Friday, October 17, 2014

Sparkling Vampires Revisited Part 1 of 2

 Hello, readers. For those of you who didn't read the bit at the end of the last chapter I posted, I'll summarize for you:  November=National Novel Writing Month=I won't have time to do this blog, but there's three weeks before November=let's make fun of Twilight.  Because who doesn't like making fun of Twilight? ...besides people who actually like it, of course.  In my last post, I had though I would break this short story up into three pieces.  Well, it turns out that it's a little too short for that.  So, I'll give you two more blog posts, and I'll take Halloween off.  It's a holiday, after all.  So, in story form, here is everything that is wrong with the rules of vampirism in Twilight.  It is a little bloody, and I do apologize for the abrupt change in tone of this blog, but you can't have vampires without having blood.



It had been inevitable, really. They had been hiding on the underside of humanity's subconscious for years, taking shelter in the modern notions of disbelief and antiquated superstitions, letting humanity explain away the odd body as the work of one of their own, or a complicated accident. However, one of them slipped up.
When a woman in the middle of a crowed street loses copious amounts of blood through a rather large gash in her neck to a very pale man who glitters in the sun's revealing rays, people were bound to raise eyebrows. However, when the mysterious, very cold, pale, yet sexy man began drinking her blood and wrestled off his would-be restrainers with an inhuman strength that seemed alien to such a wiry body, the implications were unmistakable.

He was a vampire.

Of course, police arrived on the scene quickly, but there was little they could do to restrain the vampire. Tazers did nothing and the vampire was too quick for them to shoot it. The story went viral on the internet. The articles all had quotes from the witnesses and the woman's family, but none from the perpetrator of this crime. Finally, someone tracked him down and got him in front of a camera.

The vampire was interviewed on more talk shows than most people watch. All of the hosts asked the same question: “Why did you do it?” He never gave the same answer. To the first host, he replied, with what sounded like honesty, that he had been tired of his people having to live in shame of what they were. Humanity was ready, he said, to take in another side of themselves. “Think of us as the cousin that hasn't been seen at the family reunion for a couple hundred years,” he suggested. On that first show, he had brought in a cross, holy water, and a clove of garlic to show that these did not affect him in the slightest. He had taken out a mirror to use it for styling his hair. The show had been filmed during the day to prove that he did not need to do anything like sleep. He had even gone so far as to ask the host to drive a stake into his heart with a mallet. The stake had shattered on his pale, marble skin, much to the host's surprise. “Only other vampires can kill a vampire,” he had told her, laughing at her puzzlement. He had dashed to various points around the stage at super-human speed. Each time, the host had reminded viewers that they were showing this live.
Perhaps bored with his first answer, he told the second talk-show host that he had been hungry and he hadn't cared about the consequences. On this show as well, he showcased his imperviousness to most thing that had been thought to deal effectively with vampires. Another host got the answer, “Because, like you, she just looked too delicious.”

Of course, there were calls to hunt down all of the vampires, like the people in the olden days would have. The people on this side would often call shows that were hosting that first vampire and ask why the hosts were being such fools and putting their lives in danger. Although the hosts would never say it, they allowed a creature who feasted on human blood on their shows because this would drive their ratings through the roof.

People on the other side of the argument declared that they would not adapt such outdated approaches that hadn't worked. These people declared that making friends with the vampires was the best choice. They also asked what method the wanna-be vampire hunters would employ, since nothing humanity had thought up seemed to work. In fact, it seemed that humans could not kill vampires at all. A few people simply joined the pro-vampire side for fear of the vampires-either having to hunt them or being hunted by them for speaking up to kill the blood-suckers.

Soon enough, various world leaders saw the overwhelming perks of having troops with superhuman strength, speed, and who were generally impossible to kill. In almost every country, vampires became legal citizens to facilitate them being drafted. Buildings popped up all over for those who were willing to give some of their blood to the vampires. The blood was removed in the same way as if it were going into another person.
The anti-vampire groups had multiple problems with this. One of the more popular problems was the fear that once a vampire had sampled a certain human's blood, the vampire would want more. The vampire might then find the human and take the rest, either all at once or by taking as much blood as possible as often as possible, without killing the person, much like how people milked cows. The only promise humanity had that this would never happen was the glinting smiles of the undead.

Then people discovered that vampires each had a unique superpower in addition to incredible agility, strength, and life span. Vampires with foresight quickly became employed to people who often gambled. Those in charge of the various gambling places tried to put a stop to this, but there was little they could do to stop people coming in with the results of chance known. Then the owners of the gambling places found vampires who could project shields. The betting field became sharply tilted in the other direction again, at least for the gambling places who could afford the vampires' exorbitant fees. The places that were poorer had to come up with other means of trying to block out those with knowledge of what would happen. Frequently, these people was taken care of in the same way as other cheaters had been previously: the management pulled the person in question out of the club, had a thug beat on the winner and the management would take as much money off the unconscious body as they felt reasonable. The use of this method decreased considerably when rich people sent the vampires themselves to bet at the poorer gambling places.

For a time, at least in the world that most people inhabited, everything was fine. Many scoffed at humanity's former hatred of vampires. After all, as long as they were kept sated, vampires were not much of a problem. Just as that first vampire had declared, they were like humanity's estranged cousins.

This illusion was much easier to maintain when the bodies drained by vampires were never seen again.

A war soon erupted, shattering the illusion of peace. Two nations found something that they couldn't agree over and it became pivotal enough that they deployed armies. The first entirely vampiric army marched on their foes in lock-step and soon had ripped out all of their enemies' throats. The vampires were all glutted with blood, with plenty left over. Human troops were replaced entirely with vampire troops in a matter of months.

At this point, it should hardly be surprising that a catastrophe occurred.

Maybe it was because the vampires wanted a higher pay than the top brass wanted to give. Possibly the vampires became tired of fighting for countries whose problems they didn't share. Scariest of all, perhaps the vampires simply realized what they could do and decided that it might be fun.

Two opposing vampire armies joined together one night and marched on the populace of the country some of them had been employed to protect. By morning, there was no one left alive in the vampires' path.
Vampires with more affectionate views of humanity swarmed the murderous army but the smell of human blood in the air made those who had sworn not to drink it woozy. Those who did not succumb and change sides were easy prey for the other vampires. Pieces of vampire dotted the landscape in a garish display. The remaining vampires quickly gathered the pieces and burned them in bonfires. It was not long before the only vampires left were those who actively pursued human blood.

The humans raised a resistance, of course. At first, many simply stayed home. Sadly for them, vampires did not need an invitation to enter anyone's home. These humans were, publicly, among the first to be turned into vampires or simply drained of their blood.

Many of the people realized that there was nothing they could do. Some walked out to the vampires and simply bared their necks. Many committed suicide, taking their families with them so none of them would become vampires. Others tried surviving by staying on the move.

Vampires could run as fast as or faster than any land vehicle that people used. Because breathing was not necessary, vampires could pry open submarines or the bottoms of boats and take their meal with the exercise of fighting sharks afterward. It seemed that taking to the air was the best option because vampires couldn't fly. The only problem with flight was that all vehicles needed to land at some point to take on more fuel. The few vehicles that evaded vampires for several months soon found that they could not locate any more fuel; vampires had no need of vehicles nor the fuels that powered them. The humans who had survived because of flight soon began to die out.

One woman, who had been quicker than her companions in the helicopter when it went down, managed to get away. She had raced into a basement near where the vampires had found them and had been lucky enough to find some canned food and a can opener. If she stayed away from the few windows in the single room her world had become, and did not make much noise, perhaps she would be safe.

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