Prisoner in My Own Home

I remember vaguely the Italian standing over me. I think she was over me, up and down are fuzzy. She was naked, completely, no neckless, no boots, no earrings. Not even makeup, lipstick or nail polish. A surprised expression, hard to read. The room around us completely empty, chrome-plate steel, graphite black carbon plaques on the floor and covering the only door, framing the closed ventilation mouths.

I came back to me feeling the sarcophagus around me. Something in the dark caves of my spirit knew that was the same room where I had awaken before, last time I had been unconscious and in need of recovery.

This was not the metal table where I had found myself last time.

I was inclined, 75 degrees of inclination in relation to vertical position, perhaps, laying on my back. This was a box.

The walls had been covered in protective spells, draw by warlock vampires in their own blood. I could feel the energy, containing me. And the power running behind the spells, in plaques of energy build by alien races in distant galaxies.

The box containing me in the centre of this dark, empty, room was thick as the walls of a vault.

“Am I a prisoner?” I wondered.

Moments later the sound started of mechanic parts moving in the sarcophagus. I could some how feel as if in the tip of my fingers, on the external surface of the box. 9 circles, disposed in 3 triangles, one moving at the time. Coming into position.

Minutes of show movement. Then the sound of lock, little after that the other circle. A longer wait, after the third. Then the same process, and again.

Instead of try to force my way out, I waited, paying attention to my body. Making an effort to put my memories in order.

I am a vampire now. This is real, that is my life now. This is, somewhere, in my home.

When the loud relive of air sounded, and the box started to move open, I was almost sad. Felt like too soon.

I moved my fingers, touched my hand with them. Stepped out without effort, except the effort to connect my sense of movement and sights with the hearing and the smells. Harder than that, was make the combination feel real. While I was able to rationally remember that was reality, as matter of fact. To feel the real in this was impossible at first.

The door of the room was open.

“Bob”

“Welcome back! We had to pack you, there was no way to be sure what would wake up. Besides, your body was bleeding a pretty quantity of dense energy, toxic stuff. Something you ate. That Abyssal Root is dangerous, more than anything else in that Canadian meal you had before you lose your senses.

Your woman wanted to be here to, but she had to go settle some disputes between our guests. The plans to turn this operation you two have into a viable vampiric family have been advancing while you were taking your nap.”

“How long?”

“Ten months, more a few days. All your human relatives are fine, and the human friends you caught under your protection too.

We retreated from Canada after your victory. The Englishman probably regrets the moment he decided to keep spying on you instead of honour the deal he had made. He lost considerable resources in the New Continent. Not just the elite team you met, when they disappeared the chain reaction rearranged power structure in that Nocturnal Court. The Englishman and his family will wait eagerly for a chance to avenge that expensive humiliation.

How are you feeling?”

“Dizzy.”

“That’s understandable. You look, yourself. By my experience with that kind of power, this means you have not assimilated those Elders you consumed. You managed to isolate them from your core identity, in lack of better words. Your woman will explain it better, since she has a power that is somewhat similar to that, and has more experience than I have in that area too.

We never imagined you would face that challenge. We knew there was some vampire with Oblivion Cloak involved but I expected it to be a nocturnal child. Not an entire pack of old timers!

Anyway, the brunet says that you have a better version of Oblivion Cloak, something immune to mystic detection powers available to some vampires.

For most vampiric powers, having the power is the best defence against it. Not the case for Oblivion Seed. With that power we cannot detect others users of the same power, but there are a few seeds that provide supernatural senses and can oppose our cloak. If they are mastered in a higher level than the level of the vampire wearing the Oblivion Cloak.

You case is special. You will supposedly be able to surpass any vampiric mean of detection. All you needed was to activate the power. Any child of the night with the seed in early stages of development would be sufficient.

Now you may need centuries to digest consume those elders and gain the capacity to access their memories and powers.

In a way, that takes us back to the start of the line. In a sense”.

“Perhaps. I have no idea, yet”

“Well, if you don’t mind, let’s go up. The only child of the night in this family is desperate to see you. Your cousin has been trying to brake in here since we came back from Canada. She is convinced that we gave a Coup d’Etat and imprisoned you for sinister reasons.

Actually, in the strict technical sense, you both are children of the night. Your case is just so different from what is normally expected that is easy to forget how little time you had to adapt to existence as a vampire.”

I had the impression that I was a prisoner myself. Hard to blame Janaina for think that. She was the only member of my family who decided to trust me enough to risk this leap of Faith.

And I wasn’t even able to turn her myself. I still didn’t got that capacity awaken. V was the one how turned Janaina.

I could not sleep during that day. “Too much in my mind” would be a comic understatement in the circumstances. There was a different density in me now, as if my body was much heavier, but my actual weight had not changed.

While the sun was hot outside I stayed sitting in a big armchair in the library. Sipping human blood from glass, warmed to body temperature in a microwave.

Vampires do not necessarily sleep during all hours of sunlight in a day. We feel lethargic, most of us. Move fast, think, use any power is much difficult. Impossible for most vampires.

We can still fight if our existence is under threat.

To fall sleep, or just stay relaxed and do nothing most days, is easy. I always get some reading during those hours, but literature or poetry, and nothing heavy.

Did I really destroyed all those impossibly ancient vampires? Took their powers, their very beings, for myself. Without much of a fight worth mentioning? Sounds wrong, absurd, our of proportion. More likely, I just don’t remember the fight. Maybe it is still going on, undecided. Even then, this power I have, is amazing.

I remember the vampire hunters. Manifest one of them, “push him out” from myself. The mass of shadows turn into a clay doll of blood that develops shape and detains, and change colour in from of my eyes.

He look at me confuse, with anger and resentment for being forced to contemplate his doom once more. All the hate he felt for vampires, now, he was a puppet of vampiric blood and magic. Still, I could feel my will inside his thoughts. Despite his feelings, anything I wanted from him, he would do. Betray his people, kill his beloved daughter and his grandchild who was to be born months after that night when his ambush turned against him and his pack of hunters.

There is no need for words between us. Would be like playing chess with myself.

I allow his presence to fade, and he disappears.

Never got the time to hunt bears in Canada.

Never even occurred to me that I could call V. The cyborg cell phone in my head would have connected me with her in the blink of the eye.

Time feels, unimportant to me. Or not unimportant per se, but just right, as if everything that was supposed to happen in each minute that day was happening exactly as it should. Existence was full of weight even if I could not figure out any meaning in it.

Maye that is how really ancient vampires feel most the time.

V came back, eventually. Night was dark outside when she entered the library.

“Welcome back, lover”

“Is good to be back. Albeit, I cannot be sure how much of me is back at all. Or ever will”

“I know the feeling. This was an accident, but accidents like that are part of the life you have chosen when you decided to enter vampiric existence as a king and head of your own house.

You don’t have to worry about that, or about anything, least for tonight. However, we need to talk about our situation soon”

“Are you about to break up with me?”

“Your table manners in Canada do have managed to scare me out, lover! I shall not lie to you about that. On the other hand, I have my moments too, and I am aware that some minor traces of my personality can make people uncomfortable some now and then. So, to answer the question, no. I am not giving up our marriage.

I am not your girlfriend, mind you. Much less some chick you caught in a bar never intended to present to your family. I am well acquainted to your family, lover. Keep them alive has been my full-time job, lately;

You are stuck with me for the foreseeable future.”

“I would wish nothing else”

“Since that’s how you feel, do you mind if I share something about our current affairs here in the family domains?”

“I am a little fuzzy still, but as along as you don’t feel insulted latter if parts of this conversation slide from my memory. I would love to hear whatever you have to say right now. Beats the tense silence inside my head.”

“Do you remember the ruins in Germany, where those vampire hater humans had an ambush prepared to you?”

“Of course. I doubt I will ever forget that place.”

“Places like that are natural occurrences, more common than you can imagine. No one tries to hide them from humans, human attention just tends to avoid those places. They see the ugly ruins where a battle between supernatural monsters has happened three centuries ago, but their cognition do not register what they are seeing. As a survival mechanism they avoid to look at it, think about it, remember it, or walk in that direction.

The effect gradually fades gradually over time. Insane people, the homeless ones, those too deep in misery to bother are the first ones to reclaim those places and enjoy the protection they provide against human authorities. However, vampire families have more than enough wars to keep a fresh supply of new places like that, every year.

Vampiric Realms are a sort of sovereign nations in their own right, with dimensions of Feudal Domains more or less. They are the product of deliberation, and eventually the vampire family that claims one needs to present itself to the local Nocturnal Court. We already have the register in the most important authority relevant in this universe. Most vampire families need thousands of years before a chance to get that. You are registered as a vampire king and head of your own family since the moment the interdimensional system turned you into a vampire.

That still do not replace the admission in the local Nocturnal Court. We need to be accepted as noble vampires by the vampire families of Planet Earth. The alternative would be constant fight against every force native to this planet, broadly speaking. We would be a criminal organization in the eyes of Earthling vampire families.

Stablish the territory, surround it by protective shields and place it beyond the reach of wild human society are things we can do without present ourselves to any Nocturnal Court.

In doing that we are risking to attract more attention than we would otherwise. However, your adventures in Canada opened us some doors. Many Extraterrestrials use that part of the world as a sort of crossing road, and trading post.

I took advantage of that, and contacting the people you met up there I made some offers. Now we have a few groups of candidates living as temporary guests in our lands.

Some want to trade services for protection, and live under our rule but keeping some negotiated autonomy. Some are looking for a more permanent status here.

A vampire family needs vampires. Elder vampires constitute large measure of the power and arsenal of any such family. Not just on Earth, generally speaking, that happens almost anywhere. Families without elders need to accept humiliating positions as vassals, end up devoured by larger and more powerful families one way or another. Elders that end up surviving the destruction of their family, on the other hand. Well, they rarely stay in the same Pocket of Life they originated from. Our Bob is an exception.

Safest way to not end up as the target of every contemporary of yours in the planet, when you are a solitary elder couple million years old, is to buy passage to some other galaxy. Anywhere else. Any place where you can start again as a nobody.

I managed to get us some of those nobodies, from distant galaxies. They are waiting you. I didn’t assume any permanent obligations or closed any deals. You are the law in our family lands. Ultimately, you can send anyone away. Is normal protocol to provide shelter and safe passage to guests if they choose to leave.

We need to look some maps when you feel like doing some intellectual work. Decide what use we will give to the lands we have presently, what sort of relations we are interested in have with out nearest neighbours. Then, with a general notion of those things in mind, we can start interviewing the leaders of every group under our protection. Also, the vampires who would like to join our family.

A vampire family can have many branches, and adoptions are common place. You are the head of the entire family, but we can have as many kings and queens under your rule as you feel comfortable with. The risk of challenges for leadership exists, and we must take that under consideration too.

Of course, we will have less reason to worry about challenges to your leadership after you absorb those fellows and make their powers yours.”

She insisted I needed to test myself as soon as possible, but agreed that wait another night was better. We walked the borders of the property, our family domains now. Was a lot of land, particularly for the standards of European farms. There in Brasil is usual to find much larger properties than that, in Nort East and North Regions specially we deal with a different scale, in part because surreally restrictive Environmental Legislation make impossible for smaller properties to achieve economic viability. Mostly due to Historical reasons that go back to XIX century.

Fucking XIX century that feels like 3 minutes ago for those Eldar Vampires that surround me now! I am going crazy here, with all that information and points of view that don’t belong in the same person, let’s say nothing about inside me.

On the bright side, night is gorgeous. Full of stars. We don’t illuminate the night in Vampiric Domains much, certainly not as much as wild humans illuminate their settlements.

Beyond that, the invisible force-field surrounding those places keep most sorts of pollution out, for the sake of clean the skies even more.

I had to go back to the sarcophagus bellow ground to sleep, for protection of my family. That’s something all vampires with certain blood seeds need to get used to. Sleep locked in some magically sealed coffing. This Abyss Root Seed in me is something seriously dangerous, apparently. We cannot be sure if I will find a way to contain it inside me without those safeguards once I absorb the elder vampire who has it.

This time my dear cousin Janaina, the big fan of hentai comic books, was in the room. She was curious about this place, she stone corridors and steel doors, the secret elevator. All the security measures to keep the most dangerous supernatural monsters imaginable locked and isolated.

Was a strange feeling, to walk into a place like that with my own feet, deliberately. On purpose, to let myself being locked. The feelings written on her face helped me read my own like in a mirror of emotions.

I told her once, by the end of all that, that she was likely to became my most important anchor to reality. Since she is someone I knew from before all that, and she is the only one who decided to embrace the vampiric condition. She was not turned directly by the system under control of the Creator Race, instead she is close to normal as far as vampiric experiences on Earth go.

Her queen is V, this alien vampire lowlife with a mind much closer to the human way of thinking than what most vampires are. Apparently, as far as superficial impressions go. Still, her nature, her powers, are what you could expect from the average vampire lassie recently turned from Wild Human stock.

I don’t think I could have reached that far without knowing she is there. Don’t think the rest of the family could either.

We start working tests as soon as I step out the sarcophagus, next night.