They/she, sapphic ace, multifandom raccoon, I write stories sometimes. Also on AO3 as wrongpedaldamnit.
Current hyperfixations: The Magnus Archives/Protocol, Dimension 20/Dropout, The Owl House, Starkid/Hatchetfield, D&D, Slay The Princess, Dead Boy Detectives, Greek myths (always)/OSP/Hadesgame, Scott Pilgrim, Midnight Burger, Leverage/Leverage: Redemption
Since the vampire AU got second in the poll, and I want to talk about ALL of my Mighty Nein AUs, I'm not gonna wait for anyone's go-ahead.
WE'RE TALKING ABOUT VAMPIRES NOW!
Let's jump in:
Jester is a film student from Croatia who's just moved to Chicago in order to create her thesis---a documentary series about her search for her long-lost father. Of course, unbeknownst to her, her father is tied to some shady goings-on, and once word gets out that she's been poking around, she winds up getting a pretty significant target on her back. After only a few weeks of looking for her father, Jester nearly dies in a hit-and-run meant to silence her for good... only to get bitten and turned by a vampire, who's vanished by the time she reawakens. Thankfully, the hit-and-run occurred not too far from the office of a P.I. that Jester had attempted to hire---a P.I. who happens to be a vampire herself, and who's willing to teach Jester the ropes and help her figure out her mysteries: where her father is, why people want her dead, and who turned her into a vampire in the first place.
Now that we've got our basic premise out of the way, all of the other characters are UNDER THE CUT:
Beau: She's the private eye vampire (go figure) and the youngest vampire in the story outside of Jester, having been turned in 2014. Outside of her detective business, which caters exclusively to supernatural creatures, Beau is an on-call agent of the Cobalt Soul---which, in this story, is an organization that acts as an arbiter between the various supernatural communities. They're also known for having done a lot of weird experimentation in the 50's in order to make their agents more effective, which gave rise to several sects of enhanced creatures... including Beau's vampire clan, Radian, who became daywalkers due to, well, radiation exposure. While Beau could use the Cobalt Soul's resources every time she needs to solve a case, calling on them for a favor means that she owes one them in return, so she tries her best to do her job without their help.
Yasha: She's Beau's wife and fellow daywalker, though she's from Clan Nephilhim---one of the oldest, and rumored to have gotten their daywalking powers and radiant fury from having drunk the blood of the angels (which she considers a load of crap). Yasha was turned in the 80's and didn't exactly adjust well, partially due to having a sire who encouraged mindless bloodlust above all else, but once she managed to get herself away from him, she decided to strive for a quiet, easy life. Nowadays, she runs a cafe in the same building where she, Beau, and their coterie reside, and she's fully embraced her role as the cool punk aunt. Not that Yasha isn't willing to scrap every now and then, but it's not her entire reason for living anymore.
Molly: They're a member of Clan Unseelie, a strain of fey vampires who specialize in trickery, illusions, and magical manipulations in order to spread chaos and mischief wherever they go... and yes, that's also the clan that Jester belongs to. He has absolutely no idea when he was turned, as he woke up in a grave sometime in the 60's with no memories, but based on the clothing he was wearing, his best guess is sometime in the early 1800s. Molly's the one who helped Yasha get back on her feet after she escaped Obhann, and she's also the one who suggested that the two of them move to America---which, in turn, inadvertenly led to Yasha and Beau meeting, so she likes to claim that she's responsible for that relationship. They're a performer at a speakeasy in their building's basement, which is managed by...
Fjord: Turned in the early 1910s, Fjord was a dock worker in London who made his way to America and wound up in Hollywood, starring in a series of very pulpy and very terrible Westerns before people noticed he didn't age and he had to move to Chicago. Technically speaking, he's the owner of the building, but he doesn't charge rent as long as everyone contributes to the household... and, well, everyone knows he's the coterie leader in name only. Jester, of course, immediately develops a crush on him---hey, he's a classic century-old vampire, he's nice, and he's a former movie star, what more could you want?---but it takes a bit for him to fully reciprocate those feelings, mainly because he's trying his best to do right by her as a coterie leader taking in a newly-turned fledgling still adjusting to being dead. Fjord gets won over by her charm eventually, though. (Also, he's from Clan Leviathan, who has themes around sea monsters and the hunger of the ocean, and Avantika is his sire. They broke up when he left Hollywood.)
Caduceus: He's the oldest vampire of the coterie, having been turned around 1690. He and his family were Irish druids who eventually immigrated to America in the mid-1800s, and while nobody is exactly sure what clan the Clays belong to---least of all themselves---all of them have kind of become urban legends wherever they end up, with Caduceus being most well-known for starting a club for asexual vampires in the Chicago area. He works as a coroner on the night shift and occasionally volunteers at the ER, and he also happens to be a quote-unquote "vegetarian" vampire who takes a lot of iron supplements but will occasionally go into a fugue state and feed from whatever cadaver he's recently done an autopsy on. (Also, by the way---in this universe, vampires can eat food, but only iron-rich foods will actually give them nutrients, and it's nothing compared to real blood. Vampires also don't need to drain someone completely, and they can make their victims forget what happened, but Caduceus still feels weird about drinking blood from a living being, even four hundred years later.)
Veth: She's an Unseelie vampire who was turned in the 1930's, bit her husband a couple of years later, and ended up having a son and daughter post-change (vampires can reproduce in this world, it just can't happen without intention---hence why only an eighth of vampires out there were born that way, not a lot of vampires decide they want to use their immortality to start a family). Now, she's the matriarch of a vampire family that's spread all across Chicago, and a good friend of the coterie... well, she and Fjord bicker a lot, but once you spend enough time with them, you'll realize it's all in good fun. Veth's also got a habit of taking in strays, and her latest one has definitely raised a few eyebrows...
Caleb: Turned in the 1880s, Caleb started out as a familiar to Trent Ikithon, a high-ranking and very old member of the sorcery-wielding Clan Volstrucker. He was one of three familiars who received the honor of being turned into a vampire, but they all remained in Trent's service for over, acting as spies and assassins who helped pave the way to their sire's rise to power. Caleb received an odd kind of salvation after he was caught by human authorities in the mid-90's and imprisoned in a secret faculty for twenty-five years---definitely not an ideal circumstance, but it kept him away and hidden from his master's influence. Eventually, a breakout organized by another inmate of the faculty gave him the chance to escape, and after a few years of wandering throughout America and keeping his head down, he wound up in Veth's backyard. Caleb's still learning how to be a functioning person again, but he's very grateful to Veth for taking him in, and as far as the coterie is considered, he's well on his way to becoming their friend. Even if he does get a little bit feral when he feeds.
Essek: Probably the most classically vampiric out of all of the cast, Essek was turned in the Regency Era and works directly under the leader of Clan Xhorhas---also a clan that specializes in magic, though they're way more focused on necromancy. On the surface, he's every bit the stereotypical snobby rich vampire, complete with the fancy house and obsession with vampiric code, but as Beau knows well by now, that's merely a facade. In reality, Essek goes against the system whenever it suits him, and he's had a pretty wild past that's granted him all sorts of illicit knowledge and connections---knowledge that Beau uses to her advantage, which has in turn made him one of her closest friends outside of the coterie. So far, Yasha's the only one who knows the truth about him, but that is absolutely going to change.
Beau is in the role of Robert Robertson, a superhero without superpowers who is forced to retire after a fight gone wrong. Her superhero identity was a vigilante PI named Cobalt, who fought crime with a combination of her detective skills, her martial arts skills, and a series of gadgets---including a mechanical stealth suit---that she built with limited tech knowledge and her college graduation money... but in the years since she started working as Cobalt, her father's cut her off and she can barely afford to eat, leaving her with no choice but to quit being a superhero after a fight with an old nemesis leaves her suit and several of her gadgets damaged beyond repair.
After a few weeks trying in vain to find herself a regular job, Beau gets approached by a well-known superheroine named Tempest (real name Keyleth Ashari, famously married to a superhero named Raven who was also forced to retire early), who offers her a job working as a dispatcher at SDN. In exchange for managing the current members of the Phoenix Program, SDN will give Beau the resources she needs to become Cobalt again... but of course, that depends on whether or not her band of ex-supervillains can be managed, or are a lost cause.
And the members of the Z-Team are as follows (under the cut because this is gonna be long):
Lady Azrael (aka Yasha): The chosen wielder of a weapon that grants its user incredible strength and power over darkness (which includes shadow control, turning invisible, creating shadow portals, and manifesting a pair of badass shadow dragon wings), Lady Azrael---or "Azzie," as the others call her---grew up in a religious cult that told her she was meant to bring divine justice to the wicked. This led to her killing quite a lot of people for a cause she believed to be just, and it took her falling in love with an outsider to realize she was in the wrong and to leave the cult behind. Yasha retired for a few years, even marrying the outsider that she fell for, but after her wife died of cancer, she decided she still had some fight left in her, and signed up for the Phoenix Program in order to put her sword to use---for good, this time. Of course, there may be more to this story than she lets on, and she can't explain the two-year gap in between her wife's death and when she turned herself in...
Bloody Molly (aka... uh, Molly): Probably the most famous ex-villain of the group, Molly used to be the charismatic, cruel, and shadowy crime boss known only as Nonogan---but due to a series of incidents involving deal gone wrong, a vengeful sorceress, and their powers working in mysterious ways, they woke up in a hospital one day with their memory completely wiped. Once she was informed of her criminal past, she waltzed right into SDN and requested, in her words, "another go-round at this whole superpowered-individual thing." His powers are pretty body-horror themed---he can track people through their blood, form weapons out of his own blood, flesh, and bone, and even has some mild shapeshifting stuff involving some visceral reshaping of flesh---but Molly's also got a series of eye tattoos on his body that seem to have their own thing going on, and he's still figuring out how it works. Also, even though they don't really care to look into their past, it keeps on catching up with them in increasingly infuriating ways.
Salem (aka Caleb): A sorcerer whose magic comes from a spiritual bond to a family grimoire, Salem may be the only member of the team with a darker past than Lady Azrael's. From what little SDN and the Z-Team have been able to piece together of his backstory, he's a former henchman to a very powerful supervillain in Germany named The Volstrucker, and he fled to America and entered into the Phoenix Program in order to escape his influence. Being able to carve out his own identity as a superhero is new for Caleb---he didn't even have a proper alias, as he was just one of many sorcerers recruited to work in The Volstrucker's henchman army---and though he's slow to trust and even slower to tell people about his past, he genuinely loves being able to do hero work, to the point where he'll occasionally self-assign himself to more high-risk calls. That being said, he does harbor a bit of disdain for Cobalt, both due to her leaving the hero life behind... and because of an incident that occurred prior to him entering the Program, when he was still living on the streets.
Goblinoid (aka Veth): Biochemist, wife, and mother of two, Goblinoid quit her job at a high-profile science lab after she wound up being the unwitting test subject for an experimental serum. It's not clear what the serum was supposed to do, but it gave her the ability to transform into a feral goblin creature whenever she got overwhelmed---and considering she's got both anger issues and anxiety, that happens a lot more often than she'd like. While Veth retains her mind when she transforms, she's got less control of her instincts, and her inopportune transformations have caused her to get into a lot of trouble, mostly involving fights and public intoxication. SDN's giving her the fresh start she desperately needs, both in terms of getting her powers under control and giving her the chance to be more than just a soccer mom, and she's actually gelling pretty well with the team. Even if she's a little too eager to throw hands sometimes.
Void (aka Essek): An Earth-born member of a spacefaring alien race, Void possesses the standard powers of the majority of his species---the ability to manipulate the gravity of objects, usually restricted to anything lighter than oneself---with one notable exception: he is what is known to his kind as a Singularity, whose powers theoretically have no limit to what they can accomplish. Outside of making himself float and creating the occasional gravity well, though, Essek doesn't use his abilities very often, as he believes his real strength lies in his mind... and in the past, he's used that mind to aid the goals of supervillains, only really caring about the scientific knowledge that could be gleaned from their inventions and his expertise. He's in the Phoenix Program as a form of witness protection more than anything, having turned over a lot of his clients's secrets in exchange for a lighter sentence, but working with an actual team seems to be rubbing off on him.
Princess Pixie (aka Jester): A stereotypical magical girl on the surface, Princess Pixie's fairy theme goes beyond just wings, glitter, and powers themed around light---she's a fey magical girl, with all the trickery and mischief that comes with it. Though Jester has consumed a lot of magical girl media in her life, and she's always wanted to be some sort of hero, the being who blessed her with her powers pushed her to be more chaotic for chaos's sake, making her do a lot of reckless things even if she was targeting corrupt higher-ups in the process. Of course, both her moral compass and the consequences of her actions got up with her eventually, and she wound up quitting being a superhero for a while to focus on college... but a magical girl's call to adventure can never be ignored, so Jester signed up for the Phoenix program after graduating, both for a chance to start over with a clean slate and to actually work for a team. She and her mentor are still on good terms, though. He occasionally shows up during a shift to give Jester a hand.
Fathomless (aka Fjord): Probably the one with the weirdest origin story, Fathomless is a marine biologist and the former host of a deep-sea parasite that tried and failed to make him summon and release an ancient sea god... and left him with some powers that he's still not entirely sure how to control. While under the parasite's control, he wound up committing a lot of crimes---mostly theft and breaking-and-entering, though there was some grevious bodily harm involved---and aside from learning how to use his abilities properly, Fjord sees the Phoenix Program as a way for him to rehabilitate into society and get his life back. His powers range from being able to manifest gills to being able to control water to even summoning extradimensional tentacles, the latter of which is the result of some very crass jokes made by some of the other team members. Fjord's always the guy in the group who gets teased, regardless of the setting.
Spore (aka Caduceus): A tea shop owner born to a family of funeral directors, Spore is the one and only member of the Z-Team with a completely clean record. This isn't because of some cover-up, or him just being very careful about committing crimes---he just happens to be an upstanding citizen whose macabre powers involving the manipulation of dead things (mostly through fungus and mold) have caused several supervillains to try to recruit him, in increasingly disruptive ways. Caduceus joined the Phoenix Program purely as a way to get them off of his back, and once he's done his fair share of superhero work, he's planning on going right back to living a pleasantly mundane life. Of course, being a superhero is a lot more complicated than it seems, and his new coworkers all seem to be in dire need of a friend who can dispense some wisdom, calm, and kindness... so he might be in the hero business for longer than he anticipates.
Apparently, my brain decided that this is the summer of Mighty Nein AUs, and I have three that I want to talk about... but I can't decide which one I want to talk about first:
SO
Do you want to hear about...
A vampire AU starring Jester with elements of WWDITS and VTM?
A Ghosts AU with married-couple Beauyasha and fun spiritual shenanigans?
A Dispatch AU starring Beau, with the other Nein as dysfunctional ex-villains?
Voting ended onJul 3
Propaganda for each option:
Vampire AU: It's vampires, obviously, but it's also a mystery story---Jester has three mysteries to solve, and Beau is a paranormal private eye. There's also the lovely elements of found family and political intrigue that made the original campaign so beloved, and there's fun humor and character stuff to be found in everyone being vampires from different time periods (and clans!).
Ghosts AU: Obviously, the story format is fun---there wouldn't be six versions of the show from six different countries if it wasn't, even if the German, French, and Greek versions are mostly reduxes of the British one---and we've got the "every character's from a different time period" thing in this story, too. Also, I'm adding my own spin on it by including original ghost abilities and the existence of more supernatural elements.
Dispatch AU: Uh... one Critical Role-related story, meet other Critical Role-related story. The game's great, the format's wonderful, and the Mighty Nein definitely has a lot of Z-Team vibes. Also, it's really fun figuring out how to translate D&D abilities into a superhero setting.
Tonight I had the sudden and sad realization that because Vampire: The Masquerade as a game system is so drastically different from D&D, we likely will never see the Coterie appear in the Time Quangle
Y'know, I was so worried that the meeting with their bosses would cause the Cotorie to pull the breaks on their plans and there'd be a really drawn-out thing where they start ruining the town again and then finally fight back at the end
But nope, the SECOND the head honchos are out of sight, they're going 110% on their "fix Purpee up and make it a better place for the people and for vampires" plan just to fuck with them
My DM after the final session of our first campaign (we took out the boss in four rounds and we dealt an average of twenty-something damage every time)
Brennan I'm gonna be honest, if you're out here saying that it's snowing in December in the Pacific Northwest, you're reeeeeeeeally asking me to suspend my disbelief here
So apparently HJ and Lavonte's relationship is even more insane than we thought because what do you MEAN it all started when HJ turned Lavonte and said that they'd fight to the death at the top of the Golden Gate Bridge
And Lavonte still insists that they're not together???
