The Chloenicles #1 [COMPLETE]

Chapter 11: Garlic Biology and other Misconceptions

Once we were on the highway and Miranda and I had eaten one and a half pizzas, Paul Herford graciously decided not to ignore us anymore.
„When are we there?", he asked clearly trying to sound indifferent.
„In about five hours.", Miranda answered. „Have you decided to stop pouting?"
„No?" After a brief moment of consideration he added: „Yes? Wait, I was never pouting!"
Miranda giggled. „Yeah, right."
„What exactly are we going to do there when we arrive?", I wanted to know.
„Well, fist and foremost we are going there to be safe. We will stay there until we have figured out if the AML agents are still on to us. If they are, we'll stay as long as necessary and have the people there help us. If they aren't, we'll need to find other living arrangements for Paul. And we have to figure out what to do with you, Chloe. If it's safe for you to go home.", Miranda answered.
„I also will have to give a message to the queen.", Paul Herford said like he was not looking forward to this, „They found us quicker this time, again. They are getting better at finding us. She needs to know that."
„And you are important to her because of the knowledge you supposedly have? The turning humans into vampires thing?"
He nodded and sighed. „Yeah, kind of...."

„I always thought that would be easy to do.", I unintentionally interrupted him, but I was really curious about this.
All I knew, what pop culture had taught me about this process, was, that it took one bite and voila, you were a vampire. Some TV- Shows had you die after you were bitten to finalize the vampirism but nothing more complicated than that.
Some fictional vampires seemed to have a moral problem with turning humans.
Edmund from the Dawn- books for example, who had fallen in love with Dawn, a high school girl, and loved her so much that he did not want to compromise her soul by biting and turning her, and so he left her. The books were very sad because Dawn, apparently having been subjected to the thought that only male attention gave women their ultimate worth, killed herself after he broke up with her. They were so popular and over romanticized, that we had to address them in school assemblies, because some girls had threatened to commit suicide after they had read them.

But a moral conflict a single vampire had, did not make the process of turning humans into one of them harder.

Paul Herford shook his head. „Luckily it's much harder than just like... bite somebody."
Miranda cleared her throat.
He corrected himself: „Hypothetically, it's much harder than just biting somebody for example, otherwise we'd all be vampires by now."
„But why? Why isn't it easy?"
„Well, have you ever tried turning a gorilla into a chimpanzee? My kind technically are humanoids, but our DNA is different from the average human's."

I didn't know much about biology and DNA but I didn't want him to know that.
I didn't want to seem stupid.
I wanted him to continue to tell me things and I felt like the way to do that was to seem like a competent listener.
An equal in the conversation, you could tell things to.
So I decided it was best to pretend that I knew what he was talking about.
I also wanted to be sure, just in case this was all just in his head, that he thought I believed him.
If he turned out to be delusional, I didn't want him to be upset with me.
I tried to think of a smart question.

„So if you say that you are humanlike.... Does this mean that humans and vampires can have babies together?"
He shook his head. „Our chromosome count doesn't match well enough for this to work out. Many have tried. Horrible experiments."
Damn.
This question just got me deeper into biology territory.
I needed to get out of there, to a topic, I knew more about.
Maybe it was best to change it all together.
„You said, at the place were we're going to usually are a lot of you?"
Paul Herford nodded.
„If I am honest, I am a little worried to meet so many vampires... I wonder if it is safe for a human?"
I actually wasn't worried at all.
I was an adventurous risk taker now, remember?
But it seemed like a safe topic to discuss.
„Don't worry, it'll be perfectly safe for you. Vampires, especially CotC vampires, haven't drunk human blood for ages now."
He turned around to look at me, and despite my best efforts I must have looked worried, because he added: „We don't need to anymore. We had to, way back when we were not able to process human food. Our biology is a little different from yours you know, our digestion works a little different and so on. For a long time, human blood was the only way we could take in all the nutrients we need to survive without slowly starving to death. And then one day a very smart person discovered that we could eat normally if we avoided gluten and lactose and other ingredients like peanuts and with that we stopped the blood drinking."