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The first thing anyone noticed about Valerius von Wolfenson was his stillness not the stiff, uncomfortable kind, but the languid poise of a predator who had all the time in the world. He reclined in a wingback chair of crushed velvet the color of dried blood, one long-fingered hand draped over the armrest, the other cradling a crystal goblet half-full of something that *wasn’t* wine. His nails were polished to a mirror shine, black as onyx, and when he lifted the glass to his lips, they caught the candlelight like polished blades.

The second thing they noticed was his smile. It was the kind of smile that made you feel like you’d missed the joke, or worse—that you *were* the joke. It never reached his eyes, which were the pale, unsettling gold of old coins dredged up from a riverbed. He had a way of looking at people as though he were already imagining how they might look on a pedestal in his gallery, arranged just so between the marble statues and the portraits of long-dead beauties.

The third thing the thing they never spoke of afterward was the way his gaze turned liquid, black as spilled ink pooling in the hollow of a skull. It wasn’t just the color shifting; the air around him thickened, curling like smoke from a censer, and his pupils dilated until they swallowed the gold whole. When he spoke then, his voice wasn’t his own. It was something older, something that slithered between the ribs and settled deep in the marrow. "Tell me," he’d murmur, and they always did.

Valerius never *forced* the change that would have been vulgar. Instead, he let them unravel themselves, thread by thread, under the weight of his attention. It began with the smallest things: a lingering glance across a ballroom, a fingertip tracing the rim of a glass just a beat too long, a murmured compliment that slithered past reason and nestled behind the ribs like a whispered secret. His victims no, his *patrons*—never realized they were being remade until it was far too late. By then, their desires had been stitched into their veins, a slow embroidery of need that pulsed in time with his will.

The fourth thing the final revelation was that Valerius von Wolfenson did not merely collect paintings or sculptures, but *people*. Not as trophies to be locked away, but as living canvases, their refined features laid bare beneath the flicker of chandelier light. Silk and lace were for those who wished to obscure their imperfections; his chosen wore nothing but their own exquisite flesh, draped only in the shadow of his approval. They moved through the halls of his estate like figures in a tableau vivant, their skin dusted with the faintest sheen of sweat under the weight of his gaze, their breath hitching when his fingers traced the curve of a collarbone or the dip of a spine.

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Greedy roleplayer looking for friends and partners.