The Prophet

As a child, when the visions came you couldn't control them. Not when they happened, nor the situation you'd be in at the time of the bodily and mental arrest. It's like ducking your head underwater - local amplification but the loss of the rest of the world. Everything around you distorts, becomes muffled, that's the warning you get. Better as hell not be swimming out in the ocean when it happens, or be on the back of a horse with the hedgerow blurring by your shoulder. Now, you’ve gained some mastery over them, although they’re no less painful when they hit. Your power can unite other seers or oracles and bind them in a single, amplified vision for clarity. A skilled vampiric oracle should well be able to direct such a force.

Long Description: You've always thought of dates as pins holding down the past, which would otherwise drift and lost its shape; time is so much less linear than people realise it is. Most visions you have of the future are subject to change, because people change their decisions all the time. If you ask a question of the universe "What will happen in May?" you get so many confused answers it's like being in a fever dream. But go ahead and ask "If Mary succeeds in her campaign, what would the town look like in spring?" That's better. That's the What If based on a certainty. If X happens, what does Y look like. Not “will X happen”.

The universe works with choice and motive, for how you tap into it. You've learned how to ask the best questions, because only then can you get the best answers. There’s a design to everything, but it’s flexible, bendy. The future’s the hardest to question, but the past and present are easier. Just with a well worded question, the answers come freely. Often in symbols, but you’ve gotten good at interpreting them.

The laughing irony, the sweet irony, some would say, is that you can never see your own path. Just the path of others.

You used to think this was a gift. A way to help people reroute their fates and cast off the shadow of an oncoming storm. The disinterested observer in you stood off to one side as the flames went up in your life and the roof of your life collapsed in, burying you with it. Humans, just humans, could be monsters.

You used to pull faces in the mirror. Now you just stare.

Sitting up on your makeshift bed, you'd hoped the afterlife, if there was one, would be gentle; your face in those last days had the look of having forgotten what that was like.

Why? For you, like so many of your fellow humans captive at this auction, your gifts changed about a year ago - they strengthened, turned even wilder - and even before then the world had turned against your kind, against you, for far less. A hundred ills paid, a hundred proverbial - or real - stones thrown. You've been a pariah and a witch, a demon and a devil. When people stop seeing someone as human, they treat you like an animal.

The visions have become painful. No longer are they the snatches of a clean future or a clear past with you separate from it as an observer. Instead you are dropped into another life - many lives - in rocketing intimacy as if you were living it yourself. You are these people, experiencing the trauma of their lives first-hand. And oh, how much pain is in this century.

You clung to the snapshots of love when they came, or peace, whenever the visions featured them, the few things that restored your faith in humanity. Because the darkest things people do to one another - to you, in or out of visions - scars. No amount of things seen as an observer prepares you for living it as the person. And you feel as though you have lived a hundred lives at this point, every night. When your visions took a dive into the extreme you didn't have time to mask the change to the people around you. You couldn't pretend to be coping, not fast enough. Since then (or even earlier, if this happened to you younger) you've barely survived, moving from place to place as a nobody, homeless and starving, as people hail you as a witch or demon. Or perhaps in all of this gained you a different sort of attention, and you've been the curiosity of the aristocracy, hidden away?

Hard to remember, really, your own life, the rare gleaming pearls that the tide hasn't yet come yet to reclaim in the ocean depth of everyone else. You feel like you're losing yourself. Your own life seems so insignificant compared to the breadth of everyone else.

Mechanics: Twice per night, you can ask the main Storyteller (aim for me, Orion) a question of the universe. The answer will be described to you off-game, but you may then re-enter roleplay to experience it as the character seeing it play out first hand in their mind.

If you are working with a larger group of participants, joining them all in mind for a mutual vision, come grab Orion to narrate the outcome to the group. More oracles or vision-associated vampires uniting with you will bring even clearer results, and a larger description, although your power by itself is rather noteworthy.

You might use techniques such as casting the bones, reading predictive cards, utilizing mystic boards, studying astrology, or undergoing drugged hallucinations; most often, your ability is sporadic and involuntary. Although you might require some sort of ritual, depending on your own particular method of prognostication, most often your glimpses of pivotal moments in the future come without warning. You might be harassed by distant sounds echoing backwards through time, or you might receive terrifyingly vivid mental images of a single future moment.

Some visions hurt; it's hard to predict which ones and when it will come, but you experience the worst sort of physical dysphoria (immediately preceding a throbbing head pain) on any visions that concern the topic of betrayal.