Thought for the Second: I was directed to some Biblical interpretation today about the story of Jacob, the third Father of Judaism. According to this text, which I have since crosschecked in two reputable sources, the name Jacob is derived from the Hebrew phrase for grasping another's heel. This is a reference to how Jacob was born, but firguratively in Hebrew literature, the action of grabbing someone's heel has been used as a metaphor for deception and deceit. I find this a lovely idea, because 1) the imagery is extremely evocative and 2) who wants to take three guesses at what my Hebrew name just happens to be?

I'm not a believer in the theory that we grow to fit the names we're given when we're young. I've read more than one text about the supposed meaning of names, and I've heard it argued several times -- mostly by new-age half-genes -- that a child will grow up to have an identity which is consistent with the meaning of their name. I'm extremely sketpical (read, openly mocking) of this theory, most of the time. On the other hand, my names seem to fit me uniquely well, better and more consistently than the names of most people appear to fit them. Furthermore, my names don't merely fit with who I am, but just happen to fit with what I have always strived to be, and it's reasonable to suggest that, at the time of my naming, my parents did not have any inkling that I would one day being a deceitful megalomaniac. It can't possibly have been a concious effort to live up to my names, because I became what I am before ever learning what they mean, as evidenced by the fact that I had never learned this alternate meaning of Jacob before today. Eerie coicidence or hand of the gods? Only you can decide, largely since I don't care.

At a conservative estimate, I have five names. By this, I mean names given to me by other people who were legally empowered to name me at birth, as opposed to the twenty or so nicknames I've aquired over the years and the countless names I've responded to in games or identities I've taken on by choice. I have my English first and middle name (my "real" names), my Hebrew first and middle name assigned for religious and cultural purposes, and my last (family) name, which for obvious reasons I share with several other people, generous soul that I am. In the pursuit of asking Who I Am, one's names are naturally part of the question, and indeed, the majority of people will instinctively answer their own name first when asked that question. Even I will respond with my name at the beginning of my answer. Most aspects of who I am are characteristics I've knowingly taken on, whereas my name was assigned, but even my name was earned; I've earned my name by living up to and exceeding the expectations placed upon me by those who gave it to me. There can be no question that it is part of who I am, even disregarding how well my names fit me.

My English name, of course, is Eric. The name comes to use from the Scandinavian cultures (and god only knows how it ended up in the Russian-German-Polish-Jewish culture from there. Depending on what source you check, the name means, variously "powerful," "unstoppable," "eternal," or, of course, "great king/emperor." It's believed that prior to the ninthteenth century, it was an extremly uncommon name to find given to anyone other than royalty or some equivalent power. It has been suggested by scholars that Danish kings would give the name Eric to their sons to instill in them the power to rule from childhood. Amusingly, the name is believed to have been popularized by Victorian era writers; I might not have my name if not for fictional characters.

Consistent with the first, my middle name is Charles. Believed to have been originally derived from the word "churl" (loosely equivalent to, among other things, "knave"), the name is considered to have generally meant "manly" or "fully grown" (neither of which fits me very well) but, thanks to centuries of British rule, the name is today often equated with "courageous king."

My Hebrew name is Yakov Chaim. Chaim, the name one of the two by which I prefer to be known in the circles where anyone needs to refer to me that way and is able to pronounce the Hebrew "ch" sound, translates simply as "life." The name is considered to be a blessing and an auspicious name, but rather than any fancy reason for my having it, I was simply named after my paternal grandfather's brother. Yakov, of course, is the Hebrew form of Jacob, a name given to me in honour of my paternal grandmother's sibling. In principle, my names were given to me to honour deceased loved ones. Taken together, however, my Hebrew name can just as easily translate as "life of the deceiver."

Finally, we come to my last name. As many people know, I come from good, cold-loving genetic stock. While my family's records aren't perfectly clear beyond two or three generations, doubly so because much of my family died during the Holocaust, it's hard to say for certain where my blood comes from. To our best ability to reconstruct, I'm probably half Russian (my mother's family, with my maternal grandfather having a certain amount of British in him culturally but not necessarily genetically), one quarter German (my paternal grandmother, who was actually probably of relatively noble blood), and one quarter Polish (my paternal grandfather). I tend to self-identify as Polish despite being mostly Russian simply because, since my family name has been passed down via fathers, my family name is Polish (not even Jewish-Polish but purely Polish). Lis translates, quite simply, as "fox," and family legend holds that trickster blood flows through our veins and has from as far back as anyone can remember. Certainly this holds true looking at the life of my grandfather, who was as fine, cunning, and good-natured a deceiver as I could ever hope to be, and looking at my father, from whom I learned my sense of humour as well as my love of giving snarky/false answers to people when they ask questions.

According to one Polish legend I've read, the blood of Veles, the Slavic serpent god, god of dragons and patron of magicians, musicians, and tricksters, flows through the veins of those of Polish ancestry who bear family names associated with trickery and cunning. While it's incredibly unlikely that anyone in my genetic line from the last millenium worshiped any god other than the god of the Jews, you never know, particularly in the Slavic countries where religions tended to blend together when nobody was looking.

It's an age-old question in human cultures... what's in a name? We do take on the names which fit us or do we grow to fit the names we are given? Emperor and rook becomes chicken and egg in its own way, certainly in my case. One thing which is quite clear to me, though, is that regardless of whether my names are coicidence or design, improbability or just one more sign of the hands of the gods in my life, they fit me well, and they're certainly a part of who I am.

And if you didn't enjoy reading this, take solace knowing that it was either write this topic, or post the word "fnord" three hundred times. You got off easy.

As many who read this will already know, I will tommorow write the final 2 final exam for my course. This exam covers the entirety of our lectures on the lungs, heart, and kidneys, including anatomy and physiology, and furthermore covers such related but esoteric topics as fat metabolism and obesity, x-rays, purine and uric acid metabolism, exercise physiology, and cholesterol. In all, the exam includes the material from two midterm exam and, including laboratory periods, covers about 210 hours of lectures, each of which has a theoretical "homework time" of two more hours. To help put this in context, an average undergraduate course will usually run between three to four hours per week for fifteen weeks, bringing it to between 45 and 60 hours, possibly as many as 90 hours if it has an associated laboratory period. This exam therefore covers something in the area of material equivalent to approximately two and a half undergraduate single-semester courses, which for us is about 9 weeks. This is all in addition to the fact that last year, I scored 60 percent pretty much exactly in this whole unit, meaning that it was arguably the single primary contributor to my redoing the year this time around; I'm very motivated to get a higher score this time around because then I can get the exact same scores in all other units (a goal I've already exceeded by about 14% so far) and have no further worries for the year. Understandably, in the three or four days prior to this exam, I have therefore been, in a word, preoccupied. I have been buried in the books and pretty well completly distracted from everything around me except for the essential activities of daily life such as eating, sleeping, reading comic books, playing Dawn of War: Dark Crusade and watching Boston Legal. All of this preoccupation and distraction will come to a head on November 22nd, the day of my exam -- an exam which runs pretty much from 8:30 to 4:00 with an hour off for lunch. I will be thinking of nothing except for my course material for functionally the entire day. On November 22nd.

It goes without saying that this is all part of a vast conspiracy.

Now, I'm not saying that there's an entire nefarious conspiracy out there whose goals depend on me being distracted on November 22nd. I'm not saying that somewhere out there is a shoudow-shrouded conference table, around which sit a council of darkness who want nothing more than for me to be unable to devote my mental energies to contemplating their plots on that particular day. I'm not saying that the secret masters of the world have organized my exam schedule purely so that on the 43rd anniversary of the Kennedy Assassination I'm too busy reviewing Latin terminology to unravel their complex plots. I'm just saying that they've done all that to thwart *somebody* in my class, not necessarily me.

The funny thing about conspiracies is that it's easy to leap to the conclusion that it's all about you (or at least, it's easy to make that assumption when you suffer from marginally subclinical megalomania). The truth is, though, that there are a lot of very talented, educated, intelligent, and politically-inclined people in my class this year, and that makes for a large number of candidates who the conspiracy might be trying to get out of the way for a day or so. Even in the midst of studying I've found the time for a couple of journal entries, some TV shows, and two newspaper interviews, so a little thing like a huge important exam isn't necessarily enough to get me out of the way, if that's what the conspiracy was going for. Even tommorow, I've got an hour lunch break and access to free computer terminals, which means I won't be cut off from e-mail for more than four hours at a stretch on the exam day itself. No, for the conspiracy's purposes, this is a relatively ineffective way to get me out of the way, and since it seems reasonable to assume that the conspiracy is a competent one rather than an incompetent one (the rationale for that being, if it was an incompetent conspiracy, I'd have alreday figured out who was in on it), we conclude that they're actually trying to get someone other than me out of their way.

I am, most probably, in the minority of the class when it comes to my studying -- this is why I'm repeating a year and last year's classmates aren't. Make no mistake, I've learned how to study much harder these past twelve months, and in the last four days I've spent about 24-30 hours genuinely working hard, reading, revising, and memorising, which is a lot for me. It is, however, probably less than many of the students in my class. The day before an exam, very few people in my class will watch any television, and certainly not as much as I do; tommorow, I might be the only male who shows up for the exam shaven. It is these hard-working, dedicated, boring classmates of mine who are most likely the target of the conspiracy. Give these students an exam, particularly a large and important one like this one, and all life unrelated to studying will cease for them. While they do their day-before cramming, they will be utterly oblivious to the conspiracy's activities. They will not watch the news; they will not check their e-mail; they probably won't even look out of their own windows to see if men in black cloaks and sunglasses are lurking next to the lamp posts. The conspiracy has eliminated them from the game for a period of days, and no day moreso than November 22nd.

Sadly, since I have no clue which student the conspiracy actually is targeting, there's nothing I can do about it. I'm off to go memorize the origins and inervations of the obturator nerve instead and hopefully the world will still be intact come the 23rd.

As we near December, I have been working feverishly on my annual one-shot for international Game Day. I make an effort to run an RPG of some sort on Game Day every year and I've generally suceeded quite well, holding games which have been loved and acclaimed by the majority of my players. My loyal and beloved readers today get the first look at the upcoming game. As an added bonus, I am opening up registration for this game today, and first seats will go to anyone who gets in touch with me after reading this. Only after I've waited a couple of weeks for readers to contact me will I begin opening seats to other potential players. This is how I thank you all for lending me your attention and indulgence -- writing, whether it's games or essays, is much more fun with a worthy audience.

The nature of reality has always been questioned by the great thinkers. As far back as humans have been able to formulate questions, "what is the nature of reality and the universe" has been asked and hotly debated. To date, very little progress has ever been made in answering this question, largely because the people asking have only ever experienced one reality and are not in much of a position to have either a frame of reference or a comparisson. By and large, this is for the best. As any technophile will tell you, however, the best way to learn what a thing is and how it works is to wait for it to break and then try to figure out what's gone wrong. Fortunately for us, this rarely happens with something as well-designed as the universe. Unfortunately, "rarely" is not the same as "never."

The wall of reality has just broken, and you've come through it. Good for you.

You are a cartoon character who, through design or (mis)fortune, has found yourself in the real world. It will be up to you to determine why this has happened and either fix it or take advantage of it. Whatever has happened, it hasn't just happened to you; a handful of other individuals, many of them from worlds and concepts entirely different even from your own, have come through with you. Whether the creature standing next to you is an apparently normal college student or a talking pink bunny, none of you belong in this universe -- you know it, and the universe knows it. Clearly, one of you has to go.

The good: You have brought with you your own laws of physics. Depending on your nature, you might be invulnerable to being struck by heavy objects and able to cary pianos in your pocket, or you might be bulletproof and able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. You have abilities and subscribe to natural laws which have never before been seen in this world. What's more, your mere presence warps reality around you, and more and more of this boring world becomes closer to being whatever you are with time and proximity.

The bad: Creatures like you aren't meant to exist in this world outside of newsprint and cathode ray tubes. Every moment you spend in this world, you can feel yourself losing what makes you special. The bubble of unreality around you is shrinking, and when it's gone, you're going to be constrained to the same laws of physics as these poor humans around you. If you're a talking fox, you might be looking at a slide down the evolutionary ladder followed by a brief and terminal stay in an animal shelter, but if you're a hyperintelligent robot from the planet Squazkkwee, when your cold-fusion generator stops being scientifically explicable, you're dead, and Animator only knows if you're going to take a small city with you when you go.

What are you? Why are you here? What is the nature of reality? And how the heck do you get back when you're supposed to be while you still can?

Players: 4-6
System: Old WoD d10 with house rules
Date: December 29th, 2006 (date potentially subject to change but I bloody well hope not)
Time: 3-9 pm
Location: The Concordia Games Club

Character concepts: All players will choose either a specific cartoon series or a genre of cartoons from which their character will spring. Players may choose quite literally anything they can think of, although all backgrounds are subject to ST approval and, quite reasonably, it will be easier to persuade me to accept a Looney than to accept something out of hentai. Ideally every player will be playing something substantially different from the others for this one, so I may or may not be very choosy when it comes to who ends up being in the game. Some sample concepts to get people thinking include:

• Looney: You spring from the same twisted universe which birthed Bugs and Ace Bunny alike. Possible special abilities: invulnerability, malleable form, ACME catalogue, Bag of Most Anything Imaginable.
• G.I. Joe: Your universe is mostly the same as reality, with a few notable exceptions. Possible special abilities: This Is My Boomstick, He's Gone... Into A Coma, Pilot Inexplicable Vehicle.
• Justice League/Marvel Comics: Your birthworld is one of superheroes -- and supervillains. Possible special abilities include: flight, super strength, nuclear-powered magneto-vision.
• Anime: You potentially have the power to wipe out armies and shatter planets... eventually. Possible special abilities: Diamond-Cutter Hair, Unecessary Complex Martial Arts, Really Big Energy Blast

So, if you want in, and you expect to be free on that date (best guess is fine -- I know most of you don't have the next year of your life meticulously scheduled like I do) and able to attend, get in touch with me promptly.

It is one of the oldest cliches of Clan Nosferatu that its deformed members tend to nest in sewers and other places of forgotten garbage and refuse. Many Nosferatu believe that, given their ugliness and their ostracism from society, there is no need to maintain pretensions of civility and cleanliness. unsurprisingly, Clayton Paulo had long disagreed with his clanmates on this matter, and has always attempted to maintain havens in places in keeping with his own expensive tastes and veneer of humanity and civility.

In planning to come to Montreal, the first and foremost concern for Clayton was to set up a haven which would meet his needs, namely: proximity to a major city, access to a laboratory and scientific resources, and ample security. He met these needs by looking at the city's major universities, many of which by virtue of their construction were veritable fortresses in and of themselves and which contained all the facilities he would be likely to need. If anything, the city afforded him too many options to choose from, and Clayton eventually settled upon making his home in the city of Notre Dame de Grace, at the Loyola campus of Concordia University.

At the time that Clayton was preparing to move, the university was preparing to begin construction on a new, state of the art science facility, which would boast world-class research facilities in the fields of both biology and chemistry, making it a very tempting potential haven to Clayton. Through the simple expedient of a generous donation to the university towards construction of the building, Clayton insinuated himself into the planning phase of the construction. While he never actually visited the city himself, he arranged for several small changes to be made to the building's blueprints, including embedding three secure rooms in building's sub-basement, an area set aside for secure laboratories in any case and thus accessible only to authorized individuals. The sub-basement was perfect, in that it was protected from sunlight and other environmental insults, far away from the prying eyes of casual wandering students, and guarded by security without actually having too many cameras in the halls or a constant presence of walking humans. In an area intended to remain untouched, Clayton arranged for the builders to create three small but comfortable chambers behind six-foot thick stone walls and a solid steel door, itself accessible only through several little-used hallways. Power, water, and cables for internet, phone, and television were hooked up to the room, which again attracted little attention given that several other rooms on the floor were meant to be laboratories.

The first layer of security for the haven is its false wall. Built of a foot of solid concrete reinforced with steel, this wall weighs several hundred pounds and is all but immovable to anyone unless they have access to heavy duty construction equipment or Potence. A locking mechanism is concealed in a false electrical outlet set into the wall. If an individual has sufficient strength and the key, the wall swings inwards on concealed hinges into a short, five-foot hallway, leading up to a second door, this one solid metal and requiring a second key to unlock. The short hallway is dark, dingy, dirty, and filled with spiderwebs, most of which are artificial and which have been placed with deliberate care by Clayton himself. The appearance of disuse is offset to the careful observer only by the absence of rust and other signs of age on the metal.

On the far side of this steel door is the haven itself. The door opens directly into Clayton's "unliving room." Warm, well lit, tastefully decorated and luxuriantly appointed, this room contains all the trappings which Clayton feels are part of being a human of the modern age. A plasma television sits along one wall, sitting opposite a bank of three computer screens and several hard drive towers. Two comfortable couches and several plush chairs sit near the bookcases, which line one wall and which are quite full with science textbooks, volumes of poetry, and several hundred works of fiction, including first edition printings of such works as "Dracula." These bookcases contain Clayton's video library as well, where DVDs have recently replaced his collection of cassettes; horror films and crime dramas predominate. Two doors lead off of the sitting room, which lead to the bedroom and laboratory, and a small alcove contains a modest kitchenette which is mostly dominated by a spice rack filled with various poweders and crystals, a microwave, and a refrigerator and freezer which would look more at home in a hospital than a condominium. The refrigerator is well stocked with food -- usually B positive -- and the spice rack contains a three-month supply of Quillius as well as several other narcotics and genuine normal spices, particularly paprika and garlic.

Clayton's bedroom is simple and contains few of the comforts of his living room, since what little time he spends there is rarely spent in any position to appreciate any finery. A simple rectangular metal box, airtight and lightproof, sits in the middle of the room, next to a small end table on which sits a telephone and answering machine. The metal box -- woe betide anyone who calls it a coffin -- has a light layer of satin padding and retractable straps suitable for strapping something body-sized in for shipping. The box is lockable, but only from the inside. Clayton makes a point of spending as little time as possible in his bedroom; it is functional and efficient, but he always feels uncomfortable in it if he is awake.

Finally, the third room of the appartment is Clayton's laboratory. Although Clayton does less pure research these nights than he did in the recent past, the laboratory still sees nearly nightly use, as Clayton synthesizes his own supply of Quillius as well as anything else he expects to have a use (or a market) for in the near future. The laboratory is a modest but well-equipped biochemistry lab, with equipment for standard organic syntheses and analyses. While Clayton has never seen fit to equip himself with machines for NMR, crystallography, or other techniques rarely used outside of highly advanced research or academia, he possesses the equipment to perform most any syntheses that would be required for his own areas of interests. A fumehood, the single hole in the security of Clayton's haven, leads upwards into the ventillation system of the building at large; although toxic gasses pose no danger to Clayton himself, it would not do to allow poisons to build up where they might get noticed by other nearby workers.

As of mid November 2006, Clayton has lived in his new haven for only a few days and is still learning the neighbourhood and surrounding university facilities. He has purchased a small home two blocks from the university, which he has let circulate is his real haven. Clayton himself is able to observe several of the home's rooms through webcams he has set up and linked to his real haven, but has not to date bothered even to set foot in the home. Twice per week, a housekeeper who has been paid well enough not to ask where the owner is comes to the home, cleans it, and gives it a semblance of being lived-in.

About a week ago, I was having dinner with two friends and a variety of new aquaintances at the very worst sushi restaurant I have ever eaten at. The conversation ranged over a wide variety of topics, and eventually free-associated to the topic of evolution. This can be a very interesting topic to have at a table full of religious people, even Jews as the case was this evening. I like to pretend that it's only That Other Religion which has knee-jerk religious anti-science fools, but the truth is that they're in every faith, including Judaism, which is all the more annoying because when it's my friends who are saying things I disagree with, I know that they're intelligent, educated, and have well-formed opinions based on information and wisdom, so I can't just point and laugh at them. The discussion only lasted about 5 minutes, during which time I, as the only person at the table with a solid science background (other than psychology) surrounded by liberals arts majors and a lawyer, foudn myself the only real defender of evolution. There were two significant arguments made that night, one by each side, which failed to be refuted by the other. As soon as their argument was made, though, I knew something was wrong with it, but it took me some time deduce what the flaw of logic was.

It is worth specifying, of course, that this was not a debate about creationism. The people I was talking to are smart enough to understand that evolution and creationism, as pure theories, have nothing to do with each other. To be honest, I'm a bit of a creationist when it comes to how the world came to exist -- I've got a world-class science education, quite literally, and I'm a scientist myself, but science has never explained to my satisfaction how the universe came to be or how the first proteins spontaneously aggregated into a functioning life form. That's all irrelevant here, though, because what was at issue over the bad sushi was this:

• Premise 1: The current life forms are extremely complex.
• For complex adaptations to evolve, a random but theoretically infinite number of other variations would have evolved at the same time, been tested by the environment, and failed.
• The fossil record has only a tiny number of odd species in it.
• Therefore, if evolution is true, logically, there should be a profusion of weird species in the fossil record, the example favoured by my debating partner being a feathered human. There are not, and this casts doubt on evolution's validity.

He is, of course, wrong. People who disagree with me tend to be.

The chief flaw in his logic is simple: evolution moves in tiny changes, most of which are imperceptible to an individual, whether looking at phenotype or genotype. A human with feathers would be a large, which is to say smegging huge, mutation. It would involve alternations in numerous genes to come to be. The reason why no feathered human has ever shown up in fossil records is this:

• Evolution works, at the simplest level, by altering one gene at a time. In general, it works by altering a single amino acid at a time, or even a single base-pair in the genetic code.
• The growth and development process of feathers (not even flight, just feathers) in birds requires numerous genes with tremendous variation in which genes are expressed and how in different species.
• The number of improbable mutations which would be required for feathers to manifest in a single generation are so small that they redefine "unlikely."
• Mutations which might lead to feathered humans fail to accumulate because the early adaptations fail to be selective. Direct development of feathers is tremendously energetically wasteful and so any individual growing non-functional feathers would need to consume (and first, locate and catch) that juch more food than a non-feathered competitor just to stay even. Furthermore, one of the earliest likely modifications which is believed to lead to flight is the development of hollow, weak bones, which is problematic for humans because 1) inside our bones is where we keep our immune system and 2) weak bones are seen sometimes in humans, and when it is, we call it osteogenesis imperfecta, which is commonly lethal in eraly life and so is not conducive to a large number of progeny being produced.

In 2002, the Humanity In Immortality Society held its twenty-third symposium in Philadelphia, attended by some forty vampires, twenty gouls, and a scattered few humans and others. Held every five years, the HIIS gathering is a chance for "human undead" to gather together, discuss the problems and issues facing them from an ethical and cultural basis, and reaffirm that they are not alone in the struggle to remain human in thought and deed. The 2002 keynote address consisted of three speakers and was recorded by some of the younger attendees in the hopes of circulating amongst the general vampire population and inspiring more to follow the Path of Humanity. The recordings have been available over the internet for more than four years and have been downloaded nearly eight times. The following transcript is taken from one of the three speakers.

We are here because of humanity. We are here because we are humans. True, some of us have been humans for an astonishingly long time, while others of us have done some very inhuman things over the course of our lives, but today, each and every one of us has dedicated him, her, or itself to retaining or reclaiming their humanity. We are the ones who look inward at the hunger and to it that no, we will not be beasts. We will be men and women. Or at least, civilized humanoids.

The irony of my being here speaking to you tonight is not lost on me. In the days before my embrace, I was a murderer, and poisoner, and a drug dealer, and was arguably quite deficient in humanity. I had lied, cheated, and thieved my way across Europe. Still, I was never without my humanity. In the centuries since, I've continued in all of those activities, and on rather a larger scale. Is it ironic, then that I should be here talking about humanity? Perhaps, but perhaps not. It isn't for me to judge -- I'm only human, after all.

What is humanity to us? As many of you know, I'm not really standing in front of you all in this fine suit. My hair is not this neatly combed. I'm actually slightly hunch-backed, white as chalk, completly hairless, and I have little yellow beady eyes that I'm told are quite odd-looking. I do not look like a human -- I look like Max Schreck. Nor are my insides human. Like most of you, my heart hasn't beat in a long time. My guts have no persistalsis. No adrenaline fills my veins when I'm excited. My bones do not stay strong and healthy on account of getting plenty of nice sunlight to produce vitamin D or because of any balance of parathydroid hormone. I am not anatonically or phyisologically human, and few people in this room with me are. But is it our bodies which make us human? Human babies are born each day with the wrong number of limbs or with non-functioning organs. There are humans out and about in this city who for one of a hundred reasons cannot draw nutrition from food and, astonishingly like us, must subsist by pumping nutrient-rich fluids directly into their veins.

Is it civilization which makes one human? I should hope not, or there would never have been a man alive before the nineteenth century. Primitive and uneducated people are just as human as the most erudite Englishman -- rather more so, in many ways. Most of the world's population will never sit down to a proper warm meal at a white linen tablecloth and select the proper fork for each course. When the great kingdoms set out to bring "culture and enlightenment" to the lesser peoples, they did not bring humanity. The majority of us here tonight dress well and comport ourselves with modern conceptions of dignity because that is one form of humanity, but there are no shortage of African humans who are more human than us despite wearing loincloths or furs.

Clothes do not make the man, and neither does having shoulders on which to hang a coat.

To be human is to posses humanity. To be human is to be humane. It is a truism so obvious as to seem trite and silly, and yet it is a most profound truth. Civilization is synonymous with humanity, for better or worse, because it establishes rules of conduct by which to treat other humans and attempts to enforce them. Proper etiquette is considered part of being human, rightly or wrongly, because it gives rules one can follow as a practical guide to treating others with courtesy as well as preventing us from getting gravy on our elbows. This is what we are all here for tonight: we wish to be humane.

Humanity is empathy. Humanity does not preclude going to a bar, selecting a nice looking target, and drining its blood, but humanity means taking gently, means not tearing out the prey's throat, means leaving the prey alive, means never draining so much from a single individual that they suffer. Humanity means taking their blood but not hurting them. In my life I have met hundreds of vampires and only twice have I met one whose bite did not bring pleasure to the prey. What does this tell us? We've got no reason to hurt anyone when we feed. We can be careful. We can be slow. We can make feeding pleasant for mortals. We do not have to beat them up, savage their throats, and while we're at it, take their wallets.

I myself have not hunted in thirty years. In part I consider it beneath me, and in part I consider it inhumane to take blood from a non-willing person. There has been no need. Every year I make a substantial donation to at least one major local hospital, and in return, a few kind and helpful doctors and orderlies politely fail to notice when some of their blood supply goes missing. They receive money, I receive blood, and no one need be bitten or chased. We can even ensure that I take blood for which they have minimal use -- I leave them the O negative and AB positive that they never have enough of and, indeed, happily take off their hands blood found to carry disease or be otherwise unsuitable for use in transfusions which would otherwise simply be incinerated. Humanity is the ability to make deals and be diplomatic, to reach a mutually profitable agreement which leaves oneself and other humans satisfied.

There is one other important part to being human, I think. To the best of our understanding, very few animals species are sentient or capable of understanding the concept of "I am" as being distinct from "he is." Neither scientists nor sorcerers have ever been able to show that any animals philosophizes as men and women do. An essential part of being human therefore must have a cognitive component. A human is capable of thinking "I am human" and ascribing cognitive and emotional context and significance to that thought. A human is not merely a collection of memories -- contrary to popular belief, even goldfish can be taught simple associations which they will remember for their entire lives. A human has memories and attaches to them self-referrential thoughts. A human knows that they went through certain experiences and further is able to say: that was me, and at that time, I was a man. Or a woman. Or whatever else. You get the idea.

We are humans so long as every night when we awake, we still have the will to stand up straight -- or as straight as possible, given the limits of our individual bodies -- and live according to the principle that we will strive to do right, we will minimize how much we must do wrong, we will consider the thoughts and feelings of others as we live our own unlives, and above all, we choose to say, each night: I am not a beast; I am a human being.

Few of our kind have the strength to do this. Fewer still feel any need. For that matter, many still-mortal humans never think these thoughts in their lives, and these are the mortals who rule the world more often than not. And, of course, many humans lack the cognitive capacity to form self-referrential thoughts, but this does not make them less human either; humanity is a continuum, a dimension, and it requires a certain amount of imagination. It is, after all, a human invention and not a universal absolute. We, who are here tonight: we are those who strive not merely to be human, but to be *more* human than many humans. That is humanity: to wish to be better, to strive for it, and to always try to be better than those who have already accomplished our own goals.

Never let it be, said, though, that humanity is incompatible with living forever and being able to tear cars in half with your bare hands. It is, after all, amazing what humans can be capable of. A human need not be either weak or mortal. I plan to be a human who lives for a very, very long time.

I see that the buffet is now finished being set up, so let me end here. I hope you all have a wonderful evening and I look forward to speaking to most of you in the next six hours or so. Good evening.

Clayton Paulo was born on June 11, 1420, in the city-state of Venice. The Paulo family was wealthy, powerful, and connected; while the patriach did not sit on the council that elected the Doge, he had the ear of several merchants who did. Clayton was the fourth of fifth boys; his eldest brother was destined to inherit the family fortune, his next brother the family tradition of officership in the military, his third brother the traditional spot in the clergy, and his younger brother, by dint of being the youngest and cutest, received the most attention and care, leaving Clayton largely forgotten for most of his youth. His destiny, as cast by his father, was to become a book-keeper for the family business, which necessitated him receiving teaching in his letters and numbers. Highly intelligent, Clayton took to his tutors as his ersatz family, who in turn put the extra effort into teaching him far more than they had been initially contracted to teach. In his eigth year, he was given his first lessons in alchemy, which would define the course of his life.

At the age of twelve, Clayton abandoned all pretense of following the family business and took up with the gangs that ruled the Venice streets at night. He had enough education to move money stealthily and the simple animal cunning necessary to excel at criminal activity, and so spent a brief time handling the books of one gang lord or another, but it was the city drug trade that caught Clayton's eye. Befriending a local apothecary, Clayton undertook to master the secrets of henbane and hemlock and combined what he learned in the laboratory with what he learned on the streets. Coupled with the money he was able to obtain through his family both lawfully and unlawfully, Clayton had built up a modest gang of his own by the age of fourteen and was a minor crime lord in his own right two years later. At the age of eighteen Clayton began to see how the network he was already building could be put to uses besides simply moving merchandise, and by the age of twenty, Clayton's organization had become the fastest-growing information brokering network in Tuscany.

In 1442, at the age of 22, Clayton Paulo officially branched into the field of assassination, turning his mastery of narcotics into a deadly talent for poison.

This was, in retrospect, not the wisest decision Clayton had ever made in his short life. Clayton lacked the temperament for murder, and was surprised to find that he had both a sense of humanity and a hitherto unsuspected conscience. The enemies which Clayton made in even a few short months of poisoncraft further complicated his dealings. Clayton became sufficiently distracted by his business difficulties and his inability to keep pace with the rate at which his network was spreading that he began to make errors in his narcotics work, and when a customer was killed by mistake due to a tainted hallucinogenic, Clayton took it as a sign that it was time to depart Venice for greener and less hostile pastures. Packing up supplies, money, and enough drugs to kill a small army, Clayton left the city of his birth in the dead of night and traveled North.

Clayton had always had a gift for learning languages, and had picked up a functional degree of French and English in his studies. He went West, therefore, passing profitably through Paris and up across the channel to spend several months in London. During these travels Clayton ceased working with poisons and dedicated himself to working with new and exotic drugs simply for the intellectual challenge. Over the course of these experimentations he managed to inadvertently addict himself to a concoction which he called Quillius, but he developed numerous interesting compounds and his reputation as an alchemist slowly spread across Europe in the hidden places where such names are spoken.

One individual who learned Clayton's name was Claudius Giovanni, childe of Augustus Giovanni and grandchilde of Cappadocius himself. Claudius was preparing to host a great feast for other powerful vampires and intended to summon individuals of moderate fame and repute to make for a high-class dinner for his guests, and Clayton, on the road and traveling South again back towards Venice, was one of those to receive the invitation. He made his way to the Giovanni manse, not far from his own home city, graciously accepted their offer of a night's rest in the mansion, dressed for dinner, and subsequently had his throat all but torn out by a hungry monster.

The real surprise, naturally, was waking up afterwards. It was the tenth of April, 1444, and Clayton Paulo was Nosferatu.

Clayton would never remember much of the days that followed, a lapse of memory he would later ascribe to the trauma. From speaking with other guests at the Giovanni mansion, he would reconstruct events partially -- the guests, originally intended as fodder, had been embraced on the spur of the moment as soldiers, what would become known in later years as shovel-heads, to fend of an attack by rival vampires. When those rivals, led by the famed Hardestadt, soundly thrashed the vampires who had embraced Clayton, Hardestadt offered Clayton an opportunity to revenge himself upon Giovanni by spoiling a plot to kill and diablerize the ancient vampire Cappadocius. Neither Clayton nor his fellow neonates dared refuse the offer, and thus Clayton did play some small part in saving the antidilluvian's life, or so he was told. For his own part, Clayton remembered none of this, his next coherent memory being himself crouched over the fallen and exsanguinated body of a Lasombra elder whose blood Clayton had just drained to the last drop.

The years that followed were profitable for Clayton. Together with the others embraced that same night as himself, he traveled to Scotland and remained under the tuteledge of the ancient Roman vampire Marchettus the Bold, learning to use his new gifts -- to wield strength many times that of a human and to cloak his deformed body. After some months, Clayton bid farewell to his companions -- even a fond one, in some cases -- and set off back South. He returned to Venice first, to reclaim his lost resources. With his new talents, he retook the reigns of his old organization. knowing now of the existence of vampires, Clayton looked for them, and did in fact discover ancient beasts ruled in the shadows of Venice. With these elders, Clayton happily made peace and submitted to their rules, and then he quietly returned to his old business dealings.

It took Clayton Paulo some five years to rebuild and expand his network of contacts across Europe, and knowing now of the hidden night life of the major cities, had an entire new market for his information gathering services. He reached out across the land, and soon, there were few cities where the newly-christened Vipera Pennatus did not have eyes and ears. Clayton himself chose to leave must of the day-work to human lieutenants, focusing himself on processing information received and locking himself in his laboratory to unlock the secrets of the drugs his agents sold in his name. Two or three times a year, Clayton set forth himself to travel the land for a time and learn what he could personally, his vampiric abilities of hiding and disguise making it effortless for him to skulk in most any place he chose.

Years passed. In the early fifteen hundreds Clayton grew bored of Venice and ventured East, exploring the world for a few years before choosing a new city in which to settle. During this time, he adopted the habit of making his home in a city for some ten or twenty years before moving on to somewhere new, the better to avoid too much notice as an immortal. In this fashion he traveled Europe for some two hundred years, ever building his network of contacts, largely avoiding notice, and from time to time stopping his illicit activities to dedicate himself anew to his alchemy, and later, to chemistry and the burgeoning field of human physiology and biochemistry.

In the 1750's, Clayton was among those to see the potential in the new world, and went West across the sea. The Revolutionary war was a profitable time for a vampire able to hide in plain sight, and the drug trade of North America was a vast, untapped market.

In the years that followed, Clayton took pains to keep up with technology as few elders bothered to do. Well accustomed to trying to move information across the land, Clayton was among the first investors in such innovations as the railroad and the telegraph, both of which filled his coffers and helped keep the Vipera Pennatus at the forefront of the information brokerage field. He stayed in the North East whenever possible, managing to stay away from the bulk of American political unrest. Where other vampires of his age and power began to secure their hold on cities and declare themselves lords and princes, Clayton avoided the political game and offered financial and logistic support to whatever candidates for power assured him that he could live in their city without being bothered.

On his five hundredth birthday, Clayton Paulo retired.

The newly-christened twentieth century and the end of the Great War had shown Clayton three things: that war and death were becoming far to efficient, that the world was at last beginning to take large-scale law enforcement seriously, and that the speed of technological and cultural advancement had at last made the world sufficiently exciting that one could dedicate every waking hour to studying it and still never catch up. Clayton officially handed the reigns of the Vipera Pennatus to underlings, assuring that he maintained his influence in and a moderate share of the profits of that organization and left behind the underworld for the most part. Remaining active in the information and white-collar crime end of his businesses, Clayton turned his interest in chemistry away from drugs and towards pharmacology. The next big growth in opium would be not illicit, but medical, and he could collect his obscene profits without fear of government agents breaking down his haven with this small shift in business focus. He shifted his investments. He rededicated his assets. He purchased subscriptions to research journals. And, he moved his haven to Trenton, New Jersey, because it was quiet but close to New York.

For the next eighty years, Clayton remained where he was, barring occasional travel. He built a modest estate with a laboratory and spent much of his time immersing him in the scientific knowledge which had accumulated in the last two centuries. He devoured anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, psychology, and the medical sciences, and took pains to follow the growing sciences, continuing to live off the money brought in by his older associations and, increasingly, loaning out his alchemical expertise long-distance to immortal scientists the world over. In the 1940's, he dabbled briefly with studying nuclear engineering, and in the 1970's, events in the United States brought his studies back from drugs to narcotics for a time -- Dementus, a halluciogenic specifically designed to be mixed in and imbibed with blood, brought Clayton moderate fame and increased fortune for a brief period. In 1984, mostly on a whim, he obtained his PhD in biochemistry under a purchased identity, taking six years to complete the program due to the necessity of taking all courses at night; his graduate thesis, The Haematological Processing Of Pre-Metabolized Opioids In Rats would have been nominated for several academic awards had anyone been able to locate its author after graduation.

With the events and changing political claimate of the early twenty first centuury, Clayton came to the conclusion that it was time to try another country, and set his sights at Canada, to the North. The city of Montreal attracted his attention -- rich, vibrant, large, with a thriving vampire population and no single dominant leader to harass the residents. Clayton spent five years slowly migrating his businesses across the border, and between the winters of 2001 and 2006 he purchased a new haven, equiped it with his equipment and entertainments, established contacts in the local pharmaceutical industry, and made small headway into the highly-competitive underworld of the area. All preparations were done quite openly, and any who were curious would know that Clayton Paulo would be moving to the city. When he learned that one, perhaps even two of those who had been embraces at the same dinner as himself were currently in the city as well, it reaffirmed his certainty that this was where he would be best suited living the next fifty or sixty years. Finally, in early November of 2006, Clayton cut the last ties he had to Trenton and shipped himself first class to Montreal.

Current Sketch: Clayton Paulo is old, powerful, wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice, and deeply rooted in Montreal's thriving medical research and underworld networks. He has survived for nearly six hundred years on a combination of wits, cunning, information, and cowardice. He has outlived enemies both mortal and immortal and if anything, the centuries have only increased his love of life, his jester's outlook, and his absolute, unshakeable, iron will to survive no matter what. Clayton considers himself to be retired and to be living a life of moderate luxury enjoying the fruits of a youth spent working hard -- the fact that his life of retired luxury could conceivably go on forever is not a bother to him in the slightest. The primary political issue facing Montreal's undead, the split of the city between two rival would-be-princes, is genuinely of no interest to Clayton whatsoever and he will enthusiastically throw his support behind either (or both) of the candidates who assures him only that he will be able to live unbothered and not forced to abide by any silly rules.

Clayton is a rare creature -- a vampire who has lived for better than half a millenium without losing too much of his humanity. Despite his past as a murderer and his present as a drug dealer, Clayton considers himself to be a just, merciful, and humane person, sometimes to a fault. He prides himself on not having directly taken a life in over a century. Clayton argues vociferously, in fact, that he may be immortal, but he is no monster -- he has never done anything as a vampire he would not have done as a mortal, and just because he has fangs and chalk-white skin does not mean that he has to give up being civilized and gentlemanly.

Contacts and Connections: The secret to Clayton's longevity and success has always been knowing the right people and things. Partially responsible for saving the life of an Antedilluvian in the first week of his unlife, Clayton has retained close and amiable ties to powerful members of the Cappadocians and has profited several times over the centuries from their sorcerous aid and their access to otherwise long-lost knowledge. Clayton has remained in touch with several elders who he has met and worked with over the centuries, and has additionally taken pains to maintain warm or at least cordial contact with some of the others embraced the same night as he, each of whom is now an extremely powerful individual in their own right in one way or another. Clayton has invested heavily in several internationally-respected pharmaceutical companies based in Montreal and has given enough money to the hospitals of the city that he has more than one friend in these institutions administrations, though he has not yet had the opportunity to make entertaing use of such contacts during his short time in Montreal. Finally, Clayton remains in close touch with the Vipera Pennatus, his old organization which has today grown far beyond what he ever intended it to be. While he has long since been forgotten as that network's founder and former leader, he continues to have his bank accounts funded regularly by a portion of their illicit profits and attempts to stay current with the information that they collect.

Finally, Clayton is a member of HIIS, the Humanity In Immortality Society. Dedicated to helping vampires remain humane and human throughout their long lives, HIIS facilitates contact between undead who seek to hold tight to their mortal ways and maintain, not merely the illusion of etiquette and culture, but actual civilization and enlightenment. HIIS claims some fifty to eighty members worldwide, none younger than the age of one hundred and fifty, and vocally advances the cause of treating humans kindly and fairly for much the same reasons that the Humane Society advocates such treatment of puppies. In his own interpretations of these beliefs, Clayton rarely deigns to feed from humans, and typically feeds only on blood which has been drawn from living humans, preferably mercifully. In his own haven, he typically makes procurements from the local hospitals, who, if they notice the occasional few liters of blood vanishing, generally know better than to draw attention to it. When other vampires criticize him for drinking blood which lacks the flavour and warmth of living, fresh blood, Clayton typically smiles politely and suggests that they are merely mixing in the wrong additives.

Notes:
Clayton suffers an addiction to a drug of his own devising, and has been addicted to it since before his embrace. The drug, Quillius, is a curious mixture of sugar, hashish, and hemlock, sometimes with benzene or another organic solvent mixed in to make it dissolve more easily in blood; it has proven to be addictive even to the undead and, unless made to very precise specifications and measurements, is quite lethal to humans. Clayton's addiction is minor; he *can* drink blood without Quillius mixed, but genuinely hates doing so and cannot stomach more than a pint or two a night of undrugged blood. Quillius has no significant effects in minor doses beyond adding a pleasant flavour to the blood, although Clayton tends to be much more relaxed with some of the drug in his system.

Clayton hates physical combat and avoids it at almost all costs. Despite being physically strong enough to lift a car and well trained in combat, Clayton is and always has been a coward at heart and far prefers to turn invisible and flee. He will never initate combat and never engage in combat unless he has made at least one attempt to escape using Obfuscate. If truly pressed by foes able to pierce his invisibility, Clayton will defend himself -- quickly, viciously, and with finality.

Quotes:

• I'll be celebrating my sixth hundredth birthday in less than fourteen years, you know. That sort of thing makes you stop and take stock of your life.
• I've killed before... many times, in fact. But only ever for self defense, and sometimes profit. Never on a whim or for amusement.
• Please forgive me for the rudeness of Masking my face. I realize it is a discourtesy in some circles, but I was raised to feel that we should dress our best for important company.
• It all comes down to the manner in which the ubiquitins regulate and destroy the prion proteins, and how when they fail to do so, the prions can trigger morphological cascades through... oh, never mind, just say it's "magic."
• Je m'excuse pour ma Francais. I was fluent in the language three hundred years ago, but I got a bit out of practice living in America.
• This? Merely something I enjoy. I find it adds a pleasant flavour to the blood. I would offer you some, but I'm afraid it can be quite addictive, even to our kind.
• Opium of various grades is fairly easy to obtain if you know how. I would be happy to help for a modest fee.
• I am not a monster. I state this emphatically. I am a man. I am, however, a man who will do anything at all that I have to, to see another moonrise.

I had planned to write an updated and modernized character profile of Clayton Paulo tonight and post it, and indeed got about halfay through writing it, but it's seven minutes to midnight and if I finish it tonight, it'll be late. Instead, here's some character concepts I considered for the new vampire LARP I'll be NPCing in, and you'll get more Clayton-related stuff in a few days.

Concept: The Artist
Clan: Ravnos
N/D: Architect/Curmudgeon

Background: When World War Two rocked Europe, vampires joined on both sides of the struggle. Most clans were split in two by the war; the Ravnos, of course, seeing their breathing families dying by the hundred, almost uniformly took the side of the Allies (or, at the least, hid from the whole thing and didn’t hinder them). Many new Ravnos were embraced in the fervent celebrations which followed the war’s end, and you were among them. Coming out of a motion picture show filled with newsreels of glorious victory, you wandered into a party of carousing youths and joined with them in their night-long revelry, only to be drunk yourself in the wee hours. As they say, “ask a glass of water.”

Your sire was an American Ravnos who had come to Europe to fight, and you opted to travel with him back to America. A native of Los Angeles, he brought you home in time to see the film boom of the fifties. You had always been interested in motion pictures, and with your growing command of chimerstry, you took to the whole idea with a passion. In the early sixties, you were employed briefly as a cameraman. In the seventies, you left that for the burgeoning field of special effects, and by the early eighties you were working fifty-one weeks a year. Time passed, though, and as your colleagues began to get grey hairs and began to complain that stunts were harder than they used to be, you knew it was time to move on to a new city. Hollywood was becoming dull in any case, but there was another city where the movie industry looked to be becoming much more exciting: Montreal.

Current Sketch: You’ve lived in Montreal for about five years now. You haven’t been doing much work in the industry, preferring instead to take a decade to relax, enjoy unlife, and attend the theater rather than contribute to it. You do keep your hand in, though, and much of your income comes from putting on private shows for the wealthy and powerful kindred of this and other cities, for which you are paid quite well. You flatly refuse to put on shows of your power for young or uninfluential kindred; you’re a professional, after all, and when they can pay for you you’ll perform for them.

Roleplaying notes: Be warm. Be courteous. Schmooze. When people talk about illusion, smile politely. But never, ever, give a free show. You’re an artist, damn it, not a street performer.

Concept: The Academic
Clan: Malkavian
N/D: Fanatic/Director

Background: You were born rich, white, Protestant, and English in Northern Quebec in the early sixties. Your father was a doctor of philosophy – god help anyone who called him a PhD – and your mother was one of the chief administrators of the McGill University libraries. You had learned to read before you were four years old; forget Dick and Jane, you were slowly making your way through Milton. You went through primary and secondary school, breezed through your bachelor’s degree in history, and obtained wide acclaim for your doctoral thesis, Perceptions of Mysticism Through the Medieval Period. It was a foregone conclusion that you would teach, and you spent several years passing on your enthusiasm for history to young students, all while researching into your favoured research area. It was while you were midway through writing a manuscript that you uncovered records of a purported “house of sorcerers” known as the Tremere and traced scant records of them through the eleventh and twelfth centuries. None of that was truly strange, however… what got you was that you began finding discrepancies in the histories, disagreeing accounts and conflicting reports. Confusions in history are hardly rare, of course, but somehow, the overwhelming impression you got was that somewhere, somehow, it was almost as though history had been… well, knocked off course, and what had happened next wasn’t what was “meant to be.” You dismissed it as a ridiculous fantasy, but happened to mention the finding to the department head as a joke. And that night, a strange figure knocked on your front door…

Current Sketch: It’s been less than ten years since your embrace, but you haven’t lived as a mortal in eight. You live in the university, literally – you make your haven in a secure and forgotten area of the history department, feed off students wandering the campus late at night, and spend nearly every waking moment reading. You’ve memorized physics textbooks and you write all your own computer programs, but you devour history. You tell anyone who will listen – which is very few people – that there’s something wrong with history, and you won’t rest until you figure out what. Most people pass off your belief as “typical Malkavian” but you know better, and you’ll show them…

Roleplaying Notes: Your Malkavian derangement is a minor case of obsessive compulsive disorder. When you walk through a door, turn back and tap the doorknob once. Take off your glasses every minute or two and clean the lenses. Check to make sure your shoes are tied once every ten minutes or so, *especially* if you’re wearing loafers. Become animated and enthusiastic only when discussing history or kindred topics; mortal affairs bore you. Be nice to people, though… you’re a good man and a good-hearted kindred, you just get bored easily by anything that doesn’t snap up your attention right off the bat.

Concept: The Boogeyman
Clan: Salubri
N/D: Healer/Monster

Background: In life, you were a brilliant physician. The calling of your life, indeed, was to heal the sick and repair the wounded. You became a doctor effortlessly and thrived in the stressful environment, requiring no reward other than to see people leave in better health than they arrived. When an odd, apparently contagious anemia appeared among members of the hospital staff, you investigated, and traced the cases to always manifesting on a specific night of the week in a particular area of the wards. You arranged to work a shift at the appropriate time and place, and in the dead of night you were attacked by a horrible, three-eyed monster. You will never know why it fed off of others and turned you, but whatever it was, you’re the same thing now, and neither god nor medicine seems to help you.

Current Sketch: You’ve been a vampire for about eight months now. Your mortal life ended the day you were embraced, and as far as any of your old coworkers know, you simply vanished. You’ve barely left the hospital grounds since your embrace, and attended only those vampire social functions which you had to, to learn the lay of the land and the rules of your unlife. You now divide your time between two things: working in a haematology lab you’ve set up using “borrowed” equipment where you study your condition and look for a cure, making the rounds of the wards after dark and offering healing wherever you can. When you feed nightly, it is always upon patients, never the same one twice in the same fortnight; you tried feeding once upon a healthy person, but became so ill that it doesn’t bear thinking about. You want nothing more than to heal yourself, although your new magical healing powers almost make up for your suffering. Roleplaying Notes: You are quiet, reserved, and temperamental. You hate being around the living and you’re uncomfortable around kindred who have pretensions of life. You’re a monster, like the thing that attacked you, and you don’t understand how these other creatures can keep dressing and acting human. Don’t feed on anything unless you know it was sick or injured when its blood was drawn – you can’t stomach healthy fluids, no doubt because your horrible accursed body rejects anything clean.

Notes: Feeding restriction: ill and injured. Possible flaw: infectious, tainted blood, disease carrier, or something similar.

Concept: The Geneticist
Clan: Tzimisce
N/D: Deviant/Visionary

Background: The greatest day of your life was the day your sire accepted your petition to be embraced. You had served well as a ghoul for twenty years already, as your father had and his father before him, and your master had sworn to make one of your blood into a vampire at the end of your family’s three-generation term of service. You took immediately to your new life and began to study the ways of the Koldunic sorcerers at your master’s feet. It was a fine unlife and a good one, but as you learned the ways of controlling natured, you felt that something was missing. Seeking a way to apply your magic to the body as well as the world, you bid your master a bittersweet farewell and left the old country to travel to North America, where you had heard that the sorcerers were turning their magics in new and innovative directions. You travel still, studying your clan’s magic for new secrets. You envision a new, superior form of life, the clichéd next stage in vampiric evolution. Some of the others sorcerers you had studied with have taken to calling your studies The Path of Metamorphosis.

Current Sketch: It has been only fifteen years since your change, but you feel as though you have always been Tzimisce. Embraced at the physical and mental prime of your life, you are a superior example of human stock turned into the greatest and most noble bloodline of vampires, and what better paragon of the two species to be the one to find the way to become something greater still? You have been living in Montreal for only a month, making yourself at home and beginning to investigate what insights its vampires and libraries might provide to your quest. Your normal modus operandi is to stay somewhere modest within the city and exchange your spellcasting for hunting privileges, favours, and time spent in otherwise sealed libraries, and thus you have begun making social inroads into the vampiric community to that end.

Roleplaying Notes: You are Olde Clan – you do not enter where you are uninvited, you do not burden your host, you do not break your word, and you do not bow before the kine. What the city’s ruler proclaims is law; you obey or you leave. In the meantime, you are eager and excited to begin learning whatever you can in this city during a stay of what you expect will be some six months, perhaps a year. You openly discuss what sorceries are within your power because you will be trading your services for access to knowledge, but you are vague as to your methods, as you do not wish to give away the Koldunic secrets to the lesser clans. Above all else, act with honour, nobility, and dignity, because you are Tzimisce. For now.

If there's one thing in the world that I respect, it's the demonstration of superior intelligence and intellectual curiosity within the bounds of a considered ethical framework and the limits inherent to Justice and the Universe. If there's two things I respect, then the second one is a grand deception. There are actually several dozen things in this world that I deeply respect, so the first two are certainly a given.

"Deception" is really quite a remarkable word -- it's one of those words which actually has an incredibly deep and rich meaning most people never stop to consider. Webster tells us that deception is the acts or practices of one who deliberately deceives, but that the word may also indicate "tactical resource," citing for example the idea that magicians are masters of deception but not necessarily liars. It lists as synonyms such words as subterfuge ("the adoption of a stratagem or the telling of a lie in order to escape guilt or to gain an end") and trickery ("ingenious acts intended to dupe or cheat"). At its core is the word deceive, derived from the Latin to ensnare or "to draw in." The word implies not necessarily evil, wrongdoing, or maliciousness -- although tonight of all nights is beyond all doubt the Night of the Tricksters -- but suggests at its heart merely the act of leading on astray, usually but not necessarily by underhanded means. Of the extensive meanings Webster, discusses, my favourite is " to cause to accept as true or valid what is false or invalid." So rich and nuanced a word could only possibly be applied to so rich and nuanced an art.

Goddess bless Orson Welles.

October 30th marks the anniversary of the night that Orson Welles, a decent enough actor but one of history's great voice actors and radio dramatist noted for such history making roles as Othello, Macbeth, Le Chiffre, and Unicron The Living Planet, paniced a significant proportion of the United States. Welles was co-writer (historians disagree as to how much of the script he wrote himself) of the 1938 radio adaptation of H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds which he performed himself, using the same voice which struck terror in the heart of Kermit The Frog himself. Despite playing more than one role personally and repeatedly announcing over the course of the presentation that they were performing a fictional play, Welles' script and performance were such that countless men, women, and children turned on, tuned in, turned up, and ran into the streets in the horroified belief that genocidal aliens had invaded Earth and laid waste to its defenders. It was scandalous. It was a disaster. It was one of if not the single finest deception ever perpetrated upon humanity.

I like to imagine that from whatever afterlife he ended up in, Orson Welles looks down on us from time to time, smiles paternalistically, and says "gotcha."

Was the show a lie? Probably not. All evidence suggests that Welles had no inkling what his broadcast would do (although he had certainly hoped to scare a few people) and so there was probably no deliberate attempt to mislead. Was there any malicious intent? Probably not, given that listeners were repeatedly reminded that they were listening to a radio drama and not, in fact, live coverage of invasion. Was there evil in his attempt to cause fear in the populace? Probably given, given that it was a Halloween broadcast, he was caught by surprise at the public reaction, and he set his revised script in New Jersey, where loss of life would be largely unnoticed by most of America. What can be said with certainty is that there was a glint of mischief to the whole plan, there was the intent to scare a few people who take things too seriously without properly thinking things through, and whatever else may be true, Welles ensnared his listeners masterfully.

In modern days, and in modern nights especially, this 1938 broadcast is remembered in two ways. First, several dozen radiostations worldwide replay the original broadcast (or new recordings of the old script with new voices) every Halloween or October 30th. Second and much less widely, the date is remembered as Wish We Hadn't Done That Day, when we pause to consider the schemes we have wrought which seemed like good ideas at the time but which kind of got away from us, as so many good schemes tend to do. This is very much not to say that Welles should never have made his broadcast or that he should have felt regret for the mess it caused. Rather, we hold Welles in high esteem for his work and honour his accomplishment, even as we acknowledge that, if he hypothetically hadn't meant to make headlines the next morning for convincing entire cities that their world had been conquered by Martians, he might have perhaps taken things a bit too far and could have scaled things back a bit. Maybe.

If, on the other hand, he'd meant to do it with every fiber in his being, we name a holiday after him and celebrate him forever more. He was one of the Great Deceivers, after all.

Once again, Topin Wagglegammon celebrations have been a tremendous sucess worldwide. I've received reports from well over a dozen people that they made every effort to celebrate and propagate the Niftiest Day Of The Year, spreading fnords, sharing cookies, throwing pillows, playing videogames, and just generally waggling gammon all around. This is what makes Topin Wagglegammon so much more special than most of my holidays; I'm practically the only person alive who commemorates What The Heck Was That Day or International Moment of Frustration Scream Day, but when Topin Wagglegammon comes around, I celebrate it along with other people. Look me in the eye and tell me that's not Nifty.

Regrettably, I myself was able to indulge in only very minimal celebration. My professors rather thoughtlessly scheduled our cardiology exam on October 27th, and so my Topin Wagglegammon consisted mostly of cardiac electrophysiology, mediastinal and posterior abdominal anatomy, flow-volume loops and the clinical manifestations of atrioventricularis communis. We have to have our priorities, though, and during the course of the day I made certain to find the time to eat a few cookies, play with some stuffed toys, and fnord the unwary. It might be argued, though, that studying is a perfectly valid way of celebrating Topin Wagglegammon too. In the short term, it will make me happy to pass my exam. In the slightly longer term, it will make me and others happy if I pass this year. In the quite long term, finishing school, getting work, and pulling down an embarassingly large salary will significantly facilitate celebrating future Topin Wagglegammons is style. And in the extremely long term, finishing my studies will be an important step to take in persuading descending generations that I'm the sort of guy worth listening to and thus propagating Topin Wagglegammon down through the ages. In the incredibly long term, the Universe will die and all matter and energy will cease to exist and it won't really matter if I passed my exams, but I rather think it's good for us to set smaller and more acheivable goals than that.

Interestingly, to my knowledge, only two people noticed that The Ancient Rite Of The Four Cookies And A Coat Hanger And Some Other Stuff was actually listed as being the prescribed Topin Wagglegammon ceremony for 2007, not 2006. Topin Wagglegammon is always celebrated on the same date, but as befits any day as silly as Topin Wagglegammon, it is not always celebrated in the right year. Next year we may choose to celebrate Topin Wagglegammon 2006, or Topin Wagglegammon 2008, or Topin Wagglegammon 2010, or celebrate Toipin Wagglegammon 2007 a second time, or perhaps celebrate Topin Wagglegammon 1862, depending on how we're feeling at the time. One thing which does seem safe to suggest, however, is that come next October 26, we *will* be celebrating the Topin Wagglegammon of some year. It's just that nifty.

Fun fact of the day: According to Webster, "nifty" is both a verb an a noun. In its noun form, a nifty is "something that is nifty." So, not only is Topin Wagglegammon the Niftiest Day of the Year, it is also a nifty, in and of itself. If it is, in turn, the niftiest of all days, it might rightly be referred to as the Niftiest Nifty Of The Year. From here, we enter a recursion loop which ends in exploding brains.

In keeping with this sort of logic, it seems quite reasonable to point out that "fnord" is not only a noun (one nord -- many fnords) but is also a verb, as used in a sentence above. The verb "to fnord" can be considered to mean "to give a fnord" or "to create a fnord." One may therefore reasonably say, for example, "he fnorded that wall" meaning he wrote or concealed a fnord there, or "he fnorded him" which means that he gave him a fnord. The verb conjugates normally, except that extra fnords are sometimes inserted, because that's what one does with fnords. To whit,

I fnord
You fnord
He or she fnords
Wfnorde fnord
You fnord
They fnord

This year, last year, next year, and temporoperpendicularly, Happy Topin Wagglegammon!