#reremouse

Hi! Hello! Lunchbox embrace lore, hell yeah

Her Embrace was a freak accident, happening some time in the 90s. Lunchbox's sire is the Nosferatu Elder, Reremouse, from VtM Night Road. In the game, the Courier and Julian take water out to the desert disguised as aid relief to people crossing the border into the States, from Mexico. This is used as bait, feeding Reremouse to prevent him from rising properly and going on a starved rampage. Lettow didn't come into power in '08, I believe? But I can see this practice being inherited from his predecessor.

Lunchbox, once a six-year-old Sofia, saw a monster rising from the desert and tear her family apart. Everthing became a painful, muddied blur when Reremouse reached out and bit into her - there was a gunshot and she was dropped, but not much else is remembered. Somehow, as the child bled out on the Sonoran sand, some of Reremouse's own thick vitae had fallen into her mouth.

The Nosferatu embrace is more painful than others, as there's an extreme physical transformation taking place. But, through some combination of instinct and the Beast, a very scared and hurting fledgling Lunchbox managed to escape Reremouse before he could devour her, fleeing the desert and listening to the impulse that told her the sun was bad, and blood was good.

an illustration I made for the @winterhawk-olympic-bang , for @reremouse‘s story Sticks and Stones. (art on AO3 here)

(I make all of Clint’s shirts slightly purple even when they should be white because Hawkeye just gotta be purple, but also you can’t tell me he sorts his clothes by color or uses the color-absorbing thing when he washes them so I do too headcanon his white shirts as actually a slight purple)

They Can only eat kindred blood, the one with a weakness we know of (nukeleve and running water) is a folkloric bane and when embraced they are stupidly beautiful and get uglier as they age (very unlike Nosferatu who become ugly and get even more ugly).

Best way to think of it is that the matriarch and Baba yaga are from absimilard like the niktuku but are Nosferatu instead.

Which is why she's ugly and doesn't eat kindred. Her sires just a dick.

Unless they have retconned the niktuku just for night road.

Honestly I think it could still work within the lore established for Nictuku because "omg!!! they eat people!!! THEY EAT BABIES!!!" is a popular pre-modern propaganda for enemies. It would not surprise me at all if Nictuku being cannibals was a complete lie, or just a myth. It could simply be that the Nictuku don't have the same taboo around diablerie and everyone else freaked out and took that as being the same thing as a "requirement." Or maybe you only require vitae while you have an active blood bond with Absimilliard, which I can't imagine every single Nictuku descendant has. It may be that being blood bound to an Antediluvian does fucky things to your biology regardless of bloodline.

However I do believe that if Dove really was just a normal Nosferatu who happened to be a genetic throwback, the game wouldn't be emphasising her ugliness so much. She's said to be hideous even by Nosferatu standards, and the game goes out of its way to explicitly state her lineage, so I think it's quite deliberate. In fact, part of her backstory is that her sire, Modian, found her so ugly that he abandoned her on the spot. His official excuse was that she "wasn't really his", but like, dude, he was there when she was Embraced, he knew that was bullshit. My thinking is that Dove resembled their Nictuku ancestors more than he did, he was terrified it'd reveal his ancestry, and so he tried to distance himself from her as much as possible. I cannot remember explicitly, but he might have even been the one that set the Giovanni on Dove, which screams "cover up." But take that with a grain of salt, that might have only been implied and the author might not have intended that implication.

Reremouse, though, is the odd one out as he likes to chill underground and Nictuku are supposed to be claustrophobic (plus I just found out he's the brother of a character from another CoG game who hangs out in sewers and doesn't seem to be distressed by it). I'd love to know more about him. Despite Dove's shitty relationship with Modian she seems to be a lot closer to Reremouse in that she actively keeps him fed, and is genuinely distressed at the thought of his destruction. Plus the game strongly implies he's not a Wight but he's prone to Wight-like rampages? Dying to know the story behind that.

Started doing some to-scale size references for Redwall-verse species, including some speculative ones (and corrected identifications, such as Jacques's few infamous instances of "crested lizards"... those are newts, buddy).

All the creatures in this series are obviously much less tiny or gigantic in proportion to each other than their real-life inspirations. Kinda got to do that to make a building useful for both small mice and massive badgers and otters!

All of the smaller bat species that would be present in the Mossflower and surrounding regions, though the series itself doesn't pay much attention to bats and their great diversity and very different life cycles. For the most part, any bats seen in the series are the mouse-eared bat or the pipistrelle (two of the most common, generic "lives in big caves" small insectivorous species) All of the bats in the series itself that appear are regarded as belonging to the "goodbeast" class, a pleasant change from the usual end result of Being an Animal the Public Loves to Hate featuring in Redwall (like poor rats, weasels, and snakes...). The bats that do show do seem to embrace their elevated status somewhat, though appear a bit more oblivious to the deep, nasty depths that the roots of such division go to, and their wide-reaching and often violent consequences. I suppose if you lived in a cave and never met any outsiders but one time in a generation, you'd be oblivious too. Of course... Jacques made Biology-Class-Failing blunders the first few times he tried including bats, the worst of which was presenting the bats as blind. OOPS. That's an animal-myth so widely-criticized you'd have to find a very sheltered kid or a very dim-witted adult to see people still spreading that little nugget of unwisdom.

The next time part of my series here shows bat species on it, it will include the larger ones. Which I speculate would NOT get the more friendly "goodbeast" class regard, largely down to their greater size meaning their natural predation would not be focused entirely on invertebrates (especially as the largest European bats do hunt small vertebrates, as bats are obligate carnivores). Being willing to hunt small birds, frogs, and mammals would stamp 'em with that Scarlet V of "vermin". The only reason some hunting creatures appear to still get counted "goodbeast" is that they have followed a sort of arbitrary rule: Only hunting fellow animals which "goodbeasts" haven't assigned any sort of intelligent-creature status to, which would be basically all invertebrates and fish... which becomes deeply iffy if you realize that a number of social insects, mollusks, and fish in general are very much just as conscious and intelligent as various mammals and reptiles in real life, so presumably they're sentient in the Redwall universe but just aren't capable of verbal speech. Except the ones that are. OOPS. Yeeeeeaaaaah... having river eels as named, speaking characters on occasion really hammers home that "goodbeasts" consider fish fair game only by some rigid rules division--their horror at seeing birds and mammals killed for food doesn't really seem morally motivated at all: They just want to be able to punish creatures for hunting anything close to them because they don't believe anything should hunt "goodbeasts" at all... but don't you tell them to make it equivocal! Of course Goodbeast creatures still get to enjoy delicious flesh--so long as it's from a creature different enough that they don't see themselves in it, and thus don't give silent permission for any of the underclass's creatures to "hunt outside the lines" they laid down on everybody.

XD It turns out, trying to stretch one's own personal pescetarianism into a universe that does not abide the same human-dominating ideologies... uh, turns out awkwardly! Especially weird when it's moral pescetarian stuff, which is a bullhonkey reason to not want to eat a bird but be perfectly a-okay with eating a parrotfish, especially with more modern animal sentience discoveries. It's a bonkers hypocrisy.

From: Guillim, John, 1565-1621. A display of heraldrie. London : Printed by William Hall for Raphe Mab, 1611