This is the first installment of background material I was speaking of.
“You, I believe, would find an outline of our history
useful. This all started roughly 100,000 Terran years ago. That was when our
predecessors came into the Sol System and settled on Terra and Mars. Our best
guess is that they came out of a globular cluster about 10,000 light years from
the galactic center. Now those who believe they existed tend to call them Mu.
I’m quite certain that isn’t what they called themselves. They looked very much
like us, doubtless our species would have been genetically compatible. They
dwelled here in relative peace for about 10,000 years, at which time they were
attacked by a rival species. It appears from the evidence that they technically
‘won’ the war, but a stealth fleet hit Terra and decimated their settlements
here. A few apparently stayed behind and eventually interbred with the native
Terran population. They shut down their operations on Mars and withdrew from
the Sol System.
“What makes them pertinent to the history of the Plaz is
because, as a result of that attack by the stealth fleet, some people grew very
ill and then began to ravenously attack other people, draining them of their
blood. These beings could not stand sunlight and, being essentially mindless,
they basically took care of themselves by blowing up. A few were kept in
research facilities and studied. This research survived until our race arrived
on Terra about 65,000 years ago. Their research was rather brief. They were
looking for a way to reverse the process, instead of a way to avoid the onset
of mindlessness in the first place. They did not see the potential value in
creating such a creature. You see, these revenants also had preternatural
strength and, in spite of their general mindless rage, had some noted psychic
abilities.
“Once our people arrived in the Sol System, they started
looking at what the others had left behind. We essentially revamped their
spaceports and mining outposts on Mars. We thickened the atmosphere there and
brought back some shallow seas and grasslands. On Terra, we settled in the land
mass commonly now referred to as Atlantis, as for some reason none of the
natives lived there. We did have research stations in Europe,
Asia, North America and Africa,
especially where we found the facilities left behind by Mu. As luck would have
it, one such station was so intact that they found a couple of those revenants
still inside. Those ravenous creatures immediately tried to attack and were
summarily destroyed.
“Over the space of about fifty years, our researchers
reviewed the experiments and the documentation left behind. Then they
duplicated some of it, at first, rather predictably with disastrous results.
Then, they finally managed to refine the chemicals to stop the mindless rage.
This made a transformation useful on several levels. No longer were we dealing
with revenants. The Ruby Order vampire thus came into being.
Kristano pauses, collecting his thoughts. “How do I best put
this? The Fleet was a consortium of private protection and shipping companies.
They invested the most into the research because they saw a military potential
in vampires that could retain their wit and personality. The revenant would not
be useful even as a shock weapon because they cannot control themselves. So,
Reggie, to put it bluntly we were initially conceived of as being a weapon. It
does make sense, after a fashion. As it turned out, relatively few of the
military types made the grade in those days. Most of them ended up in space
exploration and research.”
Reggie nods. “So what became of the founder of Order Ruby?
I’ve read the histories online but they don’t say much about him.”
Kristano chuckles. “It’s really somewhat ironic. Dr. Vas
Juliuan was only a vampire for about 1200 years. He didn’t really enjoy being
one. The blood drinking really bothered him, so he never learned how much the
need for that lessens over time. He was upset that he could not get the blood
drinking to cease to be and he wanted to be able to day walk without
protection. That does occur obviously. It really bothered him that one has to
be brought to the brink of death by severe blood loss for a transformation to
work. He was gone long before I was born. The few vampires around that did know
him never said much about him.”
“What about the other Orders? How and why did they come into
being?”
Kristano sighs. “It had to do with people and their agendas.
As our settlements on Terra and Luna and Mars became more established, our
decentralized, informal governments gave way, in some areas, to very familiar
forms. About 45,000 years ago there was a small kingdom in the north, close to
what is now Iceland.
The King at that time invested a huge sum of money to create, as he put it, a
more ‘regal,’ ‘durable’ vampire. They did manage to create the Order of the
Emerald, but the King was not to have his desire. The sole advantage that an
Emerald vampire has over a Ruby vampire is their keener infrared eyesight. They
can see in near absolute darkness. Our orders are closely aligned, as you well
know.
“As for Order Sapphire, they came into being just over
21,000 years ago. That was a turbulent time in our history. We were battling a
couple other spacefaring races at that time, plus there were rather severe
tectonic shifts going on here. Khaznatornii was no longer a continent by then;
rather it was six large islands and numerous smaller ones, a few of which still
exist today. At any rate, another King funded research by one Dr. Sanctitina
Olos Parana. Well, the good doctor, who is still with us, believed in her
formula so much that she was the first to use it. In the end she created a
vampire that was in all ways inferior to Emerald and Ruby. They have a higher
transformation failure rate, tend to be more violent and have a higher tendency
to turn psychopathic. This is likely why they are the smallest Order with only
ten percent of vampires. Ruby has fifty percent and Emerald has forty percent.
“There actually was a fourth Order for a time, called Order
Amethyst. It was founded in Egypt
about 7000 years ago after the complete collapse of Khaznatornii and the de
facto withdrawal of Fleet from the planet. The vampires of this Order tended to
be so violent that they were hard to distinguish from revenants. It was thought
that the Order had been exterminated in 1294 CE by a rare combined effort by
the three present Orders. However, it turned out that the Sapphire Society of Redemption
had kept about ten of them alive intending to use them as focal point
assassins. They were only eliminated a few years ago when that Society was
eliminated. They tried to assassinate Sancia herself and she was not amused.”
[An excerpt from DEBTS OF BLOOD, Copyright 2011 by Ronald C.
Tobin. All Rights Reserved.]
