#vampire code au

[hiijinkies]

post-ep8 caine that managed to survive the deletion process but not entirely, so now he's prowling the digital world and vampire-sucking the code from remaining npcs while attempting to avoid the humans. he's in pain haw haw

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no excuse i just like dressing him down

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mom said it's my turn with the homegrown caine au

code-sucking caine haunted by the ghost of his past self or something, idk.

bonus unfinished doodles v

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he lost his hat in the deletion

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I NEED MORE VAMP CAINE THANKS OK BYE :)

im honestly a little alarmed by how much attention that post got haha, but thank you for the interest! im a busy bee so arting is slow, but more will come eventually :)

in the meantime, please have this caine who got too deep in the sauce

[hiijinkies]

Out of pure curiosity for your vampire au,

How would Caine and the humans react to each other?

Would Caine hunt them as well, or would he just try to get away from them?

i have an embarrassing amount of thoughts to share for something that started out as a throwaway indulgence, my bad for the text wall. i hope it's interesting

to preface, my concept for "vampire" caine is that he's desperately trying to fill in the emptiness he feels following the attempted deletion; he's on the verge of falling apart because half of his system is now gone and, handwaving any technical aspects about this, seeks any and all active data to consume and 'patch' into himself.

this of course includes the humans-- detecting their presence is the equivalent of spilling fresh blood in front of a starved vampire. but i do like to imagine that he was so deeply scarred from messing with scratch's mind, that he also developed a deeply ingrained aversion to human data.

so in short, he's both hunting them and is also trying to stay away? instinct vs nurture/fear. all the stuff he consumes in the circus is like an extension of himself, so he's really just cannibalizing himself which makes the humans all the more delectable. but humans are also what he revolved his entire perceived purpose around? the horrors of being at war with your own fractured mind

as for the humans' reaction to caine: terrified, definitely. in their perspective, they just failed their plan in subduing caine and are now being hunted by their maddened god. they have no means of reasoning with him now, and with kinger having lost the computer, they're a bit stretched thin on ideas. but they'll find a way to be resourceful-- and they eventually build up the resolve to figure out how to capture caine.

[hiijinkies]

holy moly ok i LOVE the vampire code AU you've come up with.

so two questions for you:

1. you've mentioned explicitly that Caine would attake NPCs and other parts of the circus. does he attack the humans too?

2. how do the humans eventually go about helping him regain his lucidity?

i'm also assuming that the events leave some sort of fracture on Caine's psyche, the poor guy

thank you! i hope to make more for it once i get the time, it's become more of an indulgence than i anticipated.

he'd hunt them down, yes. in his rampage state, the humans are the most alluring things to entice his hunger, and it becomes a serious struggle to fight that instinctual urge to consume. emphasis on the struggle though, because he does strain himself to prevent harming the humans. the classic trope of a transformed person fighting back their bestial urges so that they dont hurt the ones they love, my beloved

they start out focusing on just trying to restrain caine, but through each failed attempt and subsequent observations (especially upon realization that caine isn't entirely mentally gone), they put together that 'feeding' caine may help calm him down. trial and error leads to discovering he's most satisfied with newly conjured data from the humans, and they eventually achieve a routine to keep him grounded while repairing the circus.

he is very much fractured, the whole reason he's sucking the code out of the circus is because the deletion process took something from him and he's freaked out by what he's missing. identity crises and glimpses of vulnerability galore, my bread and butter