Petals of Silver & Blood; a genre remix

You go down the stairs dangerously fast, the walls narrowing around you as they transition from the opulence of the manor proper into something altogether more spartan and practical. Concrete and brushed metal instead of stone tile and elaborate wall panelling. Your arms feel like lead from holding your passenger, who is no less injured than before despite her having come back to fuzzy awareness.

The stairs open up into a small, windowless room. Black metal security doors are set into all three of the walls in front of you. Each of them is sealed with a security panel and some manner of curse, faintly glowing sigils of ensorcelled blood crawling across the door's surface. You freeze, not certain which to choose.

Fingers still wet with blood reach up to seize you by the chin. With none of the superhuman vigour the woman should have, they steer your gaze toward the leftmost door. "Bring me closer," she says. Her voice is terribly frail.

You don't know what else to do other than to follow the directions. As you approach, she ignores the control panel, laying a splayed hand flat in the centre of the curse array. The sigils flash a brighter shade of red, then grow dim. The door hisses open and the woman droops in your arms again. Whatever she'd done has clearly taken the last of her energy.

The room beyond the door, its metal-panelled walls soaring up to a ceiling far above. It's clearly what the woman had meant by 'armoury hangar'. Two inactive war armours kneel in their bays, the glass viewports in their spiny heads blank like the eyes of a corpse. The third bay stands empty — presumably it plays host to the armour that had nearly flattened you earlier. Like that one, each of these are humanoid figures formed out of blackened metal, ten metres tall with wickedly-curved claws on every finger. You don't have very long to take this sight in, however.

You're not alone here. There are bodies strewn across the floor. Most either belong to royal day guards in black and red, or the invaders in their street clothes. The metallic tang of blood is heavy on the air, mingling sickeningly with the heady scent of machine oil. You feel the woman stiffen in your arms as it hits her palette. Worst of all, though, are the two invaders who are very much still alive.

One of them is standing over a messily dismembered corpse wearing the remnants of a night guard pilot uniform, a bloody axe held in her hands. She's hacked off his head and all but one of his limbs — overkill, considering the silver blade already puncturing his heart, but you can't be too careful where vampires are concerned. Her partner is a small, nervous looking man watching her back as she works. He's the one who notices you first. He lets out a gasp of alarm, raises what looks horrifyingly like a handgun in your direction, and pulls the trigger.

Instincts you don't quite understand kick in before the shot is even fired. The woman still in your arms, you fling yourself behind a large maintenance console for the nearest war armour. The woman screams in pain from the sudden motion, but the bullet at least only hits the wall behind you.

Guns are rare and tightly controlled, illegal on pain of death outside of very specific circumstances. Too dangerous in small pressurised environments, and those make up a very large portion of the habitable world. You don't know your name, who you are, or where you were yesterday, but you somehow know that much.

"Fuck, what is it?" the woman with the axe demands.

"A woman and a vampire! Both unarmed, it looked wounded." His voice is dramatically steadier than his fidgety appearance would have implied.

You finally lay the wounded woman down against the console. She stares at you from behind a curtain of blonde hair splattered with red, pale eyes struggling for alertness. You look from her to the corpse of a day guard nearby, a knife gleaming in its throat. In reflected in the blade, you see the man training his handgun on your hiding place while the woman with the axe slowly advances.

"I'll be back in a moment," you say, your whisper coming out as a disused croak.

"You... talk?" the wounded woman manages, sounding genuinely surprised despite everything.

You don't answer her. You're already moving. Fatigue seems to melt away, along with the pain in your limbs. What you do next is as natural for you as breathing.

You burst out from cover, ducking beneath the shot you know will aim for your chest, barely even feeling it as it grazes your shoulder. As you run past the day guard's corpse, your foot strikes the hilt of the knife, tearing it free of dead flesh to send it spinning through the air. It sinks perfectly into the gunman's eye. His last shot goes far over your head as he slumps to his knees.

The woman with the axe lets out a cry, raising her weapon, prepared to meet you with it. Instead, when you reach her partner, you snatch the handgun out of the man's failing grip, bring it to bear, and put three rounds through her head before she can even close with you. She falls to the floor bonelessly, a look of surprise on her face, the floor behind her misted with blood and brains.

Could you have done that earlier, if you hadn't chosen to run? You'll never be able to answer that adequately. In the coming years, your memories of this day fade in and out of focus, only growing fuzzier with time. Regardless, you watch a woman die with a blank look on your face, not entirely sure what to do next.

Fortunately, for the first time, she makes your mind up for you. "I... need help."

You turn back to the console where you'd left the wounded woman earlier. You round it, setting the gun down again as you kneel in front of her. She looks worse than ever — drawn and weak, drifting closer to unconsciousness by the second. You have no idea what to do for her. You lean closer over her slumped form. "How do I help you, miss?"

Her eyes snap into sudden alertness. They're not meeting yours, instead locked on your throat. A terrible, feral hunger shudders through her elegant frame. "'Your highness', if you please," she says, managing to sound chiding despite it all. Then she blurs forward, and seizes you by the wrists.

You slam backward onto the floor, her weight pressing down on you as she straddles your waist. You only have a winded moment to stare up at her, her lips pulling back to reveal fangs, before she strikes. She seizes the collar of your shirt with her teeth, tears it open, and then bites down greedily on your jugular. A sharp pain gives way to a rush of disorientating ecstasy. It floods your body, filling your veins with a tingling warmth even as your life drains away into her eager mouth, leaving you horribly limp and pliant. However weak she'd been before this, you couldn't possibly break her grip now even if you tried, a rabbit in the clutches of a tiger. It is simultaneously the best and most terrifying feeling you can remember experiencing in your life. Your sense of your own body begins to fade away, your vision going black around the edges.

In the years to come, you will grow intimately familiar with the nature and temperament of vampires. They are people. They can feel love, anger, remorse, if not exactly the way a mortal human experiences those emotions. They can practice self restraint, but first and foremost they are supernatural predators and they have the instincts of one. If you run from a vampire, they will want to chase you. If you give your back to one, you are issuing a challenge that may end in violence. And if you bare your throat to one — one who is wounded and near starving from bloodloss — few would say you have anyone but yourself to blame when they simply take all of what you're so carelessly offering.

She releases you before you can entirely pass out, pulling her fangs from your throat with obvious effort. You stare up blearily at her as she licks your blood from her lips. The wound on her chest is already closing, and her eyes are bright and alert. There's a profoundly relieved look on her face. Then her eyes flick back down to where you lay on the floor, still beneath her. You can well imagine yourself — pale and motionless, on the brink of death and confused about what is even happening. You'll never be entirely sure what the look in her eyes means. Remorse, curiosity, desire?

A shuddering crash comes from elsewhere in the manor, and that makes her mind up for her. She raises her wrist to her mouth and bites down, freshly renewed blood welling up.Without ceremony or comment, she presses the wound to your lips. On instinct you try not to swallow, but you're far too weak to resist now. It fills your mouth, hot and revolting, until you take an involuntary gulp. "There's a good girl," your lady says, her smile approving. It's the last thing you see before your numbed senses are consumed by a cold fire.

You feel yourself scream, suddenly free to curl up in on yourself. Your heart pounds erratically, your breath catches in your throat. There's a searing pain in your head as something in your mind is forcibly expanded. Seconds or hours later, when it's finally faded, you find you have the strength to push yourself up to a sitting position, still dizzy.

"Good, you're moving," your lady says. She's perched on the edge of the console, looking down at you with open pleasure. "As lovely a meal as you make, I try not to reward good service with death if I can help it. Forgive my overindulgence." The midnight blue fabric of her dress is ragged over the breast and at the hems, her blood having stained it an ugly shade of purple. Her long, golden hair is tangled and matted with red. From this vantage point, you also see that you must have lost one of her shoes as you carried her through the manor. She still possesses a pallid, unearthly beauty and a regal bearing that never fails to stop you short.

"What's... happening?" you ask, your head still spinning

She notices the shoe at the same time as you do, removing the remaining one with a wistful sort of frown. "And here I thought I'd get to salvage something from this place, other than you." She tosses the shoe over her shoulder. "I've just saved your life. After nearly killing you, but circumstances are quite extreme enough for that to be forgivable, I think."

There's another crash from somewhere deeper in the manor, and the levity in her expression slips. She glances over her shoulder to the far end of the hangar, where one of the great hatch doors hangs open, letting in the ruddy light of the morning sun. Lethal, for her. She passes a hand over something on the console she perches on. Curse sigils swarm over its surface as a matching pattern seeps out of the metal of the looming war armour's hatch. With a harsh clang, the hatch to the armour's cockpit snaps open.

"We're leaving," she tells you, indicating the cockpit. "The authorities won't arrive until it's very conveniently too late. This attack isn't just plucky rebels taking the opportunity — this has my brother written all over it. We cannot be here."

You hesitate, confused and more than a little afraid. There's another crash, louder, closer.

"No time to be delicate, then," your lady says, not without a slight note of regret. "Come here." She holds out a hand.

The words hook on something in your mind, so subtle that you barely notice it. Without a shred of conscious thought, you feel yourself reaching out to accept her offered hand. You're pulled unsteadily to your feet.

With a deafening crash and the sound of twisting metal, a colossal figure bursts into the hangar, taking one of the open doors with it. It's a different design from the others that you've seen, and somehow the way its blank faceplate regards the two of you communicates plain hostility.

Your lady shoves you into the open cockpit harder than she otherwise would have, leaping after you and sealing the hatch with a touch. You hit something hard inside, and this time, everything really does go black.

In many ways, this is where your life begins.

Article:

A Broken Thing

Killer Instincts: You are programmed for violence, something that awakens in you when you have a weapon in your hand. You may use any weapon with expert proficiency, and do not need to make rolls for feats of violence unless they pose a genuine challenge or danger to you, such as fighting a peer enemy, holding off a dozen combatants, or defending your lady under perilous circumstances.

You may make rolls to pilot war armour with steel by letting these instincts guide you, as long as they are directly related to combat or weaponry.​

Cyber-Arcane Body: Your body and mind have been modified with blood sorcery and technological enhancements, further enhanced by your status as your lady's familiar. You are capable of physical feats that other mortals are not, can recover faster from injury, and may be modified further as is convenient.​

Character creation part 2:

This is a plan vote. A plan should consist of one option from every section. For example:

[ ] Plan name
-[ ] Name vote
-[ ] Stat vote
-[ ] Power vote

Your name:

Your lady has a sense of humour. What are you named for?

[ ] An endearment

[ ] Something precious

[ ] Something sweet

Beginning stat array:

You begin the story with -2 Blood and +2 Steel. Please distribute +1, +0, and -1 to your remaining three stats, Flame, Ice, and Shadow. As an example, votes should be formatted in the following way:

[ ] Flame +1, Ice +0, Shadow -1

Starting power:

Please pick one of the following. Options from this list not picked for this vote will be available later,

[ ] Marked and Claimed

When you are subjected to unnatural mental or physical compulsion that would harm your lady or go against her direct orders or her wishes as you understand them, you may roll Steel instead of Blood to resist the effect.

[ ] Murder Doll

While in combat, you ignore pain and injuries short of full incapacitation until the fight is over. Your sense of fear is almost completely blocked out, although you are still capable of reason.

[ ] Only One Language

When you respond to social slights or maneuvering against yourself or your lady with the threat of violence, other characters do not take offence as they ordinarily would. It's all they expect from you, after all.