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The City is unique.

The City is a place where humans can live – safely. This mainly because it is as much a home to vampires as it is to humans.

It is an odd sort of symbiosis, for those who are familiar with such things. The vampires, while not great in number, protect the city from clansmen, outlaws, and others who would mindlessly feed on the human population. In return, the humans provide the vampires with blood. Not directly, of course – were that the case, the human population would quickly be turned to vampires. They provide the vampires with food via blood transfusion, so that the vampires can drink fresh blood without having to turn the human providing it.

As one might imagine, The City has an odd history. Though many vampires and humans alike were involved in its founding, two stand out in particular. In The City, they are generally seen as the leaders of their respective populations, though The City is closer to a democracy than a dictatorship in that every citizen has a say in what happens. The leaders are Nicholas Segrove and Amila Locke - vampire and human, respectively.

The idea for The City was largely Nick’s, though many others helped him along the way. He was formerly a contract killer, which put him in a position to receive a lot of favors from a lot of powerful people. Nick pulled a lot of strings to get this City founded and put under the protection of powerful vampires, known as the City Guard. He is no longer a killer, however, content to live his life in The City as the popular leader of the vampire population.

However, the City could never have been founded without Amila. She is a prominent figure in the Safe Guard, a group of humans devoted to helping others, and also an outstanding healer. (It was she, in fact, that suggested blood transfusion as a method to keep the vampires fed. Without this innovation, the City surely would have failed.) As a well-known figure among humans, she was the only one who could have convinced the first humans to move into the City, despite suspicions that it was little more than an elaborate slaughterhouse. The suspicions proved incorrect, however, and more and more humans have been moving into The City. There is no one they would rather have representing them than Amila.

The City, like all things, is not entirely safe. There will always be the danger of attacks from clansmen looking for a food source, and there is the occasional attack from within – though the aggressors are almost always punished with exile.

There are still many humans who do not trust The City, as well as many vampires who do not support it. Thus - while it provides a refuge for those who would like to see change, or willing to take risks, or are simply tired of running – it will probably never be accepted on a widespread scale.

Now on to the roleplaying aspect of The City.

It is, at its most basic level, a place where vampires and humans can interact more or less safely. Fighting is tolerated as a necessity, but frowned upon – and anything that could potentially destroy the City’s reputation (such as a group of vampires attacking humans, or vice versa) is stopped swiftly by the City Guard and dealt with.

Vampires living in the City do not need to hunt for food, as they can simply go to a blood bank and ask for it. They will receive just enough fresh blood to keep them going for a few weeks. The blood banks, despite their name, do not give out large amounts of blood on request – partly because donations aren’t made in that quantity, partly because stored blood is not good enough to satisfy a famished vampire anyway.

The city, though “led” by myself (Nick) and Tori (Amila) is run passively; don’t worry about oppressive rulership or anything. For the purposes of this thread the government is almost invisible. We do, however, reserve the right to step in on anything extreme (“LET’S ASSASSINATE THE GOVERNMENT, BLOW UP THE CITY, SLAUGHTER THE HUMANS AND DRINK THE SURVIVORS DRY!”).

The City Guard will be mostly NPCs, though if you want a position you can ask Tori or I and we will consider it. No promises, though – we probably won’t need active City Guardsmen (or women) unless the City gets really big and popular. Maybe it’ll expand into multiple threads, maybe it’ll get its own board.

And maybe a PS3 will be delivered to my house by accident. A guy can dream, right?

Anyway, let the roleplaying begin!