young vampires on social media taking selfies with fake stakes sticking out of their chests, putting “stake me daddy” in their bios

vampire meme straight from the vampire web [descriptive text – no image]

—
what they think we’re like
[image from Bram Stoker’s Dracula of Gary Oldman in titular role / Impact text reads THE BLOOD IS THE LIFE]

what we’re actually like
[image of young vampire reclining on sand in the shadows under an oceanside dock, wearing a white t-shirt upon which has been written THE BLOOD IS WHATEVER, ACTUALLY, miming as if about lick a mussel-encrusted support pillar]

1) Glitter pens available for dazzling up name tags

2) Top shelf cookies on the break table

3) Matching robes stored on site, cleaned between every ritual and kept in cedar wood cabinet so they smell nice

4) Only rarely, and when absolutely necessary, tossing a member into a whirling colorless void, ignoring their screams and basking in the rush of power the Lord of Eight Teeth offers to its loyal subjects

5) No cost day care

“I’m not here to make friends.” – Dr. Frankenstein, consoling himself when his corpse-son has nothing in common with him when it comes to interests or hobbies

Mummy: This one’s easy and a good monster to start with when you’re learning the art of self-defense. Get in a ready stance, feet planted wide, and find your center. Then, give the mummy a compliment and offer a high five. When it puts its hand up, slap its hand so hard the whole creature falls to dust from the impact. This technique’s so easy, there’s room for me to teach you in the course description, which I just did.

Want to defend yourself from Dogmans? Draculas? Fishwitches? MANY MORE?!? Gotta pay $80 for the rest and these are just the tip of the monster pile of self-defense knowledge I can impart. See you on the musty mats of the community centre!

Each free to a good home. Repeat as required daily:

I am strong. I am valued. The world will burn and I will learn to breathe ash.

The world acts through me and I act through the world. I am one with shadows and fate.

I am a person deserving of success. I will drink water. I will walk on two legs. I will maintain my form, all day, even when startled by earth fauna.

Social standards change all the time and if I were to just discard all these tomes bound in flesh, written with blood, then what would I do with all my leftover buckets of blood? Not to mention the shifting piles of skin?

I’m not saying that crafting these forbidden books was a great idea, but I’m saying: What’s the big hurry to get rid of them? Just because there’s a few tiny crowds of peasants bearing torches and clubs approaching?

C’mon.

They might still change their minds.

You are receiving this communication from us because at some point in the last few years, we have:

• Viewed you through a scrying pool and/or mirror
• Crafted a double of you from blood and willpower and used it to manipulate your moods and actions

and/or

• Sunk into a dark liquid pool then rose again to the surface, but the surface was your eyes, through which we saw as you saw, thought as you thought, pressed against your iris as intimate as breath.

Due to new legislation, now we have to ask:

Is it okay if we keep doing that?

[a picture of you, dressed in ragged clothes and translucent, untethered from the material world, an unhappy spectre]

[a picture of a whirling vortex of spectral teeth attached to an arcane digestive system that renders spirits into raw spectral energy, shredding ghosts and composting them into something unrecognizable as part of a post-life ecology that’s barely imaginable]