Priest, short for Pristaglidazephyleer, is a five-hundred-year-old Neptunian vampire living on Titan Garden as one of its most powerful and influential residents. He is slow-moving and soft-spoken, a terrifying apex predator who does not experience the kinds of fears or threats that would inspire a starfarer to be anxious or on edge- his is a calm which appears gentle at first glance, but takes on a menacing tone when viewed against the bigger picture. While his influence can be felt in many corners of Titan's dome, Priest prefers to live in seclusion, reading modern literature and pursuing his interests in the sciences; botany and medicine have been long-time fixations of his, but these days there's so many worlds with so many different kinds of people cultivating plants adapted to so many different kinds of environments, it's all quite fascinating. That Titan Garden itself is a colony sustained by the living forest in its upper-deck arboreum is one of the main reasons Priest has chosen to live here of all places. It is his home, and he intends to keep his house clean and orderly.
The Garden is a colony that does not belong to any one planetary power, it is a crossroads of the Sol system and it stands under its own largely-independent governance. Being what it is, Titan Garden has grown to be something of a safe haven for crooks and rogues of all kinds, a welcome harbor for thieves and misfits from every port of call. On its face Titan Garden is a bustling hub for commerce and culture, but beneath the surface there's an informal community of organized criminal enterprises and freelancers taking advantage of the port colony as a welcome refuge from the Neptunian Skyguard ships patrolling the void. Despite the abundance of outlaws who call the moon home, Titan has never descended into lawlessness. Wanton cutthroats and trigger-happy hotheads are not welcome or tolerated on the station- fights break out and shots pop off, but you're more likely to walk it off than get hauled off to the morgue, and if you're planning a job it's sound wisdom to take every precaution to avoid civilian casualties. Nobody's gonna tolerate going hot on an amateur-hour botch job, and a big reason this culture was cultivated is because Priest was there to plant the seeds in the Garden's very first days.
Priest is the head of a very old criminal syndicate created to displace larger interests from moving into the power vacuum of a frontier colony and smothering it. His organization doesn't have a mailing address or a large workforce, but it does have history, influence and trust- no small amount of commercial or criminal enterprises have had the idea that they could move into an isolated lunar colony and muscle the folks who got their first out of their comfort or their businesses and take the location or opportunity for themselves. Moving to a new world is a great expense, and even today people who settle on Titan need to leave behind their families, their friends and the protection of their home governments in order to set up shop under a speck of glass far away from help. Being isolated like this leaves a starfarer very vulnerable, and without some kind of protection they have little chance to push back when a bigger fish wants to take a bite out of whatever they've got for themselves- fortunately, Priest and his organization are the biggest fish in a very small pond, and nobody takes a bite out of anyone without their consent.
All inhabited worlds field some kind of defense force around their own world's perimeter, but there are only two worlds in the Sol system who have committed significant resources towards trying to control outer space itself; attempting to put a leash on such a vast, shifting and deadly expanse of irradiated nothingness and exert the will of their planetary authority. The line between "criminal heist" and "good business" is often as thin as whether or not the local authority sanctions the outcome, or if they take a cut of the action for themselves, and this distinction plays a big role in shaping who thrives and who does not. The Neptunian Skyguard claims authority over the Outer Belt, but Titan isn't a world they have formal ownership of. They generally keep their fingers out of the Garden's business, and so the community of outlaws who exist in the shadow of interplanetary commerce walk a fine line between commerce and trouble. Nobody wants to give the Skyguard a reason to start getting nosy or start chasing control of someplace unruly and violent, so a kind of informal code of conduct is maintained among Titan's gallery of rogues, and Priest's group maintains that code.
There's a Quasar droid who is a familiar sight around Titan Garden, consulting with vulnerable local businesses to set up protection from bully-corpos or violent racketeers and scouts reputable crews from the southside taverns to connect with clients who pay handsomely for a job to be done clean and professional-like. He goes by S41NT, and he is Priest's chief proxy representing his organization and his interests throughout the Garden, as well as his ear to the ground in Titan's underbelly. S41NT has been an invaluable companion for Priest, allowing the old vampire to remain secluded while also staying informed of the goings-on in his station- being a vampire himself, Priest employing an Android as his proxy is particularly useful, since it also obfuscates his age and the continuation of his presence on Titan. He prefers not to make himself known; he feels that this is an important practice for not attracting unwanted attention, or worse, Skyguard intervention in his beloved city. Talk of vampires holding court in an interplanetary hub colony would set off the alarms for every homeworld in the system, it would trigger waves of invasive emergency responses that would upturn the social ecosystem on Titan and open up vulnerable starfarers to the kind of opportunistic threats that Priest's syndicate aims to displace. It's a big problem for everyone involved, so one of the other ways S41NT assists Priest is in using his data analysis software to detect and assess the presence of other vampires on Titan- hidden or otherwise. If someone on the station is afflicted with vampirism, sooner or later Priest is going to know about it.
For Priest, his vampire troubles began five hundred years ago. It was another age; Terra was just on the cusp of industrializing, but Neptune had long been Plutoformed by its neighbor and played host to a civilization that wasn't merely discovering space, but learning how to colonize it. Five hundred years ago, when Terrans were just beginning to build ironclad ships, Priest worked the outer bends salvaging technology from the system's core. Neptunians long knew that there was intelligent life closer to Sol, since probes, satellites and capsules from other worlds kept drifting their way into their orbital space. Around this time it was mostly Martian and Mercurian tech, there were a few weird, round Europan probes, but to the children of Pluto it was a mishmash of primitive space junk from distant, developing worlds. The nascent Skyguard had an interest in studying these bits of tech, but there was a lucrative black market for salvage outfits who could find and recover them for the benefit of private interests, like the upstart Quasar Integrated Systems company. Priest worked as a doctor with one of these outfits- you meet a lot of interesting people when you're fishing alien technology out of the sky, striking deals with smugglers and fences and dockhands with a blind eye to turn while you're trying to get a piece of alien tech from your ship's hold to a private warehouse. It was by an extremely specific string of unfortunate circumstances that the modern strain of vampirism found its way to the furthest reaches of the Sol system- Priest and his crew had hauled what looked like an old escape pod out of the ink, and there was a naked, hairless lifeform sealed inside. Priest was fascinated with the idea of extraneptunian physiology, so he would press against the glass to have a closer look. The blood-eyed Martian inside would very suddenly press back.
As the top of the Outer Belt's vampiric food chain, Priest takes it as his responsibility to make sure the vampiric population never grows large enough that it can breach the realm of myth or fiction. It needs to remain implausable to the living world that blood-drinking immortals walk their streets; this need for restraint contrasts with the reality that existing vampires need to feed. With S41NT's assistance, this dynamic has been shaped into a mirror of Priest's code of conduct for the criminal underworld, tailored to the needs of vampires. Under his syndicate's watch, vampiric populations cannot exceed a threshold of one in five hundred members relative to their living neighbors, and the creation of new vampires is harshly discouraged. Extant vampires generally understand the rules, but new vampires don't and they can be hard to keep track of; they're both a risk to bringing unwanted attention to Titan Garden and a hazard to the civilians they feed voraciously upon. Just as is expected of the living rogues who inhabit Titan, vampires are encouraged to carry themselves with discretion and care for the circumstances of the communities around them. You have to hunt, but you should hunt mindfully, and don't leave a mess in your wake. And just like Titan's den of thieves, occasionally you get vampires who show up and believe they're above the rules, who go hot and put everyone around them at risk. Priest encourages his communities to handle their own problems, but sometimes- whether its villain or vampire- the old Neptunian will emerge from his seclusion to handle a problem himself.
Five hundred years is a long time to be alive. In Priest's time aboard the salvage boat, in the tunnels below Neptune, in the shadows of stockyards and cargo holds and port cities, on the ground floor of Titan and his ascent to a penthouse suite overlooking the E-District he has cultivated a great many skills, and shed the weight of his empathy for the short-lived and reckless. Priest carries himself gently, with a soft voice and no particular urgency towards alarm, and these qualities stand out when he confronts a violent problem who he's decided to handle directly. Being a very, very old vampire, Priest is able to carry the full suite of abilities granted by drinking the blood of starfarers from every world- he can walk in sunlight, he has the rapid healing and the blush of life; he has the strength, he has the corrosive touch, he can generate an electrical pulse strong enough to burn out a ship's computer; he can pass through walls, he can survive the crushing impact of a speeding truck and he can fly very, very fast. To be on the receiving end of Priest's quiet ire is a blood-chilling experience, and for those lucky few upon whom Fortune smiles, it is a short one as well. For a local vampire, a confessional with Priest means they've seen their last sunset; their ordeal has come to its conclusion then and there. For the living, for the trigger-happy, hot-headed, blood-soaked and reckless; for the guys who are itching for it and who turn a cold job hot by their own immutable impulse, a visit from S41NT's employer is only the beginning of a very long final chapter of their lives.
Botany and medicine, these are Priest's longest-held interests. As a young scrapper he used to pull some odd packs of seeds out of the crude scientific vessels he recovered from Neptunian orbit- it was often paired with some plaque immortalizing some hope for preserving the future of life on whichever world, he'd later learn, having since mastered one language after another in the span of his unlife. There was a packet of seeds that was always of particular interest to him, it came in a spherical Europan probe. They were aquatic fruit that had a then-unknown capacity for growing on land; the Europans of the time had no practical way of knowing they could do this, but Priest found them, cultivated them and watched them blossom into a round and juicy fruit. On land these plants have a deep thirst for any sort of liquid they can find, absorbing a remarkable range of fluids in through its roots to saturate the interior of its fruit-flesh, and as Priest would discover, in lieu of water this Europan fruit would accept wines and spirits, irradiated waste, liquid fuel, quicksilver and blood. Priest's cultivation of this fruit has evolved with him over time, as he harvested seeds from blood-soaked specimen to re-plant and feed with more blood, again and again, over centuries, culminating in what is perhaps his most prized possession today. Priest has shed his need for subsistence hunting, he finds it beneath his dignity and an undesirable breach of his poise and decorum; instead, Priest sates his thirst for blood by biting into a piece of his bloodfruit and drinking the contents through its skin. Afterwards he'll peel the rind and enjoy the flesh, freshly-exsanguinated so as not to make too big a mess. When he has a guest he'll often invite them to share in his old bloodfruit- it's enriched with all that Sol has to offer, and for a vampire it's a rare opportunity to taste something remarkable. Most vampires who come to know Priest well enough to visit his high-rise penthouse, perched atop a tall tower with no direct elevator access from the ground level, understand the significance of being offered a taste of the all-blood; if you're a guest in Priest's home you would know well enough already not to ask where the blood infused in his sanguine fruits comes from. If you're there, you already understand you are in the lion's den, by careful invitation. You know enough to be a courteous and unintrusive houseguest.
Lifetimes ago, Priest served as a doctor aboard his old junker ship. He was a physician, he knew how the Neptunian body fit together, but he always harbored a deeper curiosity for how these other creature were put together, and what made them tick. His crew collected junk hurled into orbit by distant lifeforms, and surely those lifeforms did not have the long ears or clawed appendages common among the Zephyleer, no. When he found that escape pod, when he ran afoul of his fate at the fangs of an afflicted Martian, he was struck by an impossible curiosity- this giant hairless creature with its beady little eyes, possessing both a Zephyleer mouth and a Medileer beak above it, its appendages straight, its feet short and flat; he'd studied medicine for years and had never known a creature built in such a peculiar way. His curiosity got the better of him, and while that wayward Martian robbed him of his mortality, it set him on a course that would culminate in an unlimited amount of time to learn how all these strange creatures worked, and then, in the centuries after, when the rare opportunity presents itself, to see those inner workings again first-hand. Today, the old vampire relishes any opportunity to relive this discovery and take a specimen apart, piece by piece, one careful cut at a time.
Priest is a long way from his mortality. When a starfarer takes up residence in his lunar colony and they threaten the careful decorum that maintains the Garden's reputation as a safe place to be, unworthy of further scrutiny by any world's power, the half-millennial vampire treats that person as a chance to indulge in his own cruel medical curiosities. Ever calm, ever poised, if Priest sees value in a dead man's life, he will carry them with him back to an isolated little room, one he's certain will not be found by accident of chance, fitted with tile flooring and a large, bright overhead lamp. He's studied the workings of the living body, the way its parts fit together, the way its muscles relax and contract to produce movement- the difference between one species' physiology and another is compelling to him. Pictures, video, holographs or even his own distant memory do not do the twisting little twitches justice. When Priest chooses to embark on a hunt, his end in a breathtaking orchestra of medical cruelty- with perfect composure the old Neptunian will open up his victim as if he were un-making a clock, turning screws and lifting away panels, un-hooking springs, removing a layer of gears and exposing the axial shaft beneath. Carefully he disassembles each component that is not strictly vital in keeping the clock alive, savoring in seeing anew how the curious thing was originally fitted together. It would not do to simply dismantle a broken timepiece, no, it had to stay working while he picked it apart; it isn't the same without the tick, tock, tick. When Priest is satisfied with his work, when he has excised every bit that is not strictly necessary for the perpetuation of life, he will take what is left and he will keep it alive as long as possible, that it might continue to beat its cruel heart and trade the blood it shed in Priest's own city with fresh blood of its own. A dead thing's heart doesn't beat, and Priest does not prefer to hunt dead things; he's got a garden to feed, and he intends to extract as much value out of his hunts as he can. A specimen for every species. They come along so rarely, these opportunities. He does so like to savor them.
Tonight, Priest is scheduled to entertain a guest. His right-hand, S41NT, had brought to his attention that rumors of a growing colony of vampires have begun to spread among the engineers working in Titan's substructure, hidden away in the labyrinth of tunnels and maintenance rooms that ring the themal power generators deep beneath the surface. If the rumors bud from a kernel of truth it poses a significant threat to the autonomy of Priest's beloved city. Tonight, however, one of the city's elder vampires, Sameki, had come to him with an urgent problem, interrupting more pressing concerns; the old vampire has time aplenty, however, so he is willing to accommodate the bicentennial Callistan. At the start of their meeting Priest offered him a ripened fruit from his collection, an offering which Sameki, in his foul temper, had chosen to decline.
"Someone Knows."
Someone was aware of Titan's vampiric community, and they had taken to hunting Sameki's valued associates. These are irreplaceable assets to his business, and their deaths represented a threat to every vampire on Titan. Sameki would not plead, but insist upon Priest to step in and put a stop to the killing of his boardroom bretheren, for the good of the whole colony. He was very insistent, as Sameki often was when he was stirred into these emotional fervors. Priest did not deal in such outbursts; he would enjoy a sanguine bite of his spurned offering and consider the proposal being unloaded at his feet. These vampires, they are old, yes? Sameki affirms that, yes, some of them have lived a century, others close to it. And their deaths, did this alarm the mortals? Sameki knew better than to lie, but he was not in his right frame of mind- of course it threatens the mortals, these were very important men! Priest would inquire, in what way did Sameki draw this conclusion? These associates were not freshly-turned, they had the leverage of a matured suite of vampiric gifts with which to defend themselves. Sameki stammered. And further, they left no body behind, did they? Naught but a pile of ash- what starfarer would be alarmed at a plume of black dust sweeping away on a gust of wind blowing down from the station's weather simulators? Sameki's quills bristled at Priest's dissecting rhetoric. He was easily several times the Neptunian's size, but even in his fury he knew to retain his composure. He was not the lion in this den.
Having exsanguinated his bloodfruit, Priest peeled open its rind, separating a wedge-shaped slice of blue-purple flesh. He extended it on the tip of a claw, an offering for Sameki- the Callistan vampire accepted it. By Priest's estimation, nothing that was happening to Sameki's associates was a breach of conduct worthy of his own intervention. There are always a few too many vampires around, and if an elder cannot defend themselves from whatever is hunting them, then this is no great loss, is it? Whatever has hunted them did not leave a trace of their presence, and so there is no compelling argument that their fates risk exposing the vampiric community to unwelcome scrutiny- Priest involving himself in these affairs would invite more risk of exposure than the affairs were creating in the first place. He considered the matter closed, and with perfect poise and courtesy, invited Sameki to join him in a private box seat for a stage performance at one of the E-District's ornate stage-theaters. Sameki declined, seeing himself out of Priest's home. He was fuming, he was positively apoplectic, but he knew he couldn't let the tiny Neptunian see that about him; if he gave any indication that he might succumb to his outbursts, he knew he would be dead in an instant. He still had a problem on his hands, but now he knew for certain that it was on him to resolve it himself.
That evening, Priest joined S41NT and one of his associates in the shade of a lofty box seat and enjoyed a performance of "The Confessional," a Caelian play from the 2200's that was critical of the Neptunian Skyguard's expanse of interplanetary power. Later they would discuss the situation growing in the colony's substructure, but for the moment they sat lofty and enjoyed the stirring performance put on by the troupe of stage actors from across the Outer Belt. There will be time later for pragmatic cruelty; right now it is time to enjoy something fleeting and beautiful.