On Vampires

[vampere]

Vampires in the context of Sanctuary

As is perhaps unsurprising, Sanctuary has its own take on vampires, and one that is very different to most other versions. In this case, they're abnormals - the catch-all term Sanctuary uses for any non-human beings, covering everything from shapeshifters to sentient piles of ooze. Vampires (also known as sanguine vampiris) however, are very nearly in a category all their own; canon refers to them as the deadliest abnormal to have ever lived, and from what we've seen I'd be willing to believe that. The vampires of old were faster, more agile, and stronger than humans, and near impossible to kill too. They were the kings of ancient ages, the pharoahs of humanity, rulers and tyrants, and more technologically advanced than humanity besides. However, in time a force rose up against them. To be precise: Christianity. Most vampires were exterminated, with the rest driven to the fringes of humanity, or sterilized.

The result was what we know as the Dark Ages (which raises some interesting questions about where vampires tended to be located and what was going on elsewhere in the world, but canon never addresses that).


However, because vampires were all but driven to extinction, we never actually get a terribly good impression of what they can do, beyond the better/faster/stronger subset of abilities. What we do get to see is as follows:

-Silver, holy water, and crucifixes have no effect.
-They can't turn into bats or fog.
-They do drink blood. (Tesla himself is an exception to this; he gets by on a specialized medication)
-Wine has no effect on them.
-Vampirism is not by bite.
-They can (presumably) interbreed with humans.
-Retractable fangs and talons for 'game face'
-A healing factor that makes them very, very hard to properly kill - the only confirmed vampire deaths we see on screen basically comes courtesy of an exploding bomb, however given that the Church managed to kill whole swathes of vampires in and around the Dark Age there are presumably other ways of doing it as well.
-An ability to learn languages by tasting the blood of someone who speaks it


The Science of Vampirism

However, if vampirism isn't transmissible by bite, the question remains: how did Tesla end up as one? The answer is something of a long story, but it basically goes like this. While Tesla was at college, he fell in with a group of scientist who called became known as The Five; a group dedicated to expanding their knowledge of the physical world, both as related to humanity and abnormal. And when The Five came across a vial of pure vampire blood dating from before the sterilization of the species - blood rumored to have amazing qualities - they did what any self-respecting scientists of the era would do, and came up with a serum based on it. In short, they changed themselves into something more; in Tesla's case the serum interacted with what was presumably distant vampiric ancestry and turned him into what he is today.

However, it should be noted that while most people (himself included) are content to refer to Tesla a vampire he is not a pure-blood Sanguine vampiris - he is perhaps more accurately a half-vampire or, possibly, dhampir; he notably loses out on the enhanced speed of true vampires, as well as the learning languages through blood trick (or at least is never shown using it). Additionally, on the one time Tesla (briefly) encounters a true vampire, she casually dismisses him as being essentially a mongrel, further enforcing the idea that he's vampire enough to read as vampire to most people, but not vampire enough to impress an actual vampire.