a_sporking_rat: rat (blue mouse)
[personal profile] a_sporking_rat
This is not a story about bad roleplay, it's just, well, a story, and, like all the others, took place the AB RP board where I developed many of my characters and met some of my best buddies. Unlike the other stories, I didn't write it down immediately back when it happened, so this is pieced together from memory. To those reading it who were there, my apologies if I got anything wrong, just tell me and I will fix it!


We had a problem with getting the players who played the leaders of therian groups to stick around. They'd come in, app for a leader, but sooner or later , usually sooner, they'd disappear. The only constant, at least for a long time, was myself and my Regina, a werelion named Cleo (if you remember my That Guy posts, she's the character referred to as Queen), and the vampire MotC, until Cygnusrex apped Sig, his Swan King, and he stuck around too, as did Phoenix's tiger queen Sandya and a few others. Everything else we went through like socks. No IC explanation was ever given as to why they just kept vanishing, so understandably I had to write Cleo as getting increasingly paranoid and creeped out and worried every time one of her fellow leaders disappeared, wondering what was happening to them, if she would be next, etc.

On an entirely different issue (which will become connected!), many players for some reason did not seem to grasp that being able to 'call' therians was not something most therians would likely welcome or enjoy. I mean, someone else is taking hold of what is basically like a second soul and using it to control you, yank you around, make you feel things you wouldn't feel on your own, etc. I realize that it's not treated like this when Anita does it, but when other vampires have done it, especially bad guys and/or in the early books, it was pretty clear that it was not a pleasant experience and that therianthropes had every reason to be *hostile* towards vampires who could call their species. Yet almost everyone at the board took the reverse stance, assuming that therians and vamps who could call them would automatically get along great because WELL THEY'RE CONNECTED RIGHT and playing it that way. This included doing stuff like having the vampires metaphysically mess around with therians beast and not only did the therians themselves not have a problem with it, even though it was frequently done without their consent, the leaders of those therians didn't take any issue with it even though 'hey, this vampire is potentially controlling/mind-rolling people!' should be alarming at best, and quite possibly go as far as wanting that vampire put down before they can become like, say, Nikolaos and the rats.

This created something of a...gap, I guess would be the right word?...in how majority players who viewed 'calling' as something fun and fluffy and a good basis for making couples (lol what potential consent issues?) played things, versus how the minority players who viewed it as 'something therians would understandably be hostile to because dude vampires use that shit to control them all the time in canon' played things. For instance, this one time, three therian characters were having a picnic, and in order to be friendly and join in or get attention or something, a fourth player had their vampire approach and start metaphysically feeling up their beasts without any invitation, warning, or consent. One of the picnickers was Hank, the wererat in SvS that belongs to writtenelision, and he's already scared of vampires because of the freakyass mind-stuff in general they can do, having his inner rat suddenly violated by a strange vamp pretty much sent him into a phobic fit, especially since the fact that the vampire was able to do that to him indicates it could do more (and just might). The vampire character didn't seem to realize what he'd done to warrant this reaction, which is one thing, but the vampire's player also seemed unaware, and certainly didn't understand why writtenelision wished they had least asked for permission before barging in on a scene and doing what basically amounts to god-modding (since metaphysical/astral/etc acts are as powerful in this 'verse as physical blows and the like) which is against the rules.

Now, remember the MotC I mentioned? His player was one of the ones who took the fluffy route. This probably would have gotten him into a lot of trouble with various therians and therian groups, except that, well, as I said, most of the people playing the other therians did it the same way, so he never got his face clawed off even though he could, and did, go touching pretty much everyone's inner beast because he was a Padma-line vamp (almost all the vampires there were from Padma or Belle's lines, which I've been told by a veteran of several AB boards is usually the case). He even once set off an accidental call to all therians in the city and there was no suspicion or consequence from any leader except my Cleo (Sig wasn't there yet).

And then this crossed over with the people who played therians as being totally cool with that shit, serving to make Cleo get even more paranoid, specifically paranoid about MotC, because a MotC who goes around doing this is bad news, and it's *creepy* to her how the therians he does it too are fine with it and maybe he's using that same Padma-line power to *make* them be fine with it? And then she encountered a case that gave her reason to believe that he could do this even to serious Alpha-level therian leaders like her. Instead of having Little Queens, we had "Sahiba" as a title for the local tiger queens, and for some reason there we also had male leaders called Tajdars because the admins like the idea of all the therian groups being set up on the same king/queen system. I guess that made it easier, even if it wasn't exactly canon. Oh well, Sahiba sounds better than Little Queen anyway, and I like the acknowledgement that tigers come from India as well as China kthnx

Anyway. There was this new Tajdar. ALWAYS A NEW TAJDAR, UGH. Sorry, I still hate how the leadership was on constant rotation and I really wish there'd been some test to be sure people were gonna stick around. Cleo was meeting him because of course as Regina she needs to rub elbows with the rest of the therian leaders and get off on the right foot, you know. And he'd already met MotC and recounted to Cleo about that while MotC can call all animals, he has a special affinity to tigers, and that "it was hard to resist cuddling up to him." Yeah. Cuddling. This guy is an Alpha, and a Leader, and he has to restrain himself against acting like an affectionate pet just upon meeting MotC? THAT IS TERRIFYING. And he doesn't seem bothered by this as he recounts it to Cleo, which, to her, suggests that this is long-distance brain-washing because how else could you not be freaked out and offended by this?

And when finally enough shifter leaders vanished, over and over, that other players began to acknowledge it IC as a concern (I don't know why they didn't before, maybe because they knew OOCly it wasn't actually an in-game issue) and MotC called a big meeting of all the current therian leaders to discuss it. Cleo considered this to be pretty weird too. Why doesMotC care? Vampires being involved with the wellbeing of wereanimals (at least for their own sake) is NOT normal in canon. And isn't it odd how therian figureheads keep vanishing and the MotC is just fine? And now MotC is suddenly making a show of caring about this? HMMM. To Cleo at least, this could mean that MotC could in fact be responsible for these disappearances as a political ploy---take out new shifter leaders as they appear, get everyone scared, show up to be the good guy, get remaining leaders oathed to him, and TAKE OVER from there. Especially since he already offer protection to the Rodere because their leader was gone. It's not paranoia to think this is possible either, because it's the sort of thing a MotC would *DO* in the ABverse--they are tricky, chessmaster bastards like that. Even if this MotC actually isn't, why wouldn't Cleo and others at least SUSPECT that he is?

Add to that, and it really looked like he was planning to make the Tajdar his Therian Servant, and Cleo had good reason to suspect this. And he already had a Human Servant, who was a necromancer to boot. That would make a triumvirate. Very big power. That's bad enough in terms of putting a lot of power on his side, especially since the Tajdar being the Therian Servant means that the Streak will come with him under MotC as well. Someone gathering this much power is up to something, or at least that's what Cleo thinks. And as a player I understood that this was not the case at all, that this was just the way that the players of MotC and Tajdar interpreted the way that 'calling' worked. But as an RPer, I had to look at it from Cleo's POV and have her react realistically. And that meant she was putting some pieces together that, from an in-universe perspective, did look like they lined up, even if it was actually just more or less all coincidence and MotC's player really did mean for him to be benign.

I actually started thinking about just stopping the way I was playing Cleo because it didn't fit in with how everyone else played. I thought it was right, and I thought it was realistic, but I figured, y'know, if everyone else wants to do it the other way, maybe that's how I should do it, it would help the game move more smoothly, etc. But then some new people joined up, including Cygnusrex and Writtenelision and Phoenix whom I later became friends with, and their characters had the same view as mine: No, therians are not thrilled about vampires being able to control them in body and mind, and everything the MotC has been up to should look like bad news from an IC-POV. And when the swanmane and weresnake groups got set up and they got leadership positions in them, Cleo finally had some people on her side, and that was cool. It meant we might actually have a chance to make some kind of political rift, which we were hoping for because we rather wanted some political drama at last instead of all the leaders just sitting on their hands and smiling at each other, which was more or less what had been going on till then. We were also kinda hoping that it would turn out we were right about MotC and his nice guy act and the player was just keeping it under wraps from us OOCly, because that would be SO COOL and I LOVE CHESSMASTER SNEAKY VILLAINS.

Unfortunately, no, it turned out he really was just a really nice vampire and the player really was as clueless as she seemed about how creepy he came off given the circumstances.

So we decided to make our own in-universe explanation for the constantly vanishing leaders! We meaning myself, Cygnusrex, writtenlision, and some of the other members.

Writtenelision made a little vampire girl named Sorcha, and another player made Sorcha's father, John Smith, who was her weretiger servant. Those weren't their original names, but it's what they're going by during this century. They originally come from a small Pictish village north of the rivers Forth and Clyde in Scotland from 850+ years ago. A pedophile vampire lured Sorcha (again, not her name then) from her home, and John didn't find out until the vamp had carried out the last bite necessary to turn her. He drove the vampire away by faith with a sacred boundary stone, but it was too late for his daughter, who died and rose as a vampire. John knew that in order to take care of his daughter forever, he'd have to find a way to live forever too, and he couldn't protect her as well if he were a vampire too because he'd have to sleep in the day like her. Being a Human Servant wasn't an immediate option either since Sorcha wasn't a master vampire yet and couldn't make him one. As a result, they traveled across Scotland looking for a shapeshifter to infect him so that he could be a supernaturally strong protector for her until she became master enough to make him her ageless Therian Servant, which she eventually did, and luckily not before he got too old either (he looks about late 30s to early 40s). As for how they found a weretiger in Scotland, they went with the idea that the shifter he forced to turn him was a monk from Rome who had been sent to convert the heathens, and had contracted his own therianthropy from a Caspian tiger strain that had lingered in Rome as a result of Romans importing various exotic therians for the gladiator games, if I remember right.

Recently, on a long journey which brought them to New York, Sorcha was driven to having to feed on animals, and, like Sabin in canon, began to rot to death as a result. Since drinking the blood of therians is more potent in canon too, John thought that he could save her by feeding various Alpha therians to her. And that's why so many NYC leaders and other therian figureheads have been vanishing!

We were going to get the admin permission to make this a boardwide plot. It was going to be awesome, with MotC being the red herring who was proved innocent all along (which would help mollify the feelings of his player, who seemed to be starting to feel her vampire was being treated unfairly by Cleo and her ilk) and solving the mystery and banding together to try to bring the real culprits to justice, etc.

But, like the plans we had regarding That Guy, this never came to pass. Myself, Cygnusrex, Writtenelision, and others left the board due to some other drama that will never be discussed, and never getting to do this plot with John and Sorcha was pretty disappointing to all those involved. I wasn't involved, but I did hate to see my buddies put out and to have made the characters and storyline for nothing. So I decided to make an NPC MotC and we would do the plot anyway amongst ourselves!

That's where we got Armel Daube, the Padma-line Master of New York that you've met in Sue versus Sue. In our RP, however, he's not actually the real MotC, but a Stalking Horse. The real MotC is Lucille, who is a 400something powerful-but-canonically-possible Padma-line vampire of French (what, don't they call come from there?) origins rather than a modern-day canon-breaking super-therian reality-warper like in Sue vs Sue. She's entirely aware of what John and Sorcha are up too, and they're exploiting her weakness for children (which extends to baby vampires no matter how old they really are, as seen with Valentina in SvS) to get her to help them. She uses her Padma-line powers to overcome even the strongest of Alphas and spirits them away in secret to feed to Sorcha. Meanwhile, she's ordered Armel to *deliberately* act as creepy and suspicious as possible towards the therian population so that everyone thinks he's behind it and won't go looking for any other possible culprits.

Except the problem is that Armel keeps failing at actually *scaring* anyone except Hank and Odette because they're already phobic of vamps anyway (and he's learned not to scare Odette because her screaming brings the entire Flock plus Max to come kick his ass). He comes off as creepy to them, yes, but in an annoying way rather than a serious threat. So he either just gets brushed off, or, worse, chased off. It is going very badly for the poor guy, but he can't quit because Lucille will have his hide. She of course feels NO sympathy at all, and Armel is beginning to loathe the day that Sorcha ever came to town. Everything was just awesome until then, he got all the benefits and respect of being a Master of the City while Lucille did all the actual work and made the actual decisions! Now he's running himself ragged every night deliberately trying to incite therians and succeeding in ways that result in physical pain for him but not the desired suspicion-that-he-is-behind-the-vanishings like he's supposed to.

Poor dude can't catch a break.

Date: 2013-10-10 03:32 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] writtenelision.livejournal.com
A. Thank you for not bringing up that stuff. I'm actively trying to forget it and this is helpful <3

B. YES! GOD THAT PICNIC. Poor Hank baby. Although it did result in good plot. And the first appearance of Shouty Rat!

C. And that meeeeting. With Gaspard and Baz and Odile.

D. I miss that plot. I wish the player behind John was still about. It's impossible to play Sorcha without them.

E. YOU REMEMBERED ALL OF THEIR HISTORY! You truly are a collection of rats.

Date: 2013-10-10 03:47 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] rodentfanatic.livejournal.com
A. Pff, no problem, I am too.

B. SHOUTY RAT FTW!

D. Ino I miss her too :C

E. YAY! I had their stored profiles at NSC to help ^^;;

Date: 2013-10-10 03:59 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] writtenelision.livejournal.com
B. THE ONLY TIME HANK GROWS A SPINE! Also the only time he swears.

Date: 2013-10-10 06:48 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] wanderingworlds.livejournal.com
This is awesome. Plot-wise. And I'm glad you never had to sacrifice how you played Cleo. Because the rest of the board sounds like a bunch of Twilighters at a horror con...

Date: 2013-10-10 08:01 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] rodentfanatic.livejournal.com
Yeah, I wouldn't have enjoyed that D=

Date: 2013-10-11 02:22 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] writtenelision.livejournal.com
You have nooooo idea.

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