Rhys is not a well-kempt or well-dressed individual. His most common appearance is so grimy, with dirt-matted blonde dreadlocks and shabby clothes that look third or fourth hand, that the startlnig contrast when he dons his armour and goes into battle leaves even people who know him well to a double-take, doubting that this man is the person they know at all.
It's assumed this is intentional.
I don't talk of my past.
Let this chronicle be but an observation, a telling of what is known and what has been revealed. You'll learn only what I want you to know, until I feel that it's in my best interests to let more be known... right now, it is not.
I wasn't always afflicted with this virus. Oh, hardly a crippling one, and if you've been in this place, this... InterCity long enough you'll know what I'm talking about. I envy the true kindred of myth, creatures of the night that they were. I yearn for the Masquerade, but at the same time, I perfer things as they are. So mnuch easier to not be classed, lumped in with a group.
I'm myself, and that will never change.
While I could choose to be of the shadows, it's hardly introverted behaviour in this day and age. And this is what survival means for a 24th century vampire. The hunters are more vicious and better equipped than the proverbial farmers with pitchforks and wooden stakes.
The charm of the scenario is lost with the entire bloodlust scrawled down on a scientist's notepad. At some point a fool with glasses decided that he had a cure, and now people who seek this alternate lifestyle tremble at the thought of 'blackjack'.
What kind of sick, deranged motherfucker, first designs a virus that drives you to steal precious vitae, then turns back and finds another way to destroy it.
Freaks, all of them.
But if you've been around long enough you know that. What about the person writing this shit?
Frankly there is little to tell. Little that I choose to at any rate. I will say that my family was wiped out.. oh, let's say, a long time ago. Possibly a bandit raid, possibly they were the bandits. Whoever was responsible was long since dead, my memories of the event are shady, blurred.
And with good reason. During this melee, I was wounded, mortally. Sure, modern technology can fix up just about anything, but when you're five hundred miles from the asshole of the world and your options are failed field surgery with a bowie knife or dying in a swamp, you tend to look for option three.
So after being left to perform surgery on myself with a rusty bowie knife, in, curiously enough, a swamp, I was fortunate enough to be found. Now while I was always happy to shed the blood of my foes, why on earth would I drink it? I never so much as got a thril from sucking on a papercut.
But drink I did. The man who found me decided I'd survive with the virus, and thanks to it, I did. Barely enough. It took time to adjust to the lifestyle, and to this day I'm a changed man. Not even a fighter any longer. I've become addicted to the hunt. In a place like this InterCity, it's inevitable, I suppose, but who goes overnight from a man fighting for his life to an everlasting relic with a freakish quirk of science flowing through his veins? Everyone ever afflicted with the virus, I suppose. And it changes you. You lust for the thril of taking down those who you'd consider mere mortals, only you're still one of them.
At least that's what you'd wish to believe. But you're not, no; because they're the prey, and after the first year, their lifeblood alone isn't enough. You crave more. The rush of adrenaline that only fear can bring on. Why? Who can explain it? Only the most timid of the changed take pity anymore, on their hunted.
I guess that's why we're feared, and hunted ourselves. Only the members of the twisted VHG can explain that one.
In any case, I was changed, became what I am. What am I? Sick? Evil maybe? No, just hungry. No-one understands that, no-one who isn't already one of us. Which is why my sire was hunted. I left well before then, but one day the unnoticed presence left the back of my mind, and with a sudden rush of fear from the man who gave me.. this.. I was my own man, and changed forever. Well until the VHG find me, at any rate.
Maybe I could've done something. Maybe I could have at least mourned him.
But I didn't.
It doesn't matter, he was dead.