Chương 90: 061 – Three Portraits

The revelation of what vampires were caused a bit of a stir among the non-humans of the excursion.

While previously they had been content to hang back and ask questions for context, the revelation that the Kaedekin were researching something that was as bad as the admittedly fucked up things Megumi had compared them to had the aliens pressing to the front and asking very intent questions, even as the normies took on the amused and exasperated air of adults listening to children seriously discussing the logistics and aerodynamics of Santa Claus and his sleigh.

Loren just listened, trying to learn the extent of the Kaedekin's knowledge on vampires.

"Yes, vampires can pass for human with preparation," Princess Megumi explained as they entered the research facility.

"But it's not perfect, and if you know what to look for they're easy to spot. Their bodies are at room temperature or colder, their skin is usually pale except for spots where their blood coagulated postmortem, and the area around them tends to be cooler than normal. Killing them is relatively straightforward. Decapitation and stabbing them through the heart also destroys their soul's connection to their body, but both can be difficult because their bodies are magically reinforced.

Prolonged exposure to direct sunlight causes them to self-destruct via immolation, and full immersion in flowing water destructively snuffs out their magic and makes them fall apart. Rain doesn't count, it has to be full immersion, but rain does make it more difficult for them to cast spells. However, it's unreliable with the older ones, because some of them can affect the weather, making it rain, storm, or fog. Best bring a water truck with a strong pump and high pressure.

If you need more detailed information, we have books on vampires we can print out for you. We brought a lot of information about them from the old universe, and we've marked what has been empirically confirmed by heroes who've met and fought them, as well which information has observational data and experimental data supporting it." Inside the research building itself, Loren wasn't surprised to see that it went underground.

The room straight through the outside doors seemed to be a cross between a reception area and a break room, with comfortable chairs and couches, a sizable pantry and kitchen area, portions of wall that seemed to be screens, brightly labeled alarm switches on the walls every two meters labeled 'In Case Of Vampire - Pull For Holy(?) Water', and… crosses. Lots of crosses, interspersed with swords that looked like crosses at first glance.

At the far end of the room from the entrance was a heavy, vault-like door that that was currently open, and which allowed Loren to see that both sides of the door contained a wheel that could be used to solidly lock the passageway. Beyond the door and to the right was a spiraling staircase around the internal circumference of the building, which led down to the lower levels.

"Vampires are also repelled by religious symbols and substances that have been ritualistically blessed," the princess of the college continued expositing as she led them towards the door and stairs, "but… well, as I said, we're not sure how effective our attempts at blessing these things are, so we added the swords." She looked towards Commander Bronze sheepishly.

"I don't suppose your ship chaplain would be willing to bless a few other things besides water?"

"I'll ask them," Commander Bronze said.

"If I may ask, why crosses, when by your own admission you're not Catholics?"

"Because they have documented effectiveness," Megumi said, "although in fairness, the person using them was a baptized Catholic. Hopefully they'll never be needed."

"One hopes the same of any emergency measure," Commander Bronze said diplomatically.

"Yup, best to have it but never need it," Megumi agreed.

"If you'll all follow me downstairs, we can go where the magic research happens. Now that everyone knows what a vampire is, I can explain what a pseudo -vampire is and why we're devoting a significant amount of research into them. They were basically Pyrotheurgists who could use their Flame to replicate vampire abilities without actually being vampires themselves. It was nothing new, even at the point in time they existed.

Pyrotheurgists have always had spells that could do things similar to thing vampire could do, they used the same kind of magic after all. However, what makes vampire abilities different from spells that do the same things is their energy efficiency." Everyone perked up at that, even the engineers among the normies. Even if they didn't actually believe in magic, 'energy efficiency' was a phrase that lay near and dear to their hearts.

Loren, for her part, was interested to hear about what the Kaedekin considered interesting spells.

"Hah ha, I knew that would get people's attention," Princess Megumi said happily as she led the way down the stairs as they curved downwards. They were doing a whole rotation.

"You see, because of how they were cursed, vampires need to conserve as much energy as possible, but they still had abilities like enhanced strength, enhanced senses, body reconstruction, hypnosis, and weird things like being able to stick and walk on walls and ceilings. Yes, they could do that last, it's in the books we're printing. And the thing is, compared to the equivalent kind of spell being used by a Pyrotheurgist, the energy cost is negligible, which is part of what makes vampires hard to find.

Now theoretically, if a Pyrotheurgist could study exactly how a vampire did something, they could replicate it with their Flame and benefit from the negligible energy cost. The problem is, Pyrotheurgists are exactly the kind of person a vampire would want to devour, because as a wizard they'd have a lot more magic stored in their soul." Oh, Loren did not need to hear how justified it was for vampires to be out to get Flames in particular!

There went her brilliant teenaged plans to escape vampires by finding a crowd of people so they would pick easier targets than her!

"This is where pseudo-vampires come in," Megumi continued.

"Most known Pseudo-vampires are savants, people who manifested their magic with an instinctive understanding of a spell. Unlike most savants, pseudo-vampires tend to manifest an instinctive knowledge of several vampire-like abilities, usually physical enhancement, regeneration, and maybe one or two others. The only exception was… her." The Kaedekin twitched, shoulders shuddering.

"Anyway! They're five hundred years old, but we still retained video files from the period depicting them in action. The videos are a vital part of the research we do, a visual record of what kind of effects we're trying to replicate, the extent of what they can do, and what they look like at maximum energy efficiency." They'd reached the bottom of the stairs, and the open doors led to another circular room.

There were a handful of Kaedekin in the room, all of them looking like college students about to make 'A Big Presentation', a mix of excited and nervous and dreading things going wrong, all somehow mixing with that welcoming cheerful smile that came naturally to the Kaedekin.

Shelves containing books stood between the alarm switches and crosses, with very readable big labels such as 'Basic Vampire Information', 'Outguard Vampire-Encounter Records', 'Apocryphal Vampire Encounters', 'Research Series Records: 0001-1000', 'Research Series Records: 1001-2000', etc. The rest of the room was dominated by the special benches for their suits, which faced a wall where a screen was mounted. On the opposite wall from the screen were three portraits of different people.

"The videos we're about to show you were originally downloads from social media sites whose encryption we were eventually able to break so they could be preserved…" However, what caught Loren's eyes were the three portraits. They were clearly paintings rather than printouts, their colors vibrant, the art style realistic and life-like. Each hung on the wall between the room's two opposite doors, where they'd been seen by anyone entering.

Loren recognized them as the same people depicted as statues in front of the bridge to the artificial island. One was a brown-haired young girl who was probably between ten and thirteen, the upper half of her face obscured by a visor-like mask, and she was depicted wearing a black dress with a white apron.

The next was a noticeably older teenaged girl with dark hair, her face obscured by what looked like ski goggles, and wearing some sort of heavily stained dark blue overalls, similar to the kind engineers and mechanics wore while on duty. This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work. The third was a young blonde girl that had Loren staring.

She was cute in the way young children often were, and was wearing the sort of frilly blue and white dress that managed to look old-fashioned no matter what century it was. Blue eyes that should have been wide and childlike—and were painted as such—against her pale skin somehow managed to look cold and judgmental above crossed arms that made the portrait seem stern instead of… well, childish. That face.

It was young, very young, but that face—"If you would all sit down, we can play the videos," Princess Megumi said, and Loren jerked her eyes away from the name plaque under the portrait so fast she wobbled slightly, and it was only Seraphine's hand on her elbow that kept her from falling and— Seraphine! Her name was SERAPHINE!

"Don't look directly at it," Serap— Sera said quietly." She might start looking back at you." Loren nodded woodenly and allowed herself to be guided to the bench, her gaze focused on the opposite screen, and told herself the feeling of that face staring at the back of her head was just her imagination.

"The subject of this first video was known as Frozen Garden, a self-taught Pyrotheurgist and pseudo-vampire who was one of the protectors of the town of Yosakimachi as a part of the Afterschool Student Alliance, the local group of violent vigilantes," one of the Kaedekin researchers—Loren had missed her name—said.

"This was recorded during an incident where several massive gravehearts—unmanifested Symbol remains—rampaged through a public street during a weekend. For those who don't know, gravehearts feed on the hearts of people. Literally, they tear through the chest cavity and devour all the cardiac muscles, although they are more strongly drawn towards hearts filled with strong feelings like fear, anger, despair, things like that. Outright daylight attacks are rare, but they do happen.

In this instance, Frozen Garden had been in the area and had been able to respond immediately. The following video is footage from that incident." The scene the video showed looked like something from a historical drama. Loren was even able to place the approximate time period as somewhen during the Late Industrial or Early Digital times. The footage shook a little and the sound was muted, but the camera was centered on the figure of a teenaged girl.

While the ski goggle were the same, instead of dark overalls she seemed to be wearing a long-sleeved coat of with some sort of ad copy on the back. Even if she didn't recognize the language, Loren could recognize ad copy.

In the footage, the girl was fighting some kind of monster wreathed in flames, with four legs that looked like giant ribs sharpened into stiletto spikes and a body that looked like someone had taken a flayed human torso, inflated it to giant proportions, turned it inside out, pulled the lungs out to make wings, and made the heart explode so it looked like a demonic lamprey. In the footage, the girl—Frozen Garden—was moving like… well, like an untrained schoolgirl doing her best to brawl.

There were big and obvious windups with her fists, slaps like she was trying to scratch the monster with her nails, awkward kicks like she was trying to hit someone in the balls, lunges where she seemed to be trying to aggressively hug, grabbing and dragging the monster by one leg with brute strength before spinning around in a circle to… swing the monster by that limb before using its momentum to slam it into the ground?

"As a pseudo-vampire, Frozen Garden had an instinctive knowledge of vampire-like enhanced strength, durability, vastly accelerated physical repair that manifested a self-healing and the ability to repair her damaged clothing, and wide-area magic absorption," the Kaedekin researcher said.

"Other vampire-like abilities had to be learned, but she showed considerable aptitude for learning them, and utilizing them at great efficiency. Her affinity for wide-area magic absorption is where she gets her name from. With it, she could rapidly absorb the ambient magic in a sphere around her with a radius from ten to thirty meters, depending on how hard she pushed. Since she was a Pyrotheurgist, it would also cause the temperature to drop like a rock.

In as little as a few seconds, she could make it cold enough for frost to start forming, while the lack of magic in the area would lock down those who needed to actively draw in magic before they could do anything, and the sudden cold would be debilitating to anyone caught in it. Our research on her focuses on trying to replicate her magic depletion ability so we can improve the energy efficiency of our generators. Next is…"

The screen changed to a still image that seemed to be the start of the next video, showing the image of the masked girl in the black dress and white apron.

"Black Queen. She's the one we named one of Surcease's moons after. This footage was taken during an incident where a tengu was stalking a popular actress who'd become embroiled in some kind of scandal, leading to a public confrontation." This time the camera was much shakier, and it quickly became clear why as a dark shape streaked towards the young girl, who was standing in front of an attractive young woman.

Loren got an impression of a slim figure, a black cape, and something in the dark shape's hand, but the masked girl—Black Queen—moved out of the way. The movement was inhumanly fast, causing motion blur in the footage, and then more motion blur as Black Queen went on the offensive.

Unlike Frozen Garden, it was clear her movements were trained and much more disciplined as she used her obviously greater speed to attack the dark shape from their left side and from behind, punching and kicking with proper technique as she darted between both positions. The dark figure retaliated with the weapon in its hand, and it soon became obvious that what Loren had thought was a cape was actually a pair of black-feathered wings as they flared open and the dark figure took to the air.

The camera moved to follow the action as the now flying figure attacked Black Queen from difficult angles until she turned and ran towards a building… and continued running up the wall, her speed allowing her to gain altitude over her enemy before kicking off from the building and tackling the dark figure in mid-air. The two tumbled, fighting for control of the weapon in the figure's hand until they both crashed to the ground, out of sight.

"Like Frozen Garden, Black Queen manifested with an instinctive ability to enhance not just her strength and durability but also her speed, and her regeneration was known to be significantly better than Frozen Garden's. As you saw, she was capable of wall adhesion, and while it wasn't obvious, she was able to generate claws of shaped kinetic force from her fingertips, which she was eventually able to develop into forcefield shields. Her regeneration and forcefields are something we're very interested in.

She could heal so well she could regrow dismembered limbs, and… well, you can never have enough ways to make force fields, especially if they're really energy efficient. Black Queen also had a lot of other abilities that weren't shown here or that she developed later, like a short-range teleport that didn't seem to use the principles of leyline teleporting, and controlling animals. That last is also something we're trying to develop, since it would make trying to get kaiju to move much easier."

"If you'll follow us downstairs, we can demonstrate some of the abilities we have managed to reverse engineer," another one of the Kaedkein researchers said.

"So far, it's still not at the level depicted in the video, but we're developed some degree of near-negligible cost strength enhancement, as well as stronger enhancements where the energy requirements are much lower than the spells we originally had when we started out…" As everyone got up from the benches, Loren caught sight of the painting at the edge of her vision. Despite herself, she turned to look towards it, Sera waiting at her side.

The plaque under the painting had the kind of large lettering that made it easy to read, and her eyes were drawn inexorably towards it. For a moment it seemed like a blur of letters, as if Loren's mind was making one last attempt to defend itself by faking dyslexia, but then everything snapped into place. Seraphine Ataraxia Vitalia Ash The Living Vampire Depicted as remembered on 2013 AD, Estimated to be more than 800 years old at the time She said the first thing that she could think of.

"You have the same name."

"Yeah… I don't know what my big sisters were thinking," Sera said.

"Most people take a while to get used to it. Every time I meet someone new, they end up all twitchy for a bit before they can separate me from… her." Loren nodded, only half listening, that name and the girl in the portrait burning themselves into her memory. She now had absolute proof that the Kaedekin came from another universe, from another Earth. Because how else could they know who this old monster was? Even if the face was too young, it was the right face.