Swallowing Bitter Reality

We started by visiting the sewers of the nearest wild human city. V used her mid powers to call hordes of rats and throw them at me, as she had done before. As an attack could be. The idea was that I would consume the animals, body and mind, adding them to my arsenal of weapons.

Instead my world disappeared bellow this sea of angry enemies cutting and biting me.

I fought, bitting back, kicking and punching, and then smashing them against the walls, in panic, I caused the tunnel to fall on us. Was a small disaster. My capacity to absorb animals, people and vampires had reached its limit. Apparently, I would no longer be able to use it, least not until I manage to properly digest those I had eaten in Montreal.

We proceeded to test my reflexes. I was slow. Almost as slow as I had been as a human.

The Italian, my wife, danced around me. Cutting flesh from my bones as too easy for her, I could barely see her body dancing around me. So Janaina replaced her, the child of the night had a sword in hand, she was learning to use the weapon. I was still too slow to fight her.

Janaina could barely cut through my skin, and her sword was Extraterrestrial steal, with a nasty cutting edge. When turned on a line of vibrating energy awakens in that edge, and then my cousin was able to cut me as you would expect a normal sword in the hands of a normal human to cut the random human guy in the streets. V’s veridic was that I was not less solid now than I had been before, but I was far slower.

My wounds still healed as they are supposed to. As the average vampire one million years old would, it is. Not as regular vampires of my age. But my reflexes would be the shame of any newly embraced vampire.

We tested my strength next. I was 20% stronger than before the incident in the panic room in Montreal. Some improvement, for a change. In a night of many defeats and humiliations.

I was still able to push away my armies of puppets. Those I had before leave Europe to visit Canada. Control those soldiers is difficult, they obey emotions mostly, ratter than verbal commands. I can see through their eyes, and I am vaguely aware of their actions and positions. That was the tool left in my tool box.

In case of an attack against our lands, I would need to stay behind and act like some sort of general, directing my unconventional troops of drones made of vampiric blood.

“You need to think carefully many times now, before step outside our domains. You still must visit wild human settlements to hunt, since that is the risk all vampires must take. Other than that, we will plan your moves carefully.

I know it is not the existence you expected to have as a vampire. On the other hand, that is not exceptional. The heads of vampiric families rarely leave their home to anything else, only for hunting. They do not fight minor battles, or visit the frontlines of any war. Only in the most desperate situations a head of family takes the risk to speak with enemies in person, or move through territory not completely under control of his family.

In your case, that is likely a temporary situation. We have reason for hope.

I suggest we take advantage of this to refine your control over the powers that remain at your disposal.

You are consuming over 300 times more blood than before, a lot more than any other vampire, but that is not a concern for the time being. We can afford the cost, and we know where all that extra blood is going. You have an intense fight going on inside you. Five battle grounds in constant battle, to be precise.

This fight may weaken your body even more than it has so far. Pay attention to that. Let’s not take any unnecessary risks.

Meanwhile, you are the head of our vampiric family. We have work to do before we can present ourselves officially to the local Nocturnal Court, and the representatives of other courts in it.

Your role in that process is mostly boring, if does not involve fight, nevertheless it is necessary. Cannot be delegated to anyone.”

“I may come up as a bit shallow and whimsical at times, lover. A child, I am not. We can take a look in the serious, boring, aspects of this administrative and logistic problems. Being a vampire does not spare us from doing taxes and things like that, I suppose. No one promised me it would, if memory serves me”

“No need to go that far, yet! We do not have any income worth talking about, for the moment we are only expending accumulated patrimony. That is, according to the plan. What we need to do first, to find a balance and stop bleeding resources night after night, is put our resources to use.

As I explained to you before. We have guests, bringing offers and seeking favours. We need to say no to some of them, and accept others. The choices we make now will shape our future as a vampiric family. To be part of Nocturnal Society all families need choose what powers they will invest in, what they will offer to other families, what they will accept in return. For now you have my contacts and my experience, Bob is half in, half out. And the British is ready to destroy us at first opportunity, what gives us our first enemy. Another important part of being a vampire family is that, to keep a list of enemies by order of importance and power.

My wife accompanied me to the sarcophagus, where she locked me for the day.

In the following night we started the interviews.

Starting by the easiest decisions.

There was the androids, three non-organic fellows. AIs in dedicated bodies, asexual fundamentally, neither boy nor girl. Originally in their own society they were part of a journalist team, got lost in the middle of a migration through space, never managed to find their way back.

Their leader adopts the name “Gregor”, it was a military of sorts, special forces, assassination behind enemy lines fashion. Turned into communicator after their version for retirement. “Simone” was a science-analyst, “Rielle” used to deal with politics and cultural commentary. Since they lost contact with their civilization they have been forced to adapt to any sort of job they had available. Gregor took the position of leadership naturally under those circumstances.

They don’t eat, don’t drink, only need energy and we can provide that. They offer maintenance for our most advanced systems, just don’t know anything about extra-dimensional, also know as supernatural, tech. Cannot be turned into vampires. Gregor will trains me and anyone who needs combat training, they will not take part in any risky operations. All they really want from us for the moment is safe shelter. That makes them ideal choice from my point of view.

There is always the risk they could be spies looking to sell our secrets to our enemies. However, that is a risk we have to face. Because it applies to anyone.

If they ever choose to make more individuals of their specie they will need immense quantity of energy, and an expensive building material for their equivalent to a “uterus”. However, that is a consideration for an uncertain and undefined future.

Then there was the minotaurs. They weight about as much as a large bull, look like you would expect the minotaur to look. We had 2 thousand of them, more a few. All members of the specie are male, and they live around 800 years. I know, that’s odd. Turns out that, in their home world they have a number of intelligent humanoid species. Minotaurs conquer other species, use the females as sexual slaves and eat the males. They don’t really need to, they are as omnivore as humans, can and do eat the flesh of non-talking animals. They habit to eat people is a cultural thing.

They are immensely strong, compared to humans. Nothing worth writing home about compared in our world, you can compare the average vampire to a 500 years old vampire man.

But they have military discipline, advanced technology, combat experience. Some of them would be available to be turned into vampires if I wanted to make them part of my family in that condition. And the Artifex Seed is unusually common in minotaur blood. This could make them both the economic base of our family, and the bulk of our army.

As extra benefit, slave-training, taming and capture, are at the core of their culture. They are masters in that stuff and the best human-farm workers a vampire can hope for.

If you decide you can tolerate the eating of human flesh, regularly, and all the adjacent. Besides, in the current situations this was our single larger expense. Unless we started a war immediately would take time to make their presence profitable for us.

That was my second easy decision. The minotaur leader was not angry, just a bit disappointed. In any case, they had lived at our expenses for almost a year, in comfort and without giving anything back. To be fair, if we had been attacked, they would have fought to protect our land. As a way to protect themselves. They got two more weeks to pack and decide their next move, and we exchanged protocolar gifts of hospitality and friendship.

Didn’t mean we would never go to war in opposite sides, what it mean is that there was no vengeance pendent between us. We were in good terms.

Those two decisions were obvious. There was nothing to think about, from my perspective. The next item in the list was different.