The sun was setting down in the mountain, a bus was slowly and carefully slithering down the road carved in the middle of the woods on the mighty face of one of them.
As the minibus rode in the sunset and the light was suddenly disappearing, Tina sighed glancing through the window at the ravine down below.
She was sighting more to her reflection, she was a chubby girl in her own eyes, some mediocre girl without a hope in the world.
Hazelnut eyes, and long dark hair, she wasn't very tall and barely stood out amongst others, being a soft-spoken and reserved individual.
Like many girls she had her heart broken by her boyfriend, there wasn't really anything out of the ordinary in her.
Except maybe it was her twentieth birthday, so she felt even worse than usual, but she was here for that right?
She wasn't so sure any longer but she had her best friend with her, Sara, a girl she had known forever.
That little trip to nowhere was her idea, she was always a fan of the supernatural and was involved in various occult things.
Mainly she was in a Wicca coven or something along those lines, Tina had never tried to inquire more than that.
She was Christian and tied to her faith, and while she didn't feel the urge to try and convert her best friend to her ways she didn't want to be dragged in weird shit either.
That was until that fateful day really, and she still was wondering if she was sinning by merely standing there.
Sara was dressed in a goth black leather uniform of sorts that exalted her curves to the point of making Tina blush.
She wondered how her best friend could bear the thought of being seen like that, considering most of the other occupants of the minibus were males.
There were twenty-three people on that bus, including the driver, and they were going to a place to do a thing called a LARP.
Tina was barely familiar with the term, she enjoyed role-playing in the past but now she had been out of the rabbit hole for years.
When Tina broke up with her boyfriend for the latter's unfaithfulness and spoke about it to Sara, she was quick to propose the trip to have her celebrate her birthday on a different note and have her mind concentrate on something else.
Tina had to expect everything from her friend, but she was appalled to discover it was a game involving vampires.
Even now she was holding in her pocket the fake dentures she was supposed to wear later on after she became a vampire.
The plot of that day involved the exploration of a real old abandoned castle in eastern Europe, in the Carpathian Balkan region where the myth of vampires was born.
It wasn't a site particularly famous like Dracula's castle or something along those lines, it was a small privately owned castle in some hamlet.
It was a site that allegedly became famous in the second world war, something that like Wewelsburg's castle became a focus for Hitler's occult obsession.
According to later found documents the third Reich had sent a squad to the castle in search of a powerful vampire, to make a pact with it and turn the losing tides of war, but none of them returned.
Some historians had debunked the myth stating that the squad had been probably wiped out by the resistance in the region, but occult fanatics to this date still loved the story of the castle and someone had purchased the castle to turn it into a hostel of sorts.
It was possible to use the venues of the castle to stage the sort of things Sara was up to on that trip.
According to Sara, Tina would have been a human archaeologist kidnapped by her and her group of vampires in a quest to seek a powerful artifact belonging to an old vampire, and in the process being turned into a vampire.
A fun fact about Tina was that she studied to get a degree in archaeology herself, so it was a kind of weird encouragement from her best friend if one could call one.
She didn't know what kind of vampire she would be, of course, she didn't care much about that, what she expressively wanted to avoid was to become the same type of a vampire a couple of people were.
They sported body modifications and tattoos that made her wonder how they lived their very normal everyday very human life.
Tina sighed looking at Sara that simply smiled, before starting to talk to her about their future adventure.
They were chitchatting about this and that and along came Altea and Lucy, the only other girls in the group, and they started to know each other.
Lucy was older than them and already had a job, a husband, and a couple of kids of her own and this was a vacation she took from her daily chores to vent out some stress.
Altea was Lucy's friend of comparable age, she was married to another woman in Germany, it felt weird for Tina to speak with her and get to know such diverse and experienced people, but it was a pleasant way to pass time as the bus drove further into the night.
The bus drove all night, and Tina and her friends slept in their seats as the driver continued his duty all the time.
They made a few stops at random local service stations to get some coffee and allow people to go to the toilet if needed.
There was a deep mist when they arrived in the morning the road wasn't wide and Tina feared they would drop down any curve, but the driver assured them to know the road very well and, true enough, they found themselves in what appeared to be a parking lot near the castle.
Tina and the others descended, it felt cold and weird but Sara acted all hyped up getting in character as she donned her fake fangs and started to narrate.
Tina sighed, all she wanted was to go and find a toilet again and hide there from what was to come.
Better yet, she wanted to go to her promised room in the hostel and have a hot shower, she felt stiff and ached all over, the minibus wasn't the best place in the world to nap,
She wanted to argue, but then again everybody was hyped as Sara and wanted to make the best of their limited time here.
Staying there was costly after all, including the bus service they had likely spent a small fortune enough to buy a car and probably some more.
They could remain for the weekend, but then they would've had to return to their respective homes.
Tina was also worried about the language spoken by the locals, she wasn't very sure that anybody outside would've spoken English.
She smiled like usual making a poker face to what felt like a poor joke and decided to go along even if she was tired.
The enthusiasm of the group only grew as they ventured into the castle, the gates of the castle were in shambles, and pieces were all over the courtyard itself like it was blasted open.
The ramparts showed clear signs of an explosion and a military fortification of sorts added to them was barely distinguishable.
In the misty courtyard an old and rusty armored vehicle with a wide claw mark in its armor greeted them, the silent turret turned toward the inner castle.
Hey, look! How cool a real world-war era Panzer!
Cried one of the boys recognizing the rusty remains as one of the infamous models Hitler had used during the second world war.
Probably the hotel had repurposed an old model as a prop for the legend of the lost Nazi battalion that was one of the driving forces of the tourism in such a remote location.
Still, it felt odd, Tina confirmed with the others that it was a real tank with what seemed live corroded and rusted ammunition in its belly.
Worse, the management had furnished the thing with skeletons, probably dummies but still, they donned the famed and hated uniform of the SS.
It seemed the real deal even, so how was it possible that none had something to say about that?