The Meeting Part:2, "Chantry Raid"
8/21/24
I'll update here periodically. Check the main page or The Captain's log for updates.
8/21/24
It had been difficult. Lord in heaven, had it been difficult. There had been the matter of finding vampires to interrogate. There had been the further complication of not killing them, and then the still greater hurdle of finding a way to interrogate them that would actually work. Professor Perseus was not a stupid man. Just killing them, as satisfying as it might be, wouldn't get him anywhere. It was an ungentlemanly thing to do in any case. He'd take his time with it and do it properly. Give them the courtesy they were owed.
Leads on his father's death proved mostly fruitless, despite his best efforts. His mother's was a different matter. Under the right conditions, they readily admitted to what they had done to her. It had been a slow torture. The point it seemed, was to drive the poor woman mad from misery and fear. Keep her from talking. Wait until she was at her lowest. Then they killed her. Under different circumstances, it might have been a mercy. The Professor didn't see it that way. He made them repay her suffering in kind. And, like rats on a sinking ship, they attempted to get out. They gave out names. Names he could, and did, trace between other adventures. They all lead like a river into the sea to Houston, and more specifically to a place called "North Houston Medical Research Institute".
From the outside it seemed normal enough. The place was a large, brick building in three sections, four stories tall. A quiet place on the northern edge of the city, apparently dedicated to the research and treatment of rare diseases. Bars on most of the upper windows, big iron and brick wall around the grounds, it was a private institution that wanted to remain private. Evidently that was why people came and went at odd intervals. Some would come in, and not come back out. Some came in, and left in an entirely different state then when they entered. And the place seemed most active at night.
Years of interrogation, observations, and careful research had taken Professor Perseus far. Getting into the building had been easier than he thought. Gates and doors matter little when reality can become putty in your hands. They matter less when you shimmy in through an unbarred window. The ivy on the walls had also been of help, making climbing into the second story window an easy enough task.
It was the middle of the night. Why he had chosen to climb in then and not during the day was simple. He needed to know where the records were. There had to be a paper trail concerning his father's death. He had names on his mother's death, and since the two were connected, if he could link them to his father's death, it would be all the proof he needed. He could finally bring justice to the bastards that killed his parents. Mad Morris's vengeance would be complete. But a regular, human employee wouldn't know where those records were kept. That knowledge was the special providence of vampires and their ghouls. And those only came out at night.
He surveyed his surroundings. The room was some kind of meeting room, as he had gleaned from the outside. Save for several chairs and a long table, it was empty. The light was on in the hallway, and he could see people walk by from the shadows that passed underneath the door. Approaching it with catlike silence, Professor Perseus steeled his nerve and waited, gun drawn. He would need to take his target by surprise. Mage or no, he was still a fairly ordinary man in terms of physicality. Even if he was hardly weak, he was in fact not a match for most ghouls, let alone a real vampire. The door opened into the room, and he cracked it ever so slightly. An ordinary looking fellow in a lab coat passed by. Ordinary, except for the thin trickle of blood that stained the corner of his mouth. The Professor had his target.
With the quickness of a trapdoor spider, he seized the man and dragged him into the darkened room. The man tried to fight, but found a gun pressed to his temple.
"Ghoul, or vampire?"The Professor asked; voice low and measured. The man in the lab coat twitched nervously. He was cold to the touch as an unmarked grave.
"Ghoul?"the man replied. The lie was a plain as the blood on his mouth.
"Wrong answer."Professor Perseus cocked his pistol. The vampire froze. Perseus spoke again. "Don't worry. I'll ask another. Tell me where the clan records are kept."
"If you shoot me, everyone in this building will hear it."The Vampire hissed. "And then we'll do things to you that will make you wish for death." Perseus was unfazed. "I assure you, they will not. This is no ordinary pistol. Inside it is a light as powerful as the sun. You'd be ashes in a second. There'd be no sound."His response was cold as ice.
The vampire tried to writhe away from the gun again. "I'll scream."
"Not if I shoot you first."Perseus said, pressing the gun into the bloodsucker's skull harder.
"You wouldn't dare."The vampire growled.
"I would."It was with those words that the vampire summoned his strength and pushed the Professor toward the wall. The leech wriggled out of his grasp, but Perseus was quick on his feet, and sprang up toward the door, blocking it with his body. He fired a single shot, and white light filled the room for a split second. The vampire beheld with terror as the light shot past his left shoulder, narrowly missing as he ducked. He backed up against the wall opposite the door, near the end of the long table.
Perseus leveled his pistol at him, recocking it. "Try that again and I won't miss."
The vampire chuckled. "Idiot."He said. "If you shoot me, I won't be able to tell you anything. How will you get your information then?"Even in the dark of the room, the smirk on his face was plain. The tension in the air was as thick as the humid summer night.
Perseus's face had a hard look on it when he spoke. "Well, I suppose I'll just have to find another vampire to ask. And if need be, I'll kill every last one in this Chantry, one at a time. After that, trial and error will lead me to what I'm lookin' for."He held his aim. The air was utterly glacial. Even time seemed to pass more slowly.
The vampire looked underneath the table for a split second before responding. "You don't have the guts or the bullets for that."
The Professor had seen the glance, dark as the room was. He needed to finish this. "This thing doesn't run out of ammo it doesn't need."He advanced toward his target.
Even in the gloom, the vampire looked panicked. He locked eyes with the Professor. "What do you need me for then?"The Vampire's voice was a desperate steel edge. If Perseus fired, he would dive beneath the table, and then head for the door. It would only work if there was enough of a gap and it was closing.
Professor Perseus spoke again. "This is faster. Where is it?"
The gap was almost gone. The gun was pointed at his forehead. The vampire swallowed, and then replied. "Ground floor. Back hallway, near the side stairwell."The words had barely escaped his lips when he dove under the table.
Perseus wheeled around and then fired. The light shot straight through the table and into undead flesh, a brief flash illuminating a puff of ash. The vampire didn't emerge from the other side. The Professor glanced underneath. All that could be found was a pile of ash and now rather dusty lab coat. He fished it out, dusted it off and put it on. He then edged silently back toward the door and listened for almost a minute. Nothing.
Gun drawn, quick and silent, he emerged into the hallway. He had a general idea of where the stairwells and hallways were from a copy of building plans he found at a library. What he was unsure of was how accurate they were. Twice he ducked into hall closets at the sound of approaching footsteps or distant voices. Twice second guessed where the back hallway was and twice he waited before rounding a corner. He made himself seem inconspicuous as he passed by lighted doors with windows of frosted glass. He found the back stairwell, and found it empty. He descended, quick and quiet. It let out into a ground floor hallway, where a door opposite read "Record Keeping". After checking to see if the coast was well and truly clear, Perseus went to it. It was unlocked. The light inside was on. He cracked the door, slowly and silently, gun still drawn. There was a woman inside, her back to the door and bent over a filing cabinet.
Perseus stopped for a moment. She looked ordinary, but so did most vampires. Ghouls too. She turned slightly, moving to a different cabinet. A pair of keys hung from her neck on a lanyard. He got an idea.
Holstering his gun, Professor Perseus walked a short ways back down the hallway. Then went back forward, losing all pretense of stealth, save for his hat, pulled over his face slightly. He entered the room causally and quickly, keeping his face out of sight as much as possible. She barely looked up.
"Good evening, Doctor."She sounded bored. "I'm guessing you're in a hurry tonight?"She asked, not looking up from her work.
Perseus dropped his voice slightly before speaking. He was attempting to imitate the man he'd shot upstairs. "Something like that."He replied, trying to look busy and inconspicuous. He looked from cabinet to cabinet. They were all unlabeled. He reached for the handle of one, and discovered quite quickly that it wouldn't open. Locked. He tried another. It rattled noisily. Also locked. He tried not to panic. It was imperative that he keep his cool. It was only then that he realized that the woman was looking right at him. "This was a horrible idea."He thought. She looked him up and down before she spoke. His back was still to her.
"Did you leave your key upstairs?"She asked. "Or did they forget to give you one again?"a wave of relief washed over him.
"You know how it is."Perseus replied. He thought he heard her chuckle.
"Tell you what."She said, marginally less boredom in her voice. "I'll lend you mine if you give it back to me when you're done. I'll leave it on the table."Perhaps this wasn't such a bad idea after all.
"Thank you kindly."He replied. The woman was busy scooping up a series of folders from the table. When she spoke again, she sounded a little surprised.
"You know, you look different without your goggles. I didn't know they'd let you out already either. Last time you were in there for almost eight months. It's only been three."The relief left his body like scattering rats. He steeled his nerve and put a hand on his backup weapon: a bowie knife. The gun may have only worked on certain types of people, but the knife was a much more egalitarian weapon. Even so, he wasn't sure if she was a vampire or not, and either way, she was still a member of the fairer sex. It was time for one last try at diplomacy, or at least play-acting.
"Has it?"he tried to sound a bit confused, which given that he had no idea what she was talking about, was not a difficult task. "You could've fooled me. It felt like I was in there for a year, let alone three months. I lost track of time."
She shrugged. "Makes sense."She didn't sound as bored as before. "Anyway, I'm glad they let you out. You make this place much more interesting."She was definitely looking at him. There was nothing flirtatious in her voice. Hers was the voice of an aloof, esteemed patron who has heard her favorite travelling jester is back in town. Professor Perseus tried for a moment to make sense of her strange remarks, but she turned to leave before he could do so. Just as well. "Keys are on the table."She continued that strange mischief still in her voice. "Nice hat by the way."She left and shut the door.
He had no time to puzzle over what the woman had said. He took the keys from the table. His first action was to lock the door, then turn out the lights. He would need time and no disturbances to find what he came here for. Key in one hand, flashlight in the other, he set to work. The first several drawers were mostly full of various academic files, logs of experiments mostly; and ordered in some obscure system that only an academic could parse. Some were quite ordinary, others grisly and disturbing. He leafed through them over the course of nearly thirty minutes. He was skimming a folder on a particularly nasty one wherein the limits of a human body were being tested via blood sorcerery when he came across the line "For a full list of involved personnel, see personnel/persons of interest files in adjacent storage."He shone his light around the room. There was, indeed, a second door on the same side of the room as the one the woman had been working at. It was unlabeled. It did not take a professor's intellect to figure out where the files were, nor to figure out that that was what the second key on the lanyard unlocked.
The second room was smaller and much older. There were far fewer cabinets in here. The only other furniture in the spartan little room was a rather large crate. No windows either, and the door only locked from the outside. Upon inspecting the internal contents of the cabinets, it was clear these were much more simply organized, alphabetized by last name. He looked for the "M"section, and found very quickly a somewhat thick folder labeled "Morris, Q". Jackpot.
Prize in hand, he made for the door, but a sound stopped him. Someone had opened the door to adjacent room and turned on the lights. He crouched, turned out his flashlight, and put his hand on his gun. He heard footsteps, then voices.
One was the woman from before. "Professor, I told you, I let him borrow the keys because I thought you sent him down here on an errand!"She was much more frantic now, apologetic.
A man's voice spoke next, southern and aristocratic. "Well, that is very strange; considering he isn't supposed to be out here at all!"There was a slight growl to his tone. "What manner of fool are you, that you would think I'd let the likes of him out early; let alone trust him with this kind of errand?!"there was a string of rather unbecoming oaths from the man, and the sound of the woman being slapped repeatedly. Perseus felt bad for her, vampire or not.
He heard her walk a few steps away from the man. "If anyone would tell me about these things it wouldn't be an issue!"She snapped back. "Besides, I don't know where he went!"
He then heard the man sigh audibly, then continue to berate the woman, while also explaining to her that the fugitive they were in search of, the man that she had clearly mistaken Perseus for, couldn't have gone far.
There was no way out of the storage room that wasn't past that man. The Professor backed himself up against the crate, gun at the ready. To his surprise, the crate moved rather easily. It was as though it was on a set of sliders. He stood up and pushed it the other way as the audible sound of the man and the woman arguing with one another continued. It revealed a trapdoor.
8/21/24
This is a real story. This actually happened to me. I have told it to several people on several different occasions and they will all tell you that it's always the same. I'm finally writing down because I feel like this is as good a time as any to do that. As a bit of a warning, this story has a lot of preamble; the actual encounter isn't very long at all.
To understand this story and why what happened frightened me so much, you must understand my circumstances at the time. I was living in my father's house and going to college. At the time, I was on summer break. I worked part time at a grocery store, where I usually worked the closing shift at the deli counter. Since the store closed rather late, I wasn't usually home until after dark, usually a bit after 10:30 pm. This obviously meant I had to drive home in the dark.
I should also explain some things about my father's neighborhood and how it's laid out. My father's house is on what either a very small mountain or a very big hill, near-ish the top. The house is one of several on that side of mountain in a suburb. The houses are laid out in streets that run more or less parallel to each other, though the gaps between streets widens significantly as you go further up the mountain. These gaps are filled by patches of woodland, which we will come back to momentarily.
Another feature that is important here is that all these parallel streets are connected via series of small back roads, which will connect these streets to the one next to them, but not always the one next to the other. The reason for this was the main connecting feature, a long street that intersected all the paralleled streets. This made these little back roads only occasionally useful. The final feature I must discuss here is a small creek. I am unsure if this was a natural creek or some manmade contrivance, but it ran around the foot of the mountain and for some its length under the big connecting road between two of the parallel streets, in the little patch of wood between them.
These little patches of woodland meant that wildlife was a very common sight. There were birds, squirrels, rabbits, raccoons, possums, the very occasional and rare coyote, and deer; dozens and dozens of deer. They were by far the most common large herbivore in the area, probably by merit of being the only ones. With few natural predators, they were almost absurd in their abundance and variety. I had the luck once of seeing a little white fawn with its mother, but most of my more unusual sightings weren't quite so magical. Most of the more unusual deer sightings I had were very old, very injured, or very sick. In a crueler but much healthier ecosystem, wolves or other predators would have eaten these poor animals a long time ago, and it would have been a mercy to them. These were animals with tumors, infested with ticks to the point of severe disease, or with injuries so bad they could barely walk. Any sensible predator would see this and think lunch. But with none around, there was nothing to be done about it. The worst was the ones with CWD.
If you've ever seen a deer with CWD, it's an awful thing. First and foremost, since it's a prion disease, it only becomes obvious once the poor creature is close to dying anyway. Their brain, which isn't terribly big to start with, becomes riddled with holes and they start behaving strangely. They forget to eat, they walk in the same circle for hours. They try to drown themselves, they forget they're meant to be afraid of people and cars and roads. And if you see one of them, the worst thing is the eyes.
Deer aren't very smart animals. You look into the eyes of a normal deer and you see very little behind them. There's not much in the way of real thought in there, no real understanding. They're just deer. But if you see one with CWD and you look them in the eye, you'll see something in there. They're afraid. You'll see this injured, drooling, skeleton of an animal stumbling around in the same circle they've been walking in for hours; if you look them in the eye, you'll see that something in there understands that something is wrong. They don't understand what it is, but they know something is wrong and they're afraid. It's a horrible, familiar animal fear. Something unknowable is happening to you, and you are afraid. There's nothing that can be done but to wait to die. CWD has no cure but death. And even in death, the prions spread from the body and into the environment.
I say all this so that you understand something: What I saw was NOT a deer with CWD. I know what those act and look like. I don't think it was a deer with a severe deformity or disease either. I also know what those look and act like. I understand how biology works; I have a degree in it. This thing wasn't a deer. I don't know what it was, but it wasn't a deer.
The summer I saw it, I was driving home from work one night. The little creek under the big connecting road had run high in recent rains and taken out part of the road. In order to get home, I had to take one of the little back roads. I stopped at stop sign in front of someone's house. I saw what I thought was a deer standing front of the door and acting very strangely.
Its back was to me, and it was moving its head and neck like it was trying to get a good look at the inside of the house through the glass part of the door. That was why I lingered at the stop sign; deer don't normally act like that. Something didn't seem right about its proportions. The legs were a little wrong, and something about the shape of the torso felt off to me. It wasn't underweight or anything, I didn't notice any ribs. But the torso had a leaner taper to it than a deer, and the legs looked just barely too long. The ears were off too, just a bit too small. Then it turned around.
The face was wrong. Deeply, horribly wrong. The eyes were in the wrong place. They weren't quite completely on the front of the face, but weren't all the way on the side either, where they should have been. The mouth wasn't really right either. Something about the proportions of it just didn't fit with the face. But those eyes, those red eyes were so much worse. There was an intelligent malevolence behind them. It looked at me, MADE EYE CONTACT WITH ME. It looked into my eyes like it not only knew what a car was, but that it was angry that I was in one and therefore couldn't get to me. And it maintained that same, horrible malevolent glare as it crept along the side of the house and into the backyard. It moved like you took a big cat and put it on stilts. It wasn't awkward and slow but graceful the way deer are. It was swift and deliberate; it moved like a predator that knew where best to step to make the least amount of noise. And in a few seconds, It was gone behind the house. I had kept eye contact with it as long as I could. I felt like I just couldn't look away from the sheer wrongness of it.
I drove rest of the way home, slow at first and not daring to look in my mirrors in case it was still there. Then as fast as possible once I had made the turn up on to the road towards my father's house. Because of the way my father's neighborhood is structured, it meant that when that thing entered the back yard behind the house I first saw it in front of, it was only a short walk up the mountain and through the patchy woods towards my father's house. It might have taken someone at most 20 minutes to walk through the uneven terrain, but something like that thing could have easy made it in a bit more than five. I got there in three. I sprinted inside, locked the doors, closed the curtains and made an effort to stay away from the windows. I tried to calm myself down and get ready for bed. I ate a bowl of cereal. I reasoned to myself that what I had seen was a deer with some kind of disease or deformity. But as a brushed my teeth that night, I realized something that I had overlooked. Deer don't have blood red eye shine like that thing did.
8/21/24
They called him "Percy" when he was a boy. It made things easier. In fact, apart from that strange and singular misadventure with the Westenra girl, her friends, and the vampire; Dr. Quincy Perseus Morris II had never gone by his first name at all. It felt like it didn't belong to him, not really.
The name had been his father's first, doctoral prefix and all. He'd never had the chance to meet the man; he'd died before he was born. An accident during a dig, his grandfather had told him. He was six then. He had been nine and his mother quite dead when he found out his father's coffin was empty. They hadn't been able to recover the body. They couldn't find it. That was what his grandmother told him. She had also always remarked on just how much he looked like his father. He didn't care for it, but he couldn't blame her then, and he didn't now. He'd only seen the man in photographs, but the resemblance was unmistakable, and it had only grown to be closer with age. The same square jaw line, the same large, round eyes, the same nose with the same bump in the bridge; they were all there. There were some differences, he reassured himself. His freckles were in different spots. He wore his facial hair differently. His messy, sandy colored hair stayed put when he put it under a hat. Not even that was his originally. It had been the only bit of his father that had been recovered from that terrible accident.
How do you not find a body at the bottom of a pit? He had thought that often as a youth. It didn't make sense. A lot about his life and his father's death didn't make sense at that age, leaving boyhood and not yet entering being a man. He had seen his father only in photographs. There was the big one of him and mother on their wedding day. The man in the photo, messy pale hair and all, had a wide, almost comical grin on his face, his bushy mustache hardly concealing it at all. He wore a similar grin in every other picture. It was like a cruel joke to Percy. His father had been a good humored man, people said; a friend to everyone, not an enemy in the world. He couldn't hate his father, not really. It didn't make sense.
That grin felt mocking as the boy's ascent to manhood wore on. He began to truly resemble his father. Not just his father, but his father as he had been when he died. When the old hat actually fit his head, around the age of sixteen, he had tried to put the whole thing out of his mind. He had by then asked his family about it. His grandfather had told him it was probably for the best. His grandmother had told him it would be better for him to leave unhappy memories behind. His other grandmother, the one who had been his father's mother, the one who had told him how he looked just like his father, had felt differently.
She'd known something. She had to have. She had this way of sensing when things weren't right, when they didn't make sense. He'd gotten that same way from her, and his father must have too. Perhaps if he'd heeded it that rainy night in east Texas, he would have gotten to meet him. All his grandmother had told him was this:
"It's a terrible thing to ignore when something is wrong. It's even worse to forget when something is right."
She had been right, of course. He tried to ignore it. He went travelling. He wanted to see the world, to go on an adventure before he settled down and went to school. He wasn't sure what he wanted to study, and it would be a good diversion.
Misadventure seemed to find the young man wherever he went, but he always made it out alright. First to South America, then to Europe, and finally England. He was eighteen by then, and he could grow a real mustache, and looked more like his father than ever.
But it was different in England than it was at home. No mocking, Cheshire grin in a dead man's photograph here. Here, his face felt like it belonged to him. Here, he could just be Quincy Morris. Not Percy, which he had outgrown by then. Not Mr. Morris, unless he had to be formal about things. Quincy was what the Westenra girl had called him. He'd even seen her blush a time or two at the mention of his name. It had been what her friends had called him too; Mina, Jonathan and the others. It felt nice. He'd been their friend and they'd been his friends too. It was like a shadow had gone from his life.
Maybe he'd marry the girl; go to college, settle down with her somewhere far away from Texas, or at least far enough away from Austin and Waco that no one would know about him or his family history. Maybe he wouldn't; maybe he'd just keep travelling. His family had the money for it. Become one of those gentleman adventurer types and write books about it when he got old and tired. Those had seemed like good ideas when he put them down in his mind.
The incident with the vampire had changed that. The girl was dead; and technically, so was he. They'd all seen him die.
When he woke, injured and in pain but very much alive, he felt different. His last thought had been how he wasn't going to just give up and die; and here he was. He had somehow cheated death. The injuries the vampire had inflicted on him would have killed almost any man from the blood loss alone. He should have died. Quincy Morris should be dead. Quincy Morris had given his life to kill Dracula and to save his friends. Quincy Morris was dead. But he was still right there. He thought of what his grandmother had said.
He realized his friends had sent his body to a hospital after he "died". Meant for it be embalmed and cleaned up, he guessed. He informed a nearby nurse, who had initially panicked at the sight of an allegedly dead man sitting up on the slab, that there had been a mistake. He only had a few cuts, some nasty bruises and a broken rib, he wasn't dead at all. She said he had been dead for three days. He said she could feel his pulse if she wanted to for proof, and there it was. They soon gave him his things and sent him on his way. His waistcoat and the shirt underneath had been ruined by a baseball-sized bloodstain, and there were tears in his trousers, but that hat, that damnable hat that had once been his father's was just fine. It didn't make sense.
He let them think he was dead, and went home to Texas. He didn't tell anyone about the vampire, or the girl. It was easier that way. He needed answers. He began looking into it, all of it. It became his pet obsession in college. His father's death, the disappearing body, his mother's death from a sickness no one could explain, all the little coincidences in his life that didn't quite add up. It would have been a wonder that he graduated, and a miracle that he got his doctorate, if those same such little coincidences didn't keep piling up.
Things just had a way of going his way. Assignments seemed to materialize out of thin air that he didn't remember writing; tests and quizzes seemed written just for him to get a perfect grade on. When he ran track for a year, he won almost every meet, and recalled almost none of it. He couldn't even remember writing his thesis. Friends told him later he'd written the whole thing in just three hours, barely edited it, and then defended it a day later. That was how he earned his doctorate.
It wasn't just in school either. Women just seemed drawn to him in a way they weren't before. He'd think of how he'd like to get to know a girl and a perfect opportunity would suddenly present itself. It all just seemed to fall at his feet, and he did well. Even so, there were things that didn't work as well as they should have; none of the girls stayed for long, and neither did he. It didn't make sense. It wasn't just that it all felt easy; it felt improbable, impossible, and unnatural. Like a miracle that was also a lie, or at least only half of a truth. But then there was one night where things finally made perfect sense.
He'd been walking home, halfway between tipsy and disappointed from a rendezvous with a beautiful young lady who turned out to only be interested in his money, when he heard the unmistakable sound of her scream. He did, of course, what was expected of a proper southern gentleman, and got out his gun as he ran toward the noise. He found the poor maiden in the clawed grasp of a vile creature, that from his experience, he knew unmistakably was a vampire. Claws, fangs, and glowing red eyes told him as much. The bloodsucker stopped and stared. Then it looked at him with a sense of horrible recognition. Everything was still, save for the shaking girl.
"Mad Morris has a son?" it said. He hadn't known what to say. Neither did it. He pointed his gun at the thing. It pushed the girl in front of itself, taunting him. "What's the matter Morris?! You not man enough?!"
The girl begged and pleaded for him not to shoot. There was no way the bullet wouldn't hit the wretched leech without hitting her too, not unless he became the best marksman in Texas in the span of five seconds. He wasn't sure what to do.
"Please, Percy! Don't shoot!" she cried, closing her eyes and trembling in terror. The vampire jeered at him from behind her, laughing through pointed teeth at his name. And with those words, his nerves turned to steel. The gun felt warm in his hand. The night air seemed to slow.
"My name ain't Percy!" He said, and as he pulled the trigger, a flash of brilliant, white light shot soundlessly out from the barrel of his gun. It passed through the girl, harmless as a summer breeze. Her assailant, on the other hand, fell to the ground, disintegrating into ash. "It's Perseus. Professor Perseus."
She ran to him, clung onto his shoulders, and thanked him profusely. Saying "Perseus, oh Perseus!" over and over as she showered him in praise and kisses in equal measure. All he could think of was the fresh realization that he hadn't loaded the gun earlier. There were no bullets in there.
After adjourning to somewhere decidedly more private than an alleyway for a very passionate exchange that lasted nearly an hour, he escorted her home. When they had arrived, she asked him for some way of expressing her gratitude. He told her to think nothing of it; that the evening they had spent was thanks enough and that by tomorrow, the night's incident would be like a strange dream to her. He knew somehow it would be. When she'd gone inside, he looked at the gun. The chambers were empty, as he had thought. He looked around for an empty place, and found a nearby field. Seeing no one, he fired off a single shot. The same silent light shot out and through a nearby tree before dissipating. Upon examination, the tree was unharmed.
He stood there for a minute, mind racing. Thoughts of his childhood, his grandmother's words, the adventure with the vampire, the Westenra girl, and all those strange coincidences ran through his mind like currents in a great river of mental overload that he found himself presently drowning in. He looked up at the moon, trying to focus on something other than his frantic thoughts and the oppressive night air. He counted the craters on its cold, impassive face. An icy shock of weird clarity ran right through him.
"Clearly, this gun is magic, and I must be some kind of wizard." He thought. It seemed like a joke at first, but then it all finally clicked. It all made sense. He was a wizard, magic was real, and vampires had killed his parents. His father had made an enemy of some powerful vampire or another and gotten himself killed. The accident hadn't been an accident. They'd gone after his mother to ensure that no one would find out what they did. He'd only been spared by magic, luck, and the fact that his father had never said a word to anyone about his supernatural enemies. It all made sense.
He was not little Percy Morris, the sad orphan with only his grandparents and some old photographs for a family. He was not Quincy Morris, a parody reflection of his father with a name and face that didn't even feel like his own. He was Professor Perseus, a reincarnation of Mad Morris's vengeance. And he knew what he had to do.
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