It all happened in a moment, and it started with three screams.

  Two of the figures, who seemed to be brandishing polearms of some kind, rushed at them from either side, closing in on them in a pincer. As for the third figure, well, there were thick woodem beams conecting each wall of the room, extending above their heads but still a couple feet below the actual ceiling.

  The third figure dropped on them from one of those beams, a glinting knife clutched in their hands, and a screech of a scream on their lips.

  An ambush, right on the front door.

  Bad idea.

  If they had allowed them to just walk a bit into the building before dropping in on them, then they would have found them with their guards slightly dropped, and they could have surrounded them, leaving no exit but to fight their way out in the semidark.

  As things were, they had a better option.

  "BACK!!!" Kurt screamed, his hand going to the back of Mila's dress's neck to pull on it, just as he jumped back and out the building's threshold. Much to his surprise, he barely felt like he had to pull. Mila had reacted about as fast as he had and made a jump of her own.

  Two flashes of red and blue told Kurt everything he needed to know about the group's other half.

  They found themselves back outside the building, in a prime position to witness the now targetless ambush they had just evaded unfold.

  The one that had tried to literally take the drop on them came first. They fell, still screaming, and met the floor face first, their knife stabbing into the dirt. The figure groaned in pain and rolled on their side, whimpering in a very not-monster-like manner.

  The fact that 'they' looked like a very slight college-aged girl, all pale and thin and with long, straight blonde hair certainly helped disipate the image even further.

  "Alexis!" screamed someone from the inside of the room, the worry clear in his voice. A moment later, their other two assailants came into view.

  The first think Kurt noticed was their 'weapons'. What in the dark might have looked like axes or shortspears, revealed itself like two iron shovels. Not rusted in the least, and certainly quite solid-looking, but still shovels.

  Shovels that were being pointed at them by the trembling hands of two very alive and very scared men who looked the same age as the knife girl.

  The one on the left was of standard height and build, with ashen skin and black silky hair that reached his jaw. The screen above his head read Maxell Draid, and his level was 9.

  The guy on the right was barely any taller, but much broader of shoulders and packed with muscle, with a bulk that was noticeable even through his rather thick jacket. He was black, and his short, curly hair was styled in and undercut. His screen read Alfred Cade, level 14.

  The girl, who had now moved onto a foetalposition on the ground, crying softly and clutching her mouth and nose with a hand while the other hugged her own stomach, was Alexis Donovan, and her level was 6.

  To his side, Conrad dropped his sword slightly (When had he unsheathed it? During the jump?) and asked, in the driest tone possible, "What in the fuck is this?" His sword dropped a bit further, and his tone rose as if to compensate. "Who the hell are you? What are you doing here?!"

  The men didn't answer immediately, instead exchanging a side-eyed glanced while keeping their 'weapons' were they were. They looked panicked, feverish and disheveled, and the shock in their faces made Kurt think that they most likely hadn't even listened to Conrad, too centered were they trying to puzzle out just who the three jackasses and the wolf were.

  And why and how they had ripped their doors apart. That one was probably pretty high up their question list too.

  "So," Kurt said, relaxing his grip on his sword. "I take it you aren't working for the fanged guy either?"

  The two men gasped, their shovels nearly dropping due to the shock. On the ground, the girl seemed to cry just a bit more intensly.

  As far as first contacts went, it wasn't a complete disaster.

  Kurt would try and hold onto that fact.

  ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

  The next few minutes were spent in the expected manner: The seven of them walked into the building setting on whichever chair or upturned bucket or whatever they could sit on, and settled themselves in a circle at the center of the room.

  After that, they talked.

  The quest group's explanation was rather lengthy, since they not only explained who they were and why they were there (They...skipped...quite a lot about their journey's eventfulness.), but also that, yes, magic was real, and yes, it was indeed a vampire that they had encountered.

  It was a very long and boring exposition, filled with definitions for terms that were just as commonplace for them as 'car' or 'shoe' were to the layman, and an even longer explanation pertaining the concepts of orders, the Department of Strange Phenomena (DSP) and how the Veil had made their existance necessity.

  In short terms, the standard issue lecture that was to be given to an Unveiled One. Because when a regular person gets plucked away from the cozy normality of a world where dragons and spells and gods were the stuff of fantasy novels and not objective reality, and into the world Kurt and Mila and Conrad lived in, well, an explanation was a very appreciated courtesy.

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  "This...cannot be real," the Maxell guy said, slumping forward while clutching his head with his forearms, with his hands both resting on his nape. His voice was so filled with dread, with a desire to negate whatever they had been through as a fever dream, that Kurt almost feared the Veil would reasert its hold on his brain then and there.

  It was something that could happen, Kurt knew, at least in theory.

  "It was real," said the Alexis girl in a flat, almost resignated tone. She was siting on the floor righ ahead of Maxell's chair, and she was using his legs as a backrest. The entire left side of her face was red and slightly swollen due to the impact her attemp at plying Real Life Assasin's Creed had led her to. Her nose and mouth were intact, and there was no external bleeding, but she still looked like an ogre had slapped her. "Whatever took Amelia had to be real, at least."

  "Amelia?" Mila asked. She was sitting on a milking stool, and Christopher Robin lay curled up on her lap, as though sleeping.

  "His sister," said Alfred, gesturing at Maxell without taking his eyes off his feet. Out of all three Unveiled Ones, he was the one that looked the most defeated. "And my girlfriend. And Alexis's roomate."

  From his wicker chair, Conrad hummed, nodding slowly and measuredly. "Loks like she's the main lynchpin of this whole group, uh?" He let out a soft sigh, and straightened his back before he spoke again. "What happened to you, exactly? Why are you here, how did you encounter the vampire, and how the hell did you come out of it alive?"

  Alfred took a moment to answer. His lower lip trembled for a moment, and it looked like he was about to break into a crying mess (Not that Kurt would have blamed him for it.), but he held on and began speaking.

  "We are college students," he began. "Maxell and I are studying a law degree. Alexis is doing computer science. And Amelia was..." He stopped himself, and his nostrils flared for a moment. "...Amelia is doing a filmmaking course. That is why we came here."

  "For a filming degree?" Kurt asked, one eyebrow arched. "Could you please elaborate?"

  "It was for a project," said Alexis. Her voice had regained some emotion, but none that was positive. "A found footage sort of thing, you know? Perfect for a low budget, amateur movie. She came to this godforsaken town to see if it would make for a good scenario for the thing. And we came along." A shiver ran through her body, and she slumped forward, sobbing. "We thought it would be fun. A weekend of just... camping, urban exploring, helping herget some neat shots of the place... we had even planed a barbeque for tonight..."

  "We left the meat in the van too," Maxell said. Suddenly, his eyes shot open, iris shrunked, and his mouth twisted in a broken smile, and he began laughing. It was a terrible sound, a bastard child of mirth and madness, and the expression of one at the end of their rope, of someone who just had laughter directed a mad world separating them from giving up. "Shit, man... it's gonna stink the whole thing up!" Another laugh. "It's gonna be a bitch to clean up...but, well, not like it's our problem now, uh? We are..." His body went rigid for a second, before he slumped in his chair like a puppet with its strings cut. Fat tears poured lazily from his eyes and onto his broken smile. "We are never seeing that van ever again, man. We are never getting out this place. That thing is gonna come for us, and drag us into that mine like it did with Amelia."

  Kurt, Mila and Conrad exchanged looks that weren't so much concerned as they were terrified.

  They knew what this was.

  When the Veil's influence in a mortal's mind is broken, there are two things that can occur: the person can completely shake its influence away, becoming a proper Unveiled, or the Veil could try and sink its hooks back into the subject's brain. As this happened, its ability to filter the supernatural became corrupted and twisted. It would 'censor' elements and thoughts that had nothing to do with the supernatural, while its actual ability to veil the kind of phenomena it was meant to erase becomes partial. The end result is a human being forced to experience the world in ways the human brain just wasn't meant to.

  In other words, the kind of insanity that destroys whatever trace of who you once were. And the risk of it happening increases with the subject's age and distress.

  And Maxell looked very distressed right now.

  Alexis and Alfred were the first to react, moving towards Maxell and trying to console him.

  "Nobody move!" Conrad seethed sharply, stoping the two on their tracks. "Treat this like it's an epileptic attack! Give him space and let him breathe!" He snapped his head at Kurt. "Glamour. Partial sensory deprivation. Now!"

  Without so much as nodding in acknoledgement, Kurt conjured his wand and cast a cloud of Glamour in Maxell's way. He used it in much the same way he had with the doctors that had been operating on Conrad: using the illusory magic to take away sensory stimuli instead of making more, onlyy this time he just did it partially, blunting the world around him instead of removing it in its entirety.

  The illusion took hold, and Maxell seemed to calm down. His breaths grew deeper and steadier, and his face relaxed in a tired grimace.

  "Maxell," Kurt called, letting his voive pierce through the bubble of Glamour over the college student's head. "I need you to listen to me, okay?" Maxell looked at him quizically for a moment, before he nodded hesitantly. "You are not doomed. Not by a long shot. The three of us are experts at dealing with this kind of stuff. On our way here we killed a demon the size of an elephant and fought away a creature capable of controlling plants like extensions of their body. In the middle of a forest. Compared to that, this vampire thing is less than nothing. Right, guys?"

  Conrad and Mila agreed, nodding andmaking small comments about how 'easy' those fights had been. He didn't like lying to the guy, evenif it was just partially and through omission, but they knew that giving him the specifics of how those fights had gone down, the would just make him panic harder.

  So they embellished.

  "You can really kill that inhuman thing?" Alfred asked as he half-eyed a steadily calming Maxell.

  "We are pretty damn sure we can, yeah." Kurt confirmed, before he addedd. "Though vampires aren't exactly what you'd call 'inhuman things', at least not in the way I think you mean."

  From her spot on the ground, Alexis gave him a confusedd, head-tilted look. "So then what are they?"

  This question was answered by Mila. "Guess you could call them 'ex-humans'." She took a moment to think before she spoke her enxt words. "Though I guess that 'mutated humans' would be a more apt term. They are necromancers and alchemists of considerable skill that have, through some lengthy and complex brewing process or the other, managed to concoot a substance, a special serum that, when injected, transmutates their blood into an alchemichal fluid capable of holding both necrotic energy and regular life force at the same time."

  "Which should be impossible," Kurt added, trying to give their audience a sense of why vampires were such an unique deal amongst the undead. "You see, necrotic magic is a sort of corruption of proper life energy, okay? An unarguably lesser thing that, nonetheless, is still extremely dangerous and powerful in its own right. Now, life energy and this magic do not get along. At all. It's a bit like regular matter and antimatter, they try to destroy each other in contact. Either the life force wins and dissipated the undead magic into nothingness, or the magic wins, corrupting the life energy and fedding off of it like a leech."

  "Except when the exist within a vampire's blood," Conrad continued. "That shit can force them into a sort of almost-balance, where the life force keeps doing its thing and the necrotic magic barely tries to corrup it, creating thusly a creature with the best of both the living and the undead. Super strong, never ages, heals from almost anything so long as they are well fed..."

  Kurt, sensing how nervous the Unveiled weere getting, cut in with some trivia of his own.

  "And they also become montrosities whose flesh mutates in order to imitate whatever it is they fed upon, which forces them to devour humans periodically least the suck too much nonhuman blood and deteriorate into a Carpenter-esque abomination." He rose a hand and began raising fingers with each new factoid. "Thay also become deadly vulnerable to anything holy enough, become universally unhinged due to how that special blood interacts with their brains and they immediately combust if they try to absorb any form of Primeval magic, which is why the burn in the sun since their bodies can't help but try and take in that specific source of energy. So no, they are not perfect, and they are not invincible."

  Conrad nodded in agreement. "The juveniles are also fucking stupid, due to not having adapted to the changes in their brain chemistry. The vampire you encountered was once, most likely, a brilliant alchemist, and yet I'm pretty sure that he now acts little better than a wild boar. So yeah, not invincible."

  "It was acting pretty stupid," Alexis conceded. "Pretty sure that's the only reason we got out that mine with our lives, but..." Her lips purred in something like guilt, and she looked up to Maxell for support.

  "That guy didn't look like he had ever been a 'brilliant alchemist'," Maxell said. "He looked like some random junkie more than anything else."

  "Well, the change from human to vampire can be pretty extreme," Mila said. "Most people only turn to vampirism when they are all old and dying, since that is one of the only semi-reliable ways of achieving eternal youth. That 'random junkie' look was most likely just a middle stage between 'decrepit old man' and 'twenty-something pretty boy"." She shrugged. "No change of that magnitudde is gonna be instantaneous."

  "And do they shed their old bodies during that change?" Alfred asked, rather sourly. "Do they do like a cicada and just molt out that dying ship before they turn into 'pretty boys'?"

  The quest group fell silent at the question, not knowing what to say.

  "Uhm, no?" Kurt answered, the 'no' coming out a lot less secure than intended. "I mean, no. AT least not as far as we know. Why do you ask?"

  Alfred chuckled darkly, and pointed sharply behind him, at an adjacent small room with what looked like a flight of stairs, and the up to the ceiling.

  "Because there is one such body right above our heads right now." He rose his head to meet Kurt's eyes, and then brought to fingers to his neck. "And it has a bite mark on its neck."