Dr.Steinman's Odyssey @drsteinmanofsgly - Tumblr Blog

Thanks to @stackedrubbish69, now I have developed a new addiction, which I call “Astaria”. Time to use WW (yes, the turbodriver one if you know what I mean) to make it no longer under construction. Special thanks to @satterlly’s sims 4 cc for the outfit and the hair, @obscurus-sims’s skin cc. Probably still need to change the eyebrow but I am too lazy to bother for now.

#ts4 #baldur's gate 3 #astarion #the sims 4 #the sims 4 cc #fandom

Vlad:

Mortals had always fetishized the idea of eternal youth, it fanaticizes them, it infatuates them, and it haunts them. However, as the expedition went on, no one really questioned whether we were looking for god’s blessing or demon’s curse. Vlad was never one with a concern of longevity nor was he one that ever longed for immortality. He had always spited the idea of pursuing immortality and he saw it as a delusion entertaining the rich and the nobles.

Despite how little he remembered about his past, or even his original last name, he could not get over the memories of being born into the wrong family at the wrong time. Life was about starvation, being treated like dirt, and used like livestock when you were not born a noble’s man in the 13th century Europe. Vlad was sold as an apprentice to an alchemist. For one moment, naïve Vlad thought maybe this was going to be his escape from the low life of a peasant.

Apprenticeship as the history may call it, but in Vlad’s actuality, it was slavery, or even worse: he was the lab rat of his master. Mercury, lead, arsenic were common ingredients of the concoctions fed to Vlad along with sometimes ashes from bizarre animals or even human corpses. Vlad was never given an option: it was either that or being starved to death. Sometimes Vlad even prayed that maybe this time the master would put in enough poison to end his suffering once and for all.

As Vlad’s misery continued, he lost all his senses, he started to hear voices, his skin is covered in lesion and blisters, his hair fell off in chunks, his muscles were constantly in the states of either full paralysis or in an incontrollable spasm. With his last bit of wandering sanity and consciousness, he thought to himself that finally it is all coming to an end. Vlad did not beg for a better afterlife or next life, he only wished to vanish, and be forever released from his insufferable life state and if anything, to never reborn into this world full of pain, ignorance, and endless darkness.

Whether there was ever a god to hear Vlad’s prayer, one may never know. But Vlad’s torment took a turn of irony: days after Vlad had lost all his senses and had all his vitals putting in the last fight against death, he started to recover rapidly from all his affliction. Vlad started to regain his consciousness, his senses, and the lesions formed scabs and rapidly fell off his skin. It was like a rebirth, a reincarnation.

Vlad did not know how to take this sudden turn of events after he was able to stand up. Vlad’s hair and skin started to lose all pigments and all his vessels and veins began to exhibit a strikingly blue color, his muscles toughened to be almost as stiff as marble. Vlad’s master however was exhilarated at Vlad’s change in physical and vitals, as Vlad’s master once wrote in his journal: I have done it, I have created the immortal, I have created god in his image, or demon in its shadow.

Vlad was locked in the basement, or you may even call it dungeon of his master’s workshop. Chained up to endure even more inhumane experiments from his master. Feeding on more of his master’s bizarre cocktails of poison and the rats that occasionally stumbles into his cell, Vlad still never imagined an escape. He had been enslaved for too long, he had long forgotten the concept of freedom, his will had been broken before his rebirth, and he was no different from a living corpse. But he started to have a burning thirst in his throat that no nectar was able to quench, and a ravenous hunger that no feast was able to satisfy, and all of those feelings were starting to awaken something primal and savage in Vlad, beyond the survival instinct. Until the day of his awakening.

For years, Vlad accepted his torment as the way the world should be, until the day his master came into his cell grabbing onto his neck, stared into Vlad’s eye with twisted zealousness, envy and disbelief. His master screamed on top of his lung that had been destroyed with pneumonia. The broken up old man was hanging onto one thing and one thing only: his morbid obsession of Vlad’s immortality. He was so close yet so far from what he wanted: the eternal youth. He screeched at Vlad, coughing up spit combined with blood from his lung “Why are you alive, why are you still alive? WHY ARE YOU NOT DEAD?” That was the moment Vlad realized, he was fed the amount of arsenic that could have killed the entire village of people.

Vlad’s master grabbed Vlad’s face and his fingers dug deeply into Vlad’s skin, the master maniacal cried “What is it, what made you so special, what made you the last one and the only one? Does it run in your blood? Is it the marrow in your bones? Is it going to be your ash?”

The master started trying to cut through Vlad’s skin with his rusty and thick fingernails and licked on Vlad’s face fanatically, like he was going to squeeze the youth and immortality out of his creation. Vlad, terrified and disgusted, instinctually struggled and broke out of the corroded chains holding his hands. Vlad pushed his master off him, and that was the first time Vlad noticed his inhuman strength.

The master flew across the room from the force Vlad pushed him with and hit solidly on the jail bars. The bone shattering sound was so loud it echoed in the alley of the basement. Vlad watched his master’s body fell lifelessly off to the flow, the master’s broken sharp ribs poked through his chest and ripped him half open from the impact when he was thrown onto the jail bar by Vlad. Vlad stared at the blood flowing out of his master’s body. The blood on the floor awakened Vlad’s instinct, he finally knew what was he looking for, waiting for, longing for in those sleepless nights struggling with his unquenchable thirst: it was living human flesh and flowing human blood that he was desiring deep down.

Vlad did not even have a moment of hesitation before giving up completely on his humanity and tore his master’s body into pieces before devouring his organs and chewed on his bones. In Vlad’s eyes, the world had always been about feeding on others or being eaten alive, just this time not so metaphorically. The shadow of Vlad feasting on the dead body of his master looked like gargoyle from a nightmare. Vlad finally realized his misery and torment was not simply from destiny, but his submission to the fate designed for him, and him, from this point, would no longer conform and be refrained to what was designed to him by the human world.

He is no longer Vlad the slave, the shackled, the test subject,

He is now Vlad, the origin of the age of the undead.

#storytelling #fiction #fantasy #story ideas

Vlad