#dlkb

scott's body count, and he'd likely insist that you call it such just to muddy the waters, is undetermined, unstated, unspoken. and honestly, this really does fit him. he's someone who at every turn wants to act like his past actions don't exist and will do everything he can to avoid being seen in light of those actions, taken in context as to what exactly he has historically done with any modicum of power.

scott is the archetypal white ass vampire. he lies and gaslights and emotionally manipulates and outright abuses people without a second thought. the fact that his kill count is unknown makes sense, because he does not care about how his actions have hurt other people. he only cares about what other people can do for him now.

we never learn anything about the people he'd massacred. never know anything about the context, the history, how things got to be this way. all we have is guesses; probably a lot of innocents, a handful of people who tried to kill him and failed, some ritual sacrifices and some at-random peasantry, probably few to nil other nobles. scott, therefore, maintains his spot firmly within vampirism as privilege. he can be forgiven, he never has to apologize, he simply does not experience consequences in the way people with less advantage would.

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owen wears his own massacre like a badge of pride. 2799. to avoid retreading old ground, suffice it to say that we frankly found him heinous far before it was outright confirmed that he'd killed literal children and would do so again. there is only so much apologia you can do when you conceive of a number as representing an actual populace. it's easy to disconnect through distance and through fiction, but...

owen (and it's here we must remind you all we are talking about characters, just in case you forget) is an ecofascist. full stop. he is someone who will not shut up about humans being The Problem and wanting to kill them off to solve this, has wound himself up into a death spiral and is attempting to drag everyone down with him, outright looks someone in the face and says "so what if a few more people have to die if you get to choose who". a lot of these other kill counts are ultimately a little more abstract and metaphorical, ending up less as direct one-to-ones and more general commentary.

owen is a spree shooter. for all intents and purposes, he is completely indistinguishable from the typical profile of someone who walks into a public space and opens fire: a disenfranchised young man who was treated as an outcast, then given access to power and privilege and sought to lash out at the people he viewed as causing these ills by hurting as many of them as possible. he is "sympathetic" in a way, but only so long as you pretend the people he hurt don't exist at all.

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our grasp on cleo is... a little nebulous, we'll admit. somewhere in the realm of 28000 dead, last we'd seen on it? cleo is the stark opposite of a lot of others here; we truly do not think they can be read as anything other than metaphor given the circumstances around their actions.

our personal take is that, if scott is one end of the "vampirism as privilege" equation, cleo is the other; forced to serve as a thrall for years, likely having no agency or ability to break free. vampirism was quite literally weaponized against them in order to put them in a marginalized position. it's a tenuous read, though, and someone with a similar skillset but better understanding of cleo could probably give a far better one with more nuance to it.

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dr. legs is... complicated. there is a certain type of anti-military sentiment that colors a lot of discussion around the bulk of his kill count. we are extremely anti-military as well but there is a bit of a difference between joining the military in the modern day and joining the military during, at the absolute latest, World War I. the style of warmonger remains mostly the same; the nature of the foot soldier doesn't quite fit up as cleanly 1:1.

we know he killed a town of approximately 5500 people; we know he considers the deaths of an additional 813 people to be his fault in one way or another for a total of 6313 dead. it's tempting to chalk up the town that was poisoned into the same category as owen, but these are very different types of violence. the glib way of putting it is that the doc wouldn't write a manifesto first.

the more reasonable take is this: military apologia is a poison, but so is pretending that someone is the sum total of only their bad actions. the military and those who actively glorify its presence are absolutely not to be trusted; veterans do not inherently fall into this category. there are a whole host of people in the real world who do wrong, realize it was wrong, and spend the rest of their lives working to amend that damage as best they can. they deserve no praise, but they do not deserve the same scorn as someone willing to do it all again.

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there is a throughline with all of these known killcounts; they are able to be grounded in some form of reality, whether in a literal or metaphorical sense. they are all fundamentally human acts, they can be interacted with on a level that informs or is informed by real-life theory and beliefs. not all of them are realistic occurrences, but all of them imply realistic ideologies or are somewhat analogous to them.

also, all of this has actually been to say we have no fucking clue what to do with dalekisbored's kill count, and that is why we have been thinking about all of this so goddamn much.

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dalek has a generously estimated kill count of around 400 people, including other vampires. the actual number is unclear and highly variable; progression in the classic Vampirism mod requires a lot of a specific resource that has a 1/3 drop chance. it is tempting to write this off as classic vampiric violence, but there's just one problem that has been driving us up the godsdamned wall this entire time:

mechanically and therefore narratively speaking, everyone dalek "had" to kill by the end of the video was either a vampire or a vampire hunter.

see, that 1/3 drop chance resource is human hearts, which are only dropped by the "hunter" mobs that the mod adds. they're used in a lot of things, but the bulk of that estimated total of kills would go towards gathering them to use in trading up towards one of the best weapons that the mod has to offer. all of this is fine and hand-waveable if you're not coming to that video for serious literary analysis, which most people aren't doing because most people wouldn't be insane enough to try and ground the gonzo logic of an extremely Minecrafty mod that's been around for a solid decade within the confines of the relatively serious and realistic setting Vampires SMP creates.

we are not most people however, so we are struggling. immensely. because within the logic of the setting of Vampires SMP, that kill count of 400 does not resemble a spree killing or a wanton massacre or a literal war crime. because that kill count of 400 mechanically cannot be anything other than someone not only capable of self-defense but actively practiced in it. the bulk of these people are vampire hunters for fuck's sake. there is perhaps literally no way to describe how insane that makes us. this guy is, in context, literally going out of his way to track down and kill vampire hunters specifically for their hearts! he would probably murder innocents if they dropped the items he needed, don't get us wrong, but they don't so he doesn't.

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dalekisbored is the scourge of abolish's employers. he's a madman who goes straight for what is, on a practical level, the most difficult people to kill as a vampire, and he does the vast bulk of that murdering because he wanted a cool sword. nobody looks good in this equation, but also nobody looks realistic either, because this is rather like trying to power-scale a looney tunes character in comparison to random shonen protagonist #305.

we recognize that this is a futile and deeply silly task, but god damn does it compel us anyway. because there is something there with horrifying implications, but it's also something that has zero practical realistic comparisons because "bounty hunter goes out of his way to kill other bounty hunters for their cool stuff" isn't a thing that happens in real life, it's the plot of an action thriller movie lauded far more for its fight scene choreography than for its plot.

there is no good way to wrap this up. what the hell is wrong with him.

in conclusion:

Void Made Flesh

Starting at the bottom of the Falling Through Dimensions modpack, as well as the video immediately following it (currently titled something like "my world is in pain"), we begin with the Void dimension, because check out these mobs:

I don't know about you, but that looks like a Dalekisbored to me! So the headcanon starts off like this: Dalek's originally from this Void dimension and was at one point a mob like this. We do also get a snippet of dialogue from him that'll be relevant for later:

"i'm happy for anything to decrease the purple, man, i don't like the purple -- i love the purple, i'm part of the purple! -- i d- i don't like it"

Which could mean anything! Anyways, the made flesh part comes from another video (currently titled something like "flesh is invading the moon") featuring Dalek's usual penchant for weird horrible fleshy gunk things, seriously, how does this motif keep happening.

At the end of that video -- around 28:45 -- Dalek sights one of the boss mobs from the Flesh That Hates mod and says in his weird I Am An Unstable Lunatic sing-song tone "i see you... mother" which is obviously in-context referring to the fact that the mob is the "mother" of that particular hivemind. Still, it sounds personal -- so what if it is?

Void Made Flesh goes like this: the Void dimension steals bits and pieces of other dimensions, eating away at them. This includes mobs from other dimensions, which become ghostly versions of themselves (that still have their full range of capacities). A hivemind consisting entirely of gross flesh, therefore, would still be able to grow and spread in the void. One problem: "the flesh that hates" implies a certain amount of sapience necessary in order to be able to Hate, so anything it pulls into the hivemind is likely raised to some level of sapience as well. Which includes nearby Void mobs, and in one case, well...

something goes wrong. thought rings in his head, an alien feeling to him -- a being of absence -- and then something twists, and he is not that thing which consumes him. he is the consumption, the Void. how dare a being of flesh try to drag him down to its level. how very dare this hivemind (still only faintly echoing) raise him to thought and expect unshaking loyalty. no oh no. he's outta here.

And then the Void spits him out because oops the flesh gunk accidentally turned a mob into a player. That wasn't supposed to happen. It's fine, the universe will just act like he's newly spawned in, he barely even remembers being part of the Void at all, surely nothing will happen which causes him to get even worse.

Flesh Made Arcanum

A newly spawned player wanders the world, unaware he is anything out of the ordinary. An unknown period of time passes before the 100 Days video, and then while traveling... the Void steals the sun from the sky, grasping for its territory to return. Dalek, who absolutely has no clue what is going on and thinks himself an immensely fragile and squishy human, bunkers down and starts panicking.

This particular world happens to be rather conducive to magic, especially Thaumcraft, so he might as well follow that particular path. He records his slow progress, and eventually gets to the point of making the mod's first core material, salis mundus, which if you've read this fic of ours...

Funny. He’d always been so worried about what salis mundus might do to his respiratory system. He’d entirely forgotten to worry about what the stuff would do if it got into his circulatory system, if it started running through his veins and growing unchecked, a miniature conduit of multimagic particulate in every drop of blood he spilled, every injury he suffered.

...gets into his bloodstream almost immediately and starts being assimilated into his weird not-a-normal-player flesh.

Around this time, Dalek starts vaguely remembering where he's from, spurred on by the appearance of Flux Rifts which -- while they do not actually resemble the Void itself -- certainly resemble something connected to the place.

See? That's dang close to an End Portal texture! In fact, Dalek figures out quite a bit relevant about the Flux Rift right away:

"theoretically, it should be possible to use the tear to travel between worlds. but, in practice... the unstable space will dismantle incoming matter to the subatomic level. [laughs] i... i finally see hope of returning to- ████"

It's a very noticeable instance of the censoring in large part because of its placement. Dalek seems to be remembering where he came from. What's more, this statement comes directly after the bit where he says the rift might disassemble him. Worrying for a human... if he's even still human. If he ever was human to begin with. He might not be. He certainly isn't now, given how fully he's immersed himself in the arcane arts to the exclusion of almost anything else.

Oh yeah and also apparently the rift was caused by an ambient buildup of magical pollution in the atmosphere, which could mean absolutely nothing relevant and definitely won't escalate further, ignore the title of the next section and the quote from earlier about Dalek being "part of the purple", that could be about anything.

Arcanum Made Rot

There are three penalty mechanics to worry about when it comes to the classic magic mod Thaumcraft.

The first is Flux. Flux is a measure of magical "pollution" as a result of human interaction with the environment, essentially measuring how unstable (ie "in flux") the magic in a given chunk is. It is largely intangible, although certain effects like Flux Flu and Flux Phage may cause the player to produce small dissipating amounts of it or otherwise drain on the player's magic. When Flux in an area gets too high, Flux Rifts will spawn, tearing through natural terrain but gradually reducing the amount of Flux in the area... unless there's too much of it for even the Rifts to handle.

Taint is the nasty purple gunk. Taint is, well, arcanum made rot. It's potentially a fungal infection of some kind as well; the best way to think of it is as a sort of proto-sculk that feeds on the surrounding environment to create even more of itself. It eats through stone and dirt alike, turns water into Flux Goo, lava into Liquid Death, and various animals into horrible misshapen gunky versions of themself that are hostile to anything that moves and isn't yet Tainted. It creates Taint Seeds, gigantic cocoons that spew out more Flux into the atmosphere for the Tainted Lands around to feed on, and expands outwards. If this is sounding like the Sculk Horde or Fungal Infection: Spore mods to you, that's because this is their precursor. As for what it looks like as it spreads...

Here's a nighttime shot (from a server I was on a while back where we did this entirely on purpose). Look familiar, by any chance?

Magic is prone to festering, especially when it has physical biological material for that Taint to feed off of. Dalek is made of physical biological material that currently is full of arcane microplastics and already secretly a body horror nightmare situation wrapped loosely in the guise of a player. He's the perfect host for it.

(Oh also the final penalty mechanic, Warp, is a measure of the player's sanity/eldritch knowledge, representing how far they've gone into the darker and more dangerous side of the mod. Dalek didn't get to this point, but it's useful to be aware of anyway.)

Fuck It We Ball

What do you do with a Dalekisbored that is now fully aware he is a horrible flesh monstrosity in multiple different ways and is probably at least a little in control of that horrific nature?

You stand back and let him cook, obviously.

Most of the rest of the playlist and our headcanons about Dalek are dedicated to various ways in which Dalek keeps himself busy for fun. Turning into a vampire? Sure! It's gonna take a few tries, his blood isn't exactly blood anymore so it's pretty difficult for vampiric infection to take hold, but he'll give it a whirl. Ruling a kingdom? Ughhhhh, fine, as long as he doesn't have to deal with any high-concept hiveminds oh goddamnit they're brainwashing people. Summoning demons and briefly becoming a werewolf and also making himself even more horrifically immortal? Of course! Throwing people into various custom-built torment nexuses? Right up his alley!

He's here for a good time, and unfortunately it is also a long time, because he's very hard to get rid of for good. He's got beef with anything that can do possession magically and nonphysically because excuse you, some people have to put in the hard work to assimilate people by hand, what is this nepo bullshit? He is just generally a horrific body horror creature and it's very rude to make him have to deal with the horrors himself, mod devs, why won't you just let him indiscriminately kill :(

loud heartbeat noises at times, often accompanied by red pulsing effects

audio balancing is rather scuffed most of the time