Origin

Anna and I continued doing fun things in our time together. The amusement park was fully functional now, and the volunteers had moved on to other devices that needed repair. The number of entertainment devices vampires had invented over the years seemed endless, and when we exhausted the ones Anna knew about we did them again and found catalogs of others to explore. Of course, there were times we simply made out in my room or hers. We had plenty of ways of doing that, too, with or without the assistance of devices.

One day I was talking with Anna. “You know, I never did figure out where vampires came from.”

“Did we have to come from somewhere? Couldn’t we have just developed, like humans did?”

“And what, we converted the apes and Neanderthals back before humans developed? That doesn’t seem right. Why does holy water have an effect on us? Are we demonic in origin?”

“Huh. I never really thought about that,” Anna remarked.

“Most of the histories in the library only go back to Vlad’s time, but I found a couple that tell our history back to Roman times. Even then, though, we weren’t new.”

“Hey, you have that time spy power you used with the Enforcers. Do you think you could use that to look back in our history and find out?”

“I don’t know. I never tried looking back anywhere near that far.”

After I explained to Anna how simple it was, Anna and I agreed to try it, separately, but both of us aiming on my room. I remembered from when I first arrived that Kelly told me a female vampire named Genevieve Thomas died to make space for me, so I assumed she lived here, and we both quickly found her.

We went back further. Genevieve looked old before she died, but merely five years before that she looked young and she had a connecting door to her husband’s room, and we saw him in the room sometimes. I remembered now Kelly had described her as a widow. I guess her husband gave up, or did something stupid and died, and she couldn’t bear to go on without him.

As far as we could tell, he’d just gotten bored. We looked back further, for thirty, fifty, a hundred years, and it was still Genevieve and her husband. They had been together a very long time, beyond a normal human life span, and it seemed they’d gotten together very shortly after Genevieve arrived in 1878. We saw her arrival and how hosting worked back then. Before that, there was another female vampire named Joan living in my room. She was here about thirty years. And we saw vampire after vampire occupying the room, back to and before Vlad’s time. Since I was on one of the upper floors, this room was here before Vlad, but by the time we got that far back we were feeling the strain of using that ability for so long, and we took a break and went and had a large meal.

We didn’t actually try looking back again until the next day, and when we did, we were able to quickly step back to the last occupant we saw and then keep going. Eventually, around 500 AD, we got back to when they first dug out this room, which was another time we had to stop from tiredness. When we resumed a few days later, we saw that before that dig-out, they had only the first five floors and fewer rooms on each floor, so we picked the first room on my side of my hallway and continued going back from there.

We went back through Roman times and far before that. A few sessions later, we were somewhere beyond 2000 BC when we found what seemed to be the beginning. There was only a single room in Trans-Sylvania at first, where the first-floor cafeteria is now, and of course it wasn’t called that before the Romans. It didn’t seem like the place had a name. We went so far back that even that room wasn’t there, and played it forward to see Trans-Sylvania created.

At first, there was just a man there, a sorcerer named Elymas. He quickly got to work summoning a demon. Or was it a god? Elymas and the demon spoke of various gods. We weren’t sure whether the demon was physically present, or Elymas just created a way to communicate with it, but it at least seemed like the demon was there in the room with him.

Was it a demon or a god? Was there even a difference? Elymas’s conversations led us to realize that the demons of Old Testament times were simply other gods, ones whom the God of the Jews didn’t want His people worshiping. What was surprising was that all of this was real. There were real gods, plural, with real power. What happened to them?

Later Elymas summoned other demons as well, and one of the demons he summoned gave him and the followers we saw arrive later the power to make portals within Trans-Sylvania, and between Limbo and Trans-Sylvania or between Limbo and Earth. It seemed that Limbo was created as a way to give people the power to create portals more easily, with less magic, and safely, since Limbo was empty and you didn’t need to know where you were creating the portal.

After a while we noticed there was one demon in particular who was summoned a lot. We also realized those followers we saw were slaves, and unsurprisingly they were the first vampires. The sorcerer used this frequently appearing demon’s power to enslave people to him as vampires. His slaves, maybe a dozen or so of them, worked in this place doing various things for him, but mostly smuggling and theft, and the entrapment of people to feed to the demons to get them to do Elymas’s bidding. Interestingly, all the slaves were male. When they sacrificed people to the demons, they were always men. When they entrapped women, it was always to convert them to more male vampires.

The slaves had the power to make portals, and they used it to sneak into places and kidnap people or steal stuff, or move it across borders and such. But they could only do it during the night of the human world, because part of their enslavement was the spell that made them deathly allergic to sunlight.

In a critical scene, we saw Elymas distracted during a moment his demon was present, and one of the slaves pleaded with the demon for a way to escape the sorcerer. This was seemingly a loophole in the demon summoning spell. The slaves were forbidden many things, but performing magic or wishing for help from the demons was not one of them because the slaves created portals in their work for the sorcerer. The demon could not act directly against Elymas, but he could do so indirectly by granting another person powers. The demon granted that slave the power to bite other people to spread the enslavement spell onto them, and he converted the sorcerer, who started becoming a sorceress, since apparently the sex change was also part of the spell.

The effect of silver on vampires was also part of the enslavement spell. The sorcerer had used that as another way to control them, and to punish or kill those who disobeyed him. It seemed that the slaves were also not able to attack Elymas directly. Once the sorcerer had become a vampire, that stipulation no longer applied, maybe because of something specific, and they used his own silver weapons to kill him.

His death did not end the spell that he had placed on them, though it did end the demon’s summoning. Also, the other slaves did not gain the ability to bite people to convert them into more vampires. That ability was initially reserved only to the one who had asked the demon for a way out. But the ones he converted gained the power. That is how all vampires living today came to have that power; we all trace our lineage of conversion back to that one vampire.

We were able to follow Elymas back to his original location in the human world through the first portal that came into being along with Trans-Sylvania itself. Continuing back from there, we observed him making it, and earlier, saw him researching how to make it. He did it because the demons he wanted to work with had been banished from the human world, and the spells to summon them no longer worked. That explained what happened to at least some of the demons; they had been banished from the human world, somehow. Elymas found a demon who wasn’t yet banished from the human world, one who didn’t have the power to do the things Elymas wanted, but this demon had the power to create another space outside the world, one in which the demons he needed could be summoned.

We hunted for the origin of the gods or demons, and we failed to find it. They were older than Trans-Sylvania and older than Elymas. Their origin was elsewhere in the human world, or in other worlds we still don’t know about, and there was too much for us to search without clues where and when to look. That would have to be somebody else’s quest.

But I talked to Kelly about it, specifically, how I could publish a book to write up this story, so that it would be in the library for all vampires curious about it.

“Just write up a document. I can convert for you into the kind of document we store in the library. We have had 37 new books published by vampires in this way since we started putting the scanned books online, and they were able to put their originals in the library rather than having to print and then scan them.”

So I did that. There were others still writing, so by the time I was done, The Origin of Vampires by Brandy Kelly became the 40th new book published directly as an e-book in our library, though Kelly also helped me make a printed copy we could put in the physical library.