Someone is helping you keep your demons at bay. You owe them a Debt.

Sometimes coming from a magical family is a pain in the posterior. Sometimes it means you have to deal with intrusive relatives and their scrying spells, sometimes you have to deal with demons. Well, not literal hellish demons, although if you squint it's hard to tell.

Someone in my family - don't ask me who but not me - made a deal with Queen Mab herself from the Unseelie Court. I'm guessing whoever it was is long dead now, but the Unseelie don't have a tight grasp of human time. One of the courtiers decided it was time to collect and sent around their collections crew. Those are the guys who could pass for demons in any evangelist's nightmares. And apparently, the debt is one whole person. And I'm the lucky person.

Thank the Goddess that Caber stepped in. Between the two of us, we managed to get the Unseelie so turned around that they might as well have been back in the Underhill. So far, we've been able to keep them from tracking me down.

I hear that I'm obliged to marry someone in the Unseelie Court. My romantic prospects are pretty dismal, but I'm not that desperate.

Someone is your go-to when you get into trouble. You owe them 2 Debts.

Who else? My sister. Doctor Theresa Schilling. The white sheep of the family. The Schillings have practiced hoodoo since the days of slavery. So what does my rebellious older sister do? She runs off and becomes a skeptic, that's what. Oh, she's willing to admit that herbal remedies might work, but don't get her started on hexes and hands and juju.

Still, she's my sister. I can call her whenever there's a problem. And there's always a problem. Last month there was a local church where the preacher got it into his head to sermonize against traditional medicine as "witchcraft." OK, fine, but he started naming names, and wouldn't you know it but Schilling was one of those names. So my sister comes to town with her organization - Society for the Examination of the Supernatural, or something like that - and does an expose on some of the miracle claims that the preacher had made. Lo and behold, it also turned out that preacher man had been doing some "laying on of hands" with a couple of women in the congregation. When Theresa got that story out, the whole church shook.

So, she's effective, and she's smart, she's my sister, and I owe her. I just have to be careful not to let her meet any of my more exotic customers. That could get ugly fast.

You are helping someone keep a dangerous secret. They owe you a Debt.

There are only a few people in the world who know how to properly brew garum, the ancient Mediterranean condiment that the Romans put on everything. Great-grandma Moesy Schilling was one. Goddess only knows how she got the recipe. She passed the method down through the family.

So, one day I've got a barrel of garum brewing in my back garden. It involves fermenting fish juice, so it's a hard thing to miss from downwind. I turn around and there's this man standing there, trying to figure out where the smell is coming from. Imani - my cat - takes one look and nopes right out of there. Not even the frizzle chickens want to get close, and they love anything that smells like magic. So I chant a quick wisdom verse, and suddenly realize I've got an incredibly old vampire standing in my back garden looking wistful at a barrel of fish guts.

He introduces himself as January. Turns out he was an ancient Roman and hasn't smelled that ... distinctive fragrance in about 1700 years. We dicker a bit. I promise never to reveal his secret to any of the local churches - like any would listen to me - and he agrees not to try and drink from any of the Schillings. He also buys the entire batch of garum.

There are a few folks in the local magical community who would love some vampire fangs for elixirs. So far, I've been able to keep them from finding out about January.

Someone makes sure you get fed regularly. You owe them 2 Debts.
Humani sanguinis, human blood. As a vampire, I have a taste for it and it's healthy for me to have myself a helping of it every now and then while I'm awake. Thankfully, a surprising number of people in Corvus Bay are into the idea of having vampires feed on them. You'd think I'd have no problem with that kind of quantity, but in truth my problems lie with quality. Just like how humans have a wide variety of foods, vampires have a wide variety of bloods.

Much like with humans and food, vampires prefer certain types of blood over others. They also prefer the aforementioned blood to not make them ill. That's why, like humans, an organization to grade and regulate blood has been set up. Once the blood has been confirmed to be drinkable, the owner of that blood is the location of secret nightclubs where can have themselves a good time while they wait to be selected as a drink by one of the club's vampire patrons.

Funnily enough, this whole process wasn't set up by a vampire. Rather, it was created by a pack of werewolves currently led by Lucas Ryder. Although he's a werewolf, Ryder has all the savvy of the very vampires he caters to. Once he took over his pack, the guy actually managed to get a pretty stable web going. It ain't as stable as a vampire's, but it's stable enough that I owe him two favors for coming to his clubs.

Someone relies on you for their fix. They owe you a Debt.
Anders Giroux, a young werewolf defending his patch of the city just like any other. And much like some of the more pessimistic lycanthropes, he's looking for a way out of the wolf life, or at the very least a way to control it so that he doesn't hurt anyone he cares about whilst the light of the moon brings out the beast, because apparently he's one of the unlucky lupi who can neither fight their change nor control themselves once the moon is out.

Anders came to me hoping for easy solutions, but sadly I had none to give. There were no easy solutions for his type of lycanthropy. The beast within him was simply to willful too bow to the normal methods of control. But that didn't mean he was beyond help. Just because there were no easy solutions, didn't mean there were no hard ones either. Even unruly wolves could be made compliant with enough effort.

So we came to an agreement. I would help him out with his control issues in any way I was able to do so and in return I could rely on him for help at a later date. Although after the corner store incident, I think I'll give his competence a little time to improve before I turn him loose on any of my problems.

Someone bears responsibility for you becoming a vampire. They owe you a Debt.
117 AD, the height of the Roman Empire. The year I was born anew. The year I became a vampire. In the dark of the night, I and thirteen of my friends undertook a ritual that year to attain immortalitatis. Seven of us died that night. Myself and the six other friends of mine who survived all did so as vampires.

To my knowledge, they're all alive and out there somewhere. It's hard for me to keep track of them. Especially when I spend decades at a time sleeping while they're up an about in the world. I've heard from all of them in the time since I woke up, but they're all scattered across the world, too far away for constant contact... Except for one.

Livius Ennius Quintus, or Quincy as he's referred to in the modern day. The one who discovered the ritual in the first place. He arrived in Corvus Bay a few years before I woke up. Quincy was always an envious guy. He was never satisfied with what he had, always coveting what he didn't own. It only got worse when he became a vampire. After that he fixated on something he didn't have and began taking as much of it as he could. Wealth, fame, power, horses, the list was as varied as it was endless.

Now though, he envies Mortality. This particular brand of envy manifested as a belief that as a vampire he was a vile and twisted abomination. As a result, he has embarked on a mad quest for redemption for what he has become. Normally I would have no strong feelings one way or the other about what my old friends get up to. But in this case, since his quest involves him owing me one to make up for leading me into vampirism, I'm supportive of his actions. Power to him, I say.

Someone has reunited you with garum. You owe them a Debt.
Garum, the ketchup of the ancient world. A finer condiment you could never hope to find. A taste almost as satisfying as humani sanguinis. Tragically lost on the tail end of Rome's glory days. Yet another victim of the fucking Christians and their campaign to ruin all that was good about the empire... But I digress.

Ever since the empire crumbled, I have been unable to find a single soul - in this world or any other in world I could reach - capable of to making a batch of garum the way I so fondly remember it. And believe me, I tried. I scoured the globe from pole to pole. I broke through to the worlds of ghost, fae, and demon. I even laid siege to the Pearly Gates! But no matter what I tried, no matter where I went, no matter who I bargained with, never could I find the prize I sought. Eventually, my perseverance fell to bitter despair and the belief that never again would I know the taste of garum... But then I met Aliyah Schilling.

I was wandering the city as I sometimes do, when a familiar scent met my nose. The scent of fermenting garum. The good kind. Not that piscis crustulum all my searches inevitably turned up. I followed the scent. A few blocks and a hopped fence later and I'm standing in someone's back garden gazing down at a barrel filled to the brim with glorious garum. The scent of a properly prepared barrel of garum ready to be tapped, a scent I had thought lost to me for centuries, really took me back. I was so entranced by the sight, I didn't notice the presence of the homeowner until I heard her chanting a quick wisdom verse.

The homeowner, a wizard by the name of Aliyah Schilling invited me in for a little chat over a cup of a wonderful Ease of Mind blend. I introduce myself and explain how I came to be in her garden, and she takes it well enough. Not surprising given her already vast experience in matters of the supernatural variety. By the end of our chat, I walk away with my first barrel of garum in a few centuries shy of two millennia for a reasonable sum and a promise to keep my fangs out of Schilling necks.

Aliyah thinks I owe her a debt because she's keeping me safe from the those of Thousand Churches who'd put a stake through my heart or from spellslingers who'd have my teeth for trinkets. Let them come. My gladius has hewn down their type before, and it will do so again. No, what I owe her for is the ambrosia she has returned to me. Now if only she'd accept my offers of immortality, or at the very least get herself a man. I've lost garum once. I can't stand the thought of losing it again.