Melissidae

Hush, now you shouldn’t struggle so. This is for your own good.

Vampire the Requiem - Bloodlines the Legendary

A handful of Kindred still exist tonight who, during the late 19th century, participated in the destruction of the Melissidae.
Those who witnessed the pogrom still talk about the Melissidae, even tonight, and the stories grow in the telling. The Melissidae, they say, could vomit swarms of wasps. They say that Melissidae had a sting, imparted with no more than a brush of the lips, which could send you into an ecstasy of pain. They swear that the Melissidae behaved like the “Queen Bees” of ersatz hives that were populated by mortals who had been twisted into near-mindless drones and forced to submit to a hivemind by a unique power of the blood. The one thing these elders agree on, however, is that the Queen Bees’ blood was sweeter than anything any of them will ever taste again. It tasted like honey.
Yes, they still talk about their fallen foes. However, when asked exactly why the Melissidae were destroyed, these elders become somewhat vague. The Queen Bees must have done something. After all, Kindred from five clans and many covenants and nations each, entirely independently, pursued the Queen Bees’ destruction. Charges or no charges, rival Kindred enthusiastically pursued the Melissidae, who soon vanished, gone but not forgotten. Now they’re a cautionary tale for the Kindred, a fount of wild tales about insects and drone-people and blood like honey.
The enthusiasm of the Queen Bees’ pursuers proved inadequate, however. The Melissidae were not completely destroyed. The Melissidae still rule their hives, even tonight.
They keep much quieter than they used to, these nights. They have developed ways to hide their hives and ways to mask their mindless servants.
In the back of every Melissid’s undead brain, she feels an itch, a chittering, rustling presence: the beginning of a hive-mind. Hungry, it needs to grow, it needs to control, it needs to surround itself with drones and workers, so that it can find comfort. To be alone in her own head fills a Melissid with a sense of panic.
This panic drives the Melissadae. The Queen Bees don’t just want control, they need it. They have no choice. A few Melissidae, repelled by a realization of what they’ve become, try to escape. For those who have their powers, though, it’s too easy to use them, to give in to temptation. A little push there, a twist here. One thing leads to another, and soon the Kindred finds herself surrounded by slaves. She’s become the slave master.
The Melissidae force their herds to be insects and believe, in the creation of a perfect community formed in imitation of nature, that they are acting in the interest of the common good. At some point, most Melissidae develop the power to erase individual thought from a mortal’s brain, forcing him to share consciousness with the Queen Bee’s other mortal thralls. The Melissidae believe that mortals must exist like this. The mortals, as drones, occupy their proper place while the vampire occupies hers, and this is harmony. If the kine need to learn to accept this — and they generally do — then the Melissid has a duty to ensure that they take up their rightful place. It’s all for their own good.
People need to love each other. The Queen Bees make them love each other. Workers and drones need authority. The hive is right, the hive is good, the hive is love, the hive is everything.
It’s all a lie, of course. No common good survives in the hive. Drones and workers exist to provide sustenance for the queen. The Melissidae do not imitate nature so much as they mock it, the all-giving, life-loving mother of the hive replaced by a dead, hungry monstrosity.
The Melissid social experiment is an exercise in sociopathy. It’s not about social concern or about the common good or about love. It’s about control. The irony is that the need for control imprisons the Melissidae. It controls them.

Culture

Culture and cultural heritage

Background: The Melissidae are almost all female. It’s not that the bloodlines observe prohibitions against Embracing men. However, the Melissidae are naturally drawn to Embrace women, simply because it feels right to them for a Queen to be female. They are the mothers of their hives.
Other than gender, no other single criterion affects how the Melissidae select childer. The Queen Bees Embrace whosoever they choose, and choose, more often than not, based on nothing more than personal whim. Melissid childer almost always join the bloodline. Some are forced to do so. Some, by the time their Blood matures, have themselves been so tightly bound (via Vinculums or with conditional uses of Dominate) that they could hardly choose otherwise. Some don’t realize that they have an alternative. Most, however, simply metamorphose into full members of the bloodline one night without even realizing.
Queen Bees have likened becoming a full-fledged Melissid to emerging from a chrysalis, like changing from a soft, empty maggot into something colder and hungrier. A new Melissid feels her Blood turn to honey; she feels a clawing need, the second consciousness hatching in her mind. At that point, she’s a Queen Bee forever.
It’s hard to imagine an “ordinary” Ventrue electing to join the bloodline, and certainly no tales have so far surfaced regarding a vampire approaching the Melissidae with the intention of joining them. Having said that, should a situation arise in which a vampire does ask to join the Melissidae, it’s likely that she’d be accepted immediately, no questions asked. A Melissid Avus would assume that the transformation of the Catechumen’s blood would take care of any questions of attitude. In most cases, she’d be right.

History

The Melissidae are the afterbirth of an ambitious, wellintentioned, stillborn social experiment of the Enlightenment. Their history begins with Catherine Dalrymple, who was, in the late 18th century, a notorious fi gure: a political theorist, a poet, a naturalist, a libertine, an atheist, a feminist, a Sapphist, an adventuress. Born in 1753, Catherine was the daughter of James Robert Dalrymple, who had fought alongside Charles Stuart in the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion. Catherine lived much of her early life on the run. James, disenchanted with the Church and the society that had brought about the war, took pains to give his daughter a classical education and a strong sense of self, one not defi ned by any faith or nation. Growing into a remarkable woman, Catherine’s powerful personality brought her into contact with many of the signifi cant people of her age: Rousseau in his paranoid last years, the Radical Dissenters (who included Richard Price, Joseph Priestly and Mary Wollstonecraft) and Thomas Paine.
Catherine, a keen naturalist, had decided quite early on that the human condition could be alleviated through an imitation of nature. In particular, she was intrigued by bees. A beekeeper like her father before her, Catherine wrote that “of all the Communities of the Natural Kingdom, that of the Honey Bee is surely the most harmonious, most benefi cial to the common weal of its Constituents; were Man to begin Imitation of the Bee, the Ills and Injustices of Society would be one day perchance eradicated, a memory.”
Breaking with the Radical Dissenters, Catherine returned to Scotland in 1789, where, re-occupying her father’s long-deserted home near Kirriemuir, a small town near Dundee, she attempted to live by her principles. She founded a communal society, intending to work along the structures of the bee hive, with herself as queen. She wrote: “I see myself as a New Melissa, a follower of that old Melissa of Myth; Whereas the First Melissa domesticated the Bees and gave Honey to the World, I shall tame the Soul of Man and give to the World the sweetness of True Peaceful Society.”
Some 20 men and women were convinced to join in Catherine’s great experiment, which, in honor of the mythological fi gure, she called the Order of the New Melissa. They agreed to hold all their possessions, and their relationships, in common, a decision which, when it became known to the outside world, shocked many. Priests delivered condemning sermons in kirks across the glens. Several wealthy individuals of the nearby town wrote outraged letters to Parliament.
In the end, the Order of the New Melissa proved a disaster. It lasted six months before, torn apart by simple human nature — jealousy, privacy, selfi shness, disaffection at Catherine’s leadership — the last of the Order left Catherine alone at the house at Kirriemuir.
The few biographers who have recounted the tale of Catherine Dalrymple concluded, using the evidence of her last writings, that she probably committed suicide some time around February 1790. There is no memorial for her in any cemetery; the historians who care assume that she was buried in an unmarked, unconsecrated grave, as was the way with suicides. She’s an odd footnote in a bright, vibrant period of history. Most living people — including a lot of students of Enlightenment history — Haven’t even heard of her.
Her fame among the dead, however, is still growing.
It so happened that the Order of the New Melissa had attracted the attention of some of the more revolutionary Kindred in Britain. Around the time that Catherine’s mortal hive began to fall apart, a Carthian Ventrue named Mary Walton Stoke arrived at Kirriemuir. Impressed with Catherine’s force of personality and idealism, Stoke began to infl uence the members of the Order of the New Melissa in such a way that its swift, acrimonious dissolution became inevitable. This wasn’t deliberate — far from it. Stoke’s intention was to revitalize the ailing group and use it to create a working community — and a Herd — of much greater size. However, Mary Stoke, although in her own way idealistic, had never been a perceptive individual, even when mortal, and, consequently, as a vampire, her understanding of mortals was very poor indeed. They quite simply never seemed to do what she wanted them to, even when under her direct psychic domination. The mortals outwitted her at every turn.
Shortly after the last of them left, Stoke appeared to Catherine, the only mortal whose behavior she had been able to predict, and Embraced her, by this time as much out of spite and frustration as out of admiration for the woman.
Catherine appeared initially to come to terms with her new condition, and Mary Walton Stoke was able to display her new childe in the court of the Lady of London three years later. Shortly afterwards, things began to go wrong. The madness common to all Ventrue began to grip Catherine tightly. She behaved strangely, her obsession with insects overtaking her to the extent that she developed phenomenal infl uence over swarms of insects. She could be seen at night, surrounded by swarms of wasps.
Catherine committed Diablerie. Apparently, one of her fi rst victims was her sire. By 1803, Catherine had been declared the quarry of a blood hunt in London.
Catherine fl ed to Scotland and to her father’s home, and there that she decided to recreate the Order of the New Melissa. This time, she reasoned, she would not fail, for she had the power now to make her workers behave as they should. She could make them believe that she was right. She could make them love her. She forced mortal thralls to behave as the drones she had wanted while living. She wanted to be a Queen Bee so badly, so very badly that, gradually, her will, changing her Blood, made it come true.
It was for their own good. It was better this way.
By the time another vampire met her, some 20 years later, Melissa, as Catherine now styled herself, had changed. She really was, in her own way, the queen of a hive, a Herd of mortals whose individual minds had been wiped away, replaced by an implacable, nightmarish hive-mind, with Melissa as queen. She had created childer of her own, and these childer of Melissa, these “Melissidae”, had a need, a hungry desire, to be the queens of their own hives. They surrounded themselves with swarms of insects, allowing them to live inside their bodies. The Queen Bees’ Vitae tasted like honey. And they grew in number at a frightening rate.
By 1860, Melissid hives had arisen across Britain. There were a few in France and even some in the United States. Somewhere between 30 and 40 Melissidae were active. In 1862, some infl uential members of The Invictus in London decided that the Melissidae needed to be destroyed. Elders of The Lancea Sanctum followed suit in 1863, and, by 1870, the Princes of nearly every domain in Great Britain, representing all of the major covenants, had declared the Melissadae anathema.
Why? Breaches of The Traditions were claimed, but, in the end, it may have all boiled down to one fact: the Melissidae reminded the venerable monsters of the covenants of what they really were.
The insects, the powers, the hives were — are — really just affectations. Other vampires are just the same. They’re all Queen Bees, really: waxy, hungry, dead things who control and rape to get what they need. Some Kindred, even Princes, resort to violence and blood hunts to avoid coming to terms with that truth about themselves.
When the “last” Melissid was destroyed in Edinburgh in 1881, the Kindred of Scotland believed that they really had ended the line. While the French Melissidae had been entirely wiped out, two had escaped in Britain, both in Torpor. A single Melissid survived in the United States (also in Torpor, somewhere on the Eastern seaboard).
While these three vampires slept, the stories surrounding the Melissidae grew. They’re better known now among the Kindred than they were a hundred years ago.
Few of the Kindred suspected that the Melissidae had survived. Although Melissa herself was never actually accounted for among those destroyed, there were three separate accounts of her end (one of the fi ve Kindred still walking tonight claims that he diablerized her). Each of the isolated domains of Britain thought themselves rid of the Queen Bees. In fact, none of the three vampires thought to be Melissa was in fact she, and so Melissa lay hidden in Torpor until 1957, when she was the fi rst of the line to come to herself. The other two survivors followed her, in 1960 and 1965. Melissa’s blood appears to have been still potent.
As Melissid numbers grew, Melissa herself became increasingly elusive. The last time any of Melissa’s brood — or anyone or anything else — saw her was 15 years ago. She might have been destroyed. She might be in Torpor. She might still be out there, as mad and hungry as ever.

The Madonna of the Wasps

There’s a friend-of-a-friend story currently going around among the night-people of Scotland, and the story goes like this: someone who knows someone who came across this village somewhere in the glens, around Perthshire or Angus, which was under the control of something terrible, and he was the only one who got out to tell you the story.
The details vary, depending on which version gets told. There’s the one about a coterie of nomadic Kindred who found themselves attacked by dozens of mortals, who were acting in concert without exchanging a word, and they carried on, closing in, no matter how many of them got killed, and they had dogs, and when the dogs went for them, some of the animals burst open, and swarms of wasps fl ew out, and only one of the coterie escaped.
Here’s another one: one inexperienced vampire, hearing the other story, curious, found a bastion of anthills in a row on the outskirts of the village. Each anthill was the size of a grown man, and, as the neonate passed them, he found himself surrounded by ants, which seemed to know where he was going, which behaved with an eerie intelligence. And he couldn’t go anywhere, and they swarmed over him, and they ate him, and he was conscious the whole time. That one should be taken with a pinch of salt. After all, if he was alone, who heard the story?
An only slightly more believable version concerns a Lupine whose pack was given an audience with a woman, a vampire or some other kind of revenant, styling herself as a Madonna of the Wasps. Again, only one Lupine got away, after the waxy-faced black-clad figure, a woman with faceted eyes like an insect, turned his packmates against him. But who listens to werewolves? In fact, sensible Kindred are probably best served by believing none of these stories; why should any vampire want to leave the safety of the city, anyway? Sensible Kindred remain in Edinburgh. Wild stories are just that: stories.

Society and Culture

The Melissidae have no cultural framework to speak of, at least not in the way that some other bloodlines do. The Melissadae are solitary, on the whole. Traditionally, what society the Queen Bees have works like this: the elder Melissidae remain in their hives, surrounded by their mortal drones, who tend to their needs, supply them with Vitae and bring more drones into the hive. These drones are bodyguards, ancillary Staff, lovers and food. After a period of time, which could be anything from a few decades to a century or more, every Melissid comes to the realization that her hive can grow no larger. Some Melissidae are simply unable to admit any more individual drones into the hive, while other Melissidae might not have reached the capacity of their powers but realize that they risk the Masquerade if their communities grow any larger. When this happens, a Melissid chooses to take a childe.
Some Melissidae prefer to leave their hives themselves, one last time, and Embrace the first likely person (which could be the fi rst person they speak to who mentions politics or religion, for example, or the best-looking person they come across). Others send their drones out, perhaps even using their powers to possess one of their servants, and have them abduct a potential candidate. In cases like this, the criteria for the candidate could be specific (a lecturer in politics, who is a woman under 40, not wearing glasses), general (a young woman with red hair) or just in the wrong place at the wrong time (the first woman they meet). Others are targeted, lured in and then imprisoned until the sire chooses either to Embrace the victim, or — if she isn’t satisfactory — suck her dry.
New childer are incarcerated. They’re often tortured, or brainwashed or simply left alone, tended to by the drones of the hive, until such time as the childer begin to see their captors’ point of view. Then the childer are let out. This could take weeks, or decades.
The majority of childer who Haven’t been subjected to Vinculums or brainwashed could leave at any time, but, given their trauma, most are so psychologically damaged that they don’t want to leave, becoming dependent on their sires, an effect not unlike Stockholm syndrome. By the time the childer have entered into the bloodline’s full heritage, this, along the fear of being separate from the hive, keeps all but the very few whose wills have not been completely broken in check.
Caught in a twisted co-dependent relationship with her sire and the silent, blank drones of her sire’s hive, a Melissid neonate fi nds herself used as her sire’s chosen agent. Technically, the childe has free rein to do what she wants, but, every so often, her sire expects her to run an errand or perform some kind of task. Given the Ventrue capacity for madness and the elder Queen Bee’s self-imposed isolation from society, these errands are often bizarre (see the sidebar below). Disobedience courts the wrath of a mad vampire with completely trustworthy Retainers.
Consequently, one or two Melissidae fi nd themselves on the run, either because they can’t go back or because their distaste at what they have to do or their Denial of what they are outweighs their fear of being alone. Some simply want to do things their own way.
Sires aren’t persistent in pursuing errant or disobedient childer, and rarely stop them from striking out on their own. Sires quite reasonably expect the Blood to do the work of creating a new hive queen. It does. The temptation is always too great. So far, every single rogue Melissid has ended up like her sire: a Queen Bee in a hive full of mortals under her control.

Hives

The Melissidae do uphold the Masquerade (or they do until they’ve driven themselves too mad to care, at any rate). Although it might appear diffi cult to hide a group of mortals who have been so twisted, when they behave like insects it’s actually surprisingly easy. People don’t ask questions. People are isolated, particularly in the cities.
Hives can take on different disguises. They’re still hives, but if they look like something familiar, no one notices. No one says anything. People see what they expect to see. They’re too polite to pry.
A perfect housewife lives in a suburban house with her perfect, loyal husband, her perfect, virginal daughter and her perfect teenage son. The huband’s an accountant, the daughter’s a cheerleader, the son’s on the swim team and they all get on so very well. And, at night, Mom can be seen tending the roses in the garden, and her hair is fl awless, her clothes are spotlessly clean and her smile is fi xed like the Mona Lisa’s.
An expensive and discreet dominatrix keeps a dungeon in the middle of town. Her clients think that the silence and submissiveness her receptionist and her silent, masked assistants display is just part of the role they play, part of what you pay for. Every so often, a client doesn’t leave. He didn’t tell anyone where he went that night, and, after a while, the police just add him to their list of open cases. The domme’s other clients notice that she has a new assistant. They don’t say anything.
The Marxist collective squatting in the house on the corner of the terrace seems harmless enough. They sometimes go out to protests or sometimes hold socialist meetings, but, on the whole, they’re just a bunch of ineffectual student activists. They’ll grow out of it. A new one joins them every month or so. No one sees the leader, but they know he’s there.
The cult only has a few members, and it’s not like they’re stockpiling guns or stealing babies, so why bother them? It’s a free country. They’re odd, with their fi xed smiles and their strange way of talking, and the way they always defer to the woman who leads them, but lots of religious types are like that. If the way they stare at you freaks you out, do what everyone else does — leave them alone.
The sorority is exclusive. It only lets the right people in. They don’t talk about the hazings, but then that’s the way with sororities. The president and her clique are beautiful, and they’re stylish, and everyone lets them run the show, because it just seems right for them to do so. No one questions it.

Out of Control

A Melissid has the power to make people do what she wants. Whether she wants the power or not. The ability to change people’s minds, and all she has to do is use it, just a little. A little push there. A twist here.
It’s a temptation, and an easy one to give in to.
As her Humanity withers like a moth on a light bulb, she starts with these small violations, and works up to larger ones. And, eventually, she reaches the point where she doesn’t even blink at dehumanizing people — even people she once knew or loved — to the extent that they feel like insects. And there’s still a lot farther to fall.
It might begin with dressing them up; like a child with dolls, she starts to experiment with the way they look. Then she makes them do things they wouldn’t normally do. Maybe — just for the experience — she possesses one, watching through his eyes as he goes out and burgles a house, or starts a fi ght in a bar, or kills a stranger or kills a relative.
Maybe she makes her drones do things to each other — sexual or violent acts, or torture or she makes them act out Greek tragedies with real sex and violence, for her entertainment. Perhaps they’re made to form bloody or obscene tableaux vivants in her living room. Maybe she starts seeing what happens if she gathers bees or wasps to make a hive inside her slaves’ bodies.
She’s in control, in total control, and there’s the temptation, always the temptation, to go a bit farther each time. She begins to cease to pretend that what she does is for the good of her workers. They become toys to her. And if she breaks a few, she can, she thinks, always fi nd some more. When a Queen Bee degenerates this far, it’s hard for her to uphold the Masquerade — and the likelihood is that she doesn’t even care anymore.
The Melissidae are a double perversion: what works for wasps and bees, what is a natural miracle in the insect world is a twisted evil in the world of people. Melissa’s tragedy was that she never understood that, even when alive. To have a vampire, a dead thing that should never exist, at its center is a thing that makes even some Kindred elders quail.
The intentions of many Melissidae are initially good, but their condition makes it impossible to avoid perversion. Their way is paved directly to Hell.

You Know This Story

“Beehive hairstyles. From the ’60s. The big bouffant, backcombed and hairsprayed until it stood up in a shining tower of hair. You know why they called it a beehive?
“Thing about beehive hairstyles, was that you couldn’t wash them. You had to sleep sitting up, and you had to keep them sprayed, so the hair was this rock-solid edifice.
“This is a true story. Back in the ’60s a friend of your granddad knew a girl who had one of these hairdos, and she hadn’t washed it for well over a year.
“So, anyway, the man sees this young woman at the shop where she’s working, and she’s ringing up whatever he bought on the till, and suddenly the man sees a little trickle of blood come from the girl’s hairline and roll down her temple. He asks the girl if she’s all right, and she says, in this half-asleep voice, that she’s fine.
“And he says, you’re bleeding, and she says, no, I’m not. And she puts her hand up to her head, and then your granddad’s friend watches as a wasp, or a bee or a hornet, maybe, fl ies out of her beehive hair, and then another one, and another one. And the guy realizes that she doesn’t feel anything. She’s just mechanically carrying on doing what she was doing all along.
“The man panics and runs. He fi nds out a couple days later that she collapsed and died a few hours after he ran from the shop.
“It turns out that somehow, somewhere, some kind of insect had laid its eggs in her hair, and when the maggots hatched, they burrowed into her head and into her brain and made their nest there, just eating away at the top of her head until they were ready to metamorphose and fly away.
“You might have heard this story with spiders or fl ies. But it was really bees, or possibly wasps. And when the story got out, that’s when they started calling that kind of hairstyle a beehive. But it was that man your granddad knew, years back, who saw it.
“True story.”

Common Dress code

Appearance: Whatever or whoever Queen Bees may have been in life, in undeath they all have this in common: they are always meticulous. Their obsession with control manifests itself in an attention to clean, fastidious lines. However they may dress, whether in hippy chic, socialist minimalism or the attire of a Republican housewife, it’s always perfect and, as Humanity diminishes, this perfection itself becomes excessive, freakish, somehow wrong. A Melissid may have too-perfectly coiffed hair, so styled and sprayed that it’s immobile, or cut very short. Pants and skirts bear razor-sharp creases, blouses are whiter than white, scarves and ties are knotted just so, shoes are clean, jewelry is tasteful and minimalist. Makeup is flawless, whatever style the Queen Bee affects. After a while, they all look like mannequins.
The sense of unease created by this attention to sartorial detail is compounded by the way the Melissidae move. The more their Humanity erodes, the more they move like insects, their absolute stillness punctuated with brief, twitchy movements — the quick, repeated click of a tongue against the teeth, the crack of knuckles as the hands clench, the cocking of the head to one side, a sudden flutter of eyelashes. Insects surround them. Few Kindred feel at ease to see a single bee or a wasp crawl out of an immobile Melissid’s nostril or mouth and fly away.

Art & Architecture

Haven: The havens of the Melissidae also tend to house their mortal drones and, therefore, tend to be quite sizable, places with enough space to accommodate a dozen or more people comfortably. For example, some Melissid have created hives in derelict stately homes, factory units and call centers. The Melissidae are too few to make many generalizations, but, whatever their hives are like, whether cult compounds, remote villages, monasteries or New Age communes, the havens are always clean. Everything occupies its proper place, even in those places where things might not be expected to be. It can seem quite peculiar to see a junkie commune’s drug paraphernalia neatly arranged or the accoutrements of an S&M dungeon placed with the precision of military kit laid out for inspection.
Despite the cleanliness and order of these places, inevitably, insects congregate in huge numbers. A wasps’ nest hangs under the stairs of a perfect suburban home, but the inhabitants do nothing. A row of beehives sits in the back lawn of the monastery. Ants’ mounds surround the sorority house. The bugs are always there. They don’t bother the inhabitants, who allow the wasps to settle on hands and the ants to crawl up legs without flinching.

Common Customs, traditions and rituals

Disciplines

The Melissidae don’t have a signature Discipline, but they do use the common powers they have in uncommon ways. For example, while the Melissidae make much use of Animalism, they use it in a different way than a Gangrel or non-bloodline Ventrue. As well, they have developed a large number of unique Devotions.

Melissid Animalism

Unlike most other Kindred, the Melissidae are adept at affecting insects, specifi cally swarming insects, such as ants, termites, wasps, hornets and bees — the Melissadae gain a +2 bonus to affect insects instead of the standard –3 penalty as described on pp. 116–118 of Vampire: The Requiem. The Melissadae are, conversely, less able to affect other kinds of animals, suffering a –1 penalty for uses of Animalism that affect creatures other than insects. Swarms of insects controlled by a Melissid count as a single creature for the purposes of Animalism.
Although the standard powers gained with Animalism •, •• and •••• normally require eye contact with the animal subject, it’s impossible to make eye contact with a swarm of several hundred insects. Insects don’t really use sight the way that higher animals do.
There’s no standard way in which Melissidae make contact with insects, but all Melissadae manage. All Melissidae who have developed Animalism • have the ability to call a single insect from a swarm or hive to them, and it’s through this single insect that the Melissid will communicate with the swarm of which the insect is a part.
How this communication happens differs from Queen Bee to Queen Bee. One Melissid might simply allow the insect to settle on her body, on her face or hand, communicating with the creature through her skin. Another Melissid might open her mouth and allow the insect to fly or crawl inside, then keep it alive in her closed mouth for the duration of the power’s use. Another Melissid might allow an insect to settle on her eyeball, holding the insect in her eyelashes until such time as the power’s duration ends, at which time she frees the insect or kills it.
Unlike other Ventrue, the Melissidae don’t need to maintain concentration when using Subsume the Lesser Spirit (Animalism ••••). When connected with an insect swarm, the Queen Bee becomes one of the swarm, and the swarm becomes an extension of her own body.
Ventrue who join the bloodline fi nd their Blood warped to produce the Melissidae’s effects in this manner.

Devotions

The Melissidae have developed a number of Devotions unique to their bloodline. Although based on common Disciplines, none of these powers can be learned by outsiders. Most of these Devotions depend on the unusual nature of the Queen Bees’ Blood, and attempts by vampires outside the bloodline to learn these powers have failed.
The ubiquity of these powers among the Melissidae has made the Devotions easy to learn within the family. As a result, most Melissid Devotions cost fewer experience points than they otherwise would. In fact, all of these Devotions (with the exception of Body Colony and Mock Mind) don’t even need to be taught. They just come to a Melissid whose powers are ripe (and who has spent the requisite number of experience points), a gift of the Blood. Melissidae often fi nd that they possess these powers for the fi rst time without even realizing. The idea comes unbidden, as the hive-mind suddenly manifesting a new extension of its will.
In game terms, this means that once the experience points have been spent, the Melissid character can take the power. However, its first use should be roleplayed, as the Melissid realizes, not always with delight, what she can do. The Melissid’s player obviously spends the experience points, but the use of the power for the first time may elicit shock, horror or overconfidence in the character.

Major organizations

Covenant: The Melissidae tend not to agree wholeheartedly with any of the five major covenants, but this doesn’t stop them sometimes finding some common cause. Due to their heritage, however, they usually find it best to keep their bloodline hidden. It’s useful for a Melissid to have Allies, and quite a reasonable number of Queen Bees have made at least a show of joining one of the covenants, and not always because they respect the covenants’ philosophies. For some, there’s safety in numbers, and that’s all.
If a Melissid in modern nights wishes to claim allegiance with a covenant, she more likely than not chooses The Invictus, for the simple reason that its strict, stratifi ed social order has at least some commonality with the Melissid vision. Melissidae may maintain hives that look like religious communities, and these sometimes fi nd sympathy with The Lancea Sanctum. A few Queen Bees — those whose hives resemble communes or socialist cells, for example — might take cover inside The Carthian Movement.
Very few Melissidae have joined either The Circle of the Crone or The Ordo Dracul so far. Both covenants have strict ideas about what a vampire should be, and it’s very diffi cult indeed for a Melissid to even pretend to have the commitment to that sort of vampiric vision. Although elders in each of the fi ve major covenants had some part in the bloodline’s attempted destruction, the Melissidae who know about the purge don’t seem to hold a grudge. On the other hand, many Melissidae don’t know about the purge, either because their sires never thought it important enough to tell them, or because some of the Queen Bees found out about only it in the minutes before they were destroyed or forced into Torpor.

Nickname: Queen Bees

Parent ethnicities

• Ventrue

Character Creation: Melissidae normally prioritize Mental and Social Attributes and Social Skills. Physical Attributes and Skills often fall low among priorities. Many Queen Bees have at least one dot in Animal Ken, and several, at some point in their unlife, have learned Beekeeping as a Specialty.
Mental Merits are extremely common. Melissidae who still dwell in their sire’s hives usually have at least one dot in Herd and Haven. Those Melissidae whose relationships with their sires are good often have a dot in Mentor. Retainers are rare for new Melissidae, as any servants they have probably serve their sires directly.
Bloodline Disciplines: Animalism, Auspex, Dominate, Resilience
Melissid Animalism works differently from the Animalism practiced by most other Ventrue, focusing on the manipulation of insects (see p. 110).
Weakness: The Melissidae suffer the standard Ventrue weakness, a –2 penalty on rolls to avoid gaining Derangements after degeneration checks. Among the Melissidae, Obsessive Compulsion is often the fi rst derangement gained. Like all Ventrue, Melissidae find it increasingly harder to avoid falling into madness when their Humanity slips away.
And slip away it does. The hive-mind sees to that, and demands company as the madness takes over. Like a swarming insect, a Melissid feels comfortable only when surrounded by the drones of her hive, or, if she hasn’t yet developed the ability to create a hive of her own, the hive of her sire. If separated by 100 yards or more for more than an hour from an individual drone of a hive belonging to her or to her sire, or from another Melissid, a Queen Bee becomes edgy, panicky and powerless.
A Melissid isolated in this way suffers a –1 penalty on rolls to avoid fear frenzy for every hour she has been isolated. (So, after two hours alone, the penalty is –2, and after four-anda-half hours alone, the penalty is –4, and so on.)
Also, after the first hour, an isolated Melissid becomes distracted by the growing buzz in her mind. Removed from her hive, she feels the itch of control again, and insecurity takes root. Until she comes into the company of at least one drone again, she suffers a cumulative –1 penalty to any mental dice pools.
The Melissidae don’t consider their hive-mind to be a weakness. To the Queen Bees, the hive-mind is their identity and their strength.
Concepts: Abbess, cult leader, dominatrix, faithful wife of a philandering politician, female executive trapped by the glass ceiling, lady of the manor, most popular girl in school, New Age hippie guru, socialist demagogue, sorority leader, the perfect housewife, unrequited lover

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Your Sire Wants. . .

Melissid sires often ask their more active childer to do things that seem frankly bizarre. This isn’t to say that they’re not without a purpose, just that the sire hasn’t told them what the purpose of these actions might be. This could be because the sire doesn’t consider the childe trustworthy enough to be party to her plans, but it might just as easily be because she simply hasn’t thought to explain. For example, a sire might ask her childe to:
Vandalize all the phone booths along one main street in the nearby area.
Obtain three fresh human fingers.
Steal a jar of honey from the larder of a specific individual.
Spray-paint a full description of a local priest’s misdemeanors in the sanctuary of the cathedral.
Catch half a dozen stray cats, and bring them to the hive.
Extract the canine teeth from every corpse in a (specified) local mortuary.

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Swarms

Individual insects are too small to have statistical scores, while individual stings or bites normally cause no more than irritation. In the case of entire swarms of bees and wasps, however, sheer numbers make up for the minor individual damage each insect inflicts.
A swarm of angry wasps or bees inflicts one point of bashing damage per turn to anyone caught within the swarm. (If the victim is badly allergic, the damage may be counted as lethal.) A victim whose body is mostly covered by clothing (over half) takes one point every two turns. Someone wearing beekeeper’s gear can escape unharmed, but the insects can fi nd their way inside anything less complete than that. Each point of damage represents one to two dozen stings.
In most cases, a swarm’s purpose is only to defend the nest. Wasps won’t typically follow an intruder more than 100 yards from where they were originally agitated, making them easy to escape. An experienced survivalist will simply run fl at out as soon as she realizes she’s roused the hive. Wasps or bees under the infl uence of a Melissid vampire, however, can be as persistent as the Kindred wills them to be. So long as the vampire directs a swarm under her control to attack or follow, they do so.
Someone unfortunate enough to be swarmed by bees makes an extended Dexterity + Survival roll to sweep the insects off. Once she reaches fi ve successes, she is free of bees. Until then, she suffers damage each turn (or every other turn, depending on how much of her body is protected by clothing) as if engulfed in the swarm. Depending on the number of bees, the extended roll may require more or fewer total successes.
Of course, the Melissid may simply redirect her swarm to continue plaguing her victim. In this case, the extended roll becomes an extended and contested roll. The Melissid’s player rolls Presence + Animal Ken; the victim’s player rolls Dexterity + Survival. If the Melissid achieves fi ve successes fi rst, the insects torment her victim for as long as she wishes or the duration of the power she’s using. If the victim achieves five successes first, he manages to swat the insects away enough to render them ineffectual for the duration of the scene. If the Melissid invokes a swarm-controlling power again, however, the extended and contested action begins anew.
A swarm under the command of a vampire can be an eerie thing to see, as hundreds of tiny bodies act in perfect concert.

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