The Fury

Your anger feels like a tangible thing, raging in the shadows of your soul, clawing at your consciousness in a bid to find release. Others can taste it in your blood, your sweat - and even your tears.

Long Description: Your anger is different. It’s dangerous, it hurts people, and you can’t figure out why. You’ve spent your whole life trying to control it, terrified of losing focus - because of what you’ll see if you let go. After you’ve come out of a snap and calmed down it's as though you've surfaced from a red fog, and there’s a rushing sound in your ears. It’s not even that you cause damage - as far as you’re aware you’ve never lain a hand on anybody. It’s everyone else who’s the danger.

When you’re angry, the people around you change. They become even angrier. The best of friends fly at one another, all fists and fury and spitting words, saying things they’ve only dreamed of saying to each other. If you don't calm down and control yourself, before long they’ll do the things that hurt the most to one another, the things that create the most pain - physical or emotional. It doesn’t last long, but it doesn’t need to. You’ve lost someone you loved this way, perhaps your own father snapped and killed your mother, or your sibling; or a best friend was joking a little too satirically, and the tavern erupted in anger, irrationally and absolutely destroying them in a late night mob. You blame yourself entirely. You’re the common denominator - every time it’s you.

It would be easy if you could just stay calm, but it’s so difficult sometimes. You feel anger like a physical thing inside you. It rises, and your own breath grows hot and starts to hiss and crackle, your ribcage expands in heat. When you’re angry, everyone within a few metres of you grows restless, irritable. That’s how it starts. If you don’t calm down the next thing happens. Then the next. Before you know it people are at one another’s throats.

It’s ruined your life. It’s ruined the lives of everyone around you, really of anyone who you’ve come into contact with. You’ve trained yourself to manage your anger with an iron cold grip that other people can probably only dream of - but sometimes, even that’s not enough.

In the last year it’s gotten worse: when you share bodily fluids such as blood, saliva or otherwise, you don’t need to be angry. The recipient of that exchange undergoes the same emotional spike into the worst of their own anger, just by tasting it. You can’t even kiss someone without them changing, they become someone you barely recognise

Mechanics: If a vampire feeds on you, they are likely to enter a Frenzy. The amount seems to have an effect: just a sip, and the effect is delayed - it might take five or even ten minutes to ramp up before that vampire is truly furious, and begins to lash out verbally at their companions. Several deep glugs, however, they might enter Frenzy on the spot, throwing you out the way - or clutching you tighter, tearing first at you before putting you and everyone else in terrible danger.

Your anger will affect any character nearby, including other mortals. Various things might have an effect of calming you down, from vampiric disciplines to human efforts to help comfort or rationalise the situation before it gets really bad. Sometimes though, nothing works and you yourself have to bring your soul back from the brink - or be totally knocked out, and come around in a minute. “The Kiss” works on you however, and being plunged into a place of unadulterated pleasure might do it - at the cost of that vampire feeling the effects of your blood. (The Kiss is the dreamy confusion and temporary amnesia a mortal feels when a vampire feeds on them; it conveniently inspires immense pleasure in the victim, and they do not remember the feeding event itself.)