The Hound
Your sense of taste and smell is unparalleled and unnatural. Tasting enough of someone’s blood makes you able to determine certain things about them, even what other people who share their blood biologically, or vampirically, might be doing. You can locate a missing child or person by consuming a measure of their parent’s or relative’s blood; you can pick out a month old scent in a crowd; but the more you use your exceptional gift, the closer it brings you to something else, something that has dogged your steps and dreams all your life.
It started out innocently enough. You wound up bumping into people all the time. You found places you shouldn’t. You’d appear, quite coincidentally, where they were. It’s not that you followed them home. You followed your nose, sometimes to a house you’ve never been before, driven by the same insatiable need to. Once you reached the end of the trail, you could relax, and leave.
Scent is different to you than it is to other people. You have an exceptional sense of smell, you can usually tell how long a wooden chair has been vacant from a bottom sat upon it, and if you’re familiar with the person, you can match the scents.
Unfortunately appearing in silence outside of a family’s home, or at the edge of the garden where a child is playing - a child you interacted with earlier that day - upsets people. You’ve been accused of things, driven out of places, perhaps even attacked, by concerned parents, jealous spouses, and furious acquaintances.
You learned rapidly to tell the difference between flora and fauna, from one person from another, even once-organic objects sing to your senses with remarkable clarity.
Blood carries the most in the way of information. It’s stronger than using scent alone, or tasting old sweat. You could follow someone with sweat or an article of their clothing. But tasting blood lets you discern things that even a dog couldn’t: what the person eats or drinks regularly, whether they have any blood-borne illness, who their children are, their parents, siblings, relatives, and finally, where they are now in the world. That last takes the most blood, a good half tankard of it.
When you have enough blood, for a split second after drinking it, it’s as if you can see out of the eyes of the person it belongs to, wherever they are in the world. Even more blood, and you can use it to taste who else belongs to that hereditary line. In the last year it’s gotten so strong that you can drink a measure of someone’s blood and use it to track not just them (though usually they are standing with you in the same room providing their blood), but a blood heir or close relation of theirs, to wherever they are in the world. You get images in your mind, like snapshots of locations and culture, music that is being played there or a taste in your mouth of the food eaten in the location, significant door numbers, streets and ideas.
Drinking blood is not an easy sell however, and eventually superstition catches up. You’re not safe from your fellow people anymore. You’re feared, you disgust people. Which is sad, and ironic, that people are the biggest threat to you when there is so much else out there that you can smell that they don’t even know exists. You don’t have names for most of the creatures of this world, not the ones that shouldn’t exist, but you know their scent.
Which brings us to The Scent. The big scent. It’s not a person, it’s not anything you’ve smelled before in this world, except itself.
You don’t know what it is, but it slides underneath it all, it weaves all these people together along the road of your life, the ones that you keep bumping into, using normal humans to mask its own tracks. It’s been there all your life, ever since you were a child, ever since you can remember.
Sometimes it’s even frightening. It comes and goes, but sooner or later it’s back. Just there, some way behind you, all edges and cold planes. You used to dream about It, but the dreams are difficult to describe to a normal person, because they don’t see scent like you do. They’d think you insane, and right now, being insane is very dangerous.
You don’t think it wants to be found. You don’t think humans - or even vampires - are meant to see it. (Oh yes, you know vampires exist; they smell completely static, unnatural, even in some of their cases cold like ice - while others might be rotting. But they don’t smell particularly like a living person. Just another thing dressed in human scents, if they’ve been moving amongst them or recently feeding.)
And the more blood you consume, the closer it brings The Scent.
Mechanics: Ingest a drop of your target’s blood to discern limited information about the target. Ingest a lot of blood to discern deeper information about the target, or determine information about targets who share blood relation to them (including direct childer of a vampire, or information about their Sire). This power can be dangerous if the blood is tainted with disease or other effects.
It is presumed that all mundane tracking by following a recent scent is an automatic success, unless that target was Obfuscated. Obfuscation leads you around in circles and confuses your senses. You can overcome it by gaining the direct sample of that individual’s blood.
A limited taste provides all of the following information:
State of health
How much blood is currently in the subject’s system
What type of creature the blood came from
If the subject is a vampire, and you have a vampire explain to you the following concepts narratively, you may also determine:
The subject’s generation
Whether the subject has ever committed diablerie
How recently the subject has fed
You can gauge the strength of any blood bonds or partial blood bonds the target has, including the bonds created by participating in the Vaulderie. You do not know to whom the subject is bound, nor whether the bonds are mutual, but you do know the number and severity of the bonds.
A deeper drink provides all of the following information:
The true name of one biological offspring or a vampiric childer (successive drinks are unpredictable in that they might provide a second identity if there are many, and third - or do nothing - and it is a lot of blood to be chugging for this; ultimately the person who’s blood you’re using has the final say, negotiate between you the outcome which would drive the best roleplay for the night in regards to the most fun for everyone involved)
The current location of the above child(e)
The ability to see briefly through that child(e)’s perceptive faculty as they are experiencing the world. You do not know if this is felt by the target.
You can gauge the strength of any blood bonds or partial blood bonds the target has, including the bonds created by participating in the Vaulderie. You learn the identity to whom the subject is bound, and whether the bonds are mutual.
