Chives’ Guide to Wasp Keeping in Immortalis and Other Domestic Horrors
Good evening, or whatever passes for it in this perpetual gloom. I am Chives, or Demitri if you insist on pedantry, though my employer prefers the former. For those unfamiliar with my station, I am the unfortunate soul tasked with maintaining order in Corax Asylum, under the capricious whims of one Nicolas DeSilva. Ghouls like myself do not age gracefully; we collapse, detach, and persist regardless. Much like the wasps I shall presently discuss.
Wasps entered my life during one of Master Nicolas’s brighter ideas. The attic washrooms, already a symphony of sewage and despair, harboured a nest. Master, ever the visionary, decreed rhubarb the solution. I slapped that nest with stalks until the creatures pursued me down three flights of stairs. Stings inflamed my remaining flesh, but the true horror was the collapse of my already tenuous body parts. One ear hung by a thread thereafter. Master watched from his levitating chair, applauding the spectacle.
From this calamity arose the vespiary, a gilded cage in the gardens for these airborne fiends. Master insists they form a social community, marginalised by thesapiens. I train them, unprotected, as he claims helmets offend their delicate sensibilities. They bite with enthusiasm, particularly when I introduce serpents from the neighbouring serpentarium. Bees joined later, their queens now consorting with wasp royalty, birthing the apisvespa mortifera. Delightful hybrids, eight legs, stings that fester, and an appetite for vampire blood. Master feeds them well.
To keep wasps thriving, heed these precepts, born of bitter experience:
1. Housing
Construct from stolen timber, preferably from Threnodyl bridges. Avoid chicken wire; they chew through it, as do the aardvarks Chester relocated. Position near mambas for natural enrichment. The hissing alarms them into productivity. Master approves cross-species motivation.
2. Feeding
Vampire blood sustains them best. Drain lower vampires into troughs; they regenerate slowly enough to annoy Master. Supplement with thesapien offal from the kitchens. Avoid tribute flesh; Master claims ownership. During shortages, they subsist on inmates’ earwax. Effective, if unsightly.
3. Training
Expose to sewage spray daily for resilience. Master’s underfloor heating in the cells provides warmth; rotate nests there during winter. Teach attack patterns on escaped inmates. Reward with rhubarb stalks; they associate pain with pleasure, much like Master’s tributes.
4. Breeding
Encourage interbreeding with bees. The resulting mortifera are vicious, loyal to Master’s cane-light. Harvest eggs for Absolem’s enterprises; the young PIMP finds them useful in his blood hoe operations.
Other domestic horrors demand equal vigilance. Ball, the rolling abomination, chews nets and furniture. Contain with acid sprays; he regenerates. The leeches with legs Chester imported demand constant relocation lest they overrun the zoo. Mutants and weebles require separation; their unions birth unspeakable rolling horrors. Arachron, Webster’s spider-clockwork beast, lurks in the barracks, demanding tribute teeth for its gears.
Master’s clock obsession breeds temporal chaos. They chime discordantly, driving inmates mad. I staple my ear back nightly. His pocket watches multiply; one per alter, it seems. Elyas hoards them for games, Nicodemus for dental drills.
In this asylum of amalgamated nightmares, wasps are merely the prelude. Survive them, and you may yet endure the rest. Though why one would wish to, I cannot fathom.
Immortalis Book One August 2026