Be Kind To Neonates.

Greetings, my fellow dwellers in the Underworld!

Tonight, I have a very special public service announcement I want to make. Which is:

Be Kind To Neonates.

Come now, we were all Neonates ourselves, once. Callow younglings, "Babybats" as it were, ignorant of the Protocol of the Damned, and beholden to our Sires for instruction in the Dance of Darkness. Why, it seems like it was only yesterday that I first opened my eyes to the Welcoming Shade of the Eternal Night, and endured the scorn of those who had the fortune to taste Immortality before I did. I cannot look upon the latest crop of Childer, with their multicolored hair, their Evanesence T-Shirts, and their faux-leather Hot Topic-issue fetish gear, and not remember my own cruel but necessary rite of passage at the feet of Lady Carlotta. Nothing says "tough love" like rusty cold iron manacles, twelve feet of braided leather, and a five-foot cudgel covered in spikes...but I digress. The point is that we all had to start somewhere. Some of us were eased into our Dark Rebirth, and some of us were figuratively tossed into the River Styx and commanded to swim against the current. And centuries from now these young ones will determine the future of our kind, just as the Ancillas and Elders of old passed the darkly-smoldering, sulfurous hellfire-torch of leadership to us. As rocker David Bowie once sang,


"And these children that you spit on
As they try to change their worlds
Are immune to your consultations
They're quite aware of what they're going through

Ch-ch-ch-CHANGES!"