Blood Shaper

“I…” A number of responses ran through Kay’s head, immediate denial, accusations, questions about her sanity, and more. The look in her eyes was dead serious, which removed some of the questions about her sanity at least, and as excitable and chaotic as Zeia could be, Kay’s experience was that it was usually well thought out chaos. “Why?”

“Do you know what my goal is?”

“The permanent removal of all vampyr from existence.”

“No, it’s… Oh. Yeah, alright, that fits. Do you know what the smaller goal necessary to achieve the main goal that I’m focusing on is?”

“Based on the questions you’ve asked me and the projects you’re involved in, you want to figure out how to inoculate people against being transformed into vampyr so that they can’t reproduce.”

Zeia let out a rueful chuckle. “It is kind of obvious, isn’t it? Whatever, it isn’t like I’m keeping anything secret. Yes, that’s what I’m aiming for. Technically, if we killed every single vampyr before they can spread their curse, or infection, or whatever it is to others then they’ll be dead permanently as a kind, but that’s pretty unfeasible. Eventually we’ll kill them all, but not in the kind of coordinated, widespread way we’d need to prevent any further victims from turning into insane monsters.”

“It’s more likely that it’ll turn into a protracted hunt to search out and destroy the smarter or less crazy ones, the ones that will run and hide and plot instead of charging out to meet any threat or exposing themselves by glutting on blood.” Kay agreed. “They’d lurk in hidden places and at least some of the ones that survive will infect others as time pass. There’d be years or decades of more victims, there would be less of them, but people would still suffer.”

“Exactly! No one’s going to stop wiping out any vampyr they encounter, certainly not the Order or the Crusade, but the sooner we come up with a cure, a vaccine, something to help those that are bitten and not helped before its too late the less people that will suffer needlessly.” She turned her face away as it flashed with a look of deep and long-term hurt.

“A family member?” Kay asked gently.

She scoffed. “No. I’m an ‘only survivor’ type. My family, my people, all got killed pretty quickly. But I’ve seen a lot of the people left behind, a lot of the people who cooperate wit us after being bitten, how they descend into the madness bit by bit or at a devastating speed, and then the person who was there is gone and all that’s left is a monster that has to be put down.” She sighed and shook her head. “We keep our distance and don’t get attached so that it doesn’t hurt as much, but there have been so many people that I know I could’ve been fantastic friends with, or were just so wonderful or amazing that never deserved to have that snuffed out.” She turned back to him, her eyes once again steely with determination. “That’s why I’m so insistent. And it’s why I want you to turn me. Into a vampire.”

Kay put a hand on her shoulder and gently pushed her out of his personal space. “I get that impacting your… the way you interact with people and me specifically, but what does that have to do with turning you?”

“The racial characteristic you have as vampires, becoming anathema to vampyr and other eldritch things, I think that might be the key to making it so more than just you can cure the vampyr infection. As much as part of me wants to shout at you that the only thing you should be doing is spending all day every day curing people and saving lives, that’s a ridiculous thought. Besides the fact that you’re only one person and can only do so much at a time, you have responsibilities and duties. You save lives all the time in ways that have nothing to do with vampyr, and I can’t diminish that. Which why we need to make it so others can do what you can.”

“We were just talking about that in the other room, but why-“

“Showing us the differences between your Skill description and the ‘regular’ Skill description only cemented my idea,” She said, whirling away and beginning to pace back and forth as she interrupted him, “Vampires, vampirism, I think you called it? Whatever, being a vampire is the solution. I’ve been doing a lot of research while you were gone, basing some of my inquiries off of some of the things you taught us or theorized about vampyr and everything eldritch in general and some of my own theories based on recent events. Your experiences interacting with the System directly firmly put me in the category that it has some kind of intelligence. Whether it’s alive or not isn’t important, just that it can think. It isn’t a set of natural laws or just how things work, it has the ability to think and plan. Combine that with you receiving the upgrade to Purify Blood while completing a Quest for the System, the racial effects you gained upon becoming a vampire, and the fact that eldritch corruption is a problem for the System tied it all together.”

“Alright, but that still doesn’t explain-“

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“Eldritch corruption is a threat to the System. It obviously wants it dealt with, but its been doing a pretty bad job of it in the last few centuries, at least in my opinion. Vampyr attacks and turnings are steadily increasing over time, although not by huge amounts thanks in part to the Order, the Crusades, and everyone else, but the numbers are growing not shrinking. Then you enter picture and suddenly the perfect weapon against vampyr exists where it hadn’t before. The System turned you into its anti-vampyr weapon.”

“It didn’t happen exactly like that and there was a lot more free will on my side of things,” Kay corrected her, “But you’re not technically wrong.”

“I don’t care about why things happened I just care that they did happen. You’re the anti-vampyr person, if being called a weapon hurts you, but like I was saying you can’t be everywhere, and a System that can think and plan has to know that.” She stopped in the middle of pacing and stared into the middle distance. “You were the test case with the Purify Blood upgrade and then you proved the usefulness of it when you stopped yourself from becoming a vampyr. For whatever reason the System couldn’t just permanently upgrade every single Purify Blood Skill, so it had to do something else. It used the moment it codified vampires as a species as it’s opening, making you, you as in vampires, the source of a permanent solution to vampyr.”

Trying not to get annoyed, Kay asked her, “What does that have to do with you becoming a vampire?”

“I think that the only way to stop people from becoming vampyr is to have them become vampires, and I think the way that someone other than you does that is to have a vampire bite them and infect them with the vampire virus. My hypothesis is that the vampire virus, like the rest of your existence, has been empowered against eldritch taint and will destroy the corrupted vampyr body in people’s bodies.” She pointed a finger at him, “You explained when you were talking about vampires as a folktale from your world that vampires bite people to turn them into more vampires, just like the vampyr do. If you really are what vampires should have been without the first one on Torotia being touched by something eldritch then you should be able to turn people by biting them too.”

“Yes I know!” Kay bit out. “And I was planning on brining that up when we discussed the issue, what does that have to do with you specifically turning into a vampire?”

Zeia pulled back looking mildly insulted. “I’m not one of those assholes who rants about the greater good then demands that other people sacrifice themselves or take the risks, if people have to get turned into another species to save everyone then I’m going to be first in line, dammit!”

He had to resist the urge to put his face in his hands. “I’m not turning you into a vampire Zeia. Not right now!” He corrected himself when she looked ready to argue. “There are so many more things that need to be done before we take that step. Like proving that I can turn someone into a vampire with a bite,” He started counting on his fingers, “that other vampires can do that, if we all can do that that the virus from vampires does overwhelm the vampyr virus, and more.”

“We should start those tests with me,” She insisted, “We can have-“

Kay interrupted Zeia this time. “No, we can start by testing things that aren’t that big first. Like getting some of those samples of vampyr crud you’ve been collecting form people’s bodies to study and seeing how they react to vampire…venom? I’m not actually sure what we have. And that’s another thing to figure out, how exactly any of this works. Jumping straight to trying to trun you into a vampire is the definition of going off half-cocked.”

Zeia’s face screwed up in annoyance. “You’re right.” She said after a moment. “Being methodical is better than running without looking where I’m going. Urgh! Alright fine!” She stomped over to a cabinet and pulled out some vials. “We can start by doing some easy tests right now.” She shoved one of the vials at his face. “Gimme some venom, or spit or whatever.” The other one got thrust at Lauren. “You too! We’ll need to see if there’s any appreciable difference in the samples.”

“I… We, uh… In some stories it’s the vampire’s blood that does the changing.” Kay said, giving in to her demands.

She grabbed two more vials. “Then a sample of that too!”

Giving her a little of his blood was easy with his Skills, and Lauren cooperated without question. Getting a bit of venom was a bit harder. When neither of them could get anything to come out of their fangs Zeia gave them more vials and demanded some saliva as well. Lauren and Kay had never bitten anyone to get blood from them, with the ease of their magic and the fact that biting someone to drink their blood was an act still entirely associated with vampyr in people’s minds it made it a smart move to avoid it. Since they were two of the three vampires that existed right then and the third probably hadn’t tried biting anyone either, no one had any idea how it worked.

Eventually image training proved to be the solution. Imagining biting into someone and drinking their blood, after taking a long series of minutes deepening the imaginary picture and adding sights and taste to it, Kay managed to get a few drops of clear liquid to drip from the tips of his fangs and into the vial. It also woke up some feelings, some instincts, that felt deeply predatory to Kay, something he’d been working on suppressing ever since the first time he’d started to feel thirsty for blood.

“Good.” Zeia took the last two vials after Kay coached Lauren through coaxing the venom out and put them in a rack next to the first four. “Now go away. You oh so logically demolished my plans for the day and now I have to mock up plans for an entirely new research study. I need space.”

Kay turned and left without trying to talk anymore with the infuriating, driven, and admirable researcher. With his guards following him he headed back toward the center of the keep.

“What are your plans now, your majesty?” Lauren asked as she reformed her helmet around her head.

“We’re going to find the fort’s commander and ask some questions, then we’re headed out beyond the borders for a little while. I want to see what things look like deeper in where more vampyr are likely to be. And after that mildly infuriating conversation I really want to kill something that needs killing.”

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