After the Masquarade

Tannhäuser · Post by **Tannhäuser** » Wed Jan 27, 2016 9:20 pm

Lots of false positives? Government spyware programs rarely stay hidden for long in the real world. Trying any sort of mundane solution to cover up the existance of vampires, beyond following the first two rules of Fight Club, would cause more problems than it would solve.

Honestly, the only reason the vampires stay hidden is because they aren't in power; if they had the secret police to make people disappear, they wouldn't exactly need the masquerade.

Occluded Sun · Post by **Occluded Sun** » Wed Jan 27, 2016 9:26 pm

Except that secret police - or the overt kind - only work if the majority of citizens remain basically law-abiding. If the masses freaked out and started burning down the cities, the vampires would be screwed. And governments only wish they had the powers that high-level vampires do.

If the overwhelming majority of organizations that could detect fiddling or make people aware once it was detected are vampire-controlled, it could be happening regularly and most people would never realize it. Amateurish attempts get uncovered. Skillful players ensure that amateurish attempts get uncovered so that people don't take claims of successful concealment seriously.

Tannhäuser · Post by **Tannhäuser** » Wed Jan 27, 2016 9:48 pm

Vampires would not be in power if torches and pitchforks could overthrow them.

The US government came out on top when a third of the country decided to throw a giant hissy fit a few years back, I'm not terribly impressed with the "powers that high-level vampires" apparently have if they can't do at least as well.

Occluded Sun · Post by **Occluded Sun** » Wed Jan 27, 2016 10:01 pm

Mind control is a pretty game-ending power.

Mask_De_H · Post by **Mask_De_H** » Thu Jan 28, 2016 12:19 am

Who's that Pokémon? It's DunningKreuger!

Mind control is also something that usually requires face to face (or at least person to person) contact. Cameras just failing would be conspicuous in their failure, but, say, the footage getting corrupted after a certain point would not be. Blurred or invisible vamps would give the game away as soon as someone captured vamps interacting with things that didn't visually shit themselves. Being in the halls of power, if they were comfortable enough there, would make anyone openly declare themselves sovereign unless there was some fear of retribution, which there would not be if they controlled the horizontal and the vertical to the extent OS is describing.

Tannhäuser · Post by **Tannhäuser** » Thu Jan 28, 2016 12:31 am

Which always sticks me about conspiracy games: they're cool, but it's hard to imagine any rubric by which someone simultaneously calls the shots and is also able to be exposed and overthrown.

COINTELPRO wasn't some far-reaching power play by the FBI, just an ugly facet of systemic racism in the American government. Its exposure didn't result in the FBI being disbanded.

Occluded Sun · Post by **Occluded Sun** » Thu Jan 28, 2016 12:42 am

It's worth noting that vampires don't need to infiltrate human society. They've been there for centuries, alongside every technological development. The only things that could blindside them are the very, very new - and probably having learned that from experience, they keep a watch on the places new things originate at.

If there were technologies that could expose them, they were probably never allowed to develop.

maglag · Post by **maglag** » Thu Jan 28, 2016 3:07 am

Occluded Sun wrote: If there were technologies that could expose them, they were probably never allowed to develop.

And in the other hand they would support the development of technologies that help them.

Vampires would've been supporting the whole blood donation system since it means the mortals willingly put their delicious blood in ready-to-drink packages.

Mask_De_H · Post by **Mask_De_H** » Thu Jan 28, 2016 4:03 am

Why would they need to do that if they can just take Joe Blow off the street and nobody can stop them? And if they were that integral in shaping human development, why not do it openly so society completely is designed around them (a la Daybreakers)?

This Incubator bullshit was stupid and nonsensical in Madoka Magica, it's stupid in V:TM and it's stupid here.

maglag · Post by **maglag** » Thu Jan 28, 2016 6:32 am

-Being able to have fresh high-quality blood delivered to your doorstep is more convenient than going to the dirty slums hunting down random Joe Blow who may be tainted with drugs and cheap booze, that kind of thing just ruins the taste you know? Just like a lot of humans find it more convenient to buy fresh meat/cooked food from shops than going out there trying to kill a rat/pigion and then needing to skin it and stuff.

-What if society is already shaped around them, and the mortals just don't realize it? Can't rebel against your vampire overlords if you don't know they're there after all.

Mask_De_H · Post by **Mask_De_H** » Thu Jan 28, 2016 7:24 am

maglag wrote:-Being able to have fresh high-quality blood delivered to your doorstep is more convenient than going to the dirty slums hunting down random Joe Blow who may be tainted with drugs and cheap booze, that kind of thing just ruins the taste you know? Just like a lot of humans find it more convenient to buy fresh meat/cooked food from shops than going out there trying to kill a rat/pigion and then needing to skin it and stuff.

Are you retarded? If we're working on a "vampires run shit" system, they wouldn't need to hunt bums. Even if we assume they don't just mind whammy someone into letting them drink, getting fresh blood delivered to your door is called "buying a hooker". Or a deliveryperson. Or a medical professional, if you're stuck on the blood bag thing. Because waltzing up to a fucking blood bank and saying "give me your finest Type O Negative" is going to raise a lot of questions in and out of universe under a Masquerade. They're probably going to have to roll the joint, which is as illegal and time consuming, if not more so than just exsanguinating a random person off the street.

-What if society is already shaped around them, and the mortals just don't realize it? Can't rebel against your vampire overlords if you don't know they're there after all.

Then there is no difference between there being a masquerade or not, because you've already squandered the setting of "our world, but there is X" because you now have to explain how society has been changed. If you don't, then we're at square one with "how the fuck does this actually work?"

Having a secret vampire conspiracy that actually runs everything doesn't make any sense unless there is another secret conspiracy they need to hide from or their temporal/martial power is too tenuous to survive under scrutiny. Even that second one contains a potential conspiracy they need to hide from, it's just people who want to kill them and are potentially very open about it. If you want vampires to just be able to do stuff because they're vampires, just drop the Masquerade. It only exists as we know it because the Dotman was a lazy fuck porting forward a game about fucking wizards that had a masquerade into the modern nights.

OgreBattle · Post by **OgreBattle** » Thu Jan 28, 2016 7:31 am

Will vampires come from certain countries, or be global

Can vampires play in the NBA. be in the military, run for office

Are vampires willing to work with Brazzers

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Thu Jan 28, 2016 7:56 am

Once supernaturals reveal themselves, I think new sports leagues need to be formed. And I start caring about sports.

Mask_De_H · Post by **Mask_De_H** » Thu Jan 28, 2016 8:07 am

OgreBattle wrote: Are vampires willing to work with Brazzers

No, but they will work with kink.com

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Thu Jan 28, 2016 8:30 am

Mask D H wrote:Because waltzing up to a fucking blood bank and saying "give me your finest Type O Negative" is going to raise a lot of questions in and out of universe under a Masquerade.

Actually, our blood banking system is set up exactly the way you'd want it to be if you were a secret vampire conspiracy.

What you'd want is for a certain amount of blood to be thrown out and "destroyed utterly" far away from patients, doctors, or prying eyes of any kind. Well as it happens, we do exactly that. All the excess blood and all the blood that hits its use by date are kept in their packages and disposed of as medical waste - where they are sent to a distant and secure facility and incinerated completely.

The blood is still good when we throw it out, our infection control protocols are incredibly conservative because we want to err on the side of not accidentally giving tens of thousands of people AIDS or something. Once we prep blood to give to a patient, we don't give it to another patient, we just throw the unused bags away. But we don't pour that shit down the sink or something, we send it to special disposal sites. I'm a doctor and I've taken a lot of blood and given a lot of people transfusions - but if there were actual vampires drinking the stuff I throw in the medical waste I seriously wouldn't know.

One thing I do want to say though, is that it's weird to me that people seem to take it for granted that vampires would care about blood types. I can't imagine why they would. Blood types are obscure immune system markers and are only detectable by very specific tuned proteins (that our bodies use to reject foreign cells). You can't taste the difference between different blood types of cows. Cows have different blood types, but I don't even know what they are because no one gives a shit. There are so many facets about blood that would dramatically change its taste that we don't really care about for transfusion because the only things doctors track are whether particular blood is going to save your life or kill you dead.

But when I do a routine blood test, I track a lot of markers that would influence taste considerably. Blood glucose is probably the most obvious - diabetics often have three to five times the sugar content in their blood as normal people. But there's also pH - where people with chronic COPD have more acidic blood. I think questions about how much sugar and vinegar is in your drink are going to be way more important to taste questions than what immune markers some of the cells have. And we have mineral content, where iron and copper levels vary noticeably. And don't forget hemoglobin itself, which in anemic people is less than half of what it is in the healthy and strong.

But beyond that, a lot of chemicals that you eat float around in your blood for a while. When I eat puffed wheat, my next-day urine smells like puffed wheat. And that's because there are aromatic chemicals that pass into my blood stream unmodified and then are filtered out by my kidneys and sent on their way. But if someone drank my blood taken from the period between when I digested the puffed wheat and when my kidneys cleaned my blood of puffed wheat extracts - my blood would smell and taste of puffed wheat. As doctors we don't actually give a shit about whether peoples' blood tastes like garlic or curry, but I imagine vampires would care about that a lot.

-Username17

maglag · Post by **maglag** » Thu Jan 28, 2016 8:44 am

Great explanation Frank! And now I finally have a sig.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Thu Jan 28, 2016 9:34 am

I'm now envisioning vampires targeting people who recently ate the food of their mortal homeland, because they're craving garlic or curry.

In fact, the next camp vampire movie needs to have a coterie trying to decide what to have for dinner, like totally normal people, saying "Italian?" and "nah, had that last night. Curry?" and then the coterie walking up to a restaurant, passing the door and going into the alley to lure diners into.

Mask_De_H · Post by **Mask_De_H** » Thu Jan 28, 2016 9:40 am

Well I've learned something today. Point conceded.

Ghremdal · Post by **Ghremdal** » Thu Jan 28, 2016 10:10 am

On the same topic:
http://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2016-01-26-too ... spoil-plot

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Thu Jan 28, 2016 12:18 pm

@Frank
While you are monologing about medical science stuff . .
How different is animal blood from human blood in terms of composition?
Would there ever really be a reason as to why a vampire could only live on people blood and not animal blood?
Would engrish suckers be able to simply increase their intake of "Black Pudding"?

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Thu Jan 28, 2016 12:50 pm

For the masquerade to work, you don't have to get zero people to spill the beans, you have to have the media and government consensus be that those bean spillers are full of shit.

First off, let's consider the Moon Landing. Obviously, the Moon Landing really happened. You can see the landing sites with an amateur telescope. There are people who believe there was a massive conspiracy, but they are treated as crazy people by he media. Like 6% of Americans claim to think that the Moon Landing was faked. In Russia, where the media is less quick to dismiss anti-American conspiracy theorists, fully one in four people says that they believe the Moon Landings were faked. Nevertheless, these conspiracy theorists have no power, and when a Moon Truther confronted Buzz Aldrin and Buzz Aldrin punched him in the fucking face, people cheered.

So you could have tens or even hundreds of millions of people believing in vampires, and have a vampire beat the shit out of a vampire hunter on live TV and have the general public nod smugly and go on not-believing in vampires. All you have to do is treat the Vampire Truthers the same as the Moon Truthers.

And you know what? There are Vampire Truthers. According to US census data, 4% of the population says that they believe vampires are real. That's nearly 13 million people in the US who believe in vampires, and of course more people in a lot of other countries. If one of them attempted to unmask a vampire in public and got beat up for their troubles, the American media would laugh about it.

Now I know what you're thinking, which is that the Moon Truthers and the Vampire Truthers are vastly outnumbered in no small part because what they believe is total bullshit. That when BoB takes to twitter to rant about flat earthing or whatever the fuck, they are openly mocked because they are wrong. But I would say that the order of causation doesn't point that way. They are treated as wrong because they are mocked, not the other way around. The actual truth value of their claims have relatively little to do with anything.

And for this, I would submit the Iraq War. Did you know that we found active WMD production in Iraq when we invaded it? Not "in reality" but 42 percent of Americans believe that we did. More than half of Republicans think that the WMD thing was real. It wasn't, and the media even admits that it wasn't. But the conservative media only admits that in very tiny type and says all kinds of stuff about Bush keeping us safe that kinda implies that Iraq War II wasn't a giant waste of time, money, and lives sold on completely false pretenses with nothing but fabricated evidence and bravado. Almost half the population is willing to believe a laughable falsehood simply because a lot of people in suits keep implying that it's true without quite stepping over the line into making the case overtly and risk getting factchecked.

Imagine if instead the major opinion leaders in politics and media and corporate fields simply denied a completely true thing. Half the country doesn't know who the Koch brothers are, despite a concerted attempt by the left to expose their (completely real) multi-billion dollar network of conspirators and political operatives. Imagine instead that there was a completely real set of conspirators that the Democrats, Republicans, New York Times, and Fox all decided weren't things to talk about. Like, I dunno, the CIA importing crack cocaine into the United States in the 80s to fund a covert war against democratic governments in Central America? Did you know that the CIA investigated itself and found no evidence of a conspiracy? It's public record that they gave money and guns to active drug traffickers and that these drug traffickers put cocaine on America's streets, but the official stance of the government was that there wasn't a conspiracy as such. And the media just sort of went along with it. When the Mercury News reported on it in the Dark Alliance serires in 1995, the lead reporter's carrier was ruined and the paper was forced to issue apologies over nitpicking about minutiae.

A successful Masquerade doesn't mean no one knows there are vampires. It doesn't mean that no one believes that there are vampires. Probably tens of millions of people are going to believe in vampires with a successful Masquerade. Fuck, tens of millions of people believe in vampires now, in a world where they actually don't exist. A successful Masquerade means that admitting that vampires exist is outside the Overton window of acceptable public discourse, telling the truth about what vampires can and cannot do will not get you on the TV accept as an object of mockery, and outing any specific person as a vampire is a good way to get your ass sued and for talking heads on the local news to chuckle about you getting what's coming to you.

The Masquerade succeeds or fails based on whether vampires are treated as real by people who have actual power. Not by how many thousands or millions of people know or think they know that they exist.

-Username17

Schleiermacher · Post by **Schleiermacher** » Thu Jan 28, 2016 12:51 pm

@Stahlseele:

Vampires are magical. The reason is metaphysical. The harder you work to make them work the way they "really" would the more you highlight how absurd they are from a scientific perspective. Or else you end up with something that's entirely unrecognizable as something that you'd be interested in telling vampire stories about.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Thu Jan 28, 2016 1:10 pm

Stahlseele wrote:@Frank
While you are monologing about medical science stuff . .
How different is animal blood from human blood in terms of composition?
Would there ever really be a reason as to why a vampire could only live on people blood and not animal blood?
Would engrish suckers be able to simply increase their intake of "Black Pudding"?

For whatever reason, domesticated pigs are about the closest match you're going to get outside another primate. Their organs and chemistry are pretty similar, and we use pig tissue for valve transplants and shit. Pig blood groups are apparently similar enough to human blood groups that you could come up with something like Type O Pork Blood to give to humans and not necessarily die of immediate rejection.

That being said, on a chemical/cellular level, pigs are pretty different in a lot of ways. Pig blood cells are smaller and more numerous than human blood cells, and they don't have all the same proteins in them. Pigs have similar clot lysis profiles but don't have the same clot formation times (human whole blood has a noticeably higher blood viscosity than pig blood). Remember also that nutrition is quite different because pigs have functional L-gulonolactone oxidase (allowing them to make their own vitamin C) and humans don't.

If you wanted to get all technobabble with sci-fi vampires, there are any of a number of uniquely human proteins (or uniquely human mutations to proteins found in many organisms) that vampires could arbitrarily have a dietary need for. Were that to be the case, it might be that humans with specific genetic defects like muscular dystrophy or whatever would be useless as food for vampires.

-Username17

hyzmarca · Post by **hyzmarca** » Thu Jan 28, 2016 7:57 pm

FrankTrollman wrote: Now I know what you're thinking, which is that the Moon Truthers and the Vampire Truthers are vastly outnumbered in no small part because what they believe is total bullshit. That when BoB takes to twitter to rant about flat earthing or whatever the fuck, they are openly mocked because they are wrong. But I would say that the order of causation doesn't point that way. They are treated as wrong because they are mocked, not the other way around. The actual truth value of their claims have relatively little to do with anything.

And for this, I would submit the Iraq War. Did you know that we found active WMD production in Iraq when we invaded it? Not "in reality" but 42 percent of Americans believe that we did. More than half of Republicans think that the WMD thing was real. It wasn't, and the media even admits that it wasn't. But the conservative media only admits that in very tiny type and says all kinds of stuff about Bush keeping us safe that kinda implies that Iraq War II wasn't a giant waste of time, money, and lives sold on completely false pretenses with nothing but fabricated evidence and bravado. Almost half the population is willing to believe a laughable falsehood simply because a lot of people in suits keep implying that it's true without quite stepping over the line into making the case overtly and risk getting factchecked.

Imagine if instead the major opinion leaders in politics and media and corporate fields simply denied a completely true thing. Half the country doesn't know who the Koch brothers are, despite a concerted attempt by the left to expose their (completely real) multi-billion dollar network of conspirators and political operatives. Imagine instead that there was a completely real set of conspirators that the Democrats, Republicans, New York Times, and Fox all decided weren't things to talk about. Like, I dunno, the CIA importing crack cocaine into the United States in the 80s to fund a covert war against democratic governments in Central America? Did you know that the CIA investigated itself and found no evidence of a conspiracy? It's public record that they gave money and guns to active drug traffickers and that these drug traffickers put cocaine on America's streets, but the official stance of the government was that there wasn't a conspiracy as such. And the media just sort of went along with it. When the Mercury News reported on it in the Dark Alliance serires in 1995, the lead reporter's carrier was ruined and the paper was forced to issue apologies over nitpicking about minutiae.

A successful Masquerade doesn't mean no one knows there are vampires. It doesn't mean that no one believes that there are vampires. Probably tens of millions of people are going to believe in vampires with a successful Masquerade. Fuck, tens of millions of people believe in vampires now, in a world where they actually don't exist. A successful Masquerade means that admitting that vampires exist is outside the Overton window of acceptable public discourse, telling the truth about what vampires can and cannot do will not get you on the TV accept as an object of mockery, and outing any specific person as a vampire is a good way to get your ass sued and for talking heads on the local news to chuckle about you getting what's coming to you.

The Masquerade succeeds or fails based on whether vampires are treated as real by people who have actual power. Not by how many thousands or millions of people know or think they know that they exist.

-Username17

I've got to disagree. Everyone believes that the CIA imported drugs. This isn't remotely controversial. No one gives a flying fuck. No one cares.

Fuck, I'm pretty sure that Hillary used a private email server. I just don't give a fuck.

No one cares about the lack of WMDs in Iraq, because it doesn't matter.

People care about Bill's sex scandal because it lets them masturbate to fantasies about oval office blowjobs. But they don't care that he was deceptive under oath. No one gives a flying fuck about that, not even the Republicans who were using it to attack him.

No one knows who the Koch brothers are because no one cares who the Koch brothers are. They're not remotely entertaining.

The issue isn't media collusion and control. The Media has long since hit the point where they're in it for the money. The issue is apathy. If your stories don't bring in the ratings, then there is no point to them. There is a limited number of things that the average person cares about.

At the top of that list is sexy people doing sexy things.

Vampires are sexy, the things they do are sexy. The public will eat them up, and so the news will cover those stories, for the ratings if nothing else.

Occluded Sun · Post by **Occluded Sun** » Thu Jan 28, 2016 8:49 pm

I hold Bill Clinton in utter contempt, and even I recognize that he neither lied nor - in the specific context of the hearing - was deceptive under oath. The prosecutor in that case established a very clear, unambiguous, and well-defined meaning of "sexual intercourse" that was practically limited to hetero bits combined.

Granted, he totally lied in the media, since by general standards of sexual activity he totally did have sex.

To return to the topic:

Even if vampires only seized power in the modern world - so that all the folklore and stories associated with vampires are correct - they still would never break the masquerade if they had something to lose by doing so.

If the highest-ranked active vampires agreed that there was no longer a need to hide, then they'd have to believe that either they could ignore their weaknesses or had a specific advantage that made those weaknesses irrelevant.

If vamps started coming out, then something very, very bad would be going on, and humanity would have a real problem.