(3.5)(Template) Now with Simplified Alt. Version! Low Angst & LA Vampires (PEACH)

[DracoDei]

Don't worry, I don't have all that much. It's just that I usually try to finish all my work before reading poni.

Oh, Ok.

Sorry, I thought that that was what you had asked me to do. I must have misunderstood your question, sorry.

Well, as I said, I would be very interested in how you see the relationship between the template and the story, DESPITE that not being the questions I was asking.

The questions I was asking were:
1.) What you thought of sengmeng's claim that the template could be improved by "elimination of oddly specific rules". This assumes that by "streamlining" he meant simply writing the same underlying rules in clearer ways.
2.) What you thought of the story itself (Refinement: With or without the influence of the template).

In aid of #2 above, I now provide additional spoilers relevant to the interaction with the template for the parts of the story I haven't written yet. You don't need to read them if you wish to avoid being spoiled for the later events of the story.

Spoiler

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Fluttershy tastes some of Cranky's blood (from a bag from the hospital) and finds it tastes horrible (he wasn't enthusastic about selling blood to the hospital after spending money on dates with Matilda). This is how the relationship between attitude of donor towards and nutrition is discovered, and this becomes widely known due to certain dramatic actions Angel takes so that Fluttershy can warn Cranky that he may have a disease (he doesn't, she just knows that food from sick plants or eggs from sick chickens may not taste good).

Celestia will, indeed, be modifying sunlight on the third day after Fluttershy's transformation. After this sunlight will not harm her or her spawn (and she WILL spawn other eripmavs eventually, since after some initial testing, eripmavism will be used as a last-ditch medical treatment).

Big Macintosh will be asking her out because:
Ah almost lost her. Made me realize how much I woulda regretted never askin' her out.
More specifically he does this by giving Twilight a bag of his blood to give to her directly, rather than the past-freshness-date stuff from the hospital, then asking Fluttershy how he tastes. She shyly replies that he tasted nice, not as nice as Rarity or Rainbow Dash (her closest friends), but DIFFERENT. It turns out that eripmavs can taste the difference between an intense friend and a light crush.

The mirror thing proves to be a hold-over from a defense that necromancers added to vampires to keep them from being detected by vampire-hunting unicorns and alicorns. Fade from mirror, fade from divinations. Most vampires keep this up so long they forget how to turn it off. I should perhaps build the choice between "Always On" and "Only on when I am spending a swift action every round to maintain it" into eripmavs so that some of them can appear in mirrors. Once made this would require a feat to get the best of both world with "Swift action to turn on or off". Then again, most PCs would pick "Always On" and not bother with the feat, relying on their diplomacy bonuses to explain themselves to anyone who notices they don't appear in a mirror.

Early experiments on elderly dying ponies in hospitals prove that eripmavism does not extend lifespan past old-age. This explains why it gives the equivalent of the monk and druid's "Timeless Body" rather than immortality. I thought about it a bit and decided to give dexterity lost to prior aging back, but not the strength.

Fluttershy is horrified when she tries to save a chipmunk that was going to almost certainly going die anyway, and ends up simply killing it when she drains it of blood. This explains the "Intelligence 3+" limit.

In order to keep Fluttershy needing to feed on Ponies rather than limiting herself to the animals she feels more comfortable interacting with (and many would offer, just as they tried to cheer her up when she was crying in "Hurricane Fluttershy"), I put in the bit about animals only providing 1/4 nutrition (I should clarify that the damage from taking blood from an unwilling animal is NOT reduced).

Later Celestia's brothers (don't laugh! I explain why they are never relevant in the series, and they AREN'T alicorns in form, plus they never appear "on camera") modify the running water and "must sleep in native soil" banes respectively. The last one takes several years/decades for reasons that aren't important to go into here.

Eventually Fluttershy and Big Macintosh will marry.

Fluttershy's condition renders her infertile(this is assumed for deathless I think, but I GUESS I could explicitly state it), but they will eventually adopt a child* who Fluttershy was called in to turn into an eripmav since he was dying after be born via C-Section after his mother died of complications while in pre-mature labor. He never gets any larger (this will be important in the next paragraph), but starts down the path to his cutie-mark and eventual career when he starts volunteering at Ponyville General Hospital, mostly working in the lab taste-testing blood. This is the origin of the feat, and any other Sense Motive bonuses I gave for tasting blood.
*I am intentionally not spoiling the foal's name, because I think I have a pretty hilariously appropriate one and I don't want to ruin more surprises than I have to.

Regarding why size classes are included in the table:

1. Big Macintosh tastes wonderful most of the time, but like any relationship, their's has its ups and downs. Big Macintosh, being big (equivalent to Powerful Build perhaps and definitely with a high constitution score) keeps trying to get her to drink more from him, but Fluttershy is much to scared of causing him long-term harm, and insists on mostly living existing on blood-bags from the hospital.
2. As for their adoptive son (who you remember is permanently the size of a prematurely born foal), takes an apple to school every day so he and his parents can feel Honest about him taking his lunch from Cheerilee's leg (Breakfast and Dinner are from the hospital bags), this happens on occasion even after he graduates from her class.
3. Their son also gets his cutie-mark when he is rushed from the hospital laboratory to the ER to save a dying stallion's life. He does so, but ends up filling up several bedpans by urinating the excess blood while still latched onto the stallion's neck. Their son notes that this is the first time in all his years of existence that he has ever urinated. This point also explains approximately how I set the storage capacity.

The influence over eripmavs you create isn't something from the story, but is my idea of how a new eripmav could be kept from doing anything too stupid while they learn the ropes, and is derived from a vampire's ability to control any vampires and vampire spawn it creates.

One thing I DIDN'T include in the template is that Fluttershy actually nurses her foal (the literal "Magic of Motherhood" causes this to happen, whereas if his biological father had raised him instead of giving him to her, it wouldn't have happened). If she had instead adopted a living child, she would have produced a substance resembling blood, but as nutritious as mare-milk.

The story ends with Fluttershy's funeral after she keels over dead in mid-sentence at a ripe old age, instantly going from a vibrant deathless (not that I will probably use that term in the story) to a corpse. We discover their son standing on Big Macintosh's head at the funeral weeping tears of Big Macintosh's blood (they were doing the feeding thing as a comfort ritual between the two of them). Ergo eripmavs, perhaps any time they cry, perhaps only if they keep crying for a very long time, will substitute deathless blood for tears.