09:37 Jun 16 2026
Times Read: 205
You really want to keep coming at me? I found your friend drunk in an Alley. Why are all your friends drunks now?
Vampire Attack (Ingress)
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Open Scene:
"It's too easy taking over a body when the resident's mind is impaired. This one had consumed a few too many at the bar, and then—after getting in a fight with a group inside—got knocked out and dumped in the alley. Imagine his fright when he saw me coming at him. He tried to scramble away but his limbs wouldn't obey; he only managed a weak, useless twitch. He just kind of rolled into a corner of his mind, as if surrendering the last scrap of himself, and I slid in—smooth, cold, inevitable. The streetlights flickered; the night smelled of stale beer and blood.
At first it felt foreign: the rhythm of his heartbeat, the friction of coarse fabric against skin, the taste of copper at the back of his throat. Then the map of muscle and memory unfolded like a well-worn road beneath my feet. I learned his walk, his curse-softened laugh, the particular ache behind his left eye. Memories came in fragments — a faded photograph he'd kept folded in his wallet, the sound of a woman calling his name, a child's crayon drawing tucked between receipts. They were trinkets, shallow things, but enough to anchor me.
I stood and flexed fingers that had held a bottle more times than a pen. The city seemed to take a breath with me. People passing by glanced at me, never quite meeting my eyes, as if they sensed a wrongness and politely turned away. I tested the edges of control with small things: a cigarette lit and pinched between fingers, the swivel of a head, a curse muttered under breath. The man's vices were easy instruments; his anger, when I pushed it, flared like gasoline.
There is a delicious clarity in newness — a body’s spare parts aligning under a foreign will. I wandered through pockets of memory, sampling tastes, hearing songs that should have been strangers but fit like old keys. I could feel his shame-sour apologies, his debts, the thin hopes he kept that never came. They were weaknesses to be exploited, yes, but also textures I could wear when I moved through the world: a laugh that softened a bark of a command, a limp that made people underestimate me.
Night after night I tried different modes of him. Sometimes I let him stagger to the corner and plead for change, watching the disgust in others as the passed by. Other times I let his fury loose, feeling the snap of a fist connect, the dull satisfaction of a stumble. It was an education in small cruelties and larger escapes. I remembered how bodies age, how joints complain, how lungs resist when you push them. I learned how to make his voice low and dangerous when the right moment came, and how to soften it to coax a smile from someone passing by.
But occupying him is a theft that leaves room for the old owner's ghost. At the edges of dusk, when I relaxed my grip, I would hear his whisperings in the back of the skull — apologies, parts of songs, the wish to be a better man. They nagged, a small chorus I couldn't fully silence. Sometimes he tried to fight back, a brief shudder where his fingers twitched toward a different choice. It was never enough. I had the motion, the intent, the majority; he had only the residue of habitat and yearning.
This time felt different, though. Somewhere between the alley and the bar's neon, I found a pocket of warmth I hadn't expected: the memory of small hands and laughter. I didn't know if it belonged to him or if it belonged to the body itself, but it tugged at something that had almost been dead in me — curiosity about continuity, about not being simply a phantom inside but a passenger who might learn to steer. For a flicker, the idea of keeping him intact, of letting some part of his life continue, crossed my mind.
Then the sirens began to wail in the distance. Instinct won. I adjusted his collar, wiped a smear of blood from his lip with the heel of his hand, and walked toward the sound to see how fear rearranged itself in others when they faced someone who had no right to be there. The city is full of bodies like this one, and rules stacked like a house of cards. All it takes is a gust.
I am patient. There will be more. There will always be more. But sometimes you find a body that surprises you: not with its strength, but with the small, fragile humanity that makes it worth keeping for a while. For now, I walk in his shoes, tasting the world through borrowed senses, making decisions that will ripple through his few remaining days. The thrill is in the operation — in seeing how far a borrowed life can be bent before it snaps back to its original shape."
That is a lot of memories, but lets start with my first memory after entering his body, the ingress. Going back into the bar to have some fun with the gang that had dumped his body in the alley.
I walked into the bar and went straight up to the leader of the gang. He was facing away, but some of the members behind him started motioning for him to turn around. When he did, he stared at me in disbelief — he could not believe I (or he) had come back in. He said, "Back for more?" and prepared to swing.
He was slow; I easily dodged his fist and drove mine downward into his right cheek, knocking him to one knee. As another member rushed in, I hit the leader a second time while dodging the attacker. I let the second fighter pass about two feet to my right—just enough space for a spinning kick that caught him in the jaw. He went out cold.
Meanwhile the leader had staggered to his feet. I hit him in the gut, then came down hard with a boot to the side of his knee as he doubled over. He was done, but his gang wasn't. Seven feet away, one of them was raising a revolver. He fired the first shot; I stepped left and felt the bullet pass by. I stepped slightly forward to the right as he fired a second time, and closed in as he squeezed off a third.
The revolver was in my hands before he could react. I opened the cylinder and let the spent and remaining cartridges fall to the floor. I placed the gun on the bar and turned back to the man who had just fired at me three times.
To think, I had been in his body for 15 minutes...
Close Scene:
I keep hearing about the filming taking place & wanted to make sure details of this scene are correct. I'm sure it will be embellished, but blood and live feeds don't lie.
Perhaps this whole event started with a remote view.
More to follow...
Open Scene:
Then the sirens began to wail in the distance. Instinct won. I adjusted his collar, wiped a smear of blood from his lip with the heel of my hand, and walked toward the sound to see how fear rearranged itself in others when they faced someone who had no right to be there.
People turned as I passed—heads tilting like birds at a new noise. A kid dropped his soda, glass tumbling and fracturing, and the sound seemed to make the sirens sharper, nearer. Streetlights buzzed above us, throwing halos that did nothing to soften the wet dark at the corners of his mouth. He leaned on me the way a wounded animal leans: not for support, but because the world still felt solid through my spine. There was a slow, greedy curiosity in his eyes that matched the smell of iron on our breath.
The city is full of bodies like this one, and rules stacked like a house of cards. All it takes is a gust.
The gust came from an alley three blocks down, a narrow throat that funneled the night into a sharpened knife of wind. It smelled of piss and old newspaper and something floral that didn't belong—a memory from another season, or a perfume someone had spilled in a rush. The sirens timed themselves with the wind, a pair of voices answering each other in a language meant to corral panic. I could feel the arrangement of the rules around us shifting: police barricades rolled inward in the periphery of my vision, a drone's lens blinked like an unblinking eye, and the flashlight beams carved white scars across faces.
Hungry things learn to read the architecture of human panic. The first rule: keep still while they decide what you are. The second: never give them reason to point. The third: when they point, make sure they point at something else.
We walked past a shop where mannequins posed with glossy indifference. One of them had one hand missing, just a ragged stump that caught the siren light and made it look like a wound. A woman behind the glass pressed her forehead to the cool plastic and mouthed a prayer without sound. She breathed like someone trying not to awake a sleeping animal. I wanted to tell her the animal was already awake—that the teeth shown beneath shirt collars were not metaphors—but my mouth kept the words shut. Speaking betrays more than silence does.
He whimpered once, a thin sound like a wire snapping. I tightened my grip at the base of his skull not to dominate him, but to keep him from collapsing altogether. His pulse—if you could still call it that—tapped in the hollow between my fingers, irregular and stubborn. Blood leaked from his lip in a steady, shameful bead. Every drop made a small, private crime on the pavement.
An ambulance screamed past, its blur of red and white pushing the rain-slick air in front of it. The crowd parted reflexively, a sea dividing for a thing they trusted even if they could not name the trust. Cops followed in the wake, their steps heavy with rules; their radios barked in clipped, coded language. I watched the pattern of their movements—where they hesitated, where they surged—and folded myself into the negative space they left. There is a grammar to fear, and if you learn its verbs you can speak without a mouth.
“Will they—” he began.
“Not yet,” I said. My voice was steady because it had to be. Lies are a tool as old as hunger.
He tasted of pennies and old libraries. He remembered things in fragments: a laugh, a name, a year that would not anchor. The more he remembered, the more he hurt. The less he remembered, the purer the hunger became—a clear, crystalline force that had no remorse and no grammar for mercy.
We reached an overpass where teenagers had scrawled initials into the concrete. A girl sat cross-legged on the edge, phone screen painting her face blue. She looked up, saw us, then looked down again. Her gaze flicked like a trapped animal checking for escape routes. Her hands tightened on the phone as if already choosing which number to dial. For a moment I thought she would reach for the call, but she didn't. Call and calling are different—one is a tool, the other a confession. The sirens had given her the choice to confess or to shut her mouth. She chose silence.
The rules keep their own company, stacking one atop another: curfews, lines painted in the asphalt, the polite distance between two strangers on a sidewalk. They keep the city coherent, a map you can trust when the night is only a blackness and not a threat. But those rules are built on small things—obedience, the faith that other people will obey—and when one layer slips, the rest wobble like a tower of cards.
A gust ran down the avenue, scattering a page from a flyer. The paper caught the light and spun like a white moth, fluttering into the throat of the city. It landed on a puddle and soaked, the ink bleeding into the water. For a heartbeat, I imagined the words washing away, the edicts and notices dissolving until there was nothing left but breath and teeth and need.
Behind us, a shout—too close, too human. A cop's baton hit asphalt, an echo like a warning bell. Heads turned. A man with his collar up tried to look larger; a mother scooped a toddler close, folding rules into her arms as if they could shield both body and soul. I read their faces like pages: curiosity, calculation, the faint flash of cruelty. People can be cruel without meaning to be. Cruelty is a byproduct of rules when the rules no longer explain anything.
We turned down a side street, the buildings crowding in like judges. He leaned heavier now; blood had made him light, but the burden of being him had not. I considered the small economy of what we needed: a quiet place where we could repair the tears hunger had opened, a dark room with a lock, a sink for red to wash into gray water. Those are practical things, the kind plans you make when survival is immediate and abstract ideals are luxuries.
A door opened—a sliver of amber spilling into the street—and a man on the stoop cursed at a lost cat or the world. He saw us. For an instant his expression sharpened into recognition, as if he had read a headline and now had the headline standing before him. Then he blinked and the recognition folded into something else: calculation. He could call it in, make a name for himself with a quick phone call; he could look away and keep whatever small safety his complacency bought him.
I stepped toward him and smiled in a way that kept my teeth covered. “We’re fine,” I said.
He looked at my hand on the other's collar, at the bead of blood on my knuckle, at the casualness in my posture that pretended the night was a neutral thing. He nodded once, the motion small and precise, then shut the door.
Later, when the sirens had passed into the city’s throat and become muzzled groans, we found the place: a basement beneath a bar that smelled of spilled whiskey and old arguments. It had a single bulb that hummed like an insect and a sink whose pipes sang in low tones. I washed his face carefully, not because it mattered whether the blood came off but because rituals are a way to keep the world legible. He watched me with a soft attention that made me think of sunsets—rare and savored and quietly dangerous.
“You could go,” he said finally, fingers tracing the water's edge. “You shouldn’t be—”
“I know what I am,” I replied. It was both fact and apology. “And I know what you are.”
He smiled without humor. “Then why stay?”
Because the rules are not entirely merciless. Because sometimes someone who knows the grammar of fear can use it to hold a moment together. Because the city’s rules fall away faster when a hand is empty. Because there were nights when someone had held me and the hold had been the difference between survival and a very different kind of hunger.
I settled him onto a cot and pulled a blanket over his knees. He slept with his mouth parted, and for the first time since this had all started his breathing evened into something like the rhythm of the living. His wounds closed slowly under my watch, skin knitting like a memory remembering itself.
Outside, the city rearranged itself as it always did: the gutters claimed their debris, the traffic reasserted its kingdom, and neon sighed against the dark. Rules stitched themselves back into place—barriers, curfews, polite distances crowding the sidewalks again. But the house of cards always remembers the gust. It remembers that one careless wind can flatten a structure that seemed permanent. And the wind was patient.
When dawn bled gray into the alley, he woke and reached for me reflexively. I let him, because some rules are better kept through contact than cold calculus. We moved out into a city still learning to trust its geometry. Dogs barked from fenced yards. Men in suits who took themselves for the law walked too straight and saw nothing but their reflections. The sirens were a memory that would be used later—an anecdote at a precinct, a headline, a rumor passed under breath at a diner.
We walked on anyway. The rules were still there, stacked and waiting, but so was the gust. And we were, as always, ready for it.
Close Scene:
2,411 words
More to come...
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