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ofmonstersandnothing · 5 years

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Vampires

Most people today are familiar with the basic concept of a Vampire, but over the years a lot of the lore has become convoluted and confused due both to the vast array of different types of vampire and the media’s portrayal of them.

So a few things to keep in mind before I get into the details:

First, despite what the recent media tells you, there isn’t an inkling of humanity left in Vampires; once they become what they are, humans become food and tools. I will admit that some of the older ones, the ones who choose to contain their appetites, can operate in a grey area of the world, but they are still to be treated the same way you should a wild predator.

Second, and I cannot stress this enough, Vampires shouldn’t be “poked” any more than a grizzly bear should be, not unless it’s your plan to become their next meal.

Lastly, and I can’t believe I even have to say this, Vampires do not sparkle; I almost decked the last person to ask me that.

No one around really knows when or where exactly the first cases of Vampirism began, but by the 1340s with the rise of the black plague, they had become widespread across Europe, making them the perfect scapegoats for the spreading disease. When humans face something they fear, they turn to fantasy, trying to find a way to control something they don’t fully understand; this combined with an inadequate understanding of how a body decomposes let to a series of “Vampire scares” through the centuries coinciding with plague outbreaks. As a body decomposes, the skin shrinks, pulling the gums and other edges back creating the illusion that the teeth and nails have grown, add to this the fact purge fluid created by the internal organs breaking down will sometimes leak from the nose and mouth and it’s not a huge stretch for people of the time to assume the person had risen from the grave to feed on someone. With present day knowledge, such beliefs are almost comedic, but these were much darker times.

Because Vampires have been around for so long they, or rather the Vampire virus, have had the chance to mutate and adapt to different environments across Europe much in the same way any other animal would, a common example being birds on the Galapagos Islands, and just as each culture has their own variation of the Vampire, they each developed their own ways to prevent the Vampire’s rise. Of course, as most of the populations across Europe didn’t fully understand just what a Vampire is, these methods are generally far fetched and ineffective.

In Italy, home to the Strega, plague victims were often buried with bricks in their mouths in an attempt to prevent them from rising again. Germany, where the Nachzehrer generally remained in their graves to chew on their burial shrouds (according to the stories, though actually not quite accurate), they were accused of attacking their surviving relatives through “occult processes” by a Protestant theologian in his tract “On the Chewing Dead” published in 1679. Whether his accusations were founded or not, it led to the exhumation of numerous bodies so that the family could stuff the corpse’s mouth with soil, adding a stone or coin for good measure in an attempt to starve and kill the assumed threat. Though ineffective when it came to warding off attacks by the Nachzehrer, the process did disrupt quite a few trapped spirits causing a sharp rise in poltergeist level activity in the area for a good decade or two after. In the 18th and 19th centuries, a common “anti-vampire” tactic was to remove and burn the heart of the accused vampire, who thankfully was already dead, and mix the ashes into a potion for the afflicted to drink. I doubt it tasted at all okay, but the upside to this practice was that, barring the accidental addition of something that is, in fact, poisonous, the potion likely wasn’t going to kill anyone.

Bram Stoker learned of the story from a friend and scholar and was inspired to pen Dracula, one of the greatest works of fiction involving vampires ever written using a combination of details from the original story and old Irish myths of Vampires and the rest, as they say, is history.

Much of the modern practices when it comes to effectively handling Vampires come from Romania, home to the infamous Vlad Tepes, or Vlad Dracula. Before Vlad Tepes came along though, Romania was home to one of the most brutal and dangerous species of Vampires: the Strigoi. The Strigoi were a big enough threat that Romanian hunters had spent years developing rituals to protect against the Strigoi, but it wasn’t until Vlad Tepes came along that they actually found a way to kill a Vampire. Vlad Tepes ruled Wallachia three times between 1448 and his death and he is highly thought of despite his penchant for putting criminals on stakes, but towards the end of his known life, he contracted the Vampire virus and so began his reign of terror. For centuries, Vlad Tepes hunted the people he had once ruled until Georg Andreas Helwing, a clergyman, physician, and the true life counterpart to Bram Stoker’s Van Helsing, traveled to Romania with the notes from his research on werewolves and vampires, including an anti-vampire technique practiced in Masuria (a region in Prussia that is now a part of Poland) that involved decapitating the corpse’s head and driving a wooden stake through their heart. After a meeting with Helwing, a small band of hunters decided to test the method on Dracula himself, successfully decapitating and staking him to become the first hunters to kill a Vampire. So miraculous was the feat that Dracula’s severed head was paraded through the streets on the end of a pike to show the world that Vampires were not, in fact, immortal as previously thought.

Even though there are a wide variety of different species that all classify as “Vampire”, not all of them drink blood. In broad terms, Vampires feed on the life force of living creatures either via a psychological link or by literally going out and hunting down their prey depending on which species of Vampire they are. Romanian Strigoi and Italian Strega, for example, are both more active feeders while the German Nachzehrer and the first vampires of the colonies are more passive, preferring instead to remain in their nests to feed.

Despite their differences, all Vampires come from the same place; Vampirism is a virus. When someone contracts the virus via the swapping of genetic material like when a Vampire bites someone, it will attack and rewrite the victim’s DNA. This is why Vampires rarely, if ever, feed directly from an open wound, most of them are territorial and prefer not to share their meals or territory with more than a handful of close “family” members and so will not risk turning a stray human. The virus, once in the human’s body, will have an incubation period of one or two months while it prepares the body for the final change, during which time the victim will become hypersensitive to sunlight along with anything that could generally be used to detoxify or purify a person’s system, like garlic, water, cilantro, and certain holy items. After the incubation period, the victim’s body will enter a sort of limbo state during which all body function will appear to cease, though it’d be more accurate to say the body had become like a cocoon for a man eating butterfly. While in this state of limbo, the victim’s body will take on physical changes, for example, the subconscious limits placed on the bodies muscles will be deactivated, essentially granting “superhuman” speed and strength, the canines will become more like a snake’s fangs, hinged and razor sharp, the eye structure will change to better suit nocturnal habits, and most importantly a majority of the bodily systems will shut down entirely. When a vampire feeds, the blood or life force they consume now goes directly into their cardiovascular system. After they wake up a fully fledged Vampire, the person can no longer process any “food” outside of blood and their previous aversion to garlic, holy water, cilantro, etc. will no longer have any effect, though they will continue to avoid sunlight whenever possible.

When a person first contracts Vampirism, they will have to be purged of the virus before entering the limbo state, meaning the often painful consumption of everything a soon to be Vampire can’t handle. If done correctly, the victim will eventually become feverish before passing out to spend the next few days sweating the rest of the virus from their system. Once a Vampire has become a fully fledged Vampire, there is no going back and the person will have achieved a form of false immortality, although as we know now, they can be killed by decapitating the head or driving an aspen wood stake through their heart. Another method, if the opportunity arises, is to simply burn them away using a magnifying glass and the sun just like burning ants in the playground. A Vampire’s body becomes more and more like paper the older they get, with some of the more ancient vampires bearing almost translucent skin, making them highly flammable; all that’s needed is a little heat and there’d be nothing left but ash. Due to this incredibly dry skin, a dead Vampire will be incinerated the second the sunlight touches it’s corpse, making cleaning up after a hunt quick and easy.

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