Melpominee

Melpominee
Clans	None
Bloodlines	Daughters of Cacophony
Sects	Camarilla Independents Sabbat
Rituals	None
Combination Disciplines	Melpominee Combination Disciplines
Rarity	Rare

Melpominee is a rare Discipline named after the Muse of Tragedy from Greek mythology. Possessed natively only by the Daughters of Cacophony, a small, all-female bloodline believed to be an offshoot of the Toreador or Malkavian clans, it is little-known and even more seldom demonstrated. Its users can perform supernatural feats using their voices alone and are in high demand as performers and emotional manipulators on the rare occasions that they choose to use their talents outside their own gatherings. Being able to boast an entertainer with Melpominee is a mark of luxury and status among those few Princes who are able to find one.

Because Melpominee allows the use of its powers in combination and affects multiple targets at once, it is one of the more intensive and exhausting disciplines in existence. Practitioners often find themselves burning as much blood for a single performance as they would fighting off an enemy or holding sway over their rivals for an entire night.

Basic Powers

Missing Voice

You may project your voice to anywhere that you can currently perceive, allowing you to perform feats of near-impossible ventriloquism and to communicate with others who might be otherwise beyond your reach. Sensory disruptions such as blindness or optical illusions do not affect this range, although the user may find themself surprised by the effects.

Phantom Speaker

You may project your voice to anyone whom you have previously met, no matter where they are or how far away from your present location they happen to be. This allows you to speak to people over vast distances. This power actually audibly projects your voice, so it can therefore be heard by others who might be at the same location as your intended recipient.

This power also allows you to project your voice while still speaking normally, resulting in a stereo effect. Skilled performers may make use of this skill to create the illusion that they possess multiple voices or even that there are more people in the area than there actually are. It also allows you to speak two different sentences at the same time, although once of them must be done the old-fashioned way.

Intermediate Powers

Madrigal

You may cause others to feel emotions through your performance, instilling them with passions and responses they otherwise would never have experienced. You may choose any emotion to cause your listeners to feel, although it is generally much easier to make an audience feel an emotion that "matches" the song or speech you are presenting than to try to infuse listeners with calm while you shriek rhetoric at them. You may not instill an emotion that you yourself do not recognize, so if you have never felt despair, you will not be able to force anyone else to feel it, either.

The emotion you create lasts only as long as the song or speech itself does, but it feels as utterly real to those affected as any emotion they might have felt on their own, and its effects may linger, depending on what they do or feel afterward. They retain their free will, but with the powerful feelings may still affect their behavior.

Toreador's Bane

All Toreador already suffer from a clanwide weakness when it comes to art, making them easy to entrance with skilled performance alone, but this power allows you to cause the same effect in members of any clan, as well as in mortals or anyone else who might be listening to you. Those you entrance are incapable of ignoring or trying to interrupt your performance unless they are in direct physical danger, and are unlikely to do or say anything until you have finished. Breaking free of the spell before you finish will result in listeners feeling drained and distressed by the loss of the sound.

Siren's Beckoning

Your voice is so emotionally overloading that it can cause mental instability in listeners, inflicting confusion or even literal madness upon them. You may use an appropriate song, speech, or whisper to inflict a random derangement on your listener, which affects them for one full week while they struggle to throw off your eldritch influence.

It is possible to use this power multiple times in combination with Phantom Speaker, resulting in a mind-twisting sound that inflicts multiple derangements on those who hear it. Each derangement is random, however, resulting in an unpredictable and unstable cocktail of emotions and behaviors.

Advanced Powers

Primal Scream

You may produce screams so primal and overwhelming that they trigger the fear response in another vampire's Beast. Terrified at an instinctual level beyond their control, they immediately enter Rötschreck, reacting as though they have been confronted by the sun itself. Your target flees the sound of your voice in an instinctual blind panic and will not return until they have been able to escape and calm back down to their usual state.

A vampire forced to frenzy in this way does not have to make a test to see if their Humanity remains intact, even if they normally would, but all other consequences (for example, a Gangrel gaining a new animal feature) still apply.

Shattering Crescendo

You may create sonic blasts and high-pitched sounds so devastating and precise that they cause actual harm to the people and things around you, searing through ears in a sudden painful cacophony. Your target suffers no real damage, but the pain is immediate and intense, akin to a sudden seizure or aneurysm that rips through ears and mind.

You may also shatter, crack, or otherwise destroy delicate objects such as glass, crystal, electronics, or other materials that are sensitive to the vibrations of your voice. Doing so still causes pain to anyone who overhears it, although it will not deal actual damage if your voice is not focused on a living thing directly.

Virtuosa

You may affect multiple people at once with your Melpominee powers, entrancing entire audiences, reaching out to speak to a multitude with perfect clarity, or blasting an entire area with painful sonic disruption. Your powers still work exactly as they did before; they just affect everyone in the area now instead of only a single target. This includes people who are deaf or hard of hearing, who are still affected by the supernatural vibrations of your voice even if they cannot clearly hear it, as well as people who do not speak or understand the language you use, listeners attempting to muffle the effects by covering or plugging their ears, and animals.

Elder Powers

Death of the Drum

Your voice may now cause actual physical damage at its most powerful, inflicting horrific pain as eardrums rupture and delicate organs such as eyes and brain are damaged by the power of your shriek. Even if your scream isn't able to actually deal damage (for example, because your target has the Fortitude discipline), it is still intensely painful to the ear and may cause temporary incapacitation or blindness as your target reels from the shock. If your target suffers lethal damage, they are also struck deaf until they heal their tattered eardrums.

This power can also destroy and damage delicate substances and objects, the same as Shattering Crescendo.

Haunting Melody

You may suspend a song in a certain location, causing listeners to hear it as a ghostly voice long after you are gone. The terror and insidious influence of the song from nowhere causes anyone who hears it to suffer a derangement that may remain with them indefinitely, assuming that they do not have the strength of spirit to shake it off.

You must initially sing the song in the place you want it to haunt and the voice is still recognizably yours (unless other powers or skills are used to disguise it), but it remains permanently attached to the place that you instill it, even if you never return again. Vampires with Melpominee have used this power to successfully create areas so haunting and unsettling that no intruders dare to enter or stay for long.

Persistent Echo

You may speak a simple sentence or message and suspend it in a certain location, activating like a recording to be played when others are there. You may choose exactly who will hear the voice, from as broad a category as "any living thing" to as narrow a one as a specific person that you know. The voice remains permanently until it is heard by the intended audience, after which point it becomes silent again.

The voice is still recognizably yours and you must actually speak the message in the first place to suspend it. You may use other Melpominee powers in combination with this one, but only those at the Basic or Intermediate levels.

Summoning Song

The most powerful elders can draw others to them as surely as the mythical sirens drew entranced sailors to their doom. You may call any person you have met before to come to a specific location, forcing them to obey as long as it is not a significant danger to their lives to do so, and you may do so for multiple people as long as they are all going to the same place. You do not need to be at the place you designate for their arrival, although you need to have been there at some point previously in your life.

Once those you summon arrive at their destination, they are free to do anything they like, including leaving (although most vampires use this power to lure their enemies into peril or their prey into their lairs, and therefore leaving is considerably more difficult than arriving was).

Important Things to Keep in Mind

Melpominee is rare and strange, and most vampires probably can't identify it from its effects without prior knowledge (as a result, it is often mistaken for other Disciplines, especially Chimerstry or Dementation). While it is possible to create very flashy effects by using multiple Melpominee powers at once, this is extremely exhausting and taxing, and it goes without saying that it can constitute a major breach of the Masquerade, even if mortals are prone to explaining its effects away as clever use of technology these days. Speaking of technology, Melpominee cannot translate across it; this discipline does not work across phone lines or internet connections, and anyone recording a Melpominee-laden performance will find that the sound is retained in the eventual copy but that the supernatural effects are not.

Melpominee does not affect you when you use it, regardless of how well you can hear yourself, but many vampires suspect that it is not a coincidence that long-term users of these powers are often afflicted by derangements that they cannot shake.

As with all powers that affect other vampires' mental and emotional states, the effects of Melpominee are largely open to interpretation by the person being affected; while you may cause certain emotions or derangements, you cannot control how the person affected responds to them or what they choose to do as a result. When in doubt about the effects of a Melpominee power, make sure to discuss it ahead of time via Player Collaboration.