The Mummy

As Egypt was explored and exploited by European and other interests, a great fascination arose with ancient Egyptian culture—particularly with its funerary customs. The ancients had embalmed and mummified many thousands of humans and animals, and scientific, superstitious and downright twisted curiosities were soon indulged as a cottage industry in mummy looting arose.

Unlike the mummies of the rich and powerful of the distant past, most of these common dead were not placed in museums. Instead, vast numbers of them were historically exhumed and sold, many of them ground up into “medicinal” powder or sold as amusements for “unwrapping parties.”

So it is not surprising to find that even now there are many ancient Egyptian mummies still in circulation around the world, quietly traded and collected for a variety of reasons. Nobody sells commercial cure-alls made with mummy powder in the mortal world any more, and most humans today would rather not risk infection or momentary disgust by unwrapping and pulling apart a dead body thousands of years old. But there are still occult interests in these matters, including those of the Vampire.

Many nosferatu pay attention to weird and supernatural things in their nightly wanderings—it is all part of their world, after all. Every so often, a supernatural being such as a Vampire will come across an old blue faience talisman no larger than a necklace bead, and that talisman will have the power to call an Egyptian mummy to its holder and enforce the Mummy’s obedience to them.

The Mummy understands any language the talisman-holder may use, but it cannot respond in any modern language. In fact, because the Mummy does not have a viable tongue, voice box or even lungs, it cannot speak coherently at all—and its manual coordination is poor enough that writing (even in ancient hieroglyphics) is effectively impossible.

There are still ways that curious Vampires can establish some form of conversational communication with these Mummy Pets, however. These brief exchanges are not illuminating. The few Vampires who care about cosmology have reported that Mummies kept as Pets are focused only on their new duties in the service of the Vampire, and that the details of their long-lost lives are vanished under the dust of millennia. They have been dead so much longer than they were ever alive that death has become the whole of their reality.

More than this, painstaking effort has assembled a strange picture of the Mummy’s reality. According to these ancient walking dead, the soul or spirit or consciousness of living creatures is a union of multiple parts, and only some of that soul remains in or near the earthly vibrational plane of the universe after death. According to the Mummies, their own highest nature has already fled far beyond the reach of their decaying flesh and bones, and the spirit that animates them is only the dregs of what they once were. It is the Mummies’ belief that something very similar happens to Vampires as well.

Vampires enjoy having Mummy Pets and rarely pay very close attention to how Mummies think the spiritual component of the universe functions…