Michael sat quietly on the edge of the narrow bed, the room dimly lit by a single brass lamp fixed to the wall. It smelled different from the polished sterility of First Class, less perfume, more old wood, warm metal, and faint traces of tobacco from Nathaniel's half-burned stick. The walls felt closer here, the furniture plainer, but after what had happened below deck, the simplicity was strangely grounding.
Nathaniel rummaged through his drawer with a soft clatter of metal and paper, muttering to himself as if wrestling both files and thoughts at the same time.
Whoosh!
Without warning, something small flew through the air.
"Here," Nathaniel said.
Michael caught it automatically. His fingers closed around the cold plastic of a sealed blood pack. He stared at it, expression tightening. "This…?"
"You'll need it," Nathaniel replied simply as he settled into a wooden chair and lit his tobacco. He took a slow drag, letting the smoke leak from the side of his mouth before he extended the stick toward Michael. "Want one?"
"I'll pass," Michael said, still staring at the blood bag as if it might bite him back.
"Suit yourself." Nathaniel leaned back in the chair, tapping ash neatly into a tray. "I know you have a lot of questions, and I have some for you, but…" He reached toward a stack of books beside the desk and picked up a thick, leather-bound volume.
He offered it to Michael.
"Here."
Michael set aside the blood pack, wiped his bloody fingertips on his trouser leg, and took the book cautiously. "What is this?"
"My life's work," Nathaniel said with a faint, wry smile. "You remember what I said about studying Hydes? That wasn't even the tip of it."
Michael glanced at him, confused but attentive.
"In that book," Nathaniel continued, tapping the cover lightly, "you'll find everything I've managed to record about Outcasts. Every species I met, studied, or chased halfway across continents. It's not complete—nothing ever is—but it'll help you understand what you are… and what you aren't."
Michael placed the book on the small table beside him and turned the brittle page with care, feeling the thin grit of age along its edges. The journal smelled of dust, leather, and something faintly metallic old ink, perhaps, or dried reagents once used to preserve it.
The illustrations were the first thing he noticed: charcoal sketches faded by time, yet still vivid enough to give shape to creatures he had only heard about in fragmented rumors.
The chapter opened with a broad heading written in Faulkner's precise but slightly uneven script:
Outcasts are called freaks, monsters, curses in human shape creatures who will never fit the normie world. But the truth is simpler. Outcasts are people whose bodies or minds follow rules nature didn't write for everyone else. They don't hide in the shadows because they're ashamed; they hide because normies fear what they can't understand. And yet, what makes Outcasts different is exactly what makes them powerful.
Michael turned the page, scanning the next section.
Outcasts fall loosely into five branches—not official, not universal, but practical enough for my research. Some are born, some are cursed, some evolve, and some are accidents of alchemy or blood.
A detailed sketch of a snarling wolf-man occupied the top corner, all pure muscle and bristling fur, its human eyes filled with despair. Notes surrounded the image, pointing to claw length, posture, and transformations observed during a full moon.
Beneath it began the first classification.
Therians are the shapeshifters—the ones who turn into beasts, monsters, or anything in between. Werewolves, Hydes, yeti, sirens with shifting forms, and even the tribal wolf-shifters from the Americas fall under this family. Their bodies transform according to instinct or emotion, often violently, often beautifully. Strength, senses, and raw physicality define them.
Nathaniel portrayed them not as simple beasts, but as individuals forced to share a body with something ancient and fierce. Werewolves were the most documented, but next to their sketch was the lumbering form of a minotaur, shoulders as broad as a barn beam, horns curling like polished bone.
A more elegant sketch depicted a siren emerging from dark water—half woman, half creature of the deep. Another showed a young man contorting mid-shift into a massive wolf, clearly a Quileute-style shapeshifter from the La Push legends. Faulkner labeled these as "Warm-Shifters," a Therian subtype with transformations tied to emotion rather than lunar cycles.
Michael's brow scrunched as he looked at the next one.
Psions rule the realm of the mind—telepaths, seers, illusionists, and those rare Da Vinci types whose intelligence borders on supernatural. They control perception, thought, sometimes even living swarms or animals through mental link. Their greatest weapon is what they see that others cannot.
The Psions section began with a portrait-like illustration of a blindfolded woman surrounded by faint spirals of ink, representing visions swirling around her. Beside her drawing, faint diagrams mapped the brain, Faulkner's attempt to understand where prophecy might reside.
Further sketches showed avian telepaths with eyes sharp and reflective like a hawk's, and swarmers commanding clouds of insects with slow, deliberate gestures.
Michael flipped the page and quickly glanced over the following section.
Weavers manipulate the elements themselves—fire, electricity, air, water, and all their cousins. Sparks and pyros are the most common, but I've met wind-callers in Greece and water-benders in the Caribbean. Their abilities mimic myths, but every spark and flame they conjure is painfully real.
This section was vibrant even in black-and-white ink. The illustrations had motion—curving strokes that suggested fire twisting around a pyro's arm, lightning crackling at a sparkbearer's fingertips, waves rearing behind a tide-weaver.
Faulkner described Weavers as individuals able to "coax nature itself to obey," marking them as the rarest of the five categories. Their power resembled spellcraft but was biological, instinctive, tied to emotion and environment. For every legend of a volcano erupting in wrath or storms splitting the sky, Faulkner hinted that a Weaver might have stood behind it.
Michael blinked, absorbing it. He turned the page again.
Morphs
They alter the body—not into beasts, but into disguises, distortions, and natural weapons. Gorgons with serpentine visages, faceless mimics who can copy skin like clay, vanishers who fold light around themselves, cyclops that has one eye and shapeshifters who can rebuild their appearance strand by strand. They are the spies, the infiltrators, the living masks.
The first sketch showed a faceless humanoid, smooth skin where features should have been, and wore black suit with red tie and white shirt— posed beside a screaming witness. A Gorgon's serpents were drawn with meticulous detail, each scale individually inked. A Vanisher faded halfway into nothingness, Faulkner illustrating the process with a series of half-erased outlines.
Morphs, the text explained, didn't become beasts; they became wrong. Skin, bones, identity, all rearranged or obscured. Faulkner warned that many Morphs struggled deeply with identity, some forgetting their original faces entirely.
Then for the last category.
The Undead
They are the strangest species. Vampires, both the cursed, predatory kind and the luminous Eclipsed breeds—zombies, ghouls, and even bound spirits. Their bodies defy death in different ways. Some feed on blood, some wander without pulse or warmth, and some exist half in this world, half in another. Immortality isn't a gift; it's a reminder that survival always demands a price.
This section was marked by a black ribbon, as though Faulkner himself treated it with dread.
A sketch of a corpse-puppet, stiff limbs, sunken eyes. Clearly a zombie reanimated by something unnatural occupied the page. Another drawing portrayed wispy, drifting spirits, their outlines faint and unfinished, as if Nathaniel feared defining them too clearly.
As Michael turned the page again, the atmosphere shifted. The paper felt heavier beneath his fingertips, and the ink grew denser, as though Faulkner's hand had pressed harder while writing this chapter.
He was met with a full spread dedicated entirely to vampires, the parchment darkened by layers of ink and careful shading. Faulkner had clearly spent years—perhaps decades, studying them, documenting every variation with a scholar's precision and a soldier's caution. Across the top of the page, written in bold, confident script, was the classification:
"Sanguine and Eclipsed."
Beneath the title lay two illustrations side by side. The first showed a tall, gaunt vampire in aristocratic attire, his expression severe, eyes deep-set and hungry, fangs long and needle-sharp. The second sketch depicted a vampire with flawless, almost angelic features—smooth skin, crystalline patterns faintly sketched beneath the flesh, reflecting imagined sunbeams as if the page itself shimmered.
Faulkner's notes filled the margins, but the main text began with disciplined clarity.
The Sanguine
According to Faulkner, the Sanguine represented the oldest branch of vampiric existence, the classical lineage of folklore, the predators woven through the darkest corners of human history. They were described as undead by every biological measure: their hearts no longer beat, their lungs did not draw breath, and their flesh remained cold despite movement. Yet this deathlessness granted them terrifying advantages. Their strength surpassed any mortal, enabling them to tear stone as though it were cloth. They healed with inhuman speed, knitting wounds in moments unless struck by fire or sunlight. Their senses were predatory in every direction, hearing capable of tracking footfalls across castle courtyards, smell fine enough to differentiate blood types, and sight that pierced through the pitch-black of tombs.
Faulkner emphasized that sunlight was the Sanguine's most absolute weakness. Exposure caused their skin to blacken, blister, then burn into ash as if their bodies remembered they were corpses. Many Sanguines protected themselves through underground lairs, heavy cloaks, or nocturnal migration patterns. Some ancient accounts described elders who could endure minutes of daylight, but Faulkner dismissed these as exaggerated tales or mistranslations.
On the lower half of the page, Michael paused at a boxed segment framed with a thin ink border:
Blood-memory: an ability unique to the Sanguine. When one drinks the blood of another Sanguine, their victim's memories flood the mind clear, vivid, sometimes unbearable. The stronger the vampire, the deeper the memory.
Beside it, a sketch illustrated two Sanguines locked in a violent struggle, both with eyes wide in agony as overlapping memories poured into their thoughts. Faulkner commented that this trait made Sanguines highly selective predators; they avoided consuming their own unless necessary, for fear of being drowned in centuries of violence, desire, and madness.
Turning to the next portion, Michael was struck by how different the Eclipsed illustration looked. Their anatomy, while humanoid, had subtle deviations, skins shimmering like fractured gemstones, smooth and impossibly pale, and eyes that seemed almost reflective. Faulkner's writing grew more cautious here, as if documenting a phenomenon still not completely understood.
The Eclipsed were an evolutionary divergence, born not from ancient curses but from a mutation or adaptation within vampiric blood. Faulkner wrote that unlike the Sanguine, Eclipsed bodies responded to sunlight not with death, but with luminescence. Their skin refracted light as though filled with billions of microscopic crystals, turning them into dazzling silhouettes. While sunlight caused discomfort and sensory overload, it did not kill them. Some descriptions recorded them as appearing "angelic," but Faulkner quickly countered this with a note: "Beauty does not imply mercy."
Their abilities varied wildly. Some Eclipsed exhibited psionic talents, the ability to read thoughts, manipulate emotions, dull pain, or sense danger in waves like pressure changes in the air. Others displayed Weaver-like traits, conjuring minor elemental effects linked to their emotional state. Still others possessed physical enhancements far beyond even the Sanguine: bursts of speed that blurred their form, strength that cracked marble floors beneath their feet, or senses so refined they could hear heartbeats miles away.
The most defining trait of the Eclipsed was their blood. Faulkner described it not as a simple fluid, but as a venom—potent, transformative, and incompatible with other vampire lines. When consumed by a Sanguine or another Eclipsed, the venom caused only agony. Their bloodstreams were simply too different.
Faulkner added:
Unlike the Sanguine, the Eclipsed do not possess blood-memory. Their evolution has severed that power. In its place, their venom carries influence, not memory.
Michael felt a cold weight settle in his stomach as he stared at the words.
He didn't know which of those he belonged to.
Nathaniel watched him quietly from across the room, smoke curling lazily upward as if he'd been waiting for that exact reaction.
"So," Nathaniel finally said, tapping ash again. "Now that you've read the basics… we can start figuring out exactly what you are."