In a dark room sat a sinewy guy of about twenty, with dark brown hair, sickly pale skin and blue eyes. The young man sat in front of a laptop and quickly typed something. Finally finishing a sentence, he exhaled and, having saved the text file, sent it to someone by mail. The guy's apartment had three rooms, with darkened windows, covered with thick curtains, and under them there were also blinds. It seemed that the man living here hated sunlight and did everything to never see it. Otherwise, the living space was furnished quite standardly. They say nothing special or unusual about such things.
That is, if you don't look in the refrigerator. Which, as strange as it may sound, didn't have the usual products for an American eye. And the guy lived in the States, to be more precise, in New Jersey, or even more precisely, in Newark.
So about the refrigerator, all that was in it were four bags of suspiciously red liquid. You might think that the man was some kind of crazy, if not a maniac. But that wasn't true, or rather, not quite true. The truth was that he wasn't human, if you look closely at his face when he smiled, which, however, didn't happen often, and if it did, it looked fake, so his fangs were bigger than a person needed, and at the owner's request they became even longer and sharper. That's the kind of metamorphosis. As someone might have already guessed, the young man was a vampire, and that, alas, wasn't his only problem. Okay, I'm tired of talking about myself in the third person. This guy is me, and my name is James Richard Parker. At least that's my name in this world. I don't remember my name in my past life, or anything about it, really. But I remember a suspiciously large number of stories that fit the definition of comic book stories. I think I was a geek, probably even with a capital G.
And it just so happened that I was reborn, or rather my soul moved or merged with another, in general, it's hard to say exactly what kind of phenomenon I fell victim to. Only one thing is clear, I ended up in a bizarrely broken universe, generally reminiscent of Marvel comics.
Its main defect, and there's no other way to call it, is a wild imbalance in the gender ratio in favor of women. The ratio at the moment is around 9-10 women to one man.
And the fact that this seems strange only to me is wildly annoying. However, that's how I realized that this is not my first life. Well, that was one of the main pieces of evidence, but more on that later.
How did I get into this situation, how did I become a vampire? I think I should start from the beginning, with my appearance in this world.
It happened about a year ago. You know, being aware of yourself lying in a pool of blood is unpleasant in itself, but it's much worse when that blood is yours. What's even worse, it was at that moment that the memories of the previous owner of the body began to strive into my consciousness. Naturally, this action gave me a severe migraine, which prevented me from concentrating on the surroundings.
All I managed to notice was a female silhouette in a black cloak running away from that dark alley where I was attacked. Speaking of memories, they almost swallowed me up. After all, our memories are largely the basis of our personality, and since I was deprived of mine, these almost killed me. One way or another, I received the memories and the feelings associated with them in a package.
So you could say that I'm not quite me anymore, just like Jimmy Parker is no longer who he was. You could say I wasn't completely reborn, and he wasn't completely dead. All in all, we became a new whole person, and I had no intention of delving into it, what happened, happened. Well,There is much that can be said about the past of my local half, but I will try to be brief.
As anyone who understands the subject can tell from my last name, I am a relative of Spider-Man, well, or his local female version - Persephone Maria Parker, to be more precise, I am the twin brother of the above-mentioned person.
We are the children of Richard and Maria Parker, famous biologists. Our parents died when we were six, and we were given to be raised by the family of our uncle Ben and his three wives: May, Helena and Cynthia Parker. We grew up nerds, as all Parkers are supposed to be in all canons. We planned to follow in our parents' footsteps and become biologists, I must say that we had a talent for it.
So much so that we were given a scholarship to Columbia University, where we aspired to get in. Well, the old me would have gotten there in any case, due to the government's preferences for a rare and endangered species - a man who does not want to be a gigolo in this world.
However, there were preferences for all men, not only those who wanted to be independent, the costs of reality, so to speak. Although they tried to keep us out of power, and such active individuals as me were kept as advertising stands to attract female voters, usually to elections, or, as in my case, applicants to the Biology Department.
One unsightly fact spoiled the mood of both the university administration and the new me in particular, let's dwell on this in more detail. The thing is that old Jimmy was, how to put it mildly, a rear-wheel drive. I can't tell you how much willpower it took me to defend my traditional orientation in the fight against the memories and feelings of this light blue. But in the end I won.
One way or another, due to objective reasons, American society in this world (and not only American, the whole world was like that) was somewhat homophobic. And it's logical, there are so few men, and they also cut themselves out of the reproduction process, but this is a solvable problem, but their refusal to build a traditional family with several women (traditional for this world) was a challenge to society. In general, such people were oppressed and despised. Yes, but the worst thing in this situation was for me. You know, I was a fan of Spider-Man in that world, I clearly realize this. Fuck, in my subjective opinion, he had the best girls among all the other supers. And when you got into a world where you could be with them all at the same time, and no one would judge, society would even approve, such a bummer. Reputation is ruined, and I have the status of lost to society from the very start. If it weren't for his genius brain and potential as a scientist, old Jimmy would have rotted away back in school. The only people who accepted him for who he was were his family - aunts, uncle and sister. In general, I accepted the feelings of affection and love for old Jimmy's family unconditionally, if they supported him like this and in such circumstances, they deserved my respect.
Families of openly gay people were also persecuted. Society demanded that they publicly disown relatives like old Jimmy.And as if that weren't enough, old Jimmy was also a masculinist. It's like feminism in reverse.
This moment was a pleasant surprise for me personally. The typical masculinist of this world stands out from the local effeminate men with his athletic build and refusal to use makeup. Which makes it easier for me to interact with old Jimmy's acquaintances. But there's just one thing! I wasn't going to interact with them.
Due to the fact that I became a vampire, and I felt the effects of the transformation the same night as I managed to hobble to my apartment in Queens. I rented an apartment with my sister, but since she had been involved in costumed heroism since she was 15, she rarely dropped by the house and for short periods, which made it much easier for me to sneak out of town without her noticing.
Why did I make this decision? Well, that's obvious. I was becoming a vampire, and vampires in the Marvel worlds are disliked by almost everyone. Even individual groups of vampires hunt other vampires, either because of a guilt complex about their nature, or because of food preferences, yes, cannibalism as it is.
What else, oh yeah, typical vampire flaws like allergy to sunlight. Anyway, I needed to get out of town to avoid being killed, made a lackey of the vampire who turned me, or, God forbid, Percy trying to heal me in some clumsy, unscientific way. My sister is a genius, of course, but the alternative of becoming a pile of ash if something goes wrong doesn't appeal to me.
And yes, vampire hunters supposedly have some kind of cure for vampirism, but who said I need it, or that they'll listen to me before killing me. There are a lot of downsides to being a vampire, but it's better than being an extra who can accidentally be killed during one of the super showdowns, or taken hostage by my sister's enemies. And the upsides to being a vampire are definitely not small - immortality alone is worth something, plus superpowers that elevate me from the position of a victim of circumstances.
I planned to deal with the downsides a little later, first of all I had to get out of town. Having left a farewell note for Percy, having glued it to the refrigerator with a magnet, I took a shower and changed into clean clothes that would protect me from the sunlight, I went to the university in the morning to transfer to distance learning. It seemed that they were even happy to get rid of me like that, well, I don't blame them, thanks to this I was able to finish my business with them within an hour.
Why do I need this university at all in light of my transformation? Well, why not, and my sudden expulsion will raise questions and my sister will obviously rush to look for me, and she will find me!
And so I sang to her that because of a breakup with a guy I needed a change of scenery, I almost threw up while I was writing this, but the deed was done.
By the way, old Jimmy really did recently leave his boyfriend, it was Flash Thompson. So freedom from persecution from the family was guaranteed to me for some time.
True, I could not go far from New York. A newly turned vampire usually has no more than three days before exposure to sunlight begins to burn his skin. It's not as spectacular and impressive as in the Blade movies, when vampires disintegrate into atoms from a ray of light, or maybe it was silver that did it for them, I don't remember.
But I didn't want to test it on myself. So I went to Newark, just 10 miles from Manhattan, or so. There I found a three-room apartment in one of the less prosperous areas, so the price was affordable. Having paid three months' rent in advance, thus spending two-thirds of my meager savings, I stocked up on a small supply of blood for food and began refurbishing the apartment for the needs of one vampire.
I darkened it as much as possible in general. It may seem strange how I got hold of blood so easily. Well, it's the 21st century, in the USA. Which means that if you have the desire and money, you can get everything, and even relatively unnoticed, which is true for any reality.
Once I had sorted out my immediate problems, it was time to think about how I was going to live on. Since I didn't have much of a choice, I decided to explore the phenomenon of vampirism and try to somehow deal with the inconveniences it caused.
No sooner said than done, I just want to say, but no way! It's in comics and movies that geniuses are able to solve the most complex problem in half an hour, or a couple of days at most. But reality, even with elements of comics, is extremely cruel.
All I've managed to achieve this year is to understand that a sucker is fate. It's a bit crude, but generally true. To put it in terms of facts, a vampire's body can go without hunger for several days in a row, but after such abstinence we become socially dangerous.
So that I don't feel like drinking any person passing by, I need to eat three times a day. Animal blood is of little help and does not give superpowers, which is why there is a high risk of going crazy from thirst and dying, throwing yourself at a passerby, because you will not be stronger than him.
But alas, I cannot feed so regularly. I simply cannot get blood in such quantities due to lack of finances. What stops me from feeding on living people is ... no, not conscience, but banal common sense, I do not need Blade's ideological followers on my tail, by the way, he is a man here, oddly enough, well, at least that's what I heard.
Alas, but information about him is difficult to find. I would gladly cleanse the city of homeless people, but I do not intend to risk it. There was another option to join some vampire clan and get blood from them. But this means becoming a lackey for a couple of hundred years, of course, if I survive, and the likelihood of surviving in their service is small.
The converted are expendable for them, which is why the likelihood of encountering a vampire hunter increases dramatically. And they won't give me so much blood there that I won't need anything, why the hell would they need it. However, even being on my own, I had to face both of them. It happened like this: a week after my escape from New York, two vampires visited me and rather unceremoniously told me that I was now obliged to serve the Krieger sect, because it was one of them who turned me.
The Krieger sect was a rather powerful group of vampires that taught its adherents the Western style of fighting, whatever that meant. But as it turned out, Percy and I's parents had done some serious tinkering with their children's DNA.
And I turned out to be a much stronger vampire than these two plain boors. And who said that every woman in this world is a beauty. If they were beautiful, I might have thought about resolving our conflict peacefully.
I don't like to spoil beauty and hurt its personifications, what can you do, I'm an aesthete. In short, they ended up as two piles of ashes in the dust bag of my vacuum cleaner, and since then the vampires haven't bothered me yet, apparently deciding that I'm not worth the effort.
The hunters were more persistent, and they came three times before they decided that I wasn't worth their losses either,True, for this I even had to conduct full-fledged negotiations. It's just that the third time the huntress was beautiful and I felt sorry to kill her.
And although Blade's friends did not forgive me for the death of four of their own, an armed truce was established between us. I pledged not to kill people, and they did not bother me. It would seem, why are they so accommodating. Well, the thing is that there are not so many hunters in Newark, and since I did not go on a rampage, they agreed not to wage a war of extermination. In general, Americans are a politically flexible people, they will agree with anyone and about anything, so the hunters in the end turned out to be not uncompromising butchers, but forest cleaners, so to speak.
I lived by writing scientific papers to order, I must say, I received good money, but it was still not enough for a sufficient amount of blood to live happily and regularly go out. So it turned out that I sat in my den for a year practically without leaving, studied via video link, wrote lazy term papers, lied to my family about why I didn't come to big holidays. As you can see, there is one vital element missing from this whole equation, namely progress in solving my problems.
All I achieved was to get out of the most dangerous place in the Universe – New York, where some kind of crap happens every day. Well, I also won back some living space for myself, but that's it.
Do you smell anything? I haven't had any relationships in a year in a world with a 10 to 1 female to male ratio. It's a fiasco, bro, as they say. The problem is that I can't talk to a woman without wanting to devour her, I don't have enough canned food in the fridge for a stable relationship.
And even if I did, I can't go outside during the day without risking dying in terrible agony. And my entire list of acquaintances in Newark is limited to couriers and hunters who quietly hate me, and that's still progress in our relationship. And I couldn't start relationships with vampiresses because I didn't want to become their slave. In short, I became a hikikomori in a gender-swapped world and there was no light at the end of the tunnel.
And I was pretty pissed. On top of that, there was the fact that there was no stable canon here, at least I didn't know of one. All the events in the comic book world that I knew were out of order and the cast of characters was different from what I remembered.
It was like, hello to you, Uncle Ben, alive and well, something like that.
What the hell do I need afterknowledge for, right?
Bitch!! - Start a harem, they said, and you won't need anything, they said, - I was moaning under my breath as I went to the fridge for a bag of blood.
I would have complained about my life for a long time, but then there was a knock on my window. Everything would have been fine, but my apartment is on the fifth floor of a ten-story building.
Of course, anyone could have knocked, but my gut instinct told me one thing - I was in deep trouble. My arthropod relative had deigned to visit me, apparently in her costume, otherwise she would have come in through the door.
Percy naively thinks that I don't know who she is, fuck, even old Jimmy knew, he didn't tell her out of respect for her privacy, but he knew for a long time, practically from the very beginning of her heroic career.
There's no point in running away from her without giving myself away. What does she want from me? Probably my help as a scientist, and it looks like I won't be able to hide my essence from her. Oh, what's going to happen now!
- Percy, I understand everything, but have you really forgotten how to use the door? - I said.
Well, I'm not going to open her window at noon. Do I look like a suicide?
Boom! Did she just fall off the wall!? I didn't think she was that impressionable. A couple of minutes later I heard a knock on the door. Looks like I'm going to get it now.
And I was already cowardly thinking that things couldn't get any worse. With a heavy sigh, I immediately swallowed the bag of blood, threw it in the trash can under the sink and went to open the door.