Nosferatu
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This city is afraid of me. I have seen its true face. The streets are
extended gutters and the gutters are full of blood and when the drains
finally scab over, all the vermin will drown.
A Treatise on the Probable Origins and Physical Anomalies of Subspecies
Homo Sapiens Nosferatus
The Year of our Lord, 1897
By Claudius Maximus, Clan Tremere.
Do not the Nosferatu share the ability of the Gangrel to establish a rapport
with the lower denizens of the planet? Verily, I have seen a Nosferatu
crouched low amid her sewer haven, staring into a great rat's eyes for
fully an hour. I believe that they have more in common with such creatures
than with the humans from whom they have so tragically devolved.
In any event, it is indisputable that whatever crime the Nosferatu
forefather committed has been at least partially expiated upon the flesh
of his progeny. While the Embrace for most of us is a blessed gift,
endowing us with the boon of immortality and the elixir of potency, the
Nosferatu are instead twisted and disfigured beyond human ken by the
transferal of vitae.
The Nosferatu, whether due to their horrid disfigurement or some other
as yet unknown factor, are to a vampire graceless and crude. The refinements
of the higher clans seem lost on them. Even their brute strength, which
occassionally proves useful, is perverted by their brutishness.
Nonetheless, a certain low cunning pervades the Nosferatu. The clan- for
we of the Camarilla go so far as to grant the Nosferatu equal status in
hopes of bettering the hapless race - is infamous for its ability to garner
and compile data of all sorts. I believe this penchant to be instinctual
rather than premeditated, rather like bower-birds adorning their nests with
all manner of gaudy debris. A Nosferatu overhears a half understood snippet of
information or gossip, and then parrots it amongst his own kind, without--
[The manuscript was never finished, and, indeed, seemed to be interrupted
in progess by the untimely Final Death of Claudius Maximus. Our esteemed
peer was discovered in his sanctum, strapped to his own dissecting table.
It was evident that the instruments of Maximus' death were his own magical
instruments. No positive identification of the perpetrators could be found,
but, scrawled on the laboratory wall in a fluid that Thaumaturgic examination
has proven to be Maximus' own vitae was the message
I AM NOT AN ANIMAL. I AM SOMETHING MUCH WORSE!
Of all the Kindred, the Nosferatu are perhaps the most alien. Other
vampires can walk amidst the mortal crowns and thus maintain at least an
intermittent grasp on their former species. Not so the Nosferatu. They
must lurk below, their view of the mortals filtered by sewer bars.