Dying is an art: I do it exceptionally well.In life, those revenants known as "suicide stalkers" were often deeply romantic, impractical sorts. They're the kind who conceive grand, mad, unhinging passions they can never express. (More often than not, they're more in love with the idea of their "ideal other" than the actual person, who no doubt snores, picks her nose or never misses an episode of "Jerry Springer.") The necessary combination of shyness, depth of feeling, and impracticality is thankfully rare, because these revenants don't just spring up every time there's a suicide of unrequited love. They are only possible when the will is strong, the passion is maddening, and the beloved never even suspects his or her role in the death.
I do it so it feels real.
I do it so it feels like hell.
Sylvia Plath
It's galling to be in love. It's worse when you're sick enough to kill yourself for it. But it's worst of all when you die for love and your "lover" doesn't know it. That's intolerable.
That can bring someone back from the grave.
Suicide stalkers have a tough row to hoe. Their task is to force acknowledgement from the beloved: only when that is achieved can they rest. However, they are completely mute, and do not even retain their pre-mortem faces. Instead, they are anonymous, faceless in the same way that nonentities are (see page 152 of UA.) The only way they can communicate with their chosen one is by dying. And they do it over, and over, and over.
This little passion play is hardly easy for the object of their obsession, either. If a suicide stalker latches onto you, strangers suddenly start dying all around you - jumping in front of your car, hanging themselves in the tree outside your apartment and jumping off the roof so that they fall in front of your office window. Because of the "nonentity effect," the victim usually has no idea that it's really one entity, trapped in a tape loop of varied demise. Lots of them simply lose their minds, battered and numbed by a hideous succession of random, pointless, gruesome deaths.
Suicide stalkers aren't malevolent: they just want to be acknowledged. Often, if their "beloved" is in danger, the stalker will throw itself in front of the peril. This usually kills it, but unlike the beloved, the stalker can come back.
If the beloved dies before it acknowledges the stalker, the spell is broken and the stalker proceeds to its eternal reward (or whatever). The only way to get rid of one and live to tell is by saving its life. If the beloved can successfully spare the suicide stalker - by cutting the noose, or catching it as it falls, or jumping in front of that train to drag it off the tracks - then the stalker is given a moment with its old face and its true voice. It has this last chance to say "I loved you, and you never knew" before it turns to dust forever.
Suicide Stalkers (Minor)
*I'm gonna make you love me. Yes I will.*
Body: 15 (Easily Slain)
Speed: 40 (Stumbling)
Mind: 40 (Single-Minded)
Soul: 30 (Obsessed)