Ifryn Macier

So we’ve been on hiatus here for a bit at Black Wednesday’s trying to locate the last few interviewees for you before my job here comes most literally to an end.

It should be perhaps be no surprise then that the most recent bedraggled thing we managed to convince to visit our studios is one severely diseased vampire. I’d say our scouts were scraping the bottom of the barrel with this one but Ifryn Macier is a stubborn old geezer who they have been trying to persuade since our doors opened. 

Ifryn, like most of his species, is of ord origin. This is mostly due to the fact that the vampire species germinated from ords and vampires fare best when they feed on similar blood types. Vampires sired from other species such as fae or anthropomorphs tend to die younger unless they feed upon those of their origin species. Worse still, some insist on drinking sugar-water and thus sentence themselves to a slow and painful death, dying as young as 50 which is a considerable markdown from the extended lifespan these beings are meant to have.

A reasonable height then for an ord at 5ft 6in tall Ifryn is still the most horrible mess of a vampire. He is 137 years old and wow it really shows. Put in stark comparison to Eyzith who is 150 and still fresh-faced you can tell how much his ills have ravaged his body. His sunken face, hollowed eyes and accompanying scowl however say more about him than his sickness because as it happens Ifryn really is a grumpy old git. 

Speaking to him it is clear that he dislikes everything and everyone. The epitome of a nasty and nosy neighbour, your business is his business and you’d better keep out of his affairs. A haggard limping and outwardly offensive individual in all ways it’s difficult to even hold a conversation with him. He gripes and snipes at every possible opportunity and generally makes it impossible to communicate. Yes Ifryn hates you and us and life and the universe. We tire quickly of trying to ask him questions, for someone so elderly he appears sapped of any wisdom.

His sickened state has no doubt left him vulnerable and likely angry; that is understandable. That said we get the feeling that he’d probably be the same awful person even if his skin were not slightly sloughing from his bones.

Alongside Eyzith, Emmus and Dro’Zar, Ifryn is one of the few remaining old vampires who recall the now obsolete way of siring and raising their kind; an outdated, well documented and draconian method for selecting children to join the species which has since perished. Due to its brutality it is hardly surprising to learn that the old system was replaced. 

This extreme method for choosing new vampires technically didn’t exist when Ifryn was born as an ord and certainly was not meant to be in use by the time he was sired. Of course, the practice was still being illegally used at the time of Ifryn’s siring, and to this day there are reports of similar set-ups occurring outside of organised society. But then maintenance of population control for a society such as that of the vampires has never been an easy thing to micro-manage.

Ifryn is then both blessed and cursed by his illness. In one respect he has become a bitter, withering old man far sooner than he should for a member of his species, in the other he has been granted immunity from their laws of population control which means he doesn’t have to pass any tests to validate the reasons he should be allowed to keep living. Incapable of breeding they are quite happy to let the man live out the remainder of his days in whatever agony the sickness brings, how nice of them.