BIG fangirl energy over here for @silkenred's Silk, the sweetest, most feral shovelhead I ever did meet. Such a treat to have them for my painting practice.
Silk is claustrophobic. Scared of enclosure, smothering, being buried, but sort of in that contradictory way that can come with trauma. Where it's both a fear, a stressor, and kind of intoxicating or comforting when it's on their terms.
Shovelheads, you know?
It's connected to and metaphorical of their fear of the Sabbat. Being found again, reassimilated, given meaning, belonging, denied freedom, not having to make choices anymore... Part of something that takes care of them like a tool.
They're also terrified of abandonment, irrelevance. Self-explanatory. But an unusual way this manifests is that it goes both ways: they're terrified of their vinculum fading, of time causing them to passively abandon those they love.
Also Gehenna. And Reno.
Do they have any pet peeves?
Itchy scritchy noises. Fabrics that feel too dry and stiff.
Their wrists being touched. Or, worse, held or grabbed. Being kissed on the mouth. It feels less like being given something, more like having something demanded of them.
Being called 'dude'.
Small yappy dogs.
The sweat, spit, and smells of living human bodies.
How hard it is to ignore spoken English in the background. Because understanding is still a conscious effort, it's harder to not make that effort, switch it off.
What are three items you can find in their bedroom?
This is a difficult one. Their current haven has two rooms: one that has a mattress in it, and a bathroom. The mattress one isn't where they sleep. It's also really cluttered, but not necessarily with anything very special or representative... I'm gonna go with quantity and count these three paragraphs as three things:
In the main room the mirror is empty, big and cheap, sixty inches of aluminum smeared behind two millimetres of glass, filling almost the whole corner. Twenty-three dollars at a catsmelling junkstore, and carried home like a cross to Calvary, sometimes on its side, concrete tattering the cardboard and parcel tape, sometimes on their back, snarling up three flights of stairs, don’t look, don’t watch how they swear but don’t sweat. The view out the window duplicates itself, darker, in the mirror: sodium gold from the street, roadflare red from the cranes.
The South Korean minifridge came with the apartment. Its white plastic top is a mess. Scissors, eyelash glue, seam-rippers. Revlon Super Lustrous Lipstick in Cappuccino and Goldpearl Plum. (A buy-one-get-one-half-price offer. Fuck it. What else do you do with 5,500 dollars cash?) Poultry shears. A Maybelline tinted moisturiser in Cool Gold with a French name that seems like it should mean ‘tainted oil’. Eyeshadow, a container of Vaseline the size of a clenched fist, a linoleum knife that looks like something to kill sheep with. Dollarstore freckle pen. Tube of Born To Glow Liquid Illuminator, half-killed already, in a shade called (you have to laugh) Sunbeam. Plastic packaging, broken into. An illegal balisong with a skeletal handle of rose-gold steel. MAC Strobe Cream: barely, sparingly used. Powder and cotton pads, nailpolish. Scent of green tea, ginseng and solvents.
The residue of glitter that covers everything is enough to lose Silk their deposit: body-safe, allegedly, but impossible to clean.
What do they notice first in a person?
How that person notices them: fascination, anger, disgust, suspicion, apprehension, desire, confusion? Are they buying the impression Silk is putting down? Are they wearing shoes they could run in? (What are the exits from this room? This situation?) Is their heart beating? How? What kind of danger do they pose, and what kind of danger could Silk pose to them? Are they armed? Are they alone, literally or in a crowd? Do they have backup? Is Silk outnumbered?
On a scale of 1 to 10, how high is their pain tolerance?
Physically: 8? Things don't hurt like they used to. A lot of sensations that still register as pain hit different, as novelty, or just experience. They enjoy the feeling of mending injuries enough that they'll writhe and giggle and whine and grimace through it. Up to their threshold, Silk in pain is more unpleasant for others around them than for Silk themself.
Mentally and Emotionally? Wildly variable.
A lot of things that should be very upsetting don't faze them: they're jaded enough, or horny enough about it, or practiced enough at dissociating and Just Doing Things, Not Thinking.
A lot of small things, or softer things, are deeply and immediately distressing. The sense of something being wrong or out of place, or being watched, or subject to a danger they can't place or shake. Noises. Realising they've forgotten something. The exploitation or abuse of people they relate to or see shades of themself in. The shame, externally or self-imposed, of someone they care about.
Those things bait their beast pretty acutely, and they don't have the practice or philosophical incentive to resist that.
Do they go into fight or flight mode when under pressure? (Or freeze or fawn?)
Speaking of their beast... Yeah. Their Compulsions are literally "terrify, brutalise, destroy, faster-pussycat-kill-kill-kill" or "if you can't run, go doe-eyed and fawning and pliable, be whatever they want you to be, stoop however low you need to, just survive". When they crack under pressure, it's basically a cointoss which one wins out.
What animal represents them best?
Oh fuck. Hyena?? Social, opportunistic, misunderstood, cackling, lotta teef, can open mouth unspeakably and unexpectedly wide? Cute if you're into that sort of thing, gross if you're not. Technically A Type Of Cat? Can be domesticated if you're nasty.
Buuut I also go for a lot of moth symbolism, with them. (Moths and butterflies are symbols of death in some places, carrionfeeders and all. They're actually associated with vampires in some other places' folklore.) Pupa, chrysalis, imago, becoming. But also how a lot of types of moths are beautiful and not mean to last, just achieve a form that lets them serve a purpose, then die. A lot don't even have mouths, they're not intended to last long enough to starve. And, of course, gravitating towards things that are bad for them and will consume them.
How would a stranger likely describe them?
I kinda just wanna dump some NPCs' impressions of them here (edited down to carry less plot and context, more impressions)...
1: Lamb, a skinhead thinblood scumbag. (Fair warning for racism and homophobia. This guy is a piece of shit.)
"You lost, buddy?" It looks lost. The crowd's changed at TRENCH, but not this much. "You get the haircut just to get in here?"
"No." With a smile and a weird little wag of its head. (He thinks of, like, Discovery Channel mantises.) Dark eyes, a shape he can't categorise. "Can I talk with Littler?"
"What's a fucking illegal want with Littler?" Only thing he can think to say. Only thing he can think to do. "Your teeth need breaking? You got a fucking smirk stuck to your face you need wiped off, cunt?"
He hunches down. Bad move. Just a moment ago, he had a head and a half on this stranger. Not anymore: they're eye to eye. Weird eyes, colour of gunmetal in the white lights by the door. And it's really less of a smirk and more of a pout? It feels bad, actually. Squirmy and worming. Heart kind of acid and tight.
"I have a gun. Here." He-or-she is still doing that thing with his-or-her mouth. (He, Lamb decides. His. Because chicks don't come round Trench anymore, and actually it'd be pretty fucking gay to be asking himself if this thing is an exception.) Faggy lashes, greasy black, thick. He pats the inside breast pocket of the coveralls he's wearing. "A knife too, somewhere else, but you're not gonna frisk me. That's a problem? I go. You try touch me again? I go. Understand?"
[Then, inside...]
The stranger doesn't, like, command the room exactly. Too small, too other, too far-from-home and outnumbered for that. And that accent. This is no place to talk like someone's fucking maid. But he shifts the vibe, slipping over to the table, looking down at August in a way Lamb feels weird about. Doesn't like how he can hear the teeth-clacking-together sound of his fingernails against the tabletop when he rests a hand on it.
"It's true," the stranger says. "What happened to him. Who happened to him. People like you, people like me: the Camarilla don't like us. We're vermin for them. Ticks. They don't want us to be anything. Only gone. And when they try make us disappear, they got a word for it: Scourge…"
His back arches in self-satisfaction, stretching into the small tight silence. Arms above his sharp little head and sleeves falling off his sharp little wrists, so comfortable it's gross. There's an itty-bitty waist you can see through the sag of the coverall he's wearing: dark grey or dusty black, pitcrew or industrial. (Lamb is pretty sure there's a fucking fishnet bodystocking under it.) He hikes a thigh, kind of, onto the table, like sitting halfway crosslegged. Fucking freak.
Lamb finds the gun in his pocket. Touches it like a talisman.
"They came for Littler," the stranger says. "They gonna come for all of us, if they can. But they gonna start with you. For some reason they think no one's gonna miss you. I can't think why."
This bitch is trouble, Lamb thinks, over and over. He fixes him in his mind, his mental book of grudges: the accent, the small body, the what-are-those-anyway-M1966s?, because mom always said if someone fucks with you and you remember anything about them remember the shoes. He remembers the leaden eyes, the feeling of being in a cage with something. The lips peeled back, grinning dreamy, and teeth in there: not neat little movie fangs or sharp nubby canines like Lamb can feel against his tongue, but something catty, sharklike. Different and more.
2: Calvin, a Toreador information broker/surveillance and counter-surveillance techie.
"Bruh…"
10 digit code. The screen unlocks. Fisheye distortion, exposure that hurts: a hunched in curve of buzzcut hair and someone standing so close to the door that the camera can't autofocus. No face.
The motion lights in the corridor shut off.
She jumps like it makes a sound. "Nuh-uh," shaking her head, pretty sure like 60% of the Sangre cut their hair like that: highmaintenance cholo shit. She didn't see any tattoos, right? She doesn't think she saw any tattoos.
Two more buzzes now. Doorbell-doorbell.
Phone in her hand, she wants to scream. The feed from the doorcam adjusts to the dark, blooming into trailcam white and deep dead-channel pewter. Not that she can see any more: soft part of their skull, deep cant of their back and shoulders, like they must have their whole-ass forehead against the door. Well.
"Back up." She speaks into the security app on her phone to get through the noise-dampening on the door. "Opposite wall." The lights snap back on in the corridor. The screen goes magnesium white. Adjusts. "Silk?"
Cree's friend. Shy careful English and all those bones in their face. Weird little thing, vibes like a robot in a movie that you're meant to wanna fuck but also feel sad about. Gave her that phone. Took on the Tongue. Hispanic. Whole-ass gun right now in the waistfront of their hotpants.
"Yo, the gun?" Her tongue forces its way round her gums, round her teeth. "You're gonna put that down. Like on the floor. Okay. And then you're gonna take a walk till I can open the door, get it on my side, close the door. Then we'll talk. Right?"
They do it like they're sleepwalking. She doesn't like that. She slides the chain, thumbs the e-lock, pops the latch. Crouches. Reaches through the crack in the door, and hooks in this big anodised black pistol, tricked out like someone had plowed dozens of game hours into making this thing look goofy as fuck. Nubby rails, red dot reticule the size of a thumbnail. It isn't theirs. She knows that, just touching it. Pockets it. Closes the door.
Then Silk again. Shoulders high and small, arms hugged all the way round their ribs like their fingers could touch at the back. Nobody moves or holds themself like that. (Just that one white kinda neo-soul guy out of Detroit who's made a career out of that and wearing leather pants.)
"So," she says into the phone. "What is it you want?"
"You said come by." They pat their pockets like looking for something they don't find. Pat their chest. Bare their teeth. Hit their forehead with the knuckle of their thumb. "The text…"
Sad sex robot. The kind, in a movie, you let in from the rain. "Ughhh. But not at like 5:17 AM, bro! Fuck. Gimme a sec." Chain. Both locks. Phone away. She opens the door, making sure the shortbarrel Mossberg is the first thing they see. "Come in."
They take off their boots without being asked while she watches them down the gun. Halter top. Kind of legs that probably have their own niche fetish subreddit. Bruises, the little pinching kind you see on tweakers and street hustlers. Two tiny shining scabs on their smooth calf, just above the lip of their boot, that six years ago she wouldn't have looked twice at. If she looks carefully, kinda unfocuses her eyes, there's a kind of microtension in the air around them, the shadows, like vibrating just a really little bit: swirling orange, purple sparks, blue-green marbling, felt not seen. They lace their fingers at the back of their neck. Put their weight against the entryway wall.
Hadn't they been different before? Coy bigcat sensuality like they couldn't turn it off. Like some roses she's known. A way of moving. Gleaming, scheming eyes and danger. Restless appetite, hungry to move and do. What's happened to them?
Do they have any hobbies?
They sew! Not quite to the extent they can even work from a pattern, really, but they can modify and do alterations on their own clothes. Some that just feels like doodling: sashiko crosses and hatchings, repairs and patches that don't quite need doing.
They like books. Poetry. Lush confrontationally intellectual contemporaries like Coral Bracho, Pura López Colomé, Anne Carson, Natalie Diaz, Louise Glück. Fleshmongers like Pablo Neruda, José Lezama Lima, but not in fashionable company. Federico García Lorca, who stands alone. Baroque dinosaurs like Luis de Góngora, Walt Whitman. (They have a secret suspicion they might've wanted to be - or at least be thought of as - a poet, once upon a teenage time.)
The chew gum like it's a hobby. Cinnamon, when they can get it.
I was tagged by @gorbalsvampire, @lealdog, and @aztarion. Thank you all so much!
Not gonna tag anyone here because I feel like this took me so long and I know a lot of people have already done it.
But anyone who's read (or mostly read) this far, thanks so much for sticking around! And anyone who's not done this yet and would like to? Consider yourself tagged, do it, and tag me when you do!
In which Silk has some strong and complicated feelings about diablery. (Who doesn't, right?)
This is Silk finding out that this chick they've been running with (and have been starting to develop kind of a fixation on for totally unsuspect reasons) ate their ex-girlfriend's soul a few years ago. What do you do when you find out someone you loved and feared and felt held but trapped by has crossed oceans of time and passed the very gates of death itself to find you again through the body of their own murderer? What do you do to that murderer when they contain everything that's left of that person? What about if you were always taught that the very act of murder-and-consumption was the highest sacrament and greatest personal attainment there is?
You freak it.
Really, absolutely no one in this scene is having a normal one, or getting out of it unscathed. (Except maybe the nice lady in the next room, whose biggest problem right now is that she's still awake and working in the dead hours just before dawn.)
It's what @lydia-too-late and I have been building to basically since this story first started slouching towards Bethlehem to be born, and so far it's so much messier and more wonderful than either of us could have hoped for! 😍
(Sorry for the horrid banner and the Yeezy jacket jumpscare under the cut. Silk demands certain sacrifices.)
WHAT WOULD YOUR OC WEAR...
Casually?
They raid nightclub bag checks, military surplus stores, on-site storage at industrial locations. Shoplift two-packs of hosiery, things to alter or destroy.
More masc when they're trying to blend in, but often with Something Wrong. A sports bra worn as a top over the nothing of their chest. Cheap lace bodysuits under a boilersuit with its arms tied into a belt.
DIY. Housepaint and handstitching. Bleach pen doodles. Extra patch pockets. Rivets and rings. Ziptie cinches and ragged crops.
WHAT WOULD YOUR OC WEAR...
Formally?
More femme creeps in when they're being fancy. Bodycon bullshit. Tights turned into tops. Dresses they could hop a fence in. Scratched legs and bruised knees and knuckles. Jewelry that looks like detritus and flotsam. Club kid partymonster lashes. Nails lacquered in bugshell green or cinnamon.
I was tagged by @aztarion and @porcelainseashore. (Thank you!)
And I know I cheated but I had my reasons.
I don't think Silk really has a casual v.s. lazy distinction: they wear what they can afford or acquire, serve as much cunt as possible until it breaks, and you get the level of effort and concept you get.
And if I did the "What would they wear to bed?" section, it'd just be jungle boots and pictures of teeth.
I'm not gonna tag anyone cos I feel like I'm late to this party and most people have already done it. The one exception to this is dear @gorbalsvampire, because I feel like you not getting the chance to do this for Jenni (if you want, only if you want) is criminal.
Tula is looking up at the sky, squinting at the stars through tissue-paper clouds, the atmosphere gone faint hellfire above the distant city lights, a rolling-Earth harbinger of terrible orange-red. One may think the wildfires won. One may think of calamity. One may think: Three hours until certain death.
The suburbs dissolve beneath their feet as they venture farther from San Narciso. Out here, the scrubby hills and city repose together on the landscape. Slums somewhere, too, sloughing off the edges of everything.
"We could just run." Silk scuffs their boots. They inhale just to snort. "Hay unos veinte kilómetros, algo así. Maybe we even make it back." A leathersounding shrug. "That's a joke."
In the moonlight, Silk's lashes cast heavy shadows over their eyes. She follows the darkness to the hollow beneath their cheekbones, between their parted lips, behind their tongue. She touches the bite marks on her wrists. Red, raw and open, glistening, but they don't bleed. They don't hurt.
The desert is always half dream. In the distance, a coyote screams into the night's silence and rouses a chorus, offering their unearthly din to the moon's slow descent. She's seen Luna there before: the tall, whip-thin silhouette on a distant hill, surrounded by her pack. But not tonight. We could just run. One of Tula's fingertips presses into her wound, splitting it obscenely open. It does not bleed, but it hurts.
(She shrugs, not-quite-smiling. "I'm sure there's a car trunk somewhere along the way…")
Her throat feels tight. She lifts her wrist to her lips, tonguing the puncture like a child, an animal. The warm, saltmetal taste sits on the tip of her tongue.
Silk is looking at her, all sleepy eyes and strange, hard beauty. Tula is looking at them too, eyes wide and rich-girl hungry above her wrist. Their jacket has fallen open, framing a starved waist and soft hips. The bones of their sternum between the halter's illusion of breasts. The excruciating shadow of hair trailing several inches below their navel. The profanity of their shorts, the way they pull tight around their hips and thighs. She wants to push them down to the ground. Make them say her name. Make them moan her name. Make them say it, say it…
Tula jerks herself back; her wrist falls away guiltily. "Just hungry," she dismisses the moment, shrugging like Silk shrugged, her shame hidden with a scowl. They could never outrun it, neither one of them.
