Main_Page > Vampire: The Requiem > Characters > Moss Vinter
Life is a canvas and we are merely paint.
History[]
Son of a sculptor, Moss entered the Embrace after his early works drew praise (and criticism for being too "strange"). His Sire, fearful age will tarnish his creative, exploratory side, shuffled him off his mortal coil a week after his seventeenth birthday in 1937.
From one parent to another, Moss spend the next several decades honning his craft. His Sire gave him unprecedented free will (to explore art) but almost no direction and severely curtailed his activities outside the studio. The paranoia of being tainted by "common thought" has left Moss with little outside experiences and a dry bank of ideas to draw on for his work. The upside is each new concept he encounters opens great new doors for his work. The downside is most of his "original" ideas are actually well-used, and sometimes embaressingly common, knowledge.
So Moss has enlisted one of the Movement's greatest strengths to aid in his work: diversity. After he left his Sire to forge his own Requiem, Moss engaged in every Kindred he could find in conversation, especially Carthians as his fellows in the Covenant aided him in adapting to an independent unlife. In return he offers a ready ear as an eager listener and if there's one thing neonate Carthians like is to discuss their missions (and feel smarter than an older Kindred).
As much as people like him, its difficult for Moss to retain all this information and he often askes for people to repeat themselves. A single Carthian may give Moss the same lecture three or four times before he catches on. In a matter of four or five years, everyone would tire of him and Moss would move on, taking what he's learned and anxiously discover what's in store in the next city.
Over time, Moss developed an artistic appreciation for this chaotic, random process of learning, with strange and new ideas set next to each other; conversations next to each but completely different. The messiness, the randomness, of ideas had a beauty all their own and so became Moss's mission: to capture this beauty in art. After several failed attempts in his studio, he discovered he shouldn't rely on just himself to make works that encompass change. A good collage needs lots of sources.
Current Activities[]
Today Moss spends less and less time traveling and more time working. Soon he will settle on a domain to act as a base of operations (though he will probably never stop traveling). He wants to know everyone in a city and, naively, be friends with everyone. He wants the city to be diverse, perferably under some turmoil, but also open to change, a state Moss has grown to revel in.
Still, there are many things he does not know and many more he's forgotten. He sometimes recalls images and feelings but not facts, names, dates and detailed concepts. The result of this is he often embaresses himself while talking to other Kindred; in being everyone's friend he tries to know everything but ends up knowing very little. And it shows.
The Collage[]
Moss's collage technique is designed to capture the glorious wonder of dynamic processes. The general idea begins with Moss picking a medium (such as paint, sculpture, poetry) and a theme. The theme can be real world (vessels, havens, cities) or abstract (purpose, ideals). He then askes as many Kindred as possible (usually only Carthians accept) who are as different as possible to illustrate how they feel about these things. Moss then collects the items and organizes them in a way that illustrates the beauty of the many. This part is truly the longest part of the process and sometimes Moss returns to his original participants and ask them to try again as "something's missing" from their first draft.
A less used strategy Moss uses is to simply bring out a large canvas during Elysium and gives everyone paint, asking them to paint his theme at the same time. This tends to decay in a sort of childish anarchy (which Moss actually enjoys) but rarely yeilds work worth displaying. And the question has been posed to him, if other people did all the work, can he really take credit for it? So he usually engages in the first technique.