romance is dead ❧ q.k | ✔

book one ❧ [viii]

Kun finally stopped you on a less busy street, all old buildings, stone and brick faces. The one in particular that you were in front of had no distinguishing signage out front, and you peered around curiously for any hint as to what the six-floor building you were looking at was possibly used for. The windows were tinted too darkly for you to see in, and the ornately carved dark wooden door held no clue as to its identity other than the street number, 101.

Your companion pulled on the large iron handle to hold the door open for you. Well, you did give him permission to surprise you, you certainly couldn't complain about not knowing what was going on. So, you stepped in.

As soon as you crossed the threshold, the air around you became noticeably cooler. Not uncomfortably so, just feeling almost as if you were a basement, the sort of coolness of being underground. You were in a lobby, a woman sitting behind a counter reading a book that looked even older than the one Kun had given you. She looked about your parents' age, some grey streaked in her hair. But you realized that assessment meant nothing, as her eyes flashed red in the warm, dim light when she glanced up from her book to the two of you.

"Good morning," Kun greeted her, and stepped up to the counter to hold a small black card the size of a business card out to her.

She took it, skimming the front and back for all of one second before handing it back to him. Without a word, she went back to reading.

"Come on." Kun ushered you further into the building, through the black velvet curtain past the desk.

This time, you emerged in a much larger room. There were no lights, but it was still illuminated by an old-school movie projector casting a grainy, black and white scene on the opposite wall. You watched as a woman in clothes that you couldn't even pinpoint the timeframe of—other than definitely not being from the past century at least—walked, turned, and waved at the camera. The clip then replayed from the beginning by itself, no manual rewinding necessary.

You rewatched the short two-second clip again with delight before you turned to Kun. "What is this place?"

"It's a gallery, of sorts," he explained, gesturing to the video. "A group of vampires all got together and compiled videos, movies, films, kinetoscopes—every sort of moving image you can imagine—that they had been holding onto over their lifetimes. And they're all on display here."

"Kun, this is so cool!" You gasped.

"I think we all—non-vampires and vampires alike—tend to have this idea of vampires as being stuck in whenever they were turned. You know, a vampire turned in the 16th century is treated the same way we treat a painting from the 16th century. Like we're... artifacts or something. And we're not, we lived through everything else that came after we turned too. We're not dead history, we're living, moving history." Kun had led you into another room of the gallery as he spoke, where a clip of a busy street market was repeating. "I think this is a good reminder of that. The oldest stuff is on the bottom from the invention of the camera, and the newest up at the top. It goes all the way to the present, digital. The top floor isn't finished, they'll keep adding to it as the years go by, as we all keep living through history."

You watched the market, vendors and customers, families, horses, produce, rugs and wares. Just a microcosm of everyday life from whenever and wherever this was. A peek into moving history.