The Mole

Like the elders of the Gangrel Clan of vampires, you are able to move through the levels of earth and merge your physical form with the soil, becoming almost insubstantial to hide and to travel. It’s just as well: this world feels alien to you, and too bright. The turning of the age has brought with it belching fumes; impenetrable academia; political rot; and the expansion of western ideals into everything - the world is shrinking, the wild land is dying and the indigenous peoples of it are suffocating. With more financial loopholes than you can keep up with you are finding yourself slowly bound by a system, gasping for the old earth and clawing through the bars of this loud Renaissance cage.

Long Description: As you lay yourself down, the soil is a continuation of your skin, full of frantic whispering life. And indeed: it is a continuation. With a shrug of power that feels not too dissimilar to an egg cracking upon the back of your head - free then to run its hot yolk down your scalp, and over your neck - you are capable of sinking into the earth, down through the soil and all of its uppermost levels. You do in truth, merge with it. From within you feel everything. Beyond the woodland is agriculture: miles and miles of autumn-dry fields and the fruit-sour of cow excrement. Sheep huddle at the hedgerows, cattle sleep. The air is plump and beating with bodywarm life.

But inside the forest, the darkness is still and total; full of a different kind of consciousness. Nothing visible, but it shivers all the same from the grass, from the boles of oak trees, from the murmur of the night air.

You possess an unnatural connection to the earth, and it soothes your everyday fears and anxiety. The world is loud, and has likely victimised you since you first took to rolling about in the dirt and making snow angels in the soil. Contact with bare earth grounds you, and being separated from it for long periods makes you irritable and uncomfortable, or anxious, almost agoraphobic. The world is shrinking, and with it goes the wild places.

If you make skin contact with natural earth (the sole of a shoe doesn't count!) you are able to meld into it. Your consciousness moves through the earth at a quick walking pace, and you can stay buried for up to an hour at a time. However, those with strong senses can still smell or feel the vibrations of your presence in the earth, and if the ground you inhabit is violently disturbed, you emerge as if the very earth gave birth to you. You cannot meld with man-made floors, and rough stone is extremely difficult for you. Currently, you need training from those with equal affinity with the earth to be able to expand your abilities and breadth of surfaces open to you.

About a year ago your powers strengthened. You've found yourself able to learn the history of trees, ground, shrines... all natural objects as long as they are made primarily out of an organic substance - and even certain inorganic metals such as cold iron.

Mechanics: Unfortunately, your captors have rather eliminated your power for the weekend in terms of your melding. However, touch any object with strong natural connections still, such as a wooden chair or a cold-forged blade that has never met the heat of a forge, and you gain insight into how it was made and for what purpose, especially who it was intended for and is there is any difference in who actually uses it most, or who possesses it now. You gain glimpses into its use, almost vision snapshots of what it's done and where it's been.

After the Embrace: You can stay melded indefinitely, and also meld through minerals and hard stone. Still can't bypass Claudius' ward though, which is erected around the mansion. Whoops.