Damn, how my head hurts, he thought.

He opened his eyes suddenly, sensing a danger that turned out not to be there. Perhaps a remnant of his dream. In any case, his attention was quickly taken by the room he had woken up in. He didn't recognize it, but that was the least of it. The strange design, a bunch of screens showing even stranger things, symbols and numbers without real meaning to him.

Which, of course, didn't help with his headache.

Life is that, one headache after another, only for me it doesn't end, he thought.

He didn't bring his hand there.

He knew that if he did, it would only hurt more.

The floor was shaking. He was pretty sure, it wasn't that his head was spinning from the pain. He had once ridden on a plane with his good friend Davy Jones, but the trip had been pleasant, not like this. In any case, had he somehow found himself in something similar?

He hadn't even woken up in his elegant custom-made coffin, as usual.

Something weird was going on here, that's for sure.

Dracula staggered forward, looking around as if he could find something that would make all the pieces suddenly fit together.

He saw nothing and no one. He was alone in this strange place.

Then Dracula knew that the danger he had sensed upon waking, or what had woken him in the first place, really existed and that wasn't true. But all he knew at first was that he suddenly went blind and something viscous and heavy was squeezing his head.

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"What the hell is this?"

Dracula struggled with that slippery bastard of many tentacles, opening it with his nails like a can of preserves.

He fought valiantly, spilling its nastiness over his face, a horrible way to finish waking up. But in the end he overcame it. He tore it from his face, lifted it above his head and split it in half, bathing in the tar-black blood of the monster. Significantly less disgusting than the goo it had been pouring on him, though certainly not his favorite type of blood. He licked his lips.

He threw the corpse to the floor, stomped on it several times, just because, and then spat on it. Still, he didn't feel he had gotten even enough. He passed both hands over his face to clean off that shit.

Then he realized that what it had poured on him was some kind of acid. An acid that, of course, hadn't even tickled him.

It had only ruined his hairstyle.

"What the hell was that?" He had been asking himself from the beginning, but seeing its stomped and opened corpse on the floor gave him more reasons to ask that question.

To which, of course, no one answered him.

The thing was dead and now he was really alone. Dracula decided to take a look out the window, hoping he hadn't overslept again. The last time he had slept for a thousand years and the whole world had changed.

He had adapted quickly as was expected of him, but that didn't mean he wanted to repeat it. Gradual changes were less disorienting.

Through the window, he saw...

Well, maybe the world hadn't changed, maybe it had. He had no way of knowing.

Because he found himself in some kind of aerial vehicle that was somehow moving away from planet Earth, crossing the void beyond the stars.

He could see the rest of the planets floating in the vacuum and the sun burning intensely.

"This is the last time I take a nap."

Dracula... in outer space?: END