Things That I Like: 8 Things to Do With Zombies

Apparently I’ve been on a zombie kick as of late. I haven’t actually written any zombie stories recently, but I just finished writing a three-part series of articles on zombies for Sanitarium and there’s a zombie section to be written up soon, for a sourcebook that I’m putting together. Here are a few ideas that I haven’t seen often, or at all.

1. The zombie virus only affects children

Did you see World War Z? There’s an implication that kids aren’t targeted by zombies. There’s that scene where one of the kids seems to be getting chased by zombies, sure, but it’s just as likely that the zombies were going for the guy in front of him. After all, the zombies were interested in him, how did he get past the other ones to begin with.

CYOA brainstorming: Fallen Paladin

What is this about?

Fall: God is Dead
Weapon: Vampiric morning star
Powers: Necromancy 2, friend to animals, charisma, resourceful, favored by demons, unholy strength, serpent's reflexes
Companion: Engineer
Residence: Airship

When a god dies, its paladins feel the agony. They feel its loss, and the abandonment. They know, intimately, the difference between the world as it is and the world as it once was and never will be again.

CYOA brainstorming: Battlemage (undead & acoustic)

What is this?

Abilities: Soul Seeker, Soul Companion, Soul Drain, Summon Undead, Empowered Undead, Army of the Dead, Aria, Hymn, Legato, In Rilievo, Elegy of Fragility, Staccato, Marcato
Skills: Charmer, Bocca Chiusa, Cappriccioso, Soul Ripper, Martyr, Thrall, Soul Gaze

Right off the bat, this is a necromancer who controls the dead through sound. Ze can't ever sleep. Ze can't ever talk, it's sign language only from here on out. Because ze must always, always be making the binary-like code that raises and controls the dead, a series of clicks with tongue and teeth that can never end.

CYOA brainstorming: Mage

What is this about?

Mana Blue (wood & death)
Ideal Golem (petrified wood, bone, &c)
Order Illusionist
Specialties Celerity (primary); prestidigitation, necromancy, alchemy

Our character is alone. If there is magic elsewhere in the world, there are no other mages. Not even our character knows how this happened, and ze's long since given up on explaining zir existence.

CYOA brainstorming: An Adventure in Time

What is this about?

Alright. This one is going to be pure fun. Hello!

Time machine: Large
Home base: Eh. Let's ignore this one, actually.
Equipment: Universal translator, gold, infinite wardrobe, two sets of futuristic armor
Mission: Magical Nazis
Companions: Socrates, H. P. Lovecraft, Jesus, Laika, Helen Keller

Well! This certainly became loads more feasible of a story than I expected. At least, I would read this thing.

So what's gone on? Well, obviously, magical Nazis. That's what's gone on. Oh, and the protagonist has been displaced by zir home time. Now ze's crossing all time and space with a few special companions. Their time machine is a few stories tall. You know, pretty big. They live in it.

And they travel across time and space in their not-a-house to fight magical Nazis that are trying to break history apart.

Socrates is an absolutely fantastic person to have aboard. Most people only remember him for his intelligence, but back in the day he was famous for his exploits in war, too. Socrates comes from a society where all the men fought, and he lived to old age.

You don't mess with Mr. -tes, is what I'm saying.

I'm going to rule that Laika has been given human intelligence. Somehow. And is a diehard Communist, of course. For the Motherland! This Nazi business is personal, mate.

The CYOA states that "like all blind people, Helen has the potential to become a formidable martial artist and sword fighter." This will be a lot of help in a temporal war against magical Nazis.

And then we've got Lovecraft and Jesus. Obvious choices, really.

I... don't know what more to say about this. Just got to say again, I would totally read this.

CYOA brainstorming: The Island (Candid version)

What is this?

Island CYOAs were (are?) a fad on /tg/. I know of almost a dozen, and I come across a new one every so often. The idea behind each of them is the same (you find yourself on a spooky island thing, GO) but they differ in the options that they give. They also differ in how many options you can pick before you have to start taking penalties.

This one is not particularly forgiving.

Shelter: None
Companion: The Necromancer
Artifact: The Amulet, Possessed Sword
Covenant: Abominations
Nemesis: Fear and Madness, The Other

Oh, and The Other gets some choices too, dang it:
Shelter: Gypsy Caravan
Companion: The Other (a different one), the Blackbark Faerie
Artifact: The Sarcophagus
Covenant: Island Guardians
Nemesis: The protagonist

So what have we got here?

Our protagonist has been displaced to some horrible Otherworld. It matters not whether it's an actual island or not, though we'll refer to it as such for convenience's sake. It's a very dangerous place, inhabited by all kinds of horrible things. There was apparently a magi-tech kind of civilization based here, but it's anyone's guess what happened to them.

Perhaps the Island got them. It has a will of its own, certainly. And it's out for the protagonist's blood.

To that effect it has also plucked up two of the protagonists friends. Perhaps the protagonist's appearance here is a fluke, but theirs was certainly not. They have been told that the protagonist is a very, very bad person now, and that killing zem is of the utmost importance. Letting zem live will do nobody any good, but will mean the deaths of millions.

It may hurt them to believe it, but they've been thoroughly convinced that ze's somehow gone down a bad road.

The statuesque servants of the old civilization are at their disposal. The faeries of the Island, who may be connected or have simply moved in after the original inhabitants left, are responsible for conveying the Islands orders, and one of them is accompanying the protagonist's friends to help them on their quest. They are traveling with other humans (who, unlike the faeries, are definitely latecomers to the Island), who are not noteworthy for their combat skills but know the roads of the Island. And one of them has slight precognitive abilities that should be of help.

Should they die by anyone's hand but the protagonist's, the Island will be able to revive them.

But the worst thing is... our protagonist can't be totally sure that they're wrong. The protagonist has fallen in with some potentially bad company, an amoral necromancer whose reason for tagging along is unknown, and has explained the situation to the protagonist. The necromancer is definitely not popular in these parts, though, especially among the undead (of which there are many). And... there are horrible Lovecraftian monsters that like you. Which is probably not a good sign.

Finally, the protagonist is in possession of a thinking sword. It can steadily improve the protagonist's skill over time, but it is also the source of a growing compulsion to kill. The amulet, which confers both physical and mental health, is keeping its influence at bay, but the amulet will be effective for only so long.

CYOA brainstorming: Undead abomination

What is this about?

Type Tinker
Seal Holy circle
Phylactery Amulet
Nemesis Merchant

I like the combination of the first two. "You tried to augment yourself with machine parts bridging the gap between living and unliving matter through necromancy," but there's something about holiness, something of Heaven or something celestial, that works against you.

So there are two questions we've got to ask here:

How does necromancy cross with machines? And what does the Celestial Power have to do with machines?

While I'm afraid that we might fall into some unfortunate implications, let's say that there's an industrial element to Hell. Necromancy and the Infernal Power go together like a charm, I guess, and it's because this is some devilish kind of machinery that holy magic works against it. Why don't we do a bit of a biopunk/cyberpunk dichotomy here, and make Heaven a genetic engineering/flesh-shaping kind of place? Like the elements of H. R. Giger's artwork got a divorce and half of them went off to Heaven and the other half to Hell, and then they both got contracts to redesign the places.

Yeah.

And our humble character made a deal with Hell to rework zir body into some half-machine thing that would never die.

Its phylactery is a small object. Let's make it a battery. The character will keep on going so long as it has power, so you have to destroy its (basically unlimited) power source. Maybe, to go beyond the bounds of the CYOA but also make things more interesting, the battery is charged by dying. It can conceivably run out, but if somebody dies in its vicinity then the character will start running again.

And some silly merchant holds the battery. For now.

Radiant Shadows: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

A review for Radiant Shadows, by Sarah Baethge

Nutshell: Vampires. And anti-vampires. And a Good/Evil dichotomy that's actually a Light/Dark dichotomy that's actually an Optimistic/Pessimistic dichotomy... I think? Well, there's a rogue vampire that has to be taken down and things happen and the plot makes sense, maybe, but little else does. 

Atmosphere: 1 out of 5. It was... okay at first, but then the story tries to present itself as an in-universe document and it falls apart. We know that it's an in-universe document because that's how it's being described and talked about. And we know that's how it is for the first part, at least, because the narrator is talking about certain concepts not just as if the reader doesn't know what they are, but explicitly because the reader doesn't know and the narrator wants xem to understand. It's this next thing that's the trouble: The supernatural world is not in the open. It is a secret. So this story is being written as an in-universe document directed, apparently, at people who don't know about vampires and witches and things, despite there being an organization, which this narrator works for, which wants to keep that stuff secret.

Characters: 2 out of 5. The only character that I remotely cared about was Caroline. I don't even know why, it was just something about her bubbliness. Still, that didn't even last until the end of the first part (let's just say she's not very smart).

Plot: 2 out of 5. What it says in the nutshell. There's a rogue vampire! And stuff happens! And half of it could be avoided with the common sense that God gave to one of Michael Myers' victims.

Writing Style: The story opens poorly. There are more technical problems than I can shake a twig at: formatting (I say as I keep hitting "Preview" and find myself still unable to fix That One Problem), typos, issues of tense, quote marks being handled badly, missing dashes, the works. I also don't like how the parentheses are inserted into the story or how some words are emphasized with italics and others with bold type without any apparent rhyme or reason. There is also no consistency in any narrative voice.

Worldbuilding: The only strong point of the story, honestly. There are some neat ideas here. The explanation for why vampires need to feed on humans is passable and there are a couple of clever needles in the haystack. There's this dream dimension stuff that was pulled from out of freaking nowhere, but don't worry because we get an infodump to tell us everything we're going to need to know in just a few minutes. I like how vampires have wings there, though, even if the bat wings thing is silly.

I'll be frank: I simply cannot believe that a good editor was employed for this story.

Details, details: [here there be spoilers]

As I mention in the nutshell, I'm a little unsure of what to make of the alignments described in the story. At first they're Good and Evil, and then they're Light and Dark (except that there's apparently nothing to distinguish this system from the first), and while the story vacillates between these two it seems at times that the author is confusing morality with outlook. At least I hope so, because I don't want to read a story where people are "Evil" or "Dark" because they're pessimists. Oh, and this seems to be an inborn condition, which I doubly don't like.

I like how vampires are common in the paralegal profession. It's a good place for them, and I'm not making a joke about lawyers. It really does make sense, up to and including why they're just paralegals.

Why do vampires consider it a punishment to turn someone into a vampire? They seem to like being vampires. That's like if I said "You'd better watch out, or I'm gonna give you some free books." Maybe you don't like books, but I certainly don't know that and it's certainly not widespread enough of an opinion for me to make "give them free books if they're bad" a general policy.

I thought you said "Ultimate Showdown of
Ultimate Destiny."

The Count's accent is stupid and cliche. Do we really need a vampire, called "the Count" no less, who sounds like Bela Lugosi? And why, if this is a private nickname made on the spot and shared with one other person before the namer dies, is it being used by somebody who has a close, familiar relationship with the vampire?

Why can't the narrator in Part Two believe that the "two" Stephen Browns are the same person when one of them is undeniably Weird and the narrator himself is a vampire?

"Ultimate Battleground of the Nightmare Dimension." I can't even...

Good things, good things... Like I said, there were some good needles in the haystack. The author should get some more needles like this, melt them down, and forge them into a Sword of +2 Interesting World. The fat needs to be trimmed, though. This is a fantasy kitchen sink as assembled with parts from eight different manufacturers, one of whom may not really exist.

(this, incidentally, is what I thought of when I read "Ultimate Battleground of the Nightmare Dimension")

What Happens in the Darkness: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

A review for What Happens in the Darkness, by Monica J. O'Rourke.

"Manhattan died." 

Nutshell: A shock attack by foreign powers leaves America broken and powerless to resist invasion. Meanwhile, there's a soldier with his finger on the button of a secret military project: America has vampires, and he's the one that's going to let them out. 

Trigger warnings for this story: Rape and sexual mutilation, attempted rape of a minor, racial slurs. And gore. There are some horror novels that are light on the gore, but this so ain't one of 'em.

How would you do a vampire medical procedural?

The Chronicler's Guide for Vampire: the Requiem had a chapter on procedural stories. Legal procedurals, police procedurals, etc. One of the writers' last suggestions was a medical procedural, but they admitted that they had no idea how to proceed.

Myself, I can't think of any kind of vampire take on House, MD or Gray's Anatomy, which suggests that the field is white and ready to harvest.

So let's get to brainstorming, shall we? How would you work this angle?

Idea: Vampires soak up evil

Vampires collect… Sin. Evil. Depravity. Corruption. There is something that is horrible beyond imagination, something which incites others to commit unsavory acts, inspiring them to lie or steal small things in small amounts, and leading nations down the path of genocide when it is too widespread. People can be horrible without its influence, but it certainly doesn’t make it easier to choose the right course.

Idea: Vampires possessed by their blood

You could possibly call these vampires "tragic" if you were so inclined. It is the blood itself which controls a vampire, which may be either cooperative with the force flowing through its xir veins or be engaged in a futile struggle to retain control. The blood has no physical control over its host but it is able to insert sensations into its host's mind, whether it does so in order to speak to its companion or as an assault on xir mental stability. A person may try to resist but the blood is well-equipped to wear down xir resolve. Even without resorting to finer techniques of psychological manipulation the blood can simply "shout" relentlessly in its host's mind until, for the sake of being able to sleep or have even a single minute of rest, xe will follow through with what the blood wants him to do. Suicide might be considered but the blood can make its host suffer agonizing pain. While that might not be enough to dissuade some people simply on a mental basis the pain can become intense enough to make it impossible to move.

Many older vampires have lost their sense of self to one extent or another. They have become so compliant to the demands of the blood in them that as it speaks, they act, and their will slowly ebbs away.

To some extent this curious relationship arises because, magically speaking, memories are contained in the blood. They're still located in the brain, yes, but there is a sort of sympathetic relationship relationship between blood and memories. As masters of bloodwork the main power of a vampire lies not in xir shapeshifting or incredibly strength or telepathy or anything else of this sort. Indeed, a vampire may not even possess these powers (do with them as you wish). No, a vampire's main asset is xir natural power over memories. Draining blood from someone can drain their memories, too. Simply drinking their blood allows their memories to be read.

Transferring their own blood to another person has the effect of infecting them with vampirism because of this power. Their blood is, essentially, alive and a thinking entity in its own right, and it infects the blood of the victim with these selfsame attributes. A very small amount is enough to affect the victim's memories but not enough to truly start the process of blood-conversion. Larger amounts are required, commensurate with the strength of the victim's willpower and even sense of self (many vampires will engage in psychological torture before beginning blood-conversion). Because of the large amount of blood required to spawn a single vampire, let alone multiple vampires, spawning vampires hunt much, much more frequently than other vampires. They don't need to eat or replenish their energy in any other manner (in a way they're perpetual motion machines) but the blood in them is constantly decaying, as it were. The blood must be replenished on a regular basis, and giving up large amounts to create more vampires only makes the need more pressing.

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Idea: Zombies that can mimic and infiltrate human society

Zombies don't look like shambling corpses all of the time. Usually they look like- and act like- living people. When they succumb to zombiism they do not lose memories, skills, or any other aspect of their original personhood but everything becomes subjected to two overriding drives: to eat people when hungry, and to stick as close as possible to the life that one had before becoming a zombie. Zombies don't change their habits at all except so far as is necessary to cover up their cannibalism and carry it out more effectively. They also don't eat very often: a single person has enough meat to keep a zombie looking fresh (they start to turn corpse-like over the course of a month if unfed, and also look slightly corpse-like when they will be feeding soon or having recently fed) for a week, or maybe two weeks if that person is only eaten over time and is a little bit overweight (this requires cutting them up while alive, to keep them from turning into zombies themselves). Yes, this does mean that some zombies kidnap people and fatten them up to get more meat out of them.

Human settlements become infested with zombies usually when a zombie comes into town. Someone eventually escapes but before getting eaten, and becomes a zombie. The zombie sticks to its original life as much as possible, even refusing to leave the town (unless travel is a part of its normal life; truckers-turned-zombies are really, really bad), and new zombies are created from people who escape being eaten but not being bitten, and sometimes when the zombie decides to recruit some people in order to make hunting easier.

Eventually, either the zombies are killed or the town is eaten, which leads to the zombies slowly growing hungrier, corpsier, and crazier until the drive to eat overcomes the drive to stay normal and they wander from the town, becoming your normal corpsey-zombie (but a little bit faster and definitely a bit smarter). They'll eventually recover their full memories and freshness unless killed before they get a good meal, but now they don't care about sticking in one place and they just wander around, essentially nomadic serial killers. Nomadic zombies are responsible for most outbreaks, and usually have left the area before a containment team is notified and sent to the area, so they're not only crazy but also often very old.

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Idea: Displaced Time Travelers Taking the Slow Way Back

Yes, more time travelers. Yes, more vampires.

But no stable time loops this time, oh no sir.

Where did they come from? Or when? A long, long time hence, of course. Or tomorrow, or somewhere in-between. But on an otherwise-routine trip their machine malfunctioned and they found themselves stranded in the past. A few seconds was all that it took to confirm that help wasn't on its way. If it were, then it would have arrived before they even discovered the malfunction. That meant that they were totally on their own.

They refused to accept this.

The machine was truly a masterpiece of technology, far beyond anything that we could conceive. That it was unable to return them to the past was a horrendous spat of bad fortune, but that didn't mean that the whole machine was down anymore than a broken engine in a car means that the brakes and battery are also irreparably damaged. The machine was built to affect the biological structure of things in order to produce food and adapt its passengers' bodies to whatever circumstances they found themselves in.

Its capabilities were far beyond what was considered to be required for most missions, but the quasi-singularitarian technology of their day was even more advanced, and it was no trouble at all to outfit the machine with such potential. It was the passengers' one spot of good luck (though perhaps it was no luck at all, but had secretly been intended for just such a contingency as this, some of them wondered) and they used it to re-engineer themselves biologically. Their memories were doubled in their junk DNA, their lifespans were lengthened, and they were given the ability to infect others with this same condition so that their own DNA would be altered in select places. Each generation would carry the memories of the next.

Unfortunately the process didn't work completely beneficially. Errors crept in, consequences of dabbling in sciences a little too advanced than they were familiar with. Their diet, for example, was totally screwed up and they find it impossible to digest anything more substantial than a fine paste. Sunlight will give them a massive case of sunburn within seconds, and prolonged contact with cancer them up like you wouldn't believe.

Their aim is to survive the long thousands of years between where they were and where they had come from, and they're prepared to do it by any means possible. They've been playing with history, pulling these strings and cutting those ones, all to accelerate our advancement (and doing about as good of a job as anyone who didn't get a PhD in historical puppeteering). They don't care who they have to kill, how many lives they have to destroy.

Because in the end? It won't matter one bit.

History can still be rewritten. They're in the alpha timeline, if you want to call it that, the one that simply had to come before there could be a timeline where they were rescued. And so long as they're willing to pull the trigger, they can be the cavalry they knew that there was no point in waiting for.

(note: to be clear, the "vampire" concept is as novel to them as it is stereotypical to us. they messed up history like you wouldn't believe and there were no such stories in their timeline.)

Genre Splash #5: The Polish Wasp Conspiracy [B]

Continued from Wednesday. 

The boginki require hosts for their eggs. They possess a venom that paralyzes in small doses and causes cellular breakdown in larger doses, and they use it for its former effect after choosing a target. Captured and paralyzed, the boginka's victim is helpless to resist as dozens of eggs are implanted deep in the flesh. They will nourish themselves on their host, who will be sustained as the adult boginka regularly injects them with a nutrient slurry. The larvae that are the earliest to rouse themselves (and are the most fit) will make their way to the brain, which they will consume and... replace. They merge with (or devour, depending on how you look at it) each other and plug into the nervous system, between these two actions drastically increasing their intelligence. Very soon, they will begin secreting a counter to the venom in their host and be able to secure food on their own.

Genre Splash #5: The Polish Wasp Conspiracy [A]

Challenge: Wasp clerics of life and discord, chemical weapons, and conspiracies. In modern-day Poland.

They have been called by many names. Vampires, demons, even fairies. But in Poland, where the last of them live, they are called the boginki, the little goddesses. They are not human, though they may do a good job passing. They're more like wasps, to be honest. Pretty easily mistaken as wasps, actually, at least until they get too big. Just ignore the pure white color of their shells.

The resemblance is only incidental. Insects they may possibly be, but they're off some entirely different branch of the tree, its only extant members. While they once ranged across Europe and possibly further their numbers were never especially high. They were primitive in their way but intelligent enough to recognize that over-breeding was too likely to lead to their being hunted down (the shadows are only good for concealing you when the shadows are big enough to hold you) or outstrip the humans and leave them without hope for a future generation. Once upon a time their reproductive cycle was separate from humankind, humans made far superior hosts to the point that boginki that depended on other animals were outcompeted. Nobody knows exactly who first made the discovery that somewhere along the line there had developed some defect that prevented their offspring from maturing properly in non-humans, but enough time had passed that there were none who were not so defected.

Idea: Vampires, the Neil Armstrongs of Time

Time travel is utterly fatal. If you travel back in time, even by a second, you will die. No special effects. No horrifying bodily trauma. No marks, no mess. Just dead.

Now, this was wonderful for the weapons industry, but not so great for the "going back in time and seeing the past" crowd. The best that you can do is set up some probes and then call them back, but time travel messes up electronics something bad. You won't always get clean recordings, and you won't even always get your recorder back. You can always let your recorder take the slow way back to your time in order to avoid giving it a nice wash in the timestream twice, but the longer it'll take to reach you the more time it'll have to be destroyed in some other, more mundane, manner.

Thankfully, there's a wonderful solution. Vampires are totally dead, contrary to every scientific law which would like to have a word with them about animated corpses that sustain themselves on blood. And while nobody was expecting them to actually exist, it wasn't two minutes before the secret was out before some crazy scientist said what all of the other crazy scientists were thinking. "Let's send them back in time."

It wasn't as simple as grabbing vampires off of the street and throwing them into the past. There had never been very many, and there were even fewer now. An even bigger problem was that you couldn't trust them. As soon as a few had been collected, though, a solution to both problems was easy to fashion. The crazy scientists recruited crazier personnel, trained them for the missions that they would shortly undertake, and turned them into vampires.

Of course, how did vampires come to exist in the first place? They should be impossible. And to lesser beings, they are. Or were. And would be. But time travel makes temporal tense a tricky thing. Billions of years from now, the universe will be coming to a close. Our descendants will have scratched the ceiling of possibility and uncovered every secret. They were content, because it would have been useless to be otherwise. But they were not going to leave the doable undone. And though it was still impossible to travel through time and live to tell the tale, it was slightly less impossible to create something that could act, think, persist, and yet be dead.

It's funny what the universe will let you get away with, in the end. Our descendants created vampires, and they sent the first vampires back to the dawn of history. Not to do anything that would be considered spectacular in any other circumstances. Just exist, and keep existing, and bring more people in as necessary to keep it going. But history was rewritten by that simple, continuous act. Not that our one-time descendants minded. They had done all that they could. Their history was full. But by granting this gift to their dim and distant ancestors, they could create a history fresher and more full than their own, a history with billions of years of time travel against a universe of light, not huddled around the last remaining, manufactured stars, waiting for the darkness to come in.

Idea: Ice Age Horror

There is something that is called the Dark Place, where life exists in a strange manner more dependent on patterns than on genetics or physical matter. Occasionally some of these patterns manage to steal away to our world. The Dog People have long hunted wolves and men both, adopting as their own the shapes of the dominant predators in their territories (and in other places the Dog People are not wolves but tigers, coyotes, or jaguars). The Hidden People are as fluid as water, able to squeeze through even the tiniest of cracks. All creatures of the Dark Place are weakened in the light, but the Hidden People are so vulnerable to light that they move in the open only on nights that the clouds block out the moon and stars.

But the most important of all are the Starlight People, so named because of their quiet, instinctual fascination with the stars. They are ageless so long as they have blood, and they are as strong and fast as the greatest of humans, and they never tire. They heal quickly and can see in the darkest conditions. But for all their powers they, like the rest of the Night People, are vulnerable to the light of the sun, which robs them of their powers and leaves them like the humans that they once were.

Some hunt the Daylight People but most, remembering their own prior existence as one of the Daylight People, coexist with them to their mutual benefit. A tribe with one of the Starlight People has a great warrior and hunter on their side, one whose need for human blood is sustainable in larger hunting groups and can be supplemented by prey animals. Even more importantly, the Starlight People are storytellers and shamans, keepers of histories that stretch back for centuries.

Supplementing their diet with animal blood has consequences. The Starlight People are very much human in how they process and store information, and this can only be changed for as long as only human blood is consumed. Only very few of them have interacted with individual man-hunters for so long that they can compare their respective mental states over long periods of time, and fewer still suspect that the reason for this lies in diet. Without a straight diet of human blood the weight of ages will over the centuries crush one of the Starlight People as she buckles under the strain of holding an ever-increasing amount of memories, far past the point that the human mind was designed to bear. When one of them grows tired with the weight of so many memories, it is a great honor to be chosen as her replacement.

• Perhaps in the future towns and cities may be built, and these will have a great enough population that a vampire could feed solely on human blood and yet not overtax any of them. For now, though, it is the man-hunters that are the oldest and wisest of their kind.
• Someone has disappeared from his tent in the night. Was it one of the Hidden People, or other Daylight People that took advantage of the past night's conditions to steal someone away without being suspected themselves? Or did he even leave of his own accord?
• With only few exceptions the Starlight People either hunt or live with the Daylight People, because recluses that feed only on animal blood will start hunting indiscriminately as soon as they lose enough of their sanity. If one were to recover later on and make the connection, how might he handle this? It could prove difficult to "adopt" a tribe that knew that of his past as a man-hunter.

Fiction: Bubblegum Peculiarity

This story at Fictionpress.

Also included this week:

A Story Across Years: Chapter five. "Tradition, of course. I wonder when it started."

Secret Life: Chapter nine. Sci-fi horror. "He is afraid. Afraid that he knows why he is here."

Bubblegum Peculiarity

Was it a peculiar home? A peculiar family? Oh, indeed.

"If you continue to fight me about your vegetables then I can assure you that you won't be happy."

But some things are part of every family, no matter how peculiar.

Miss Taylor could hear the mother from the other side of the door. And the girl responded. Too quietly for Miss Taylor to make out the words, but the tone that she used conveyed the impression that she wasn't worried.

That was good. That was very good.

Miss Taylor knocked on the door.

It meant that she probably wasn't afraid of her mother.

"Elizabeth Taylor," she announced as soon as the door opened- which was very, very quickly. Miss Taylor held up her identification. "Child Protective Services."

Miss Taylor hoped that this would be a false alarm. But the problem that had been brought to their attention had nothing to do with whether or not the woman was doing anything that might make her daughter afraid of her.

Still, it didn't seem that the woman was afraid of CPS. That was either a sign that everything was alright or... or that she was such an unfit parent that she couldn't even begin to conceive of what she might have done wrong. Which would mean that they probably wouldn't be able to get her to fix the situation.

The apartment that Miss Taylor walked into was a modest one. There was a kitchen but the living room was doubling as the dining room. The girl- Nancy, according to their reports- was eating dinner on a TV folding tray. The woman... did not appear to be eating dinner.

"Not hungry?" Miss Taylor asked.

The woman laughed. "Oh no. I'll be eating later. I have a very restrictive diet."

Nancy appeared to be nine. Her mother couldn't have been older than twenty-five, and that was pushing it. At most, she couldn't have been older than sixteen when she had given birth to Nancy.

"I apologize," the woman suddenly said. "I'm Autumn Frase." She shook Miss Taylor's hand energetically, then gestured for Miss Taylor to take a seat beside Nancy.

The couch was leather. Probably older than Nancy.

There didn't seem to be more than two people living here, just as the report said- Hell, there seemed in some ways to be only one person living here.

Which, actually, gave weight to the unfortunate side of the report.

But definitely no father in the home. That was something that she could confirm right away.

Autumn pulled up a seat in front of the two of them. She sat with grace, and gave a stern look at her daughter. "Green beans. You. Now." Something peculiar came into her eyes. "Or you won't grow up to be like me."

Whatever was behind those words- and there had to be something- it got Nancy to resume eating.

"I'm sure that you didn't come here to make a social call," Autumn said, "social worker though you may be. If you'll forgive the pun." She paused just long enough for the silence to become awkward and for Miss Taylor to wonder if perhaps she was expected to respond. But as soon as she opened her mouth to do so, Autumn went on. "So if you'll get down to the business of, well, your business..."

"To cut to the chase, we've gotten reports that your daughter has been left at home alone."

"Well, that happens here and there, doesn't it?" Autumn replied.

"Not for days on end, it shouldn't. And not repeatedly." Miss Taylor smiled, and hoped that it reached up to her eyes. "But I'm sure that we can get to the bottom of this and discover that it was all just a big, big misunderstanding." She hoped. She couldn't figure out why she was in this line of work sometimes. Always hoping so desperately that she was wrong. Sometimes it was so, and she stressed for nothing. Sometimes it wasn't so, and the stress was added to by horror.

Autumn practically stared into her soul, her gaze was so intent. Beside her, Miss Taylor noticed, Nancy had stopped eating again.

Not out of curiosity- no, it was out of curiosity. But not only. There was stress there as well. Who the fear was for, or exactly what part of this meeting was triggering it, Miss Taylor couldn't determine, but it was there. That had the potential to not be good- or to be very good, because day-to-day life was always so peaceful that she was hypersensitive to stress. With as little as she had to go by right now, Miss Taylor thought that it was a very good toss-up.

Miss Taylor supposed that she ought to say something, but then Nancy spoke up. Miss Taylor wondered if perhaps she had caught some sort of... some sort of glance shared between the two before Nancy had spoken, but then Nancy repeated herself and continued talking. "It's late. I know because my mom is up and she gets up really late. Also, the clock says that it's five past seven. So."

"So?" Miss Taylor repeated.

"So we're your last people!" Her eyes lit up. "We can make hot chocolate! Can't we mama?" she asked. Nancy looked at her mother with imploring eyes.

"Well, I suppose that that depends on Elizabeth," Autumn said. "I can call you Elizabeth, can't I?"

This was confusing. Everything was confusing. Where had this come from? "Sure." Really. She couldn't remember the last time that a family had asked her to drink hot chocolate with them. Probably because there had never been such a time before now.

"Well then." Autumn grinned. "Do you have to return to the office at the end of the day or do you normally go home?"

"I can go straight home if I have to, but I don't see what-"

"But will they miss you?" Nancy asked, adopting a pouting expression. "That is, will they expect you to come to the office, and be worried if you don't?"

Miss Taylor also couldn't remember the last time that a nine-year-old child had prefaced a clarifying statement with the words "That is." For much the same reason as her other recent failure at recollection. "No, I suppose not. Why?"

"It makes things easier," Autumn said. "I don't have to wear your skin and mimic your voice for a few hours in order for everyone to see you end your day as normal."

If that wasn't the strangest thing that Miss Taylor had ever heard- and she had heard no fewer than three very strange things in the past two minutes- then she was going to give up trying to understand anything at all in the world.

Before she could think about it any further, though, Autumn moved. And there was only the barest fraction of a second for the words "People don't move that fast" to flash through her mind before her neck was snapped and she stopped being surprised forever.

Autumn looked the woman over. "It isn't often that dinner comes to me, Nancy. Might be the last time I get to eat before we have to move. They'll start looking for her soon." She turned to her daughter. "You need to mind yourself better. There was a moment when you didn't sound like a normal nine-year-old."

"What would you know about normal nine-year-olds, mama?" Nancy retorted. "You haven't been one since forever."

"1750 is hardly 'forever,'" Autumn replied. "And being old doesn't make me blind." She chuckled. "Actually, for our kind, it makes me less blind."

"Your kind," Nancy muttered. She turned away.

"Oh, Nancy. Nancy," Autumn said, and she gently nudged Nancy's chin so as to make her daughter look into her eyes. "You just haven't grown into your wings, dear. You'll be fit for immortality yet."

"Y-you sure?"

"Of course." Autumn stood. She picked up the social worker's body and began to take it into the back. "And don't forget to eat your vegetables. That's important while you're still human."

"But mama..."

FIN

Notes for this story.