Someone on Tumblr asked me for a Top Ten list of vampire gifts that Aro would like to have. Writing it was way too fun not to post for posterity, and since it's half real headcanon and half sillycanon I'll put it here in the Drabbles. Enjoy :)


1. Supernatural storyteller: I mentioned the need for vampire skalds the other day, but Aro wants a *magic* storyteller, one that's a bit Renesmee-ish. This person can tweak the senses to experience the story being told. You taste the salt air when you hear about a sea voyage, see the beautiful pollution-inspired sunsets when you haven't looked out of a window for 800 years, smell the burning flesh of the protagonists in the Lay of the Last Libishomen (um, that's Caius' favorite, I guess?), and best of all: this storytelling vampire can make you taste and enjoy the food she remembers sampling back in her human traveling days. You might think Aro doesn't need this gift because of his own, but his "experiences" via others' minds are more observant and flat than what he hopes to achieve here. Of course the storyteller can't be too powerful; pure hypnosis presents an assassination risk.

2. Eyes and Ears: I have to agree with Kyilliki on this one. Aro wants the ability to peek in on anyone, anytime, anywhere. Realistically, if he ever got a hold of Alice this is what he would use her for 99% of the time. He knows enough about the subjective caveats of her gift to be skeptical of its usefulness in true large-scale future-predicting, and sadly he's fresh out of wars to fight at the moment anyway. But all he would have to do is have Caius and Demetri take her on a world tour and meet everyone he knows, and then she'd theoretically be able to "latch" onto any of them, in that "immediate future" way she has of spying on people she's familiar with.

3. Pain Management Specialist: If Aro ever finds this person, they'll be gift wrapped and given to Caius as a birthday present. Aro isn't really all that interested in torture himself (besides the evil-scientist kind), but he does feel rather sad for Caius that the Volturi actually only have Jane's gift to use for this. (Alec's is creepier, but it doesn't make people scream enough) Anyway, this person can actually access his target's pain history, and not just physical pain either. The most horrible memories are brought up to relive, worst fears feel imminent, etc. I'm totally borrowing this from chapter 16 of Haemophilus Leona's fic Saudade, in which Jane's gift operates this way. But in giving this gift to another vampire, Aro gets to double Caius' interrogation arsenal, plus Jane gets taken down a notch, which is long overdue.

4. X-ray vision: Let's be honest: dissecting vampires is hard, and dissecting werewolves smells really terrible. Aro needs a living, breathing MRI machine for his research. The coolest thing about this person is that they don't just give him a fuzzy gray image or colored dots- it's like that old Adam software where you can peel away the layers "in vivo".

5. Miracle Healer: Automatic tissue regeneration is cool, but Aro wants a vampire who can touch a vampire's severed arm and regrow the missing hand itself. He misses the Didyme Days when pilgrims flocked to Volterra (or wherever they lived back then) just to bask in her aura; having a humanitarian (vampiritarian?) talent or two like this on hand would make Volterra a positive destination again, not just a negative one. Caius argues that he doesn't want more useless visitors, but he can't deny it would be handy to be able to replace his Guards' limbs when he gets a little too carried away with his Fireside Chats.

6. I have no idea what to call this, but Aro wants a vampire who can examine any work of art and then go home and duplicate it perfectly. But even that's not good enough; he wants to find a person who can extract a piece of art from someone's memory and duplicate it from that. Aro can steal all he wants, but he can't go back and un-burn the stuff he didn't have time to save from the Library of Alexandria. ("Perhaps you shouldn't have started that stupid fire in the first place," Athenodora says every time this comes up. "Nobody's perfect," Aro always replies.)

7. Gift-Finder: Nope, I don't mean another Eleazar. I mean someone who can discreetly look your wife in the eye and know what she wants for an anniversary gift. This vampire is Super Needed after Aro's faux pas last year of giving his beloved Sulpicia a lifetime suscription to Girls and Corpses.

8. Gift-Dampener: You guys know I don't like super-powered OCs. The only powerful OC I want is one whose proximity temporarily shuts off all gifts within a certain radius. Emphasis on temporarily, because otherwise that would be a superpower, now wouldn't it? Anyway, this one is only on Aro's list because it turns out this is exactly what Sulpicia wants for her anniversary gift: a month-long second honeymoon during which Aro has no clue what she's thinking.

9. Changeling: Um, better employ that #7 gift again, Aro. Turns out what Marcus wanted for Christmas was not a vampire who can alter their cellular structure to look and smell like Didyme.

10. Supernatural Materials Engineer: Because of the risk of this genius vampire developing those cool vampire-tissue weapons that are always popping up in fanfics, they'll only be alive long enough to invent the best possible noise-reduction technology ever. Volterra's inner walls might be "sound-proof" to human ears, but they're not good enough yet.