faces at the masquerade

faces at the masquerade

there are things you can be in the lovely dark but i haven't written those up yet. mostly it's bugs and skeletons and hives of art nouveau blood flukes and stuff. but here's things you can be also. three variations on a theme.

49th Century Space Adventurer

satellite, by dusty ray

Under your greasy black cosmonaut suit you're a reinforced skeleton packed full of copper plugs and corroded batteries and lightning-scarred xolotite computer chips.

You're immune to naked vacuum and sick irradiance and bitter cold and abject loneliness. Love burns you like fire.

Start with any two of these. If you abandon what your class gives you, start with four.

1. harpoon gun (greasy filthy jagged. motor winch can drag your body+kit weight. wired into your skull, and fires autonomically at anything you want badly enough.)
2. core decryptor (like a dripping wasp stinger adrenaline shot. destroys a load-bearing self-deception. one use.)
3. fulgurite devil horns (punish with a 1 HP shock when you lie, even compassionately, then chain three times to zap others around you)
4. neurospike (unmakes ideas, which have HP = their host's INT. At 0 HP an idea reveals its most childlike root formation.)

5. ovospike (unwrites pretensions, which have HP = their host's WIS. At 0 HP, a person reveals something foundational and vulnerable that the pretensions were meant to protect.)

6. white lock (marble dog collar. only removable by you. lets you control their facial expressions and intercept and rewrite any words they speak. if they speak.)
7. black lock (13 black glass nails. each one contains something you believe. while it's in someone else, it's not in you. bleeds incessantly until it's removed.)
8. red lock (13 tiny glass balloons drifting on rusty wires. each one contains a memory. while they're in the balloons they're not in you. if they break they're gone forever.)

9. void lock (featureless brass mask with fur lining. while wearing this you're psychologically inviolable to spirits, empathy, grief, agony, and hope, and cannot say no to anything. easily removed in theory, but not in practice.)
10. cassowary boots (replace your legs from the thigh down, need constant maintenance from someone who isn't you. anyone who touches them must save or bleed. attack as a short sword, disembowel on a crit)

11. ulfbox (void opaque. expands big enough to climb inside. clarity, stability, hope. must save to get out. take a penalty for everything horrible you can think of outside, and each time you've ever used it.)

12. core encryptor (a white needle they swallow. pins one idea inside them. if they speak it, they die. one use.)

You have to speak in impenetrable 49th century argot all the time. Here is some of that. 
The format is denotation (connotation).
    Vaka! = get real! (get fucked!)
    Fyott = steal (abduct)
    Klo = steal (wound irreparably)
    Clean = what you are now, forever
    Gemfaring = what you do, and no whole person will
    Drop = leave (for planetside, or suicide)
    Goner = outer space (i hate myself)
    Shunt = outer space (i hate you)
    The Infinite Macabre = outer space (please pretend it's beautiful)
    Alas! = general purpose Hwaet
    Glittery = pretty (but never beautiful or good)
    Noctivagant = person (lonely and stark)
    Thou = the only second person pronoun worth using
    Shaking = needful (needy and disgusting)
    Melty = needy and disgusting (cullbait)
    Brāgit = useful to me (cullbait)
    The Cull = you're safe, because it already happened to you.

Make up the rest yourself, along roughly these lines. It doesn't matter if it's even consistent from one sentence to the next. The point is that nobody can understand what you say, and you have no way of conveying anything good and real to other people.

Elf

sea, by dusty ray

 

Elfs engage with the world exclusively as an intricate work of art to be studied and criticized. Some let it drift by like sea wrack, others obsess over the fine details of a single life and collect nails and hair for a personal shrine, or skin you with scrimshaw knives for standing in the way of their favorite romances. When a human friend dies they might extemporize a weepy eulogy, or replicate their death exactly on themself for comparison, or leave to complain to the other elfs about the tedious and predictable conclusion. 

Characters in stories are a sort of double-negation. Those are people who matter. They live forever, like Elfs do, and they're much better at following storyrules than meat people. They're easy to understand and easier to relate to. Losing a character is like losing a loved one to Elfs, and the storyteller who did it is a murderer. But even murderers can be redeemed with the right ordeal. Good stories are about change.

Torment means growth to Elfs, means transfiguration, means opening doors in the body to let out greater expressions of inner beauty like flowers of flesh and blood, means making gaps to insert themselves and feel real under your skin, means love because love is change and change always hurts, don't you see? All stories are love stories. When they've got two fingers and a tongue in the socket of your gouged out eye it's because you finally make sense to them, because you're finally healing and satisfying them like you're meant to. Torture happens to real people. You're being whumped.

They congregate in cenotes and chasms, plush gray skin insulating them from the cold and pressure, staring studiously past each other with their vast well-black eyes, engraving the spiral stories of their lives in stone for the others to read when they've gone. Other elfs are grudging equals but the only virtues another elf can have are taste and consensus.

Elfs are not capable of making "I" statements, or articulating anything about themselves besides their tastes and preferences. They don't know what they look like, and hate to be told.

They don't bleed or get sick or feel pain. Inside they're like plushies. They understand their own experiences only at distant remove. Reconstructing the play from the reviews.

When an elf would die or be dismembered, they lose their (arm/leg/head/all remaining limbs), easily fixable by popping them back together like a doll, in a minute or two.

 

Vampire

adogyawnsadogsighsadogsleeps, by dusty ray

ONE THOUSAND THOUSAND SHARP SHARP SHARK TEETH CRUSHING GRINDING GEAR TEETH JAGGED GNASHING DOG TEETH CRUSHED INTO A SCREAMING MACHINE OF IRON AND BONE. STOLEN SKIN YOU'RE TWITCHING IN. THE THINGS THEY DON'T REMEMBER CRAWL THROUGH YOU LIKE WORMS AND YOU CUT AND GRIND AND GNASH THEM INTO SLIMY SILVER MEDICINE. LOVE DESPAIR HOPE SELF AS LUBRICANT ALL RENDERED DOWN TO WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT 
WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT 
WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT 

WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT 

WANT WANT WANT

 

If you are a vampire you may only express ideas beginning with "I want..."
The two emotions you feel are "the want hurts more" and "the want hurts less."
If any part of you is ever uncovered, everyone can tell it's all wrong. They'll react to it like a pus-weeping sore.
Anything beyond animalistic pursuit of your wants must be a carefully rehearsed and scrupulously kept-up habit.
Over the course of six seconds, you may deglove your entire body, or reglove it. 
Laid bare, you have stats as a panther, but can't do human things.