06:00 December 14th-23:59 December 20th, 2019
Andy
Andrea had always had a very cautious demeanor. That is why she had been very noncommittal when her twin sister, Azalea, asked her to go out hiking. She knew from experience that Izzy was unable to stop herself from taking risks and allowing things to spiral out of control.
However, after her visit with the doctor yesterday, Andy felt she could use some risk taking and a little loss of control.
"As far as we can tell, you and likely your twin should be almost entirely asymptomatic. However, if you were to conceive a child and have a son, almost certainly they would suffer from severe hemophilia their entire life."
Those words kept running through her head, over and over, almost on a loop. She hadn't wanted to bear a child before getting herself tested to make sure she wouldn't pass anything debilitating on to her child. Unfortunately, hemophilia could be a lot worse than just debilitating.
It was far from the only gremlin lurking in her genetic makeup, but it was the only one with a near certainty of being passed on to her children and their children after them.
She didn't feel comfortable trying to conceive under those conditions, and she had no clue on how to break the news to her boyfriend, who had been making noises for some time about having kids. If she was honest with herself, she didn't even really want to have kids with him in the first place. Most of all, she didn't want to have that conversation anytime soon.
So she called up Izzy and told her to plan out the hike and she would come with. As suspected, Izzy had mostly been planning to wing it, and it was only due to Andy's influence that she brought a change of clothes, multiple changes of socks, some water, and some food.
Andy was very careful, making sure that she didn't put herself at risk of sliding down any of the ridges or getting stuck in snow. Izzy, of course, just ran right ahead as though nothing were wrong. All was going well until one of the ridges gave way entirely, sending both her and her twin sliding down about 20-30 ft of sheer rock.
When they got to the bottom, they each were bleeding at a deceptively fast rate from their thighs. The rock had cut through their pants and their skin in places, causing the wound to literally seep blood. At first, this was hardly the chief concern even for Andy, who first wanted to make sure her twin hadn't broken any bones.
She hadn't, but neither of them were in any shape to climb back up that dropoff and the other route was directly off a cliff of about 50 ft. She pulled her cellphone out of her jacket pocket only to realize that it had been smashed by a rock at some point. She wasn't able to get the screen to turn on at all. Luckily, Izzy had had her phone in the opposite pocket…which led to the exact same results.
Thankfully, she had told her parents where she was going to be and that she would call from her hotel room tonight when she got back to it. When she missed that window in a few hours, hopefully this would sound the alarm.
Andy and Izzy huddled together for warmth, reminiscing about past misadventures and laughing about some of the times they had pulled one over each other or their parents. It took a while for Andy to realize that their bleeding had hardly slowed at all. The wound was large but rather superficial, so this was both surprising and concerning.
Andy explained to Izzy what she had found out from the doctor earlier, and for the very first time since she could remember, she saw fear in her twin's eyes. Apparently, "largely asymptomatic" and "unaffected" were not synonyms. A smaller wound might not have clotted noticeably slower, but with a wound that large they could only hope that their body did what it was supposed to do before it couldn't anymore.
As they began to tire and weaken, and night began to set in, Andy noticed a large, bulky, white shape lurking in the corner of her vision. For some reason, this terrified her, and she grabbed her sister's hand for comfort. This gesture of affection and love kept the white shape at bay, only able to pace a large perimeter around the pair.
However, Andy could still hear it commenting, saying things like "Yes, that should do nicely".
When the two twins were found 22 hours later, still held in each other's embrace, they were surrounded by stained stone and a small pool of their mingled blood. They were pronounced dead at the scene, and when their parents discovered the news, their father had a catastrophic heart attack and their mother had an irrecoverable stroke. Within a matter of 4 days, the entire immediate family was dead.
Meredith
Meredith had not been taking her iron pills. She hated how hard they were to swallow, and she hated how much they messed with her digestion. Wasn't it enough that she cooked everything she ate in cast iron? For soups and stews, she even had a cute little cast iron fish that she would drop in there so as to increase the iron content.
She forgot exactly why she needed so much iron in the first place. She had already made it to 87! There wasn't much of a further benefit to dragging things on longer from here. Maybe if her children or grandchildren would visit every now and then, she would feel differently.
The truth is, she hadn't been taking her iron pills because when she tried to open the lid she accidentally dropped the bottle and it rolled underneath the couch. She was no longer limber or strong enough to get it back, so she had to wait until the neighbors visited again, or perhaps the rare occasion when her children visited.
She was sure it wasn't too much of an issue. Meredith wished she wasn't so tired all the time, that's all. As she continued preparing her stew, she accidentally dropped her little fish behind the stove. She was hungry, so she just kept making her stew. Except suddenly she had one of her fainting spells, and when she woke up she was in a lot of pain on the floor.
Her phone was on the table, her land line was on the counter, and her stove was still on. It took her several long minutes to realize that she wasn't going to be able to get back up on her own. The knife she had been using to prepare her stew was resting more precariously than she remembered, and she watched in horror as it fell end over end before burying itself in her stomach.
It hurt less than she thought it would.
She lost track of time, wondering if any of this would have happened if her children or grandchildren had visited in the last month or so.
She had zoned out so hard that she didn't notice somebody had entered the house until she saw the neighbor kid, Kathleen, hovering over her with a concerned expression.
"Miss Meredith! Miss Meredith! I called 911, an ambulance should be here soon." Kathleen paused when she realized that Meredith was paying attention to her, and immediately continued, "Hey, if you aren't feeling well you can always ask me for help. You don't have to do it all alone, you know."
Meredith's eyes widened, before they recovered in realization. This sweet, naive child thought she was going to live because the ambulance was on the way. At 87, she almost certainly would not make it for very long even if it did save her life initially.
Kathleen set to work trying to stabilize the wound. She had seen a medical documentary on Meredith's TV that basically said if somebody had been impaled by something, don't remove it because it could be keeping the blood in the wound. So she very carefully tried to keep a firm level of pressure on it so Meredith wouldn't lose too much blood when the paramedics arrived.
Eventually, they did, but they brought with them unwelcome guests in the form of a pair of uniformed police. The police took one look at the poor looking black girl bent over the elderly middle class white woman with a knife in her abdomen and drew their own conclusions. It didn't help that Kathleen was covered in blood from trying to help her elderly friend.
The paramedics did what they could to stabilize Meredith while the police asked Kathleen politely if she would be willing to go with them to answer some questions. Thinking nothing of this request, she agreed. Many hours later, she would come to regret that choice. She realized quickly that the police believed one thing and no matter what she said they refused to consider an alternative explanation. When they told her they would have to keep her overnight, she politely asked if she could have some medications retrieved from her home.
They flatly denied her, even when she pleaded with them that it was a matter of life and death. They finally told her they would get her medications if she told them what they were and why she was prescribed them. Kathleen didn't want to divulge that information so she was out of luck.
Unfortunately, due to some uninformed choices her mother had made relatively early in life, Kathleen was born otherwise healthy but with antibodies for HIV. It soon was proved that she was symptomatic, and from an early age she was required to do all sorts of things to avoid worsening her illness. One of those things was the medicine she had to take every single night and every single morning. However, the last thing she wanted to do was tell a bunch of cops that she was HIV positive. She did tell them what the drug was but did not expect anyone to listen or care.
This process repeated itself for several days, and Kathleen could tell that they weren't going to listen to her no matter what she said.
Meanwhile, in the hospital, Meredith was fighting for her life. They had caught her injury rather early, but there was no such thing as an insignificant abdominal wound, especially at her age. She was now hooked up to more machines than she could count. She just wished they would let Kathleen come and visit her once more, before she passed. Out of the corner of her eyes, she kept seeing a large white shape approaching in the shadows. However, all she had to do was think of how she had basically treated Kathleen like a daughter, and been treated like a mother in turn, to keep the shape at bay. She didn't fear death, but she feared that the shape might do something worse than death to her before she left this Earth.
Kathleen had been too long without her medications. She didn't even remember the long litany of consequences such an issue might bring, but she did remember that it might make her medicine less effective in the future. One day, one of the interrogating officers came in with a seemingly harmless sniffle. That didn't stop him from getting right up in her face, trying to intimidate her into lying about what happened.
Sure enough, in turn she got sick. The officer's condition worsened far more dramatically than was previously expected, but hers was even worse. Eventually, lying in her jail cell at night, she found herself struggling to breathe. Despite her best efforts, she lost the struggle just before midnight. In a hospital not that far away, Meredith also lost her battle at roughly the same time.
Shanna
As a young werewolf pup, Shanna Lunes was supposed to be powerful. Full of vitality. Practically invincible. However, life had seen fit to bless her with exactly none of those traits. She wouldn't officially get her wolf until 16. Maybe, if she did, she might be able to recover from the illness that had plagued her all her life.
Except, if the human doctor her parents had finally brought her to was to be believed, she wouldn't be making it to 16. She wouldn't even make it to 13. She had Mixed Phenotype Acute Leukemia. She had apparently had it since she was 8, and it was a miracle that she had even made it this far. The low level healing that all werewolves had access to even without their wolves had apparently been doing its best to fight the cancer, but it had failed.
If they had caught it even a year ago, maybe it could have been treated. 2 years ago, and it almost certainly would have been. The doctor was kindly admonishing her parents about not coming to see him sooner.
Except, of course, what did it matter now? As the Alpha and Luna of an unremarkable mid-sized pack in Colorado, there was no upside to putting their secret at risk, and they had had no reason to believe that she wouldn't get better on her own before, or that their pack doctor wouldn't be able to provide treatment. When her condition worsened, they risked more than the doctor might ever know to try and get her treated. Eventually, her father couldn't take it any more and lost his temper, bringing the full force of his dominance to bear with his wolf in his eyes. His wife wisely stepped in front of him as a distraction so he could bring his wolf back under control.
Still backed up by her mate's dominance, she asked cooly and calmly what they could do now. The doctor wanted to say, "Wait for the end." Something about the air in the room told him that might have negative consequences to his own health.
Finally, he said that they could try a few things, such as marrow transplants and certain chemotherapies, but they could only hope for the best.
Unbeknownst to them, however, it was far too late for even that. Her father had had a business meeting the day before, and his counterpart had just returned from China. His wolf had successfully been fighting off a new variant of coronavirus which would later become quite famous worldwide. His pup didn't have a fully functioning immune system or a wolf to fight it off, and her condition rapidly degraded by the hour.
Within just 24 hours, Shanna was on a ventilator, unconscious. Her parents stayed by her side the entire time, leaving their beta in charge of the pack. Right around midnight, just before the solstice, her heart stopped. Despite the medical professionals' best efforts, they never did get it started again.
The only silver lining to this was that this particular alpha and luna began spreading the word that wolf children could get childhood cancer, and they lead the charge on getting pack doctors educated at detecting it and ensuring they had the supplies to begin treatment. They, of course, were never quite the same after losing their pup, and they never tried to have another.
Victoria
Victoria was a track star. Her school had an entire shelf in the trophy case dedicated to just her achievements. She was also intelligent enough and hardworking enough to be able to maintain straight A's in all of her classes, and she was fortunate enough that her parents didn't need her to get a job. She had a core group of friends that she was really close with, and she was quite popular overall in the school.
One would have thought she had it made. Victoria had thought so, too. However, that all came to an end when her coach started trying to train her in the hurdles, an event she had instinctively been avoiding. She was able to do quite a few sets, but she missed the timing on one and as she fell to the ground, she both felt and heard a sickening crack in her left femur.
She was unable to walk, so she had to be taken away in an ambulance. At the hospital, she discovered that she had early onset osteoporosis, likely triggered by the hormone imbalance caused by her severe PCOS. She was given a cast but instead of giving her crutches, she was given a wheelchair.
She had to change her diet to very carefully improve her bone calcium, as well as take iron supplements and hormone supplements to try and correct some of her body's issues. It took a month for her femur to heal, and another 6 weeks of physical therapy before she was allowed light exercise again. She could only be thankful the official track season was in the spring, and she was free to begin building herself back up again.
Her coach, on the other hand, no longer was willing to invest as much time and effort into her. She strongly felt that Victoria clearly wasn't serious about remaining on Varsity if she was willing to miss more than 2 months of practice. She was even more dismissive when she saw the doctor's note recommending light exercise only.
In order to try and gain her coach's approval, she practiced as hard and long as she could before she couldn't push herself through the pain any more. If her coach was willing to be realistic, she would have realized this had a strong probability of backfiring and worsening Victoria's health severely, further delaying her recovery.
Instead, due to Victoria's poor results, she recommended that she stay off of the track and go practice on some park trails or something until she was willing to fully commit to training. Victoria willingly did so, but she didn't realize that all the strain she had been putting on her legs put her at severe risk of reaggravating her injury. Now she was throwing a more uneven and unpredictable surface into the mix, which she had low experience with.
She managed to improve her lap times daily, slowly improving until she felt she was ready to present herself to her coach again, but she wanted to wait a couple of days to make sure. During this time, she continued doing laps, rather enjoying the solitude she found there in the morning.
One day, she decided to take the full length trail rather than the shortcut she always took. She wasn't really pushing herself today, she just wanted to explore some more of these trails. What she didn't realize is that the longer route was a lot longer than the shortcut she had always taken, the map not fully doing it justice. It also contained a lot more hills and took her much deeper into the woods.
The first hint that maybe she should be a bit concerned was when her run, which had started in the mid-morning, was still going on at noon. Luckily, it was a weekend, but she very clearly wasn't going to be home in time for lunch. She had left her phone in the car as her running outfit didn't really have anywhere to put it, and she had a small water bottle already strapped to her arm.
Her legs already hurt, both in the normal exercise way and in a slightly worrying way. Her water bottle was empty at this point and she had strongly considered stopping to walk. She pushed herself, convincing herself that maybe she would stop to walk after the next hill. Then the next.Then the next. She kept going in this way until one of the downhills proved far steeper than she was prepared for. It also led directly into a sharp corner at the bottom, which otherwise led to a small drop off almost completely concealed by bushes.
She was unable to fully control her momentum, and just when she might have recovered and made the turn, her right ankle collided with a concealed tree root, sending her over the edge. She cried out in pain as she felt her left femur once again give out.
She soon realized that her only hope was that somebody would come by to investigate the disturbance she had left in the bushes. What she didn't realize is that this hill was unpopular with most other runners, who would instead choose to turn around rather than continue on, and too remote for those who came out here for a relaxing walk. The runners who did habitually run that hill would be too preoccupied with making the corner to notice some slightly damaged bushes, and they would hardly suspect that the culprit for that would still be down there.
She couldn't get her body to push through the pain to move in the way it needed to to drag herself back onto the trail, and soon she became dehydrated from the sun still pouring through the trees. As the night set in, she began to grow unnaturally cold. Victoria hadn't merely fractured her femur once more. She had also had the jagged edges cut through several medium priority blood vessels in the immediate area. She had slowly been bleeding out internally for hours now. This also reduced her ability to regulate her own body's temperature.
She did not make it past midnight. The coroner who was presented with her body almost a full week later could not tell if she had died of internal bleeding or simple exposure. She had been found by a runner who had made almost the exact same mistake, except of course they did not have brittle bones nor did they land awkwardly. Plus, they had a relatively soft object to land on, which immediately caused them to freak out. Scavengers had eaten parts of her chest, abdomen, and arms, which both enhanced the freak factor and made her cause of death harder to diagnose.
Her parents eventually discovered that she had been running there nearly every morning due to her Coach's influence. After they made enough of a fuss, they eventually learned the full story, which led to the Coach being forced to find employment elsewhere. Not as a coach, as she had managed to basically get a star athlete killed over a minor medical condition due to a willful disregard for medical advice and basic physical training best practices. No, her best bet was to literally move states and cover up this sordid history and maybe still get to work in her field. In the age of google, the prospects were not good.
Elspeth
Besides having absolute nerds for parents, Elspeth had one other major debuff. She had relatively severe autism, which she could normally overcome to interact with general society. However, she also had a minor neuromuscular disease, which left her with feelings of weakness and occasional nervous twitches. This also led to her hands sometimes shaking uncontrollably, regardless of what she did to try to stop it.
As a student about to graduate college with a degree in general physics, she would have felt this not too much of a loss. However, occasionally she would get overstimulated and basically lose the ability to function entirely. She had tried going to therapy, wearing air pods during lectures, even wearing sunglasses when she had to be in bright environments, but nothing would fully eliminate the problem. She also had not fully identified all the triggers.
Recently, however, she had found out she was lifemates with a vampire, McKenna. McKenna had a rare genetic trait that left her unable to consume blood from animals or from blood banks. She could only consume it directly from the source. It had something to do with her body being unable to manufacture a specific enzyme or something. Her mother also had this, so it was likely that was where she inherited it from.
McKenna had received another, even worse trait, from her father. In periods of high stress, she could fly into a blood rage. Elspeth had borne witness to more than one, and it had taken a lot of effort to talk her girlfriend down. A lot of her own blood, too.
Luckily, McKenna had never been so far gone as to truly put her at risk, and had even reciprocated on more than one occasion.
With McKenna's blood in Elspeth's system, she didn't suffer from the muscle weakness or the occasional shakes that she had. However, she was even more prone to fall victim to overstimulation, due to her heightened senses at those times. This could lead to spiraling anxiety attacks, which McKenna could feel through the mate bond.
McKenna warned her that if she had too much blood in a short period of time, it could trigger the transformation into a vampire. This could also happen if she was ever drained of blood for some reason while having her blood in her system. Elspeth wasn't sure about becoming a vampire, but it didn't sound that bad. Apparently, unlike in the movies, they could slowly build up some resistance to sunlight through careful exposure. They could also wear sunscreen and full coverage clothing to protect themselves, mostly.
On her way to one of her finals for the semester, she had forgotten that she and McKenna had just been intimate the night before, and she left her airpods in her dorm because she wasn't allowed to have them for the test. McKenna and her hugged each other before McKenna continued on to the chemistry department. She was a second year med student, and she really wanted to become a doctor and make a difference. She strongly suspected that her vampire senses and reflexes might help her in this endeavor, rather than hinder her, if she could learn to control her bloodlust. It helped that ever since finding her mate, she was only ever drawn to Elspeth's blood, and nobody else's. She was even faintly repulsed by the blood of other people now.
McKenna was at first confidently breezing through her intermediate chemistry final until she felt a strong sense of panic welling up within her. She had been trying to ensure she used most of the time to not draw attention to herself, but based on what she was feeling through the mate bond she wouldn't have a lot of time before her mate's panic could trigger her bloodrage. She sped up her efforts so that she would be working at the absolute upper limits of what might be believable for a mortal.
This did not account for the time a reasonably well studied mortal might spend wracking their memories for the answers or the processes with which to get them. She fully employed her racial trait of near perfect and instantaneous recall so as to cut to the chase as much as possible.
30 minutes into a test that was supposed to take 2 hours, she was done. She controlled her speed as much as possible as she carefully navigated down to the teacher and submitted the test. She hadn't made a notecard so she didn't have one to submit, and she hadn't had time to make one up on the spot so she would have to defend her answers later.
As soon as she was outside the classroom, she was moving at vampire speed trying to get to her mate. The feeling of panic was only intensifying, and McKenna realized that Elspeth might be nearly catatonic right now. She could feel a red haze beginning to settle over her vision and could only hope that she could reach her mate before she lost control completely.
Unfortunately, this all served to only further intensify the feeling of panic within her. The red haze of her blood rage had almost completely taken over her vision when she zipped into the testing area after a student returning from the bathroom.
Elspeth, for her part, had been feeling mostly alright going into the test. The problem is, for whatever reason, the darker color of her skin from her middle eastern heritage left her peers distrustful, and they often liked to discuss rumors of various awful things going on in the middle east as well as supposed crimes committed by middle eastern immigrants in her presence. When the test started, they were forced to abort those conversations, but the words were already bouncing around in her head. She didn't bother defending that she had actually been born here, because they wouldn't care in the slightest.
For some reason, the ticking of the clock, the scraping of pencils against the paper, and even the shuffling of papers were way too loud for her. She went through the various exercises she was supposed to use, designed to reign in her panic and allow her to function, but she could tell it was only getting worse.
She began working on the test, but found herself only partially able to focus on it. She wasn't quite able to engage the hyperfixation that might have redirected her panic attack. Still, she found the answers strangely easy to recall or work out, and she was halfway through the test relatively quickly. She had been studying all this for the better part of her college career, let alone this semester, and while this course had been especially challenging, she knew she was fully capable of excelling on this exam.
She awakened a feeling of stubborn refusal from within her, unwilling to allow this to hinder her performance, and so she did her damndest to block everything else out except the next question on her exam. She reached a question designed to force her to think, rather than just work out a formula or select out of 4 or so options. Except, she wasn't really in the place to think right now, and the second she broke her momentum she was paralyzed, unable to continue on. She was quite sure she should be able to reason this out, but right now her mind was failing her.
Suddenly, she found herself in a stall in the bathrooms, held by her mate who was clearly not fully in control right now. She gave her neck willingly and barely controlled the cry of pleasure the sensation of McKenna's fangs gave her. She snapped out of her fugue as she realized she wasn't reciprocating, so she quickly bit into her mates throat. The blood tasted amazingly sweet, and the sensation of consuming it was heady. Of course, her mate had several evolutionary advantages when it came to speed of consumption, and neither of them thought about this until McKenna suddenly found her fangs had nothing more to consume.
With a wail of panic, she heard her mate's heartbeat come to a near sudden stop. It stayed that way for several minutes before restarting with a much slower cadence. Her mate was now a vampire. Several things flashed through McKenna's mind, not the least of which is that she would need to do several things to keep her mate safe from the sun until she could build up a resistance.
However, Elspeth was in a full panic right now. With her new vampire instincts, freeze was no longer a viable response, so she instead went for flight. Still wearing her t-shirt and shorts in preparation for the relatively hot Melbourne summer, she didn't realize the mistake she had made when she practically flew outside.
In a full blown panic, McKenna followed her, preparing to give up her jacket for now to keep her mate safe. They had mostly left the campus entirely at this point, and McKenna had just barely caught up to Elspeth.
Elspeth turned to McKenna, her face and body covered in growing scorch marks, with lines of molten red where her veins should be, as she desperately asked, "What the hell is happening to me?"
McKenna didn't have time to respond. Instead she lunged forward, intending to cover her mate with her jacket so she could bring her back inside to safety. However, with her newborn vampire's lack of resistance to sunlight and lack of blood, Elspeth burst into flames before McKenna could get there. She was reduced to a pile of ash within just a few moments.
What McKenna had not thought to mention, is that while vampires could build up a tolerance for sunlight, their initial tolerance was incredibly low. Newborn vampires had to be nearly glutted with blood and wearing full coverage clothing, sunglasses, and usually a wide-brimmed hat or a hood for several months until their tolerance was high enough to allow them to look a little more normal during the day. Immediately after the turn, a vampire might last 2 to 3 minutes at most. McKenna had been very aware of how much time had been wasted as she tried to catch up to her mate, and now her mind was simply left blank, unable to process the consequences.
The recoil of pain from the snapping of the bond left her reeling, as she fell to her knees. Her entire purpose for existence had burned up alongside her. Her sanity was entirely gone. Without really thinking about it, McKenna stripped herself down to the skin right there in the field, did her best to gather the pile of ashes to herself, and used the silver dagger usually kept in a hidden compartment in her skirt to slit her own throat before impaling it into her heart.
Within a few minutes, the blood loss, silver, and complete exposure to sunlight had clearly done their job, and soon McKenna joined her mate in Nyx's realm.
By 9 in the morning, Melbourne time, the wind had even largely scattered their piles of ash, leaving a woman's discarded clothing and a soot-covered dagger as the only evidence they were ever there.