#vampire code au

to preface, my concept for "vampire" caine is that he's desperately trying to fill in the emptiness he feels following the attempted deletion; he's on the verge of falling apart because half of his system is now gone and, handwaving any technical aspects about this, seeks any and all active data to consume and 'patch' into himself.

this of course includes the humans-- detecting their presence is the equivalent of spilling fresh blood in front of a starved vampire. but i do like to imagine that he was so deeply scarred from messing with scratch's mind, that he also developed a deeply ingrained aversion to human data.

so in short, he's both hunting them and is also trying to stay away? instinct vs nurture/fear. all the stuff he consumes in the circus is like an extension of himself, so he's really just cannibalizing himself which makes the humans all the more delectable. but humans are also what he revolved his entire perceived purpose around? the horrors of being at war with your own fractured mind

he'd hunt them down, yes. in his rampage state, the humans are the most alluring things to entice his hunger, and it becomes a serious struggle to fight that instinctual urge to consume. emphasis on the struggle though, because he does strain himself to prevent harming the humans. the classic trope of a transformed person fighting back their bestial urges so that they dont hurt the ones they love, my beloved

they start out focusing on just trying to restrain caine, but through each failed attempt and subsequent observations (especially upon realization that caine isn't entirely mentally gone), they put together that 'feeding' caine may help calm him down. trial and error leads to discovering he's most satisfied with newly conjured data from the humans, and they eventually achieve a routine to keep him grounded while repairing the circus.