Blood Sport

Games were her playground, the laboratory where she explored through trial and error how to socialize. Players attempt to be assertive, diplomatic, convincing. And if it fails, well, it's only a character that others reject, not oneself.

"I've seen it happen all the time," she says. "People learn social skills by playing." For a few hours a week, the games allow a social outcast to rise from the basement and inhabit another self, one who fears nothing, least of all the opinions of others. The result, however, is not always pretty.

---

An overweight vampire with fierce eyes and a goatee breaks off a conversation with a tweedy professorial type and a redhead in a lab coat. Approaching a newcomer, he plants a hand on his shoulder.

"Where are you from?" he demands. "What's your clan? Who is your sire?"

The newcomer's answers come slowly.

"Clearly another mental defective," the goateed vampire announces before steering the rookie into the Mentor condo community center where the game is being played. Along the way, he introduces himself -- Jonas Nimrod, newly appointed scourge of Cleveland, responsible for introducing newcomers to the city's vampire prince.

He leans in to whisper: "My character is an asshole. You know it's nothing personal, right?"

Inside, the game is a nonalcoholic cocktail party, with extra hissing. Vampires chat about imaginary jobs, families, and plans. Occasionally they discuss make-believe philosophy. What's your opinion on the enslavement of wraiths?

As the evening wears on, a small group breaks out of character in a corner. One pudgy young man in clunky boots complains about the Society for Creative Anachronism, the medieval reenactment group that appears to draw from the same crowd. The SCA is too heavy on the mock combat, the man tells his friends. "It is just like high school," he complains. "Everyone wants to be around the jocks."

Afterward, gathered around a couple of tables at an all-night diner, the players are boisterous, stripped of the poise lent by a good suit or slick costume. The conversation is less personal, less practical, even less philosophical than during the game. People seem to drop in and out of the conversation at the wrong point, maybe just half a beat off. Gestures seem overbroad, and the laughter a little too loud.

Wells, who has created life-sized, white-on-black portraits of many local gamers, sees past such awkwardness.

"A lot of them don't have parents who know what they are up to -- or even have parents in the first place," he says. "I look at some kids and think, 'You are being raised by a subculture.'"

At one Cleveland by Night game, players mingled in the darkness of a backyard abutting Cain Park. The werewolves that would eventually encircle the Vega house were on the loose. Rather than brainstorm a solution, a group of 10 powerful vampires decided to cruise around the city in an imaginary car. They stood on the lawn, arranged as if sitting in a vehicle. A mafioso vampire in a white suit and shades spat orders at an imaginary driver: "Let's go to a bar." When a storyteller announced that they'd arrived, a vampire dressed in flannel and jeans mimed bailing out of the car, swaggering up to the bar, and demanding a drink. But the bartender didn't have what he wanted, so after some arguing and cursing (not all of it in English), the mafioso decided to take the party elsewhere. The expedition ended at a strip club, where some members of the group pretended to receive lap dances and speculated on whether the undead get erections.

They didn't have to pretend. The guys were all over 21 and owned cars. But like Jonas Nimrod, they were acting with a self-assurance and forcefulness that the players seem to lack in real life.

"To be an asshole requires confidence and certain social skills," Wells says. "Once we are done with them, they aren't really assholes, but they do have the capability to be."

---

A few weeks after Undead Ltd. closed on the Vega Avenue properties, the entrance hall of the boarding house is a jumble of boxes. Two big-screen TVs haven't been hooked up, and the fridge is still mysteriously freezing the milk. But the gaming house next door is ready for afterlife. Working weekends and evenings, volunteers have stripped piss-smelling carpet and dragged broken appliances to the curb. A wall partitioning upstairs from downstairs has been torn out, the attic swept, and the rear balcony opened.