Settling in! I was faced with an interesting problem here: how did monsters integrate themselves into human society? Dealing with that would have taken a lot of time and would’ve gone off on a huge tangent, practically its own story, so instead I dealt with it the same way the game did: montage-ing over it, haha.
This transition leads us into a sort of “free” period where there’ll be some one/two-shots while I wrap up some loose ends before we hit the final scene in the story. How many one-shots there’ll be will depend on how many ideas come to me before we all finally say goodbye...
Figured Gaster would have no familiarity with cars since there weren’t any in the underground, so riding in one would be rather nervewracking, haha.
Guess who found more vampire lore that would've been helpful earlier! (This is what happens when you skim the mechanics pages too fast...)
Turns out there are concrete rules about how much blood vampires need.
Vampires require 12 hit points worth of blood every 24 hours (the amount of blood you'll get from draining 2-3 people or 12 rats dry, mechanically. The designers maybe didn't think this through...)
The source is immaterial, and may come from people, corpses or animals. They're all just as good, though fluff wise they won't feel good subsisting on animal and dead blood (there are no mechanical penalties). The blood doesn't have to be fresh or taken directly from the vein, you can keep it stored in a fridge or whatever equivalent.
Vampires lose the power boosts they gain with age if they don't get enough blood, but cannot regress below the level of a newborn vampire. Age categories aren't present in later editions, so basically: vampires and spawn can't get any weaker than the base stat block given for them in the monster manual.
They do lose a hit dice per day without sufficient blood (blood is required to maintain the physical body, their bodies will slowly revert into corpses without it.)
They will, however, eventually lose control of themselves if they wear down to a single HD and revert to a state of mindless animal hunger and go on a bloodthirsty rampage draining the blood out of any source they can get their hands on. (Failure to get any blood at this stage causes the hibernation state as they become trapped in their own withered corpse unable to move until somebody feeds them blood.)
HD recover rapidly with sufficient nutrition; regaining 1 per every day of full feeding.
sorry for coming out of my rewatch obsessed with zhao ke (the gardener) but actually i'm not sorry because he rules. also listen. when xiao heng was on grampa-mandated house arrest for five years, he apparently spent all his time "listening to music and gardening". that started eight years ago. zhao ke has been a gardener for the jiang family for seven years. so i'm imagining him being i guess originally a xiao family servant maybe, and him keeping xiao heng company during his confinement and the two of them getting really into gardening together, and then him becoming xiao heng's first spy. because at least HE is allowed to leave the property. right? and xiao heng MUST have started his spy network during his confinement, or are we supposed to believe he's built it up from nothing in the past three years?? i think that would be a bit much, suspension-of-disbelief-wise. so yeah budding (no pun intended) schemer child!xh who does nothing all day except listen to music and garden had to start somewhere, and because of the gardening connection and the fact that zhao ke has been planted (no pun intended) with the jiangs for seven of the eight years since xiao heng's father's death, i think zhao ke as the inaugural field (no pun intended) agent is solidly rooted (okay i did intend this one) in the evidence.