The Voice

The heights and depths of your songs carry powerful emotions, and it can manipulate the emotions of those around you. With magnificent arias or oration, you raise others to the heights of passion; black melancholy flows from your melodies of despair. The part of this power you cannot control ties into the banks of memory - both yours and theirs. The closer you come to perfecting your voice, and the more enthralling the performance, the harder it is to remember your own personhood. Day by day you are becoming what they always wanted: an object of performance, beautiful but empty. How long until you are nothing but song?

Long Description: All those in the hearing range of this power feel an intense emotion of your choice, related to the subject of your performance. It is temporary, but the effect lingers long enough after the song has ended for enough minutes that a listener may go on to have a very different night than first begun.

While the song is active the emotion is overwhelming, summoning a rush of memories, images of events that inspired similar feelings in the individual’s past; it plays out in strange relief behind their eyelids, and for a moment they might as well be back in time. For everyone who can hear your song is stirred by a memory, vivifying it in time and bringing back the details of faces, names, places and sounds that the listener might have thought lost to them. Conversations fill out, laughter becomes richer in the memory, details spring forward that might help recollection of difficult or traumatic events.

Meanwhile you were made a scapegoat, jealousy coveted and contained, forced to perform, even driven into lethal danger - probably being blamed for someone’s besotted advances on you. Stirring emotion of this depth in an audience is something you have learned to fear; the mind of an audience so unpredictable, and a song meant to bring peace and love might well be horror to one, or infuriating to another. You’ve been “gifted” with the impossible ability to force an emotion into an audience, but you might well have perfected it out of survival, and for your own protection, because when you’re singing without conscious thought, the results can be anything - and an unpredictable ear is a dangerous one.

By the charms of music and the echo of their song, sirens were said to detain travellers, and make them altogether forgetful of their native land. You don’t know if sirens exist, but this is your experience of it. In the last year your powers have grown, and now, for every memory that is sharpened by your song, another seems to fade - it grows dim and cold in the listener, far away in their heart. 

Once, people could come to you for solace, sharpening the fading memories of their loved ones and old experiences. Now it is unpredictable, a song meant to inspire joy might make the listener forget a memory that brought them grief. A warsong to inspire bravado might make them forget a time they felt powerful. A lullaby lamenting things lost might make them altogether forget a memory where they shared love with a child, a spouse, a friend. 

You have been called all manner of things, and perhaps even attacked by people who claim that you have stripped away parts of their mind. Things can’t go on this way, you don’t know who to turn to; only recently you’ve discovered that for every day you go without singing, you become confused in the mind, your recollection for language stumbles and certain words - things that should be easy words, names for things like tables and chairs, the sky and that bird over there - are beginning to fade. 

They come back when you return music and singing to your life, but lethargically, grudglingly, and some words and meanings of words you have to relearn all over again. The world is a large and expanding place, and it’s becoming more alien to you the more you try to hide your gift - or rather your lifelong curse.

Mechanics: If you are forcing a certain emotion into a song, announce your attempt verbally by calling out in a clear, loud voice: “Off Game - human special ability: The Voice - I am singing to inspire emotion” and then state the intended emotion before beginning to sing. If you do not do this other players may listen and decide for themselves what emotion the song would inspire in their character. This power affects all creature types, even ghosts.

You can channel the full force of your ability into a song sung very close to a singular person audience, perhaps directly into their ear in a low lullaby or lilting voice. When done in this manner they can select one memory of choice and have it sharpened, the recollection improved drastically, but it’s at the cost of another equally important memory losing a similar level of detail.

The Anomalies of the Blood

A dossier of abnormalities recorded from kine* born under the effects of the Long Night, otherwise known as The Black Sun, The Black Dawn, etc. All subjects display abilities beyond normal human limitations - most unique to the individual. 

Claudius has also requested it of me that we should note the following effect has been observed from all kine collected: upon feeding on the subjects afflicted with anomalous blood, Cainites experience a heightened emotional and visceral reaction that lingers beyond a usual feeding. This could be an invaluable asset to the Auction. 

*Note - “kine” is, of course, the name we Cainites give humans.

The Voice

Observation Summary 

It can be difficult to define the limits of certain blood anomalies, especially then they concern emotion. The subject appears to be able to influence the emotions and even memories of both kine and Cainites in the vicinity, through the manner of song. With a lullaby, they can put even the most conflicted soul into a state of deep peace, and inspire courage and hope with a rousing anthem. Such songs are liable to come with memories associated with their linked emotions, hurling them into the front of the mind if you are to listen. One finds themselves treading the ground of their greatest losses or fondest nights, as if it were happening all over again before their eyes.

Detailed Account

Whilst this power is both dangerous and supremely useful (consider a song of daring and inspiration moments before a battle were to start…), it can be contained. With a suitable gag, the subject is unable to exact this power over others - and it is for this reason that I suggest the subject should be bound thusly at times with discretion and clear heads are required. They should not be underestimated; upon my first meeting with them I found myself completely caught off balance when I asked them to display their abilities, and I consider myself to have excellent control. It seems that no matter the age or power of the Cainite, the Voice will reach them.

It is perhaps not surprising to hear that the subject has spent much of their life as a caged songbird. Not only is their power potent, they have a delightful singing voice which I can only assume is part of their gift. Then again, it could just be luck that both qualities aligned so well. They tell me of being likened to an angel in their youth - placed in choirs and treated with awe bordering on reverence. Such kindness was not to last. 

Upon reaching puberty and taking steps into adulthood, their ability to twist emotions with a song was no longer an act of purity. People began to realise their voice inspired other feelings too, awakening base desires or kindling heart-rending sorrow. It was around this time that they found themselves in a position similar to many of our gifted kine; a plaything of the wealthy. Such an ethereal and seductive power was sought after by royal courts and powerful dignitaries. The subject recounts performing in more cities than they could name; sometimes they weren't even told where they were going.

As they grew older, the blood anomaly grew hungrier. No longer content to bloat certain emotions and revisit long lost memories, victims of the voice found that other memories had faded. Whatever emotional moments of their life that stood as an antithesis to the intention of the song were drained of colour, like a dream that you struggle to hold onto after waking. The subject found it difficult to stop once they started singing - the song taking on its own life heedless of the singer's desires.

The subject tells me they are afraid of it, to a degree. When they sing, they often forget things; where they are, why they are singing - sometimes even aspects of their identity. Parts of their own memories slip away. They describe their voice as an entity of its own - using their flesh as a host. It is a sickening sensation. They tell me that on occasion after performing, they find themselves overcome by the urge to vomit or a feeling of dizziness. It is my belief that these effects are simply the blood anomaly itself growing at a rate the kine is not able to keep up with. It might be that with training or indeed a guide of some sort, they will master this power before it masters them first.