A man falls - Part 2

Lucas woke upside down, with the head under the water, and his right foot stuck in a pile of junk on the river's margin. He managed, with some difficulty, to release his foot and get off the water.
His skin was pale, with a tone of blue, but he didn't feel cold. Although he was probably as strong as before, he begun to feel as if he was weak, and the feeling was getting worse. As the poison was still in the way of getting him to transform, he had constant hallucinations and fever, and, in despair, he ran inside the forest, and there remained, in horror, for quite a few days.

To understand the process of how a human transforms into a vampire, we have, however, to get back a "few" years in time.

Contrary to common belief, pure vampires aren't monsters, and in fact, never were. They also don't have long canine teeth or anything else that could, esthetically, denounce them as vampires.
They have, however, super strength and other attributes which they generally manage to hide.

One of these primitive vampires is supposed to have transfused it's own blood into a dying young woman he fell in love with, thus creating the first impure vampire, or, vampire-human. Since pure blood vampires live a secret life, most legends and tales only talks about vampire-humans, referring to them simply as vampires.

Back to our tale, the science of that old age wasn't advanced enough to allow the vampire to understand why her loved one got sick frequently, needing transfusions from time to time.

The story tells that they had a son, Andrauss, and that he was born healthy, and without manifesting any of his father's attributes, until the age of twenty two. At this time, he also begun to have similar symptoms as his mother. One day, his father was a bit exhausted from giving too much blood from himself to his mother, and she then transfused him her own blood.

The father was surprised as Andrauss got away without transfusions for about two weeks, which was almost seven times more than he could stay without his father blood. He then begun to experiment on blood transfusions of different kinds, having for source cow blood, then dogs, and other such common animals. The vampire-human rejected all these kinds of blood, which either didn't do any good, or even made him feel sicker.

One day, the father found in a human friend a voluntary who gave him a bit of his own blood. He tried injecting that on Andrauss, one of the times he was very sick, only to find him getting better in a matter of minutes, and again, sustain his health for another two weeks.

The records aren't very clear, but it's stated that Andrauss married and had twelve sons, of which nine were boys, and that after his human spouse died in an accident, he retired to live with his father and mother. The three of them always lived in country-like places, away from crouds and the noise of civilization. They had to change location from time to time, because it was difficult to explain why they didn't age a single day, as the years passed. Whenever the couple received the visit of his grandchildren, they had to lie that they were brothers of Andrauss, because they also developed the vampire qualities around their twenty years, and since then, didn't age a single day, either, making their father looks like a friend or brother of the same age.

One of Andrauss sons, which by that time was called Augustus, got very fond of politics and the affair of state in general, and so managed to get popular in roman empire court, as a very intelligent politician and public servant. He was also perceived as a man of kindness, who was uncomfortable with all kinds of injustice.

Using his influence, he managed to acquire a property, around Pompeii, by the age 18 d.c., and relocated there his entire family, including his grandma and grandpa. As the decades passed, they managed to build a very beautiful village and the most beautiful garden ever seen around there.

With the passing of the years, tough, the Roman elite got very found of Pompeii, and many senators, and even the emperor, begin to spend more and more time in there. Pompeii became a city for the intellectual and the young as well, and all this attention begun to be a threat to the vampire family. However, Augustus was very admired and the story tells that whenever he acquired any slaves, he immediately set them free. If any of his employees ever found out about his secrets and/or of any member of his family, he probably managed to keep the secret to himself. Augustus family was taken as very reserved, so they could fake the "rebirth" of his relatives under a different name. Augustus managed to disguise his youngness through makeup for several decades. He even felt psychologically older, and used to walk, talk and gesticulate as an old man would do. 

In a beautiful day, in the year 79 a.c., the Pompeii croud gathered to a celebration of the Roman empire. An emissary of the emperor himself was present, and everyone, including all of Augustus uncles and aunts, went to the street to see the presentations, which were among the most beautiful ever seen, even to present day.

And in this climate of party and joy, not even the vampires realized that when the burning lava got down from the Vesuvius, it was already too late to run, or to savage anything.

The vampire's village was, indeed, one of the first buildings to be destroyed, along with everyone inside, followed to the city's main exit, and then, downtown, where most of the crowd gathered.

Of Andrauss and his family, the only remaining were some of Augustus cousins, which stayed at their homes, away of Pompeii's fate, but some of them without their parents or anyone else to take care for them.

The younger one begun to starve from a hunger that human science couldn't yet handle, and that the psychology of such a young creature was too fragile to endure...

And it was by that time, that the human-vampires developed the ability and the deep desire for human blood, as a means of both relieving their sickness symptoms. Aided by the guilty, horror and insanity the twisted vampire-human himself had to face, made of him a terrible monster, whose image was transmitted to his sons, which he conceived by slaving female victims and raping them. These children were raised more like animals than human beings, and in time, the flexible, morphing physiology of the vampires developed the long canines which allows then to inject their own blood on the victims, causing temporary paralysis, allowing then to feed without having to fight their victims.

All of this slowly took the state of things to be as they are today ...

-- To be continued  ...