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caddy-whump-us · 5 years

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Some questions/food for thought: Why can Lucian never be a Black Swan? Has he done something to discount him from that entirely? Does he ever beg to be treated like one (and get suitably punished for his insolence)?

Oh anon~ This is about to be a Deep Dive into the Lore and Backstory. Spoilers ahead for some of the unwritten bits of the vampire series. And this is seriously long, okay? And, more importantly:

CAUTION/TW for referenced non-con, sex work, and forced/non-con sex work, and physical violence. Nothing is described outright; all mentions are only oblique references. Still, please proceed with caution!

Okay. Lucien. This snide little asshole. Let’s talk about him!!!

Lucien could be a black swan–in theory. But he’s been passed over because he’s actually not entirely human. O wat? O yes.

So the “red light district” of this city (which needs a name; I generally picture something like Yharnam from Bloodborne but with fewer monsters and more of a functional city) is called Smoketown. And it’s off to the southeast corner of the city, on the other side of the river. And this is the part of town where the drugs, gambling, dance halls, and sex workers are found. To use the local slang, there’s grindhouses and ponyboy stables, and dollboys around Smoketown.

There’s a bit of a hierarchy, I guess, in all this, with the “dolls” and “dollboys” being the top tier (charging the most), down to the ponyboy/ponygirl stables (middle tier), down to the grindhouse boys/girls (lower tier), on down to the “crib hoors” and “street hoors” (generally regarded as awful and only suitable for the most broke and desperate). This is a real simplification, but I guess that explains the basics?

Lucien was, some time ago, a dollboy (so was Maggie Magpie, actually). They’re regarded as the prettiest and most expensive–if you want to be fancy you could almost call them courtesans. And, ideally, they’ll get themselves a particular patron and be a sort of love affair for pay.

An aside: so this imagined world has different views on sexuality (and to some extent gender? but not quite so much). Basically, when one is young, go ahead and fool around. You’re young, what you do now is less important than what you do later. But because this culture still very much holds to primogeniture, you had better be married to someone with whom you can have a biological child. That’s the ideal. But while you’re young, a teenager, a 20-something, go ahead and fool around–ideally not in Smoketown, but if you’re a boy and you find yourself drawn to a boy classmate, well, that’s just how it is when you’re young. And if you’re a girl, and you find yourself drawn to a girl classmate, well, go on ahead, because young love is passionate but rarely lasts. You can like whoever during this period of particular romantic and sexual freedom.

Once one gets a little older, it’s considered mature and responsible to “grow out” of this phase of experimentation and rampaging passion. You settle down, you marry someone with whom you can have biological children, and your firstborn will inherit your estate, &c &c. But, of course, some people just…won’t. Because this is how they are. In some cases, like Nikolai and Jonathan, they go on with their relationship and don’t grow out of it but rather into each other (this is why N&J staged a secret wedding between themselves, with rings and all; they can’t marry in the eyes of the law, but they consider themselves married). And, yes, this is not considered mature or wholly acceptable, so they keep these (quite committed) relationships as secret as possible.

In other cases, especially among the titled, the gentry, the upper-class, who all marry each other as one does, if you must indulge in this misplaced youthful exuberance, there’s Smoketown. And if must go to Smoketown, at least pay for the services of one of the sex workers of equally high status. (Does that always happen? No. But you get the idea.)

So you have this set of “houses” of highly-paid, highly-regarded “dollboys.” And these houses are both in competition with one another but not a strenuous competition. Any competition mostly plays out in trying to find or recruit new workers (Maggie, as an example, was born to a sex worker and, presumably, a client and was kept as a kind of a household servant in that same “house” until the proprietor of the Aviary encountered him and essentially bought him and kept on using him as a household servant until he was of age to actual start work; he’s in debt at this point).

And, of course, the different houses have different aesthetics. The Aviary tends to have boyish workers that play to that nostalgic “school romance” or “university romance” aesthetic, Lucien’s house (no name yet) tends to play more with gender especially re: clothing and makeup. Lucien likes feathers and leathers and silk and lace and painting his eyes. He knows he can kind of saunter along and blur that line. And it works well for him.

So that’s Smoketown. Now. Off north of the river and outside the city (northwest of it, I think?) is a district called “The Five Churches.” And there are, indeed, five churches, that all share a large plaza or square onto which their doors open (p.s.: weddings are conducted on the porch of the church; just a fun fact there). The sixth side of the plaza is open to the city. Beyond and behind the churches is a massive, massive cemetery–it is absolutely the cemetery for the entire city (please picture Highgate Cemetery or the Glasgow Necropolis).

And somewhere out in or beyond or (actually) under the cemetery is a secret, hidden, exclusive…club, I guess. It’s not a cult, but it’s extremely secretive. A secret society, is I guess the best way to put it. And it is called The Red Circle.

The truth is, the Red Circle is really just a giant whump party. The rich and powerful (men, almost exclusively) have at their disposal a selection of whumpees to use as they see fit, to release the tensions of the lives or to satisfy urges that otherwise cannot be soothed or just because.

Now it’s time to introduce a new character. His name is Cyprian and he is a vampire. And he is also under the control of the Red Circle (for reasons I haven’t figured out yet). They’ve got something to use against him if he betrays them, IDK.

Etienne has actually found evidence of Cyprian but doesn’t know it. There are tally marks in a book hidden in Viktor’s library that add up to about 3 years and change and at the end are the initials C. G. That’s Cyprian from back when he was Viktor’s black swan. And, yes, Viktor turned him into a vampire. And, no, Cyprian wasn’t happy. He should have been Viktor’s heir, but that didn’t work out. And now he’s under the command of the Red Circle. But why?

Well if you have a bunch of whumpees and you love whumping them, how do you keep whumping them without constantly killing them and then needing new ones? The answer came from some of Cyprian’s research (he started digging into the whole “black swan” custom among other things): it is possible to create a kind of ghoul, a kind of half-vampire by carrying out the procedure used to turn a human into a vampire but carrying that procedure out only partially.

Rather than draining the human of all (or almost all) of their blood and then feeding them blood from the vampire that drank their blood, a vampire can inject a human with a small amount of their blood (not taken from the human victim in question here) and you’ll end up with what’s been termed a ghoul.

Ghouls are worthless to vampires: their blood is disgusting, they smell like rust and iron to vampires. And they don’t get many of the benefits that full vampires have–they can’t move so fast, they don’t have the sharp teeth, &c. they do have better vision at night but their eyes are inclined to reflect light like a cat’s eyes will.

Instead, ghouls are more like humans but still have the vampiric sensitivity to sunlight (neither ghouls nor vampires burn in the sun, btw) and are bound by what’s called the Obligation of Flesh. Where vampires can sustain themselves with blood only, ghouls have to eat raw meat with some regularity. This both keeps them essentially sane and (more importantly to the Red Circle) helps them to heal inordinately quickly. Deny them meat and they heal like typical humans. Feed them some raw liver or brains or raw chicken and raw eggs and they’ll start mending right before your eyes (no, it isn’t comfortable, thanks). Yes, they can die and much more easily than true vampires and some of the Red Circle’s ghouls have, in fact, died.

Now you’re probably way ahead of me by now: Lucien is, in fact, a ghoul.

The Red Circle’s method goes like this: one or more of them identify someone they want to add to their collection. This decision is discussed and debated until consensus is reached–and they’re very careful about how often and who they add to their collection. At that point, lower-ranking members are sent to the target’s working house and pay for their services–whereupon they whump them up but badly.

This happens sometimes, even in the best houses, even in the Aviary. The target is allowed to heal but this means less money for the house. As soon as the target is back at work, someone else comes in and repeats the process: payment, whumping. The proprietor is not likely to put a bruised boy out on the floor in a good house, so back he goes to heal and, again, money is lost. And this repeats as long as is needed until word gets out that the proprietor is getting a little fed up with this pattern but it’s not one obvious person or one obvious group doing it. At that point, a messenger from the Red Circle will arrive with an offer to buy the target outright at an extravagant cost, enough to make losing this one boy worth it, especially if it means an end to having an unworkable boy so often. It may take time, but the proprietor is eventually coerced into accepting the offer and the target is spirited away by members of the Red Circle (or aspiring members maybe? pledges, if you will?) and to their secret meetingplace.

Everything about this sucks, including the part where Cyprian makes them into a ghoul, because that alone hurts like hell. And then they’re stuck there, getting whumped regularly, then patched up and/or fed raw meat. One of the higher-ranking members serves as a kind of proprietor there; Cyprian is as much a servant (or slave?) as any of the ghouls.

So that’s how Lucien ended up being completely undesirable to vampires. But how did he get out of the Red Circle? Mostly because he was a very bad element to add to the collection and there was an uprising against the members of the Red Circle and there may or may not have been some revenge whumping and even cannibalism (gotta meet that Obligation of Flesh somehow).

At that point, after the Red Circle was broken, everyone in the collection kind of went their own ways. Even Cyprian was free. Lucien, though, kind of fascinated by Cyprian and the things he talked about, sought out Viktor and offered himself as a postulate. And, as we all know, Viktor accepted him. And Lucien set out to be the best and most devoted because that’s how you get rewarded in the world he comes from.

But the first time he offered his blood to Viktor, Viktor laughed and called him a monster and refused his blood. And here Lucien, having learned of the whole black swan tradition mostly from being in Viktor’s house, had been hoping for such a place of honor and now it seems like it’s been absolutely denied to him forever–because he’s a monster with blood Viktor can’t consume. And, yes, Lucien is unbelievably angry and bitter about the whole situation, especially when Etienne enters the picture (unexpectedly).

I hadn’t thought about him begging for the chance to be treated as a black swan and then being punished for daring to ask for such a thing but, damn, now I want to think about that. He probably would–albeit in private. There’s a lot of jockeying for position among the postulates and Lucien has worked his way up to the top, almost a class by himself, and he will not let that go easily. So to be seen begging for something could weaken his position and that won’t do. And yet…and yet…he does want it…

He might get what he wants someday. But it’s going to take some interesting circumstances.

So that’s a bit of a deep dive into the lore, worldbuilding, and backstory that’s running along and behind the vampire stories. If you made it this far, thanks for reading all this! Bits of this will come out as I get more of the stories sorted out and written. But there you have it~

#whump #whump adjacent #worldbuilding #vampires #Lucien #viktor #backstory #lore #captivity

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