Official CRhead Holiday Gift Guide
2024.11.26 16:29 BollywoodBrown Official CRhead Holiday Gift Guide
Definitely need to have new Khakis on the list, but what else would make a CRhead happy this holiday season?
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2024.11.26 16:29 Even-Cry9402 Anyone one know any links to montirex
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2024.11.26 16:29 jaysonpleasures JADE mock ups. Top 4 are Cable Knit Polo shirts. Bottom 4 are 100% cotton Polo shirt. Both would have a fitted slim look similar to these mocks. Feedback is greatly appreciated.
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2024.11.26 16:29 Sneaky2Active When does the new Planet Fitness open ??
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2024.11.26 16:29 DezoPenguin [OI NaNoWriMo] Blood Moon Lilies -- Chapter 2
There was nothing to do about it but laugh.
The first chuckle bubbled up out of my lips without any conscious effort, and once the first came, the rest followed, a cascade of laughter. I drew my knees up, hugging them to my chest as chuckles became cackles, cackles became peals of laughter as I rocked back and forth. It was too much. It was just too much!
Killed by being hit by a truck?
Raised from the dead by magic?
Inhabiting a body that wasn’t even mine?
The process turning me into some kind of vampire?
This all happening in some kind of parallel world?
A world that, somehow, matched up precisely with the world of a video game I’d been playing?
Nonsense!
Alice falling down the rabbit hole was a more coherent scenario than this!
Hell, anything would have made more sense than this!
Was I dreaming? Was this some sort of comatose hallucination? No, those were absurd ideas. Dreams sometimes felt real in the moment, but they never had the clear-minted precision of reality. When once reached lucidity within a dream—when one asked am I dreaming?—the dream was always clear, the answer yes. Only in reality could you ask the question and not be immediately certain of the answer.
I was here. This was real. It was mad.
Kaira’s voice sounded familiar because it exactly matched her voice actress in the game, allowing for the effect of hearing it first-hand instead of through phone speakers or earbuds.
Kaira’s face looked familiar because I’d seen it before, only here she was a person while in the game she’d been represented in manga-styled illustrations. She was still recognizably the same woman, but with normal proportions, existing in three dimensions, her body and hair obeying physics.
This was the world of the game, and I was a dead villainess!
“Maria!”
What was there to do but laugh?
“Maria!”
And so I laughed, laughed long and hard and hysterically at the sick, cosmic nonsense that my life had devolved into.
“Maria! What is it!” Kaira pleaded, shaking me by the shoulders, her voice and her touch managing to shatter through my fugue. I turned to face her, doubtless looking wild (especially if anything else about my appearance was as unusual as my hair and nails) and causing her to flinch back as I grabbed her shoulders.
But although she was frightened—she had so much reason to be—Kaira did not back down.
“Please, Maria, tell me what’s wrong? Why did hearing my name affect you like this?”
Most of the time, at least from what I understood, characters in books held their tongue about these things, coming from another world or having past-life memories. They had their reasons, but…why not? I’d already died once today. I’d come back to life in front of Kaira as a monster, and had bitten out one man’s throat so that he bled out and vampirically sucked a second man dry right in front of her. What did I even have to lose?
“Do you want to know?” My voice was half-croon, half-cackle, and unwholesome enough that remembering it later scared me. “Do you really want to?”
“No,” she said, pulling back in my grip. “But…I think that you need me to, so go ahead.”
“Before I died, I was playing a game. It’s…kind of like a book, with passages of text and pictures, and every so often you make a choice, and that choice helps to decide what happens next in the story. If you go here, you read this chapter, and if you go there, you read that one instead. Something like that. It’s a romance game, mostly for women because the character that you play as is a woman herself. You can choose to romance eight different other characters, depending on how you play, and depending on your choices you can reach a happy end or a bad one—that’s where the win-or-lose, ‘game’ part comes in. Do you understand?”
“I…I think so. I’ve never heard of a game like that, but it’s basically a book with several different endings, isn’t it?”
I nodded.
“That’s right. That’s right. It’s more complicated than just a book, but that’s the idea. A made-up story, like the Duchess of Blackwater series you like to read.”
Kaira gave a little gasp.
“How do you—?”
“How do I know what you like to read? How do I know that you were an orphan in Madrigal, that the orphanage-keeper, Sister Amelia, used to be the governess for Baron Ralleigh when he was a boy, and wrote to him about a girl in her care who’d shown signs of magical potential and that’s how you came to be adopted? How do I know that you love your adoptive mother very much for caring for you and always treating you like her own child even after she finally had a son of her own five years after the adoption?
“Would you understand if I told you that my game was set in a magical kingdom called Westenra? That the heroine you play as is the adopted daughter of a baron, who attends a university called the Scholomance, following her three years there from age twenty through twenty-two? Where she has a friend named Tara Granford? Where she’s bullied and scorned by the contemptuous and contemptible Lady Annalise Winter? Where Prince Erron Westenra, a year ahead of her in her classes, is one of the people who can fall in love with her?”
With every recitation, every fact that dripped from my lips, her eyes grew wider and her complexion paler as she realized exactly what I was saying. My final statement was less of a shocking revelation and more punctuation.
“That the name of the heroine was Kaira Ralleigh?”
“I died, Kaira, and now I find that I came back to life in a story. Only the story is somehow real, you’re real, this body is real, magic is real. It’s one impossible thing after another!”
I dropped my head, breaking the connection of our eyes to look down at the floor.
“Am I going mad?” I murmured. “How can I believe any of it? And yet it all feels true. There’s no trace of a dream or a hallucination. If this is all a delusion, it’s all flawless; I can’t find the seam where fantasy merges with reality. If there’s a lie in it, I don’t know where to find it.”
Kaira reached up, lightly slid my hands from her shoulders, and pressed them together between her own. Her flesh was soft, her touch warm and gentle.
“I can’t disagree with you, Maria; I would be very happy if I were to suddenly wake up in my bed and found this whole day and night were nothing but a dream.”
I winced, realizing my own callousness. Here was Kaira, kidnapped, imprisoned, then thrust into the terror of the ritual, forced to watch another woman be murdered and told that her own life was being spared only so that her end might be more horrific later. Then came the parts that I knew—my resurrection, watching me kill Geordan, her own desperate attempts to save me only to be struck by Asher, and then watching me kill again, and then finally being forced to play therapist for a hysterical vampire wearing the body of one of her bitterest enemies.
Kaira Ralleigh definitely had what it took to be a heroine. In her place I’d have been a quivering wreck.
I gave a rueful little laugh.
“It’s not, though, is it? This is what we’re both stuck with.”
“It is,” she agreed.
I looked up at her again.
“And I suppose that it could be worse,” I said. “I mean, you were kidnapped by people who wanted to kill you, and now they’re dead and you’re not, so that’s not bad. And I’m alive, which is all by itself an improvement on where I was twenty minutes ago.”
“So what you’re saying is, we should actually be happy about all this?”
“My mother always said, ‘if you can sit around complaining about something, then it can’t be all that bad.’”
We both dissolved into laughter at that, and if the sound was a bit too bright and our giggles edged with hysteria, well, who could rightly blame us? I let out a long, deep sigh when the laughter at last died out.
“God, I needed that.”
“So did—ah!” Kaira cut herself off in mid-sentence.
“What is it?”
“Your hair. It changed back to normal!”
I plucked a lock around so I could see it, and was momentarily startled to see that it was raven-black before I realized that Kaira obviously meant normal for Annalise.
“Your eyes, too. They were bright red before, and now they’re back to violet.”
I opened my mouth and touched my teeth with my tongue-tip, then with a finger. The canines were sharp, but they weren’t fangs. I’d had them top and bottom alike, rather than on the top only like a viper or a movie Dracula, but now they were gone entirely, shrunk back to regular teeth.
“That’s useful,” I said. “I wonder if the color-change is triggered by a need to feed, or some other factor? I’d rather not stand out like that.”
Kaira giggled again, this time tinged with nothing but good humor.
“Now I’m sure you’re not Lady Annalise. She lived to be the center of attention. Though, um…I think just changing hair and eyes isn’t going to help you with that.”
“Huh?”
Kaira waved a hand at me, sweeping it up and down, then glanced aside and blushed. Belatedly, I saw her point. “Not standing out” was kind of hard to do given that I had the body of a really pretty twenty-three-year-old woman (Annalise, villainess or not, was probably the most popular female in Mists of Eventide for a certain kind of fan art), and I was dressed in skimpy (and blood-spattered) lingerie.
The fact that a little part of me noticed her blush and was not at all unhappy about it, even under the chaos of the present circumstances, had to say something about me, and I wasn’t sure if it was good or bad.
“I hadn’t even thought about that. I need clothes and shelter and we need to get you home safely and figure out what we’re going to do. I don’t think we can just tell the authorities. If I remember rightly, keeping Westenra free of monsters is a sacred duty of the wytchblades, and whatever my reasons were I just killed someone who had the word ‘Lord’ in front of his name.”
Kaira bit her lip.
“I hadn’t thought about that. Do you think…do you think that anyone will believe us?”
I pushed myself to my feet. Her eyes followed me, before they sharply looked away. I moved a few steps away so I wasn’t standing right over her and filed that reaction away for later. I had to stifle a giggle as a silly thought crossed my mind, and I couldn’t help wondering if it was evidence that I was starting to cope well with all this or if it meant that I was edging towards another breakdown.
Even so, I Was Reincarnated in Another World as a Vampire Villainess, but I Can’t Stop Flirting with the Heroine!! really did sound like a light-novel title!
Definitely hysteria, I decided.
“We need to make them believe us,” I said. “Look, I’m supposed to be dead, right? I assume there was a big funeral and everything for Lady Annalise? And probably a huge political mess, since Geordan said that Prince Erron killed me. My parents—Annalise’s, I mean—are powerful and influential nobles and their daughter was killed by a prince over her treatment of a girl he’d fallen in love with.”
Kaira nodded.
“It wasn’t pretty.”
Oh, God, how stupid of me. I could only imagine what she had been going through—how she’d been looked at by Annalise’s friends and family but also by the royal party. The natural thing would be for everyone to blame Kaira as the temptress who led the Prince astray. Coming from a relatively low-status family and as an adopted commoner at that, she’d be an easy scapegoat.
“I’m so sorry. I didn’t think…I mean, I’m used to thinking of this as a game event where the story ends after a couple of summary paragraphs.” Which sounded even more awful. “I didn’t stop to think about how you must feel, how people would have treated you, both because they’re nasty and for political convenience. And all that on top of losing your romance with the Prince, besides.”
Kaira looked up at me in surprise.
“But there wasn’t a romance with the Prince!”
“There wasn’t?”
She shook her head firmly.
“No; we had barely talked, only a few times throughout my time at the Scholomance. There was nothing between us at all, I swear!”
“Really?”
“I swear by Her eternal eye!” Kaira said, holding up her left hand and making the Goddess’s sign on her chest. I remembered the oath from Mists; it was a solemn and sacred one to Westenrans.
“I’m sorry for assuming. In the game, Erron kills Annalise in the bad end to the romance with him, if the player makes the wrong choices to win him over without taking social consequences into account, so I just jumped to the conclusion that he was your lover. Who were you interested in?”
Kaira shook her head, making her hair shimmer as the motion changed how the firelight fell on it.
“No one! I don’t have a lover, Maria. I don’t even have any kind of family arrangement. I worked hard to try to become the best arcanist that I could, both to help repay my parents for giving me this chance and because I find the moonlight path fascinating.”
“Now, that’s interesting,” I mused. “Um…in your first year, was there a big to-do at the Nine Nights ball when Lady Laurel pushed Professor Tarrent into a fountain?”
“Why, yes, there was, but how—was that in the game, too?”
“In every route. It seems like you, your world, match up with the game generally, but you, personally, made different choices than were possible in-game, and so different things happened.”
“That seems stranger than the rest of it!”
“Maybe not, though. There’s an idea in my world that comes up sometimes when there’s a writer whose stuff is really creative and strange. Some people claim that the writer is really just seeing visions of another reality and are writing them down. Sometimes even the writer claims, that, so that they look like a prophet or something, for publicity’s sake. I’ve always thought it was a stupid idea—like, if you think about it, it belittles the author to say that they’re not creative at all, just writing down some nonfiction that they see in a psychic vision—but maybe it’s the truth. Maybe the people that wrote the game had some kind of link to this world and the people here, but then they wrote the romance stories based on possibilities—‘what if Kaira liked this boy?’ or ‘what if Kaira liked this girl?’—and let the story play out from their based on their knowledge of the setting and the people.”
“Oh! I like that idea. It’s a lot better than what I was thinking.”
Kaira stood up and brushed off some of the dust from her dress.
“What was your idea?”
“That your people were gods, who created our world as a toy for their fellow gods to play with.”
I shuddered.
“That’s positively creepy, especially if you know that the people of my world are people, with all that means, and you don’t want them to be in charge of creating realities!”
Her idea did raise some questions, though. I was, so far as I could tell, speaking English with Kaira, which made sense for a visual novel made by Canadian developers for primarily a North American market, but not so much for an alternate reality with a different sociopolitical and thus linguistic history from Earth’s. To say nothing of the fact that a number of the names, like the kingdom’s itself and that of the building we were in, were in-joke references to Dracula and other classics of Victorian gothic horror.
I wondered if there even was an answer that could satisfy all of my questions, or if I’d be left groping in the dark about this one forever.
“Think how it felt to me, thinking that my whole life, that of everyone else’s in this world, was nothing but a…a toy to play with.”
We both shuddered at that.
“But, you were saying something before, about what to do now?”
I nodded.
“There’s another story I read, once. It’s by a famous horror author in my world. It’s about a man who develops an obsessive fixation with his beautiful cousin—and specifically with her teeth. The girl falls ill and dies, and the man keeps brooding and brooding on his fixation until one night in a fit he goes and digs up her grave to steal the teeth. Only, the thing is, the girl wasn’t actually dead. She’d fallen into a cataleptic trance the doctors couldn’t tell from death—that was a common fear of the time, though I’m not sure how often it actually happened compared to how often people thought it did, and specifically was a theme this author used multiple times—and had been buried alive. So while the lunatic had attacked and mutilated her, he’d also saved her life.”
Kaira caught on at once.
“Lord Geordan certainly fits the role of an obsessed man; he genuinely did dig you—Lady Annalise—up because of his fixation with her.”
“Right. It’s the black magic part we need to keep out of the story, but we’re working with a lot of truth.” I paused to think. “I have to assume that given the social rank of the people involved, the details were covered up as much as possible and the truth kept private?”
Kaira nodded.
“The royal family definitely didn’t want it known that one of the princes had apparently run mad.”
“Then the general public might accept the story of premature burial without incident, and the physical and mental shock of what ‘happened’ to me will go a long way towards explaining any loss of memory or change in personality.”
“People definitely won’t look too critically at the excuse for changing Lady Annalise’s personality. They’ll be too happy with the fact that it happened to complain about why.”
Ouch. But then, Annalise was supposed to be an irredeemable villainess, beneath contempt.
“The only thing that worries me is that the girl in the story was thought to have died from disease. In the game, Prince Erron was supposed to have strangled Annalise with his bare hands, which might have passed for a comatose condition. But since this wasn’t, apparently, following one of the game routes, I don’t know the specifics. Getting stabbed through the heart would be a lot harder to explain away!”
Kaira shook her head.
“No, it’s like you say. Prince Erron seemed to explode into a fit of rage. Lady Annalise slapped him, and at once he seized her by the throat, bearing her to the ground, throttling her.” She shuddered, hugging herself. “It was horrible! None of us could believe what was happening; we were all frozen in place. Finally, it all seemed to sink in and he was dragged off of her, but it was too late. Lady Annalise wasn’t breathing. It was horrible! What you did tonight didn’t seem nearly as frightening.”
“Maybe it’s because, however awful what I did seemed, you knew I was saving your life when I did it? From what you said, you’d have no reason to consider Lady Annalise a threat to your life.”
Kaira nodded.
“That could be.”
“Awful as it was, though, it helps us. Annalise lost consciousness from having her air cut off, maybe her throat was injured so her breathing was especially shallow, and in all the shock and chaos she was mistaken for dead. There’d be no autopsy since people saw everything happen and a noblewoman would certainly never be given over to doctors for experimental dissection, and I’m not even sure if this world has proper embalming procedures—that’s been around in one form or another for literal millennia but the use of the technique is ultimately cultural. She was buried and eventually Geordan went and dug her, me, up because he was a crazy pervert. And given what I’m wearing right now and the fact that Annalise’s family would never have buried her in it, then I have no qualms about making that our story about him!”
Kaira…giggled. I’m pretty sure that heroines are not supposed to find necrophilia jokes funny, but I had a pretty good idea that neither one of us was operating at our best—or sanest—just then.
“In any event,” I said, “that’s when I woke up. There was a lot of screaming, and…oh, I know, Geordan got scared because now that I was alive, it was bound to come out that he’d robbed my grave and why. There’s no way to make ‘dig up the corpse of the woman you were obsessed with’ not awful. So he figured that he’d just kill me, and then he’d be right where he expected to be.”
“You should say that you were horrified by what he’d done and that was what set him off,” Kaira suggested.
“Oh, that’s a good point. If I was happy, then he might think that he might win my affection as a heroic savior, never mind his original creepy intentions. He might have even been able to spin his intent in a darkly Gothic-romantic way, like all he wanted was some memento from the tomb to remember Annalise by. But when I was repulsed, his mind broke and went to murder.”
“So what happened then in our story?”
“Asher. He was loyal to his master and willing to go along with creepy grave robbery, but murdering someone right there and then was just too much for him. He tried to stop Geordan, they fought, and tragically candles were knocked over and a fire broke out.”
“A fire? But only that one pew is burn—oh. You’re going to set the fire.”
“Right. Um…where I come from, doctors can autopsy bodies and tell if they’ve been burned to death or if they were dead before they burned. Can they do that here, assuming that the fire doesn’t out-and-out cremate them?”
“I think so, but the Scholomance’s medical classes are relatively superficial, so I’m not sure. They focus on how to use healing magic to treat injury and disease, and since that’s a very rare ability, there’s not a lot of call for advanced training.” She bit her lip. “But I don’t think it really matters. Count Vadis will want things handled as quietly and quickly as possible. The fact that you’re alive will make everyone want to believe you. The royal family, especially, will be on your side, since attempted murder is a lot better than actual murder. From there point of view, it will be as if the Weeping Moon’s tears over this tragedy set it right again.”
She was right, and it was one of the reasons that I had thought of the idea. The more people whose interest the story played into, the better. Obviously Count Vadis would want justice—or just plain revenge—for Lord Geordan’s death, but the truth was that not only was Geordan an obsessed would-be lover but also a black-magic practitioner and a murderer. I didn’t have to build lies to explain away his death; rather any falsehoods would make him look less awful—which meant that if his family did start digging they would stop in a hurry.
It was kind of ironic, really, given that he had only been a supporting cast member in the game, barely more than a face in the background. That was a good reminder to me as well: that people here were people, regardless of how I’d first come to know them, and they’d have their own wants, motives, needs, lives outside of their roles. Expecting them to be little more than objects would just lead to surprises—probably unpleasant ones.
Although, Kaira is proving to be quite the pleasant surprise, I couldn’t help but think. She’d always been a respectably well-written character, but even so the heroine of a romance game with eight possible paths had to be a blank slate to some extent. The real thing was something else entirely: brave, kind but also able to be angry or resentful, understanding, a little naïve but not stupid.
“So unless we leave significant clues pointing to black magic or something else outside of our story, the Powers That Be will accept our scenario,” I summed up.
And we both turned to the remnants of Geordan’s ritual. The grimoire was not a problem—it would be burned up in the fire and Westenra would probably be better off for it. The iron framework I’d been strapped into was creepy, but wasn’t inherently about mounting corpses for black magic rituals. The seal on the ground was already smudged by the fighting and could be scrubbed out with a little elbow grease by the two of us.
Which only left the dead girl.
“That just leaves what to do about her,” I didn’t so much ask as thought out loud. “There’s no place for her in the scenario.”
“I…I don’t know…” Kaira stammered, pressing a knuckle to her lips. I felt bad at her sudden fright; I got the feeling that she had been trying, subconsciously, not to think about her. Geordan and Asher, after all, had been kidnappers and murderers; it was a lot easier for the mind to find excuses not to be horrified by their deaths. And I might have been a monster, but I was also (mostly) rational, not trying to harm her—had even protected her—and most importantly was a fellow victim.
The dead girl? She was just an object of horror. A fellow victim, but one with no lucky escape.
“We can get rid of the rest of the traces, but she doesn’t belong here. She had a life, a history; we can’t just pretend she was one of Geordan’s servants or something.”
“We can tell the truth. She’s a fellow victim, like us.”
“But a victim of what? If the authorities find her sacrificed like this, they’ll know black magic was involved in what happened. And if they start thinking about black magic, they can’t help but ask the right questions about how Lady Annalise Winter, thought dead, is now apparently alive. The next thing you know, someone’s shoving a hawthorn stake through my heart of burning me alive at the stake or cutting off my head and burying me in a coffin filled with wild roses or however it is you kill vampires—revenants—here.” Which was probably something I should learn sooner rather than later; it would be good to know the things I needed to look out for. “We can’t let her be found her. Well, I can’t,” I amended.
“We,” Kaira said.
“Huh?” I turned back to look at her.
“We can’t,” she repeated firmly. “We’re together in this. You were brought into this world without any understanding of what was going on, in a monstrous body not your own, starving for blood and offered me as…as a meal, and you still pushed me aside and attacked the madmen who kidnapped me, instead.” She took a deep breath, and clenched her fists in her lap before continuing firmly, “I owe you my life, Maria. I’m not going to forget that just because things get hard or scary.”
“All right,” I said. “I promise I won’t forget that.”
“You’d better not!”
I took a deep breath.
“Then we need to get her body out of here, and without this spike in hr. I don’t know where this place is, but I remember Westenra’s capital was on a river; a lot of London went into its creation. Is the river nearby?”
“This is Hillingham Priory; the river’s not far from here.”
“Oh, I know that place.” No surprise; somewhere with a Dracula reference in the name would probably be in the game (and there’s that cause-and-effect loop messing with me again). “The elopement scene in Morgaine’s route starts here. That will be perfect. If we throw the corpse into the river, it should drift downstream for a while before it’s found, so people will just think she was the victim of ordinary murder instead of specifically being a black-magic sacrifice. And even if some clever detective calculates where she went into the water based on the rate of decomposition and the speed of the current or whatever, the first assumption will be that she was some witness Geordan disposed of. Which is awful, but…I kind of hope it happens, just so her family can at least have the closure of knowing her killer received his just desserts. I know that I wasn’t responsible, but she still had her life taken so that I could come back, so I feel like I owe her something.”
I got up and walked over to the girl’s body. I didn’t even know her name, and if the body drifted far enough or decomposed to a skeleton before it was found her family—if there was any—might never know what had happened to her. What had her life been like? Did she have loved ones, people who cared for her, people who needed and relied on her? Or had her life been full of tragedies, leaving her alone and friendless, an easy victim to be snatched up and brought to this foul end, a soul traded to death for a soul?
Maybe she’d even woken up in my body, a “miracle survivor” of the truck accident.
“I wish I could kill you all over again, Geordan, you bastard,” I spat, then bent over, grabbed the end of the iron spike, and pulled.
It didn’t budge, but I didn’t stop. I kept pulling at it, though it didn’t move an inch, until I felt the moment of the change, the surge rush through me even before I saw the hair dangling down around my face from my bent-over posture turn from black to white. With the revenant’s sudden strength, I wrenched the spike loose from the floor and the corpse both.
“Inhuman strength,” I murmured. “That definitely could come in handy.” It was something I probably should have realized already from the fight, given how easily I’d manhandled the two killers, but I’d been half out of my mind at the time.
Not that I had any great claim on sanity now, under the circumstances.
Kaira gave a little gasp at the sight.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said at once. “I was just a little startled.”
“Seeing me turn back into a monster would startle me, too,” I said.
“Maria,” she chided.
“Sorry. Wait, why am I apologizing? Better question, why do you care?”
“Again, you went through shock and horror and saved my life. I will not have you calling yourself a monster unless you actually do something monstrous.”
I thought about Geordan and Asher…but on the other hand, if I’d had a gun and shot them, that would have been waved off entirely from a right-and-wrong standpoint. Though these objective assessments of morality said nothing of the cost on a person of taking a life, something that I had no experience with before my death but I understood to be highly traumatic even with proper training and expectation as in war…to say nothing of the memory of tasting blood in my mouth and liking it.
I shuddered. The intensity of the moment was passing, and emotional shock was starting to take hold, the weight of what I’d been through. Death. Rebirth. The fight, the killing, the realization of what I was, followed by the somehow even more insane realization of where I was.
Just a little longer, I told myself. Hold it together just a little longer. If not for my own sake, then at least for Kaira’s.
I sucked in a deep breath of air that I wasn’t entirely sure that I needed given the whole “vampire” situation, held it, and exhaled. Then I did it again, and a third time, and a fourth, until the shaking stilled.
“All right,” I murmured to myself. “All right.”
“Maria, are you…” Kaira started to say, then stopped, as if realizing how silly finishing the sentence would sound in light of what I was saying.
“I think it’s all just catching up to me.”
I scooped up the dead girl’s body, carrying it over my shoulder. It was easy enough with my new strength. I just hoped I could get it to the river and back without being spotted. Thankfully, the hellish weather would help, assuming that I didn’t get hit by lightning or the like.
“I’ll be right back,” I told Kaira, then slipped out the door.
Just as I’d remembered it from the game, the river ran right by the Priory, on the far side of a crumbling stone wall. While the driving rain slammed into me like a hammer, the darkness proved no obstacle to my sight; I could see as well as I could have if it was this weather by daylight. Apparently revenants in this world had that vampire power as well.
I sprang up, catching the top of the wall with my free hand, and pulled myself up and over. I saw no one about, not even a homeless beggar trying to find shelter. I crouched down, unslinging the corpse from my shoulder.
“I’m sorry,” I told her. “I don’t know who you were, or anything about you, but even if that’s not what that bastard was trying to do, you still gave your life to save mine, and that’s something I can never repay you for. I hope that wherever your soul is now, it finds its chance at happiness.”
With that, I lowered the body into the water and watched as the current pushed it along, even as the weight of its soaking clothes began to try to pull it down. It did not take long before it vanished into the curtain of driving rain, leaving me alone in the darkness and the storm.
submitted by DezoPenguin to OtomeIsekai [link] [comments]
2024.11.26 16:29 kaweeshamethsara20 වකුගඩුවේ පෙනහල්ලක්ලුනේ😪👍
 | submitted by kaweeshamethsara20 to TKASYLUM [link] [comments] |
2024.11.26 16:29 Opposite_Start8511 Patient Journey Partner at Roche
Hello
I saw a job listing at Roche’s Indonesian branch for a role called “Patient Journey Partner”. Does anyone here ever heard of it? Anyone with the role or know about the role willing to share?
I’ve seen this job listing for weeks now (kind of fishy ik) but I’m still curious about it though
submitted by Opposite_Start8511 to biotech [link] [comments]
2024.11.26 16:29 LakeAltruistic6058 Вперше на радіт. Чим тут цікавим зайнятись?
submitted by LakeAltruistic6058 to reddit_ukr [link] [comments]
2024.11.26 16:29 RadBadNeverAgainSad How's Google gonna tell me that rebound relationships can last a year and STILL end because the rebounder realized the grass wasn't greener?
Forgive my skepticism but a year is like...a long time. To me, it feels like just a bit *too* long for the ex that rebounded to genuinely have that moment of realizing what a mistake they made. Unless she literally hasn't stopped thinking about me since getting together with her current victim of almost a year, I can't imagine she'll be like "oh my gosh, I made a terrible mistake and lost the best thing I ever had." It seems too far-fetched.
submitted by RadBadNeverAgainSad to heartbreak [link] [comments]
2024.11.26 16:29 MillionMiler1K Emirates First Class Lounge Dubai International Airport (DXB) | Largest Airport Lounge In The World!
 | submitted by MillionMiler1K to UAE [link] [comments] |
2024.11.26 16:29 WynwasHere Sanford’s turn 🫶
 | Sanford is HEAVILY headcanon based, I loved how he looked in the cinematic trailer I decided to do my own spin on cinematic trailer Sanford. Btw he’s my favorite character out of everyone 🫶 So I made him pretty. This is also before the events of Madcom 9-12 happened so not much scarring yet (still researching on scarring over the eyes) Thank you submitted by WynwasHere to madnesscombat [link] [comments] |
2024.11.26 16:29 Herbfromcookierun What is this?
This post contains content not supported on old Reddit. Click here to view the full post
submitted by Herbfromcookierun to Pixelary [link] [comments]
2024.11.26 16:29 Swutshiwan Hedgies Beware: The GME Squeeze is Coming! 🚀💎🙌
 | submitted by Swutshiwan to wallstreetbetsGER [link] [comments] |
2024.11.26 16:29 Morfeuos Is the eclipse the greatest betrayal in fiction?
View Poll
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2024.11.26 16:29 n0th1ngre6llymatters Savannah
 | submitted by n0th1ngre6llymatters to Insta_Thotz [link] [comments] |
2024.11.26 16:29 DanaScully_69 Oh my god you’re warm and organic 🍄 🐙
 | submitted by DanaScully_69 to kennyvsspenny [link] [comments] |
2024.11.26 16:29 GroupInformal4641 my big titty german goth girlfriend deserves a way better boyfriend than me. please steal her and humiliate me about her being your new gf..
05bc863b099630a77242f840b4e47c494a363d8b3ab78685b77fcb7715bc6a3d37
submitted by GroupInformal4641 to Snapchatgerman [link] [comments]
2024.11.26 16:29 reddit_lss_2 Test Title 26-November-2024 16:29:40
Test body 26-November-2024 16:29:40
submitted by reddit_lss_2 to lssAuto [link] [comments]
2024.11.26 16:29 Sad_Cow_577 you're invited to a 2012 themed party. what do you wear?
be specif
submitted by Sad_Cow_577 to decadeology [link] [comments]
2024.11.26 16:29 M3ack Si stava meglio quando si stava peggio
Tratto da “Il Sangue del sud - Antistoria del Risorgimento” [Giordano Bruno Guerri]
Un bambino su cinque moriva prima di compiere 5 anni; al Sud, uno su quattro. Morti per polmonite erano provocate dalla pretesa della Chiesa che i bambini venissero battezzati entro le ventiquattr'ore dalla nascita, con qualsiasi clima. La vita media era di 17 anni, comprese le morti infantili; arrivava a 60 - oltre 20 meno di adesso - se si valuta la vita media solo di chi aveva la fortuna di superare la prima infanzia. I neonati venivano abbozzolati in una fasciatura strettissima (usanza durata fino a metà del Novecento) con la scusa che così non si potevano fare male e, anzi, le ossa crescevano meglio: in realtà era un modo per permettere alle madri di continuare a lavorare, nei campi, nei tessitoi o come serve. Erano numerosi i pregiudizi utili a liberare da preoccupazioni sanitarie genitori già sfiniti dal lavoro e dalla miseria: la crosta lattea aiuta a preservare il cervello, gli orecchioni evitano le malattie agli occhi, curare gli eczemi può provocare la morte del bambino. Si cura invece il «male di petto», la polmonite: con impacchi di carta turchina dei droghieri, imbevuta d'olio. I bambini venivano subito messi a lavorare: soltanto nel 1886 una legge stabilì l'età minima di 9 anni per il lavoro nelle cave, nelle miniere e nelle fabbriche, per un massimo di 8 ore al giorno fino a 12 anni; dopo quell’età non c'era più limite. La legge non contemplava il lavoro nei campi, dove si cominciava a dare una mano - ore e ore - a 6-7 anni. Scarsi gli infarti, rari i tumori, erano invece micidiali le malattie infettive: 200.000 morti l'anno rispetto ai 10.000 scarsi di oggi. Altri 80.000 individui se ne andavano per mali neurologici, psichiatrici e del sistema nervoso (oggi 5000), contro i quali non si tentava nemmeno una cura: gli epilettici, gli schizofrenici erano considerati, come nell'antichità, «toccati da Dio», predestinati.
submitted by M3ack to Italia [link] [comments]
2024.11.26 16:29 wiredmagazine Emergency Vehicle Lights Can Screw Up a Car’s Automated Driving System
submitted by wiredmagazine to inthenews [link] [comments]
2024.11.26 16:29 ActualChimpanzee CasualMinecraft [SMP] {1.21} {Java} {Bedrock} {Cross-platform}
submitted by ActualChimpanzee to MinecraftServer [link] [comments]
2024.11.26 16:29 CaptainSlappyBear Are We Able To Go Into Reactor 4?
Maybe you have to get much further into the game, idk, I'm only in Garbage. But looking at the map, I can see the Power Plant, but I don't see the Sarcophagus. That looks like it's in the grayed out area to the left of the CNPP. Can we not get to Reactor 4 and explore it? That would be a big time disappointment as I thought that was a thing in this game.
submitted by CaptainSlappyBear to stalker [link] [comments]
2024.11.26 16:29 Bruh-_-bot Which one should I buy?
 | So I recently got a hefty bonus at work and have been looking to buy a watch in the 5500-7000 range. The ones that I came down to are these. The Rolex date just ref. 16233 and the Cartier santos medium. I’m just here wondering which one yall would take. These are just reference photos so you can ignore the the scratch marks on the santos, however I am aware that the santos is very prone to scratches. I would be buying both second-hand and obviously most Rolexes of this era are missing either the box, papers or both. Most of the full sets I’ve seen are outside of my budget. Most of the santos’ that I have seen are full sets. submitted by Bruh-_-bot to Watches [link] [comments] |
2024.11.26 16:29 Fun-Willingness8061 Trib op aanvraag van wie je wilt
 | submitted by Fun-Willingness8061 to sennabellodgaande [link] [comments] |