glowfic | This one's different

The nearest person—

—is not the human-shaped figure standing close by, holding out a canvas bag in his direction.

"If you want to survive, you will need to create weapons and shelter. Start by chopping down trees and gathering wood," says the not-a-person.

(The nearest person is over thataway. So there is someone around. Maybe not very close by, but around.)

...

Blair ignores the human-shaped non-person and instead runs towards the nearest person. He'll slow down from vampire speed when he gets there, but for right now? Nope. Vampire speed. Whoosh.

"You can use your pickaxe to dig through dirt, and your axe to chop down trees," the not-person calls after him, but it's limited to human speed so he won't have any trouble outdistancing it.

Then: The edge of this landmass. An ocean. A distant wall of fog.

He can swim. He's crossed entire oceans before, this one isn't a big deal. Maybe the fog will mean the end of whatever this is? He goes to see.

The fog: is fog. It is foggy. It fogs. In a perfectly flat vertical wall, totally impenetrable to sight and sound.

It takes him just under three and a half seconds to cross the barrier, and on the other side is an island very like the one he just left, enclosed in a fog-wall square of precisely the same dimensions, with precisely the same granularity to the weirdly blocky landscape, and the sun in precisely the same just-past-noon position in the sky relative to the new frame of reference.

On being crossed, the new island proves to have one major distinction from the old one: instead of noxious hazy purple-grey areas that smell like death and dismay, it has less-hazy red areas where everything is absolutely covered in fresh blood. The trees are bleeding; the grass is bleeding. The smell is definitely not human, but not all that much less appealing.

Unfortunately the way he discovers this is by smelling the fresh blood.

He belatedly realizes he should stop breathing as he realizes the absurdity of trying to eat a tree. Because he is also trying to eat a tree, and boy does he feel stupid.

The tree yields approximately half a mouthful of weird-tasting blood from its blood-soaked leaves before he does enough damage to the trunk to make the whole thing dissolve into a shower of tiny wooden cubes. It will tree no more. How dare he.

He can't say he feels that sorry, just - incredibly confused. The tree turned into cubes? How?

He wonders this as he fails to stop himself from attempting to eat another tree. Nom. Probable cubes. Why him.

At least he has the presence of mind to hold his breath, now. Maybe this can be the last tree he attempts to... eat.

He gets a few more mouthfuls of blood out of this one before it, too, is cubed. What a terrible mess.

The cubes themselves are strangely resistant to damage, and whiffle together into unified cubes whenever two or more of them touch. It's all very weird.

Even without the smell, he is definitely surrounded by a whole lot of blood. If he managed to be gentler with the next tree he might even be able to get something resembling a meal out of it, if he wanted to do that; it's unfortunate that the delicious blood-bearing leaves vanish when the trunk gets cubed.

He's not sure he wants to drink this, actually. Actually, no, he's sure that he doesn't want to drink this. Ugh. Ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh.

He's just. He's just going to hold his breath and go. Okay? Okay. And find a body of water to. Wash this off in. Ew ew ew ew ew, maybe if he's hungry but ew.

Before he is quite out of the gore zone, a mysterious gory flying creature appears some distance away and zooms toward him via no discernible propulsory mechanism. It's no match for vampire speed, though, so if he feels like fleeing to the nearest pond, the nearest pond will be happy to welcome him and the flying gore monster will have no chance of keeping up.

...

Yeah, let's just outrun the flying gore monster and let the pond welcome him.

This place is weird. This place is so weird. What kind of witch caused this?

It would've had to be one hell of a witch. Or many hells of witches all working together.

The pond is on the border between a snowy area and a forested area. The water temperature changes pretty abruptly in the middle, following the same invisible grid as the rest of the place.

A fluffy white bunny appears out of nowhere in the forested area, out of sight but not too far for him to hear its heart begin beating; it lollops over to the pond and nibbles on some grass. So at least theoretically there may be food sources other than trees available.

Okay. This is all - very bizarre.

He holds his breath and then - goes back to going towards the one person he can sense.

Don't eat the trees. Don't eat the trees...

All the way across the island, and through another fog wall, and on to the next island after that. This one is thankfully the kind with the weird hazy purple areas instead of the gore zones.

And he's getting closer to the person-signature. In fact - is that the person? Possibly accompanied by some number of nonpeople, because that's definitely more than one set of humanlike noises.

He lets himself breathe when he sees the purple hazy areas, and not a moment before.

When he's close enough to the person-signature, he slows down to an ordinary human speed, and walks.

This isn't civilization, but working with someone else that's trapped in this place sounds better than working alone. He doesn't turn around. Walk walk walk.

In the central forest area of this island, there is a tidy little house, extremely square and symmetrical. It appears to be made of wood. Inside are a number of nonpeople, each with its own room in the tidy symmetrical layout.

The person is outside the house. She is wearing what appears to be plate mail over an indigo bodysuit, but has her helmet off. Her hair is well past shoulder length, an impressive feat given how tightly it curls, and is mainly a distinguished shade of deep brown, except where the sunlight touches it just so and it glints dark gold. She looks like she could be anywhere from sixteen to thirty, and is approximately five feet eleven inches tall, and without question the most beautiful human being he has ever seen.

As for what his power has to say about her...

She has a very flexible outlook, hard to pin down and summarize. She dislikes waste and inefficiency and needless destruction and necessary evils. She approves of making a positive difference in people's lives and matching up a person's skills and temperament to a productive and fulfilling occupation that they will enjoy and do well at. Her favourite hobby is mathematics.

So this is what it's like to fall in love as a vampire. He'd been wondering. He supposes that it's different for other vampires, but for him, it goes like this:

It's like he went for a pleasant stroll, and when he went to take a step he found that the solid ground under his feet fell away and dropped him off a cliff. It's like falling thousands and thousands of feet, into a dark, warm sea. It's like not even realizing he was cold before until he's reminded of what it's like to be warm, warm like the comfort of sleeping in at home and warm like knowing you belong and warm like standing before an enemy that could easily kill you and saying No, this is too important, I'm not backing down. The love songs that compare love to fire make sense to him now - a warm hearth, and a raging inferno. Simple and powerful and something to be respected and taken care of and then strong enough to burn down the world if he just saw reason to light a torch.

Because he would kill for her, he's absolutely certain. If she asked him to put out the stars, he'd seriously consider it. If she asked him to leave her forever, damn himself to an eternity without her - well, it'd kill something in him forever, irrecoverably, but he'd do it. She deserves everything she wants, and if he can, he'll get it for her.

He isn't at a loss of what to do. It's the simplest thing in the world, really.

He drops to one knee; he's aware of the parallel to proposing, but the specific image he invokes is of a knight before royalty.

And then, because he's still himself, he smiles wryly at her. "Hello. Blair Lowell, at your service. It's a pleasure to meet you."

Her surprise at his sudden appearance is very restrained. A slight change in expression, and that's it. Remarkable composure for a human.

"Well, this is unexpected," she says mildly. "Hello."

He is of course completely impressed and enamored with her. No one is surprised, not even him.

"Sorry for the surprise," he says sincerely. "I'm friendly, really. And somewhat confused."

Understatement. He is more than friendly, and more than somewhat confused.

"I hadn't thought there was anyone else here. How long have you been in this," she makes an understated gesture encompassing their surroundings, "bizarre universe?"

"About half an hour." He stands; she's easily taller than he is, but kneeling forever seems annoying. "Among other things, I have the ability to track other people with the use of magic, arrived on an island, and thought it was wise to find the nearest person and go talk to them. And here I am."

Let's see how she takes the magic before he gets into the vampirism.

"That must be a convenient ability to have," she says, slightly amused. "Lacking any such helpful talents, I've been exploring this island by myself for the last few weeks."

He - would like to ask about her living conditions and if she's been okay during those last few weeks, but thinks it's probably overstepping his bounds for right now.

"What's it like, then? Another island has bleeding trees."

"The trees here don't bleed, or I haven't caught them at it," she says. "The whole world seems to have been designed by someone with a very poor understanding of both biology and physics, and yet it continues to function. Stars fall from the sky at night, animals explode when killed, and I have an entire collection of unsettling automata," she gestures at the house, "who look like humans and move like humans and speak like humans but don't appear to think in any detectable way."

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