MORTIS

Mortis is an Ananke Malkavian living in Minneapolis in the year 2022. He lives with a large group of other Anarch vampires, including his blood-brother. The entire household is in a band called Tornado Sideshow that performs primarily punk and rock gigs. Mortis is proficient in many instruments, but primarily plays the guitar. He resides in the basement of their shared home with his brother, Sarasti, with whom he shares a Trophy Room typical of his bloodline.

The Ananke Malkavian bloodline is known for their use of a form of divination involving fresh gore, which makes the feeding ritual more complex and risky. They also are known to keep Trophy Rooms in their havens, which are quite literally rooms containing bits and pieces of the divination they've done, or simply their best catches while hunting. Mortis and Sarasti's trophy room is hidden away in the basement, and contains mostly bones, taxidermy, and also a giant pile of suspiciously moving flesh that has been fed vampiric vitae several times. Mortis carries around bones that he rolls like dice to tell the future quickly when there isn't any fresh prey around.

Details

Pre-Embrace

Prior to his Embrace, Mortis was a musician making small-time money playing gigs while working on a higher degree. He went by a different name that has now been long forgotten. He often went to live music, preferring punk and rock shows for their high energy, and also spent a little time doing minor mending and tailoring jobs to earn some spare change that didn't go towards his education.

Embrace

Mortis was Embraced in the late 1980s at an underground punk show that had gotten nasty. An attack had broken out, and a Malkavian in the crowd had taken it upon themselves to "rescue" a few of the injured by Embracing them. Those two lucky people were Mortis and his brother Sarasti. Their sire, named Viscera, is a well-known and mostly respected Ananke Malkavian with extreme skill in all Perception-based abilities. He frequents the Minneapolis music scene and lives in a small house with a Brujah named Vince, who plays the role of adoptive sire to many of the other members of the coterie.

Appearance

Mortis has an affinity for fashion. He likes to dress in wildly impractical and over-accessorized outfits, generally leaning towards the punk style and other alternative fashions. He sews a lot of his outfits himself, sometimes modifying them ont he fly.
His hair is mostly black and cut in a choppy style. Most days he uses a bit of product to help it stand up a bit more. The pieces that hang down on the sides of his face are permanently bleached (with the help of a nearby Tzimisce), and he re-dyes them every morning. The color he picks is merely based on a whim, and he doesn't use gloves or towels, so his hands are stained the rest of the day, and there are many colorful handprints and smudges all around the house.
His irises are so dark that they appear black. He has an unnerving tendency to stare wide-eyed regardless of the situation, giving him a rather creepy vibe. He often wears dramatic black eyeliner as well.
Mortis has many tattoos of stitches, running around every joint on his body as well as in a select few other places where he has been injured in the past. He wholeheartedly believes that his body and soul are being held together by these stitches, and that if they weren't there, he would simply begin to unravel and fall apart at the seams.

Behavior

Much like the typical Malkavian, Mortis is insane. He has to actively hold himself back from shredding open corpses on the spot, be they animal or human, and it only gets more difficult the more fresh the body is. He is obsessed with death and collects trinkets and mementos from his hunts to put in his trophy room. His deepest desire is to figure out why Kindred have been kept from true life or death and must remain in a state of unlife. He believes there must be a true calling to being a Kindred; a true purpose for his existence.
One of his more difficult derangements gives Mortis a sort of manic depression. When he completely fails at something, he often falls into a deep state of apathy, losing the motivation to put effort into his appearance or interactions. This lasts for an indeterminant amount of time ranging from a few days to several months in the worst cases. Immediately after this passes, he is flung into a manic fever, doing everything with twice as much energy and chaos as before. In the same amount of time as the preceding depression took, his mania will fade back into normal behavior.
In general, Mortis is a cheerful and chaotic sort of person. He likes to be loud, and he's deeply opinionated. At the same time, he's caring, and will go to the ends of the Earth for the people he cares about.

Music

Mortis has a deep and emotional love of music. He plays the guitar, but jumps around to other instruments as he desires. He performs with his band when he can, and spends a lot of time writing new music in the studio in their basement. His sound-based synesthesia makes writing music an entirely immersive experience, visualizing colors and shapes as he hears the notes.
Mortis tends to get a little bit crazy onstage. He wanders around mid-song, completely unable to see due to his synesthesia blazing with the overwhelming amount of noise, often knocking things over in the process. His brother does the same, making their guitar cord clotheslining a real hazard. He has fallen offstage mid-song several times, and when cordless guitars have been involved, he has wandered fully out of the building and down the street.
He also moonlights as a guitarron player for local mariachi bands when they need substitutes. He shows up wearing the closest match to their outfits as he can (he owns a good many) and knows almost all of the standards by heart. His memories are fuzzy, but mariachi is the music he grew up hearing. He also speaks fluent Spanish.

Notes

• Mortis enjoys keeping ladybugs, but his approach is unsettling to most. He likes to buy them live and allow several of them to live within his lungs, as Kindred don't need to use them. Sometimes they reach the top of his windpipe, and he coughs them out at random.
• Whatever his preferences may have been in life, in death Mortis finds himself unable to find any care for romance. He is steadfastly aroace.
• Due to a prey exclusion, Mortis downright refuses to consume any sort of mind-altering substance. He will not drink from mortals under the influence of alcohol or literally any drug, making hunting a more particular event for him. He also cannot bring himself to "drink" mortal alcohol, even though it won't do anything to him.
• Mortis, as well as his brother Sarasti, became very close friends with Adam Valentine, a Tremere taken under Vince's wing around the same time as their Embrace.

Mechanical Details

Merits
• Oracular Ability
• Early Riser
• Death Becomes You
• Labrynthine Mind

Flaws
• Infectious Bite
• Prey Exclusion
• Disturbing Mannerism
• Stubborn

Derangements
• Synesthesia (+difficulty to Perception)
• Manic Depression
• Obsession With Death

Gallery