Chapter Text
It's 2021, January. The world has barely recovered from the COVID-19 pandemic.
Fortunately, it didn't last that long, just a few months. Soon enough, a cure was discovered that would quickly cure COVID-19 and with it a host of other human ills. It was bad enough that there were some restrictions, curfews, and the obligation to wear facemasks. But to bother with it for another year or more? Who'd want that?
The world is facing other changes now.
"We have news from around the world. The big reveal. Vampires, werewolves, witches exist."
"The undead announce their existence."
"The same company that came up with the cure for COVID-19 has now come up with synthetic blood."
"Real magic exists!"
"Vampires come out of coffins"
The media is awash in it. Everybody's talking about it. And no wonder. This is not what mankind expected.
"For centuries, they lived in secrecy. Until now. They know it's risky, but they've decided to come out into the open. And there's an expert on the supernatural here in the studio with us, one of them, to help explain everything. Caroline Forbes, welcome to the show."
The camera panned to reveal a blonde vampire seated next to the anchorwoman. Although she doesn't look like a vampire at all. At first glance, she looks like a young woman in a costume.
"Good evening, thank you for the welcome," she smiled just like any other guest during the interview.
"I guess we can start with the expected question. Who are you, anyway? I mean what kind."
"I'm a vampire. A pretty ordinary vampire, at least, so I don't have any special powers. I've just been interested in mediums since I was human, and lately, I've been helping set up this whole reveal. That's why I ended up becoming I face and spokesperson in the media."
"When you talk about setting this up, what preceded all of this?"
"Quite a lot of things. For the last couple of decades, or this millennium especially, that's been our goal. Several key elements needed to be achieved for this. The main key element was synthetic blood, which we had been developing for some time. We couldn't just go out into the world saying that humanity was our 'food'," she indicated the quotation marks by the word before continuing. "We needed to satisfy the hunger of the vampires with something other than animal blood, and we suspected you wouldn't put much face on robbing bags from blood banks. It was mainly us vampires that needed to be tamed in this and offered something."
"And did it work? Have they... or are you vampires tamed? Is no one protesting?"
"This was the other thing that was needed. Give the supernaturals some rules. With everyone hiding and living somewhat outside the law, there were no rules. Locally at most. Mostly the stronger wins and don't mess with someone you can't take on was the rule. That's not the case anymore, now certain laws apply to everyone. Now, not many people can just murder a village without it getting to the authorities later and being punished for it."
"So we don't have to worry about walking down the street somewhere at night, for example, lest a vampire attack us?"
"There's always a certain risk, just like there's always a risk of being mugged by a thief. And just as such a thief can then escape the police, someone supernatural too can escape. But then that's the responsibility of both the police and the supernatural authority in the area, who is tasked with detecting and punishing this under the new laws."
"Why did you decide to come out in the first place?"
"A lot of answers are offered, that we just got tired of hiding. But in reality, we were kind of forced to do it by you. The threat of the media. It was only a matter of time before something got out of control, someone attacked someone, and just when maybe someone was going live, it would go viral, and then who knows what would happen. You'd learn about the existence of the supernatural, especially vampires in a bad light, and we didn't want that. We want to show that even supernatural beings can be a valuable part of society."
"Does this have anything to do with the cure for COVID-19? That it was created by the same company that came up with the synthetic blood is impossible to miss."
"We took the opportunity. The vampire blood was able to cure COVID-19 with the left back, it was the first opportunity to help the world. It just took us a while to get the quantities and dosages fine-tuned enough, because we didn't quite want to just start handing out vampire blood to people in large quantities. That's why there was enough to heal, but not so much that it stayed in the bloodstream for unnecessarily long and there was a risk of turning."
"Don't you want to share the vampirism?"
"Vampires can hardly have children. If there are more vampires in the world than any other creatures, we'll start to risk extinction for all of them. But if a vampire wants to turn someone, he can. Only vampire babies are his responsibility at first. Otherwise, he has to answer to the authorities."
"I'll come back to the synthetic blood. How much does that relate to the show and the True Blood story?"
"We took a little inspiration there."
"So the whole series is otherwise fictional?"
"This True Blood series is entirely fictional. At least it was at the time, now it's coming true a little bit. But all the characters are fictional."
"Didn't the interest in vampires back then play into your hands a little bit?"
"Actually, it's a little bit our fault. We wanted to get vampires more in people's minds and a better light, romanticize them a little bit. We went a little overboard, sorry about that," she smiled there. "But there was an ulterior reason for all of this. We were trying to get a little bit of truth into one of the shows there, too."
"Do The Vampire Diaries? Is that why the I character Caroline Forbes exists there?" the host guesses immediately.
Caroline confirms it with a nod. "Exactly. We used the Vampire Diaries books that were written by someone who didn't know what was going on. That's why they don't fit. We put more thought into the series. It's still not all true. There's some artistic license in there, some events are left out, some important characters are missing, which is mostly the fault of Twilight."
"I don't think I understand exactly how," the presenter is somewhat confused.
"There's one important character missing at the beginning of the series, and then the next one is branching off from that. We were trying to get it in there at the time, but as the series started so soon after Breaking Dawn came out, they didn't like the idea of another vampire kid and were afraid of copying. And it was important to us that the series was made in the first place so that some of the important facts like the effects of vervain, lapus lazuli, and the origin of the Original Vampires could be included."
I shook my head in agreement as I watched this on TV. Yes, they were right. The events of The Vampire Diaries and subsequent spin-offs fit in some ways and in some ways they don't. That's why I want to explain and I want to show you some memories, mine or borrowed, that will show you how it all was.
You can guess who I am. The one who's telling it all.
The narrator.