Chapter 1: Waking in the Dark
The first thing I knew was pain.
Not the dull ache of a hangover or the sharp sting of a cut finger. This was something deeper. Something primal that clawed at my insides like a starving animal trying to tear its way out.
I gasped—or tried to. My lungs burned. My throat felt scraped raw with broken glass.
Where—
Concrete beneath my palms. Cold. Wet. My fingers curled against grit and something sticky. I forced my eyes open.
Darkness. Not complete—a sliver of moonlight cut through a gap in boarded windows. Enough to see shapes. Crates. Rusted machinery. The skeleton of some abandoned building.
And blood. My hands were covered in it.
Not mine.
The thought came unbidden, certain. How did I know that? I stared at the dark stains on my skin, watched them catch the faint light.
My stomach lurched. Not with nausea—with hunger. A hunger so absolute it made everything else irrelevant.
Memories crashed into me like waves against rock.
I remembered dying.
Car accident. Head-on collision at sixty miles per hour. The dashboard coming at my face. Then nothing.
But before that—
Before that I was someone else. Someone who lived in a world without magic, without vampires, without any of this. Someone who watched TV shows about supernatural beings for entertainment, never imagining—
The Originals.
The name surfaced through the chaos in my skull. I knew that show. Knew it intimately—every plot twist, every character, every death.
And now I was here. Wherever here was.
I pushed myself upright. The movement was too fast, too smooth. My body responded before my mind caught up, and suddenly I was standing, swaying slightly as reality tried to reassemble itself into something coherent.
A blue flicker at the edge of my vision.
[HYBRID SUPREMACY SYSTEM: AWAKENING]
[CURRENT STATE: DORMANT]
[HOST DETECTED: BINDING COMPLETE]
[INITIALIZING... PLEASE WAIT...]
The words hung in my peripheral vision, translucent and impossible. A game interface. In reality.
System, my scattered memories supplied. Like those novels—transmigration, power systems, leveling up.
The text flickered again.
[INITIALIZATION COMPLETE]
[SYSTEM STATUS: DORMANT]
[AVAILABLE FUNCTIONS: LIMITED]
[HOST SPECIES: VAMPIRE (NEWBORN)]
[WARNING: ESSENCE CRITICALLY LOW - 15/50]
[WARNING: FEEDING REQUIRED]
Vampire.
I looked at my blood-covered hands again. At the body I was wearing—not mine, never mine. Taller than I used to be. Broader shoulders. Someone else's fingers, someone else's skin.
Someone who had been turned into a vampire and left to wake up alone in an abandoned warehouse.
The hunger surged again, doubling me over. My vision sharpened. Colors bled into something more vivid, more real. I could hear heartbeats—my own was absent, a silence in my chest where rhythm should live—but somewhere close, something pulsed with life.
No.
I straightened. Counted my fingers. Ten. Still ten.
The hunger didn't care about my count.
A sound. Soft breathing, maybe forty feet away. Behind a stack of crates. The heartbeat was there too, slow and steady. Sleeping.
My feet moved before I made the decision. I was across the warehouse in seconds, the world blurring at the edges, and then I was standing over a man.
Homeless, by the look of him. Dirty clothes, ratty sleeping bag, the smell of cheap liquor seeping from his pores.
The hunger screamed.
I don't have to kill him, I told myself. The show—vampires can feed without killing. Control the feeding. Take what you need and stop.
My fangs descended. I hadn't even known I had them until they were there, sharp points pressing against my lower lip.
"Sorry," I whispered.
He didn't wake up as I bit into his neck.
The blood was warm. Alive in a way nothing else was.
I drank.
The System pinged somewhere in my awareness.
[FEEDING IN PROGRESS...]
[ESSENCE REGENERATING: 15/50... 30/50... 45/50...]
His heartbeat slowed. Fluttered.
Stop.
I couldn't.
STOP.
I ripped myself away. Stumbled backward. Crashed into a crate hard enough to splinter wood.
The man groaned, shifted in his sleep, and didn't wake. The wound on his neck was already closing—vampire blood in his system from my bite. He'd live. Wouldn't remember anything.
I hunched over and vomited.
Blood splattered on concrete. My stomach heaved again, bringing up nothing but more crimson. My body was rejecting food it desperately needed, some psychological remnant of a conscience that hadn't quite died with me.
Then the nausea passed.
And I felt... fine. Better than fine. Strong. Alert. The hunger had retreated to a manageable ember instead of a raging inferno.
I just drank a man's blood.
The horror should have been overwhelming. It was there—I could feel it lurking at the edges—but already something else was pushing it aside. Practicality. Survival.
This is what you are now. Deal with it or die.
The casual acceptance scared me more than the feeding had.
[ESSENCE RESTORED: 50/50]
[STATUS: STABLE]
I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. The blood smeared across my skin.
Okay. Okay. Think.
New Orleans. I was in New Orleans—I could feel that somehow, the way you know your hometown by scent alone. The abandoned warehouse, the French Quarter lurking beyond these walls.
The Originals was set in New Orleans. 2011 to 2018, roughly.
Marcel Gerard ruled the city. Klaus Mikaelson would come eventually, bringing chaos and family drama.
I needed to figure out when exactly I was. Early season one? Before? After?
Light shifted.
I looked up. The sliver of moon through the boarded window had moved. The darkness beyond wasn't quite as absolute as before.
Dawn was coming.
The panic hit like a physical blow. Vampires and sunlight. A very permanent combination.
"Move," I whispered to myself. "Move, move, move—"
I ran.
The speed was intoxicating and terrifying in equal measure. The world smeared into streaks of color and shadow. I crashed through a door, not bothering with the handle, and tumbled out onto a side street.
The sky was lightening. Not sunrise yet—not quite—but the deep black had faded to something closer to navy.
How long was I in there?
Buildings. Doorways. I needed inside, needed underground, needed—
A maintenance door. Metal, rusted, probably locked.
I grabbed the handle and pulled. The lock shattered.
Stairs leading down. A basement. Concrete and dust and the beautiful darkness of earth pressed close.
I half-fell, half-ran down the steps. Found a corner far from any possible light source. Pressed my back against the wall and slid down to the floor.
Above me, through the layers of building, I heard the city beginning to wake.
[TUTORIAL QUEST ACTIVATED]
[OBJECTIVE: SURVIVE 24 HOURS WITHOUT DETECTION]
[REWARD: BASIC STATUS WINDOW]
[TIME REMAINING: 23:47:31]
I stared at the floating text. A quest. Like this was a game.
My hands wouldn't stop shaking. Not from cold—I couldn't feel temperature properly anymore—but from the enormity of everything.
I died. I'm in a TV show. I'm a vampire. There's a System in my head. Klaus Mikaelson is going to show up eventually and he could kill me with a flick of his wrist.
Hysteria bubbled in my chest. I bit down on it, swallowed hard, focused on my breathing even though I didn't need to breathe anymore.
Priorities. What are the priorities?
Survive the day. Find out when I was in the timeline. Get clean clothes—I was covered in blood and someone else's dead skin cells and probably looked like a murder victim.
Simple enough.
The shaking slowed. Didn't stop, but slowed.
Twenty-four hours. I can survive twenty-four hours.
I had survived worse. Maybe. I couldn't quite remember the specifics of my old life anymore—just fragments, impressions, the ghost of a person I used to be.
That person was dead now.
I curled my knees to my chest and watched the System text fade from view. The basement dripped somewhere in the darkness. A pipe, probably. Or condensation.
New Orleans was waking up above me.
Sixty-eight hours, the System had said about new vampires. Transition instability. I was on a clock within a clock.
I closed my eyes. Not to sleep—I didn't think I could sleep anymore—but to think.
Marcel Gerard. I needed to meet him. Prove myself useful. That was how you survived in this city—you either had power or you had value.
Power would come later. Value I could provide now.
I'm useful.
The phrase surfaced from nowhere, and I held onto it like a lifeline.
I'm useful. I can be useful. I just have to survive long enough to prove it.
The dawn broke above me, fire and gold painting a sky I couldn't see.
I stayed in my basement and planned my way forward.
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