Height restructuring in Elders and elder than
Elders
A Discourse On Time and the Vampire by Handel W. Care
The question is: Why don't we have a group of midgets as Elders, and further, are the Antediluvians going to be called "shorty" by the first person they run into after waking? We know that humankind has been getting progressively taller through the centuries; the average height is greater now than it was a mere 20 years ago, for example. Thoughts on the uses of Vicissitude or Obfuscate to hide the fact that a Vampire made in 50 AD has a serious height deficit are one way of looking at this. Another way is to see this as more of a subtle activity of change over time
(something vampires tend to have in abundance) rather than something as
gross as direct action by the use of Vicissitude.
We know vamps can get stronger, prettier, more dexterous etc over time, so
physical change is quite obviously possible. Being dead things with a
structure which is suffused with blood in a manner that edges towards a
very good sponge in many ways, rather than totally in specific structures
such as veins and organs in the way the Kine are, the 'normal' rules don't
tend to apply in many situations. Then we have the regenerative effect that
is a constant - waking each evening with the same length of fingernails,
hair and so on as when the embrace occurred and unlife began. Sure, some
damage takes longer to recover from, but most of this too will leave no
traces of its presence eventually. How then, we should ask ourselves, would
one be able to effect any change in this form in a long term manner without
the use of supernatural abilities? I'm sure everyone has seen the
occasional Toreador Elder with a beauty that is quite beyond the limits of
human possibility.. and you can be sure that they don't go to the Tzimisce
for face lifts. There are Elder Brujah who are beyond the human limits of
strength without their Potence - close observation of the aura during
exertion will allow one to know whether this Discipline is in action or
not, and I've seen certain incredible certain feats of strength which were
just that, feats of strength. Quite apart from these extremes are the
personal triumphs of the less showy, everynight kind of vampire. Some of
you, certainly, would have found that while skill in certain physical
abilities comes more quickly, overall endurance, dexterity or strength will
increase.
This rewriting of the 'unchangeable' code in the undead things we are
leads me to consider a holistic effect idea of the
magical/spiritual/physical links twixt the vampire's body and what the
person perceives, or perhaps what they expectto perceive. Habit can be a
very powerful thing. Exercise and practice, use of muscles in extended time
frames, these tend to have an effect on humans, and so perhaps our
subconscious idea of this causes changes within the blood and form that
houses it. The logic behind the practically obscene levels of beauty in
some vampires escapes me for the present, but then thinking like a Toreador
for any amount of time makes me want to hit someone. I suspect that vanity
is another habit that could get particularly strong after a century or more
- it can be sickeningly strong after little more than a decade of natural
life, after all. Personal strengths, personal focuses are enhanced over time.
Now, to the actual point here (yes, there is one... somewhere) - if a
subconscious feedback loop 'told' the body to grow marginally as the
person who was now a vampire saw the general Kine population getting taller
and 'thought' they should maintain the same relative height to them it
would be quite possible for a 2000 year old elder to not appear overly
short in this day and age. The precision of the relative height would
depend on a number of factors - one of which would be torpor, as with the
lack of feedback alteration would be frozen, another the rapidity of the
procedure. The vampire is a predator, and standing out too easily amidst
the prey (I'm continuing to ignore Disciplines here, obviously) isn't the
most intelligent of ways to keep oneself in blood... so this could be seen
as a variant of evolution, a very singular and personalised one that is
repeated in all of us sooner or later.
It occurs that this theory is espousing a very basic kind of body control
reminiscent of the Vicissitude or Protean Disciplines. Well, everything has
to start somewhere, doesn't it?
