The Nervampires

When a person has been coldly treated throughout his or her life, the person may on occasion rise from the grave after death, smashing open the coffin and digging his or her way out by force, and a new Nervampire is born, a vampiric species that feeds not upon blood but upon the feelings that it was denied in life.

It might be thought that as an undead thing, hated in life, it would be even more hated in death and exterminated by all who come across it. However, the Nervampires, although there are not many of them, have survived for several reasons.

First, unless one has become very hungry, they look and act very much like ordinary people. Sunlight does them no harm, nor does silver or garlic and they have no trouble in crossing running water. Religious symbols do produce some discomfort, as many Nervampires hate the gods and goddesses for treating them badly in life, but they can hide that so as to blend in with ordinary people.

Contrary to popular belief they do not need to feed very often, normally just once a month, and can do the jobs that they did in life. If you look closely enough they may seem a little pale, and their undead hearts do not beat, but otherwise they look no different to a living human. A very hungry one will have long extended prehensile middle fingers and deep red eyes and will find it very hard not to leap to the attack and feed by force.

When one feeds, he or she puts his hand upon a person's head and drains out the person's feelings and depending on how much is drained, the effects vary. At one end of the spectrum, there are people who volunteer to allow a part of their feelings to be drained, generally those who are suffering from a severe mental illness or a great personal bereavement, and who cannot find relief from any other source and in moderation this can be very helpful to the drained one, enabling them to function again in society.

If too much is drained however, the drained person will be left weak and giddy and incapable of feeling strong feelings of any kind at all which can leave them psychopathic and a real danger to society. In the short term forgetfulness is a symptom, which can greatly hamper attempts to find and slay the Nervampire who did the draining. If too much mental energy is drained then the victim will die without a mark on their body, although dusting for fingerprints will find them unless they have been wiped away. The killing of one adult will feed the Nervampire for an entire year before he or she feels the need to feed again.

Secondly, they are strong, as strong as two men with long-lived ones stronger still, and hard to kill. Most of the things that work on vampires do not work on them and if killed with a normal weapon, unless the body is cremated at once, it will rise with its wounds healed within five minutes. Staking them does work, but the person who staked it is caught in a rush of all the feelings the Nervampire has fed on, which can be enough to drive the slayer insane if the Nervampire is an old one with a great many victims. Many are either too weak or too scared to try and kill one of these.

Thirdly, they can be very useful as well as dangerous. They can heal the insane and the deeply depressed, rarely kill unless desperately starving or extremely angry, and a line of them have much more powers then just one.

A line of them can suck the heat from the situation and help to quell a riot by a kind of mind magic in which they focus their powers and feed on the anger of the rioters, calming them down as they do so.. The Crystal City has a small colony of them some of which serve in the City Guard.

They have no love for the living but they do not have a great hatred for them either like most of the Undead do. Providing they stay within the law, some countries have even granted them human status. They make good spies as they can uncover a human's thoughts when feeding and some militaries use them to interrogate POWs without the need for messy and degrading torture or expensive and not always reliable truth drugs and/or scrying spells.

What other races think of them varies-some want to kill them on sight, others think them to be a bonus, but most have a deep distrust of them at best unless they have been cured by them.

OOC-I don't know how to add them to the Undead codex.