The Bane

They call you Mage Bane. Your blood hums with a strange power, almost as though it was oppositely polarised from the energy of actual magic. Vampires with access to sorcery that touch you feel a tingling numbness in their skin as your blood roils and writhes in response. You are an anti-magic agent, devouring and nullifying even the strongest of thaumaturgical effects on an individual; all they need is to ingest your blood.

Long Description: You might have first noticed your power by visiting sites that are natural wells of magic, and staying there too long, long enough to notice how charged and at peace you felt. Stone henges; eerie crossroads in the oldest of forests; a seemingly abandoned house will hum to your senses and you will feel it under your skin as you all but reach out and - suck. Vampire's can wear their magic like a royal drape. A drape you find all too easy to tear off.

It is a terrible comfort, to swallow magic, you like to leave it inside of you for as long as you can while you digest it. It's the best sort of comfort, a saturation that is both barbed and pleasurable at once. A lawless horde of colour fills the world, colours that other people will never see - and there's so much of it - all there for the taking. You don't have competition for it, it's not as though anyone else were eating magic near you. So you aren't exactly worried it will run out. There's always more. More to take in, to inhale recklessly, your draughts long and deep as in the power goes and you begin to reek with it.

Around the magic types of the world dance strange half shapes, will-o-the-wisps that hang in the air or clutch at their staffs or light up the treasure in an old temple; each of them aglow with bright fires and brilliant serpents. You've known about the supernatural world for a long time now - might not be too happy about being captive to a type of magic you can't eat: death magic. Necromancy. It tastes foul and wrong, like chewing on the fluffy fungal remains of a plate of food that's been left out for weeks. It provides you with nothing but nausea, and you can't swallow it even if you try. It hangs there like a sickly anomaly in the air, or around an artefact.

You can taste magic. It's addictive, it feels good going down, and oh does it go down... You're able to literally consume it, head on. You can absorb magic passively through your skin or reach out a hand to touch a ward and - ah - pluck it, drag it down into your mouth and chew and swallow, and feel utterly reborn.

You can see when wards crimp and buckle - you physically see magic now, it lights up the air like a nova. About a year ago, that all started. Soon you were spotting different colours dancing past your eyebrows in a blaze of power, at least when you're near especially old magic. You've become something of a desperate connoisseur. It would be beautiful if you had time to really look; magical fire always reminds you of spirits or snakes in the air, writhing around themselves. You might feel conflicted over stripping it from the world but it's so very addictive that it's hard to mind.

Mechanics: One feeding upon you will instantly break blood sorcery that has been placed upon a vampire or a human, and render them immune to it for three hours hereafter. Similarly, a splash of your blood across a basic magical ward (or any object imbued with minor magical effects) will destroy it. Necromantic wards and magic are exempt. For larger, more powerful magic circles or rituals, your arterial blood must bathe the symbols fully - a very dangerous process for you - in order to destroy it. A smear of your blood is enough to temporarily dampen the effects, however.

You are likely to find yourself inexplicably attracted to vampires with magic, even without knowing their power. It does not appear to affect necromancers or vampires, like the Lasombra, who draw on death and the deeper region of Shadowlands for their magic, but it certainly impact Koldons and Tremere. You may discover as the weekend goes on that this is because you are able to swallow magic to heal yourself and regenerate your blood. It is slow and not terribly effective at this stage, but any sorcerer who is able to see it in action will soon realise that the embrace may heighten this into a power that could be devastating on a battlefield against mages or vampires using magic of this world.