Explanations

The next day, Iris, in lieu of Izzie, approached Saix and asked him to have Xemnas gather a meeting of everyone in the castle so they could explain what they were. In the Grey Area, every member of the Organization was gathered, some sitting, some standing, and in the middle of the room stood Izzie and Iris.

"What did you have me call this meeting for?" Xemnas asked like he didn't already have an idea.

Izzie took a deep breath, her arms crossed over her chest. "You all have surely been wondering what we are. More than one of you have seen firsthand just a fraction of our abilities. For those of you who haven't, I'll tell you, I was the one who hurt Saix." She looked to him, sitting on one of the chairs the Grey Area had to offer, and continued, "He's obviously quite a bit bigger than me, but I put a crack in his femur. With nothing but my hand."

Everyone besides Xemnas, Xigbar, Saix, Vexen, Demyx, and Axel looked around at each other, surprised.

"Iris and I, and those like us, we're strong. Impossibly so. I can stop a train at full speed. Iris can rip trees out of the ground. Along with being strong, we're fast. Last I heard, the average speed we can run is somewhere around five hundred miles an hour." Again, everyone kind of looked around. Some had looks of disbelief on their faces. "Whether you believe me or not is beside the point. The reality is, this is true. We're strong, we're fast, we move very fluidly, and, not to toot my own horn, but…we're beautiful. We can see everything, down to the tiniest molecule, we hear for miles away, and while we never get hot or cold, we can detect the smallest fluctuation in temperature. I can differentiate who each person in this room is by your scent alone. All of us, every being like myself and Iris, are this way."

"And what are you?" Xemnas asked. Izzie averted her eyes, breathing in deeply before flinching, having caught Saix's scent. She swallowed tightly against the flame the smell ignited in her throat.

"We are vampires."

When Izzie said that word, nearly half the room rolled their eyes. Larxene giggled.

"This is what you called us for?" Xaldin asked, his gruff voice annoyed. "Vampires don't exist."

"Yet here we are," Izzie shot back coolly. "Surely you've noticed the color of our eyes? Red is not a naturally occurring color," She looked around at some of the unnaturally colored hair among the Organization members. "Though I suppose here those laws might be different. Vampires have red eyes. Can you guess why?"

Xaldin glared up at Izzie, irritation all over his face.

"What do we eat, Xaldin?" He blinked. He had never told her his name. Not to mention, something about her was making even a warrior such as him uneasy. She smiled a little, then looked around the room at each face.

"Iris and I subsist on blood. It's the only thing we consume. Our eyes are red because of this. If we were thirsty, they would turn black." In his chair, Saix frowned. While it was true that Iris's eyes were red, Izzie's eyes weren't. They were very clearly green. He could see it even from here. But before he could open his mouth, she continued, "We have fangs that elongate when we hunt, or want to look intimidating. Isn't that right, Xemnas? You've seen both mine and Iris's. So have Xigbar, Saix, Axel, and Demyx."

Everyone looked at each mentioned member, who had varying expressions on their faces. Xemnas looked stoic, his face calm, but his chin lifted. Xigbar had his lips pursed, his eye turned away from the group. Saix was glaring, Axel looked sheepish, and Demyx looked downright terrified.

"We did," Axel said when he saw no one else was going to answer. "They definitely weren't normal canines."

"So is everything about vampires true?" Vexen inquired, his scientific curiosity piqued.

"Not everything," Izzie replied. "The sun doesn't hurt us. It doesn't do anything to us, really. Stakes to the heart, no. Unable to see our reflections, no. Sleeping in coffins, no-we don't sleep at all. Being unable to go into church or step on hallowed ground, no. Basically, the only thing about vampires that is true, is that we need blood to survive, we have fangs, and we can't die."

"You can't die?" Demyx repeated. "Like, at all?"

"We wouldn't be truly immortal if we could," Iris said.

"Well, that's not one hundred percent true," Izzie corrected. "Vampires can kill vampires. That's it. Humans and man-made weapons can't, nor can diseases. We don't get sick."

"So then how old are you?" Xigbar inquired.

"Me, I was born in 1490. I'm five-hundred and twenty-nine years old. Iris was born in 1683."

"Three-hundred, thirty-six!"

"There are vampires even older than me," Izzie continued. "The oldest being Atticus. He's the leader of the Council. They create and enforce the laws of our world."

"Vampires have laws?" Zexion asked.

"Of course we do. We and humans would never have survived as long if we didn't."

"And what are those laws?" Xemnas asked. "How do vampires gain dominion over others?"

"Shortly after Atticus and his brothers became vampires, they realized that the reason the human population was struggling so badly was because of rogue vampires. While they are annoyingly proud, even they recognize that we need humans if we want to live. At that time, the number of vampires outnumbered the humans. So, Atticus and his brothers formed the Council. Over a period of time, they came to grow their coven to a very large number. There is the main council, which consists of Atticus, Decimus, and Celio. Atticus can read people's minds. He can go back as far as he needs to in order to get the information he needs. His youngest brother, Celio, can influence the elements. Outside the main rung is what is called the Guard. These vampires are all gifted with extra abilities. There's Charles, the muscle. No known vampire in the world is as strong as him. He's the brute force they need. Then there's Enoch. He can see the future. Ramir and Etain's powers are…disturbing. Ramir can cause the illusion of pain in a victim, so much so that it incapacitates them. Etain can pull all your senses from you, leave you in complete darkness. If a vampire deserves a merciful death, Atticus uses her to pull their sense of feeling. Then there is Katherine, who can cause whoever she wants to see, hear, feel, smell, taste…anything she wants them to. So if she wanted you to see complete blackness, that's what you'd see. After her came Weston. He can copy any power and use it, so long as he's touching the person whose power he is copying. There are other members of the Guard, but those are the main six. They came one after the other after the Council was founded. Because they had such power on their side, many vampires began to fear them. And what happens there is fear? There were many fights. Many castles owned by human-known vampires burned, and their inhabitants killed. The Council was merciless to those who refused to obey the laws put into place. Eventually vampires went from being a known creature to the stuff of fairy tales and legends. Today, if humans find out about us, they must be turned, or killed. No exceptions. That is the one law that regularly enforced. No one outside of our world is to know about us." Izzie looked around and everyone's face, her eyebrows high. "Iris and I have just broken the most important law of our kind."

The room was quiet for a moment before Xigbar said, "Well, hey! We're not human, so no worries."

"You are human enough," Izzie replied grimly. "You are not vampires, therefore you are fair game. If you were to go to our world and by some cruel joke played by the universe, Atticus found you and read your mind, we'd be toast. Me, you, Xemnas, Axel…everyone."

"We like avoiding the Council at all costs, anyway," Iris said. "We don't have the best relationship with them."

"Why is that?" Xemnas asked.

Iris turned her big eyes to him, and replied, "They tried to kill me when I was young." 'When I was young' definitely didn't make sense coming out of a child's mouth, but Xemnas reminded himself that she just said was over three-hundred years old.

"There is another law that gets enforced when needed," Izzie said. "And that is to never make a child immortal."

"Which is complete crap because Enoch is a kid," Iris grumbled. Izzie smiled a little.

"That's why there's kind of a grey area." She looked back to Xemnas and continued, "Most vampires are older teenagers or adults. There are very few children among us. Typically the cut-off for creating a vampire is twelve. At twelve the brain is developed enough to understand that there is a secret that needs to be kept, and kept well. Children who are turned younger than twelve may have issues with that."

"Who would want a kid forever, anyway?" Larxene mumbled under her breath, her voice heavy with disgust.

"Many reasons, actually," Izzie replied, making her start. She hadn't thought anyone could hear her. "Most of them quite selfish. Even I creating Iris was selfish. Iris is nine. There have been children turned even younger than that. I believe the youngest was around a year old at the time of transformation."

Demyx looked over to Axel, his eyes huge in his head. "Why?" He breathed. "Why would anyone do that to a kid?"

"To keep them cute and beautiful forever, most of the time. Sometimes it was because the child was sick and would die, but mostly it was just to keep them cute. But there was one thing their creators didn't think of. At such a young age, the brain is not nearly as developed as it needs to be to handle this life, and to make matters worse, development completely freezes. When an immortal child became thirsty, he or she would slaughter entire villages. When they became angry or agitated, they'd slaughter every human they were near until there were none left. They couldn't be taught or restrained. This was centuries after the Council had been established, and they could see that their work was being destroyed by these children. They were forced to intervene, and since the children couldn't protect our secret, they had to be…eliminated. Children aged one to ten were put to death along with their creators, who fought to protect them."

"If you knew of the risk, why did you create Iris?" Xemnas asked.

"The reign of the immortal children happened around a hundred years before I was born. I was not there to see the devastation first-hand. While that is no excuse, if I had been around, there's a good chance Iris would not be here."

"Thanks," Iris said, rolling her eyes. Izzie looked back at the girl and softly patted her head.

"The dangers of the immortal children were not something I was thinking of when I came across Iris. I was thinking that I couldn't just let her die. There were a couple factors that played into my decision; the fact that I knew what kind of pain she was going through, and that…well, that I saw my own children in her."

Saix's head jerked up from the hand he was leaning it on as Xemnas replied, "Your children?"

"I had half a dozen children when I was human," Izzie replied. "All but one of them died. I watched them suffer. Being so powerless as a mother is…terrible. I didn't want to let Iris suffer the way that my children had. This time, I could help. This time, I could save a suffering child. So I turned her. At the time, I didn't think about how young she was, or how hard it might be to teach her. And yes, it was difficult. For a long time, I thought I'd made a mistake. I thought that she was going to be like the immortal children that were killed. So I took us to an uninhabited part of the country, where there were no clusters of people. There were the occasional native, and, unfortunately sometimes I was too late to stop her, but as time passed, I noticed there was a change in her. She stopped trying to fight me. Her temperament shifted and she stopped becoming so easily angered. She began to learn to manage her emotions and the temper tantrums I'd dealt with on the daily became more and more isolated, until there were none at all. When a native happened by our home, she would sit by the window and watch them instead of attacking them. After fifty years, she had finally regained herself."

"So then does that mean that the other children could've been taught?" Vexen asked.

"Possibly," Izzie answered. "I try not to think too hard about that."

"And what do you recall of this time?" Xemnas asked Iris, who turned her eyes thoughtfully to one side.

"The first few years of my new life are hazy, honestly. My earliest clear memory of being a vampire is hunting a bear. I do vaguely remember fighting Izzie and attacking natives, but only bits and pieces. It was like one day, a switch flipped, and I wasn't so savage anymore."

"After Iris showed she could be trusted, we moved back closer to humans, and, I'm going to be honest here, it was so we could…feed."

"Animal blood isn't as healthful to vampires as human blood is." Iris added.

"You kill people?" Demyx whispered.

"I thought you'd come to that conclusion a while ago," Izzie said. "But, yes. Iris and I have killed people. Every vampire has. But, I tried to preserve the little innocence Iris has left and after she became fully conscious again, I never allowed her to kill. It is possible for us to feed without killing our prey, it's just very difficult."

"Why?" Xemnas asked.

"When we smell or taste human blood, a sort of frenzy begins. You can think of us as sharks. It makes it nearly impossible to stop once started. Everything in your body shifts. Anything you were thinking of gets overwritten with the need to feed. And most of the time you won't be able to stop until your prey is dead."

"So then how do you become able to stop?" Axel asked.

"Years of practice. Nowadays, Iris and I are able to obtain blood through blood banks. We haven't actually hunted in years."

"Isn't that suspicious?" Xigbar asked. "Going into a blood bank and just…asking for it?"

"Most blood banks are run by vampires," Iris replied. "We infiltrated them nearly the second they were created."

"Unfortunately for us, blood banks didn't exist back in the seventeen-hundreds. We had to get blood the old-fashioned way. And one day, another vampire happened to see Iris feeding. She went off to the Council and reported what she had seen, and within the week they were at our doorstep." Beside her Iris fiddled with her skirt while she chewed on her bottom lip. "They kicked open the door and flew right in. Charles restrained me while Etain deprived her of her senses. Another member of the Guard was about to kill her when I screamed for Atticus to see my memories of raising her. I was lucky he listened. He saw everything, from the moment I bit her to the moment they entered our home. Much to his obvious displeasure he saw that Iris was just like any of the rest of us, she just had a difficult first fifty years. And just as quickly as they came, they were gone. We haven't seen them since."

"This is quite a story," Xemnas mused, tilting his head slightly to the side. "And even though I have witnessed some strange behavior from you, I'm not too sure I believe everything you've said." Izzie shrugged.

"Like I said before, whether you believe us or not is the beside the point."

Nearly the moment she finished speaking, Xemnas said, "I would simply like to see more of your abilities in action."

Next to Izzie, Iris perked up. "I would love that."

"Actually, I think he meant to see Izzie do stuff." Xigbar said, earning him a sharp glare from the little girl. Izzie giggled.

"Don't underestimate Iris. She's a kid, but she's a lot tougher than she looks."

"That's right. In fact, you wanna see a vampire's abilities? I'll show you. You! Big guy!" Iris pointed at Lexaeus, who had been silently observing the conversation, and said, "You, me, arm wrestling. Now."

At this, the Organization's doubters made themselves known by snorting, rolling their eyes, or just plain laughing. True, to the logical mind, a child arm wrestling an adult was laughable, and a girl as small as Iris going up against a behemoth of a man such as Lexaeus was downright comical.

"Iris, I don't think that's a good idea," Izzie said.

"Yeah," Larxene giggled. "He'd crush you."

"No, I don't think he would," Izzie corrected nonchalantly. "I just don't want Iris to break his arm."

"I won't break his arm. Besides that, it's not anybody else's decision to make but his. So," Iris turned back to Lexaeus, her hands on her hips, and said, "You gonna or not?"

Lexaeus stared calmly at Iris before looking around to see everyone smirking at her. He sighed, then rose to his feet, and uttered one word.

"Alright."

...