Verbina29's Site

Setting

Argentum Antipodes is a historical fantasy setting, in which vampires existed alongside humans secretly until something like the 1930's or 40's, when color film photography became popular. The universe is based on an inversion of the semi-popular idea that vampires don't show up in mirrors because mirrors used to contain silver. So in the Argentum Antipodes universe, vampires can instead only be seen in things containing silver, like silver mirrors and black and white camera film. So once color film was invented and popularized, the masquerade was broken, and vampires were revealed to the public. Tensions between vampires and humans are understandably not great, being seen as monstrous bloodthirsty killers for hundreds of years (and notably having actual bloodthirsty killers among your ranks) does a lot to damage an image. So many vampires are quite invested in keeping their vampirism a secret, and many humans are quite invested in revealing those secrets (after all, it's kind of impossible to know if a vampire is a bloodthirsty killer without first knowing that they're a vampire). So vampire hunters frequently utilize photography in order to reveal vampires, since they won't show up in color photos, but will appear just fine in black and white. And vampires often break into darkrooms to destroy film negatives before they can be developed and reveal their identities as vampires. Most (reasonable) vampire hunters are more akin to detectives, simply discovering who is and isn't a vampire and attempting to determine the perpetrators of vampire-related crimes. Some vigilante vampire hunters do exist, though, but killing off anyone that's a vampire generally causes significantly more problems than it solves, since most vampires are not bad people.

Vampires

Vampires are, fundamentally, just people. They can die in all the normal human ways, except that they don't age and can't die of old age. They have to drink blood, but there's no real difference between human and animal blood, so most vampires just drink animal blood. They burn in the sun, but it's mostly just light sunburns, at least for weaker vampires, though stronger vampires will usually be severely hurt by sunlight. Vampires usually have a unique power, but they're usually pretty subtle, and almost never explicitly supernatural. These powers don't work on other vampires, so sometimes vampires can tell other vampires from this.

Characters

The relationship chart for the Argentum Antipodes cast. Click for full size!

I don't want to rewrite their (admittedly pretty basic) profiles, so I'm just going to link their ArtFight pages for now. I keep those more up to date anyway, usually.

Hunters

Beatrix: ArtFight profile
Silvester: ArtFight profile
Eike: ArtFight profile
Sol: ArtFight profile

Vampires

Cassandra: ArtFight profile
Velvet: ArtFight profile
Nox: ArtFight profile
Aconite: ArtFight profile
Ernest: No ArtFight profile, I wasn't really satisfied with his design. I named him and Silvester solely so that their ship name could be Silver. He insists that Silvester doesn't waste color film photographing him. He serves as the heist's lookout and getaway driver. He's a pretty normal guy, he just doesn't want his boyfriend to know he's a vampire. His power is increased empathy. He can be a bit of a downer at times.
Lucida: ArtFight profile
Malko: No ArtFight profile, I wasn't really satisfied with his design. He's a vampire that doesn't really want to be a vampire. He's pretty weak and shy, but can be a little bit self-serving at times. He isn't part of the heist crew, but he's also not really helping the detectives.

Story

The summary is basically that it's half detective story and half heist story. Most of it follows Beatrix in the first person as she investigates the murder, starting at Cassandra's ball where it happens. She had a bad feeling about the ball that turns out to be right when the body of Leon Moreaux is discovered, absent any blood, the crime seemingly committed by a vampire. She immediately gets shit together, taking notes, interrogating people, and lining everyone in attendance up to take photos. It's not a terribly large event, everyone can easily be gathered up in one room. Silvester takes some photos, police are probably called to deal with everything properly, and eventually everyone gets to leave, and they go back to the detective agency building to develop the film. Meanwhile, Cassandra, Velvet, Aconite, Nox, and Ernest are planning their heist—it's not exactly hard to figure out where the detectives will be developing their photographs. It really shouldn't be that difficult to pull off, really, they're probably overqualified. All they have to do is break in and destroy those negatives. They've gotta be pretty quick, though, since they need to ideally do it before they get developed at all, or at a minimum do it before the hunters tell anyone else their findings. Pretty hard to accuse people of being vampires without any evidence. All of the heist crew is participating for slightly different reasons, but they make a pretty good team when it comes down to it. The heist crew sections are probably third person perspective. Of course, the two perspectives intertwine when the heist actually gets executed.

I haven't actually decided how it should end, though. I might just have two versions, one where the hunters succeed and one where the heist crew succeeds. Hell, maybe have it change between the two versions, just to gaslight people. If there's demand, I might post the draft I have of the first part at some point.