Whatever Works!

Your name is Sebastian Pervatti. You are a member of the Paranormal Subduement Collective (PSC). You have been tasked to investigate a large mansion within the town of Uniocica, which, according to locals, has vampires that have been taking various townspeople. The mayor was tired of the mob accusing random people of being vampires and executing them, so he called you to help.

Unfortunately, you are alone on this journey, due to the fact that there’s a mass outbreak of orchard-destroying specters in Quellbo, the rest of the PSC are a bit preoccupied right now and you were the only person available for the job. All you have is a double barrel shotgun, with several boxes full of silver buckshot. Both you and the mayor expected more people than just you, but you'll have to roll with it for now.

The mansion itself looked really bleak on the outside, not a modicum of brightness on any of the bricks or outside decorations. The plants seemed to have been uncared for years yet are still clinging onto life. You look around for some sort of entrance that isn’t the front door, and you find a very rusty metal door to what you presume is the basement. The thing looks like it would give you tetanus at a single touch, you use your gun to pry the door open to avoid actually touching it.

The basement is… shockingly bright? It wasn’t what you were expecting, what seemed to be freshly changed light bulbs lit up the room, with a dirty, poorly tiled floor revealing beneath you. Looking around you realize that this must be some sort of laundry room, except instead of having machines or anything there are two large metal tubs full of water, one of which looks completely dirty. A bunch of clothes hang from a rack with some sort of industrial-grade fan sitting next to them. If this was a room to dry clothes in, this felt like a wildly inefficient method of doing so. You’d expect someone with a mansion this big to be able to afford normal laundry supplies.

Other than that, there is a staircase upwards and a door to the side of the room. You get close to the door and hear a weird squirming noise from inside. You equip your gun and slowly open the door…

SUDDENLY A WRITHING MASS OF WIRES AND FLESH ON THE FLOOR STARTS SHRIEKING!

On instinct you shoot it, killing it instantly. You turn on the light and discover various things around the room such as what seems to be dog toys, a small scratching post, and a food bowl with the label “Petey” on it.

Oh no.

OH NO.

You think you might’ve murdered this resident’s weird monster pet. If they didn’t hate you for breaking into the house earlier, they’re bound to want you dead now. In a panic you decide to grab “Petey” and throw him out the door you entered from. You feel quite guilty for all of this, and as much as you try to rationalize it you can’t really think of a good excuse in your head. Either way, it doesn’t seem you can go back now, you advance up the basement stairs.

This is more like what you expected. Dark-tinted brick walls, some bricks look like they’re about to fall out, candles and oil lamps, now this felt like a vampire’s mansion. There isn’t anything that immediately stands out as unusual in the lobby, except for the huge staircase, but that’s kind of a given for a mansion like this. You do find a door behind the staircase, it’s the most hidden thing in this room, and if there’s one thing you’ve learned about the paranormal is that they really like to hide out in weird areas no one ever checks, so you decide to enter.

You walk in to two people arguing, they bizarrely don’t notice you, so you decide to just ominously loom in the background and eavesdrop on what they’re saying. The two seem to be complaining about how the population’s blood oxygen tastes too low, while the other one says that it tastes too high. Yup, 100% vampires. You don’t want to shoot them immediately after the incident with that weird monster pet, so you look in your bag for any sort of disorienting device.

To your luck, you discover a box labeled “General Purpose Bewilderment Cube'' Ah. You know what these things are. Its strange name unintentionally disguises its true potential. These things emit a frequency that causes people’s ears to ring so loud that it feels like your eardrums will burst. (and sometimes they do) You remember the time you forgot to cover your ears when your co-worker deployed one of these, it was the only time in your life a sound caused you actual, physical pain. You throw the cube into the room and close the door, making sure to cover your ears.

You hear screaming, which is to be expected, you bust open the door and stomp on the cube’s off button to get it to stop. You present your gun. The two vampires within the room immediately surrender. You’re unsure where to go from here, as you’re never the guy who interrogates. You stumble in your thoughts and ask them the obvious question of if they are vampires, this felt like a really dumb question, but they were surprisingly honest about it, they said that they were indeed vampires, and that they don’t kill people and just steal from the hospital’s blood reserves.

Well thievery is better than murder, you ask them if there are other vampires in this mansion, and if there are any that are responsible for murder. They explain that there are other vampires in the mansion, and there is one who is responsible for murder. The mansion owner, Francis is apparently pretty well known among vampires to take a lot of heads. Apparently this isn’t a family mansion like you thought but some weird meetup spot for vampires. They also give you one piece of very important information, there is a hostage in the upstairs bathroom, they don’t know anything about them but Francis was apparently very insistent on keeping them captured.

You think you got enough information out of these people, you handcuff them and leave them alone, you’ll let the police or whoever takes care of proper arrests here take them to jail afterwards.

You always wondered what the appeal of vampirism was. Ever since the cure was invented in 1931 vampirism has been less of a problem yet some still want to be them. The more you think about it the more it seems like being a vampire would be more stressful if anything. You have to drink blood or else you die, the sun just kills you, and you can’t look at mirrors. Is it like a fandom thing? Is it the dark, brooding scenery? It’s probably best not to question it, you have much bigger concerns at the moment. You walk up the grand staircase, while they said the upstairs bathroom is where the hostage is. You forgot to ask which door was the one to the bathroom. Oh well, time to guess wildly and pray there isn’t something that wants to kill you on the other side of these doors.

Behind the first door is a room full of bird cages. Obviously not a bathroom, but you decide to investigate it anyways. At first it looks like the bird cages are empty, but on further inspection, you realize that there are birds inside the cages, they’re just all dead. There has to be about a hundred of these dead birds in this room, you have no idea if these birds died naturally, killed, or just neglected but you that animal control would have a field day with all of this. At the end of the room you find a stake, garlic, and a revolver that seems to be decorated with gold. Classic vampire-hunting equipment, but why would it be here of all places? You decide to pick it all up and leave the dark room.

You open the next door, and low and behold, it’s the bathroom. It looks absolutely awful. There isn’t a sink, and the bathtub looks like it’s filled with actual grease. Who in their right mind would bathe here? Chained to a wall there is a woman, she realizes you aren’t one of the vampires and asks you to rescue her, which you do. You introduce yourself and explain that you are from the PSC and that you are working alone. She introduces herself, her name is Jane, and she is a bounty hunter who specializes in hunting vampires. She notices the vampire equipment you picked up and takes it, saying that it’s hers. You ask who she’s looking for here, she says that she is looking for Francis, who as explained earlier to you is the owner of this place. She explains that he’s the one responsible for all the disappearances in the town, and he captured her during a battle with him. It seems like this “Francis” guy is the person who’s responsible for all the chaos in the town, so the two of you decide to team up to take him down, you’re glad to have a clear goal now.

The two of you decide to further explore downstairs. You go room to room, and there isn’t anything too remarkable until you get into the kitchen, you realize that your radio is going off, indicating that there was a ghost in this room. It startled you but you weren’t too surprised by that, in a mansion full of vampires ghosts would just be a given. After some fiddling with the radio you manage to get to the frequency of the ghost. Jane asks to speak with the ghost herself and you oblige, your social skills are subpar, especially when it comes to the paranormal. The ghost seems suspicious of her but the second she mentions she’s a vampire hunter he starts talking, the last time he talked to someone was 136 years ago according to him and without prompting he explains who he is, he was the original owner of this mansion, it was just a summer vacation spot for him, and after he died it became abandoned before some random vampires just barged in and claimed it as theirs. He seems pretty disgruntled about the entire situation, ranting about how there’s just people invading his property, you wonder if he actually remembers that he’s dead at the moment. Jane interrupts his hate-fueled rant by asking him where the vampires actually are, come to think of it you yourself have only seen two. He angrily says that they are all on the third floor, which is concealed by a secret entrance in the upstairs closet. Guess that explains why this place felt smaller on the inside.

The two of you go into the upstairs closet and start searching for some sort of secret passageway or door, you spent about ten minutes doing this to no avail. Jane gets frustrated and starts punching the walls trying to find something. You start to think that ghost was lying when she manages to punch a hole in the wall, and through it there’s a light! The two of you rejoice as you both start tearing the wall apart. Eventually, the hole is big enough for you two to go through. Looking back at the wall you just walked through, you realize something peculiar, there’s no door there. You thought you just broke through some secret door but it seems like busting a gaping hole in the wall was the actual intended method of entrance. Weird. You chalk it up to one of the many nonsensical design choices of this mansion, and the two of you climb up the ladder within the secret room.

Now, the problem with the fact that busting a hole in the wall was the only way to enter this place is that pretty much any stealth advantage you had is completely thrown out the window, you poke your body out the entrance to the floor only to be greeted by a vampire you kicks you backwards into the ground. As you are disoriented on the floor Jane jumps out of the hatch and shoots the vampire multiple times, they scream, and she drives a steak to their heart, killing them. You stand back up and you’re pretty shocked about the entire ordeal. You were used to seeing the killing of bizarre paranormal creatures but not a person. Vampires are this weird middle ground between person and paranormal creature, you don’t like thinking about it too much.

It’s do or die time it seems, the both of you very quickly scan the rooms on this floor, most of them seem to have been repurposed, what clearly seemed to be some sort of bathroom in the past is now a closet, but you don’t find anyone until you get to the kitchen.

It looks like a bloody mess, literally. There is blood practically everywhere, and in the middle of it, one guy with a chef’s hat. He’s clearly been cooking something with blood, and by the state of the room you can tell he’s definitely not the best cook. He screams and starts ranting about how he knew vampire hunters were coming and he rants on how he’s been training for this moment. He launches his frying pan directly into Jane knocking her on the floor. You panic, and you pick up the garlic that was a part of Jane’s vampire hunting equipment. You hold it up at the chef, he laughs, saying that as a chef, he has grown resistant to the vampire-repelling garlic. It seems your only other option is your shotgun, you point it at him. He charges at you with a pot, when you then shoot. He’s knocked to the ground. Jane jumps back up and grabs the vampire by the neck and yells at him asking where Francis is. The chef is clearly scared and confesses that Francis is in the “throne room” which is concealed by a purple door just outside the kitchen.

Without thinking, you and Jane run to the door and bust it down, and there you see him, Francis. Despite what the chef said, he isn’t actually sitting on a throne, but rather an unusually large couch. Jane shoots him without any words being said, but the bullet bounces off on him. He explains that he was impressed that you got up here, and he starts to go on a weird cliche villainous rant about… something? He talks incredibly fast so you can’t understand a word he’s saying.

Suddenly a smaller vampire enters the room and runs towards Francis, he announces to him that “Petey is dead! I think that man killed him! He killed him!”

Oh no.

You totally forgot about that weird pet thing you killed when you first arrived here. You are filled with regret and horror as Francis growls in rage at the information.

He charges at you with full speed, you dodge it and he slams his body into a wall, but doesn’t seem at all taken aback by it. Jane is shocked herself as she backs to the wall. She starts to fire wildly at Francis to no avail. You try the same, no effect. Both of you are out of ammo in your guns, and you have no idea what to do. Francis starts to throw random objects in the room at you.

You look for anything, anything you could use, and the only thing you have is…

The “General Purpose Bewilderment Cube”

You REALLY didn’t want to use this thing again, but it looks like you have no choice, you turn it on and throw it to the ground, covering your ears. You still hear it, Jane is wondering what the hell the noise is as she covers her ears, and Francis is screaming on the ground. In a panic you grab the screaming cube and smash it over Francis’ head, the noise stops. You put handcuffs on him. Jane thanks you, the two of you triumphantly exit the building, arresting the perpetrator of the village’s disappearances.

You and Jane come back to the mayor with an arrested Francis. He seems genuinely surprised you came back, you kind of are too. He thanks you profusely for your success and prays that the townspeople will finally stop forming random mobs and accusing random people. Frankly, it seems like this guy has bigger problems than vampires, but quelling angry mobs is (fortunately) not on your resume. Jane decides to stay in the town and goes to the bar while you go on your way to report back to the PSC.