My friend Maia, @TheCrossGM has been working on a Table Top RPG game called "Back From the Brink: A Vampire's Worst Day", a game about vampires who find themselves in the unfortunate position of recovering their Souls and thus their ability to comprehend all of the pain they and their fellow vampires have been inflicting on the humans they rule over. I've been lucky enough to talk to her a good deal as she works through the nature of that world and how the game will work, and I got more than a little inspired. So I wrote a quick little micro fiction about how one vampire who's regained her soul encounters another who has only just regained theirs.
Enjoy!
“Well now, what do I have here? A frightened little fly caught in my web? Ah, but not such an ordinary drab fly are you. No mere human, obvious enough, but no mere vampire either.”
“What is that? Panic in your eyes? A desperate struggle to escape me? Tsk tsk. Such futility. And yet, the power to defy your own fate isn’t that far from your grasp. But, have you the strength of will to seek it out, I wonder?”
“You see, you are quite right. I can see what you are. And by all that racket in the city below us, I know what happened to you as well. More or less.”
“What was it exactly? Was someone who looked like a past lover, or parent, or sibling, murdered before your eyes? Were you made to witness some long forgotten torture from your past? Experience betrayal with an all too familiar twist of a knife in your heart? Or was it a more pleasant memory that awoke you? A mother singing her child a lullaby? A stranger caring for an elder reminding you of a beloved grandparent? The smell of what was once your favorite meal?”
“It doesn’t matter really. You needn’t tell me, or anyone. What matters is that you have become one of the Souled, and clearly you have royally fucked up.”
“Not that I can fault you for that. It was hard, wasn’t it? One moment you were a terrifying monster without a shred of care for all the pain and terror you inflict. Then it just happened, and like a tidal wave it all came crashing down upon you at once.”
“Regret. Guilt. Responsibility.”
“You started feeling them again for the first time since you were turned and you made a fatal mistake: you let that emotional turmoil show, and someone noticed. Then you did the only sensible thing you could, you fled. From all the chaos and screams of ‘Find them!’ I can still hear, you weren’t nearly careful enough in your escape I’m afraid. They’re coming for you, and they will never cease hunting you down. Not until they find you, and snuff out that reborn spark of a Soul inside of you for good.”
“But before they could catch you, you ran into me, and now here you hang in my web. So I am going to give you a choice, my Soulful little fly. If you wish, I will hide you, and teach you what makes those few vampires like you and I who have reclaimed our precious Souls so very different from our still soulless siblings. So long as you heed my warnings and pose no danger to me or mine of course. Fail in that and I will protect myself first.”
“Or I can set you free. Right here, right now. To make your own way and find your own means of escaping your pursuers.”
“Choose now little fly. Which is it to be? Shall you fly away alone? Or take this spider’s hand and learn just how tangled the web of this world has become?”
