Bloodline abilities

Lucas was subjected to a series of strange experiments within the realm to figure out exactly how normal bloodline abilities in vampires worked. This meant that Lucas had to be subjected to conditions that caused his original ability of water breathing to activate. Nick accomplished this thanks to the water summoning charm aquamenti. He summoned a large orb of water and directly tossed Lucas into it. Lucas's bloodline ability worked a bit differently than Nick had assumed as rather than filtering the oxygen out of the water via magical means it instead caused a pair of gills to sprout from his neck.-

'So this ability is closer to autonomous selective transfiguration rather than a spell , interesting.' Nick thought as he looked over the results that the realm gave him. He then proceeded to change the fresh water into salt water and marveled as the gills shifted slightly in adjustment. Nick spent the next hour alone switching the parameters of the water to see how the ability would react. High acidity , low acidity , brackish , volcanic , polar and a few more different possible variations. The ability adapted to each and every type of water flawlessly , Lucas was less fortunate.-

He had burns , frostbite and bloodshot eyes from the hostile conditions of the water before Nick finally banished the summoned fluid. He flopped onto the hard ground of the realm limply but Nick ignored him since he was merely being dramatic. His health was not in any danger at all and was even starting to rapidly improve as his vampiric regeneration came into effect. Still thanks to these tests Nick now had a fairly solid understanding of how vampire bloodline abilities worked. There was unfortunately a single problem that he discovered that would prove to be a pain to go around.-

See bloodline abilities in vampires were actually limited by the vampire themselves as it wasn't that they simply didn't have more than five abilities at once but rather that they CAN'T have more than five. It was a standard matter of pitcher size which was to say you can only add so much water to a pitcher before it overflowed. In this case vampires bodies were the pitcher and five abilities was the overflow point. This was because of an inbuilt survival mechanism that made it so they couldn't exceed this cut off point and were thus stuck at five abilities.-

Nicks solution to this was simply to expand the pitcher so that it could contain more abilities. He did this by actually cutting off the royals ability to use normal magic in the future entirely. See the bloodline magic was stored in the blood in the vampires body and with the amount of blood in a normal body the room for them was of course limited. Nick instead chose to create an enchantment that canibalized the vampires magical circuits into extra blood veins thus increasing the room for abilities.-

He needed to sneak into Hogwarts in order to make the ring to give to the royal clan since his workshop had all the high end tools for this but he vanished before anyone even knew he was there so it wasn't a problem. The final product was a beautiful silver ring with a simple woven band that had a dragon head design on the top with a artificial ruby in it's jaws. The Tepes clan had a thing about dragons thanks to Vladimir Tepes's title of "son of the dragon". Nick was halfway tempted to have made it a spike with the ruby at the top as a nod to "the Impaler" but they HATED that title.-

Nick couldn't really blame them since the first title was given out of respect and awe while the second was basically done out of fear and spite for the cruel acts that earned the man that title. Nick was hopeful that he could get an audience with the king of vampires himself to make this deal since the mans word was law amongst vampire kind. Unfortunately that was easier said than done considering that he had vanished from the public eye after the vampire hunt a century prior that had him targeted by a lot of powerful wizards.-

Nick knew he was still alive though as news of him shows up periodically in the vampire community when he solves high level political arguments amongst the royals. The last time he made an appearance was five years ago in a case of a new mithril mine being discovered by two royals and them fighting over it but openly and covertly. His solution was simply to split custody of the profits between both parties based on the seasons. A simple solution but not one that two opposed factions would normally agree to.