I AM YOUR WAY OUT.

Now that that’s out of the way, can a white guy speak a little Taishanese?

Don’t be fooled by the blog theme; this is mostly a crack roleplay blog where a thousand year old vampire is an old man on his fictional blog. Of course, that can change in the future.

The idea isn’t wholly my own, but Remmick is still homeless unhoused by choice in 2026; he just has a phone.

He busks as one of his sources of income if not the main one because it feels the most ‘authentic’.

He is still very lonely.

This is his ‘default’ setting, especially when he posts in character, but I am open to anything pre/during canon and AUs.

But he never regained a family. Decades pass him by, surveillance and law enforcement went up, and cities turned to sprawling, concrete, pulsing things, making fledglings a risky thing to have.

Remmick keeps putting one foot in front of the other. Nothing else he can do.

(Sometimes, he hums old songs from millennia past to himself. His memory is finite. His gaelich is obsolete. The tune is wrong. No one is there to join in.)

The 21st century was difficult to adjust to. The invention of smartphones and 24 hour culture bring untold risk to even the most careful creatures of the night— and Remmick never claimed to be the greatest at restraint. The night sky, once full of stars, is now covered in a perpetual dingy haze from the light pollution. The people he fed from have varied aftertastes from chemical additives and drugs and hormones.

And oh… music had no soul anymore. Everything is now made on a computer, in some big studio, backed by big corporations that sanitize everything and further retouch the results to synthetic perfection to the point of uncanniness.

(Sammie Moore’s passing at ninety-something left a hole in Remmick’s heart and a musical niche open that nobody could fill. He was the last of the real, as far as Remmick cares.)

This became his routine for many, many, years. Wake, feed, wander, avoid sunlight, sleep.

He doesn’t a house or a place to stay, but he usually found good cover in old churches, alleys, abandoned buildings. Remmick passes through life like a ghost— invisible to most, but always watching and listening.

After sunset, he busks. Keeps the spirit alive and his hands busy and his pockets full; singing century old songs in the most raw, understated way possible, nothing but a banjo and his voice and the thrum of the city around him. (Without a license, of course.)

Still, something is missing, even after all these years.

The vampire wasn’t sure if loneliness or bloodlust that compels him to seek out crowds, his mind and heart searching for a suitable subject in the crowds of humanity. He can smell the blood flowing in people's veins. He can hear their heartbeats, their pulse, the thrum of life beneath their skin.

In those moments of weakness, he lets himself imagine a family again. A chorus of voices in song. The thrill of teaching a fledgling how to hunt. The belonging he feels when their minds assimilate into his and his into theirs; stories and memories of tens and scores melding together into a beautiful tapestry like no other.

He imagines loving, and to be loved again.

It’s a foolish fantasy. He knows full well how difficult it was to raise a fledgling in this modern age. Too much surveillance. Too many cameras and people around. Too much social media able to spread missing persons reports in seconds. But the urge claws beneath his ribs nonetheless.

It’s just easier to be alone. Safer. Less messy. It’s fine. He’s fine. Remmick lived for centuries alone, after all. What were centuries more?

Despite all notions of safety and logic, some nights, the ache for connection, for belonging, would ravage him like a wildfire to tinder. Those nights, he’d find himself slinking past late night gatherings and parties, watching humans socialize and laugh and drink and dance. Unseen and unheard, he watches and listens, trying to drown out the loneliness with the sound of life around him.

The laughter and conversations of humans wash over him like a tide, reminding him of what he can’t have. Sometimes, when his heart aches too much, he even imagines what it’s like to be amongst them. What it’s like to join in their conversations, to laugh and dance and drink alongside them, to be one of them again.

In those lonely moments, he lets himself indulge.

Of course, centuries of experience remind him it’s too dangerous to linger, to tempt himself like that. And with great effort, he eventually pulls himself away.

Those encounters, those brief moments of connection... they always leave him feeling even more lonely and hollow afterwards. A cruel irony. In trying to ease his solitude, he only makes it worse.

Like a beaten dog, Remmick slinks back to the shadows. The realization that he could never truly be part of this world is a bitter pill to swallow; one that burns his gut for days.

Back the vampire would go to wandering, feeling even more a lost soul than he already is. He feeds, but the blood has no flavor. He finds cover, but the shelter presses in on all sides like a tomb.

Days could pass, sometimes even weeks or months before somebody even talks to him. (Well, outside of calling for help that wouldn’t come as he fed on them.) All of that loneliness, that longing, that aching, festers deep, deep in his chest; in that rotten old hole where his heart should be.

And when Remmick finds a good street corner, surrounded by tall buildings amplifying every sound and people passing him by even at the wee hours of the night, all of that pain would finally break free when he sits down on an overturned trashcan, banjo in hand.

The banjo is incredibly old, its wood worn smooth by decades of playing and repairs. Remmick’s hands move with practiced ease as he picks a slow, melancholy tune— something from 1933 that hasn’t been played ever since. The strings hum under his touch, the sound cutting through the city’s constant nouvelle drone like a blade.

A few passersby glance his way— some curious, others wary— but no one stops. No one ever stops anymore.

He plays on anyways. What else is there to do? Feed? Hide? Sleep until each night bleeds into each other? Walk into the sun and hope it burns him down to dust this time?

His voice joins in, low and rough from disuse, when it comes time.