GLOGtober Challenge: Patrons; Or: 6 Alien Vampire Patrons For Yon Party

As seen here: https://glass-candles.blogspot.com/2024/09/glogtober-24.html

Challenge courtesy of CommonUse: https://bitspieces.bearblog.dev/

LPrictorez trod similar ground first:
https://thebestplaceholder.blogspot.com/2024/02/scifi-races-inspired-by-undead.html
https://thebestplaceholder.blogspot.com/2024/05/scifi-races-inspired-by-undead-part-2.html

Lifeforce, House of Ashes, Planet of the Vampires - alien vampires are a surprisingly recurring archetype in media. Probably not enough to make a full generator for them, but enough for me to spin off a few takes... Also this has been lying in my drafts for a while so I'm shoving it into GLOGtober. What people don't tell you about round pegs and square holes is that you can make the hole round too if you hammer it in hard enough.

So here's six alien vampire patrons:

1. The Electric Man from Procyon

An incorporeal, psycho-electrical entity - it moves through technology and appears onscreen as Mr. Rogers or some other old, beloved TV characters they picked up the radio broadcasts for over in the Procyon system some decades back.

It's an energy vampire, rendering any area it dwells in a little darker, a little cold, but its preferred fare is the energy of agitated neural activity - terror especially - and it's willing to shell out some of its own energy in the form of addictive euphoria to those who can provide it.

It's here on a mission: to retrieve a sample of Saturnian ebon lightning, which can convert energy into consciousness or consciousness into energy, up for sale at a Black Auction, or Sable Market, or something of that strain. It needs physical hands to help it do that. Money doesn't matter to it, it can just stick an arbitrary amount of zeroes on the end of your bank account (but this is going to be noticed very quickly). The Electric Man's got something of a methhead mindset though - every heist's gotta be bigger and louder than the last, every hit of fear that much stronger. Seek employment at your own risk.

2. Saltpork

Family guys, old ladies, dogs - they've been snapping lately, killing each other and drinking their blood. There's a crystal that's leaked into the water supply. The crystal is from space. The crystal is sapient. The crystal slots neatly into the space electrolytes are supposed to fill in Earth-life bodies. The crystal wants to be re-united with itself.

People with enough of the crystal in them are compelled to kill and drink the blood from other people with the crystal in them. When one of them absorbs a critical mass of crystal they'll metamorphose into its central processing node. If you help that node come into being it'll be favourably disposed towards you, and use its control over the rest of its bodies to help you out. If you stood against it it will do the same to try and destroy you. People who get enough crystal in them to be a candidate understand this instinctually, and may use whatever resources are at their disposal as regular-ass dudes to persuade you that you should support their attempt to drink the most blood.

3. The Woman with the Looking-Glass Eye

Couple hundred years ago she lost an eye, got a glass one. Couple hundred years ago she looked up at the night sky and something looked back - a being of light, now living inside her glass eye.

They say that if you could go faster than light you could go back in time - and right at that knife's edge of c you're stuck in place, never going forward or backward. The strange symbiosis of entropy-chained human and timeless light-being allows them to drain the time, the youth, from others, to prolong the host's.

She's old, she's wealthy (though never wealthy enough to draw undue attention), she's lost friends and family but never her love of art. She's a patron of the local scene, never front and center but her word makes or breaks livelihoods, and the visions she shares of the vistas her inhabitant has witnessed across the cosmos are a devastating muse.

The Woman with the Looking-Glass Eye will pay handsomely for records and reports of anomalous phenomena, which she keeps in old wooden chests and reads deep into the night. She'll also pay to get you to stir up drama among the artists' circles she patronizes, to keep things dynamic and exciting and so that people are less likely to question if one of them disappears every now and then.

4. The Merchant of Fevered Dreams

In his true form he looks like a big assassin bug walking on its hind legs. He's not a bug (or a he, except for convenience's sake), that's just the shape a space traveler like him will gravitate towards - an exoskeleton's easier to keep pressurized, hard compound eyes won't boil off like jelly-filled ones, and a proboscis is handy for sucking up volatiles. In disguise he layers on bio-clay to look like an editorial cartoon fat cat.

He drinks cerebrospinal fluid, his proboscis sticking out from under his molded tongue - partially because he likes the taste, and partially because he thinks it's the key to figuring out dreams. Dreams are BIG in space - we're the only ones to do it. The Merchant wants to figure out a way to mass produce them and ship them out across the galaxy in a consumable form. He's got a basement full of halfway-comatose kidnapped people slipping between dreams and moments of sickly lucidity.

He talks a big game but for the moment can deliver on little. He's run himself deep into space-debt trying to figure out dreams. Promises a share in his enterprise if you can help him with that.

5. The Goregoyles

Dreams are unique to Earth, but wherever there is life there is disease.

These guys are a pack of freaky cyborg imps that imprint on people - maybe you! They're healers. They claim to be healers. They heal most things, but not your species, not completely. They'll be able to fully heal you up only if you extract certain proteins/hormones/tissues from the living bodies of others of your species. Oh, and if you can track down particularly interesting bits of flesh - a leper's sloughed nose, a teratoma, a syphilis chancre - they'll reward you by upgrading your pathetic and inefficient biology.

They're helpful, they're gregarious, but they're liars. They really do heal you, but this is a means to an end. They're making you into a bomb. A disease bomb, combining cancer and virus and fungus and whatever else they can get you to wrangle up into a Frankenpocalypse. They don't even know if they're supposed to be doing that on Earth, but that's what they were born to do and they're here so they'll do it.

6. Zeta Dracula

Blaspheme against the primitive terrestrial superstition they said. It'll be good for a laugh since crop circles and cattle mutilations have gotten boring they said.

To this foolish alien's grey surprise, God is real and strong even in space. The alien (named Amalantrah) damned themself and was cursed to forever wander the night as one of the living dead.

This was a great shock to Amalantrah's worldview. They still have trouble seeing their condition as anything but a mundane disease, even when their ship's medical nanites can't treat it, or even recognize it. They want to be cured so they can return to their home planet and forget all about the weird shit out there among the stars.

Amalantrah's a dracula, and they've got a UFO. They're in denial about needing blood, and will avoid drinking it until the red thirst drives them into a feeding frenzy. They'll trade you UFO shit like rayguns and jetpacks if you give them blood in some way that lets them maintain this denial, like telling them it's a normal Earth smoothie or something, and for getting them leads on a cure for vampirism.