An idea I had when reading 'Carpe Jugulum'-when Vlad and Lacrimosa are complaining about the Count's methods of building immunity.

As for everyone, even vampires, Vlad de Magpyr had only one family. But, even at the tender age of fifty he knew his father was not entirely normal by vampire standards. Oh, there had been blood, and predation, and all those vampiric things, and young Vlad had always enjoyed them, though never as much as Lacrimosa, but there were also...

The words flashed behind his eyes. Holy symbols. Garlic. Sunlight.

Barely two decades old and he had been cast out into the sunlight to play, first only at the very end of dusk, then just before the sun began setting, then dawn, then the late morning and then...dawn. That day had burnt, but he had not died as he should have. He was stronger than Lacci, at least, she had gone completely to dust. It had still taken years for even the most overcast day to lose its innate peril. But the Count had been happy when it had. So happy that Vlad had found his glee both unseemly and slightly repellent.

By the time he was a hundred he could still remember sleepless days spent in a coffin with a garlic pillow. Lacci had screamed and screamed until their father had pointed out the necessity of learning. Vlad had been slightly more pragmatic in his attitude. He had thrown the horrible pillow out, when no one was looking. And, when evening fell had almost had the coffin lid hammered down upon his face as his father woke him demanding why his son was refusing to better himself. The next day he had slept on the garlic pillow, even though it made his eyes itch and his nose run, as though he had hay fever. It was so undignified, but little by little it had stopped working, though he was convinced that the garlic pillows had given him daymares when they had been present in his coffin.

Vlad had sulked for days after that. And that was hardly the end of it. By the time he was half-way through his second century he was used to being liberally splashed with water, and had even ceased to wince when the droplets hit the gorgeous silk of his waistcoat. That was what really bothered him-the ruined waistcoats, so much so that he failed to notice that he should have been crumpled on the floor in agony. Nor did he cower from holy symbols, having spent large portions of his life studying the wretched things. In the beginning they had made him writhe backwards, but within a few short years he only tried to take a instinctive step away from them when he wasn't concentrating. And when he did that the Count would tut and sigh and tell him to try again. And the Countess would nod worriedly, and Lacrimosa would jeer, until it was her turn.

Igor was another subject entirely. When he had been growing up Vlad had, if not liked, then appreciated, the craft of the Igors. He had enjoyed seeing the architectural cobwebs that Igor supervised so dedicatedly, and Vlad had even been known to inspect the candles for that fine dribbling that marked quality in a vampire of the old school. But then the Count had deliberately set out to reveal the stupidity, the lack of progression, that every lisp, every limp, every lovingly created cobweb displayed. And Vlad had seen it, and had learnt to resent it, to want a servant that preferred polite orders to dementedly screamed ones. He even hated the beloved candles and cobwebs that had he had so cherished before, as signs of his status, instead seeing them as signs of his imprisonment as a creature of the immovable and eternal past.

The one thing his father had never tried to challenge was the blood. The blood was always essential, though the methods of attainment were more acceptable. A compromise, his father had called it. Vlad had learnt to live with it. Because the only thing that mattered was the blood itself...