The hungry corpses who have inhabited the Moulding Room these last thirty years have dedicated themselves to surveillance and subversion in equal measure, and that subversion extends to the flesh, both their own and others'.
Basic Discipline Levels
• The Contagion Principle
The vampire can disconnect a shred of her fingernail which, on contact with living or undead flesh, burrows just under the skin. The owner feels a sympathy with it, and knows how far away and in what direction it lies, for as long as the effect lasts. A vampire with this power activated will never be able to lose track of the person implanted.
•• The Pleasure of the Text
The vampires of the Moulding Room have a terrifying ability to consume information. A vampire with this power seeps his blood over a book, CD, DVD or video tape. Then, he takes the blood back into himself, leaving the media blood-smeared and completely devoid of any of the recorded material on that medium. In this fashion, the vampire literally ingests the knowledge formerly stored n that item.
••• The Eye Behind the Glass
The Residents of the Moulding Room are masters of surveillance, and part of this has to do with their fetishization of the camera, the Eye Behind the Glass. The Residents have turned the fetish into a fact. A resident with this power can literally remove her eye and install it with wiring, Vitae and spittle behind a camera lens or a mirror, meaning that she can always perceive that area as though she were looking out of the lens or mirror herself, wherever she is.
•••• Face of New Flesh
Faces are everything to the Moulding Room. The face of a celebrity in a gossip magazine, the newsreader, the head of state. Yet the vampire barely has a face at all, a blur at most. Even with the costly application of will, the vampire can only be seen in a mirror, or in pictures, or on film. But with the right application of knives and blood, the vampire can steal the face of a living human, allowing him to appear as that mortal. And the more famous the mortal, the easier that face is to remove – the more one’s face appears on screen, the less his face is his own.
With a human face over his own, the vampire has a reflection, and appears in photographs and film entirely normally, until the face withers away. If the character has the Hollow Mekhet weakness, he gains the stolen reflection, but still has no shadow and makes no sound on recordings or through telephones.
••••• The Soul Transplant
One of the founders of the Moulding Room discovered, back in 1976, that the human soul was, in fact, a small organ vaguely resembling a six-inch-long spermatozoon encased within the breastbone. Or maybe he was making it up. It fundamentally doesn’t matter. This, the highest power of Detournement, makes it happen. With a scalpel, the character opens up the breastbone of a dead or comatose human and pulls the slithery, still-screaming object out. If the owner wasn’t dead, he soon will be. Residents of the Moulding Room with this power keep libraries of “souls,” preserved in formaldehyde. When the time comes, they transplant these “souls” into other mortals, or consume them, in order to gain moral strength.
