#I wrote this into my fanfic and I want this headcanon spoken to the masses

[pineapple-coffee]

The real Jedediah Smith got attacked by a bear and had a scar on his face. So does Jed in NATM have a scar too

[random-thought-depository]

Vampire child development timeline that I wrote up as plot-relevant worldbuilding notes for my Blindsight fanfic. Focusing on ancient vampires cause it's an elsewhere fic set around 8-7,000 BCE.

Note: it pronouns are faithful to what I'll probably use for vampire characters in my fic; I think the old ones that had their own culture probably didn't have as strong a sense of gender as we do (I definitely headcanon Sarasti and Valerie being only cis-by-default) and as less social beings they didn't have as strong status emotions as humans so wouldn't feel the need to linguistically distance themselves from other animals by having a special pronoun for people, so it/its is probably the most faithful translation of how they thought of themselves.

Birth to 1 year old: nursing, feeds entirely on mother's milk, develops ability to walk and climb on and cling to things (usually mother).

1-2 years old: weaning: milk teeth have erupted, starts to think the solid foods mom eats smell tasty and starts to think mom's behaviors of chasing or trapping and killing and eating small animals looks like fun. With some parental guidance this turns into foraging behaviors and regular consumption of solid food, which gradually displaces mother's milk from the diet as mother's milk gradually dries up. By two years old or so transition from mother's milk to solid food is complete and the young vampire can feed itself on a day-to-day basis, though it's still dependent on its family for complex and evolutionarily novel tasks (like, say, weaving a blanket) and it will instinctively stay close to or cling to its mother or other parental figures. At the end of this stage the vampire is still mostly pre-verbal but has some limited comprehension of spoken language and can make some of its wants and feelings known through a combination of simple sign language and simple grunts and cries.

2-5 years old: learning to talk: first spoken words usually come at around 2-3 years old, acquisition of the vampire's native familect is usually more-or-less complete by 4-5 years old. Note for comparison: human babies usually say their first words at 12-18 months old: vampire children are slow talkers and a lot more of their brain development precedes linguistic fluency! Or, as vampires would think of it, human children develop slower in most things but are very precocious talkers.

4-11 years old: childhood: the young vampire is a child in the sense familiar to humans, albeit a precociously clever, self-sufficient, and perceptive child. Vampire children still seem relatively human-like at this stage; more talkative, more sociable, and more energetic than the adults, though less energetic than human children at equivalent stages of development.

11-13 years old: the young vampire is still pre-pubescent, but is now growing bigger, stronger, and smarter than a typical human adult (vampires do more of their growth and development before puberty). This is the stage of life in which a young vampire is likely to begin to participate in big game hunting with older relatives.

13-14 years old: puberty: reproductive organs become functional, menstrual cycle begins in females, secondary sex characteristics develop, interest in sex develops. Males experience a short growth spurt and increase in muscle mass as their bodies begin to produce adult levels of androgens; most vampire sexual dimorphism (lower than humans) develops at this stage of life.

14 years old: onset of adult metabolic pattern: as the vampire is now done with growth and intensive learning, metabolism lowers dramatically to reduce protocadherin input needs. The vampire begins concentrating much of their blood in the body core around the organs, resulting in classic vampire cool skin temperature and "bloodlessness." The vampire becomes much more lethargic, now spending most of its time in a sort of very shallow open-eye sleep in hidden dens, alternating short bouts of high activity (mostly associated with hunting, fighting, or mating) with long periods of low activity. Playfulness (broadly defined) diminishes as the vampire becomes much more conservative with its energy.

A vampire usually begins to participate in predatory attacks on humans with other members of its family at 14, around the onset of adulthood.

After reaching adulthood at 14, a vampire ages more slowly than a human due to its lower metabolism (kind of like those turtles that can live hundreds of years). Assuming nothing kills them before old age does, they live something like 130+ years. Menopause in female vampires occurs at something like 80. That's active life, during hibernation their metabolism gets so low they almost don't age, so vampires that hibernate a lot can easily live centuries if you count the hibernation periods as part of their lifespan; I wouldn't be shocked if a few of the old ones cracked the big triple zero mark.

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At first I thought ancient vampires probably had long nursing periods, like human hunter-gatherers, cause restricting their own reproduction was important to them so they'd value the prolonged lactational amenorrhea, but while nursing the mother couldn't hunt, and I headcanon that they 1) had a better sense of smell than humans so they could track the female ovulation/menstruation cycle by scent and do birth control by just avoiding sex during the five day or so fertile period per cycle, 2) were a less sexual species than humans so birth control by abstinence would have been easier for them. So I think they'd prefer other birth control methods.

14 is probably around when Neanderthals reached maturity IIRC; that was one reason I picked the number; I like to interpret vampires as a sibling species of humans rather than an offshoot, with some "primitive" traits retained from the last common ancestor, and I think it makes sense that vampires, as a more intelligent but less social species than humans, would not have developed the very long childhoods of Homo sapiens sapiens.