8 a.m. – Time to wake up
By
Green Kobold
The young man turned on the little camera on his computer, He had prepared himself for this, washed his shoulder length, brown hair, brushed his teeth (just in case), shaved and even used a little make-up to cover up the results of having been stressed out for the last two days. The lines under his eyes, that had almost turned black from lack of sleep, were covered by at least three layers of skin-toned make-up, but he was unable to do much about the line of worry on his forehead where none had been until recently. At least he had never noticed it before.
As the camera was fading in he put on a serious and authoritative look on his face before starting to speak.
"Hello, my name is Ingo and I am from Berlin", he said in High German with a little hint of a Berlinish regional dialect.
"I have to warn you all." He made a little, dramatic pause looking as seriously into the camera as possible. "They are already in politics and economics. They have their seats in the media and the entertainment-industry. Everybody has heard of them, read novels or at least watched films. Nobody believes that they really exist." If he could have controlled the zoom-function of the cam, it would slowly have closed in for dramatic effect. But since he couldn't he just spoke the next words with as much weight and seriousness as he was possibly able to… while he was leaning into the camera.
"But vampires do exist."
It took him only six attempts to get the shot right.
In the finished film he later uploaded on YouAir that was just the introduction. It was followed by a few minutes filmed with the help of his buddy Micha, a man of few words and a passion for his digital video-camera. The quality of that camera was considerably better than of the little webcam Ingo had used, so the cut in the film showed an abrupt increase in clarity.
Ingo was walking across Alexanderplatz, wearing his long, black leather coat and, while a street band was performing faintly in the background, spoke a text he had prepared before.
"Forget everything you know about the weaknesses of vampires. Crosses don't scare them, stakes through the heart tickle them at best, garlic doesn't keep them off and most of all sunlight doesn't kill them. The only thing that finishes them for good is a well aimed head-off-chop." With a bit of disgust in his voice and face he added: "Fortunately they automatically dissolve into thin air right after or else one would have to deal with a decomposing body." When saying this he felt glad he didn't have to fight zombies.
Here the film had a cut over to Ingo walking across the place on the eastern side of Berlin's ward, the Brandenburg Gate. As usual it was swarming with tourists, taking pictures. He simply continued with his speech.
"When you're bitten by a vampire you don't turn straight into one yourself. A single vampire cannot suck enough blood out of you with a single bite, so the vampire-virus it's injecting you with in the process, can take you over. But I guess several vampires at the same time could."
He was passing through the gate while a group of teenage tourists were making faces and waving at the camera.
"Once you have the virus in you, but are not one yourself, vampires can smell you somehow and are being attracted to you. That's why we, who have been bitten, are called "die Gejagten" or in English "the hunted". The only way vampires cannot smell you is by swallowing garlic-pills. It seems to cover up the virus' smell somehow."
The scenery changed a bit as he was strolling in front of the Reichstag, the building that hosts the German parliament.
"A few of us don't want to hide forever and so we became active. We call ourselves "slayers" and hunt the vampires ourselves. We exist worldwide… but, as far as I know, I'm the only one in Berlin. Why do I tell you all of this?"
A hard cut that hurt the eyes as the pictures quality dropped massively again, brought the viewers back to Ingo's apartment.
"I have been informed that all known slayers, including me, are planned to get killed."
Even though he tried to keep a stoic cool, a shadow of sadness and desperation lied over his face as his mind quickly jumped back to the moment when he was sitting in front of his pc in the middle of the night and opened the e-mail that brought the news of his planned demise.
"I received a message from Bob in California that all slayers are to be murdered at the same time, worldwide, when it's exactly midnight between the 30th of April and the 1st of May, also known as Walpurgisnacht. It's the day after tomorrow." He made another short pause. "I just wanted to inform you what is happening. This might be my last message."
When he turned the camera off he thought to himself, "I can't do this alone. I need help."
