WEEK 1

[strangerpeople]

WEEK 1

[Well, this is...happening. This is a thing. This is your life now. The Commander is expecting you to just up and kill one another, and then try to get away with it. No big deal, right? You guys can handle this. You won't fall for what she has. She's clearly an idiot. A loud idiot, but still an idiot. She's not going to get one over you.

...Right?

In any case, the Commander's quarters are now open for anyone who decides they can actually stand to be in the same room as her, but beware - any favor you might ask of her is going to come at a price, and who knows what she'll ask you to do if you decide to gain a boon from her. Unless you're a suck-up like Baku - then she'll apparently be flattered. Maybe that's a good tactic to use?


Whatever you do, try not to murder the bread again. The Bread Did Nothing Wrong.


There are fifteen strangers in this place.]



MONDAY | TUESDAY | WEDNESDAY | THURSDAY | FRIDAY | SATURDAY

Comments

[backuphero]

Sorry, didn't mean to startle you! Looks like we had the same idea, sort of... weird question, what year was it before you woke up here?

[earietale]

It's fine. I probably should've been paying attention to everything around me a bit more.

[Yeah, considering you're being told to murder each other and stuff.]

1960. Don't worry, I think it's not that weird, considering at least two guy are saying it's the twenty-first century.

[backuphero]

I only met one, but I haven't been asking everybody I could have... and there's another one says he's from the fifteenth century. Nineteen-sixty, though, you're only sixteen years out... we're time neighbors, or something!

[He smiles, but "paying attention to everything" wasn't anything he'd done either.]

You might've noticed more than I did yesterday, once that harpy started taunting us all I just lost it.

[earietale]

Wait, that means...1944? Weird, since that's actually the year I was born.

[Like, what are the odds of that?]

Yeah, I kind of figured out quickly that things weren't the same, after an...um...incident.

[She doesn't like talking about the bread she murdered.]

[backuphero]

[Rest in pieces, bread, we hardly knew ye...]

I'd ask, but in this place I figure you'd admit it if you wanted anybody to know...

And yeah, '44. That is a weird coincidence.

[And puts her right at the same age as his best friend, who isn't here, and ow. There's even smaller odds at play here than he's letting on, unless he just winced.

...he totally did.]

[earietale]

Yeah...do you think it means anything? Or is it actually just a coincidence?

[She could believe there was some bigger picture here, but she's also pretty sure she's never seen or heard of you before? It really could just be a random coincidence for all she knows.]

[backuphero]

Who knows? There doesn't seem to be any kind of pattern as to who got thrown in here. We're definitely not all from the same part of the world....

[earietale]

Good point. It feels like it's entirely random, and with that Commander lady the way she is, it probably actually is.

[I.E. She is not smart enough to think of having them all be connected in some way.]

I'm Barbara Finch, by the way. It's nice to meet you.

[Yeah, she kind of just remembered that she doesn't know you, so she thought that it's probably introduction time.]

[backuphero]

Jonathan Morris. Pleasure's all mine.

[He smiles, and makes a gesture as though he's tipping an imaginary hat.]

Honestly, I don't think Frau Commandant had any say in us showing up here. She said this was the most important job she'd ever been given, right? That means she's got bosses somewhere.

[earietale]

[Well, now she has to do a curtsie with an imaginary dress, otherwise she'll feel like she's being rude.]

Really? I didn't notice that. It definitely makes it sound like she's answering to someone else. But I can't help but wonder who else in the future would want something like this to happen. As well as make it happen.

[Time travel really shouldn't be possible, she's pretty sure? At least it shouldn't be used for this.]

[backuphero]

I wish I didn't have any idea, but... the kind of powers it'd take to pull people through space and time don't usually go hand in hand with "being a decent person", where I'm from. The who doesn't interest me so much as the how, and especially "how do we get out of this mess".

[He is really, really hoping this doesn't involve SPACE VAMPIRES, okay, but he's not about to drop that on somebody he was just introduced to, either.]

[earietale]

I agree. I don't think the who matters if none of us knew them before. I just hope we can find a way home somehow.

But, wait...have you...dealt with jerks that could pull people through time and space before?

[Go ahead and drop that bombshell on her. It can't be much worse then murdering bread with space lasers.]

[backuphero]

You're probably not going to believe me, but... I don't like talking about my father, and he only told me about this once, so if it doesn't make much sense, that's why.

His best friend apparently told him that he'd been pulled out of time himself, once. He fought his way past a lot of heroes from our past, and eventually had to defeat something called a "Time Reaper", from ten thousand years in the future. It had torn a rift in time itself, and... not even Dracula had that kind of power. But he said killing the thing fixed that and sent everyone home. If it's one of those... God, there might be somebody watching us to see who's left if we all turn on each other, to find out who's "strongest".

[In hindsight, namedropping Dracula like he's a real person probably isn't the most overwhelming piece of this.

Worse yet, it's all actual canon, so much as a single route through a fighting game in story mode can be.]

[earietale]

[Despite the more...eccentric parts of the story, Barbara listens carefully. It takes her a minute to respond, but when she does, she seems fairly calm.]

I'll admit, it's a lot to take in, and some of it is a little hard to believe, but...I think I believe you. I mean, we've already traveled through time and space and got put in this mess. The idea that there's a world where Dracula is real and stuff like that happens doesn't sound...too crazy. I just hope that you don't turn out to be right.

[Cause, compared to you, she is not the strongest person in here.]

[backuphero]

So do I. Something like that, fighting it while having to protect people, too... I don't even want to think about it.

[He falls silent for a moment, obviously thinking about it anyway, but then brightens up.]

So Mr. Stoker's book is just a novel, where you're from? I mean, officially that's what it is where I'm from, he had to condense a lot of things and cut some stuff out, but....

[earietale]

Yeah, it was all a book on my world. Then we also got a movie that was pretty good. But it's all fiction. Probably a good thing, since I'm not sure how well some people could handle actual vampires.

[There would probably be several people that died of fright.]

But, now I have to ask...does your world have werewolves? Or Bigfoot? Or, I guess...do they have more supernatural creatures then just Dracula? Or is he the only one?

[backuphero]

Werewolves, yes, though the ones in America aren't the same as in Europe. Bigfoot... I'll be honest, I got no idea. Haven't really been out in the Pacific Northwest.

So... yeah. Some stuff's just stories, but there's a lot that's really out there.

[It says something about his upbringing that he's now completely relaxed while talking about folkloric monsters most people would be afraid of.]

[earietale]

Darn. I was hoping I might be able to see a real Bigfoot if I ever got to see your world.

Still, I guess it's sort of cool to see world where monsters are real. As long as some aren't as...deadly.

[She's thinking that there's got to be one that's not so bad? Maybe?]

[backuphero]

[He can pick up on that thread easy enough, at least. And there's at least one he knows of for sure....]

There are stories about Dracula's son, who turned against his father. His mother was human - I'm not sure if this is a part I got told because my mother's a doctor, but the way I heard it, she met Dracula because she'd heard he could teach her real science, so she could heal people. Turned out he wasn't so dead as to be immune to a charming lady, and inevitably they got married, had a kid.

It... turns into a sad story. Do you want to hear the whole thing, or should I just skip ahead to the parts my ancestors are in?

[earietale]

Maybe...skip the sad parts, if they have death in them. If you could, please.

[Nobody wants to hear about death right now unless necessary.]

[backuphero]

Yeah, I... I can work around that.

[He definitely understands that. It's going to be pretty obvious as this tale is told that Jonathan is quoting pieces of it from someone else's telling...]

So he grew up, and a wide gap grew between the son and the father. They came to blows over it - junior believed that humans had a hard enough lot in life and didn't deserve to be punished for it, and his father thought they should be wiped out, because they had taken one of the few bright things in his dark life away from him.

Another one of those bright things walked away, and threw away the name his parents had given him in favor of flipping his father's name backwards to show his disdain for him. When my... really ridiculous number of greats grandfather Trevor met him, he went by Alucard. He couldn't stand to see what his father intended to do to the whole world unleashed on - well, it's Romania now, it was Wallachia back then. They fought side-by-side, along with a witch and a young nobleman who insisted he was either a pirate or an acrobat or both, and that was the first time the Belmont family sealed Dracula away.

Alucard sealed himself away, then, though all three of his companions begged him to stay. The weight of what he'd done was just too much to bear... so he missed the next few times his father popped back out of the coffin. He woke up in 1797, because something had gone very wrong with that generation's Belmont scion, and he'd promised Trevor he'd wake up if his family needed him to.

[And just when it sounds like he was really getting started, Jonathan stops abruptly.]

The next part's sad, but not death-sad, it's people-getting-possessed-so-it-looks-like-they-went-crazy sad. Should I go around that, too?

[earietale]

[Darn, just when it was getting good! She looked like she was really invested up to that point. But she can't help but be lost in thought for a second before answering.]

I don't think that's...as bad as actually going crazy, so I'm gonna say keep it in.

[backuphero]

All right.

[He nods, and takes a deep breath before starting back up.]

So... right. 1797. Up to that point, Dracula's Castle only manifested about once every century. That time, though... it had shown up a few years before when a corrupted priest and his followers resurrected Dracula, and kidnapped a bunch of women. Richter Belmont fought his way through to free all of them, killed the evil priest, and defeated Dracula, but then something went really, really wrong.

Somehow the priest's spirit stayed behind, and... it took a few years to get control of him, but then Richter vanished and the Castle reappeared. It kind of... without its master there, it sort of implodes? I haven't seen it happen yet myself, but that's one thing pretty much every legend and written account agrees on. So he vanished, and Alucard's father's Castle reappeared, and that's what he woke up to. He'd promised he'd be the one to help if the Belmonts needed him, so he went to investigate.

When he got there, it seemed like business as usual for storming the place. Monsters everywhere, some that recognized him and some that didn't, some that were friendly towards him and some that weren't. There was another hunter there, though, her name was Maria Renard. It's not clear if she was actually related to Richter or if she'd just kind of been adopted, but she'd come there looking for the man she called her brother. She was a perfectly normal human, somewhere around seventeen, and Alucard looked only a few years older, so she treated him like an equal...

[He stops speaking and smiles.]

And he had no clue how to deal with that.

Everybody assumes they fell in love at first sight or something, there's like three novels and a movie where they do, but all we know for sure is that he was worse with girls than anybody and they were pretty constant companions once they'd freed Richter. They did, of course, though they didn't fight side by side to do it. Most of the legends agree that Maria was basically acting like a lookout for Alucard, going ahead and figuring out what he'd need to do if she couldn't clear a pathway herself. In the end, she knew she couldn't bring herself to fight her own brother - could hardly believe he'd declared himself master of the castle - so she gave Alucard a charm that'd let him see through illusions.

He was able to see and take down the evil priest, then, and Richter recovered his senses... but once he'd managed to get them both out from where they'd fought, it was obvious something was wrong. The one thing every story agrees on is that a second castle appeared, and that was where Alucard had to go to fight his father. Nobody knows for sure what happened between them, there, but he returned, and both castles fell to ruins. He would have left by himself, probably gone to sleep again, but Maria followed him after making sure Richter was going to be all right.

Like I said, they were traveling companions for a long time. There's a family in Spain that claims her as a kind of ancestor, and they pass a spear down through their eldest children that might well be Alucard's own. It's named after him, and my father's best friend carried it into battle when they fought together. Apparently he had Alucard hand it off to him directly when he was a kid.

He's still out there, somewhere. Just vampire enough to never age past twenty, just human enough that the sun won't ever kill him. Could be kind of a sad life, but... trust me on this, hunters gossip worse than cops, and from the stories that make it over to the States he's made the best of it. I think maybe he promised somebody he wasn't going to sleep through history again.

[He looks uncharacteristically thoughtful, for a moment, then shakes it off.]

So for whatever reason, 1797 broke the "once a century" pattern. There were three resurrections between 1830 and 1860, one in 1897, one in 1917, and then... well, about two years ago, but the Church couldn't get anybody in to investigate until me and... my partner, in 1944.

[earietale]

[She is paying close attention as he tells the tale. It’s pretty interesting, even if it's completely different from the original story of Dracula. And it even had a bit of a happy ending!

Well, until that last part.]

Wait, don’t tell me that...they took you before you could do anything there? You just...disappeared in front of your friend before going in?

[And she thought Rick was having a bad time.]

[backuphero]

[Hey, he can try to explain the 1897 incident, with his grandfather and the Harkers and Lord Godalming and that whole group, she just needs to ask!

But oh, that's a maybe even heavier question she just did ask.]

Well, it's a little better but a little worse than that. We made it in all right, started investigating like we were supposed to, and it turned out Dracula wasn't running things. Apparently the anguish of the people this war's killed was enough to call the Castle into being on its own. Some crazy vampire "artist" named Brauner had moved in, and brought his daughters with him. The last thing I remember is looking at this locket one of them dropped after we fought, her sister stepped in and they escaped, but... the photograph in it didn't make any sense.