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This novel is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Chapter One
One of the hunters had come back and reported to us and also to the collective community mind that he was seen by a group of young teenagers, and that they had tried to film him with their cell phones as he was anesthetizing his prey. The second commander was always one to worry about the littlest of things. “So what if they had filmed him! What they will see when they look at the video is nothing but a half blurry image of some person with the rest of the surroundings in high definition.” I had said. “And even if someone believes their story, they will have no proof to confirm it! So don’t worry, let mankind start his theory about vampires anew. It’ll give them something to occupy their primitive brains for a while instead of killing each other over nothing important!”
I am the leader and also more ancient than the rest of my crew. Mankind’s theory about us goes back hundreds of years, and thanks in part to one of them writing a story about Vlad Draculea and his ruthless rule in the 1400’s, we’ve been branded as vampires who drink mankind’s blood, sleep in coffins, and die in the rays of the sunlight. Let them keep on believing what they want about us, for the most of us find it rather amusing! Their mythos about Bigfoot though is so very true, for they were our workers, and for a few of the lower class crew, a pet and a friend.
By the middle of the 1400’s though, we have been stranded on this planet for over two thousand years, and have only rarely been feeding on humans. That is part of the fallacy in the story from Bram Stoker, for when we can avoid it, we really don’t prefer human meat. In all seriousness, it just don’t taste good regardless how it is prepared, and that’s why we prefer to consummate the very same meat products as humans do. We can get by with very little sustenance, as compared to humans who figuratively starve if they do not eat daily. And as far as the killer rays of the sun are concerned, well they are a little too strong for our skin, but only if we stay outside for a few hours in the sunshine. We acquire a burning of our scales akin to humans who become sunburn, and it is only because we come from a planet whose star is red and not as young as this star is. When we first heard of Stokers story, the second had went to Walachia to see if this Vlad was another of our kind who had also became stranded here. He walked throughout the village and after tapping into the information he needed from the barbaric minds of the villagers, went and procured a copy for us. The counsel sat around as the second (who was at the time the most proficient at deciphering what we consider a real primitive form of communication) enciphered it for us, one chapter a day. For us it was fun entertainment and there was lots of hand knocking (our form of laughing) on the floating quartz platform we had constructed to imitate a table. When one lives as long as we can do, and being stranded on this planet as we were with nothing to do anymore, then even Bram’s story was an interesting diversion of the daily boredom. The only really interesting time is when one or many of us have departed (died in your terminology).
We keep our population at the exact same number as when we arrived, or crashed as you humans would say. And we have lost many over the millenniums. The most of us have departed due to this planet and it’s ever changing surface structure. When an earthquake happens and you are devastated because many of your own kind have departed, then most times there where some of us also caught up in the earthquake. We make underground tunnels and regardless of how good our specialist try to stabilize the structural walls, when the forces of your planet move the plates constantly around, we also suffer losses. We have had a few of us who did literally go up in flames like the mythos from Stoker, but it was fate that they got trapped somehow in some building which caught on fire, not the sunshine of your star! Due to our advanced communication, we know when one or many depart from us, for we are one collective mind in our community when we wish it to be. As in when we depart, we attempt to say farewell to the others and congratulate them in advance on a new brooding. To keep the continuity of our species at the same number, which is also well thought out by the counsel in case they would send another rescue ship for us, we are only allowed to brood our eggs when our numbers have diminished. To brood the eggs is something which is normal on our home planet but a very special occasion for us castaways here on this one!