The Kiss

The Kiss is the gentle colloquial term used by vampires to refer to biting someone and sucking their blood. The name is not only an aesthetic one; the experience of being bitten by a vampire is overwhelming both physically and emotionally, and is most often described by victims as a pleasurable and even addictive experience. This is due to its important evolutionary function of allowing vampires to feed without their victims continuing to struggle or escape, as well as allowing them to feed non-fatally if they wish to avoid depleting their local food reserves.

Almost all vampires automatically inflict the Kiss on those they bite as an inborn power; they couldn't avoid doing so if they tried. However, a few vampires are incapable of generating the Kiss (most notably the Giovanni, although they aren't the only ones), which generally makes their lives a little harder and their feeding habits a little messier.

The Kiss and Mortals

Mortals are by far the most common recipients of the Kiss, since they are the major source of nourishment for vampires. For most mortals, the Kiss is experienced as an overwhelming feeling of pleasure and lassitude, causing them to relax and wallow in the sensation until the vampire has finished their meal. Mortals under the influence of the Kiss generally do nothing whatsoever; most will fall down or buckle if standing, and the most activity they can usually muster is murmuring or slight movements. (Of course, the moment the Kiss ends, many mortals get understandably frightened again.)

The Kiss doesn't truly erase memories, but it can cloud them with its intense emotions, often leading mortals to reconstruct explanations such as a wild night with an unknown lover or an overdose of a party drug to try to understand what has happened to them. Most savvy vampires can nudge them toward a version of the story that works best, although especially panicked or sensitive mortals may require further use of supernatural powers to calm.

Because the Kiss is so overwhelmingly pleasurable, many mortals may become very quickly addicted to it, even if they were only fed on by a vampire a single time. Addicted mortals and ghouls who seek to repeat the experience often become blood dolls as a result (if they survive their search, anyway).

The Kiss and Vampires

Although the Kiss is designed to make prey quiet and docile for a vampire, they are not immune to its effects themselves. Being supernatural, vampires are less affected by the Kiss than mortals are, but not by much; while they retain more awareness of what is happening and ability to take action while being bitten, they experience the same flood of pleasure and relaxation that their food usually does.

Of course, this does not come up as often, since vampires biting one another inevitably leads to the complications of blood bonds, but this contributes to the Kiss being seen as a very private and sensual act between vampires. Most vampires consider the Kiss between two of the undead to be on a similar level of intimacy as sex, bringing as it does intense vulnerability along with pleasure and surrender of control. When a Kiss is administered accidentally or due to an emergency, such as a vampire biting another while in a Frenzy, it still causes the same sensations and emotions, which can be embarrassing and often leads to vampires pretending not to recall the incident.

Some vampire powers, particularly in the Presence discipline, can affect the potency of the Kiss.

The Kiss and Supernatural Beings

The Kiss works just as well on supernatural beings such as shapeshifters and fairies as it does on mortals... to an extent. Supernatural beings bitten by vampires feel the same pleasure and emotion from the Kiss, but like vampires themselves are not rendered helpless by it and can still speak, move, or try to take action. This tends to be unfortunate for vampires, since in the majority of cases a vampire biting a supernatural being is doing so because they have mistaken them for a mortal and are ill-equipped to deal with the likely resulting scuffle.

A few supernatural beings are immune to the Kiss: ghosts, who have no corporeal body to chew on, and Risen, who no longer really feel the rotting body they are inhabiting. A few of the Fomori are also immune to the Kiss, depending on how badly reorganized and damaged their original mortal bodies are.