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Description
I am Cassandra-Kide, and I have been writing a diary entry over and over again in my head this day.  All day.  Well, night, technically.  I could be called a night owl.

Let's get breaking the fourth wall over with right away.  I am writing this, but also, the one you know as Aryn Chris is writing it.  I won't be able to publish this on my own, for more than one reason, so I leave the legal right to do so up to her.  Maybe she will, maybe she won't, but no one can claim she stole the work later if we do it this way from the start.

Also, the City falls under an odd set of laws that mean one needs RavenBlack's own permission to write about it.  We have that permission.  I'm still astounded at how easily Aryn Chris contacted him and got it, given that he's the devil himself to find in the City, and Aryn Chris doesn't even live in the City.  Ironic, or perhaps just providence, given that I can't publish anyway and therefore he doesn't need to be accessible to me.  I sent a message to him telepathically once--I don't even remember what about--and he didn't reply for several weeks.  An e-mail from Aryn Chris was responded to much more quickly.  It's a wonder.

I don't have a diary.  I don't have the money to buy one, nor a place to keep one, nor much to write in it, nor any inclination for it to be found and read.  I'm worried less about identity thieves than about becoming too predictable, and something like a diary--if found--might all too easily tell a stranger a lot about me and how I behave.  Right now, anyone observant knows that I lurk in the Dark Myst Tavern out on [enter street corner].  They don't know where I sleep or who I know and don't know, who my friends and enemies are, who my family was.  They don't know which hunter is my brother, and therefore they don't know which hunter has me for a sister.  A lot of hunters have dead sisters--without knowing which one I am, they can't use us against each other.  That's the main reason I never speak my old name.  The other is that I don't want my brother to know I'm not dead.

I'm supposed to be dead.  There's even a grave.  I assume there was a funeral--two, one for the family and a second for the hunters.  They know that my fate was their responsibility, and they mourn me as they mourn every other lost Bait, even though only my own brother and Roger knew me.  They're like a family of their own, supporting each other... which is good, because most of them have no other family at all.  Occupational hazard, in most cases, and for the rest, the reason they join up in the first place.

I've been writing and re-writing this entry in my head for hours, though... it's hard work.  I was an English major in college, before all this happened, when all this happened, and I used to take pride in knowing that I good at it.  I used to hang onto that as the only part of my identity that hadn't been ripped away.  Is it so amazing that a few years alone, in the dark, scared and half-mad, can rip away all the vocabulary, grammar, and voice techniques I once knew?  I feel like a child again, stumbling around and looking for words to fit, but none of them fit, none suit my needs.  Reading this is like reading a poor, young-adult excuse for a novel.  On some level, I am still shamed by this.  I wonder if there is a way for me to take classes again.  I cannot restart, obviously, if I'm supposed to be dead, but it's just as well... reasons for not using that old name aside, I don't look the same now.  No one would recognize me.  I wonder if anyone will take the name "Cassandra-Kide" as real  and legal; I suspect that my best shot would be to pretend I am a foreign student, enrolling under student visa.  Were I to do so, though, in the interests of protecting my brother, I would have to take other classes and possibly choose a different major.  I have always wished to be a historical writer, however, so the idea dismays me.

There are those who would consider me well suited for an occupation in the historical field, and there do we come to the crux of my problems, the meaning behind all these veiled words and little hints.  If you know RavenBlack City, especially as a local and native, I'm sure you've already figured it out.  If Aryn Chris has imprudently let the cat out of the bag and it's explicit on the cover (front, back, or inside), then of course you knew before you cracked open the book.  Yep.  I'm a vampire.  Vampire means immortal [ie. can be killed, but does not age], hollow fangs through which blood is consumed [pop culture aside, the blood MUST be human and it MUST be fresh], and nocturnal.

I was turned before Twilight got big, and now the publishers have stocked every book store from here to Nantucket with teen vampire novels, but they really are utter fiction.  They are poorly written, something I can still be sure of even after forgetting most of my major, but the point is that they are fiction.  "Vampire" is not another word for "demi-god," nor can any vampire I've ever heard of make contact with sunlight without burning (no matter how much dark cloth or sunscreen they have on), nor do any survive off blood donation banks, nor do werewolves exist.  I'm serious, there's no such thing as werewolves.  Witches and shamans, maybe, who can and do change their bodies, but the only thing out there that can turn you into a like being via biting is a vampire.  Also, I hear that Stephanie Meyer's idea of a vampire is an eternal teenager living in a small Washington town, and it sparkles in the sunlight?  Sometimes called a "sparklepire" or "fairy vamp" online.  It is true that some varieties of vampire sparkle and glitter as the sunlight burns them away, however, they burn in the middle of all that.  Most vampires burn without the special effects.  Also, there are no teenage vampires.  No teenager gets turned on purpose, because apparently all the hormones get locked up in there and they become an insane vampire, even moreso than any regular vampire is.  It is a danger to its fellow vampires.  If turned, purposely or accidentally, a teen vampire is typically hunted down by the first House to find out about it and staked.  Also can't imagine a vampire surviving long in any small town, especially an isolated one, both because of the small food supply and because it would be out there alone without House protection--even one hunter by himself could take it down, and no one would even notice.  The more I hear about this story that started the latest vampire fad, the more I shake my head and wonder what's so hard about inventing a new word to describe the latest fictional creature you have invented.  Vampires are vampires, and it's pretty sad when even some of them hate the story more than they like the new crowd of volunteer victims.

I wish I could breathe.  Just wanted to put that out there.  It's odd to miss breathing, and sneezing to get a bad smell out of your nose, and things like orgasms, but I do.  Do you know why it's odd to miss orgasms?  It's because I was a virgin.  I've had sex as a dead thing, but it's not pleasurable... just uncomfortable.  I miss having the opportunity, even though I never took it, because now I'm just an immortal virgin and will never know.  Most vampires are not virgins.  I suspect that most of them include sexual activity in their feeding not because it gets the victim's blood pumping or because they are sexual creatures themselves so much as that they miss what they used to have and want to pretend they haven't totally lost it.  When a vampire isn't mad or feral, many of them are surprisingly lucid.  The ones that forget they were ever alive and human do so on purpose.

Something I'd like to clear up:  mirrors, video tapes, and cameras.  First off, all vampires can be video taped or recorded with digital equipment.  The idea that recording devices do not work on vampires comes from the idea that cameras cannot take their picture, which in turn comes from the idea that vampires do not have a reflection in a mirror nor a shadow in a lit room.  This is not entirely accurate.  A reflection is typically a reflection of a physical spirit; if I understand correctly, the Egyptians called this spirit ba.  A fair number of vampires have no reflection, because they do not have a physical spirit; they are broken up somehow, stiff and more prone to being completely still than moving around, and I personally find them much more frightening than vampires with reflections.  Such a vampire reaches old age only through great effort, strong will--it is supposedly much more difficult to control the body without a physical spirit, which makes sense, if you think about it--and cunning.  These same vampires do not appear in photographs, because analog photographic equipment contains mirrors, nor can they be seen through a telescope, binoculars, or a telephoto lense, for the same reason.  Vampires that have reflections appear in photographs just fine.  Digital recording equipment has no mirrors, and records the physical body instead of the physical spirit (I assume), so even the ones with no reflection can appear on the Late Show and security cameras just fine.  It should be noted that almost all vampires can be audio recorded regardless of the method, and that the ones whose words you cannot hear after the fact are the feral ones.  Audio equipment records some level of the spirit proper, I think, because feral ones are pretty much nothing but the body and the need to feed; they have no soul in them, while feral.

I start a new paragraph to deal with the issue of not having a shadow.  Aryn Chris tells me that shadows just mean that there is something blocking light from reaching the wall or floor, and that anything without a shadow must not really be there in the first place, must not have a physical body with which to block light.  If we assume that there really are or have been vampires with no shadow, and we fit that with something else I heard once, it can connect.  Destroyed vampires sometimes stick around past the loss of their body, if the remains of their spirits are not either also laid to rest or also destroyed.  Those ones do not burn in the sunlight, though they seem to become invisible over time... they are shades.  They are ghostly vampires that drink the blood of human spirits instead of their physical blood, often with the same affects.  If someone saw one of those vampires in the night, it could be the origin of shadowless and reflectionless vampires that move more naturally and smoothly than the typical reflectionless vampire.

Some varieties of vampire have unique powers or traits.  I've heard that that LARP game, Vampire: The Masquerade, has some system to it, but let me disabuse you of the notion that it depends what House you're in, or even which kind turned you:  it doesn't.  The reflectionless vampire is one variety.  Some are telepathic, some telekinetic, some able to teleport.  Some are clairvoyant, some clairaudient, some clairsentient.  Some can fly.  Some can walk through walls.  Some cannot swim without sinking all the way to the bottom, even if the bottom is the ocean floor and a water pressure that destroys their body.  Some stiffen with rigor mortis if they come in contact with running water or the spray from a waterfall, and no one knows why.  Most have no powers of healing, but I was taking private instruction in Reiki before I was Bait, and somehow I've retained that.  There are theories that some of the varieties are based on the human genomes that get turned, or on one's religious beliefs, or on the strength of the vampire that turns you, but no one really knows.  Some varieties overlap, and telepathy is rather common, especially between bonded pairs and between childer and sires.  I don't have a spouse, a childer, or a sire, but I do know that I can telepathically communicate with other vampires now and again.  Never humans, but vampires.  As far as my "variety" goes, I know that I am of the kind that can turn a human on accident, involuntarily and even unknowingly, and that that, at least, is very much something that's passed down from sire to childer with no other factors.

I reside in RavenBlack City.  I was born here, raised here, lived here as an adult, turned here, and buried here.  The City is full of vampires, as any local well knows, and it was founded by a man called RavenBlack--it's much less common knowledge that RavenBlack himself is a vampire and still around, and only he himself knows whether he was human when he founded the City so many hundred years ago.  He's not that easy to track down.  The City has it's own laws and customs and traditions, and while I know the gridmap of the City by heart, I cannot point to it on a world map.  Tourists come here a lot... people who live here leave, and others come to stay.  The outside world exists through a curious curtain, however, one that I don't recall considering as a human; the outside world does not interfere with RavenBlack, nor the City with the outside world, and I think the two may not exist on quite the same Earth at all.  Sometimes we seem to be an American city, sometimes one of Eastern Europe, or Western Europe, or even Canada.  Once, I think we were surely a part of Asia, for there were neon signs in every language and I remember wearing a hanbok as my uniform at work.  In grade school, when they taught us about the City, we never learned which nation of the world we belonged to, and yet we have no army or many farms to support ourselves as a city-state--nor is there any national patriotism.  We celebrate no independence day or armistice day, only religious observances and the day the City was founded.  I have never been on a plane or boat, and yet field trips included the Parthenon, the Louvre, and Cairo.  Some friends and I skipped class one day and went to Hollywood and Vine.  We never thought twice about it, or at least I don't think I did.  That's just how it is.

So, Aryn Chris wants to get on with her night and this has turned into more of an introduction than a chapter anyway.  Post or comment or whatever it's called if you have questions, because it looks like this is a rough draft of the introduction to the book, where we explain all the basics upfront so we can get on with the story and you won't have to keep guessing about my hair color all the way til page 120.

Speaking of which, my hair is so dark an auburn that it's pretty much black.  It's long and full and thick, but soft to the touch and it does not break.  My eyes are "dark chocolate," and I'm beautiful.  Not sure what racial mix, because I never was any good at telling them apart.  I'm white or a very pale Latina, I think.  Again, I don't look like I did as a human, so it's not like I can figure it out based on genealogy...  Some vampires are beautiful, most look the same way they did as humans, and some are ugly.  The one that turned me was a greasy, non-attractive human-type, so I'm going to say that my physical changes are one of those "variety" things that have nothing to do with who turned me.

Description
I am Cassandra-Kide, and I have been writing a diary entry over and over again in my head this day.  All day.  Well, night, technically.  I could be called a night owl.

Let's get breaking the fourth wall over with right away.  I am writing this, but also, the one you know as Aryn Chris is writing it.  I won't be able to publish this on my own, for more than one reason, so I leave the legal right to do so up to her.  Maybe she will, maybe she won't, but no one can claim she stole the work later if we do it this way from the start.

Also, the City falls under an odd set of laws that mean one needs RavenBlack's own permission to write about it.  We have that permission.  I'm still astounded at how easily Aryn Chris contacted him and got it, given that he's the devil himself to find in the City, and Aryn Chris doesn't even live in the City.  Ironic, or perhaps just providence, given that I can't publish anyway and therefore he doesn't need to be accessible to me.  I sent a message to him telepathically once--I don't even remember what about--and he didn't reply for several weeks.  An e-mail from Aryn Chris was responded to much more quickly.  It's a wonder.

I don't have a diary.  I don't have the money to buy one, nor a place to keep one, nor much to write in it, nor any inclination for it to be found and read.  I'm worried less about identity thieves than about becoming too predictable, and something like a diary--if found--might all too easily tell a stranger a lot about me and how I behave.  Right now, anyone observant knows that I lurk in the Dark Myst Tavern out on [enter street corner].  They don't know where I sleep or who I know and don't know, who my friends and enemies are, who my family was.  They don't know which hunter is my brother, and therefore they don't know which hunter has me for a sister.  A lot of hunters have dead sisters--without knowing which one I am, they can't use us against each other.  That's the main reason I never speak my old name.  The other is that I don't want my brother to know I'm not dead.

I'm supposed to be dead.  There's even a grave.  I assume there was a funeral--two, one for the family and a second for the hunters.  They know that my fate was their responsibility, and they mourn me as they mourn every other lost Bait, even though only my own brother and Roger knew me.  They're like a family of their own, supporting each other... which is good, because most of them have no other family at all.  Occupational hazard, in most cases, and for the rest, the reason they join up in the first place.

I've been writing and re-writing this entry in my head for hours, though... it's hard work.  I was an English major in college, before all this happened, when all this happened, and I used to take pride in knowing that I good at it.  I used to hang onto that as the only part of my identity that hadn't been ripped away.  Is it so amazing that a few years alone, in the dark, scared and half-mad, can rip away all the vocabulary, grammar, and voice techniques I once knew?  I feel like a child again, stumbling around and looking for words to fit, but none of them fit, none suit my needs.  Reading this is like reading a poor, young-adult excuse for a novel.  On some level, I am still shamed by this.  I wonder if there is a way for me to take classes again.  I cannot restart, obviously, if I'm supposed to be dead, but it's just as well... reasons for not using that old name aside, I don't look the same now.  No one would recognize me.  I wonder if anyone will take the name "Cassandra-Kide" as real  and legal; I suspect that my best shot would be to pretend I am a foreign student, enrolling under student visa.  Were I to do so, though, in the interests of protecting my brother, I would have to take other classes and possibly choose a different major.  I have always wished to be a historical writer, however, so the idea dismays me.

There are those who would consider me well suited for an occupation in the historical field, and there do we come to the crux of my problems, the meaning behind all these veiled words and little hints.  If you know RavenBlack City, especially as a local and native, I'm sure you've already figured it out.  If Aryn Chris has imprudently let the cat out of the bag and it's explicit on the cover (front, back, or inside), then of course you knew before you cracked open the book.  Yep.  I'm a vampire.  Vampire means immortal [ie. can be killed, but does not age], hollow fangs through which blood is consumed [pop culture aside, the blood MUST be human and it MUST be fresh], and nocturnal.

I was turned before Twilight got big, and now the publishers have stocked every book store from here to Nantucket with teen vampire novels, but they really are utter fiction.  They are poorly written, something I can still be sure of even after forgetting most of my major, but the point is that they are fiction.  "Vampire" is not another word for "demi-god," nor can any vampire I've ever heard of make contact with sunlight without burning (no matter how much dark cloth or sunscreen they have on), nor do any survive off blood donation banks, nor do werewolves exist.  I'm serious, there's no such thing as werewolves.  Witches and shamans, maybe, who can and do change their bodies, but the only thing out there that can turn you into a like being via biting is a vampire.  Also, I hear that Stephanie Meyer's idea of a vampire is an eternal teenager living in a small Washington town, and it sparkles in the sunlight?  Sometimes called a "sparklepire" or "fairy vamp" online.  It is true that some varieties of vampire sparkle and glitter as the sunlight burns them away, however, they burn in the middle of all that.  Most vampires burn without the special effects.  Also, there are no teenage vampires.  No teenager gets turned on purpose, because apparently all the hormones get locked up in there and they become an insane vampire, even moreso than any regular vampire is.  It is a danger to its fellow vampires.  If turned, purposely or accidentally, a teen vampire is typically hunted down by the first House to find out about it and staked.  Also can't imagine a vampire surviving long in any small town, especially an isolated one, both because of the small food supply and because it would be out there alone without House protection--even one hunter by himself could take it down, and no one would even notice.  The more I hear about this story that started the latest vampire fad, the more I shake my head and wonder what's so hard about inventing a new word to describe the latest fictional creature you have invented.  Vampires are vampires, and it's pretty sad when even some of them hate the story more than they like the new crowd of volunteer victims.

I wish I could breathe.  Just wanted to put that out there.  It's odd to miss breathing, and sneezing to get a bad smell out of your nose, and things like orgasms, but I do.  Do you know why it's odd to miss orgasms?  It's because I was a virgin.  I've had sex as a dead thing, but it's not pleasurable... just uncomfortable.  I miss having the opportunity, even though I never took it, because now I'm just an immortal virgin and will never know.  Most vampires are not virgins.  I suspect that most of them include sexual activity in their feeding not because it gets the victim's blood pumping or because they are sexual creatures themselves so much as that they miss what they used to have and want to pretend they haven't totally lost it.  When a vampire isn't mad or feral, many of them are surprisingly lucid.  The ones that forget they were ever alive and human do so on purpose.

Something I'd like to clear up:  mirrors, video tapes, and cameras.  First off, all vampires can be video taped or recorded with digital equipment.  The idea that recording devices do not work on vampires comes from the idea that cameras cannot take their picture, which in turn comes from the idea that vampires do not have a reflection in a mirror nor a shadow in a lit room.  This is not entirely accurate.  A reflection is typically a reflection of a physical spirit; if I understand correctly, the Egyptians called this spirit ba.  A fair number of vampires have no reflection, because they do not have a physical spirit; they are broken up somehow, stiff and more prone to being completely still than moving around, and I personally find them much more frightening than vampires with reflections.  Such a vampire reaches old age only through great effort, strong will--it is supposedly much more difficult to control the body without a physical spirit, which makes sense, if you think about it--and cunning.  These same vampires do not appear in photographs, because analog photographic equipment contains mirrors, nor can they be seen through a telescope, binoculars, or a telephoto lense, for the same reason.  Vampires that have reflections appear in photographs just fine.  Digital recording equipment has no mirrors, and records the physical body instead of the physical spirit (I assume), so even the ones with no reflection can appear on the Late Show and security cameras just fine.  It should be noted that almost all vampires can be audio recorded regardless of the method, and that the ones whose words you cannot hear after the fact are the feral ones.  Audio equipment records some level of the spirit proper, I think, because feral ones are pretty much nothing but the body and the need to feed; they have no soul in them, while feral.

I start a new paragraph to deal with the issue of not having a shadow.  Aryn Chris tells me that shadows just mean that there is something blocking light from reaching the wall or floor, and that anything without a shadow must not really be there in the first place, must not have a physical body with which to block light.  If we assume that there really are or have been vampires with no shadow, and we fit that with something else I heard once, it can connect.  Destroyed vampires sometimes stick around past the loss of their body, if the remains of their spirits are not either also laid to rest or also destroyed.  Those ones do not burn in the sunlight, though they seem to become invisible over time... they are shades.  They are ghostly vampires that drink the blood of human spirits instead of their physical blood, often with the same affects.  If someone saw one of those vampires in the night, it could be the origin of shadowless and reflectionless vampires that move more naturally and smoothly than the typical reflectionless vampire.

Some varieties of vampire have unique powers or traits.  I've heard that that LARP game, Vampire: The Masquerade, has some system to it, but let me disabuse you of the notion that it depends what House you're in, or even which kind turned you:  it doesn't.  The reflectionless vampire is one variety.  Some are telepathic, some telekinetic, some able to teleport.  Some are clairvoyant, some clairaudient, some clairsentient.  Some can fly.  Some can walk through walls.  Some cannot swim without sinking all the way to the bottom, even if the bottom is the ocean floor and a water pressure that destroys their body.  Some stiffen with rigor mortis if they come in contact with running water or the spray from a waterfall, and no one knows why.  Most have no powers of healing, but I was taking private instruction in Reiki before I was Bait, and somehow I've retained that.  There are theories that some of the varieties are based on the human genomes that get turned, or on one's religious beliefs, or on the strength of the vampire that turns you, but no one really knows.  Some varieties overlap, and telepathy is rather common, especially between bonded pairs and between childer and sires.  I don't have a spouse, a childer, or a sire, but I do know that I can telepathically communicate with other vampires now and again.  Never humans, but vampires.  As far as my "variety" goes, I know that I am of the kind that can turn a human on accident, involuntarily and even unknowingly, and that that, at least, is very much something that's passed down from sire to childer with no other factors.

I reside in RavenBlack City.  I was born here, raised here, lived here as an adult, turned here, and buried here.  The City is full of vampires, as any local well knows, and it was founded by a man called RavenBlack--it's much less common knowledge that RavenBlack himself is a vampire and still around, and only he himself knows whether he was human when he founded the City so many hundred years ago.  He's not that easy to track down.  The City has it's own laws and customs and traditions, and while I know the gridmap of the City by heart, I cannot point to it on a world map.  Tourists come here a lot... people who live here leave, and others come to stay.  The outside world exists through a curious curtain, however, one that I don't recall considering as a human; the outside world does not interfere with RavenBlack, nor the City with the outside world, and I think the two may not exist on quite the same Earth at all.  Sometimes we seem to be an American city, sometimes one of Eastern Europe, or Western Europe, or even Canada.  Once, I think we were surely a part of Asia, for there were neon signs in every language and I remember wearing a hanbok as my uniform at work.  In grade school, when they taught us about the City, we never learned which nation of the world we belonged to, and yet we have no army or many farms to support ourselves as a city-state--nor is there any national patriotism.  We celebrate no independence day or armistice day, only religious observances and the day the City was founded.  I have never been on a plane or boat, and yet field trips included the Parthenon, the Louvre, and Cairo.  Some friends and I skipped class one day and went to Hollywood and Vine.  We never thought twice about it, or at least I don't think I did.  That's just how it is.

So, Aryn Chris wants to get on with her night and this has turned into more of an introduction than a chapter anyway.  Post or comment or whatever it's called if you have questions, because it looks like this is a rough draft of the introduction to the book, where we explain all the basics upfront so we can get on with the story and you won't have to keep guessing about my hair color all the way til page 120.

Speaking of which, my hair is so dark an auburn that it's pretty much black.  It's long and full and thick, but soft to the touch and it does not break.  My eyes are "dark chocolate," and I'm beautiful.  Not sure what racial mix, because I never was any good at telling them apart.  I'm white or a very pale Latina, I think.  Again, I don't look like I did as a human, so it's not like I can figure it out based on genealogy...  Some vampires are beautiful, most look the same way they did as humans, and some are ugly.  The one that turned me was a greasy, non-attractive human-type, so I'm going to say that my physical changes are one of those "variety" things that have nothing to do with who turned me.