PeteMork wrote:Now this one could easily be Elysse, IMO.
In one of the stories, Elysse stands out in the road waiting for an approaching pickup truck while Orson stays out of sight on the side of the road. The picture I remember having of her is hair the colour of the darkest coal you've ever seen, eyes like polished black obsidian and skin so pale it took on the moon's greenish glow. The hair was so long she could have worn it over her T-shirt and you wouldn't have realised she
was wearing one, and in that scene, a T-shirt was quite literally all she was wearing. The truck turned out to be driven by another kind of monster that Elysse later dubbed "Frankenbeans" because she dispatched him by flinging the "frank" one way and the "beans" the other.
What I remember removing from that scene was that Elysse's body was clearly visible from the waist down, and that Frankenbeans had fixed his gaze on her unfurred mons veneris and the thinly visible bald cleft below it. At the time, it seemed like "too much information" to some of the mods. In retrospect, maybe it wasn't. When I wrote that sentence or two, it was to serve warning that this pickup truck driver may have profane appetites. What I don't remember being near the fore of my conscious thinking was the juxtaposed image that we all sometimes run into again and again with Eli or Abby: she's young, she's sweet, she's defenseless, she's sensitive, she's
vulnerable, she's all kinds of child-like things - and she'll make hamburger out of your body if you anger her, no matter how big or strong or fast you are, or how many ribbons you have on your uniform. In my mind, she was just using what she knew empirically of human nature to project an image powerful enough to make most drivers under such circumstances stop and investigate.
I've recently run across an image of a woman who'd lost all her body hair to some kind of alopecia. Head hair, leg hair, eyebrows and lashes -
all of it. That image led me to musing about what kinds of body a vampire "spirit" would choose, if it
could choose, and what kinds of remodeling it'd do to that body if it could, and why. The immediate thought was "well, of course, growing hair means expending nutrients and energy". Why, indeed, would a creature who can sleep comfortably buried in six feet of snow need hair?
I might choose the body of a young girl. She'd have to be old enough (or at least large enough) to have enough (vampire) muscle mass to overpower any man she might have to consume or as might decide to attack her, but young enough (or at least small enough) not to have too
much muscle mass to lug around. Winged flight is a very energy-expensive activity, and vampires can't just grab a few snack bars when they start feeling a bit peaked. She'd have to be slender, too, because of aerodynamic considerations, almost to the point of being outright bony. She'd have to be young enough not to have breasts not only because of aerodynamic considerations but also because (1) vampires will never be concerned with nursing an infant the same way girls who grow up to be mothers would nurse, and (2) breasts just represent worthless mass to have to expend energy and nutrients on. Pigmentation would be lost along the way because melanin's meagre UV protection is useless to a creature who can't abide the sight of the sun in any event (with the sole exception possibly being in the eyes where enhancing vision in "low light" conditions is concerned). I'd have chosen the body of a young girl who can't know anything of adult carnal desire also because
my understanding is that vampires have no libido, and there's no point wasting energy lugging around mass that's really only concerned with tending to ordinary human reproductive processes.
I might also choose the body of a young girl because there are certain kinds of men who can be pretty much counted on to isolate themselves willingly and completely with a girl who looks impossibly young, dumb and utterly defenseless. As offensive as this suggestion might be, I maintain that an Eli or Abby or Elysse who consumes such men exclusively could be seen as a public service - a vampiric antivampire.
And, of course, hair would have to go, because of aerodynamic drag and because of (literally!) dead weight.
I suppose the body of a young boy would work as well, except, well... again with the mass that contributes nothing to the vampire's survival, and in this context, the image of scissors just makes me cringe.
So why would a "young" vampire choose to maintain waist-length black hair? Camouflage. With such hair, wearing nothing else, it'd be easy to hide in plain sight (in the night) just waiting motionlessly while prey moves into easy striking range. The boon of making an attack easier might well outweigh the bane of having to deal with the hair on those relatively rare emergencies when sudden flight becomes immediately imperative. Besides, if she has to be where people are, it'd be worthwhile to appear more or less "normal" because solitary vampires, I'd think, would be averse to drawing undue attention to themselves.
There wasn't a lot of "choosing" with these kinds of parameters in mind when Elysse was taken to the Dukesbane dungeon and somehow transmogrified. Somebody thought she was pretty and knew that the duke had a thing for dark-haired girls, and he liked them young, and that was pretty much the end of that. It'd just have made
this line of discussion a bit harder to work with if Elysse had turned out to have hair the colour of driven snow, or the colour of a raging campfire.
The thing about Eliforms (Eli and Abby) that sets them apart from creatures more in line with Lugosi's archetype is that the infection's host apparently survives more or less intact. Lugosi's Dracula doesn't suffer loneliness, guilt or angst, but Eli definitely looked worried (if not outright
scared) when she opened the door to let Oskar into her living room.
As with the Russian child model I posted a few days ago, for me, the girl in this image is all about the eyes. There's knowledge in those eyes, and pain, and the concept behind this image is an artistic felony.
This girl doesn't belong to the night. She belongs in school singing with the choir or playing a flute with the woodwind ensemble or kicking soccer balls past goalies. She belongs at home with her loving parents and annoying siblings, getting caught with her hands in the cookie jar. She belongs in her well-lit bedroom plopped stomach down on the pink comforter on her bed scribbling all kinds of air-headed preteen nonsense into a diary. She belongs with her friends at the amusement park loading up on Cokes and elephant ears and cotton candy under blue skies and the late afternoon sun.
Elysse standing half naked before the pickup truck projects an image that is a lie. She's very far from defenseless, and hooking up is the last thing on her mind. Within that lie, for an Eliform vampire, is the truth that the lie itself is a lie; hooking up is still the very last thing on her mind, but she's still a
human girl, a
little girl, and needs love, attention, friendship, lots and lots of friends and to
not be careful all the time to put her life at undue risk.
Instead, when she's alone (as she is most of the time), I've an idea she'd consider herself very lucky to find a nice, comfortably dark little untended mausoleum to snooze the day away in.