Dark Jack

The Prophecy

Oh, well I didn't know that. That solves the issue of not having seen the necessary/useful information from the Compendium; I'll need to know more about this wolflike race of yours (for them to come from the west or south would be feasible, although which direction is more likely would probably depend on their culture more than anything else), but generally speaking if you have the desire and knowledge to participate, you're welcome to submit a character for review.

As for removing Syn's character from the roster and updating the number of free spaces displayed in the OP (not that I see any particular urgency in the matter, unless we suddenly saw a huge increase in interest from new players) I was pretty much just waiting for some final and certain confirmation that he had indeed dropped out. His absence alone is about enough, though... I'll keep it in mind and do what has to be done when I feel the time is right.

The Prophecy

Ugh, see, I've been dreading that the day would come when someone new wanted to join the RP before Mahz found a solution for the thoroughly underwhelming post size-limit that prevented me from adding the Compendium. Yes, The Prophecy is still open to new players and you'd be welcome to submit a character, although as things are now there would be a severe problem in actually making a character compatible with the universe. This is high fantasy with fairly detailed lore and mechanics when it comes to the world, races and magic, and without the Compendium new players don't really have a chance to familiarize themselves with this before making the character.
Hmm... How about this: for the moment you can just try to explain the character you have in mind without writing a full CS, and in the meantime I will try to break up passages of the Compendium that are the most important to designing a character for the universe and put them here. I'll have to reformat the text and such, since the original format was lost during Guildfall, but I should be able to have the most important bits ready fairly quickly, considering that they're already written and just need reposting.

The Prophecy

Well, blacking out is a possibility during the process of turning, at least, but it's not exactly a given... It is much quicker than the transformation you describe, though. As I said the power of the curse is in the blood, but normal blood can only be converted to vampiric blood by a vampiric heart. When vampiric blood is introduced into a non-vampire's system it preserves its supernatural properties, however, and even when this is the only bit of vampire-blood in a person, it will still cause localized manifestation of vampiric powers where it is, most frequently evidenced by the rapid healing occurring if it entered the recepient through a wound. Initially one won't feel much of anything despite having already been infected, and won't feel anything until the vampiric curse - either directly through the vampiric blood, if the infection was through a wound, or indirectly by transferring the curse to a portion of the victim's own blood if they were fed the vampiric blood and made to start digesting it - reaches the heart, which usually happens quite fast. At that point one will feel great pain in one's chest, and for a period of time that usually takes several hours but can take several days the victim will experience constant agony and suffer a burning fever, all while their body spasms incontrollably due to the trace amounts of the curse that will even then begin spreading to one's blood. Turning is so bad that it is actually possible, albeit rare, for one to die from it before it ends. The torment ends once the heart is fully claimed by the curse, and after that it usually takes about a day for the vampiric powers to fully manifest, though they will increase every minute up till then as their blood becomes more and more permeated with vampirism. The psychological changes tend to gradually occur over several days after that, and color-alterations over a few weeks. The fangs grow quickly - and painfully - within the first two days, though, enabling the fledging vampire to quickly start feeding.
And yes, it is technically possible to be incompatible with the vampire's blood, just as humans can be incompatible with each other's blood and such... not to mention different species receiving blood from each other. Due to the preserved healing-factor of the vampiric curse, however, the vampiric blood will draw upon its own power to heal the bloodpoisoning rather than let it hurt the victim. Small enough amounts of vampire-blood can even completely exhaust itself healing the damage it itself causes before it reaches the victim's heart, preventing the turning from ever taking place.

The Prophecy

'Coward', the teleporting fellow said. What defined a coward? As far as he had understood the word, it referred to a person who lacked courage, and he supposed in that particular interpretation of the word it was an accurate label for him. Although, he also had the impression that others took the word 'coward' to mean someone who easily gave in to fear, who was quick to become afraid and flee, and in this sense the word was as far from a fitting descriptor as it could possibly be. Would a man who was afraid not simply have killed his opponent and then fled, rather than speak out and make not only his presence, but even his location known to those who remained alive? And would a fearful entity not have concealed itself, whereas he faced the spontaneously appearing masked man on the rooftop out in the open, making no attempt at hiding himself, with no cover and no obstacle between himself and the others. Had Blue just turned her head his way she would have seen him, and likely been able to survive his warpick. That would have been bothersome... because then Ixion would have tried to kill her, and he would have had to stop him.
The man who stood on the rooftop did so brashly, 5' 9" tall and of a seemingly normal build, his feet set a short distance from each other on the wooden shingles below, his left leg stretched to the lower part of the slanting surface while his right one was bent at the higher part of the roof, close to the ridge. He wore simple moccasins on his feet, just barely visible past his curiously roomy trousers, the legs of which seemed to become wider and wider the further from the waist they descended until they seemed fitting for extremities at least ten times the size of those actually inside them where they ended at the ankles. They were held up by a leather belt that was tied in a knot at his left hip rather than secured with a buckle, with an empty leather hoop attached to it at the right hip and a scabbard hanging from its left, containing an exotic sword that appeared to be nearly identical to Blue's demon sword. Most of his upper body was clad in a coat just long enough for its lower rim to reach beneath his pelvis, buttoned up from its halfway standing notched collar to just beneath where one would suspect the navel would be, below which it was open and revealed that his midsection was wrapped in what appeared to be strips of cloth. He stood casually, shoulders relaxed and elbows to the sides, with his hands in the pockets of his trousers. All of his clothes, and even the strips of cloth that hid his abdomen, were a uniform very dark red, so dark that they almost appeared black; even the buttons on his coat, curiously matte as they were, was the same color as everything else.
He was facing Ixion, but like the assassin himself this man, too, was masked. His coat had a hood, but this was lowered at the moment and revealed the man's ruffled snow-white hair, shining in bright contrast to the dark colors that otherwise shrouded him. His face was covered by a simple matte black ceramic mask, the only holes in which were for the eyes. Aside from this the uniform black was only broken by a rough upwards-curving line that went nearly from one side of the mask to the other, about at the level where the mouth of a person would be, as though it depicted an unrealistically wide smile... a smile that very much looked like it had been drawn with a finger in now-crusted blood.

"Tha's a mighty strange thin' for an assassin to say, innit?" the man chuckled, amused and apparently unworried. "Ye're either a big ol' hypocrite, mate, or real bad at yer job. 'Sides, be'er I kill 'er than you, eh?"
Chuckling to himself, the man pulled his right hand - clad in a thin glove that was the same color as the rest of his clothes and long enough to prevent even a gap of skin from showing past the hem of his sleeve - and reached for one of his coat-pockets, from which he pulled a small book bound in black leather.
"Would ya wait a minute, eh?" he asked, looking at Ixion through the eye-holes in his mask with very visible and strikingly violet eyes. "I'd like to finish givin' ol' Blue 'er gift... I don't real have an' business with ya." His gaze shifted, moving straight to the vampire at the other side of the alley. "Either of ya."

The Prophecy

The reason I never mentioned the dilution of the vampiric curse before is that it doesn't really affect modern vampires very much, as the curse is almost identical in all of them. After having been passed down and diluted some dozen times or so the curse reaches the point it has in such as Morgan, where the blood itself is sufficient to contain nearly the entire curse and transmit very close to its full power to the recipient. Vampires infected by those more recently related to the originals have closer to the initial strength of the curse, but lose a little of that power every time because their curse is rooted in their hearts, but their power flows in their blood, and the blood cannot contain the full extent of the curse. The amount of power lost at each transmittance is significantly smaller than the former... when the originals passed down their blood, the result only had about half the power they had; the ones coming after that only had about two thirds of their predecessors, the ones after that three fourths, then four fifths, then five sixths... you get the drift. The power transmission has stabilized over the ages, making the power lost very insignificant, so there will never really a wholly powerless vampire. Still, there are those that devote their lives to trying to find some surviving early ancestors to take their blood and "upgrade" themselves...

"First-stage" vampirism?

The Prophecy

Ah, Blue's magic didn't make her surroundings darker, actually... it was just that at the time of her sealing the blinding light back into her sword before shooting it out as a beam, the world seemed much darker than it had been before due to her eyesight (in particular, since I was writing as her, but it probably extended to everyone since it's a pretty natural reaction) having tried to adjust to the searingly bright surroundings from before. It's like, if you walk from a brightly lit room into a dark one, or stand in light and look into darkness, you can't see anything, but if you walk into the darkness and let your eyes adjust your surroundings will gradually seem brighter. It's the same thing that happens when you're blinded by headlights at night; your eyes try to adjust to the brightness of the headlights, and afterwards the night seems much darker than it had been a moment ago.
And yeah, it does need to be a vampire's blood that comes into contact with the wound for his rapid regeneration to activate. As a matter of fact all of a vampire's abilities come from its blood, and the curse that permeates it; the vampiric blood is what keeps a vampire alive. That is also why a severed vampire limb would need to be continuously bathed in vampire blood for it to survive... a vampire's heart is the only part of it that can survive on non-vampiric blood, because it is what infuses normal blood with the curse, transmuting it into vampire blood. Different vampires also have varying strength depending on the dillution of their curse, or how many times it has been passed between individuals from the original vampires to the current recipient. The originals were almost incomparable to modern vampires... but I digress. Vampiric blood is infused with persistent life and facilitates accelerated healing; normal blood is not and does not do the same.

The Prophecy

Great, I've been looking forward to this. Since Rhaevnn mentioned it I'll also say that I fully support and encourage updating your character sheets when relevant, most notably when changes occur pertaining to the characters' appearance or equipment. You can always expand them, too; just be sure to notify me if you do so.

Hmm... When Morgan climbed to the roof, by "opposite" did you then mean the same roof as Ixion and the assailant but at the opposite end, or a different roof opposite of theirs across the alley they were in?
Also, I imagine Morgan would at least get scorched a bit from uncovering part of his face. Even if it was downturned, even trace amounts of sunlight hurt vampires in this universe.

The Prophecy

Ah okay, good. It was supposed to be easily deductable (as are many things I don't outright tell you about), but it just seemed as though the conclusion that her name was Blue was reached quite suddenly after my last post as her, and I didn't think I made any particularly clear hints to her name in that... So you just guessed it earlier and only took to using her name now that she's dead. That's fine.

The Prophecy

That's a very interesting name you suddenly adopted for the woman so unanimously... did I slip up in my last post and mention it by accident, or did you just guess? Regardless, I find it borderline unnerving that you so unerringly concluded that her name was Blue. Which it was from the start.
The weapon that pierced her wasn't a spear, by the way; that's my fault for leaving out a small, yet rather significant detail in describing it, namely that the handle attached to the beak is at a ninety-degree angle to the beak itself, to the side it curves towards. It's not a spear, it's a pick.

Shienvien said "Now I wonder whether death-rebirth cycle in Reniam could actually be supported as far as the world goes."
(...?)

You really aren't going to let that one go, are you? Eh, I've been pondering that question since you asked it the first time... and technically it would be possible, though the circumstances a rebirth could occur under would be quite limited, since normally (as I once explained) the soul of an infant is formed from the energies of its parents, and its Seeds of Good and Evil sown when it makes its first decision. The Seeds are rooted deeply into the soul once sown, however - so deeply that removing them change the very nature of one's lifeform forever - so a reborn entity would keep its Seeds, just as it would keep its soul from its past life/lives, as this cannot be replaced either. The body would be new (which would start to force new memories onto the soul, making it repress the ones from past lives) and created from the parents, but the soul and Seeds would be preserved, making it possible to actually have a good or evil infant. It would furthermore require that not only the person entering into the cycle had complete faith that this is what would happen, but that the parents to facilitate the rebirth had this faith as well. It would be a difficult thing to pull off, but it's theoretically possible in the Prophecy universe, yes.

The Prophecy

I managed to injure my left hand pretty severely yesterday, too... Hit it on something sharp. Hurts pretty badly and makes it so that my index finger won't move as much as it's supposed to, although that's probably just the swelling. Still, sorry to hear that misfortune has struck you as well, Shien.
And congratiolations to you, Nessa, on both passing your driving exam ( or test? What's it called in English?) and on obtaining good news in regard to your wrists. Good to know that it is at least not everyone that has fallen victim to bad luck.

I reposted the revised ???-post in the IC, Merc and Rhaevnn; I reused several parts of the old one, but added a whole lot more.