People who live in cities have this misconception that the countryside is quiet, and peaceful, especially during the night. Marie had camped before, and so she was prepared for some noise but the crickets were extremely loud, and the sound of their legs sawing together filled the darkness. The dying coals shed a small amount of light on the surroundings, but without a moon the night was generally black.

Marie tossed and turned on her bedroll, trying to find a way to lie comfortably but the ground was a lot harder than she remembered. The whole situation was complicated by the mugginess of the night, her skin was sticky and damp and it was just unpleasant.

The Adventurers all seemed to be quite noisy sleepers as well, so the choice to camp with them seemed to have been counterproductive in the end but she wasn’t going to get up in the middle of the night to find somewhere else to stay. A nap later might be her only choice.

As she lay there, she began to feel like they were not alone. It wasn’t a particular sound, smell, or sight but a change in the atmosphere. It was almost as if the temperature just suddenly dropped by five degrees, but it really hadn’t. It was impossible to explain this sensation to someone else, she just had to lay there and experience it.

Suddenly, there was a crunching sound, a rattling breath, and one of the Adventurers was now silent. Marie felt frozen by fear, as if someone had nailed her down to her bedroll. All of the hair on her skin was standing up, and waves of freezing terror were rolling down the length of her body. She wanted to sit up and scream, to wake up everyone, or at the very least to flee for her life. She was able to do none of that, she just laid there shivering as another cracking sound rent the still air.

“Come in to my home…” Another cracking sound, and a grunt of pain, and a gasp of enlightenment before silence.

“Take my things…” There was snapping now, and then a sound that was uncomfortably squishy.

“And think that you can run…” This time there was tearing, and an actual scream.

“You can never escape…” A series of snaps, tears, rips, splatters and every other horrific noise echoed from the other side of the fire.

Oh my god! What is this? Some kind of magic? I’m just lying here like a sacrificial animal. Those Adventurers are fucking dead! I have to get out of here…NOW!

Marie started to try and get control of her body back. She was still feeling the horror and terror of whatever this monster was, and the aura it projected, but she was also trying to push beyond that. Her body was rocking back and forth as she tried to get to her feet so she could run. The night had returned to silence, and the sound of her body rocking on her canvas bedroll was loud.

“What’s this? Another one? You weren’t with them before…” The voice was sibilant, and haunting. As the figure drew near Marie struggled even harder to try and flee, but he body betrayed her once again.

“They must have picked you up later, or you are simply unlucky enough to camp with thieves. A pity.” The figure bent over her, and the reflected light from the coals revealed the monster’s features. He had pale white skin, a bald head, long pointed ears, a bat-like nose, red eyes and pointed teeth. All-in-all he made Count Orlok look like a charmer, and his appearance was a clue to the most dimwitted about his nature.

“V..v…vam…” Marie struggled to get words past her locked-up jaws, but ultimately failed. It didn’t really matter though, as an amused light filled the blood-red, and glowing, eyes of the monster. He reached out with long-fingered hand, which had long pale nails on each finger, and lifted her head up slightly until it forced her whole upper body into a sitting position.

“Yes, my darling, you have guessed it. I am a vampire, and unfortunately for one so clever as you I am a bit peckish. I killed your friends because they were not appetizing to me, but you…an elf, look delicious. It’s been a long night, and I could stand to have a bite.”

The monster chuckled at his own pun, which of course meant that it wasn’t funny to anyone else, before he bent over and opened his razor-filled maw. Marie felt his teeth enter the side of her throat, but it was nothing like the movies where two tiny holes get made, this was more like a chainsaw tearing away at her jugular. She tried to cry out but blood just overflowed out of her mouth, and she started to choke.

It seemed like it was going on forever, but in reality the vampire quickly released his grip on her throat and move a slight distance away. Marie felt her upper body fall back down on her blood-soaked bedroll with a thud. The pain had been excruciating but she was already starting to go into cardiac arrest from blood loss and everything was getting fuzzy.

“What the fuck are you? Your blood has no magic in it, it tastes human! Are your ears a lie? Or are you some kind of filthy halfbreed? Just disgusting!” The vampire was spitting out her blood on the ground like it was the worst thing he had ever tasted. Marie couldn’t see that well but his face appeared to be twisted in anger and disappointment.

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The vampire rushed back out into the dark, moonless night and soon disappeared from her field of vision. Not before rooting around in the possessions of the Adventurers, though, and finding something Marie could not make out. And then, everything really did fade to black.

***

It wasn’t even the pain that woke her, because that was incessant and had been the thing to knock her out in the first place. No, she was broke out of her unconscious state, back into the hell-realm of suffering by her implant going apeshit. Messages were being rapidly displayed in her mind, completely blocking out her field of vision. It was as if the GUI was all her mind could comprehend at the moment, beside the agony of course.

~EMERGENCY~

HOST IS DYING!!!

HOST HAS STABILIZED.

HOST IS DYING!!

RECALIBRATING…

RECALIBRATING…

REBOOTING…

The darkness mercifully claimed her once more, the pain blocked out by unconsciousness. An uncertain amount of time passed in this state, but lucidity returned eventually. Of course, it was not because she magically felt better all of a sudden, it was because her body had entered an all-new zone of extreme pain.

Marie’s eyes flew open, it felt like molten metal was being pumped in to them, and a blizzard of flashing lights crossed her field of vision. Her body was writhing on the crowd to a staccato beat as her muscles contracted and released, contracted and released. Every single time it felt like those same muscles were going to be ripped from the bones they were attached to, bones which felt like they were cracking from within. All the blood in her veins felt like it was boiling, and it struck her as absurd that it had not completely burned through her flesh yet.

Marie felt herself throwing up continually, until there was not even anymore acid in her stomach to be rid of. It was at once the most painful experience of her short life, and the most terrifying.

Marie prayed for death.

Why me? No. Fuck this shit! I just wanted to get away from the life everyone told me I had to lead! I don’t deserve this. No one deserves this. AaaaAaAaGH!

Even in her internal thoughts Marie could not keep from screaming, much less what her physical body was doing. And it just kept going on and on and on, like a song that gets stuck in your mind and you can’t stop hearing. A song of screaming.

~EMERGENCY~

RECALIBRATING…

REBOOTING…

The darkness returned, like a cool cloth on a warm summer’s night, but even as she faded away Marie knew it couldn’t last. Her natural state now was agony, and this is the place she would be returning to. With her last bit of energy before unconsciousness took her, Marie called out to any gods listening to make it all stop.

Darkness.

Infinite, Eternal, All-Encompassing.

All of that and more, until it just...stopped.

Marie woke up again, and this time she wasn’t feeling the same pain as before. It was such a relief that it took her a few moments to notice that it was already just after dawn, and that her body felt like it was burning and dark black smoke was rolling off it.

A few seconds after that the pain hit her, and the screaming resumed. It wasn’t very loud screaming, her throat was hoarse and raw from all the yelling during the night, and her voice was almost gone but in her mind it was loud.

This pain was different though from all the internal pain of the night before, it was clearly coming from outside and burning her.

The sun was burning her.

The fucking sun...

Marie leaped up from the remains of her bedroll, surprised to find that her body was responding without any extra pain or issues, and headed deeper in to the woods away from the road. She pushed through the brush, looking for anywhere to escape the sun’s hateful gaze, and felt the branches and thorns rip at her but she couldn’t care less at the moment. Black smoke trailed after her like a racecar’s exhaust, and Marie could feel her skin peeling away, crisping, burning, and then turning in to the smoke.

She pushed through some saplings and then the space around her opened up and all there was was browning grass under her feet. Marie looked up and found that even the regular light in the sky was burning her eyes, but she was able to make out the massive crown of a tree over her. She quickly entered its shade and then she could see it was a tree of a size that dwarfed anything she had seen on Earth. Next to it the redwoods were shrubberies.

She kept running until she reached the trunk, which seemed to be so large it would take a dozen people linking arms to reach around it. She found that the tree had started off as many smaller trees that were close to each other, and then had fused to make a giant trunk. There was a place where two of the trunks had not grown together and she could just get her body into the gap which let her into a hollow space in the center of the trunk. The sun’s merciless light was now no longer hitting her, and she was no longer smoking.

Darkness was, once more, her savior.

She took a deep breath, but this caused her to start coughing uncontrollably, and her whole body was wracked by it until she started coughing up liquid into her hands. Marie looked down in to her cupped palms and saw dark, black blood; it was hard and dry and sticky like pop rocks.

What the hell happened to me last night? That monster attacked me, I was dying and then I didn’t. I woke up smoking, but otherwise fine, and now I am coughing up some sort of blood gravel. I guess I should be feeling grateful that I am not dead, but I am really just feeling confused. Was that thing really a vampire, and what does a vampire mean here on this side of the Portal compared to our folklore on Earth? My head hurts. I need to figure out what is going on with me before I take any more steps forward, because this is all messed up. I don’t like this at all!