The Fifteen Strangers Mods (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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15strangers2018-07-15 08:49 pm
strangerpeople) wrote in 15strangers2018-07-15 08:49 pm
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.]
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[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.
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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.]
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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.
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[That poor friend is having so many problems probably.]
What was wrong with the photo?
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We met a man - well, a ghost, but he kept his mind after he died. That, uh... that doesn't usually happen, if you don't have ghosts either. Anyway, he trapped himself in the Castle, hoping someone would come along he could help to finish what he'd started. He'd been a hunter, but he failed, and... he was the one in the picture with those two.
I feel like I'm just talking at you, almost. I mean, this all sounds pretty crazy, right?
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[Yeah, she can’t really deny that.]
But, to be honest, the entire situation we’re in sounds crazy. I mean, we’ve traveled through time, you from 1944 and me from 1960, purely so that we have to be in this dome place that might be in space, where a lady with the world’s most annoying voice is telling us to kill each other if we want to go home. Not to mention the people from all sorts of different worlds, including a guy that I’m still afraid might be a demon.
So, in comparison, it’s still kind of believable.
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[There's a wry sadness in his voice, even though the smile on his face is genuine.]
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Yeah, pretty much.
At least most of the people here are nice. We could be stuck with a bunch of jerks.
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[His voice trails off, but after a short silence - ]
If it's not something you'd rather forget about... what'd you do before here? Just school, or... what?
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But...when I was younger, there was one thing that was more interesting.
[She’s not really sure if he wants to hear her...complain? Reminisce? Talk about her past and be sad, really.]
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It sounds... really nice, honestly. Calm, if you can be when you've got brothers... not that I do, but stories travel....
What was that other thing, though?
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Then the rest of the town found out about him and, well...you know that saying about judging a book by it’s cover? They did it hard.
So the town goes into a mob to kill Bigfoot, and he just tries to defend himself, while the little girl just tries to make things better. Bigfoot ends up killing a couple villagers, sadly, before the rest of them manage to kill him. Then the little girl yells at them, shaming them for making it get physical, before going home with her parents to leave the rest of the town to think about what they’ve done.
[She blinks a second after finishing, seeming to realize what just happened.]
Oh, sorry. I kind of...ramble a little bit when I talk about that.
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[He's not teasing with that.]
So that's why you asked about whether or not we know about a real one, then?
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Exactly. The idea of meeting a real Bigfoot instead of another guy in a costume is just, well, cool.
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[Yeti, on the other hand, are a different animal entirely.]
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