Black Nerve

Endowments

Expression: Vespertheca
Prevalence: common to all members of Vesperis vulgaris
Endowments:

• Vespercrypt
  • Look: swollen nodule of ileal flesh, blotched black and red like lichen.
  • Desc: An invagination of the small intestine housing a single vesper. Around it, the altered flesh is wrinkled and covered with extruded filaments to absorb nutrients
• Central Thallus
  • Look: Thin cord which attach to the dorsal nerve fiber. Sometimes pierces inner walls or organs, resulting in scars.
  • Desc: conveys the endowed sensorium and recieves cogitation impulses. The connection between vesper and bane.
• Peripheral Thalli
  • Look: Thick cords that run variously throughout the body, connecting to nidal sites.
  • Desc: Each transports nutrients and impulses from the crypt to a nidus, which distributes them to subordinated endowments.

Expression: Umbral Meridians
Prevalence: all members of V. vulgaris
Endowments:

• Umbracelium
  • Look: Long black hairs threading all inner cavities of a vesperbane.
  • Desc: Conducts enervate from the soul to crypts or nidi, or to endowed outlets.
• Umbral Sinuses
  • Look: A system of sinuses, glands, ducts and resevoirs, often filled with a gray translucent fluid.
  • Desc: The so​-​called ‘wet enervate’ produced and used by vespebanes owes to the presence of umbral slime, a kind of mucus amalgam vespers can produce. It attracts and binds to enervate, and this way umbral slime greatly reduces the dangers of temporarily storing and manipulating enervate outside the soul.
    Umbral slime is flushed to the site of umbral wounds, and mitigates damage until the umbracelium siphons the enervate.
• Umbral Sheaths
  • Look: When inactive, chitin is darkened, with many small holes visible on very close examination. When active, typically obscured by enervate.
  • Desc: Myriad pores coat the cuticle, and release a film of umbral slime. Allows claws, raptorial spines, or mandibles to deliver enervate with each strike. Allows chitin to absorb incoming strikes or enervate. Umbral slime preserves the temperature​-​sensitive enervate through a kind of evaporative cooling through oxidation. When the slime is reabsorbed, the dry coating remains. This ‘gray ash’ to most smells unpleasant, though bitter and stinging rather than repugnant. Among banes familiar with certain mammalian ichor​-​hosts, they’re also called ‘sweat flakes’.

Expression: Sanguine Vessels
Prevalence: all modern members of V. vulgaris
Endowments:

• Haemohyphae:
  • Look: An red, anastomatic network like the tunnels and tracks of many worms throughout the body.
  • Desc: Conveys ichor and ichor​-​regulating hormones and lymph to various sites in the body. Induces metaplasia for subendowment flesh altering, or for the development of endowments.
• Red Spleen
  • Look: a bloated bulb of flesh squeezed between vital organs, often marred by growths and discontinuities.
  • Desc: resevoir of ichor.

Expression: Wretched Raptorials
Prevalence: common among most cultivated pedigrees of V. vulgaris
Endowments:

• Raptorial
  • Look: A wet red tentacle, flexible and ever​-​shifting enough to be called liquid muscle.
  • Desc: a supernumary limb made almost purely of ichor. Somehow, fashioned into a weapon like this, the virulent erosion of bat blood is assuaged.
• Nidal Ganglion:
  • Desc: Banes often have more than one, and even just one has more articulations than any natural limb, let alone accounting for its transformative nature. Low level directing of raptorials is typically done by a cluster of nerve cells in the associated nidus.
• The Teeth:
  • Look: can resemble spines, mandibles, scales, bones, and other multitudes wrought by ichor.
  • Desc: because the growing of bones or marrow triggers a crepuscule response, most hard anatomy in any wretched raptorial is actually homologous to teeth or claws, even when grown in the unrecognizable shape of vertebrate internals.
    Extant variations: red spear, red blade, red shield, red flail, red spines, red tendrils, red chrysalis, red child. Of particular note are the red spines (detachable spines are lauched with great force, like missiles), the red chrysalis (engulfs entire body), and the red child (entirely detachable, semi​-​autonomous).

Expression: Lips of the Conjuror

Prevalence: occurs among cultivated pedigrees of V. vulgaris

• Look: an opening in the flesh crowded with instruments distantly resembling palps, tongues and lips. Where they aren’t enervate​-​black, they are wet and drip with many muscuses.
• Desc: advanced enervate constructs, such as even the simple nerve missile or melter ball, require delicate arrangement and molding of enervate for stability and effect. The lips of the conjuror accomplish this.

Techniques

Above the mental evaluations — the loyalty and mastery of heartlands history expected of all vesperbanes — any pawn hopeful to ascend to the rank of wretch should learn at least three of the wretched fundamentals. These are not the true fundamentals — the ability to siphon, metabolize, and discharge enervate; the ability to ingest red ichor without putrefying internally; or to nurse the vespers without being impaled from within by their white fingers. Those are a matter of course, implicit in any survival of the pharmakon rites.

Aura Form Techniques:

• Bane blast: the user charges their tarsi with enervate, feeding it to bursting with energy. They then unleash a blast of concussive force. This is often accompanied by a spray of enervate, and the shape, range, and intensity of the blast are among the many variables distinguishing each vesperbane’s style.
• Force grip: the user charges their tarsi with enervate, starving it of energy until it hungrily leeches at the world. Doneat the feet, this allows to cling to even vertical surfaces, in addition to its combat grappling potential.
• Beta compass: the user releases a dark wave of enervation, which alternately self​-​attract into lines like dark rivers, or branch out like lightning. If enervate is nearby, the lines will curve toward them, allowing this technique to locate enervate bodies.

Umbra form techniques:

• Melter ball: the first word in umbraconjuration, the user shapes a mass of enervate into a membrane​-​bound glob. It can be thrown, and when the membrane in broken, the enervate within is released, deliquescing the target.
• Shell shroud: the user coats their own chitin in enervate, and charging it so that it softens the force of blows and the blunts the effect of enervate attacks.

Ichor form techniques:

• Mending clot: the user directs the flow of ichor in their body, closing wounds with blood hormonally signaled to coagulate and birth the vivid red flesh characteristic of ichor metaplasia. Effective for flesh wounds, but applied to tissues of more advanced function, the result is simply structural.
• Chyma bleed: the user prepares a spongy mass of flesh within their body, densely packed with hemolymph. When suffering blood loss, the mass can be compressed, ‘bleeding’ a flow of replacement life fluid to stave off unconsciousness
• Ooze child: the user casts off a mass of ichor capable of sustaining itself, often resembling a slime mold (or with skill, a kind of liquid worm or slug). If thrown upon a foe, the ooze may bore into their flesh and squeeze inside to sup on their innards. Being born of the users’ blood, the ooze may also serve as a model, mirroring their body’s reaction to substances (useful for identifying poisons).

Rhiza form techniques:

• Legersnare: The user weaves the filaments of their cultivated mycelium into tough ropes of hyphae. These growths crawl overtop their chitin like vines. When this technique is prepared, the filaments are compacted and dried, killing that part of the fungal mass. Thus, the user has no special control over their legersnares, but through dexterity and skill, they are capable of quickly creating tripwires, nets, and restraints. The user can grow barbs along the rope in places, allowing it to attach securely. With enough skill, traps can be made in the heat of battle, meaning engagements with foes unable to parse their sleight of hand or keep the user occupied end with them bound and harmless. Even without this chicanery, the legersnare offers all the utility of a rope, including functioning as a kind of grappling hook.
• Shatter Dust: the user prepares special spores. When the spores land on chitin, they adhere and begin to form tiny appressoria to pierce the chitin. The target experience this as a kind of itching that escalates in pain, but it requires vigorous scrubbing to be free of it. As the spores dig into the chitin, it is weakened, making it increasing vulnerable to physical trauma. If the spores are not all removed, the result in a mundane fungal infection. If the ‘dust’ reaches sensitive membranes, the results are more dehibiliating.
• Mycospike: The user grows a large appressoria at the tip of a root. When pressed to a surface, the appressoria can penetrable any armor short of metal, but due to the slowness and steadiness required, it typically requires restraining the target first (if only by grasping them with the hand equipped with the mycospike). The mycospike can penetrate any armor short of metal.