This is not a question where I need an answer fast, nor am I looking for criminal solutions.
I started watching What We Do in The Shadows, a comedy which revolves around vampires that have been living in Staten Island for centuries. They’ve gotten “total [Vampire] domain over a couple of streets” over that period of time. I wondered how other Immortal folk can get away with maintaining a house/flat/business for centuries. Connor MacLeod had a place in Lower Manhattan and IIRC a well established antiquities business. I understand The Dark One even has a timeshare in Boca.
Assuming the Immortal Ones don’t feel like packing up and moving every generation (something I did nine times in 16 years, and I’m a simple mortal soul), how do they keep their businesses/investments going over the years if their customers/creditors shuffle off their coils so often?
Still trying to wrap my mind around this concept. :smack::smack::eek::eek::eek:
There was an old, abandoned brewery in Stapleton when I was growing up on Staten Island. If it’s still there, it’d be a swell place for vampires, at least until urban renewal caught up with it.
Not sure how it’s done in comedies about immortal vampires but I believe in the real world, some states (South Dakota, for instance) allow for perpetual trusts.
They have mind control and human familiars. And banks are institutions that last longer than 1 human lifetime (which was why MacLeod was constantly adopting himself)
Although the 3 normal vampires in *WWDITS *don’t seem like the sort to even bother with any bank accounts, never mind investments. Given that at least one of them isn’t even a US citizen, I don’t think they care much about the niceties of things.
Many corporations/businesses do OK for decades or even longer, despite ups and downs. You just need some business sense. IBM is still doing OK by focusing on profitable markets; they weren’t selling many mainframes in 1920 but they do now.
(As for vampires, I thought their legal problems had more to do with attacking people and sucking their blood. As far as I know, it’s not illegal to be really, really old.)
Any business that can’t generate new customers will die out, immortal or no. It generally takes about two years. The solution to that is that you need to generate customers.
It is not difficult to hold property under a trust or LLC and transfer it to another as need be. As vampire problems go, this is one of the easier ones.
Unless the vampires are dealing strictly in things ancient, I don’t see any reason their businesses should lack customers. There are always new generations of clients being born, after all. As for businesses lasting for generations, check out the list of oldest businesses in history. A couple of centuries on Staten Island is nothing. Kongo Gumi was founded in 578 CE, for Buddha’s sake.
Most stories I’ve read involving immortals have them doing exactly that. You have to leave every so often, trusting your holdings to a bank/friend/minion. You come back in a few decades and “inherit” the estate left behind by your grandfather/greatuncle/whatever.
Connor MacLeod’s antique business was well-established, but he was also wealthy and had immediate access to all sorts of antiquities. He wouldn’t have needed any time at all to get a business up and running in a new city. I don’t think we actually know how long he’d owned it, but it couldn’t have been for very long.
I’m not sure how you’d pull it off if you insisted on staying in the same place forever.
The vamps in question are all roommates. Easy enough to “sell” the property every 40 years or so to another of the group, then re-establish a new, younger identity. Lather, rinse, repeat. Heck, for that matter just vamp a couple of lawyers, incorporate, and buy the property that way. As long as the property taxes are paid, nobody will even notice.
The problem, of course, is getting the initial capital.
Until recent decades, there were no “significant” (for lack of a better word) identity documents. As a general rule, your identity was who you said you were. If Joe Vampire decided to fake his own death and start calling himself Joe Vampire Jr., there was no government agency to say otherwise.
I’m not sure how immortals would re-invent themselves in these days, what with Social Security numbers, driver’s licenses, and other computer-tracked forms of ID. But until recent decades, it would have been a trivial matter.
Seems like that is the easy part: same old routine. Dracula would be still be relaxing in his castle right now if he hadn’t tried to rock the boat. But one can understand that you’d want to try something different after a while; can’t really blame him.
I’m assuming that you’d want to keep your identity as an immortal secret. If you stay in the same place for too long, eventually people are going to realize that you and your roommates haven’t aged in decades.
If you don’t really care about that, much easier for sure.
I’ve never understood why various immortal beings seek to join or associate with police departments (Angel, Forever, Forever Knight, iZombie, Lucifer, Moonlight, New Amsterdam, The Vampire Detective, The Vampire Files, etc). If you’re trying to hide a major secret, why call attention to yourself by hanging out with an organization full of investigators?