"Someday," Lina agreed with a laugh. "And neither would I, but if you're forced to rely on something uncertain, Prestation ain't bad to rely on. Especially if the consequences for breaking it are bloody awful - as they should be. Reputation is everything, especially among our kind."
She leans back in her chair as she listens to Aaron describe Weiss. "A Nosferatu artist, huh? Well, I guess tattooing is change in its most direct form. I've seen guys work themselves out of their norms using tattooing, especially the fellas studying Banes. That's a good start."
Lina smiled at the question about what she did to develop.
"Well, my method came from understanding people. Nothing is permanent, least of all people. So I got to watching them. Learning their lives. Understanding their secrets. Figuring out what motivated them. I learned about the soul, first. The dark and the light. I learned to observe others so I could observe and understand myself. People change for many reasons, but one of the biggest ones is to avoid pain, be it physical or emotional. And I realized that to transcend this Requiem's suffering put upon us by God, I have to understand suffering, and how our tests against the Curse change me."
A pause.
"So, for example. After sparring with Disciplines to get my vitae less sluggish and to warm my body up to the idea of Change and meditation through katas to get myself focused on being able to control myself, we'd get down to the hard training. To learn to snap the leash on my Beast and bring it to heel, my old mentor taught me that you have to condition your Beast to act how you want it to, with a set stimulus that you can replicate even in moments of awful stress. He showed me how to train my Beast like the animal it is. Provoked by fire? Tame it, or be punished. Starving and presented with a vessel? Control it, don't drink, or be starved longer. But that doesn't come naturally. You make yourself find ways, a structure of a leash. It's a lot of time chained up, frenzying - but in those critical moments before you lose yourself, you learn a lot.
For me? I use mindfulness techniques to help, in a specific way, like Pavlov's bell. The Beast rises up and threatens to overwhelm me? I start doing things like naming objects in the room in my head. Always in a specific way, always in a specific order, because my Beast has learned to associate that with peace. It's a conditioned response, one that came about through my experiments. It was hard, and it hurt like a motherfucker. But every time I'm out there, relying on the Coil, I've got a method that I know will work. Trial and error with good notes got me there."
She shrugged.
"I'm putting together my plan for how I'm going to make myself malleable enough to overcome how the Beast separates me from mortals, but it's getting started with getting closer and closer to people to learn even more about how they change as stimuli are introduced. That's one of the reasons I re-upped my investigator's license, to have cover for that research. Immersion is easier that way. Anyway. Enough about me. How about you? I'd imagine you've probably got a much more formal approach than me."
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