Have some Blindsight vampire OCs from my Blindsight elsewhere fic set in the early Holocene (around 8,000 BCE)! You may have met Heron, meet her (surviving, adult) kids!
I might use it pronouns of ancient vampires in my fic, but for now I'll just use conventional ones.
Heron has three surviving adult children: Magpie, Drowning, and Stargazer:
Magpie is Heron's oldest child (she had another one before him, but that one died of disease in infancy).
Magpie is not the child of Heron's regular mate/partner at the time. Different ancient vampire families were very distrustful of each other and mostly just avoided each other, but they did sometimes trade or otherwise cooperate. A feature of ancient vampire "diplomacy" was that they'd often send a breeding-age female near ovulation to the other family to do the deal, with the understanding that she'd get gang-banged by some or all of the males of the other family. This made the other family less likely to kill her, as she'd thereby be a potential pathway for the proliferation of their genes. It also increased the genetic diversity of the species and the family, and thereby mitigated the low genetic diversity of ancient vampires and the tendency of their social structure to compound this by promoting inbreeding. Magpie was conceived in such a union. This means during his early life his blood relatives had to protect him from Heron's regular mate, who'd have killed him to free up space in the family for his own offspring if he could have gotten away with it, much as male lions will kill the cubs of rival males.
Magpie got his name because as a child he made a sort of friend of a magpie, feeding it little scraps of food until it trusted him enough to perch on his shoulder. A normal vampire might do something like this, but probably with the intent of betraying the animal and eating it later; when Heron and her mom asked him when he was planning to do this, they noticed he seemed a little upset by the idea. This was one of their first clues that there was something odd about him.
Another early clue was that Magpie did not go through the normal ancient vampire childhood phase of torturing small animals. Vampires are far less playful than humans, but they are a highly intelligent species closely related to humans and play is part of how humans learn and a common trait of intelligent creatures, so play is also a normal behavior of vampire children. An unfortunate but common manifestation of playfulness is sadistic play, which is common even in human children (in our species it is often directed toward other human children), and vampires are an aggressive species with a strong hunting instinct. In ancient vampires, sadistic play with small prey items during childhood was a normal part of how the hunting instinct "wired up" during brain development. Thankfully, usually by the time a vampire reaches adulthood the sadistic impulse has become very tightly coupled to the hunting instinct and thus the sadistic play phase has passed; gratuitous cruelty is rare in adult vampires; it would make them less efficient predators. The worst an adult vampire was likely to do was take a few moments to gloat over cornered and/or wounded prey before delivering the death blow (the most horrific plausible human-vampire interaction is what might happen if an unsupervised vampire child in the sadistic play age range encountered a lone and vulnerable human child young enough to be easily overpowered by a maybe 3-8 years old or so vampire child). But Magpie never went through a sadistic play phase, and even seemed uncomfortable when his mother, grandmother, and grandfathers/great uncles (Heron's mom mated with a pair of brothers, so unclear which is which) were teaching him how to hunt, fish, and trap nonhuman animals. He even sometimes showed altruism to animals; his relationship with the magpie has already been mentioned, and he may even have sometimes tended injured animals back to health and fed and protected them until they could fend for themselves again.
The family also noticed subtler things about Magpie; how gentle he was with his younger sisters and how enthusiastic and attentive he was in helping his older relatives look after them, how attentively he protected Stargazer from her older sister Drowning's attempts to target her for casual low-level sadistic play, how eagerly he volunteered for small tasks around the camp...
Magpie is neurodivergent in the same kind of way as Cassie/First from The Nightmare Stacks; a relatively high-empathy high-altruism individual in a species where sociopath-adjacency is the norm. Compared to a normal vampire, Magpie has an abnormally high capacity for pro-social impulses such as affective empathy, altruism, compassion, and guilt. Empathy is connected to imagination (as it is, after all, fundamentally a matter of imagining what it's like to be something or someone else), so Magpie is also atypically playful for a vampire, in a broad sense of playfulness that includes things like abstract curiosity and the capacity to appreciate art. Another early sign of Magpie's difference was a tendency to doodle representational art. Normal vampires sometimes also make doodles as a kind of stimming, but they are usually geometric rather than representational; for instance, Magpie's grandmother has a tendency to doodle spirals with notches separated by the exact length of a segment of one of her fingers (a human with a measuring device would be astonished by how precise they are for a casual free-hand drawing). Magpie may be a little bit of a runt as a consequence of the genes responsible for his neurodivergence, kind of like how autism often comes with poor sensorimotor coordination and chronic digestive problems in humans, but the effect isn't very severe; he may be shorter than either of his sisters, but within the normal distribution of ancient vampire male size (vampires have lower sexual dimorphism than humans and Stargazer is big). He may also have a mildly neotenous look as an adult (compared to ancient vampire average), as some of the genes responsible for his neurodivergence may be related to the ones involved in domestication syndrome and the ones involved in making Homo sapiens the most neotenous and hypersocial hominid, but again, the effect would be noticeable but not super-dramatic; to vampires of his own time he'd look a bit distinctive but normal-ish.
Around 1-2% of the ancient vampire population were like Magpie, comparable to the occurrence of autism, sociopathy, and transgenderism in humans. This is common enough that Magpie's family were aware of the existence of vampires like him and had that as a reference for his (to them) strange behavior, but rare enough that he was the only person like him in his family (with the partial exception of Stargazer) and, given the ancient vampire social structure, Magpie was the first person like him that any of his family members had extensive interaction with.
Empathy and compassion for your prey has obvious potential liabilities. So does being more altruistic than the other members of your social group. There is a reason Magpie is not typical. In a sense Magpie is a rather lonely and profoundly tragic person. But being kinder than your fellows is not necessarily entirely a negative in terms of personal or reproductive success. Magpie's family benefit from his abnormally high altruism and therefore value him as an ally. If you were a cold-hearted rational selfish killer, whose company would you prefer, another one like you, or somebody more altruistic and compassionate than you, who treats you better than you treat others? The unkind can still appreciate receiving kindness and recognize its source as an asset they wish to preserve.
When Magpie was around 9-11 years old he observed his younger sister Drowning getting casually slapped around by Heron's mate because she'd irritated him. Vampires mature faster than humans, a 9-11 year old vampire is a very different thing from a 9-11 year old human, at that age Magpie was already smarter and more physically powerful than most adult humans ... but he still had not yet reached his full adult size and strength, and Heron's mate was a particularly physically impressive specimen of vampire-kind, bigger and stronger than Magpie would ever be, and would be eager to kill Magpie given an opportunity/excuse. Magpie walked up to him and basically said "If you ever hit my sister in anything but necessary self-defense again, I will attack you. I realize that if that was a one-on-one fight I'd basically just be committing suicide by doing that, as you are a physically powerful adult male and I am a child and you really want to kill me and would have done it when I was a newborn baby if mom and grandma would let you get away with it. However, consider this: mom, grandma, and grandpa/great-uncle value me more than you, because I am their blood relative and you are not, and also because I'm nice to them while you're kind of a jerk even by vampire standards, if I attack you they will take my side and you will end up taking a beating at best and getting expelled from the family or killed and eaten at worst. As you mentally process that, factor in that I would be willing to take what you in my place would consider an unacceptably high risk of getting hurt or killed to protect my sister cause I'm a freak like that. I expect you to now examine my game theory, find it impeccable, and change your behavior in the way I've demanded." It worked! Vampires are highly observant creatures with the memories of metaphorical elephants and if you cross them - or help them - they will remember. You bet Drowning was taking mental notes during that incident and referred back to them for the rest of her life!
I've been talking about this in terms of pure selfish cold game theory logic, but there is also a dimension that humans might find more sympathetic. Even neurotypical vampires have some capacity for affection (it still served important social functions in ancient vampire social groups). It wouldn't be very anthropomorphizing to say that Magpie's mother, grandmother, and fully vampire sister think he's a precious beautiful cinnamon roll too good for this world, that the way he acts toward them plucks at calcified and atrophied but still existent strings in their cold vampire hearts, that his kindness toward them endears him to them, and that they have the same kind of concern for him that human parents often have toward a child who is different in a way that makes them vulnerable.
Of course, like just about every ancient vampire who survived much past their fourteenth birthday, Magpie is by human standards a serial killer. He can basically function normally in ancient vampire society, and he's now in his thirties, which means by now he's personally killed a number of humans that's probably closing in on double digits.
It would be very hard for an "ethical vampire" to survive in Magpie's time; their only plausible options for obtaining the protocadherins they needed would be scavenging by grave-robbing (very unsanitary and therefore dangerous, and inefficient) and non-fatally bleeding humans (very inefficient). A vampire who refused to hunt humans would probably be expelled from their family. But also (and related to the previous sentence), Magpie has never been taught human morality, and insofar as ancient vampires had something like morality it was like tribal/mafia morality taken to its ultimate logical conclusion: the family was everything, entities outside it weren't moral patients, and it was laudatory and often even mandatory to harm or kill outsiders if doing so would benefit the family. To refuse to hunt humans would be to betray the only concept of pro-sociality Magpie has been taught; his obligation to fulfill his social role in his family by, among other things, participating in food acquisition. Magpie's mother, grandmother, etc. recognize that killing humans is emotionally distressing for him and even feel a kind of compassion for him and attempt to offer him a kind of emotional support, but this support is mostly oriented toward trying to make him more OK with killing humans. Magpie finds killing humans unpleasant (they are so similar to his mother, grandmother, sisters, and grandfathers/great-uncles!), but the ecological context and culture he's embedded in is not conducive toward developing this discomfort into any sort of moral principle.
To say that killing humans is "emotionally distressing" for Magpie understates how horrific the experience is for him. The vampire brain habitually constructs much more vivid and tangible remembered and imagined experiences than the human brain. By human standards, Magpie has hyperempathy.
The most common unit of social organization in ancient vampire society was the matrilineal family. The usual procedure was for male offspring to be expelled from their natal family when they reached adulthood, around the age of 14, after which they would seek a family with a new "eligible bachelorette" alpha and try to join it as the alpha's mate. This was a dangerous period in a male vampire's life that they often did not survive; alone, they were easy prey for vampire families seeking to free up trophic space for themselves by killing and cannibalizing a rival, they had no-one to help them if they were wounded or got sick, and also vampire courtship was terrifying, with a high risk of the male suitor experiencing literally lethal rejection (on the flip side, male vampire courtship strategies included things like "kill the alpha's present mate, kill all her existing kids, that way the future kids you impregnate her with will have no competition," and even a courting vampire male might get lethally skittish in the presence of a stranger, so it was pretty terrifying for the females too). Magpie's family decided not to subject him to this experience. For one thing, his atypically high altruism is beneficial to them, and they did not like the idea of losing that asset and transferring it to a rival family. But also, they like him, were concerned about what might happen to him if he had to fend for himself (e.g. his atypically altruistic nature might lead to him being taken advantage of), and just didn't have the heart to exile him. He was therefore allowed to remain in his natal family as a non-reproductive helper. This means he'll probably never get to reproduce, but he'll be safer, and he can still ensure the proliferation of his own genes by helping the reproductive success of his mother, and potentially in the future his sisters and nieces. This is pretty similar to the "deal" many female vampires get, and he's...
... Settling for it in the absence of any clear better options, but not exactly content with it. As I said, in a sense Magpie is a profoundly tragic person; a brilliant, observant, sensitive, compassionate person born into a species of (similarly brilliant and observant) cold-hearted killers, condemned to a sort of profound emotional isolation, forced to prey on beings heartbreakingly similar to himself if he wants to survive. I think Magpie would love to trade places with a modern vampire; he'd be so much happier in some lab somewhere eating ethically produced synthetic protocadherin supplements and writing software or something, getting to work and socialize with a human prodigy or three, who I think he might relate well to (I think they might seem kind of like big intellectually precocious kids to him, in a good way; curious, friendly, playful, intelligent enough to challenge him intellectually, much more fun company than most of his own kind). It's one of history's tragic ironies that the PfizerPharm bio-engineers had only the most common vampire genotypes to work with, had no clue vampires like Magpie existed; vampires like him probably have fit much better into twenty-first century human society than the neurotypical type. Modern vampires are... kind of like if aliens re-created humans in the distant future and only had the most common human genotypes to work with so they ended up creating a version of humanity that's 100% neurotypical cisgender heterosexuals; we've re-created a simplified, impoverished, homogenized version of the original species.
Drowning (or maybe River, I haven't decided - which do you like better?) is Magpie's younger sister, the middle child. She's about five years younger than Magpie (ancient vampires usually had relatively wide birth spacings) - at present, she's about thirty. Drowning is Magpie's half-sister, being the daughter of Heron's regular mate at the time, and unlike him she is neurotypical by vampire standards. She's Heron's only adult vampire-neurotypical child, as her older brother is neurodivergent and her younger sister is half human; by vampire standards she's "the normal one." She's firmly next in line to be the next alpha (breeding female, kind of authority figure) when Heron hits menopause. Despite being the middle child, she has a kind of "big sister" attitude toward her siblings, perceiving that their difference is a kind of vulnerability and being protective of them; this is especially true of her relationship to Stargazer, who is mildly disabled by vampire standards.
She's called Drowning because when she was a young adult she once swam after a teenage human girl and killed her by holding her underwater. :(
Stargazer is a vampire-human hybrid Heron deliberately produced because Heron and her mother decided it would be useful to have a family member who was immune to the crucifix glitch and could pass for human. Stargazer is Heron's youngest adult child. To create Stargazer, Heron picked a nice healthy-looking young human male and spent a few months stalking him while slowly implanting a hypnotic command that, when the trigger stimulus was provided, made him see her as a girl in his community he had a crush on (similar technique to the one Valerie used to implant seizure cue in Echopraxia). From there it was a simple matter of catching him alone, showing herself, giving the trigger stimulus, arranging a meeting in a secluded spot, and... well, you can imagine the rest. That human was relatively lucky; he didn't realize what was happening and came away from the episode alive, intact, untraumatized, and with some subjectively pleasant false memories (though the discrepancies between his memory and that girl's might have led to some pretty awkward questions later); it could have been a lot worse.
Stargazer is human-looking enough to pass for human, albeit a funny-looking human (to humans, the vampire nose would never be fooled). She's very tall and she has a lot of funny-looking features by human standards (big jaw, big ears, etc.), but the only really blatantly inhuman thing about her appearance is her tapetum lucidum, which isn't noticeable in daylight.
Stargazer is very tall; she's the tallest person in her family! Ancient vampires and humans had a sort of tiger/lion/liger dynamic where the hybrid was bigger than either of the parent species. This was a consequence of ancient vampires being taller than humans but having serious problems with lack of genetic diversity, like cheetahs. This lack of genetic diversity, combined with being forced to prey on a very closely related species, meant that infectious disease was a grave problem for ancient vampires and they usually suffered high allostatic load. Modern vampires are bigger than ancient vampires because they don't have this problem. Because Stargarzer has a human father, her immune system and physiology presents a very different disease-resistance profile than most vampires, so she is much more resistant to infections (in fact, she is more resistant to infections and parasites than most humans because her hybrid physiology is so unusual; there are no species-specific parasites well-adapted to live in her). In other words, Stargazer has hybrid vigor. Stargazer's family has noticed that she is rarely sick, she recovers from illnesses quickly, and her injuries heal quickly (especially wounds). This hybrid vigor also meant more vigorous childhood growth.
Stargazer has a much higher metabolism than normal vampires, and she doesn't do the vampire thing where they mostly keep their blood in their core and only periodically refresh the outer tissues. Her skin is much warmer than a normal vampire's; her family think she's great for cuddling up to on cold nights. Because of her higher metabolism, she's much more active than a normal vampire. She has a much more human-like sleep cycle, sleeping 7-10 hours per day and being fully awake the rest of the time. She tends to find the normal ancient vampire lifestyle of spending most of their life in a cramped hiding place rather boring and get restless, although at least it's more pleasant for her than it probably would be for a human (how would you feel about spending most of your time inside a claustrophobic tomb-like hole, sharing it five other people who spend most of their time sleeping?).
Stargazer's higher metabolism and large size means that, by vampire standards, she has a very big appetite. However, Stargazer has a functional human copy of the protocadherin y gene, so she can make her own protocadherin y and does not need to eat humans. In her entire life, Stargazer has only eaten a few bites of human flesh, once or twice, out of curiosity. Her appetite imposes no serious burden on her family; vampires are very efficient predators of nonhuman animals.
Heron originally created Stargazer with the thought that, since a hybrid would be immune to the crucifix glitch and could pass for human, they'd be good at sneaking into human villages and towns and abducting children for the family to eat. They gave up on that idea the first time they took Stargazer with them on a human-hunting expedition and it was a disaster.
Like Magpie, Stargazer has hyperempathy. Magpie is able to be an effective human-killer despite that because, like a normal vampire, he has a brain that's relatively good at shutting down unwanted trains of thought, he has a pain response wired around the assumption that he can't count on help or mercy if sick or injured, and when he's in hunting mode he's in a state kind of like dothe where he's able to ignore even very severe pain if he has to. Stargazer's more human-like neurotype gives her a strong tendency toward perseveration, she doesn't have hunting/combat mode as a distinct physiological state the way a normal vampire does, and she has a pain response more like a human; adapted for a highly social species that can usually count on help if sick or injured. So...
... One of her relatives stabs a human in the stomach with a spear. Stargazer knows gut wounds hurt a lot (ancient vampires had a pretty good knowledge of human anatomy and pain response, partly as an extension of their own medical lore cause they were closely related to us, partly to be better able to kill us). Stargazer imagines what that would feel like and experiences mirror neuron activation and instantly collapses to the ground clutching her own stomach and screaming from the pain of a sympathetic imaginary wound. It really feels like she's being stabbed in the stomach herself! She might start doing a Midsommar empathy maiden sort of thing where she's mirroring the movements and screams of the victim - it's not an affectation or a mind game, she really is feeling their pain! Worse, she naturally perseverates on the distressing idea and stimulus, she can't stop imagining what it would feel like to be stabbed like that, so it doesn't stop when her family get her away from the situation. She spends hours, maybe even days lying near or in the family den, writhing on the ground and screaming from the pain of a completely imaginary wound! I think she might have been stuck in this state until she killed herself with adrenalin overload if her family hadn't eventually managed to basically help her CBT herself out of it. After that, her family gave up any idea of using her to hunt humans and she's completely excused from that; she's the only adult in the family who's never killed a human.
Normally, an adult ancient vampire who can't or won't hunt humans is in very grave danger of being expelled from their family or filicided and cannibalized by their own family (the selection pressure of this is probably part of the reasons vampires are supermajority sociopath-adjacent). Thankfully for Stargazer, she has another value to her family that makes her worth keeping around and alive to them. Because she can pass for human, she can be used to trade with humans. Theoretically, ancient vampires and agricultural humans are natural trading partners. The vampires are excellent at trapping and hunting wild nonhuman animals and being wired for hunting they even enjoy it (hunting was one of the closest things ancient vampire culture had to institutionalized fun!), and being so few in number and having low metabolisms they need little meat themselves, so it would be easy for them to produce a surplus of hunted meat, skins, etc. for trade. Agricultural humans have labor-intensive and resource-intensive manufactured goods like pottery, textiles, and bappir; these are by default "expensive" or unattainable in vampire society, because a vampire family-nation's entire material culture must be almost entirely portable by usually less than two dozen people or disposable, and because labor (or, more precisely, drudgery) is relatively expensive for vampires because there are so few of them and because they are very independent-minded and very lazy. Pottery is particularly valued by vampires; a good pot or two is useful for preparing soups, broths, and medicinal concoctions, and is compatible with the vampire lifestyle, though a bit awkward, heavy, and fragile; most vampire family-nations in the Hilly Flanks region of this era have bought or stolen a pot or two and treat them as valued heirloom possessions, like their meteorite iron axes and knives. A few of these bought or looted pots even pass along tenuous ghostly vampire long-distance trade routes, from family-nation to family-nation, reaching regions where the local humans are still mostly nomadic hunter-gatherers who don't make pottery (this behavior is an extension of an ancient practice dating back to the vampire happy time or maybe even earlier by which resources like obsidian and meteorite iron are spread around). If humans were as coldly selfish and rational as vampires, there would probably be a thriving inter-species trade between vampires and human agriculturalists! But humans are not so logical; humans fear and hate vampires too much to easily trade with them (even humans willing to trade with vampires are disincentivized from doing so because they are often regarded with hostility, as traitors, by others of their own kind who find out about it). In a way, this is a sort of meta-level rational irrationality; by acting this way, humans deny resources to their predators and weaken them. Stargazer's ability to convincingly pretend to be a human (to humans) and trade with humans is therefore useful to her family. Because of her, her family's consumption of grain (mostly in the form of hard dry breads like bappir, which keep relatively well and can be readily eaten) has increased dramatically in the last five or seven years or so; agricultural humans are often willing to trade venison or other wild game meats for grain at a ratio very calorically favorable to the vampires (the agriculturalists are getting a good deal too; their food system is good at producing cheap calories but not so good at producing protein), and agriculturalist-grown grain now makes up a substantial percentage of her family's calorie intake.
Human agriculturalist products acquired by Stargazer in this way include beer. Vampires sometimes accept beer as a kind of food, it has water and calories, but to a vampire getting drunk is a very disagreeable experience; vampires have a strong instinctive sense of a dangerous world and dislike being vulnerable, and drunkenness is a kind of vulnerability. But Stargazer sometimes finds beer therapeutic. She would say that sometimes the inside of her head is "noisy" and sometimes has "too much going on" and beer "quiets" it. She has human-like tendencies toward fantasy, mind-wandering, and self-reinforcing recursive thoughts, but combined with vampire-like sensory hyperawareness, HSAM-like memory, and memory and imagination so vivid it's often experienced like a series of parallel subjective sensory realities almost as detailed, vivid, and tangible as the input from her senses (vampires don't use the past tense because they don't experience the past tense, they don't remember the past, they relive it, remember?). The result is that she's prone to literal overthinking! For her, a cognition-impairing "downer" like alcohol is sometimes kind of like holding down the power button on a computer with too many running programs, shutting down some of her excessively proliferating trains of thought and clearing her head (her family's attempts at breaking her out of her hyperempathy loop episode may have involved getting her drunk, and they might have been at least contemplating trying a "hard force quit" of knocking her out by hitting her really hard on the head).
Stargazer's higher metabolism and more human-like neurotype means she has more human-like play impulses (broadly defined) and enrichment needs. Stargazer has some very strange habits by ancient vampire standards. She makes visual art, such as carving intricate, complex, repeating patterns into spear shafts and other tools. She also makes a kind of music, using instruments she has fashioned or improvised from odds and ends lying around along with her own voice. She's also adorned herself with a kind of scarification-based body art (more on that later).
Being more active and playful also means Stargazer has more abstract curiosity; the name her family gave her is a reference to one manifestation of it. She watches and studies the stars at night, sometimes seeking high places to better do so. Ancient vampires sometimes studied the stars, but only for utilitarian reasons such as to predict availability of seasonal plant foods or movement of game herds. Stargazer is curious about the cosmos. With her vampire-like eyes she can probably see much more in the night sky than a human can without a telescope, especially as I think she might be able to use her vampire-like sensorimotor system to do something like long-exposure photography; she might know about the moons of Jupiter and other celestial bodies humans won't discover for ten thousand years. Highly intelligent, she's studying the apparent movements of the stars and planets and may also have done things similar to Eratosthenes's experiment measuring the size of the Earth (relatively easy for her to do given the far-ranging nomadic lifestyle of ancient vampires and that she has excellent visual memory); she's trying to figure out the structure and nature of the cosmos...
One time Magpie saw her stargazing and asked if she was planning to eat a star, since in a normal vampire that sort of still posture and attentive observation of distant objects would usually be hunting behavior; vampires can have a sense of humor! The rest of her family are mostly uninterested in her stargazing (it registers to them as weird and pointless but apparently not doing her much harm, so just sort of something to shrug at), but Magpie often joins her in stargazing now. His higher empathy and higher altruism make him willing to show interest in her strange pointless unnecessary work because he can tell that it makes her happy when someone does that, but also, his neurodivergence makes him a little more imaginative and curious than a normal vampire. He'd never study the stars like this on his own initiative, but now that he's doing it anyway, he finds it kind of interesting. From Stargazer's end, it's nice to have somebody show interest in her weird human-like interests (being a person like her in ancient vampire society is rather lonely), and two eyes are better than one, and Magpie's fully vampire eyes may be at least a little bit sharper than hers. Magpie is similarly more-or-less Stargazer's only appreciative audience for her art; he will look at her carvings and listen to her music to make her happy, and will even sometimes make art of his own to show her because that makes her happy too, and he can appreciate her art a little and take a little joy in making art in a way his neurotypical relatives never would.
Stargazer and Magpie are close. They have somewhat similar neurodivergences. They aren't exactly alike; Magpie is neurodivergent but he's still fully vampire, with a vampire metabolism and vampire feelings, instincts, and preferences regarding stuff like preferred activity level. Still, Magpie and Stargazer have some very significant similar personality traits and experiences (Stargazer also has much higher empathy and altruism than a normal vampire), and a shared sense of difference from their neurotypical relatives, so they have a strong bond. I think they'd also be close because... Drowning has a close older sister sort of relationship to Stargazer now, but their relationship did not get off to a great start. By vampire standards, Stargazer is slow, spastic, and probably has other impairments too; this activates the circuits in Drowning's brain that identify vulnerable prey, with the result that child Drowning (called something else back then) saw Stargazer as a good target for predation practice/sadistic play. During those years Magpie spent a lot of time hovering around Stargazer (also called something else back then), protecting her from the casual cruelty of her older sister. Stargazer is half human, and humans feel gratitude to those who help and protect them. Stargazer is half vampire, and vampires take notes on who helps them and who harms them and remember.
Squickly by human standards, as adults Stargazer, Drowning, and Magpie are a polycule as well as siblings. This was a common ancient ancient vampire behavior; ancient vampires knew about the dangers of inbreeding, but they had little inhibition against non-reproductive incest, and since vampires can smell how close a female is to ovulation birth control was easy for them. Stargazer has a somewhat atypical sexuality by vampire standards. Normal vampire sexuality is very tied to sensory and social cues. Stargazer has a human-like tendency toward daydreaming, fantasy, and fantasy-arousal feedback loops. One of Stargazer's odd activities (as her family thinks of it) is masturbation; autoerotic activity is very rare in vampires. They see it as of a piece with her uselessly embellishing tools and uselessly staring into the sky at night and see all these things as connected to her higher metabolism, and they're not wrong!
With the assistance of her siblings, Stargazer has adorned herself with a kind of scarification body art. Stargazer gets Drowning and Magpie to use their sharp teeth to carve patterns into her skin, and maybe then rubs pigments into the wounds to make crude tattoos of a sort. When they do this her siblings get to lick up her blood, which has a little protocadherins in it and therefore is tasty for them, which is nice for them. It wouldn't be wrong to see this as a kind of kinky intimacy.
Most of Stargazer's fantasies are non-sexual; most of Stargazer's fantasies are artistic and abstract. Like many neurodivergent people, Stargazer tends to retreat into her own head, into an imaginary world that is friendlier and more sensible to her than the real one. She has a human-like tendency to daydream and fantasize, combined with a vampire-like ability to construct imaginary and remembered sensory experiences almost as detailed and tangible as the real one. She essentially has a sort of personal Star Trek holodeck in her head that she carries with her at all times, and she creates most of her art in there! Stargazer's fantasies are mostly visual/sensory rather than narrative; she occupies much of her time and mental energy creating imaginary pictures, soundscapes, and smellscapes. What she does blurs the line between imagination and art, as to her these imaginary sensory worlds are almost as detailed and tangible as the real world; she can create an imaginary object that looks and feels to her like a real object, she can imagine rotating it in her hands and it feels like touching a real physical thing, etc.; to her the difference between fantasy and reality is more intellectual than tangible; she knows her creations aren't real because she knows she created them with her thoughts. Some of her creations are representational, e.g. of animals and landscapes, but most of them are highly abstract, often representations of mathematical patterns. In this her behavior is an outgrowth of a common vampire stimming behavior (see: her grandmother's spiral doodles), but her version is much more elaborate and sustained. In a sense, Stargazer's physical artworks are simultaneously her most ambitious and some of her least ambitious creations. In her imagination, Stargazer is a goddess, able to create immense and intricate structures at will; she need merely think it and an impossible sculpture as high as a mountain rises on the horizon or impossible complex tetrahedrons encase the sun and moon or the horizon folds and the distant sea becomes the sky. In the real world, she is limited by physical resources, her own physical strength, and the limitations of physical objects.
A normal vampire could theoretically use their imagination this way too, but normal vampires have little motivation to use their imaginations this way. The closest normal vampire equivalent to human fantasy is an expression of grief; a grieving vampire will sometimes become withdrawn and spacey as they retreat into their memories to spend time in the company of their lost loved one there. It is, in a sense, one of history's tragic ironies; vampires evolved to have incredibly vivid imaginations but mostly use them only pragmatically, while humans evolved to take great joy in imagination and fantasies and paracosms but can construct only comparatively minimalistic wire-frame imaginary worlds. In this, Stargazer's neurotype is in a sense a rare and precious blessing. Stargazer is also in a sense unusually blessed in having vampire-like senses and a human-like sense of beauty.
Stargazer will sometimes describe one of her imaginary creations to Magpie, so he can make a version of it in his own mind. In this way, she is able to share some of her otherwise invisible internal creative life with someone.
Some of the novelties and challenges Stargazer presented for her family while she was growing up and some of the challenges she faced as a child with human-like emotional needs being raised by vampires:
Vampires have a shorter childhood than humans but their language acquisition is slower. Stargazer mostly matured more slowly than a vampire child, but by vampire standards she was a precocious talker. I think she'd have been a slow talker by human standards, but she started talking earlier than a vampire child usually would, and at a lower level of general brain development.
An exhausting hyperactive hellion when she was little! Vampire children are more active than vampire adults and do play, but they're still kind of low energy and sleep a lot compared to human children, they have a strong instinct to cling to and remain close to their mother or other parental figures, and they quickly develop an intuitive sense of a dangerous world that makes them usually stay close to their parental figures (though I think they'd love hide and seek and pursuit games, so they might indulge in that when they feel safe). Little Stargazer had a higher metabolism, more human-like playfulness, and less of an intuitive sense of a dangerous world, so she was more energetic than a normal vampire child and more prone to wandering away. This was mixed with a Magpie-like disinterest in sadistic play, relative disinterest in predation practice, and discomfort when her parents were teaching her to hunt, trap, and fish (I think her hyperempathy might give her problems even when hunting nonhuman animals like deer).
Stargazer's rearing would have been a special challenge to her family because compared to a vampire child Stargazer had higher demands for socialization, enrichment, affection, touch, and positive reinforcement. Vampires by default spend most of their lives in a kind of very shallow open-eye sleep, and they're a lot more touch-averse than humans, and then of course there's the whole sociopathy thing. Imagine a child with the activity level, sleep cycle, and emotional needs of a human toddler being raised by people like that! Thankfully, Stargazer's parental figures were aware of this and wanted her to grow up into an adult who would like them (as that way she would be more willing to cooperate with them), and even vampire parents, in their own way, tend to like their children and want what is best for them, so they tried to adjust their parenting style accordingly, to parent her more like human parents would. In this she was much luckier than modern vampires raised by humans, as her parental figures actually knew approximately how human parenting works; they had opportunities to observe human parents interacting with their children, and ancient vampires were attentive students of human behavior, with a large body of cultural lore about it (in order to more effectively and more sustainably predate on humans). So, considering that she was raised by sociopath-adjacent people-eating monsters, Stargazer's childhood was surprisingly OK and untraumatic; her terrifying people-eating mother, grandmother, and grandfathers/great-uncles treated her a lot better than a lot of human parents treat their children, even by human standards. However, I think it might be difficult for vampire parents to avoid inflicting some understimulation and emotional neglect on a child with human-like emotional needs, even if they were making a real serious effort to not do that. Little Stargazer's favorite elder was Magpie (who'd have been nine or ten when she was born - that's most of the way to adulthood for vampires, but still prepubescent!), who was more patient and attentive to her because of his higher altruism and empathy and had more genuine sympathy with her because of his higher empathy.
As a hybrid, Stargazer is immune to the crucifix glitch. When her grandmother first (carefully!) showed her a cross-shaped talisman taken from a human victim at the seizure-inducing degree of visual arc, Stargazer's reaction was a small involuntary spasm, a giggle, and her language's version of the words "It tickles!" Stargazer soon discovered that the little pair of sticks terrified Drowning, and promptly saw the opportunity to turn the tables on her childhood tormentor and had a lot of fun chasing Drowning around with it, marveling at how her older sister cringed and fled from a harmless pair of sticks. Her grandmother eventually dissuaded Stargazer from this behavior by asking if she was curious what a crucifix glitch seizure looked like and, on being given an affirmative answer, offered to let her induce one on her by holding the cross up close to her face (I'm going with an interpretation that crucifix glitch seizures are usually not fatal in themselves, the big danger to the vampire is they leave it helpless in the presence of its enemies). This wouldn't have worked on a neurotypical vampire child, but Stargazer has much more affective empathy than a neurotypical vampire, and seeing grandma contorting around like a possessed person in an Exorcist knock-off while exploding from both ends with shit, piss, and vomit before passing out was enough to make her decide she'd really rather not inflict that on anyone again. Heron's mother is very emotionally intelligent by vampire standards!
There might have been a mildly scary experience the first time Stargazer cried as an older child, past the age at which weeping normally becomes physically impossible for vampires. She might have been worried that something was wrong with her eyes, and her family might have been like "Is this a neotenous/human distress response or an eye injury or irritation or infection? Can't tell, guess we'll just have to wait for her to be less sad and see if her eyes clear up then!" An epidemiologically vulnerable species with low genetic diversity, ancient vampires were very afraid of infections!
Similarly, there was a bit of a Carrie moment when Stargazer reached her menarche; being closely related to humans, vampire females have a menstrual cycle, but they don't bleed like that; it was a little alarming for her until her family reassured her that, no, that's... probably normal for you? Human females do that! It was also a bit alarming because it made her smell a little like a wounded human, enough to arouse vampire predatory impulses; her family have the self-control to not attack her, but there's a kind of disturbing period every month when her mother and sister are very obviously fighting down the impulse to do that (the selection pressure this represents probably has a lot to do with why vampire females don't bleed like that).
