Episode 216 of the Letters Page: Writers’ Room: Disparation Vol 2 # 2

You get a vampire, you get a vampire, everyone gets a vampire

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Vampire Lord Legacy is canon!

This was a fun episode! Frostbite vs the Sanguine Six was a cool fight; hopefully we’ll see some art of the other characters at some point in the future. Unity getting fed into a woodchipper is sticking with me though; best girl did not deserve to go out like that.

I guess it’s time to think of variant ideas for Frostbite Absolute Zero. Playing on his ability to turn other vampires into ice vampires, we could have:

Power: Frostbite deals 1 target 2 infernal damage. A non-character target dealt damage this way is Indestructible until your START PHASE and all damage they deal is converted to cold damage.

Or something that plays on him using icicles to stake vampires:

Power: Frostbite deals 1 target 2 cold damage. If a target is destroyed by this damage, either draw 2 cards or salvage 1 Item card.

RIP Christopher’s luggage D: It’s really not worth flying anywhere, especially internationally.

I just noticed the vampiric Freedom Tower in the background of that cover. I wonder what the F is for. Fang?

“Why is he French?” My thoughts exactly. XD

I really do love the glee with which they approach cheesy, over-the-top edgelord antiheroes.

If you made an android out of blood, would that make it a hemorrhoid?

I’ve grown to like garlic less and less as time goes on, just because it really doesn’t agree with me. Might I be a vampire?

A vampire planet, you say? Like some of… world? Of vampires?

This furniture tangent is legendary.

oh man, nothing worse than getting a bee stuck under your fingernail <.<

Christopher has told me that he did get it back now.

This guy looks a LOT to me like Dmitri from Darkstalkers XD

Slight missed opportunity when they were setting up the story: when I was on a school trip once, a pillar of smoke went between us and the sun, and it didn’t blot out all light…but the sun turned bright red.

I mean, vampire world under a red sun, right?

(Also I totally sympathise about luggage stuff. In high school I travelled from Tasmania to France and back, and the only time I had any luggage issues was going back from Melbourne to Hobart. Fallen at the last post!)

He does. Makes me want to stake him even more.

Be pretty funny to have a character who, let’s face it, is pretty transparently inspired by Superman, end up getting stronger under a red sun XD

Adam’s instinct for what would happen if the Moon turned to dust is really good.

For a non-pseudo-science picture of what would happen if the Moon got atomized:

• First all the fragments and dust would spread out in the sky as a result of the initial impact energy. It would all end up in a ring around the Earth, following the Moon’s original orbit path.
• The ring would probably re-accrete back into a moon, over millions of years. In the meantime, the Earth would have a ring. But over the long term, rings are not stable around the Earth (ironically, to get a stable ring, you’d need a moon!) and would either accrete into a moon or dissipate out into space.
• If the Moon was close enough to the Earth and the pulverizing impact energy was high enough, you could probably get full-sky coverage of dust for a short (geologically speaking) time. In that case, we could estimate how much sunlight is blocked from reaching the Earth’s surface. It would be a general broadband reduction, like a neutral density filter rather than a UV filter.
• If there’s enough dimming, the big problem is plants. With not enough sunlight, you’d see huge dieoffs with major crop yield reductions. Basically the Lady Astronaut scenario.
• Yeah there are life forms that live without sunlight, but the thing they have is some other energy source. Plants on the surface would die faster than they could evolve to use some other energy.

It’s a pretty nasty scenario! Listening to them talk about the initial Vampire World setup story, I was figuring that the big chunk of story after the moonsplosion would have to be the F5 (and glimpses of others) doing disaster relief, trying to help people and stop society from collapsing completely…and all the while, little hints that Something is happening to people, just off-panel.

I like having the reveal with Tachyon - she’s working harder than ever, trying to genetically modify plants to survive, and that makes it impossible for the vamps to get near her, even with Aminia…so they send in Dana.

Last bit of the story has AZ and Legacy trying to escape their friends, and getting turned right at the end. I feel like Blood Countess would have to be happy with the Oracle for showing her all of that!

Given what they said about how Blood Countess would regard the Sanguine Six in Vampire World, I can imagine her (either at the Oracle or in-world) making some kind of speech like Smith’s comparison of humanity to a virus in The Matrix.

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Vampire Lord Legacy, for belated comparison.

Also Vampire Hunter Baron Blade, aka the sexiest form of Blade: File:Sentinels of the Night Baron Blade.png - Sentinel Comics Wiki

But yeah I liked this episode. I liked AZ essentially being a hero just because he’s so exasperated that the F5 just instantly gave up on heroing the second things got just a little bit hard. I feel like timeline-wise this might be the point somebody noted they kept writing AZ as taking the hero route after all any time he had the choice despite all this grumbling, and really started leaning into him being the “ethics guy”.

And the writers really like using the whole “Ryan has to play on his friendship with Meredith to somehow kill her” plot between this and the Visionary’s Universe Tachyon in the next issue, don’t they.

This just came to me well after the fact, but I realized they totally discounted the possibility of vampire-werewolf war from my letter when they were creating this world. No moon means no werewolves!

Oh well, I bet it’ll happen in the main universe at some point when Apex gets sick of Magistra Damaris (however that’s spelled, I think we’ve seen it on a Rook City Renegades card but don’t recall which).

Moonless Night iirc, but didn’t we get an explanation on the back of Apex’s event that we saw?

Just checked it out. Episode 191 confirms it’s spelled Magistra Damaris. She’s depicted on Blood Magic’s Boon, right next to Moonless Night in Update 21. I thought we might have seen flavor text attributed to her, but maybe I was mistaken.

And yes, Update 23 has the Collection side of the Apex event that mentions suppressing the moon to force the werewolves back to human form. So no wolfies in Vampire World!

Isn’t the moon technically all around them though?

“No moon means no werewolves”

Bah, you cretin! The great Baron Blade has suffered more from the loss of the moon than any so-called werewolf ever could! But simply to prove your ignorance, I shall now adapt my Reversed Regression Serum to re-instill the power of my Lunar Photon Collector into these mutants, and they shall be permanently transformed into their superhuman lupine appearance! Now tremble at my genius, fools!

I think we’re mixing up a Schmeese’s Cup of (Pseudo) Science and Magic. The werewolves’ curse is predicated on the full moon, right? Never gonna see that on Vampire World.

I guess the other part to consider is if there are big enough pieces of the Moon still in orbit to reflect some of the solar energy and provide moonlight that way. Maybe make some kind of weird almost-werewolves?

If madness caused by the moon is Lunacy, then madness caused by the asteroid-like chunks of a shattered moon… actually I think that would still be called Lunacy, since Luna is the proper name for Earth’s moon, just as Sol is the proper name for our sun (makes it kinda weird that we don’t call the planet Terra more often). If somebody blew up Venus and created a second asteroid belt between Mercury and us, we probably wouldn’t call that the Second Asteroid Belt or the Inner Asteroid Belt… we’d probably call it the Venus Belt, and if there was a cult who worshipped Venus (as a planet, rather than as the brightest “star” in the evening sky), and they drew magic power from their rituals, then even if the rituals stopped working, they would probably continue worshipping the Venus Belt. And who is to say the magic would stop working? There are equally valid pataphysical arguments for either outcome. Damn, I really want to writeboth versions of this setting now…

So have your version of Baron Blade with his Moon Beam go by “Lunatic” now, driven mad(der) by his success destroying the Moon!

Lasers work by pumping energy into a material that is directly between two mirrors, one of which is partially transparent. The material, the “lasing medium,” has to emit light at some wavelength in response to the energy input. The other thing you need is to make sure that the mirror separation distance is an integer multiple of the wavelength. So, the lasing medium emits light, it bounces between the mirrors, and every time it goes through the gain medium there’s constructive interference, building a brighter and more coherent beam. (Plus stuff with Einstein coefficients.) You don’t have to build all the constructive interference, but it helps. There are variations with one mirror, for instance, or a fiber loop that just circles around. Eventually some of the light escapes out the partially transparent mirror, and that’s the beam that zaps out, pew pew.

So anyway, during a full Moon, the Earth and everyone on it are located right between the Sun, a source of energy, and the Moon, a mirror. So werewolves must be a lasing medium, and the rest of humans aren’t.

Runs away

I think you’ve just written the backstory of Alpha 2000! Werewolves with frikkin’ lasers!

Not to question your highly accurate Werewolf science, but what is the partially reflective mirror in this scenario? And what is the “beam” that is being projected?

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Not quite, what I am saying is that werewolves are frikkin’ lasers! Because SCIENCE!

@skywhale Yes, those are good questions… Maybe they aren’t emitting a beam. It’d be a real shame if a werewolf laser beam hit any passing cosmic entities…

I think we should all agree that for safety purposes one should never point a laser OR a werewolf at another person. Oh, and use protective eyewear when working with either.

This entire thread is reminding me of this XKCD “What If” article:
https://what-if.xkcd.com/141/

" If you were standing in the path of the beam, you would obviously die pretty quickly. You wouldn’t really die of anything, in the traditional sense. You would just stop being biology and start being physics."

So, I had a thought. Threre was a “cosmic dust storm” wrecking the world but enough plants, animals, and humans survived that it was not an extinction event.
It was Akashbuta, she flashed back to the dinosaur extinction event and used her energy to keep life on Earth.

Frost Bite yelling at Paul for going full on evil because of one little curse makes me think Setback would be one of the first vampires to join his faction. I also figure Pete’s luck +/- powers would also cause humans near him to “accidentally” die so he would have access to blood but not personally kill or make new vampires.

I can see Akash being in a situation similar to Poison Ivy back during the No Man’s Land arc in DC, where Ivy ended up taking over one of the bigger parks and turning it into a refuge for children.

Hmmm…

So did C&A mention the fates of the Prime Wardens in Vampire World? Because I just had a thought about them. Ra and Fantatic are definitely not vamps, as I think even vampire Tachyon couldn’t survive getting close enough for long enough to bite them. Cosmic might have been off planet when stuff happened, or is trying to minimize the damage (which is also what Tempest is doing). But what if Argent Adept got bit and turned? What if the remaining Wardens had to team up with Akash, originally in a “enemy of my enemy” situation to take down Drake, and then kept together because they together are the last, best hope for getting Earth and life through this long night.

I mean, that sounds like a great concept for a fanfic, if you’re in the mood to do a bit of writing…

Most of my college years was spent doing crack crossover fanfiction on the old anime FFML. I’m sticking to my own stuff, these days.

Though if Christopher ever wants to subcontract out writing novelizations of some big Sentinels storylines…

A lot to say on this episode as well, now that I’m caught up to it. I think a lot about, for lack of a better term, the science of supernatural creatures; it’s acceptable that C&A are loose with this kind of lore, since comics only try so hard to make sense or be realistic, but I do like to try and Justify things a little more.

From a scientific perspective, the problem with a large number of vampires is that, especially with much of the sun’s light being blocked out, the vampire population will rapidly deplete the accessible sources of useful energy. Plants would no longer grow, and anything not in a seed vault would be permanently extinct even if the cloud eventually cleared. Vampires would rapidly run out of people, animals, plants cultured to produce blood, combustible fuels to operate steampunk devices, and any electrical supply not tied to a geothermal or hydrodynamic stationary location. Technology would not be able to save the vampires for long, and most fictional magic systems come with some sort of cost for power, so it’s likely this couldn’t fix the problem either.

Vampire unity is the same as regular unity, except her power signature is red instead of pink.

The city should lean into the gothic vibe and be called Mega Therion.

“a thing from another hero or villain”…like Bugbear’s Bloodstone perhaps?

Christopher is absolutely correct. Garlic is wonderful…I particularly like the little jars of minced garlic.

Bold of you to assume Bugbear will ever be in a story or get referenced again.

He certainly should. He’s exactly equivalent in game representation to Biomancer, and C&A never shut up about him!