The Countess is a Terran vampire, and may very well be THE Terran vampire of the modern age. Born in the mid-14th century, the Countess is entitled, arrogant, imposing, generationally wealthy, extremely resourceful and utterly ruthless in her pursuit of whatever it is she happens to want. She's the inheritor of an estate that predates industrialization by several lifetimes, and she was present at the moment the modern strain of interplanetary vampirism was created. She's never known "need," only "want," and she does not regard other people as anything more than a means to an end- they are there to serve her needs in exchange for a morsel of the wealth and power that is hers to bestow. She still enjoys the fashion of her youth, and has long been known to wear a painted white mask over her facial disfigurement- it clips to secure fasteners nailed into four points around her skull. The nails are of an old design, they look hand made upon close inspection, though few are afforded the audience to get close enough to inspect them.
While she is a millennium old and has spent most of that time in nearly-uninterrupted comfort, the Countess is not an idle person, far from it. She has unlimited time at her disposal, and the minutiae of maintaining her estate and its holdings is attended to by servants and advisors, so when she isn't busy making decisions or directing the momentum of those decisions, she's largely free to pursue mastery of one skill after another. While it is not an exhaustive list, some of the notable fields in which the Countess is an expert practitioner include painting with oil and watercolors, the culinary arts, tailoring and dressmaking, carpentry, architecture, gardening, mathematics, calculus, physics, astronomy, chemistry, lockpicking, swordsmanship, archery, statesmanship, metallurgy, whitesmithing, blacksmithing, cobbling and shoemaking, alchemy, fiction writing, poetry, sailing, nautical captaincy, music theory, foraging and mycology, tracking and game hunting, anatomy and physiology, medicine (old-timey), stage acting, language fluency (all), horseback riding, agriculture, diplomacy, business management, logging, optometry, cardiology, transporting logistics, wing chun, mechanical engineering, philosophy, watchmaking, glass firing, ceramics, industrial architecture, marksmanship, theology, military strategy, jiu jitsu, automotive repair, aeronautics, urban planning, electrical engineering, medicine (modern), computer programming, networking and IT, robotics, ontology, astronautics, warp theory, space captaincy and interplanetary communications. She'd been studying contemporary magic theory when her research was interrupted by a sudden need to depart from Terra, but we'll come back around to that in a minute.
To understand her story today, it's helpful to understand the story of the Countess's origin. It was inland Terra in the 1350's, in a small mountainside city governed by a royal family. The first Count had memories of his grandfather's rule, in the trade agreements and curious merchant-wares that began to appear in their city; and he had more vivid memories as a young adult of his father's rule, and the ornate public buildings and monuments he invested the family wealth into. The first Count watched a torch pass from one generation to the next, he saw the impermanence of each ruler, immortalized in paint and stone but left to live that eternity in the shadow of their successor, and he determined that when it was his turn to rule he did not want to succumb to such a fate. He wanted his rule to be everlasting, he wanted it to be himself as the end of the generational line, the exclamation point at the end of a very long historical paragraph. He kept to his studies and performed his part, but when it came time for him to ascend to the seat of power, he chose not to pursue an heir of his own. He sought to pursue immortality of a different sort.
A belief in devils, imps and infernal bargaineers spread throughout inland Terra around this time, it was believed that a devil could grant a man power, wealth and success at the cost of his immortal soul. The first Count was obsessed with demonology, he had studied old tomes and researched first-hand accounts of people who claimed to have met devils, dealt with devils and even those who have hunted and vanquished them. He knew that devils were real, and he had concocted a cunning plan to outwit an infernal wishmaker- if he could secure life everlasting, if he should simply never die, then his soul would never be relinquished as payment for the power he could enjoy for all time. It was brilliant, he believed; he just needed to find a way to make contact with a devil, and when he came into power he began work immediately, in secret, to realize his dreams.
The truth about many early Terran myths centered around devils and demons is that most of them stemmed from encounters with early starfaring Mercurians. The first world to ascend to interplanetary travel were the Martians, but the second world to achieve planet-hopping technology was Mercury, because the Martians who first landed on Mercury cooked to death on its surface and left their starship behind for this planet full of irradiated weirdos to pick apart, reverse-engineer and acquire for themselves. Throughout the tunnels of Mercury there were enough eyes with enough Gifts that no piece of durable, practical Martian engineering could elude someone's understanding, and when enough of them put their heads together they could read, interpret, document and reproduce the interconnected systems and technologies necessary to build a boat that could go into space, land and take off again under its own power. Being Mercurians, they would set right to work making the engines bigger and meaner and the cockpits more fun to operate from, with big shifter rods and more knobs and dials to turn. Because wayward Martians left Mercury the gift of astronautics, Mercurians immediate began to leave their own planet behind and start to check out what their neighbors had going on on their worlds.
To a Terran of this period, the sight of a Firewalking Mercurian was both frightening and intriguing. Here were people who were man-shaped as they were, their bodies painted chromatic hues, their hair a shock of white. The adornment of their horns and their lashing, prehensile tails stood out as unearthly, but what seeped the Mercurian into the fabric of Terran myth was their Gifts- each Mercurian could shape or bend some aspect of the universe itself to their whim, and early Terrans who happened upon them would occasionally attempt to secure a boon for themselves. The Mercurians of the time couldn't understand any of Terran's many languages, they could only act within the purview of their own Gifts and simply guessed at what the planet's inhabitants were asking of them. "Do your funny trick? Okay." This is partly why stories of devilry involve both granted wishes and twisted curses, as each Mercurian who was found and addressed was mostly working within the narrow scope of what they could actually do. Whether or not the Terrans were happy about it was on them.
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It was in this context that the first Count sought his devil, to strike a bargain for an immortality that would save him from mouldering in the shadows of his own descendants. His efforts would not be fruitless, as he would happen by chance upon a Mercurian starfaring crew taking refuge in a great old castle overgrown by foliage in the heart of a great black forest. The crew had been midway through a voyage to Mars when they discovered their ship had a stowaway- one of Sol's rejected children, afflicted with that banishing illness and that thirst for the warmth of living blood, had found refuge from Sol inside the strange metal ship, a sight he'd never seen before. When the ship had rattled into space, the afflicted Mercurian stirred from his hiding place, and a keen-eared crewmember noticed a new sound that was not accounted for. When each occupant of the ship recognized the other there was a bit of a panic, a lot of sealed doors and a hasty decision to land on the blue planet briefly and sort out what in the light of Sol they can do about the dangerous, hungry person hiding out in the bowels of their starship! None of them wanted to get bitten, sleeping in their quarters wasn't an option, so they tucked their ship down near a building-looking structure far away from any Terran colonies and hid out in that old castle until they could figure out what to do about the guy in their ship and continue on their merry way. As fate would have it, this was also the day the first Count went looking for a devil to strike a bargain with to secure his immortality.
It was an awkward meeting. Here was a Terran, almost fawning in his attempt at diplomacy with these denizens of the inferno, and there were a handful of Mercurians, none of whom knew a word of what the guy was saying, none of whom wanted to get bit by a guy whose whereabouts were unknown to them. They looked at the Count, they looked at each other, and they smiled. Everyone was about to get exactly what they wanted.
No one has ever known enough about this interaction to document how it happened, but it is safe to believe that the passing affliction from the affected Mercurian to the Terran Count, directly on top of two intersecting lines of Terra's wellspring of magical energy, cause the passing of the illness to mutate and evolve in the novel new ways that produced the modern strain we know today. It's safe to believe that the original afflicted Mercurian was Gifted with the purview of speed, which explains why modern vampires inherit the boon of fast movement. It's also safe to believe that the impossible coincidence of these many intersecting factors were why the first Terran vampire inherited an inversion of the Mercurian gift, capable of stealing useful attributes away from other species. It's safe to believe these things, but no one present thought to record them and no one's really had access to the data they need to discover it. In practical terms, a couple Mercurians fed a local to the guy in the back of their ship, luring him out and letting him feast so he would stay put in one place long enough for them to shoot him. They dumped the Count, incinerated the body and took off from Terra with great haste. The first Count awakened into his vampiric unlife beneath the moon, beneath a shooting star and adjacent to a smoldering circle- no doubt the devils' retreat to their Hellish inferno. He felt cold, he felt hungry, but he also felt powerful. He somehow knew he could not die. His would be an unending legacy, and he would be present to enjoy all of it, for all time.
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Now, our Countess was not a blood descendant of the first Count- as you recall, he did not want an heir, but he did need his staff of servants and attendants to persist with him into his eternity. The Countess of today was the daughter of one of the first Count's most trusted advisors, a voice of wisdom who the Count would not want to lose to the receding sands of time. When he had ascertained the extent of his immortal gift, and came to know its limitations, the Count would descend upon his most trusted men, feasting upon them and afflicting them with his baleful immortality, gifting them damnation and condemning them to that same hungering cold. Knowing that his men would not be happy without their loved ones by their side, so to did the first Count feast upon the families of his advisors, his attendants and his hand-picked servants, that they might all serve him loyally into his grand eternity. The Countess- our Countess- didn't appreciate being volunteered into her father's affairs so readily. When she awoke to her own Sol-spurned unlife and met the coldness inside of her, she would, in that moment, vow to kill every person responsible for this fate, to the man.
Had the first Count lived and died and passed on his reins to a successor, he might have been remembered even from the shadows of his descendants. Had he left well-enough alone he might have settled into that feared slump of faded-but-still-present memory, but well-enough wasn't enough for him, and in his pursuit of unrelenting control he created a monster so resentful that she would devour him, his family and all of his ancestors, usurping their generational power for herself. The Countess studied broadly, she learned how an immortal might die, and one by one she set to work plotting and killing the Count and his closest advisors, beginning with her own father. The Count could not understand- he at first assumed the duplicitous hand of a foreign spy or a hired assassin, or worse yet, a cruel twist of the devil's bargain, so warned about in the old tomes. It wasn't until the Countess would confront him with a glinting blade in her hand, set to take his head from his shoulders, that he would know how his immortal tale would come to its untimely end. His story was never his to be told. He wouldn't simply be forgotten, it would be as if he never were at all.
Building her own cabinet of advisors from the families broken by the first Count's possessive avarice, the Countess would eclipse the Count's dynastic rule with her own. She was at the helm of a remote little city connected to distant lands by carefully-planned trade routes and inter-regional commerce, built over generations by her late predecessors. This hateful little hive and its squabbling little ants- if it weren't for these people, she wouldn't have been afflicted with this baleful curse or this chilling hunger. The way she saw it, this city and its people were indebted to her- they cost her a normal life and burdened her with this insatiable hunger for blood and warmth. It is only fitting that they would, in turn, help her feed it. The Countess leveraged her new authority to make her vampirism everyone's problem; the royals controlled the pursestrings and the city's populace was dependent on them to sustain their lives, so when their new royal began to feed upon them they had little place else to go but the long, winding trade routes or the isolating wilderness surrounding them. She would fight her usurpers man-to-man and feast upon her dissenters. Her rule was a dark age with seemingly no end.
The Countess was cruel, but she was shrewd as well. She made sure to preserve the trade agreements her predecessors set up with her neighbors, guaranteeing the safety of outside interests and rooting out the bandits who would threaten them. She was fair to the traveling merchants, who in turn agreed not to sell supplies to her adversaries. Coin has a way of turning eyes blind, but not all foreign agents were amicable to the newly-minted Countess. Whispered rumors began to spread about a blood-feasting tyrant, and those rumors eventually found their way to sympathetic ears- particularly those who had a means to fight back against this new strain of undying immortal. It's been said that there was a school of spellweavers who specialized in using Terran magic for martial purpose, pledging to fight those monsters which neither spear nor arrow could fell. It's been said that they ventured to the isolated city and confronted the Countess within her own domain, pressing to vanquish her the same way they have countless other terrors. It's been said that one of them landed a bolt of corrosive magical energy from their hands, catching the Countess in her unnatural bursts of speed and searing the flesh from her face. It's only ever been said that this may have happened, because the fury at her magical disfigurement- the infliction of a wound that would never heal- was so great that she slew her assailants, sought out their school, slew their members to the man, sought out their decendents and their antecendents and hunted them to the ends of the earth, wiping the collective lineage of that school from the face of Terra. Over decades she tracked and hunted their bloodlines, and she left no soul alive. Modern scholars are still attempting to piece together the scattered remnants of the collected knowledge of this school, which may well have been lost to steel and time.
While these spellweavers failed to kill her, the disfiguring mark they left upon her had a real impact on her- a cherished remnant of her lost humanity had been blasted off the side of her head, and it wasn't growing back. It struck something inside her, deeper than any wound of the flesh. Unable to see herself anymore, to see the face of that mortal woman who was so deeply wronged, instead only seeing the lidless eye and the snarling fang of the monster that men would risk life and limb to purge from their world; she began to shatter any mirror her eyes fell upon. She left them hanging where they were, radial fractures and shards of glass glinting on the floors beneath them. She could not walk among people without them gawking at her, and she couldn't pretend not to notice. She began to spiral, and eventually she retreated from her city, away from the light of the public, where there were no mirrors or pale, staring peasants. She retreated deep into the Black Forests, to the very castle where the first Count had met his devil. She established a proxy to govern for her. She cast herself a mask of painted porcelain, a not-quite-correct expression of how she remembered looking, and she pounded nails into her own head to secure it over the visage that looked back at her from every reflective surface. She still held her seat of power, but life got a little bit harder for her, and a little bit easier for the people of her city.
Word traveled neither far nor fast in that age, and after a generation or two came and went, the story of the Countess seeped into the fabric of legend. Terran travelers whispered tales about a mad regent who stalked the night and fed on the blood of the good, the just and the faithful. The stories would grow from telling to telling- she would not appear in mirrors, she recoiled at the sight of holy sigils, that iron nails were driven into her flesh, evolving over time into wooden stakes being driven into her heart. The castle she inhabited was foreboding, even more isolated than the city she now rules from afar. There she dwelled; reading, studying and ever-undying, brooding and ruminating on the men who had taken herself from her, piece by piece. Her wealth sat in her castle coffers, sustaining her and her attendants alike. The world would grow and evolve and she would follow its evolution from afar, every new advancement offering some promise of restoring what has been taken from her twice-over. Every few generations some would-be hunter would venture to her castle to vanquish the immortal tyrant and bring closure to her victims- they would, mostly, join those victims in a very long list of the dead. It wasn't until recently that one of them would find success.
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It was no feat of mortal heroics or martial skill that drove the Countess out of Terra. It was a cunning descendant of one of these vanquished vampire hunters, a clerk with the regional government, who stitched together the bigger picture of how a centuries-old tyrant still has her fingers in modern-day mortal affairs. It turns out, as the Countess retreated from direct rule into her isolated castle, entrusting the region's management to her aides and proxies, she still owned much of the land in the area, and over the ensuing centuries that land had been leased and developed, expanding the isolated city into a thriving little state. That land was parceled out and leased through different proxy companies, and it was the hunters' descendant who first noticed that a suspiciously large number of these small, regional little companies appeared in records dating back hundreds of years. They connected these land-holding companies back to the stories they'd heard from their grandparents about an immortal tyrant who fed off the blood of her own people; they came to understand who has been long-feeding from provincial coffers through this tangle of rental agreements, and concocted a plan to be rid of the Countess once and for all.
While the land had been developed and the community thrived, the Countess's castle retreat remained in isolation, accessible only by a single winding and unpaved road and enshrouded by thick forest and a sheer mountain ascent behind it. The building was old, it had not been allowed inspection even one time since structural safety codes were ratified. It was, by legal definition, a hazard to any local person who might happen upon it. This old castle was all that stood between the Countess and the scorn of Sol above, and so, with a little bit of bureaucratic wrangling and one or two forged signatures, this anonymous clerk scheduled the ancient building for imminent demolition. Tear down the walls she hides behind and expose the cruel monster to the light of day. It was neither brawn nor blade nor crack of whip that drove out the Countess, but generational memory and the stroke of a pen. She was no fool, she knew what was coming. The night before her castle's scheduled demolition she took the form of a barn owl and flew to the nearest starport, picked out a ship and fled Terra, the ship's on-board crew captive as a sufficient snack for the long jouney ahead of her. She knew there was nowhere else in this modern world she could flee to whose walls would not again be imminently toppled, and while she was wise to the first attempt, a subsequent one might yet catch her in her diurnal slumber. Word travels far and fast in this age. Only a starship can travel faster.
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On the outskirts of Saturn's orbit, a distress signal raced across the emergency satellite relay network. There was a vessel adrift, and it needed assistance. Emerging from the cold void of space, a ship called the Silverback answered the call. Captain Grum and their crew of the dead stepped aboard this wayward starship, shaking off the frost of a deep slumber, eager to find themselves a warm meal. What they found instead was a lone woman in an antique dress, a sword on her hip and a meal hanging from her hand. She immediately recognized Captain Grum and their crew as descendants of her curse, the spread of her affliction preceding her even this far away from Terra. She introduced herself, and informed the crew that they will work for her now, and that they will take her the rest of the way to her destination. The crew of the Silverback looked to one another, then back to the Countess, and they descended upon her, all at once, to subdue her. In a heartbeat- the only heartbeat aboard that cursed ship- the Countess asserted herself and showed a fleeting gesture of mercy to Captain Grum and their crew, reiterating her claim: they work for her now. The men of the Big Fish Tow and Repair Company did not press the issue further. They knew they'd finally run afoul of an even bigger fish.
Titan Garden is an isolated little city, a crossroads of distant worlds and a cosmopolitan hub for culture and commerce. The face of the colony hides a few secret little societies which uphold their own codes of conduct to ensure their mutual survival. An old vampire, Priest, abhors wanton maraudering, maintaining a rogue's order to ensure there is no compelling reason for larger world powers to upturn his beloved little city. A disgruntled vampire, Sameki, finds himself and his associates under fire from a mysterious assailant, afforded no help but their own vampiric gifts to resolve the situation quietly. Beneath the surface, in the life-sustaining substructure of the lunar colony, newly-afflicted vampires are being driven from the stability of their lives, receding from a public life that had been taken from them with no resources beneath them to catch their fall. Watching all of this, an evolutionary biologist and her ad-hoc assistant at the station's major science facility carried out the clandestine work of researching and documenting the symptoms of the vampiric condition, in hopes that a way to reverse or cure it can someday be found, and that broader acceptance of the condition might follow soon after.
Somewhere, old leather boots clack against the metal grates of Titan's labyrinthine substructure. The Countess of Terra has eluded Sol's wrath and found herself on a new world, in a new city, scuttering into its sewers like a rat. She'd learned the lay of the land before her new subordinates set her down on Old Titan's tarmac. There were vampires down here, distant relatives of her own ancient court, who found themselves driven from a world that had scorned them, accursed by no will of their own. Oh, what they could have if only someone could lead them. Down here, in the bowels of Titan, she could shape a new court for herself. She could shape a new city in her image. She just needed to start from the bottom and avoid Sol's wrath just long enough to build momentum towards the summit. She was owed a city beneath her heel, and whatever it took, she would collect on that ancient debt.