The Chronicle of Felix: Refugium Sub Notabili
(An excerpted biographical dossier, compiled from fragmented archives and unreliable recollections.)
“He was a man whose shadow remembered what his flesh could not.” — marginalia, Codex Noctivagus, 1978
I. Origins in Smoke and Iron
The Mortal was born sometime in the early years of the twentieth century, amid the soot and metallic breath of the northern Brittain. The exact place has never been confirmed — Manchester, Edinburgh, perhaps Glasgow — though it hardly matters. Such cities were cousins in grime. The few scraps of record that survive suggest an orphan, unnamed and unsponsored, left to the charity of industry. He came into being where the clatter of the rail met the hum of the factory, and where no one bothered to write the names of the forgotten.
By adolescence, Felix had drifted to London with a small gang of fellow strays — petty criminals and hoodlums. What he did there is known only through vague reports and self-contradictory stories. Petty thefts, black-market errands, the occasional night spent in police custody under a false name (possibly Donald Gavin). No reliable birth certificate was ever located, and when questioned later in life, Felix himself described his youth as “a blur of cold fog and warm gin.”
II. The Girl, the Deception, and the Trade
At twenty-five, Felix met a girl named Esmeralda, seventeen and radiant with that peculiar West End innocence that dreams of salvation through affection. She belonged to a small evangelical circle that met in rented halls and sang hymns to cracked pianos. To win her favor, Felix fashioned himself anew — a reformed man, a respectable gentleman from a modest but upright hardworking family. This masquerade lasted long enough for him to glimpse what he would later call “the perfume of normalcy,” before the gravity of vice reclaimed him.
To secure a better life, he returned to trade — this time in subtler contraband. Heroin and morphine were profitable in the interwar years, and Felix quickly rose through maritime channels, ferrying his poison between the Lowlands and the Thames. Ships were his sanctuaries; ports his parishes.
III. The Occultist and the Awakening
Accounts diverge violently here. Some name the occultist who ensnared him, others veil it behind euphemism: the Magus, the Sorcerer of Battersea, the Beast in Brocade. Whether or not it was Aleister Crowley is immaterial; London had no shortage of men dabbling in forbidden mixtures of science and ritual.
What is consistent is this: Felix’s deceit caught up with him. He sold something impure, something tainted, to the wrong collector — a man whose hobbies were neither sane nor safe. Felix was abducted by the man’s associates and subjected to an experiment that defied easy description — a transfusion of blood, narcotics, and unholy curiosity.
When he awoke, he was no longer merely human. What remained of Esmeralda — whether lover, victim, or witness — was found days later near Hay’s Wharf, her body emptied of meaning.
IV. The Masterless Years
Thus began Felix’s long exile. A Caitiff, some whispered — a masterless creature, shunned by all proper lineages. His bloodline was deemed “particularly impure” by the Matsrizi, a proud and calculating strain of old blood who kept meticulous ledgers on London’s night-borne population. Their notes describe him as “excessively cautious,” “unambitious,” and “pettily criminal.” The kind of monster no one truly feared — only pitied.
Yet Felix endured. He nested for a time in the shadows of The Devil’s Acre, Westminster’s forgotten quarter, beneath the notice of both mortals and their predators. There he learned to vanish in plain sight, to steal without moving, to fade from memory before eyes could blink.
V. The Seas of Diminishment
In this world — or the one adjacent to it — the immortal are bound by geography. Their strength wanes as they stray from their soil; their power thins like ink in rain. Open water is their great undoing, the boundary between dominions.
Felix, defying instinct, took to the sea. He joined a crew of other unusuals: two vampiric thralls, a ghoul who subsisted on corpses, a rat-born shapeshifter, and a mutant whose gaze could beguile but not feed. Together they ran contraband between Europe and New Orleans.
Rumors from the Crescent City tell of a quiet, pale man who spoke little, drank heavily, and seemed to carry the weight of unremembered centuries — though by then he was barely fifty.
VI. The Frailties of Blood
Felix was riddled with weaknesses. Bright light seared him, loud sounds unstrung him, and even patterns on wallpaper could send him into trembling fits. His mind was a kaleidoscope of intoxication and self-control. For decades he wrestled with perpetual inebriation — chemical and spiritual alike.
Still, he honed certain arts: the shifting of flesh (Protean), the vanishing of sight (Obfuscate), and modest traces of endurance and speed. Most curious was his Transfixion, a paralyzing gaze uncharacteristically potent for one of his lineage. Some thought it the echo of the experiment that birthed him; others suspected a psychic fracture masquerading as a gift.
VII. The Long Drift
Through the middle century, Felix persisted. He never aligned himself with the Sabbat — perhaps out of fear, perhaps apathy. He killed rarely and only the desrving, fed discreetly, and often left his prey sleeping with only the faintest of dreams. His affection for whiskey and the new sounds of soul and rock ‘n roll gave him an oddly mortal charm. By the 1960s, he spoke in a drawl borrowed from southern United States, a self-conscious performance that amused those who knew better.
Wars among the night-folk of London drove him north to Glasgow, then back south again. Eventually, weary and threadbare, he crossed once more to the continent — Antwerp, 1973. There he found solace in a shabby café dressed up in Texan kitsch, a place that smelled of coffee, leather, and dust. Behind its façade lay his Haven.
Over time he developed strange new talents — the ability to sense the life of buildings, to manipulate thresholds and rooms (Domestii), and a machine-whispering form of Auspex. Those who encountered him then described a man who could intuit the hum of engines, the fatigue of clocks.
VIII. The Irony of Longevity
By the 1980s, Felix’s name began appearing across Europe — Paris, Munich, Berlin, Marseille. He had outlived his enemies through sheer mediocrity. Once filthy and trembling, he had grown almost handsome in a weary, bohemian way. He quoted films, mimicked comic book heroes, and told bad jokes about death and sex. He had become something new: an ancient who pretended to be harmless.
In 1995, fate — or comedy — introduced him to Lagartija, a Toreador of mixed heritage and infuriating vanity, draped in silk and self-love. They fell into one another’s orbit, exchanging blood, laughter, and barbed affection. Through Lagartija, Felix tasted the structured world of the Camarilla and its political theater.
The Prince was gone; chaos reigned. Felix, ever adaptable, became the useful jester — an intermediary, a fixer, a man sent to remind fledglings that rules exist. His humor bordered on vulgarity, but it amused the Elders enough to spare him.
IX. Refugium Sub Notabili
Felix maintained two Havens in the Netherlands — one near the Scheveningen Brush, another in the heart of The Hague. These fledlelings met in another, known in hushed circles as Refugium Sub Notabili, thus served as a playground for ambitious neonates, a place where the unnoticed could pretend at consequence. Felix visited this place like a weary caretaker of delusions, granting the young their illusions of grandeur as long as they kept quiet and drew no mortal eyes.
For years, this quiet equilibrium held.
Then came the mercenaries — Nordic ghouls of Odinist bent, their rites mingled with blood and snow, and the inevitable arrival of the Sabbat, drawn by rivalry and opportunity. The city descended into shadowed conflict. Felix, caught between factions, was poisoned — his first true Torpor, a slumber that lasted months and from which he awoke changed.
Lagartija deteriorated soon after, body and spirit alike unraveling. Their bond, once intoxicating, soured into revulsion. By the early 2000s they had parted, each retreating into isolation. Lagartija’s slumber continues to this day.
X. Epilogue: The Quiet Joke
In Antwerp, they say there is still a man who looks a little too unchanged for his years. He sits in a dim café that pretends to be American, nursing a glass of whiskey, humming along to vinyl that skips on the same note each night. When asked his name, he smiles faintly and says,
“Felix – Means lucky. Don’t know why.”
Those who know what he is — or what he became — seldom press further.
Excerpt from The Felix Dossier
(Compiled and annotated by the Office of Nocturnal Affairs, Archive of the Old Cities)
Felix appears to have assumed partial stewardship—some say management, others exploitation—of the Estate of Lagartija ever since. Yet even then, his instincts were finely tuned to the scent of danger. By degrees he withdrew from the Hague, a city whose elder intrigues had begun to congeal into something resembling ossified paranoia, and turned his gaze toward Amsterdam.
There, the climate was more permissive, at least by the nocturnal standards of the age. Amsterdam remains one of the few sanctuaries in Western Europe where the younger and less pedigreed may—if discreet—indulge their appetites and ambitions without immediate reprisal. It is a city of performance and pretense, a miniature court of jesters and philosophers masquerading as nobility, a playground of Antics, as the old ones say with a sigh.
The prevailing order is of the Invictus persuasion—stately, contractual, and coldly feudal—though the local elites occasionally acknowledge the philosophical refinements of the Dragon-Blooded. Other creeds, whether of the Church, the Coven, or the Rebellion, find little purchase here. Amsterdam’s nights belong to the courteous tyrants of the Old World.
Felix himself is said to maintain a grand Haven along the city’s port—an address whose ownership records are curiously inconclusive. Its reputation is that of a neutral salon, a place where those of non-vampiric provenance may sometimes be found in conversation or competition, though always under the host’s precise and watchful eye. Those who have attended such gatherings speak of them in hushed tones: cautious affairs of intellect and intrigue, conducted as though the walls themselves were listening, and perhaps they were.
In-Game (IC) Profile: Felix
Felix is an exercise in paradoxes. Boisterous yet cautious, a degenerate yet monastic in his will. A vigilante who ruthlessly quells bad actors, yet someone who can spend years among mortals, them none the wiser to his nature—sharing games, movies, and the occasional intoxicant. Shunned by peers and often held in contempt, he nevertheless remains a crucial nexus for maintaining contact among the broader supernatural community.
Felix is no pushover. He is unusually well-informed on firearms, modern technology, the internet, vehicles, and politics. Unlike most Kindred, he is a Nomadic Vampire—a rare breed—maintaining Havens in Berlin, Marseille, and the Hague (though barely, as bad memories linger), with his primary domain in Amsterdam.
Originally heteronormative from the 1990s onward, Felix’s dalliances with the Toreador Lagartija broadened his tastes; he now reportedly prefers femboys over women. His adaptability, charisma, and cunning make him simultaneously dangerous, amusing, and enigmatic—a figure of paradox and intrigue, always skirting the edges of both respectability and contempt.
Out-of-Character (OOC) Reflection
This story draws on my experiences in the Crimson Lion LARP during the late 1990s, set in The Hague. The character Lagartija was my partner in marriage at the time. We divorced in 2006 and haven’t been in contact since 2011, and I have no absolutely desire to reconnect. My memories from that period are complex, colored by personal frailties, pathological personality disorders, poverty, and encounters with institutional cruelty.
There were moments of intimacy and adventure—we were, by most standards, extremely gothic—but we were also damaged, impoverished, and unkempt. I sometimes scraped mold off my food to eat. I indulged fully in the LARP world from the early 1990s until the early 2000s, and revisiting these memories triggers a mixture of nausea, bitterness, and unease.
I was a frustrated, anxious, and obnoxious person, heavily shaped by a difficult childhood and the neglectful, cognitively impaired parents I grew up with. There was also a deeper frustration about my identity, my gender, my sexual needs that collided with my exterior. This inner turmoil fostered confrontational, sarcastic, petty, and sometimes vindictive tendencies.
Despite this, I take some bitter pride in how fully we embraced the WoD aesthetic—we slept in coffins, exchanged blood, and cohabitated with rats we could call by name. These are over-all not achievements to be proud of; we were filthy, ragged, and sick. During this time, I contracted infections from poor hygiene, and my health issues worsened.
I tried to love someone deeply broken beyond repair, whose psychiatric medications and feral tendencies reflected her state, while I myself was broken in other ways. Physical beauty, I realized too late, is meaningless if the soul within is dying.
That era is firmly behind me. I once considered setting up a Vampire game in Amsterdam, even designing aspects in Google Earth, but the thought of executing it now fills me with a metallic tang of resentment. What was immersive then feels derivative, pedantic, and cultish today. While I had some connections in the OWBN, White Wolf circles, and even one Father Sebastian, my circumstances and choices left me going nowhere.
The BBC’s Dracula and the canonical “Interview with the Vampire” narratives fail to capture the morbid, cadaverous truth of vampirism. Vampires, in my conception, are animated cadavers, pathetic in many ways. A truly immersive experience must affirm this morbidity in its daily rituals—but it is no longer a world I would willingly inhabit, unless drawn in by someone even prettier, with a healthier mind and soul.