2020.09.03:Dario's Last Night in Las Vegas

Dario's Last Night in Las Vegas
Dario Lastra and his cousin, Emma Giovanni, narrowly escape death at the hands of a Lamia witch named Contessa
IC Date	09-03-2020
IC Time	Dusk
Players	Dario
Location	Las Vegas, NV
Spheres	Vampire

A small click, a faint creak. That’s all it took to rouse the tall, lithe young man who was napping lightly on the couch. Shadows from the setting sun were beginning to stretch slowly along the floor. Little Emma, his eight-year-old niece and ward, was asleep upstairs. His name was Dario and for a good many reasons he was all that stood between that little girl and a terrible death.

Like a phantom, he silently rose off the couch to his full 6’3” of height. He was whip-thin but his form radiated preternatural power, made supernaturally strong with vampiric blood. He was a ghoul in the parlance of vampires, an ugly word for a very beautiful thing. Dario stood completely still, listening for any signs of an intruder.

After several silent minutes, he moved forward like a whisper, heading toward the front living room. ‘Did I set the alarm after Emma got home from school?’ he thought, silently cursing himself for getting complacent. As he crossed the threshold into the front living room two things happened simultaneously. First, he became aware that several figures were standing in the room. Second, one of those figures swung something long, maybe a baseball bat, at his head. ‘You should have gone for the body,’ Dario thought to himself. ‘Then I wouldn’t be able to duck.’ He quickly dropped into a crouch as the weapon whistled harmlessly over his head and smashed the plaster wall behind him.

At a quick glance he counted six people in the room, all dressed in black fatigues, and all ready for action. Dario had two knives concealed in hidden sheaths in his belt, but he instinctively knew that in the time it would take him to reach for those weapons his dead body would already be on the floor. Like bottled lightning he rose and shot the inner ridge of his left hand into the throat of baseball bat dude. He felt the satisfying crunch of shattering cartilage as the man dropped dying to the floor. ‘Mortal. Good,’ he thought.

Then he cursed himself for feeling relief at finding that his opponent was mortal. There is no good, there is no bad…

—————————————————————————————————————-

“…there is only now,” Bianca said sharply. She was one of the Giovanni vampires responsible for his proxy kiss—his ghouling—and she was training him. Dario was standing in sand, wearing nothing but a pair of shorts. The desert air was cold on this December evening, and one of Bianca’s servants was spraying cold water on Dario’s bare form. On his shoulders were two massive bags of concrete. His legs were spread and his knees were bent sharply as he struggled against the cold and the weight. But he knew the price he’d pay if he dropped them.

The vampire was slowly circling Dario, holding a reed-thin cane. “A bird will drop frozen dead from a branch never having felt sorry for itself,” she intoned. “It knows neither good nor bad, only now.” Quickly she whipped Dario’s thigh with the cane. It wasn’t too hard; she had no desire to permanently damage one as valuable and loyal as Dario. But it was hard.

Dario gritted his teeth against the pain.

“Say it,” Bianca calmly ordered.

“There is no.. good. There.. is no bad. There.. is only now,” the young ghoul recited.

“Good,” Bianca said. “Again.” And the cane swung.

—————————————————————————————————————-

Two of the closest figures simultaneously advanced on Dario. The dimly illuminated room crackled into sharp detail as the smell of ozone filled the air. One of them had a stun gun. Shit just go really real. Dario lunged forward, leaping into the air. As he leaped, he raised both knees, smashing each attacker in the chest. Their mortal sternums were crushed by Dario’s supernatural strength and their already-dead bodies crumpled to the floor.

‘This can’t be it,’ Dario thought. ‘There has to be more. They didn’t send six humans to take me down.’

The young ghoul’s powerful, slender body spun and twirled, striking like lightning this way and then that. Within the span of a few heartbeats the other three attackers were dead on the ground and Dario was untouched. They may as well have sent six school children after him.

‘This can’t be it,’ he thought to himself again.

In explosive affirmation, the front door smashed inward off its hinges. A large figure forced its way through the doorway. He looked vaguely like a man, maybe one who had a few dozen too many steroid treatments. Pulsing veins thrummed along the man-creature’s bare head, and his eyes were narrow black beads in a yellowish swirl. Obscenely large muscles threatened to shred the tight black pants he wore, and a sweaty gray tank top was barely and desperately clinging to his torso. Other than being about seven feet tall, he might otherwise pass as some grossly overly hormoned human…except that in place of a right hand, a large metal warhammer jutted out of his forearm like he was born with it.

“Daddy gonna smash boy into pieces!” the creature bellowed in a hoarse, raspy voice. “But daddy gonna keep boy alive so Mistress Contessa can have fun too.”

Behind the behemoth, out in front of the house, was parked a large black SUV. Standing next to the vehicle, Dario saw two men. One was holding a military rocket launcher and the other was loading a round into it.

Shit.

—————————————————————————————————————-

“You’re a vampire!” Dario bellowed. “You’re faster and stronger than I am.” Blood trickled down from his now-broken nose.

A man in a black martial arts gi was squared off against Dario, who was dressed in a white gi, now stained red with his own blood. The movements of the man’s compact form showed an economy of motion and extreme confidence.

“You think that matters?” bellowed Edoardo, another of the three Giovanni vampires who had been assigned the task of ghouling and training Dario. “Will you only fight when it’s fair? Are you going to give up Emma’s life because something more powerful than you attacks?”

That was the wrong thing to say and Edoardo knew it. Dario grimaced and lashed forward. Make no mistake, he was Edoardo’s lesser but he moved with a power and grace that would humiliate the most accomplished mortal warrior. He lunged forward with a series of kicks and knees and elbows that would have slain any man where he stood. But Edoardo was no man, he was an old Giovanni vampire and he knew what he was doing.

Edoardo effortlessly blocked or evaded every strike from Dario, then savagely arm barred the young man across the throat, knocking him backward and onto the ground. A human would have been struck dead by the blow. Edoardo was holding very little back. He wanted Dario to feel helpless, to feel grossly outmatched.

“Come on,” the vampire roared. “Come and fight me!”

—————————————————————————————————————-

Dario let out a growl and charged the behemoth. With his body language he telegraphed a high attack, like someone who was unskilled and overly confident might attempt to do. The arrogant creature took the bait and prepared his defense high, smiling at the anticipation of breaking Dario’s body. At the last moment, Dario dropped, sliding low across the smooth tiled floor. In a flash, the ghoul’s knives were out. As he slid through between the beast’s legs he slashed up with the knifes, tearing through the creature’s genitals.

‘I hope this piece of shit has something down there,’ Dario thought.

The great creature howled in unearthly pain, dropping immediate to its knees. But by that time, the ghoul warrior was already behind the monster and back on his feet. He raised his arms—impossibly strong for how slender they were—and plunged both knives down into the creature’s skull with preternatural speed and power. The monster’s lights were immediately shut off as the great bulk slammed lifeless to the floor.

With immense power, Dario leaped for the stairs. Taking three or four at a time, he rocketed upstairs and down the hall to Emma’s bedroom. He pushed the door open with such force that it busted open at the doorframe. He glanced around the empty room. No Emma.

‘Good girl,’ Dario thought. ‘Just like I taught you.’

He bounded faster down the hallway to the panic room. He punched in the code on the keypad. There was the loud clicking of powerful locks releasing. The heavy, reinforced door swung open. Young Emma, just a child dressed in pink unicorn pajamas, was kneeling on the floor holding a stuffed bear to her chest. Dario won that bear for her at the state fair. It would have been much cheaper to buy one from even the most expensive, high-end boutique toy store. But Emma wanted that bear. Dario could deny her nothing, so he kept throwing stupid rings at posts in that rigged game until he won the bear. She almost never let it leave her side.

“Dario, what’s wr…” she started to ask, but was cut off as the ghoul immediately swept the child up in powerful arms, pulling her to his chest. He then ran at full speed through the guest room, leaping up on the bed, and then through the window! Emma screamed as glass shattered everywhere. Dario curled as best as he could protectively around her as together they flew out the second-story window, landing on the roof.

Emma was crying as Dario ran at full speed across the rooftop, fast like a preternatural shadow in the gloom of the night. He ran like his life depended on it…like her life depended on it.

“You fight until you can’t fight anymore!” he could hear Edoardo saying in his mind. “And then you fight some more!”

Suddenly he leapt into the air, high and far, using every ounce of superhuman strength that he could muster, launching the two of them impossibly far away from the house. With a great splash, they landed in the pool. Time seemed to stand still as water arced upward at the exact moment that the rocket passed through the front doorway of the house, flew past the dead beast in the front living room, and exploded in a blast of military-grade explosives, detonating the building like it was made of balsa wood.

One of the two mortal men, the rocket launcher loader, grinned. “They’re dead. Nobody survives that.” Burning pieces of the house were still floating through the sky.

“Hell yeah,” he rocker launcher shooter agreed. “They’re dead. Too bad about Hugo, but Mistress Contessa can always make another one.”

An extremely overweight man in an expensive, bespoke white suit that could barely contain his bulging rolls of fat approached the two from behind. He names Mr. Chalmers, and he was Mistress Contessa’s most trusted servant.

“Are you sure?” Mr. Chalmers asked, his baritone voice assuming a tone that indicated it wasn’t a question at all. “Did you see the bodies? Do you want to be the ones to tell Mistress Contessa if you’re wrong?” He licked his corpulent lips with almost a kind of pleasure. “You couldn’t even die to escape the agony. She would just keep bringing you back. Over and over and over.”

The two men looked at one another with terror in their eyes. “Fuck,” one of them said. And they trudged toward the wreckage of the house. Meanwhile, Mr. Chalmers squeezed his fat form into the back of the SUV and pulled the door shut. The vehicle drove away.