Chapter 4

“So, I gotta say,” I said. “This vampire planet is pretty nice.”

“Brash, you’re saying that through a hologram projected by a floating skull,” Princess Kira said, leaning forward to look me in the eyes. “Via a cybernetic brain connection while you yourself are buried in a hermetically sealed stasis vault while waiting a death sentence.”

“Pff!” I made my tiny holographic representation flip its tail in a very Brashy sort of way. “It’s not a death sentence.”

P90, who was also seated at the small cafe table that Cindi, Princess Kira, and G282 were seated at, snorted loudly.

“It’s not!” I said.

“Sorry, Brash,” she said. “I’m snorting at the idea that this is a death sentence. It was a delayed snort.” She paused to look around the cafe again. My little floating holographic projecting skull bot, helpfully lent to me by my new fiancee’s father, gave me a pretty good view of the table, but not the room beyond. But I assumed that it was a nice cafe, since all my friends (and one harem member, eyebrow wiggle eyebrow wiggle) were guests of King Lioncourt. And he was the father of my fiancee, which meant he had to be nice!

“He’s going to be fighting every child of every Primogen of every clan on the entire planet,” Kira said, her fingers flexing on the table. I started to puff up my chest. “At once!”

“Wait, really?” P90 asked.

“That’s what Brash agreed to,” G282 said, nodding.

“I did not!” I exclaimed, using my cybernetic connection to make my tiny holographic dragon leap up and hiss angrily in a way that cats had definitely stolen from dragons and not the other way around.

“When the Lady Brando claimed right of simultaneity and then Count Orlock seconded it and you said thirded?” G282 asked. “That was when you agreed to let every single one of them fight you at the same time.”

“Is that what thirded means?” I asked. “I just thought it was a good response. Orlock was all in my snoot at the time. He growled real loudly.”

“Yes, Brash,” G282 said, sighing.

I paused.

“Well, I’ll still win,” I said, cheerfully. “I’m Brash! I can do anything! Plus, I have a water cannon. That toasts vampires super fast.”

“Firstly,” G282 said, ticking off her fingers in her prim, official way that made her so super cute. “These vampires are all higher class vampires, meaning they’ve had their inoculations.”

“You can inoculate against water?” Cindi asked. She had been quietly sitting and watching, holding a tea cup in one hand but never drinking. I wondered if maybe the fresh blood she had was not to her tastes? Now that I thought about it, no one else was drinking either. Maybe no one liked blood. I mean, I wasn’t a huge fan of blood, but, hey, when in Vampire Rome, better drink Ceaser’s blood after stabbing him twenty three times, am I right?

“With sufficiently advanced magic, yes,” G282 said. “Secondly, even if they were weak against running water, the fight is going to be in an open air arena near the equator. And on this planet, the equator is actually colder than the poles.”

“Is it because it’s tidally locked?” Cindi asked, curiously.

“Yes, basically,” G282 said, sighing. “The practical upshot is that Brash’s water would freeze before it hits the vampire. Frozen water isn’t running water. And there is the third, most important fact that we’re all forgetting.”

“What’s that?” I asked, puffing up and fully offended.

“Thirdly...” G282 sighed, then glared at me. “You gave all your guns to the FREAKING POLICE IN SAN FRANCISCO!”

“Oh right!” I slapped the side of my head. “Well, then I’ll...” I paused. I was going to say use my nuclear mines. But, wait, I had given those over too. And the spinfusor. And the goblin spheres. And the hellwhip. “Uh...”

“Okay, yeah, you’re dead, Brash,” P90 said, in shocking disregard to her status as first harem girl. “Sorry, dude.”

I felt a strange sensation at that moment. It was like someone had tapped the very tippy tip of my nose with an ice cold finger and said ‘boop.’ And yet, no one had done that at the cafe. Then I realized what it was – someone was tapping my physical body. “One second everyone! I need to disconnect from Skully!”

“You named it Skully?” Cindi asked, eyeing my holographic projection skull.

“Yup! It’s cause it’s the smart one that’s right every episode despise David Duchovny sneaking peaks at the script,” I said, cheerfully.

Cindi giggled as Kira’s brow furrowed. “What?” She asked, sipping her tea cup. Her eyes widened and I disconnected just before she reacted fully to realizing that she had sipped on blood. Seriously, what was with all my friends and not liking to drink blood just because they weren’t vampires? It was starting to strike me as incredibly rude. But I resolved to not let that let me be a rude dragon as I opened my eyes to find that the tiny sphere of pure black metal that was my cell ... was empty. I blinked, then sat up – and suddenly, a shimmer filled the air, then resolved into a lithe, gray skinned girl with straight black hair and mischievous ruby red eyes.

“Alexandress, the vampire princess!?” I exclaimed as Alex grinned at me.

“Boop,” she said, touching my snoot again. I shifted to my human form reflexively, so now our noses were touching. Like Spiderman and Mary Jane, in that movie! I gulped, slightly, and remained perfectly still. Since, well, right now, this girl was my fiancee. Even if I didn’t quite understand all the whatsits and whoosebeings and politics (more like polidicks) that had led to me being ensnared in her kissitudes, I did know that I needed to be the right kind of polite to avoid making the situation any worse.

“You’re super cute,” I said, grinning.

“Oh, you dick, that’s my line,” Alex said, then flipped around so that she was floating a few inches above my hips. “So, uh ... I actually came to apologize.”

“For?” I asked.

Alex blinked. “Seriously?”

I grinned at her, then reached up to tap her nose. She snorted, shaking her head. “Okay, for getting you all snared up in this dumb Cam bullshit.”

“Pff!” I said, leaning back against the curved wall of my cell. “It’s fine. Though, uh, I’d like a little bit of backfo. That’s background info said cool style.” I focused, using my shape-shifting to grow sunglasses and a backwards baseball cap. Alex giggle snorted. If she had been fangs deep in someone’s neck, their blood would have gone all out her nose, that was how hard she giggle snorted. I wasn’t sure if that was cute or gross...

Alex sighed, explosively, then reached over. She took my hat, flipped it off my head, and planted it on hers. She settled it down, the baseball cap ruffling her hair in a very tomboy sort of way. It went well with her casual T-shirt and short shorts. Like, her T-shirt was easily three sizes too big, and hung low to her thighs, so it made her shorts look almost invisible. It was crazy cute, especially with her skinny, athletic frame. But it was her wry smile with the tiny hints of fangs that made my heart go a mile a minute.

“Okay, so,” she said. “What do you know about the Cam and vampires and stuff?”

“Nothing!” I said, cheerfully.

“Okay...” She frowned. “Basically, there was this guy named Cain. Ever heard of him?”

“Nopes a doodle!” I said, shrugging.

Alex pursed her lips. “Okay.” She rubbed her chin. “So, just accept that there are seven clans of vampires who are part of this big circle jerk called the Camarilla. There’s the Brujah, the Malkavian, the Nosferatu, the Toreador, the Ventrue, the Gangrel and the...” She sighed. “Tremere.”

I nodded again. “Punchy, crazy, uggo, pretto, richo, wolfo and magic-oh!” I said, cheerfully, ticking them off on my left hand – though I had to grow two new fingers which I termed the Brashie and Alexie, in honor of their inventor and his fiancee.

“Huh, yeah, basically,” Alex said, grinning at me. “You picked that up fast.”

“I never got to pet the Gangrel Primogen...” I said, sighing sadly.

“You can pet me,” Alex said, grinning. I beamed at that and sat up a bit. Alex floated around so that her head was in my lap and her legs were cocked up against the wall. It would have been uncomfortable if she hadn’t had natural flying abilities. I grinned and started to thread my fingers through her long black hair. “Anywho, during the fourteenth century, the Tremere did long term projections and basically realized that us chomp-jobs and homo saps were going to be real bad for each other. They’d hunt us, we’d manipulate them. It’d basically turn the world into one big cluster fuck.”

I shuddered. “Ugh. Vampires secretly running modern society. That’d be terrible. A real...” I paused. “World of suckness.”

Alex snorted. “So, the Tremere used their magic know-how to build spelljammers in secret. One night, they took off from Venice and we found this world and set up shop.”

“Huh,” I said. “Makes sense.”

“I am leaving out, like, six centuries of infighting, war, diablerie, and people being petty asshats. But, eh, no one’s perfect.” She shrugged. “I hear Earth had its own fuckups without us around.”

“Yeah, there was this huge jerk named Hitler!” I said, nodding quickly. “Like, he was the biggest jerk.”

She nodded. “Yeah, dude, I’ve read about Hitler. We’ve all gotten to catch up ever since the United Nations blew up the Five Talon Empire.” She closed her eyes as my fingers pressed against her scalp. She groaned. “That feels real nice...” she sighed.

“Sooooo, why were you going to be married to Kira and why did you ring me instead?” I asked, curiously.

“Oh, that.” Alex’s cheeks darkened ever so slightly and she hooked her fangs over her lower lip, dimpling them cutely. The urge to smootch her went up five or six notches on the smootch-o-meter. But exposition was important too, so I held myself back. Instead, I just kept petting her and waited for Alex to find her words. And find them she did. “Basically, we vampires aren’t the best at the whole technology thing. Something about our predatory nature and stuff.” She shrugged. “Put ten super-smart vampires together in a room, they’ll be more about scheming and fucking each other over and such.”

I nodded.

“So, my dad, he wanted to get us better techno-gadgets. That meant marrying us to someone who could do the fiddling. The best choice? The Dwarves of the Diamond Asteroids.” She shook her head, sadly. “And that’s why my best friend in the world became a total biznatch.”

“Whaaaaat?” I asked.

“Yeah, it’s true. Princess Kira – or as I knew her then, Kay...” she sighed. “She was tutoring with us. We’ve got some of the best necromancers in the FTE, you know?” She shrugged. “Well, I was learning how to raise skeletons to do all the boring jobs for me and she was getting her education in, and ... we were friends. Then, suddenly, we were finacess and she wasn’t just a chill dwarf. She was just a Princess, and wouldn’t stop talking about Duty and Honor.” She shuddered. “And that’s not my scene.”

I nodded.

“Then she got all obsessed about the Quantum Hoard, and her father pulled her back, but the whole marriage thing meant that I was on the market, and before you know it, I’m up to my freaking eyeballs in the spoiled snot-kids of every half baked Primogen!” She shook her head, sighing slightly. “And then she swoops back in, like everything’s normal again!” She sighed. “It ... pissed me off, you know.” Her eyes closed. “So, I just, you know, I just wanted to hurt her feelings and fuck with my dad because I was so fucking tired of being pushed into a square hole, you know?”

I nodded again. “Hey, it’s cool! Besides, I’m totes going to add Kira to my harem!”

“Your harem?” Alex laughed, sitting up, which made her hair trail through my fingers. “Seriously?”

“I’m a dragon!” I said, cheerfully.

“Ask a dragon question, get a dragon answer,” Alex said, shrugging.

I paused. “Hey, uh, what’s the Quantum Horde?”

“No, not Horde. Hoard.” Alex booped my nose with her finger.

“Like ... okay, is it For the Horde style horde, or, oh boy, this hoard is worth ten thousand XP hoard?” I asked.

“The latter. I think.” Alex’s brow furrowed.

“Cooooooooool!” I whispered, my eyes widened. “A treasure vault full of novas.”

Alex giggle snorted again. Then she leaned up and kissed me on my lips. Her lips were cold and soft and her tongue darted in. But rather than letting the kiss linger, it was more like a little bit of a tease. She floated backwards, her voice quiet. “I better go before Dad catches me here. Good luck in the arena, Brash. And...” She paused. “Brando’s kid is a total wimpnoid, so hitting her early means she’ll be down for the count and you can focus on everyone else. Orlock’s kid knows a fuckton of Celerity, so he’ll be fast as fuck. And don’t even try and talk to the Malk’s kids.”

I nodded. “Got it!”

Alex vanished. And I leaned back in my bed and closed my eyes.

I was running. Running desperately fast. My heart hammered as I slammed through a door. Behind me, I could hear the steady thump thump thump thump of footsteps. I craned back over my shoulder and saw him. He was huge, burly, his arms heavy slabs of muscle, sticking out from underneath a leather apron that was stained black and brown with ancient blood. His face was a horrifying, unseeing thing: A curved pane of metal and glass, glittering in the electric lights of the mansion. And in his hand was a curved, bloody blade – somewhere between a knife and an ax.

He’d killed once.

He’d kill again.

I stumbled into a bathroom and backed up against the window. No way out. There was no way out.

“Brash!” A posh voice barked in my ear.

I looked to the left. Standing next to me was a man. He was thin and reedy and a little handsome in a smug, smarmy sort of way. His eyes were unreadable and dark, while his hair was a mangy mat of black. He wore a sleek fedroa-esque hat with a fine three piece suit. His shoes were very shiny and he was looking at me with something between exasperation and irritation.

“Oh, hey!” I said. “Fedora guy! Uh, why is a scary dude in a mask chasing me? Is this Friday the Thirteenth?”

“Brash, I need you to focus,” the posh voiced man said. “The Quantum Hoard. You need to-”

The door rattled. Crash. The ax-knife had smashed into it, splintering the varnished wood inwards. The second smash actually sent the metal tip of the curved knife partially through the door. When it was yanked back, splinters flew and I could see the faceless mask of the man outside. He wasn’t even breathing heavily. I looked back at the posh man. He grabbed onto me with both hands, frowning.

“Brash, you need to listen to me. You absolutely have to get to the Quantum Hoard before Lord Darkeye.”

“Oh!” I said, nodding. “Okay. I knew that already, Mr. Fedora.”

“It’s not a fedora!” He shouted at me. “It’s-”

The door exploded inwards and I screamed as I sat up, clutching at the walls of my cell, my heart literally going five million billion miles a second. And my heart could do that. It was a fancy magical heart. Two vampire guards – both looking quite severe in their body armor – frowned at me. I panted heavily, looking at them.

“Sup?” I asked.

The flight to the arena was pretty fun. Yes, I was in chains. But apparently, the chains were ceremonial! And they felt pretty comfortable, wrapped around my arms and shoulders. I watched the landscape of Necronox flow by underneath the window of the shuttle, while my five vampire guards stood solemnly to either side of me. Once the shuttle had reached the equator and settled down, the door opened and we were wheeled off. Well, I was wheeled off. Well, technically, the post I was tied to was on a hover barge. But hovered off wasn’t as cool as wheeled. Wait, no, it was way cooler than wheeled. Okay, I was hovered off by the guards and out onto the snow that dappled the grounds. The mega-city of Necronox spread outwards in every direction, but none of the skyscrapers were constructed near the arena itself. Instead, they each kept a respectful distance, so it seemed like the horizon glowed with an almost aurora style glimmer.

But that was just reflected city-light.

The sky was stark and clear, with the stars sitting fixed and untwinkling. The air felt almost like an afterthought, making noises feel muted and distant. I wondered how much of it was frozen to the ground. Fortunately, I had shifted my butt to be resistant to such cold, and so it was more like being in a normal outdoor place for me.

The vampire guards set me off at a square of raised stone that looked out over the arena. The arena itself was less flat and open than I had expected. Instead, it looked like an ornate maze of gothic arches, snarling gargoyles and statues, frozen over ponds, hedges, and other intricate bits of baroque grotesquery. All of it formed into a chaotic, wild area with plenty of sneakspaces and runny avenues for running away through. Hovering above it, I could see a stylized half-moon. Its belly glowed with silvery light, but its back was covered in a curved dome. Standing within that dome, wearing thick coats and breathing out fog, were all my friends, and in significantly more revealing clothes, were the six Primogens and King Lioncourt.

I grew an extra arm out of the top of my head and waved at the King. “Hi Dad-in-Law!”

Lady Brando snarled and her voice boomed out of the speakers built into the side of the moon. “Silence!”

King Lioncourt lifted his hand to quell Lady Brando. Lady Brando looked most unquelled, but she at least stopped telling me to silence. And she hadn’t even thrown in a ‘puny mortal.’ But I could taste how much she had wanted to. But if she had said puny mortal, I could have flung back that, on the Brandonara-Addam Scale of Immortality, I was at least one point five steps higher than vampires. I could go get a tan at least. Stupid vampires.

(Alex excepted, of course!)

“This battle,” Lioncourt said, his voice booming from the speaker. “Is to see if any of the Primogeniture of the Camarilla is worthy to claim my daughter, the Princess Alexandress Lioncourt, in marriage.” He lifted one arm. “The rite of simultaneity has been claimed by both participants. And so, all childer of the Primogeniture will be tasked to slay Brashivalampathorus Castrovel Miles. Once the ring has been claimed from him, the survivors can settle the ring’s fate themselves.” He frowned. “Does anyone object?”

“I object!”

I gasped. Alex, whose mouth was open, glared at Lady Brando, who had stepped up to object before she could object. Lady Brando, though, was glaring at me with a venom that I had never before seen in my life. No, wait. Not quite true. I had seen that level of pure, petty hatred at least once before. I shivered and tried to not think of my battle on the Warsphere. Me and Dad versus Emperor Xosh. But it was hard to not think of Xosh’s pitiless eyes as Lady Brando sneered the following.

“My son – as well as many other of our childer, cannot fly.” She frowned. “This mongrel thing can. I demand that his ability to fly be stripped until he is victorious. Or dead.” She sneered.

“I second this,” the Nosferatu guy said.

“Yeah, I have to admit,” Sir Tepes said, nodding his wofly head. Ugh. He was so far. And so fluffy! I just wanted to pet him. “His flight is a pretty huge advantage, considering how the arena is a maze and all. He could just fly out of it. You know. And technically, that’d be a victory, wouldn’t it?”

King Lioncourt inclined his head. “Sorcerers!”

Two robed figures emerged from literally nowhere to my left and right. “Hi!” I said, smiling at them.

“Strip his flight,” Lioncourt said.

“Hah!” I said, grinning. “My flight’s only mostly magical!” I paused. “Wait, that’s most of it, crap.”

“You will have it returned on your victory,” Lioncourt said, quietly, as the sorcerers began to incant. They used not only somatic and verbal components that I recognized, but also weird blood magics that seemed to be proprietary Tremere trickery. I felt a cold that went deeper than the air freezing temperatures outside. A cold that penetrated my scales and made me squirm and grit my teeth. It settled right into my flight organs (which, for you non-dragons out there, is kind of like the place where you get a heart burn, but slightly lower) and then started to throb. It throbbed and throbbed ... and suddenly, I felt a horrible weight settle onto my shoulders. I sagged against the pole.

“Ow...” I whimpered.

“You freaking tranch!” Alex snarled at Lady Brando.

“Alexandress!” King Lioncourt barked. But despite that, I could see Alex literally vibrating with rage. P90 looked as if she was sizing up Lady Brando for a staking and salting, while Cindi was more looking at me, chewing her thumb nervously. Kira was clutching her hands to her chest, and watched me too. I tried to give them a thumbs up with my head arm.

“Let the games ... begin,” King Lioncourt said.

And that was when the chains dissolved and the stone floor I stood on canted forward and I yelped as I was dumped, head over heels, into the maze ... and into the fight with six of my fiancee’s evil exes. Without flight powers. Or any high powered energy weapons.

Ugh!

What a day!

Okay. Focus. I focused. Then I clicked on my Brash Fight Music playlist. I had gotten this ever since I had eaten Dad’s iPod. And so, as the exciting beat started to fill my ears and the voice demanded that I test my might I sprinted down the corridor I was in. Snarling gargoyles zipped past as I focused and unsheathed my psi-sword. Do you know how slow and hard running is when you can’t fly? It’s not that it’s actually harder, it’s just that you suddenly know that you can’t not run anymore, you know? I was still thinking this as the techno went to full scale speed and I rounded a corner and into a spray of bullets. I yelped and flung myself behind a planter. Bullets whined and clipped through the air, chopping chunks off the frozen plant in the tree. Other bullets gouged off chunks from the planter.

Fortch, most fully automatic weapons ran out of ammo way faster than people thinked.

Hence why, after only a few seconds, the guns started clicking. I rolled out of cover.

There was Lady Brando’s son.

“Dio!” I snarled.

The incredibly pretty blond haired linebacker with the two Uzis didn’t even bother reloading. Instead, he tossed his weapons into the air ... and then ... posed. His hand flipped up – two fingers fanning before his eyes in a V pattern. His other hand contorted upwards and pressed to his hip and he turned ever so slightly to the side. Sparkles surrounded him and I gasped, dropping my psi-sword. My hands went to my mouth, struck dumb by the raw, intense poseness of his pose. It was the most posing pose that had ever posed. His whole body flared and I trembeld, unable to move. Dio ‘hurmphed’ and then fished out two magazines. The Uzis dropped down from where he had tossed them, the magazines clicked home, and Dio smirked.

“When you wake up in hell, dragon,” he said, his voice booming. “Tell them that it was I, Dio, who sent you!”

And he opened up with both Uzis.

Bullets slammed into my chest and shoulder and face and shins and thighs and arms and I danced backwards, twitching and writhing. Bullets skidded me along the icy ground, my heels slipping and bouncing as I was pushed up against the corner I had run around, then pitching me backwards and onto my belly. Dio sneered as he lifted his Uzis, walking forward cockily. “All too easy...” he muttered. And once he was within kicking range, I snapped my leg up and kicked him right in his stupid knee with all the strength I had. His knee twisted fully into a perfect right angle and his eyes bugged out of his head and he went down.

I scrambled to my feet – it was harder to kip to your feet when you can’t fly – and grinned down at him.

“Thirty lethal soak, biiiiiiitch!” I said, flipping him off as I moonwalked backwards.

Which was right when the huge wolf leaped onto my back, chomping its teeth onto my neck. I yelped as it pitched me forward and my face mashed into the ground. The wolf’s teeth pierced into my skin and pain flared as my HUD flashed up a warning: Spine in danger. Spine in danger.