Rome.. Myca secretly made preparations to leave the city and continued trying to break their sire’s relationship with his brother, knowing that Symeon would never leave as long as Gesu remained in the city - and Gesu himself had already made it clear that he would never leave.
Unknown to Myca, however, Symeon had his own plans to try to stave off the impending disaster for even a short time: as the departure of the Dracon had been what had precipitated Michael’s last decline, it was likely that only the Dracon could help slow down the inevitable- and finding the mysterious, mercurial ancient when he didn’t want to be found would have been impossible, necessitating a different solution on that problem. Symeon plotted together with Gregorius Dimities, another vampire who had been in the service of Michael the Patriarch, to reshape Myca both physically and mentally (albeit temporarily) into a false duplicate of the Dracon and sent them to Michael under the false pretense that they were his lover, returned at last, in the final nights of Constantinople.
Myca themself was not consulted in this decision, much less given a choice. Michael himself recognized that he had been sent a fake copy and that Myca Vykos was who what was beneath - but didn’t care. The ancient vampire had already had an eye on Myca for some time, encouraging their curiosity and hunger for knowledge: he recognized their similarities to their ancestor and wanted to make them into a (un)living record of Constantinople. As a “reward” for spending these last nights at his side, Michael “gave” Myca his Dream, made them into its inheritor without their consent or knowledge by laying a compulsion on them that would last for hundreds of years. On top of that, Symeon hid all those memories from his childe when Myca was returned to his custody, magically erasing and repressing them for the next several decades along with reversing the physical changes.
Within a relatively short time after Myca returned to themself, things went right to hell. In April of 1204, the Fourth Crusade sacked Constantinople: Myca, along with their sire, (barely) managed to flee the city by ship on the first night of the sack (perhaps predictably, Myca didn’t mourn their grandsire, who refused to leave and died when the crusaders set the monastery where the Obertus had made their haven on fire). For a time, the two of them traveled through the Balkans, staying with various Tzimisce lords who Myca had earlier bargained for sanctuary, including their longtime friend and correspondent, Velya the Flayer, until an opportunity presented itself.
An ambitious Ventrue lord, Jurgen of Magdeburg, pushed east in a bid to expand his territory: unfortunately, the Tzimisce voivode of voivodes, Vladimir Rustovitch, did not take kindly (as no Tzimisce did) to an upstart Ventrue pushing into his territory. Myca - knowing both that the war between the two sides would be costly and that Rustovitch, like many other Tzimisce lords, was already long-committed to war with the Tremere - stepped in, offering both sides a diplomatic solution (that, of course, benefitted the Obertus). Their solution? Create a buffer state between the two warlords that would be administered by a neutral party in the form of the Obertus order, with Symeon of Constantinople guaranteeing the treaty as head of the order. Neither Jurgen nor Rustovitch were blind to what actually Myca was proposing, but reluctantly conceded, agreeing to the tenuous peace and granting the Obertus order the landholdings in question, where a series of monasteries were established.
For the next two decades, Myca lived apart from their sire, in what amounted to nominal independence: while they continued to serve Symeon as his primary diplomat, were expected to travel to his court in Oradea if he had need of them as well as travel between different lords of their clan in order to strengthen diplomatic ties, and were (secretly) being spied on by their sire’s agents, it was still more physical independence than they’d had before, with the space and freedom to pursue some of their own interests as long as said interests did not conflict with the duty expected of them.
Among those interests was an exploration of the Road of Sin, a path of morality that emphasized self-knowledge, self-will, and sensual pleasure, and by nature a thorough rejection of the religious precepts that they were expected to follow as a member of the Obertus lineage. Myca had already begun to reject those teachings while still living in Constantinople, and a chance discovery of a lost text in the Library of the Forgotten had led them to the teachings of the Road of Sin. After they had fled to Transylvania, their old friend Velya had introduced them to Ilias cel Frumos, a fellow young Tzimisce and koldun Sinner-priest, to be tutored further in those teachings.
The two became lovers and companions, and Ilias began guiding Myca along the path to confront their self-doubts and the lingering questions and problems of identity that had always simply hung beneath the surface. Questions that Myca had never had the time or space to do more than simply accept, much less think about or try to put a name to, a slow process over the time that they lived together. It was a fairly happy period in their unlife - but unfortunately, it didn’t last.
In 1232, Myca received a very puzzling “gift” from Jurgen of Magdeburg: a box containing the torpid body of Nikita of Sredetz, one of their clanmates and the Archbishop of Nod, high-ranking member of the (failing) Cainite Heresy. Nikita, according to Jurgen’s letter, had been discovered in an Obertus monastery that the Ventrue had attacked in violation of the treaty for unclear reasons (that were, ultimately, not Myca’s problem to deal with). Though highly irritated at being sent this problem by a man that they hated, Myca soon grew obsessed with solving the various mysteries associated with Nikita. There was something familiar and powerful about him and while deeply unsettled, they were not going to simply let those questions go.
After completing (yet another) diplomatic assignment from their sire, Symeon granted Myca the freedom to investigate Nikita of Sredetz to their heart’s content. For the next two years, they investigated, while keeping Nikita locked up in torpor behind layers of wards in their basement. Their investigations took increasingly strange turns, and simultaneously Myca was haunted by terrifying dreams that they could only remember in pieces at best when they woke up, their long-repressed memories slowly reasserting themselves.
Both these apparently-unrelated things came to a head on what was likely to be the worst night of their entire unlife: Myca returned home on their sire’s orders intending to move Nikita’s body to Oradea, only to find the monastery deserted mysteriously, because everyone inside was dead, and Ilias’s wards on Nikita shattered. Unable to leave before the sunrise, Myca and their traveling companions were forced to remain in the monastery during the day.
Myca woke up remembering everything, every detail of the myriad violations of their bodily and mental integrity that had been committed against them by their sire, Gregorius Dimities, and Michael the Patriarch all those years before in Constantinople: that, alone, was terrible. And then everything got worse, when they woke up in their living room...with one additional vampire, who matched every description of their great-grandsire, and a stranger wearing their boyfriend’s clothes.
During the course of their investigations, Myca had learned that “Nikita of Sredetz” was not, in fact, Nikita of Sredetz: the real Nikita had been murdered by someone very powerful, his death too brutal for his ghost’s memory to hold onto. While they (reluctantly) suspected that “Nikita” was a childe or grandchilde of the Dracon, their ancestor, the truth was far more convoluted. The Dracon himself had murdered Nikita and taken his shape and identity solely to destroy the Cainite Heresy as revenge against its (now-dead) patron, Narses, who had helped to bring down Constantinople. Afterward, his revenge complete, the Dracon had nothing left to live for: he had outlived everyone he had ever loved, everything he had tried to build, and he was tired of living. And, unfortunately, Jurgen had not killed him as he had hoped, but instead sent him to Myca, staked in a box.
All of this would have been difficult revelations for Myca to have processed if they had read them in a letter: having their ancestor himself tell them all this while in their living room was beyond difficult. To make matters even worse, and impossibly terrifying, Ilias had been possessed - by the Eldest himself, the Tzimisce Antediluvian, the godlike progenitor of the Tzimisce clan, reuniting at last with his favorite childe. The Eldest didn’t care what the Dracon wanted: he would not allow his favorite childe to die. Not when there was a suitable vessel at hand.
[Tzimisce], acting through Ilias’s body, forced Myca to be the host for the Dracon’s essence in order to save his existence, the two of them essentially sharing one body. The moment the process (which...involved vivisection...) was done, Ilias (apparently) died, crumbling to ash, as his body couldn’t bear the strain of being an avatar for the Eldest.
Grieving and broken, Myca took their books and fled back to Constantinople. Fortunately for them - and unfortunately for everyone else - this did not impede them from plotting. Though they continued to play the dutiful childe, they knew just what their sire had done to them, and quietly nursed a slow, lingering hatred for the man who they had loved and once trusted almost as much as they trusted themselves, and the knowledge that someday, they would bring a reckoning against him.
At the same time, the order of the world that had held sway for so long was changing, as the Middle Ages drew towards a close. The Black Death was disastrous for maintaining Kindred society and population due to the population pressure caused by the deaths of so many mortals in such a short time. To make matters worse, the mortal Inquisition gained even more power, trying to ferret out evil in the world - especially supernatural evil, and with a particular focus on vampires. Elders threw their young childer as sacrifices to keep their unlives safe, on top of the myriad of abuses that elder vampires often inflicted on the young. And, finally, the young vampires had had enough.
The Anarch Revolt (or so this conflict was eventually called, which eventually became a Europe-wide war) began in the 15th century: Myca, who had kept in touch with their longtime contacts, conspirators,and friends back home, was a leader in the Tzimisce branch of the Anarch Revolt, which began with young Tzimisce rising up against their elders and attacking those who did not side with them.
Together with Velya the Flayer and Lugoj Blood-Breaker, Myca devised a ritual that would break the blood bonds that young Tzimisce had with their elders, which had compelled their obedience. In addition, Myca used their books and accumulated occult knowledge to pinpoint where the Eldest’s actual body was, allowing Lugoj to lead an attack on the Eldest (which Myca was not present for), culminating in him apparently diablerizing and killing [Tzimisce].
The fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453 forced Myca to flee back to Romania, at which point they took a more direct, active hand in the Anarch Revolt. Their means of assistance took the form of traveling with several wandering packs of anarchs, providing tactical and strategic support and, scholar to the bone, risking their unlife to save books from the libraries of elders who their comrades attacked. However, while the rebellion had done quite a lot of damage, they were outnumbered and outmatched, and the anarchs were ultimately forced to the bargaining table in 1493 by the new sect known as the Camarilla, formally formed in 1486 as a response to both the Inquisition and the Anarch Revolt and which sought to uphold the status quo of Kindred society (at least, as much as they could).
Myca was in attendance at the Convention of Thorns near Silchester, England, as one of the anarch delegates, in their capacity as diplomat, and they were not pleased, to say the least, with the terms given to the anarchs. While amnesty was offered to the anarchs for their crimes, with the exception of the most awful, absolutely none of the grievances that the anarchs had were addressed and they were not allowed to negotiate. Instead, the anarchs would have to return to their clans and sires, return to the status quo that they had fought to avoid.
Instead, Myca stood up, quietly and viciously insulted Hardestadt, the founder of the Camarilla, and walked out, followed by the other Tzimisce and Lasombra delegates, as well as the few anarchs from other clans that did not take the amnesty. As a further gesture to only further underscore the contempt that they felt for the surrender offered to them, as well as in defiance of the Camarilla’s “Masquerade” that demanded vampires hide among mortals and erase all evidence of their existence, they orchestrated the massacre of the mortal population of Thorns, a small village near Silchester, in as flagrant a display of supernatural power as possible, joined by several of the anarchs who had followed them (and who were all forced to flee the Camarilla’s retribution).
The Convention of Thorns represented a personal crossroads for them, in more ways than simply the political: first, they changed their name to Sascha Vykos, in honor of a fallen comrade. Second, while they had, over the years, finally realized and come to terms with their gender identity, aided by their time spent absorbing Tzimisce Metamorphist philosophy while completely out of the orbit of Obertus religion, it was not until after the Convention of Thorns that they slowly began to reshape their body truly to their liking.
That same year, Sascha was among the delegates present at a meeting in Mallorca, in which, after a series of negotiations, the nascent Sabbat was formed, consisting mainly of members of the Lasombra and Tzimisce clans as well as the anarchs from other clans who refused to surrender to the Camarilla. This sect’s primarily (ostensible) goal was warfare against the Antediluvians - and the Camarilla, who in their denial were seen as catspaws and pawns of those ancients.
After the Sabbat was formed, Vykos’s role as tactical support was formalized when they took on the office of priscus, one of the council of independent advisors to the various senior and regional leaders of the Sabbat, who also were responsible for coordinating strategic efforts whenever the sect went to war and dealing with whatever trouble that they were needed to deal with as they saw fit. The next several centuries were a busy time for Sascha, between their duties “advising” the various Sabbat leaders, using and manipulating mortal pirates as proxies to fight the interests of the Camarilla (who, typically, were much better at using mortals as proxies and far more interested in doing so than the Sabbat, granting them far more influence in the mundane world), and their own interests in furthering their occult and historical studies.
As busy as they were, Vykos still managed to take time out to finally bring down the reckoning on their sire that they had been quietly planning for three hundred years. In 1550, while Symeon was involved with peace negotiations to try to unify the non-Sabbat Tzimisce, Sascha showed up in their sire’s court, playing the penitent childe just long enough for Symeon to let his guard down. And then they struck, killing their sire through diablerie - and tortured him in the process, dragging it out.
Eventually, however, Sascha grew bored with involvement with Sabbat politics and went into seclusion, much more interested in their studies than interacting with the outside world. They spent over a hundred years with their books before reemerging in the late 1700s, during the infighting of the First Sabbat Civil War, leaving Europe for the New World (at least temporarily). Once they returned from sabbatical, Vykos began traveling the world, simultaneously to do their duty as wandering priscus and chase all the knowledge that they could, collecting a considerable amount of books and artifacts and setting up various (well-protected) personal libraries across the world. As a Noddist scholar, they studied the origins of vampire history as well as the eschatology associated with it, and were considered one of the foremost Noddist scholars in the vampire world (and their rivalries with the few other top Noddist scholars, most especially the Gangrel Beckett, often involved ‘attempted murder’.)
While Sascha was brutally effective in their service to the Sabbat as both scholar and warrior and infamous for their skill as a torturer (which was saying a lot, given that they were a member of a clan long infamous for brutality and for skill in torture) and for their treachery, they were also more than a little erratic in behavior. The larger picture of their schemes made very little sense to their enemies - and not much more to their own sect, at times. Their ultimate goal was to recreate the Dream of Constantinople, acting on the compulsion that had bound them for centuries as one of the inheritors of Michael’s Dream, though - Tzimisce to the core - they intend to build this incarnation of the Dream on a foundation of blood and bone, while diablerizing the few survivors from Constantinople in order to complete their knowledge of that vision.
In 2003, their duty as priscus brought them to the side of Polonia, the Lasombra Archbishop of New York City, in order to advise him during the Sabbat’s ambitious crusade to conquer the Camarilla-held cities of the East Coast as well as lead their own brutal raid against Washington, DC, and taking it for the Sabbat. Despite their critical role in the success of the offensive, Polonia was given most of the credit and promoted to Cardinal, while Sascha was made Archbishop of DC: though their own ambitions lay elsewhere, Vykos, who had a long-standing rivalry with Polonia, seethed.
Though they set up shop for a time in DC, Sascha did not stay long: they skipped town (without permission), leaving a power void in their wake. While their superiors were presumably not happy, there was little that they could do to them, both because of their own personal power and because they were an effective priscus.
Vykos resurfaced, some time later, in the aftermath of an averted cycle of Gehenna: while the apocalypse had been threatening for quite some time, with fulfilled signs and portents popping up all over the place, Gehenna was, ultimately, averted. They had heard rumors - as did their longtime rival and fellow Noddist scholar, Beckett - about the formation of a third Trinity in Istanbul, and had gone to investigate those rumors, the two rivals ending up independently in the same place, at the remains of Michael the Patriarch’s haven under the Hagia Sophia.
Matters nearly ended extremely badly for the two of them, as even Vykos, powerful as they were, was in well over their head. At the fall of Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade, Michael the Patriarch was diablerized and murdered by his ex-lover, Mary the Black, Baali and demon-priestess, but his spirit still existed inside her. By the time Sascha and Beckett came to Constantinople, the two had come to an accord and sought a third member for their new Trinity: Michael (acting through Mary) forced Vykos to mentally submit while he burned the Dracon free from their body, a compulsion impossible for the Tzimisce to resist. Beckett managed to rescue Sascha, saving their unlife (much to their mutual chagrin) and escape, though severely injured, with their torpored body in a body bag.
Sascha woke up several nights later: Beckett, in the meantime, had sought sanctuary with a powerful vampire known as Prospero, a friend of his (and acquaintance of Vykos) who was essentially Prince of the Cayman Islands and offered sanctuary on neutral ground. While not especially happy about being rescued - and even less happy that their rescuer had been Beckett of all people, their longtime rival- Vykos was furious that “Prospero”, who they had occasionally been sharing notes with (and vice-versa), was actually Amerin, a member of the Inconnu. And to make matters worse, with Mary pursuing the two of them, Vykos and Beckett were essentially stuck in the same place, in the Caymans, until they could come up with some kind of plan to deal with the situation and with a high possibility of having to at least temporarily work together.
On top of that, Vykos had to deal with several unpleasant facts: the first being that, with the Dracon now removed from their body, that they were free from their ancestor’s bitter, self-destructive consciousness seeping into them and tainting their thoughts for the first time in centuries. Basically, they were as close to sane again as it was possible for an elder Tzimisce to be. Second, they finally realized that the Dream they had fought to build, to complete, for so long, had been forced on them, instead of being a legacy that they had freely chosen to recreate. Now what?
At least things can’t possibly get much worse. Right?
CANON PERSONALITY:
Over the long course of their unlife, Sascha Vykos has undergone considerable changes in personality. Some things have remained constant: they have always been intelligent, logical and curious, wanting to know everything they could, hungry for knowledge and trying to use what they know to make the world make sense, an intellectual down to their bones who overthinks everything. They have also always been ambitious, manipulative, and selfish, though to what degree and how they express those traits vary depending on their age.
As a young vampire, when they were still Myca, they were soft-spoken (even when in thoroughly bad temper), polite, and often pleasant in manner, though simultaneously not-so-secretly prickly, sharp-tongued, and temperamental beneath their diplomatic, often charming (for as long as they could manage it) facade, as well as introverted, difficult to read, and withdrawn, a very private, guarded individual. They were also stubborn: described alternately as “headstrong” (by an acquaintance) and “strong in their own convictions” (more charitably, by their boyfriend), they were slow to change their mind - or accept a truth - without evidence given to them.
Though their manipulative, selfish, and amoral tendencies had been present in life, as they first were raised as nobility/minor royalty, then were an acolyte in a House of mages known for their lack of ethics in the practice of magic, they only got worse after they became a vampire, raised among the clan that reveled in their inhumanity and in Byzantium’s vampiric society, even more cutthroat and manipulative than the mortal society that it was founded on and among. While Myca was not as casually or as brutally sadistic as many of their clanmate the lives of mortals (beyond perhaps a few prized servitors) meant nothing, and though they could pretend to be kind and helpful as long as it benefitted them, they could best have been described as an amoral monster-in-waiting. In addition, they had that streak of cruelty lying beneath the surface, as they would quite thoroughly fuck someone up if they crossed them without blinking or remorse, remember their grudges and take vengeance as appropriate at the right moment...even if that “right moment” meant waiting a good long time. (see: what they did to Symeon).
Though Myca was an expert at playing by other people’s rules when necessary, doing so chafed on them as much as rampant ignorance, excessive religiosity, and people questioning their decisions when they were in a particularly stubborn mood did. Their selfish and amoral tendencies only compounded after they began practicing the tenets of the Road of Sin: though good for them in many ways, including the emphasis on self-knowledge and self-will, the Road also called for its practitioners to control their Beast (essentially the superpowered, bestial self all vampires have) by indulging in their whims and desires: essentially, do as they please without caring who they hurt.
In addition, Myca Vykos was surprisingly fragile beneath their calm, graceful control and apparent confidence. Though very aware of how gifted, talented, and skilled they were and quite confident in their own abilities, they also had considerable self-image problems born of roots that it would take them centuries to fully untangle and understand, self-image problems that bled into many aspects of their personal life. Uncomfortable in their own skin due to a combination of unknowing dysphoria and repressed trauma, and quietly unsure that they were worthy of their lover’s regard or that they were anything more than a hollow, pretty shell, empty on the inside and longing for something undefinable and out of reach, they held their doubts to themselves even when they needed the help. Even with how good they were at figuring out what other people wanted - and how to use that as leverage - they were absolutely uncomfortable with the idea of anyone besides their longtime lover wanting them, terrible at intimacy, and often oblivious to when someone did want them, which was difficult with their choice of Road.
Despite their emotional turmoil, however, Myca had the resolve to try to push past it: to refuse to reject themself, to come to terms. And then they got broken, and the amoral monster-in-waiting became just a monster.
“I am not what, or who I was before. I am not yet certain what, or who, I am becoming.”
Sascha Vykos changed quite a bit from their younger days: perhaps the only good change is that they fully understand and accept their personal identity, paring away their self-esteem and self-image problems and come to terms with it, being completely what they are and refusing to compromise on the matter.. Otherwise? Not so much. Their stubbornness has calcified, their manipulative tendencies honed to outright treachery, their ambition grand but monstrous.
First, they no longer play by the rules of others: as a powerful elder in their own right, Vykos no longer has to bow to the expectations of their “superiors”. Though their position as priscus carries with it certain unspoken expectations, such as any “advice” being couched in polite recommendations, they don’t even follow that as their advice is far more in the veins of strong “suggestions”. They are often best described as a “loose cannon”, a known rogue element, with how they often prioritize their own agendas above that of the sect they serve, most notably illustrated by how they left DC for their own reason, without permission, at quite possibly the worst possible time.
Second, though a certain cooling of the heart is inevitable with elder vampires, centuries and millennia distant from humanity, Sascha takes this to extremes. Detached and alien in outlook, Sascha regards much around them as subjects to study and no longer fears such mundane concerns as death or Gehenna. Though they conduct twisted experiments (...and make their furniture out of unfortunate ghouls), torture prisoners to their limits (and beyond) on behalf of the Sabbat and as part of their own studies, those activities are not undertaken out of simple sadism (which, while terrible, would at least be comprehensible), but out of careful calculation and cold cruelty that is widely infamous across sects. “Complete monster” might be putting it mildly.
In addition, strong displays of emotion are rare for them: “stoic” is, again, an understatement. Vykos follows a particularly strange path called “Death and the Soul” that controls the Beast through detachment and study of death, in order to understand how the irrational (such as emotions and supernatural phenomena) interact with the rational (the realm of the flesh). Practitioners of this path are expected to be callous and detached: Sascha usually follows these tenets quite well. Occasionally, however, in certain extraordinary situations, Vykos will (albeit briefly) actually feel something, be it anger or (even more rarely) surprise, revealing that their sharp tongue and irritable temperament from their younger days aren’t quite gone yet. They also sometimes display a sly sense of humor, or at least what passes for a sense of humor, anyway.
Beneath their stoicism and detachment, however, Sascha is not mentally stable: they never have been, even before the fact that all elder vampires generally are not sane by nature. Unfortunately, their mental degeneration began while they were still young, precipitated by being forced to share their body with the Dracon, their ancestor’s bitter self-hatred and self-destructive tendencies seeping into all their thoughts and everything that they did, pushing them to behave even more erratically. It remains to be seen, however, what removing the Dracon would ultimately do to - and for - Sascha’s mental state: while they were as close to sanity again as an elder Tzimisce could be (which...isn’t saying much, really), what that means for Sascha in the long run is still unknown.
SKILLS/ABILITIES:
Ridiculous. Absolutely ridiculous, between both their age and the fact that the canon has absolutely stupid scaling for ability scores. I’ll break down what they can do (and if need be, I can provide their character sheet for the canon backing for all this), but please let me nerf this stuff. Please. I really don’t want to deal with all that OP bullshit.
Supernatural Abilities: Is a vampire: cannot eat food, drinks blood to survive (and power many of their Disciplines, their supernatural powers), burns in sunlight and in fire. Exposure to sunlight and fire will not kill them immediately, though the longer they are exposed, the more seriously that they will be hurt: they have a leeway of several minutes before direct exposure will kill them. In addition, they can use the power of their blood to temporarily make themself stronger/faster/more resilient, but their normal baseline of physical capability, before the use of any of their supernatural powers, is strong enough to lift ~400 pounds, graceful and dextrous enough to be a professional acrobat, and with above-average stamina. .
In addition, the various clans of vampires in this canon all have a different weakness, supposedly due to their progenitors being cursed by Cain, the first vampire. Clan Tzimisce’s weakness is that unless they sleep with two handfuls of earth of a place important to them as a mortal - often, though not always, from their ritual graves when they were Embraced - that they weaken slowly until they can fulfill this requirement.
Vicissitude: one of the affinity Disciplines associated with the Tzimisce and their signature power, Vicissitude generally involves the shaping of flesh, either the user’s own or someone else’s, and the changes wrought by flesh and bone crafting are usually permanent (barring further use of Vicissitude to further change it). For most of these changes (barring the relatively fast transformation powers such as zulo form), it is usually necessary for the user to touch whoever they are working on and physically sculpt those changes, even in themself. Though possible for someone of sufficient power to mind control a skilled Tzimisce into subconsciously shaping themselves without touch (and only themself), it’s...never a good sign.
Vykos has mastered this Discipline to levels only reachable by elders of particularly strong blood.
Can alter height, build, facial structure, skin tone, eye color, hair color, and other elements of appearance
Can alter the skin itself, muscle, fat, and cartilage as desired
Can alter bone (and other hard material inside the body)
Can take on the zulo war form: essentially, temporarily transform into a horrible monster built for close combat. Claws, really tough hide, bone spurs, towering above normal people, etc. While the transformation is technically indefinite in length, it’s only suitable for fighting, and takes 12 seconds to complete. .
Can transform into a living pool of blood and manipulate body fluids to an exacting degree.
Can turn into a horrible bat monster with much the same properties as the zulo form, except a flying bat, as well as transform their own blood into corrosive acid.
Can cocoon themselves in a cocoon made of blood to protect themselves from sunlight and fire: while extremely resistant to both sunlight and fire, direct, prolonged exposure to either (or both) will eventually destroy the cocoon (still safer than direct contact without it, though).
* Since I mentioned wanting to nerf their powerset, I would prefer to not do anything with the powerset at 5th bullet point and higher. (Basically stop regains at the zulo form).
Animalism: another affinity Discipline for the Tzimisce, Animalism allows its users to communicate with and control animals as well as influence the Beast (oddly, all mortals - not just ghouls- have something of a Beast that can be influenced for purposes of this Discipline).
Vykos is fairly adept at use of this Discipline: not a master, and definitely nowhere near the potential they could have given their age and the strength of their blood as their interests and priorities lie elsewhere, but still extremely good.
Can speak to animals telepathically (with eye contact)
Can summon animals of a specific species (“all crows” or “all emperor penguins”) in an area in voice radius of them: in order to respond, the animals have to be able to hear them.
Can soothe a creature, making them docile: this also works to help pull vampires out of frenzy. In addition, can cow a mortal into a state of fear or apathy.
Possess the body of an animal: see through its eyes, control it, etc. If done very well, can also use their mental Disciplines through the animal.
Auspex: third and last affinity Discipline for the Tzimisce. Auspex grants its user supernatural senses and allows them to see through illusions (if they choose to).
Vykos is fairly adept at their use of this Discipline: not a master, and definitely nowhere near the heights that they could reach if they so chose given their age and the strength of their blood, but still extremely good.
Raise one of the 5 senses to superhuman levels.
Can read someone’s aura to figure out their emotional state and powers
Psychometry: can learn something about an object and its previous owner(s) from its resonance.
Telepathy: can read and project thoughts.
Celerity: Not an affinity Discipline of the Tzimisce, but fairly common. Allows the user to have superhuman bursts of speed and enhanced reflexes and dexterity for about six seconds at a time/per activation of the Discipline: in addition, this supernatural speed breaks the laws of physics in that the vampire doesn’t experience/cause any changes in momentum, friction, etc, and is obviously supernatural.. Vykos’s level of skill with this Discipline is about average: they’re competent, but not anything special, and with their current level of mastery, their bursts using this power are about twice that of their normal.
Fortitude: not an affinity Discipline of the Tzimisce. Unlike most Disciplines, it is not consciously activated, but it is instead a passive power. It gives the user resistance to all forms of damage and basically makes them immune to blunt trauma. This supernatural toughness does apply to sunlight and fire, and while Fortitude does not grant immunity from those weaknesses, it helps the vampire better able to stand up to them for longer.
Vykos is fairly competent with this Discipline: not a master, not an adept, but fairly above-average competent with it. So they’re fairly tough but not the toughest: as an equivalent, their level of competency with this Discipline basically gives them the equivalent of wearing a stab-proof kevlar vest with ceramic plating at all times, except that this protection weighs nothing and covers their whole body.
Presence: not an affinity Discipline of the Tzimisce, but a fairly common one, Presence is the Discipline of supernatural allure and emotional manipulation: unlike Dominate, it can be used on crowds, is subtle, and through certain forms of mass communication (such as video, voice recordings, or over the phone: it cannot be used in purely text-based mediums). The effects of this Discipline can be resisted by the strong-willed (aka “ignoring the user).
Vykos is also fairly adept at use of this Discipline: not a master, but fairly good.
Can make people want to approach them and listen to/agree with what they’re saying: essentially a spell of fascination. While immediate and intense, it is temporary: it’s not strong enough to make people forget about self-preservation (being in danger will break the effects), but even after the immediate effects are broken, those who had this used on them will remember how they felt while the power was active.
Terrify/intimidate others with a glance.
They can make people want to please and serve them through entrancement, out of false love and adoration.
Finally, they can call someone that they have met and and compel them to come to them immediately, no matter how far away they happen to be. (Obviously, they have to have some way of communicating with them to make this work).
*note that I would actually strongly prefer to not ever use the last two effects described here and would prefer to stop regains for Presence with the terrify-at-a-glance power.
Dominate: not an affinity Discipline of the Tzimisce, but again, a fairly common one. Unlike the more subtle Presence, Dominate allows its user to overwhelm another’s will, forcing them to think and act as the vampire wants. There are several important restrictions on the use of this Discipline: first, the user must maintain eye contact with who they’re using the power on. Second, they must either speak (or be heard, if they have telepathy) in a language that whoever they are using can hear and understand. The stronger-willed the user, the more difficult it is to affect them with this power and it is flatly impossible to use Dominate on vampires stronger in the blood. It is also impossible to issue commands to someone that either would force them to be physically self-harmful or suicidal, and 2) go against their inherent nature as a person.
Vykos - perhaps ironically given their own history - is a master of this Discipline.
Issue one-word simple commands that must be obeyed. (“run”, or “stop”, etc)
Impose post-hypnotic suggestions.
Alter memories: this includes erasing completely, simply changing, or restoring memories that have been tampered with. Note that in order to do any of these things, the user must narrate to the person whose memories that they are working on how they are changing those memories, essentially walking them through it like a hypnotist. The more complicated the changes to the target’s memory, with the exception of fixing any altered memories, the easier those changes are to unravel.
Able to wear someone down over time in order to make them susceptible to commands that they would normally be able to resist.
Possess a mortal’s body: see through their eyes, control their actions, etc. If done well enough, can use mental Disciplines through the mortal’s body.
*While I list these powers for completeness’s sake, I am not really comfortable with playing with Dominate outside of a tabletop environment where there are more concrete rules to govern its use. If possible, I would prefer to either stop regains for Dominate with the single-word command or to not have Dominate as a regain option at all.
Thaumaturgy: a system of blood magic developed by the Tremere that adapted Hermetic magical principles into magic usable by vampires. Thaumaturgy in general is extremely codified, extremely scientific (as far as magic goes), rigorous research, extremely reliable, repeatable effects.
Thaumaturgy itself is divided into two ways to express the blood magician’s will: paths and rituals.
Rituals are elaborate, organized instructions for magical effects: the complexity and difficulty of these rituals varies, but if performed correctly will always lead to the same result. Variance is error, and error leads to nowhere good: “not working at all” is the best outcome in that case. Rituals also require elaborate trappings and components: chalk circles, chanting, etc, take hours at the shortest and days, even months or possibly years, at the longest. Larger-scale, extremely powerful rituals might also require really rare things, like the heart of a seventh son of a seventh son and necessitate multiple thaumaturges working in concert (the most infamous ritual being the Tremere ritual, cast by the most senior members of the clan, that cursed the entire Assamite clan with an inability to drink vampire blood).
Paths are basically learned, instant applications and expressions of thaumaturgical principles distilled into reliable and repeatable effects, similarly to rituals. Unlike rituals, however, the use of paths is much faster, does not require components save the thaumaturge’s own blood and will, and, while powerful, are not as potentially powerful as rituals are. Successfully using a Path spell requires concentration: if the thaumaturge’s concentration is broken before the spell is cast, then it fails.
Vykos is a master of thaumaturgical knowledge, which is extremely rare for a non-Tremere vampire - and doubly rare for a Tzimisce, as the preferred tradition of blood magic among the Tzimisce is koldunic sorcery. Their knowledge came from several different places: first, from reverse-engineering the Hermetic magic that they knew as a former Tremere mage, second, from their obsessive chasing of knowledge over the years, third from browbeating members of the Tremere antitribu into teaching them before all the Sabbat-aligned Tremere mysteriously died, and fourth from torturing Tremere who fell into their hands into giving them their secrets and then taking their books once they died. While they know a significant number of rituals - excepting, of course, the Very Secret Tremere-only rituals - most of the really powerful ones are beyond their power to cast, given the very few thaumaturges among the Sabbat after the deaths of the Tremere antitribu. The rituals that they are seen using most often have to do with thaumaturgical wards, both undoing those cast by others and casting their own (such as wards on their study/library that will burst into flame if anyone not them - or their servitors - tries to steal a book).
They have knowledge of three Paths: the Path of Blood, Lure of Flames, and Movement of the Mind: while they have mastered the first two, their mastery of Movement of the Mind is only at apprentice level.
Path of Blood
Can determine information about someone’s history and lineage by drinking their blood.
Can force another vampire to use their blood in ways as they choose, but must be touching them in order to do so. (*obviously useless when dealing with non-vampires)
Can temporarily make themself stronger in the blood by concentrating their blood
Can magically steal blood from someone else - vampire, mortal, etc- without having to come into contact with them.
Can cause someone’s blood to boil in their veins.
Lure of Flames
Can create and control flames equivalent in size and strength to a raging forest fire and smaller.
Movement of the Mind
Can telekinetically lift and manipulate objects up to 20 pounds.
Mundane Skills:
Sascha Vykos is over a thousand years old, and has never spent extended periods in torpor, unlike many of their peers: they have had the time to cultivate a wide variety of skills during their unlife. While many of those skills are academic and knowledge-related, as Vykos was, is, and will always remain a complete bookworm, not all of them are, as they do occupy a fairly dangerous position in a sect prone to both internal and external war and strife.
By that same token, though they no longer serve as a diplomat, they still retain most of those social skills and put them into practice regularly, if not in the same capacity that they once did: Sascha still knows how to weave and manipulate a web of intrigue with a consummate skill, lie extremely well, and knows their way around fairly complicated etiquette gracefully. In addition, they have honed their intimidation and interrogation skills to a considerable mastery - the two social skills that they use most now. They also have about average skill with performance - singing, dancing, etc-, not that they have actually used that skill in years, and while they’re able to read people’s emotional state and understand them, is only barely adequate at best.
While they are a bookworm, and always have been, the luxury of not knowing how to fight has never been an option afforded them: and they are a very dangerous opponent. Between their upbringing as a noble in the early medieval period and then as an apprentice mage in a House devoted to dominance and conflict, they were already at least conversant in basic combat skills before they became a vampire, skills which only sharpened over the years. Vykos is decent with a bow (though that particular skill is more from their noble background than from any need in the years since) but is far better and much more dangerous to face in hand-to-hand combat, either unarmed or with a blade, especially a knife. An actual master at either of those will still beat the hell out of them - because while very, very good, they are no master - but it won’t be an easy fight, between keen alertness (they’re really good at noticing things and spotting ambushes) and the even-more-important ability at being stupidly good at dodging things, even before supernatural powers are taken into account.
Sascha is also reasonably athletic (“ talented amateur” level), somewhat stealthy (about comparative to the average teenager who makes a habit of sneaking out/doing things they shouldn’t), and is fairly competent at surviving in harsh environments. As a diplomat during the medieval period, they traveled extensively, regularly riding a horse and being perfectly comfortable doing so: they still have the skill, though it hasn’t been necessary or relevant in a long time.
However, their passion has always been in knowledge, and they have made it their business to Know Things, specifically a lot of things. First, they have a solid cross-disciplinary grounding in various humanities fields, with a depth of knowledge enough to earn several Ph.Ds, if they cared enough to do the legwork to set up identities to allow themself to do so. Their especial specialty is in history, and between their own firsthand experience of over a thousand years of history, the fact that they know people who have lived even longer, their obsessive research, and their access to accounts not available anymore to mortal scholars, the past is basically an open book to them. Whatever they don’t know, they In addition, they do not restrict their study simply to mortal history, but to vampiric history as well: in addition to their study of Noddist lore, they are also extremely well-informed about the inner workings and history of both the Camarilla and the Sabbat (the Sabbat more so than the Camarilla, due to being a founding member of the Sabbat). Their other main obsession is with the study of the occult: they know most of the basic hidden truths and secrets of the World of Darkness and are extremely well-versed in the eschatology surrounding the First City and Gehenna. In addition, given their experiments, fleshcrafting, and skill at torture, they know a lot about the human (and vampiric) body, anatomy, and the limits of both: if they actually turned their knowledge to good ends, they could be an amazing doctor, but that isn’t likely to actually happen.
Outside of their areas of expertise, Sascha has a smattering of other knowledge skills, including a considerable understanding of the fundamentals of political systems- in essence, how they work (and where to theoretically put pressure to get what they want)-, a fair bit of knowledge about folk tales and wise-women’s superstitions, enough financial knowledge to theoretically do their own finances, a basic understanding of mortal laws, and enough herbalism lore to be fairly good at the use of even rare plants (though definitely not a master or anywhere close).
Sascha has also ensured that they are able to find whatever piece of knowledge that they are looking for. First, they are fluent in 32 languages: while canon does not list most of them, languages that they are explicitly stated to have proficiency in include Latin, medieval and classical Greek, English, and Enochian (the language of the First City: fluency is a requirement for being a Noddist scholar). Second, they are superlatively skilled in how to research: if they don’t know something, it’s guaranteed that they know how and where to look and how to use the sources they have available to them (or know what books they don’t have to look for) to put them on the right track. Though most of their research is conducted in libraries, they are also able to investigate in the field, with about the same level of skill as a skilled private investigator: they definitely aren’t as good at that as more academic research, but they can get the job done.
That being said, Sascha - as befitting an elder vampire - is very bad at using modern devices and adapting to modern technology. They have no idea how to use a gun (why would they, when vampires are resistant to most bullets and they can either turn into a horrible clawed monster or light people on fire to fight?), can’t drive, and a computer is the one kind of magic that they have no idea about. While their superlative skill at research means that they could probably figure out what keywords are needed to find whatever they’re looking for if they couldn’t use their books for...some bizarre reason, but they would need to either order a ghoul servitor or some unfortunate young Sabbat vampire to operate the computer and put the keywords into Google for them because otherwise nothing is getting done.
CHARACTER: AU SECTION
AU NAME: Myca Eliade
AU AGE: 23
PHYSICAL DIFFERENCES:
Sascha Vykos had, for much of the modern nights, reshaped themselves into being distinctively...alien in appearance and enigmatically beautiful. Seven feet tall, inhumanely perfect, completely androgynous in appearance and covered with intricate scars (...that are skin clefts that can open and allow them to speak through them as well), tattoos, and piercings. Their “original” form is far more normal-looking, if still very beautiful, though not inhumanely so: tall (...for the medieval period) and slender, with long black hair, dark eyes, and very pale skin, fine-boned with sharp, delicate features.
Needless to say, Myca Eliade is far more normal-looking, having far more in common appearance-wise with their “original” appearance, except being fairly short (5’5”, as opposed to 5’9” or 5’10”), not quite so pale, and deliberately presenting androgynously (where they, in canon, presented as male for the early part of their unlife, before they became Sascha).
AU NAME: Myca Eliade
AU AGE: 23
PHYSICAL DIFFERENCES:
Sascha Vykos had, for much of the modern nights, reshaped themselves into being distinctively...alien in appearance and enigmatically beautiful. Seven feet tall, inhumanely perfect, completely androgynous in appearance and covered with intricate scars (...that are skin clefts that can open and allow them to speak through them as well), tattoos, and piercings. Their “original” form is far more normal-looking, if still very beautiful, though not inhumanely so: tall (...for the medieval period) and slender, with long black hair, dark eyes, and very pale skin, fine-boned with sharp, delicate features.
Needless to say, Myca Eliade is far more normal-looking, having far more in common appearance-wise with their “original” appearance, except being fairly short (5’5”, as opposed to 5’9” or 5’10”), not quite so pale, and deliberately presenting androgynously (where they, in canon, presented as male for the early part of their unlife, before they became Sascha).
AU HISTORY:
Only child of first-generation Romanian immigrants: parents couldn’t take care of them and gave them up to the system, was adopted as a very young child by a well-off (upper middle-class-ish) Greek man and his wife (both also immigrants and naturalized citizens of the United States, though far more successful financially).
Definitely a prodigy: started school a year early + skipped a grade later on, but was not permitted to skip any more out of concern for their socialization.
While well-provided for, their childhood was kind of emotionally bleak and lonely. Their adoptive father was strict and had extremely high expectations, their adoptive mother, while kind, was distant, and they did not make many friends.
Everything got worse when their adoptive father’s wife ran off with his brother when Myca was in their early teens. Their parents’ marriage had been failing for some time, which only made the perfectionist loop of Myca and their adoptive father’s relationship worse. Their father took out his stress by expecting even more perfection out of Myca, who performed the best that they could, even brilliantly, because they loved their father, but never quite up to standard.
Their father, already a fairly devout Greek Orthodox Christian, turned even more to the solace of religion to deal with his divorce, which....honestly made everything worse, especially when Myca rejected religion as an answer for them and further strained their relationship.
High school was a misery for them, between a strict, super religious father, being too smart and too mouthy to ever get along with their peers + being two years younger, a hidden case of depression, and their unresolved, unspoken gender and sexuality issues. While they were able to put a name to both after some research - that they were genderqueer and bisexual- having the correct labels didn’t help that much, given everything else.
University was somewhat better on the personal front, at least in terms of getting away from their father, being able to at least try to explore their gender self-expression and sexuality, being able to make some friends for the first time in their life,, and getting some kind of treatment for their depression. They double-majored in history and classics, with a minor in linguistics, and graduated summa cum laude.
During their senior year, they applied to Ph.D history programs for Byzantine history, intending to go right into a doctoral program(and earn their masters along the way) out of a combination of ambition and financial concerns.
While they got several acceptances, competition for funding was stiff, especially in history. Brilliant but untested soon-to-be-BAs mostly lose in funding to smart people who already held masters’ degrees, and only Recolle University gave them guaranteed funding, so the choice was Pretty Easy.
Good thing Myca got guaranteed funding, because over the summer that they were home before they started the Ph.D program, they made one last attempt to be honest with their father by coming out to him, and he took it badly.
Almost immediately after that disaster, they packed their things and moved to Recolle, and haven’t gone home to visit their father in two years. At this point, they’ve finished their second year in the program, should be finishing their coursework within another semester, and is already starting to stress about comprehensive exams.
Works as a teaching assistant (their main source of funding at the moment) for various undergrad history classes at RU, 1 class a semester. Also has a moderately popular Youtube channel that they started out of exasperation at their students and used as a teaching tool, essentially the sarcastic historian’s guide to history.
AU PERSONALITY:
Much more in line with their canon self’s younger personality: soft-spoken, introverted, graceful and polite on the surface, not-so-secretly very prickly. Sharp-tongued. Not a nice person, despite being able to act pleasant.
One big difference is that they are not a monster. Morally grey and shady, yes, pragmatic, yes, but unlike Sascha, who went from “amoral and selfish” to “amoral monster-in-waiting” to just “monster” over the course of their life and unlife, they have a recognizably human moral compass and a conscience. They were raised in a much more normal environment, among more normal people: Sascha, on the other hand, was minor royalty in the early medieval period, then a mage in a House that cared very little for ethics, then a vampire from a clan that reveled in their inhumanity and particularly a subset of said clan that was an extremely weird blood cult on top of that, all of which contributed heavily to “inhuman mindset” even as a young vampire. So, without that? Still not a good person, but at least much more human, with a conscience and some idea what ethics are .
Their self-doubts and self-image problems have somewhat different root assumptions. Unlike their canon self, who as a mortal and young vampire grappled with their gender identity and personal desires in environments that did not allow for realizing the truth about themselves for a significant amount of time, Myca Eliade had ready access to these concepts and was able to figure themself out fairly early, knowing themself and relating to their identity and what they want in a much healthier way. However, unlike their canon self, who was a perfectionistic high-achiever held to high standards but was praised for their achievements (back when they still cared about pleasing their sire, anyway), Myca was never good enough for their adoptive father, held to impossibly high standards that they could never reach.
Myca Eliade is far less traumatized, to put it mildly, and far more stable.
Only child of first-generation Romanian immigrants: parents couldn’t take care of them and gave them up to the system, was adopted as a very young child by a well-off (upper middle-class-ish) Greek man and his wife (both also immigrants and naturalized citizens of the United States, though far more successful financially).
Definitely a prodigy: started school a year early + skipped a grade later on, but was not permitted to skip any more out of concern for their socialization.
While well-provided for, their childhood was kind of emotionally bleak and lonely. Their adoptive father was strict and had extremely high expectations, their adoptive mother, while kind, was distant, and they did not make many friends.
Everything got worse when their adoptive father’s wife ran off with his brother when Myca was in their early teens. Their parents’ marriage had been failing for some time, which only made the perfectionist loop of Myca and their adoptive father’s relationship worse. Their father took out his stress by expecting even more perfection out of Myca, who performed the best that they could, even brilliantly, because they loved their father, but never quite up to standard.
Their father, already a fairly devout Greek Orthodox Christian, turned even more to the solace of religion to deal with his divorce, which....honestly made everything worse, especially when Myca rejected religion as an answer for them and further strained their relationship.
High school was a misery for them, between a strict, super religious father, being too smart and too mouthy to ever get along with their peers + being two years younger, a hidden case of depression, and their unresolved, unspoken gender and sexuality issues. While they were able to put a name to both after some research - that they were genderqueer and bisexual- having the correct labels didn’t help that much, given everything else.
University was somewhat better on the personal front, at least in terms of getting away from their father, being able to at least try to explore their gender self-expression and sexuality, being able to make some friends for the first time in their life,, and getting some kind of treatment for their depression. They double-majored in history and classics, with a minor in linguistics, and graduated summa cum laude.
During their senior year, they applied to Ph.D history programs for Byzantine history, intending to go right into a doctoral program(and earn their masters along the way) out of a combination of ambition and financial concerns.
While they got several acceptances, competition for funding was stiff, especially in history. Brilliant but untested soon-to-be-BAs mostly lose in funding to smart people who already held masters’ degrees, and only Recolle University gave them guaranteed funding, so the choice was Pretty Easy.
Good thing Myca got guaranteed funding, because over the summer that they were home before they started the Ph.D program, they made one last attempt to be honest with their father by coming out to him, and he took it badly.
Almost immediately after that disaster, they packed their things and moved to Recolle, and haven’t gone home to visit their father in two years. At this point, they’ve finished their second year in the program, should be finishing their coursework within another semester, and is already starting to stress about comprehensive exams.
Works as a teaching assistant (their main source of funding at the moment) for various undergrad history classes at RU, 1 class a semester. Also has a moderately popular Youtube channel that they started out of exasperation at their students and used as a teaching tool, essentially the sarcastic historian’s guide to history.
AU PERSONALITY:
Much more in line with their canon self’s younger personality: soft-spoken, introverted, graceful and polite on the surface, not-so-secretly very prickly. Sharp-tongued. Not a nice person, despite being able to act pleasant.
One big difference is that they are not a monster. Morally grey and shady, yes, pragmatic, yes, but unlike Sascha, who went from “amoral and selfish” to “amoral monster-in-waiting” to just “monster” over the course of their life and unlife, they have a recognizably human moral compass and a conscience. They were raised in a much more normal environment, among more normal people: Sascha, on the other hand, was minor royalty in the early medieval period, then a mage in a House that cared very little for ethics, then a vampire from a clan that reveled in their inhumanity and particularly a subset of said clan that was an extremely weird blood cult on top of that, all of which contributed heavily to “inhuman mindset” even as a young vampire. So, without that? Still not a good person, but at least much more human, with a conscience and some idea what ethics are .
Their self-doubts and self-image problems have somewhat different root assumptions. Unlike their canon self, who as a mortal and young vampire grappled with their gender identity and personal desires in environments that did not allow for realizing the truth about themselves for a significant amount of time, Myca Eliade had ready access to these concepts and was able to figure themself out fairly early, knowing themself and relating to their identity and what they want in a much healthier way. However, unlike their canon self, who was a perfectionistic high-achiever held to high standards but was praised for their achievements (back when they still cared about pleasing their sire, anyway), Myca was never good enough for their adoptive father, held to impossibly high standards that they could never reach.
Myca Eliade is far less traumatized, to put it mildly, and far more stable.
