The horror began for Lucy Loud on a cool afternoon in mid September, the kind where golden sunlight drenches the world and the cool breeze contains just a faint hint of the autumn chill soon to come. The previous summer had been an exceptionally hot one for Michigan and temperatures were in the mid to high eighties just as recently as a week ago. There hadn't been much rain since the dry season began in early June and all of the vegetation colored thirsty shades of brown and dark green. The heatwave held steady through most of the summer, its iron hand gripping and crushing the region until there was no blood left to give. In the doggiest days, it seemed like it would never end; it was all too easy to imagine that the heat would last forever and that there was no way to escape it.

Finally, it petered out, and now the weather was rapidly becoming crisp and fall-like. School had started on September 5th and Lucy was still settling into the routine of a new year. She was a quiet, bookish girl who enjoyed reading and history and, by all accounts, should have gotten good grades. She did, but only in the abstract subjects. She wrote poetry and fan fiction for her favorite show, Vampires and Melancholia, but she found the former rules of grammar to be both vexing and far too rigid. She averaged an embarrassing C+ in English but at least that grade was somewhat respectable. Her grades in math and science were anything but.

For some reason, Lucy grappled with the rigid confines of the harder subjects. At the very least, it kept her humble. She naturally gravitated toward self-superiority and couldn't help but look down on her peers as idiots, lamebrains, and "basic bitches" for not reading or enjoying more intellectual pursuits. To her, their tastes were ordinary, pedestrian, and conformist in nature, everything liking, thinking, and saying the same things like a group of NPCs in an edgy 4chan meme. Ha, she thought as she looked down her nose at them, what normies. Meanwhile, I am better. I am superior. I am smarter.

Then she got an F in both math and science and had to pump the brakes a little. Math and science were both extremely logical constructs. With them, you operated in a set framework that didn't really change. It was a pattern, a puzzle; once you figured out all the pieces and where they went, you solved it. Math was sort of like a murder mystery: You had to use forensic truth and deductive reasoning to find your way to the logical conclusion. That she couldn't do that really put a damper on her budding ego.

She was secretly thankful for that. After hobnobbing with other literary types on social media, some of whom were "big names" and had "made it" in the industry, she realized how insufferable being a condescending ass was.

Her egotism - or former egotism - was not the "hot topic" as Lori might say. The issue was that even now, in fifth grade, she was still struggling with math and science. Everyone around her seemed to grasp the material just fine. As far as she knew, she was the only one who had any problems with it. Not so smart now, are you, Lucy? In all fairness to her, she found it hard to focus on subject matter that didn't captivate her. She could read entire novels about ghosts, vampires, and serial killers - the really long doorstop Stephen King level novels - but if you handed her a page of romance or comedy, she'd take forever to slog through it, and hate every single word as she did so. Numbers and scientific equations held absolutely no interest for her and even though she tried to make herself connect with it, she couldn't. She tried teaching herself math and science at home, figuring that she would learn better at her own pace and on her own terms, but it bored her to tears and she never got very far into a lesson before abandoning it and going off to read something else.

Lucy loved to read. She was young but had been reading for what felt like ages. She favored horror, of course, and had decided in the back of her mind that she was going to read every horror novel ever published, which she was now beginning to realize was an impossible task. She had so far read almost everything by Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Neil Gaiman, John Saul, and Richard Laymon, and was currently making her way through the short stories of Robert Bloch, Richard Matheson, and Ray Bradbury, the latter of whom she was surprised to find was a very good writer despite not writing much "horror."

Her favorite books were about vampires. Lucy loved vampires. She could wax philosophical about her love for the blood drinking undead, but at the end of the day, she could only really say that they fascinated her. She had tried to figure out what it was that attracted her to the vampire but had never come up with a satisfactory answer. Suffice it to say, she just liked them. The first vampire media she could ever remember consuming was The Lost Boys, a movie from the eighties about teenage vampires in California. The vampires wore really crazy eighties outfits and looked like one of those old school hair bands that Pop Pop listened to, and little Lucy, maybe four at the time, though they were the coolest things ever. She had her mom buy her a long black coat like the one the head vampire wore and would dress up in it for her twice daily viewing of the movie.

From there, she branched out into other vampire media - books, movies, and TV shows. 'Salem's Lot by Stephen King, the original 1931 Dracula with Bela Lugosi, and The Vampire Diaries. She was six when she discovered Vampires and Melancholia.

That show changed her life.

Everyone has that one "thing" that they fall head over heels in love with and which occupies a special place at the center of their heart. For Lucy Loud, that thing was Vampires and Melancholia. Set in modern California, it followed the life of Edwin, a vampire who was several hundred years old. He had lived a long, full life and was burned out on living, seeking death but not quite brave enough to just walk into the sun and be done with it. Edwin had tasted every flavor that life had to offer ten times over, and had become a thrill seeker. He engaged in crazy and reckless behavior when he wasn't despondent - he suffered radical mood swings and would go from almost crying to gleefully jumping from the tallest building in Downtown L.A. just to see what would happen. The show featured flashbacks to Edwin's many, many years of life, and it was revealed that he had been stalked by generations of hunters from a family that he had wronged some time in the 1880s. He had duked it out with dozens of their best but always managed to escape, sometimes only narrowly.

Edwin's character riveted Lucy. He was beyond good and evil, beyond even human, and spoke to her own inner feelings of dissatisfaction. Her life was good, she had no reason to complain there, but at times, she just felt…blah. There was a word for it that kept escaping her until she chanced across it in a book. It was sort of a languor.

Malaise. That was it. Malaise. It was defined as: A general feeling of discomfort, illness, or uneasiness whose exact cause is difficult to identify. Perhaps there was a better word, but this one would do. She sometimes felt blah and she didn't know why. It wasn't sharp and insistent like depression, it was more like boredom. Everything bored her and even the things she loved made her crinkle her nose. Edwin suffered from chronic boredom as well, and she really identified with him because of it.

It didn't hurt that the actor who played him, Mark St. John, was incredibly handsome. Tall with dark, piercing eyes, black hair, pallid skin, and pouty, sensuous lips, he was just masculine enough to be appealing but too feminine to be intimidating. Oh, he could be downright terrifying in the show, but that was make believe. In all of the interviews Lucy had seen and read with him, he came across as a quiet, sensitive man who cared deeply about his fans.

Of which Lucy was perhaps the biggest.

Lucy didn't go in for idol worship. She liked writers, musicians, and actors, but she wasn't one of those fans who put them up on a pedestal, far above reproach. She criticized artists that she liked all the time, which often put her at odds with other fans who treated everything said artist did as sacrosanct. Stephen King, for instance. The horror community was slavishly devoted to Stephen King and treated him as a god even though he had more than his fair share of flaws. Which is okay, everyone does, but to ignore them and to try and shut down anyone who offered valid criticsm was BS. Edwin - he would always be Edwin to her - was different. She had posters of him on her walls and followed him on social media. She slurped up every scrap of gossip about him and was in multiple forums and Discord servers dedicated to him. She had read, and knew, everything about him. He was born in the San Fernando Valley on March 16, 1995, took drama classes in high school, and started acting at age seventeen. He had been in six movies and three TV shows aside from Vampires and Melancholia. His favorite color was green, he liked Thai food, and electronic music.

It was he - more than the show itself - that attracted her to the Vampires and Melancholia fandom. She started off writing fan fiction for the show last year, posting short one-shots of dubious quality and possessing little to no imagination. In short, she wrote what everyone else did. She eventually started a fic based on Edwin's past, focusing primarily on the period between 1788 and 1802, and it quickly became one of the most well known and controversial stories in the fandom. Some people loved that it didn't stick entirely to the canon of the show, other people got legitimately pissed that it was "too different." Some thought it was dark and transgressive. Others said it was edgy bullshit and needed more ships and lemons so that it was like everything else being published. Some people called it gold, others shit. Lucy didn't;'t think it was either, but that's fandoms for you. People are passionate. For something, against something, they're very vocal and very opinionated. You'd be hard-pressed to find a tepid middle of the roader in a fandom.

Lucy enjoyed writing for the show and also getting recognized for doing something she herself was passionate about, but she hadn't been active in a while. She liked to write but lately she had been focusing on poetry and didn't think her work was good enough yet to share. If people thought her prose was trash, just wait until they got a load of her verse!

Though she wasn't writing as much in the fandom as she used to - or reading as much as she used to, come to think of it - she still followed it very closely.

Because of that, she saw the fateful tweet as soon as it was posted by the official Vampires and Melancholia Twitter page.

WANT TO MEET EDWIN AND SPEND A DAY WITH HIM? ENTER NOW FOR A CHANCE TO WIN!

Lucy blinked in surprise, sure that she was misreading it through her bangs. She brushed them out of her eyes and squinted, reading very, very carefully to make sure that there was no misunderstanding.

There wasn't.

It worked like this: You signed up for the contest and, in a month's time, a random name would be selected,. The winner would be announced on Twitter; ten runners up would receive lesser gifts, including gift cards, merchandise signed by Edwin's own hand, and the complete second season of Vampires and Melancholia on DVD.

The idea of meeting Edwin in person made Lucy downright giddy with anticipation. She quickly signed up and crossed her fingers, hoping for the best. In all honesty, she didn't think she was going to win. Inside of an hour, 10,000 other people had signed up, and when she checked the next day, the number had risen to 25,000, where it more or less stayed. True, someone had to win, but the statistical likelihood of it being her was small, to say the least. She didn't know the exact numbers involved but she knew that she didn't have that great of a chance. It was all in good fun, though, she told herself.

She might not win but okay, no big deal.

Or so she thought.

The more time went on, the more she wanted to win the contest. She mentally constructed elaborate fantasies wherein she and Edwin walked through moonlit fields, supped on Thai food, and became best friends. He would fly her on his back, show her ancient relics he had collected in his long and varied life, and introduce her to the secrets of the universe.

Of course, he would actually do none of those things since he wasn't really a vampire, but still. She pictured them beginning a friendship that would see them always together, always hanging out, maybe with her getting to write an episode of the show. That would be awesome. Her critics in the fandom would lose their ever loving minds and suffer a psychological meltdown that would be legendary in the notoriously psychotic world of fandoms. That thought brought her great satisfaction.

But being able to meet her hero, even if they didn't become thick as thieves, would be even better. She cautioned herself not to get her hopes up, but it was hard not to. You wouldn't know from her calm and goth-like exterior, but she was still a little girl and still got very excited for certain things…like Halloween. And Christmas. You know that tight, chest constricting feeling you get in early December, when the big day is so close you can taste it but every day drags on longer and longer than the one before it?

That's how Lucy felt in the last days of the contest to meet Edwin. As soon as she woke up in the morning, she was instantly gripped by giddiness. She would check Twitter for updates on the contest, knowing that she probably wouldn't find any, then passed the rest of the day crackling with nervous energy, unable to sit still or concentrate for long periods of time. As the end of the contest neared, she struggled to sleep at night, and willed time to hurry up and move faster. If anything, however, it went slower and slower until it almost seemed to be going backwards. Lucy considered herself a very patient person, a trait she had developed and honed from many years of reading, but this was just plain ridiculous. She was perpetually on the edge of her seat and it was becoming intolerable.

Finally, it came, the big day. She woke at 6am sharp and checked Twitter before the sleep had even cleared from her eyes. She saw an official announcement from the page and her heart rocketed into her throat…only to crash back into her stomach when she saw that it was only saying the results of the contest would be announced at 2pm.

Ugh.

You made us wait this long, why wait even longer? Just tell us who won already.

Lucy's stomach clenched and her chest suddenly felt very heavy. Whoever won, it wouldn't be her. Though she had been looking forward to this day for weeks, now that it was finally here, she was nervous as all heck. Up until now, she could bask in the warm glow of her stubborn hope, but soon that would be wrenched kicking and screaming from her grasp.

She blew a dejected sigh and forced herself out of bed. Now her excitement was gone, replaced by depression. She took a deep breath and began steeling herself for the inevitable let down. Since she was up so early, she took a long, hot shower. No one bothered her, and that improved her mood slightly.

Done, she cut the spray, toweled off, and jumped out. She dressed in her clothes for the day - black, drab, and shapeless just like all of her clothes - and brushed her teeth. She gargled with mouthwash and flicked her eyes to the floss, half hidden behind a plastic cup like a dirty secret. Her dentist once told her that you don't have to floss all your teeth…just the ones you want to keep. Lucy didn't know if flossing was really that vital or not, but she tried to do it often. Unfortunately, it was a real pain in the neck, so she "tried" more than she actually "did."

She reached for it, but decided against it at the last second. Instead, she left the bathroom and snapped the light off behind her. In her room, she put her shoes on and grabbed her backpack, then went downstairs. She poured herself a bowl of Mini Wheats and enjoyed it in relative silence until her siblings started to come down. Lana and Lola were arguing over who was better, Spongebob or Patrick, and Lynn ducked around them with a football tucked to her chest, pretending she was running down the field at the Superbowl or something. Lori was talking on the phone to Bobby and Luan was, of course, cracking a stream of corny jokes that made everyone groan. There goes my silence, Lucy thought. She took her empty bowl into the kitchen, left it in the sink, and went into the living room to play around on her phone until it was time to leave.

At 7:10, Lucy shoved her phone in her pocket and made the three block trek to school through the crisp October morning. The trees along the route blazed with color like torches lining the stone walls of a gothic castle and the cool breeze washed over her. At school, she stowed her books in her locker and went to her first class, where she struggled to pay attention. She watched the clock more than she did the board, and the second hand seemed to linger like a sleeper reluctant to wake up and get out of bed. She drummed her fingers on the desk and tapped her foot restively on the floor.

At lunch, she sat with her friends at their usual table by the wall, where she and Haiku talked about the contest. Haiku had entered as well, but you wouldn't know it from how calm and serene she was. Then again, Lucy wasn't exactly wearing her impatience on her sleeve either, aside from being kind of fidgety.

After lunch, Lucy slogged through the rest of the day. Right before the winner was announced, she went to study hall, where she dipped into a book of short stories. The first one didn't hold her interest, but the second one was awesome and enchanted her. By the time she was done, it was quarter past two.

Go time.

She took a deep breath and checked Twitter.

The first thing she noticed was that her mentions were jam packed. There were fifty of them, and she missed a proverbial beat. One of the threads she had commented on must have blown up. She clicked and read the replies, all of them mentioning her by name.

Congratulations.

Congrats.

Way to go.

Huh?

At the very bottom, she saw it, and her heart burst right out of her chest. There was the announcement…with her name tagged.

She won.

SHE WON.

Excitement filled her. Inwardly, she threw her phone into the air, flopped back her head, and let out a mighty cry of victory.

In actually…

She just smiled.