Vampire Core: Reborn as the Hot Evil Vampire Lord, But I’m Socially Awkward

- [Somewhere on Earth] -

One Month Ago

She’s such a fucking loser.

Sarah, standing outside of the bookstore by herself, waves to her classmate as the other girl goes to leave to meet with her actual friends. The two of them are really just acquaintances at best, and while it felt nice to spend time with another person, it was actually a rather uncomfortable experience because Sarah knew the entire time that it wasn’t real. For the other girl, this was just a time-filler — a happy little five-minute interaction before she goes off to see the people who actually belong to her life.

Sarah rubs her face with a hand, the other holding a small fabric bag with long handles.

She doesn’t even like vampire books.

“I can’t believe that I spent the last of my money on this…” she mutters quietly.

She was just playing along with it because she wanted the other girl to like her. The other girl liked vampire books, so for those five minutes, Sarah did too. She does that a lot — pretending to be someone she isn’t whenever she’s around other people.

Sarah lets out a long exhalation, her shoulders dropping, and then she turns and walks off by herself, the shopping bag held in both of her hands in front of herself. Her shins kick the book over and over as she walks, starting on making her way back home. It’s uncomfortable, but it’s on purpose. Maybe it’s self punishment of some kind, or maybe she’s just craving stimulation.

She’s always like this.

She’s always… shapeshifting. Oftentimes, she doesn’t know who she is herself or what she likes at all. She’s spent so long pretending to be this person or that person in order to get anyone to like her that she’s never really figured out who Sarah actually is. At this point, it doesn’t feel like she can be anyone anymore. It feels like she’s locked herself in into being this amorphous shape of a person. She walks on two legs, she talks, she moves, but she doesn’t feel like she’s a human, like she’s alive.

The funny thing is, despite this being her long term plan, it’s never worked. Her entire life she’s been around people, but never with them. So why does she keep doing this?

Sarah wishes she knew.

Lifting her eyes from her shoegazing, but not her head, Sarah looks around herself at the people moving around the city. She doesn’t understand them. They seem to have so much energy, so much… life. They’re bounding around, seemingly connected to others and themselves as if they belonged to this place. It’s like they’re fish, and she’s just here wandering through the crowd like a fallen leaf drifting over the surface of their lake. They’re in the same place, and they pay her no mind, but she clearly isn’t one of them either.

She’s on the other side of the mirror glass all by herself.

Her eyes fall back down where they, in her own heavy heart’s voice, belong. The wind comes to accompany her on her way home, but even it changes course eventually.

And in her idle thoughts while walking, her mind’s eye drifts back to the man she saw at the book store. He seemed so sure and steady in himself by those other books, like a person who knew who he was and what he wanted.

How does he do it? How does anyone do it? She just doesn’t understand the human secret.

Sarah wishes her stupid classmate hadn’t shown up. Maybe she could have pretended to be someone else and talked to him instead of her. Maybe she could have learned something about… Well, she isn’t even sure about what, but just anything really. She doesn’t talk to a lot of guys.

But that wasn’t meant to be.

So, the shuffling creature known as Sarah resigns itself to its ever-given state of defeat and makes its way home. Her body moves and undertakes the motions all by itself to get that way, as her mind is lost within itself, thinking about imaginary scenarios had she done this or that instead.

She crashes into someone.

Everything flies out of Sarah’s grip. She was lost in her daydreams, her eyes not in the same place as her thoughts. The world spins together with her, and she falls down onto the sidewalk. Her book flies out of her bag and tumbles across the pavement.

“Sorry! I’m sorry,” mutters the man she had run into, shaking out his hand. He must have scraped it on the concrete. “You okay?”

“Ow… I’m fine. No, I’m sorry,” says Sarah. “I wasn’t looking where I was going,” she admits, brushing herself off and only then opening her eyes to really look at him. “AH!” she yells, rather abruptly, pointing straight at the man’s chest. Immediately, he leans back, likely frightened by her being a weirdo. “You’re the guy! B-Bookstore guy!” she stammers, her face changing.

What the hell is she saying? Oh, God. She’s such a dweeb.

It’s not really quiet, the world around them being chaotic and loud with the noises of people and buses. But in Sarah’s mind, a deafening silence overtakes everything all at once as a raging sense of confused embarrassment floods her. How did it come to this? It’s that guy from before, from the bookstore. The one she was thinking about in her daydreaming this last half hour. She’s sure of it. His hair, features — it’s unmistakably him.

She’s laughing awkwardly and shaking out her hands too. Why is she shaking out her hands? She didn’t scrape them like he did. Shapeshifting Sarah doesn’t know at first, but then after a microsecond of reflection, she realizes that she’s doing it because he did it a second ago. She’s copying him.

“Sorry,” apologizes the man, despite it clearly being her fault. She’s made it weird now. She can tell. God, she’s such a fuckup. ‘Bookstore Guy’, really?

“No, it’s just…” she starts, laughing anxiously as her daydreams and reality collide like crashing waves, leaving only the mess behind that is her life.

Wait.

Looking around as she realizes something. “My book!” she cries, looking around the ground as dozens of people walk around the two of them standing there in the middle of the way.

It’s not that she even wants the damn thing, but she paid for it. She needs it, so she can go back tomorrow when the store reopens to return it and get her money back so she can buy the book that she actually wanted. She doesn’t have a lot of it, so she can’t afford to waste it on ‘Enfangled’ of all things.

She sees a black-covered book lying there, the people walking off of the next bus barely stepping over it. Diving, she snatches it out before a boot tramples over the cover and sighs, holding it against her chest in relief.

He’s recovered his too. The two of them stand there, looking at each other.

It’s like he’s waiting for her to say something. It feels like it’s her turn in a conversation, and she hasn’t said a word, and she’s making it super awkward.

“Anyway, I’m really sorry again,” she says again, clutching her book against herself like a shield and looking at him. Her knuckles, white, clench as she crushes them with her hands against her chest, as if she were trying to stop her heart from breaking out of her ribs. “Do… do you like reading?”

What a stupid question. What the hell is wrong with her? Of course he likes reading. She just saw him in the bookstore. God, she hates herself.

He looks back at her, calm as can be, given the obvious question. “Me?” he asks, confused as he looks at her. “I love books,” replies the man, nodding and rubbing the back of his head sheepishly, clearly being kind enough to not tease her about her dumb question. She appreciates that. “A little too much, I guess,” he relents, looking at the spot where they fell, casually taking the blame for her mistake.

She really appreciates that.

Sarah laughs, her feet shifting, and then she looks up at him. “Me too,” she replies.

A truck barrels down the street, honking as it weaves through the people at an irresponsible speed. But she doesn’t really notice it as she’s sort of lost to her own daydreams again, thinking of this scenario and that scenario in a matter of seconds, until an uncomfortably long time has passed with her just staring like a creep.

Sarah thinks about what her favorite character would do at a time like this.

— That’s pretty nerdy and lame, but fictional role models are the only thing she has to go with.

They’d be brave.

And so, Sarah, the shape-changing girl, does what she does best and pretends to be someone else. This time, someone more courageous than she is.

“…This is a little weird, but do you want to maybe… go hang out together at the bookstore sometime?” she asks, not quite able to fully manifest herself into the role as it really is too far away from her normal state of being. “I can show you what I like to read. — or, like, the library… you know…” she mutters, laughing awkwardly as her finger that had been playing with a strand of her hair pulls it suddenly too tightly.

Oh, God.

Why the hell would she make this about herself? ‘She can show him what she likes to read’? Who talks like that? That sounds so selfish and disinterested. She blew it. She wants to die. Why didn’t she ask him what he likes?

“Sure!” he replies entirely unbothered. “I’d like that a lot,” he agrees.

…Huh?

In an instant, a thousand lights burn brightly inside of her body and mind as her rampaging heartbeat threatens to overload her senses. Everything in her is buzzing.

He said ‘yes’?

Did she hear that right? There’s no way she heard that right. There’s no way that this worked. Sneaky spineless Sarah’s last contact with a boy was back in kindergarten when a playmate said that he liked her, so she started crying and dumped a bucket of sand on his head.

He smiles. That’s weird. Why is he smiling? Sarah isn’t used to guys smiling at her. “— Bookstore girl,” he replies, turning her awkwardness back around into her own heart with his insanely charismatic confidence.

Everything shatters apart. Sarah’s sense of perception vanishes into her own mind, a fog and euphoria clouding her thoughts and feelings as she, in a matter of seconds, envisions an entire shared life together with this random guy she just met five minutes ago. Lost to her delirium, the bookstore girl laughs into her hand, and she smiles more, shifting her weight and looking away from a second to the ground.

This is bad. She has the giggles.

Sarah doesn’t know what to do with this. She’s just used to people either vaguely frowning at her or just keeping a blank expression and posture.

The two of them stand there apart from each other. She’s keeping that expression, and he’s just rubbing the back of his head, not sure what to do about it.

She’s so lost in her imagination that she’s pretty sure she missed half of what he was saying, because instead of listening, she was just staring into his eyes. He looks so kind and protective.

For example, she’s pretty sure she was so lost in her fantasy that she missed his name and everything else he said, because by the time she snaps back into control of herself, he’s getting ready to depart. He nods to her and points unbothered with one finger back her way. “I’ll see you there,” finishes the really cool man as he vanishes into the crowd, leaving Sarah standing there filled with emotions she doesn’t understand, raging loudly enough to drown out everything else inside of her.

‘See you there’.

…Where is ‘there’…?

Realizing that she zoned out of hearing where and when her first ever date is, Sarah almost screams to herself within her mind and rushes through the crowd, trying to chase him down. But there are too many people, and by the time she makes it through, he’s gone.

She could cry.

In fact, she is crying. It looks very bad. She’s not hiding any of herself anymore as she makes her way home, full of more self-loathing than ever before. Why is she like this? She almost had it, this was her big chance to finally become someone normal. She was this close, and she blew it because she’s… herself.

Sarah wipes her face into her sleeve.

…The bookstore.

The girl stops in her tracks.

He probably took up her invitation to meet up at the bookstore again, right?

Her mind races as she comes up with a scheme.

She’ll go there tomorrow again, and then every day after that. She’ll stay there all day every day for a month if she has to. Eventually, he’s going to wander back in there for their meetup, and she can pretend to be calm and cool about meeting him at the time they had agreed to be there.

She consciously chose to refer to it as a 'meetup’ rather than a date because the word is too embarrassing and alien for her to process. People date each other. But the thought of an entity like herself dating seems impossible. It’s like a fish learning to blow a saxophone; it just isn’t compatible with what it is.

Sarah, the fish girl, feeling a little relieved at her insane complot that she fully intends to pull through, cleans up her face and then keeps walking home. Idly, she reaches into her bag and takes out the book.

She stops dead in her tracks, looking at the heroic, dark-armored man on the cover, holding a gigantic two-handed sword as a half-naked elf clings desperately to him.

“’Swordserer; Don’t Trust the Horse…’” reads Sarah, her brain processing.

She LOVES Swordserer! She’s read all of them!

But this isn’t her book. This must be his. Oh God, she thinks that she loves him. Fresh imaginations of marriage and starting a family with the stranger whose name she doesn’t even know come to her mind, only to last for about ten seconds before the counterweight of her realization hits her.

They swapped books.

She has his book, but that means that… he has…

…No…

“NO!” screams Sarah into the air.

He has ‘Enfangled’.

Damn it all. It’s all ruined! It doesn’t matter if she goes back and ever manages to find him again, because he’s going to think that she’s a ‘vampire book girl’ and she won’t be able to dash that, so she’s going to have to pretend to like vampire books for the rest of her life in order to keep up the charade. He’s going to think that she’s so lame. It’s over. She’s cooked!

Sarah starts crying again, walking back home.

Unfortunately, because of her tears, she doesn’t notice the white, several-ton heavy box truck barreling down the street as she crosses over toward her apartment complex. The last thing she hears is a loud honking before she turns her head and stares into a pair of bright headlights.

The girl flies off, her head cracking against the pavement, and she dies instantly, and next to her, clutched rigorously in her hands, is a book covered in droplets of her blood that run down the cover, down the blade of the swordsman. A broken butterfly hairclip lies beneath her head.

Everything goes black.

Sarah finds herself floating in an empty void, and, for some reason that is far beyond her understanding, the book has come with her. Although her old body hasn’t joined along. Her newest shape is different. She looks like a yarn doll, almost. Apparently, this is what a soul is.

After some time in this odd, dark place, a glassy screen finally appears in front of her. It looks like a window, like a computer’s monitor.

~ [Reincarnation Process Complete] ~

Your time of self-reflection and healing within the Well of Souls is finished.

After forty-nine days of contemplation here within the Bardo, your spirit has come to be ready to return to a world.

Note: Given your deeply burning passion for the subject matter — going so far as to bring a physical object with you all the way into death — we have collectively decided that you are a fitting candidate to be reborn as this era’s Summoned Hero.

Your mission is to defeat the evil Vampire Lord and save the world before he brings about a most terrible future. You will be equipped with the tools necessary to fulfill your task.

Please proceed to stay there as such, until you re-die.

We hope this development is to your liking.

However, if it is not, please do not worry! Given that this decision is final, there is no need for you to become frustrated, as it cannot be changed.

Good luck!

“…I don’t… I don’t understand,” mutters the lost soul of the girl, torn from her body as she looks at the window and then down at the book in her hands. “Wait!” she calls up, slowly processing what’s happening.

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REINCARNATION UNDERWAY!

THREE-TWO-ONE!

Sarah, or at least the thing that was once Sarah — having changed its shape one last time — is pulled downward into a current of water and brought to a different place that is very, very far away from anywhere she has ever been before.