#oc lace

[purrhibition]

Another selection of hobonichi doodles

[ribbonzregretz]

i hate him so much ohhhh my fucking gawdddddd

[i take commission!]

[epic-and-kitty]

Since I mentioned I was shipping my new player character with the Sanitized Octo Samurai, here she is with her man and some concept notes. Her name is Lace.

[silkenred]

Running From Memphis

[In which we get a quiet flashback of Silk's packlife and a glimpse of Lace, the pack's only Thinblood. More under the cut...]

Now is the carcass of a stripmall: Lee's Discount Liquor Locker & Food, SpeedyPrint, Thompson Burr ROAD LAWYER, all sagging under the weight of that vine that eats everything here. This unit sold music, instruments maybe: no signage left to read, but a stave of vinyl-transfer notes unspool along the wall. Empty bottles and folds of tinfoil, carpet the colour of an unclean tongue. There are sounds in the night that could be bugs or frogs or birds and Silk would never know. Ermine's hiccoughing laugh beckons out from the lightless backrooms, quickly joined by the others. They all have a different laugh for while Reno is gone, doing what he does.

"Sure," Silk says. "They do that in America. You can be somewhere that's nothing for nine out of every ten minutes of driving, nothing but asphalt and advertising, and they still call it Houston… Atlanta…"

"Memphis."

"Memphis." Silk nods and goes on nodding.

Heavy head. A rummaging pain in their guts. After finally being full, glutted and sated, the first pangs are always the worst. (You thought you were free? You thought it could last? If there's one lesson you can learn from eternity, they're starting to think that's it.)

Wax and Hawk and a big mechanic's wrench, Pacman jaw as wide as their palm, they cracked open the kind of roadside fire hydrant you get every three miles or so along busy runs of freeway or highway (Silk's never been clear on the difference, just movie words), and sprayed Silk down till the red ran pink then clear. It felt like being pressurewashed, riotpoliced, in the headlights of their stolen Toyota truck. Luna, laughing. Her no-Reno laugh. Silk was warm until then, failure nursed like a dying coal, under the tar of gore that Luna made a brief show of licking from their forearms, neck, chest, until she said something about diminishing returns – meaning she was bored – and left Silk feverish, unfinished, in jeans that were ruined for good: skinny lightwash Levi's, brown with blood.

"There'll be other chances," Lace says. "The war's, like, what, five hundred years old. Not like we're running out of enemies. Listen. Babyteeth over here? I get it. They won't even let me try."

She bounces in place, sucking and spewing breath. Trying to pump something up from a well that never struck water. She whines, low in her throat, a borrowed sound. (Silk read something once, probably partially bullshit, about a girl in Bengal raised by wolves. If it had made her a good wolf, the missionaries never would've got her. She would have never turned into a story.) Slithering sound of Lace's trackpants. Outline of their volume, low on her narrow hips, against the different dark beyond the storefront window, the parking lot and lightningbugs.

"Ermine, Hawk, you, me," Silk says. "We all get it. Got it. Panders. Placebo group in the study. Same dose of nothing, right?"

"If that's true," says Lace. "How come I'd trade places with any of you in a heartbeat? How come Reno treats you like the fuckin' golden baby? That whole much-is-expected-of-those-to-whom-much-is-given run. And he doesn't treat me like anything. I could count the words he's ever said to me."

"Do I need, like, proof of purchase to redeem all this much I've apparently been given, or..?"

The wrong thing to say. Lace, silently, no whine and no groan, turns away for the grimy plateglass left behind in the storefront window. Puts her fist, and the heavy steel lighter, and her skinny brown forearm through it.

Silk smells the blood before they see it. (And if they can smell it, then…)

Lace eases her arm back through the hole she's made. Trembling and pink, the sound of her lungs. She pinches the cigarette into the corner of her mouth. Her face in the flame is too young for this shit, maybe forever. Maybe not. No one knows yet how long they last, the kind of thing she is — or if there's world enough left to find out.

"C'mere." Silk pours off the counter. "Kiss it better."

She thrusts out her arm, makes Silk come to her: tattered skin, one long gash, bright red and slow, but bleeding. It's not a choice for her. Night air steals through the break in the window. Silk takes her wrist in their fingers. Bends to the pale underside of her forearm, tongue alive with the foreknowledge of how she tastes, and their throat already working.

"You know I used to be in a band?" She blows smoke away from Silk. Gestures with the dancing coal of her cigarette at the black notes on the thin and off-white walls. "Entradas Oscuras. My mamá didn't like it – devil music – but I was gonna move out any day now anyway. Maybe out on the road. We were getting kinda good? I was bass. They say about bassists that they're all tall, dark, and quiet. I heard the joke that one outta three ain't bad so many times I started telling it myself. Thing was like as big as I was, and the good kinda heavy. Something else they say, though, about bassists? That no one cares. No one cares that you're there, but they notice if you're not."

On the floor now, Silk kneeling, with Lace's arm raised to slow the bleed a little. Lapping mouth, gnawing almost-kisses. She tastes of butter before it burns, leaf tobacco, gas station air.

"Guess I kinda did though? In the end. Go out on the road, I mean."

Hawk is in the backroom doorway, hooked in by the scent. Cartoon wolf, windowsill pie. "Fuck are you two doing?" He tries to sound like he doesn't care, but Silk's pretty sure they can hear his leather pants creaking like a tree about to fall.

In Dallas, in eleven months, in the time of the mask, he will try to kill Silk with a prybar and a pair of boltcutters and a broken Wild Turkey bottle, and not – for some twist of love, bad luck or good – the inch-long hooks of keratin that sleep inside his fingers.

Lace will say nothing for six weeks after. Two out of three ain't bad.

[purrhibition]

princess (pretentious)

[epic-and-kitty]

How many kids do you estimate Octo Samurai having? Does he often care for them himself? (Kind of a weird question, so no fear to not ask)

(stares at the ridiculous amount of fan kids I have for every fandom) I'm probably one of the few people on Tumblr where this isn't a weird question

I think Sam would probably keep it to one or two biological kids (doesn't want to stress out his partner who would probably be laying the clutch), but willing to adopt any street urchin he can find. He saw a lot of kids in the domes suffering but being a wielder of a Great Octoweapon, he was constantly on guard and couldn't take them in. But on the surface, if you are a street urchin and look at him for a millisecond, he's taking you in, partner or not.

He often does care for them by himself. I see him as ethier owning a dojo or teaching at one, but I can also see him staying at home with the kids while his partner earns most of the money.

In San's story with Lace, she's the one earning cash through turf war, tournaments and occasional sponsor deals. But they head to the Metro on weekends looking for Sanitized or lost Octolings to take them to the surface and find them homes, any that don't immediately find homes or get sent to Marina to put them through the Memverse they take in temporarily until they find them a home. Hachiko just happened to be feral enough when they first found her that by the time they expected her to leave, she had bonded to them enough for them to officially adopt her

[epic-and-kitty]

Quick and dirty question but what is Lace's sexuality?

Lace is bi and demiromatic!

[silkenred]

I have many questions! For Silk, essentials 7, life 5 and 6, death 10 and 11? For the other members of the pack, how would Silk describe them, and their petsonalities or individual quirks/strengths/flaws? :3c

ESSENTIALS

7: Which Disciplines do they possess, and which do they favor using?

Oh, oh! I know this one! It's a fun game of "pin the clan lineage on the caitiff!" Or maybe it's just a matter of how the Blood has tried to protect them, and against what pressures and traumas? Who knows how these things work.

Silk has a little sprinkling of Auspex, Dominate, and Celerity.

Auspex is the one they use most, for the simple reason that they have a heard time turning it off. Their hearing and sense of touch are abominably sensitive, always at least on the edge of overwhelm. (It's a sensory issues metaphor, folks!) And sometimes their sensitivity to bad vibes and potential threats screams to life - brain throbbing, skin crawling - and warns them of things to get fight-or-flighty about.

Celerity is more of a background thing: eerie boneless grace, a catty casually perfect sense of balance, horrible mobility in their joints, a twitchy zootropic skittishness in their response to threats.

But Dominate is probably the one involved in some of their most dramatic "on-screen" moments so far. It's rough, unsubtle, like cramming a hand through someone's eyes to get at their brain and tear things free, twist things out of shape. They don't really even use it to command or get their way. Just to hurt and cow and take things away. Dominate, in my opinion, should always feel like a violation. With Silk, it's very much characterised that way.

5: Who Sired them, and into what Generation were they Sired? What’s their relationship with their Sire like, and what were the circumstances of their Embrace?

(Yes, I just realised I accidentally answered this one from Essentials instead of Life. 🙈 So you can have this for free, to make up for the fact that I've already answered Life 5 here.)

This is an easy one. Mostly because they have no clue, and nor do I! They're a true Pander. Scrubbed clean of lineage by the mass-embrace. Not a pit or a grave, but a hot and pitch-black shipping container, full of moving and unmoving bodies: slickness under naked feet and searching hands, the sound in the dark from time to time of someone praying.

Some of their packmates manifested obvious clans, later on: a Tzimisce, a probable-Gangrel, a Lasombra... But even then I don't think any of them knew who their sires were. Silk quietly envied them anyway.

LIFE

6: What were their goals and ambitions in life? How has this changed?

As far as they remember? They took things mostly day by day and night by night. Silk wasn't wealthy, or in regular employment, or secure in their work or family or housing situation. It's hard to make plans or have goals or ambitions when everything could fall apart at any moment.

They wanted to feel right and beautiful in the body they had. And they wanted to be a poet. Or at least to know poets, to be in touch with art, and part of a world where those kinds of thoughts and sensibilities mattered, and where being able to read and say the right things made you pretty and worthwhile.

Other than that, in practical terms, they survived, and survived, and survived, and tried to enjoy what they could when they could. (An orange on a day where the sun feels just right. An apartment all to themself.)

DEATH

10: Do they believe they are descended from Caine, or do they follow a different path?

Yes. Totally! Kind of. Their education in all this was patchy, and coloured by their pack-priest Reno's eccentricities. And since then they've been unministered to for long enough that was already tangled and contradictory has gotten overgrown and personal: a mixture of fearful kneejerk fundamentalist eschatology and a more metaphorical theogony.

They weren't a good Catholic in life, and as a Noddist they were half-lapsed from the start, not raised to have a huge amount of reverence for Caine as a figure. Was he the first recipient of the love and becoming that awaits all their kind? Perhaps. Or perhaps he's a metaphor, a shorthand for the blood, that love, that becoming: the beginning and the end point, the complete actualisation of What One Is. The latter feels like a belief with more real and actual utility, to Silk.

But their belief in the Antediluvians and Gehenna is far more literal.

11: How do they feel about Diablerie?

It's the eel's hips, baby.

Remember what I said about what Caine means to Silk? How else are you gonna get closer to that?

Deep down Silk feels deficient, botched, halfmade. Diablerie is not only a sacrament of the Blood. It's a test of what you are and a chance to transcend it.

PACK

This has already got long, so I'll keep it brief...

Hawk: An attack-dog's attack-dog. Lot of insecurity under all that machismo. Gone to war now... Does that make him the best or stupidest of them all?

Lace: Poor, sweet Lace. Couldn't even feed without the help of someone else's fangs, but the pack would've been lost or burnt without her.

Ermine: Everyone in-crowd needs an outsider. Ermine volunteered.

Luna: You'll never belong anywhere again the way you belong to a Fiend. Terrible. Wonderful. Gone.

Wax: Funny who the world gives all its luck to. To have and lose one inheritance is unfortunate; to gain another seems unfair. The kindest and most cautious of them all, in ways his Beast crushed in its jaws.