In the Virtual Bank Line

I know, it's been a quite a while since my last post, but on the good side, if my evil plans come to fruition, I'll have much more to post soon. In the meantime, I have a couple of Virtual Bank Line episodes I wanted to record.

7.23.2006
I was sitting at my kitchen table with several of my former co-workers, including my old boss. We were trying to solve some kind of engineering problem and were in a heated discussion, but the television was on and it was loud enough to be distracting.The television show was some kind of nature program about how animals react to the panic and pain of other animals. The narrator was saying that when an animal was dying traumatically, other animals would kill it to relieve its suffering.

On the screen there was a dog. It had no hair left and its skin was a horrible, mottled pink, like a raw sausage. It was lying on its back, writhing and crying. The skin was stretched and looked like it was going to burst. Another little dog jumped onto it and began tearing at its belly, eviscerating it.

The engineers and I looked on, horrified, but soon realized that we had a much worse problem. We had vampires.

I came upon a vampire killing a very large woman (another co-worker of mine, but nobody I knew in real life). The vampire was a punk-looking blonde girl, about 12 or 14 years old. She standing in the shower, having dragged the woman halfway in after her. The blood was spattering all over the shower and her, and as I walked in, she looked up. The woman's blood continued to ooze onto the shower floor and down the drain, while the girl looked ashamed of herself, then turned to smoke and fluttered away.

The rules of vampires aren't what you think. Vampires don't die in the sunlight; they just lose their vampire powers, along with any memory they may have had of their nocturnal activities. As vampires, they have amazing strength, no fingerprints and they can turn their bodies to smoke, making them able to enter sealed rooms and fly through the air. They instantly regenerate when wounded, so they can't be killed, even by a stake. The thing that's lethal to vampires is the wood. It's like smothering a fire by putting to much fuel on it - when you put a wooden stake into a vampire, the wood "absorbs" the smoke and you're just left with a piece of wood. You can't ever BURN the wood, though, because it will release the vampire. You put it in a coffin and bury it.

As humans they retain the ability to regenerate, just not as quickly. They also have problems metabolizing food: their digestive systems are really set up for being solely carnivorous. Because of the way they metabolize they are normally very thin, with very pink complexions. Mostly, people think of them as beautiful, healthy, rosy-cheeked people. They have unusual amounts of energy and age more slowly than ordinary people.

Vampire victims do not turn into vampires; they just die. I have no idea what it is that turns people into vampires. Perhaps they're born mutations, perhaps it's some kind of virus.

I stood there over the body of the dead woman and wondered how I would catch the vampire, and if I caught her as a human, how do you even begin to prosecute that?

7.24.2006
I'd been on vacation with the Pirate, and at the end of it all, I had to go to a funeral. I was driving into the city for this funeral, but for some reason, I seemed to only intermittently have a car. I would be at a traffic light and realize that I was sitting on the ground with four large pillows in my hands. I was annoyed because I knew that I had to carry these pillows with me, but they were awkward. It's true that in real life, I often feel like I have too many things in my hands at any given time.

I arrived too late for the funeral, but went to the family's house for the reception. In the kitchen, I met the dead man's girlfriend. The dead man was the boy I liked when I was in kindergarten. He'd be my age, but in the dream he was only 20 or so. His girlfriend was sobbing because they'd been having problems right before he died. Suddenly, the wall opened up and I could see an image of the dead man walking down the front walk hand in hand with another woman as the girlfriend's voice kept crying in the foreground.

I went back outside and there were two groups - the dead man's family and friends and my entire family. Why was my entire family here? All of my aunts and uncles and cousins, everyone was gathered at picnic tables out on the front lawn. I noticed that most of the people who didn't know each other were making awkward conversation or at least sitting together and sharing their grief. But there were some men who were specifically avoiding even looking at each other. It was as if they were trying to maintain their status of strangers.

As I walked through the kitchen outside, one of my little cousins was talking to one of the dead man's little cousins, saying "My cousin Malachy's a hitman, but nobody else in my family anymore..." It was a well-known fact in my family, but not something we talked about. But I looked outside at the group gathered there in a whole new light.