“Underwater Treasure”: vampires, cool history nerd things // StayHomeWriMo Day 29

Hello, friends!

Shoutout to my girl El for watching the horrible series of Twilight with me (more like her forcing me to watch during school) (#TEAMMIKE) and this post is largely inspired by HOW STEPHANIE MYERS DID VAMPIRES DIRTY and a ton of Pinterest and Tumblr shtposts that I’ve been seeing and pinning often.

The first draft of this was pretty terrible and this story ended up being the only story I drafted multiple versions of XD.

“Dammit, Simon!” I cursed, letting my feet skim on the dusty ocean floor, weighed down by the backpack of rocks I wore.

Simon looked at me, mildly amused. “You hast stubbed your phalanx once more, is it?”

I glared at him, cradling it. There was no blood- I mean, vampires definitely didn’t bleed easily- but it still hurt.

“Okay, you’re the one who dragged us all down here to discover some secret treasure or whatever!”

Katerina looked up from several feet away from where she and Adrian were digging through a pile of long, flat rocks.

“It is rumored that there are twenty million tonnes of gold on the seafloor, Leila. You must understand that this opportunity is not passable. If another vampire got to it before us our family name would simply be shamed.” Katerina said nonchalantly, her red curls floating in the water behind her.

Perks of being a vampire? You didn’t get hurt or bleed or die or be cold or get hungry often or run out of air or be unable to speak underwater. Plus, you were immortal.

Basically, everything was a perk.

I sifted through the dirt, my hand getting poked at by some sort of weird underwater creature. I pulled away, repulsed.

“Look! I found something!”

I turned to see Daphne pointing eagerly at what looked like a very old, very musty stone chest that was beyond eroded by the water. It was basically a lump of rock by now.

Daphne tugged at it, gently at first, her dark braids soaked to the back of her scuba gear. She looked about fifteen, but she was actually much, much older than that. From what Leila knew, Daphne had been born in the early 1900s. Adrian looked like he was seventeen, but he was actually born in England and arrived in America when the first pilgrims sailed here- like, the 1600s.

Yeah, crazy, I know. I was much more recent- in the early 2000s, when I was sixteen, I was on my deathbed, dying of cancer, when Simon found and turned me, adopting me into his patchwork of a family. In reality, I should have been well into my thirties now, but at least I wasn’t nine hundred years old like Katerina (even though she looked barely fifty) or over one thousand years old like Simon (he only looked fifty-five at maximum).

Daphne proceeded to rip the stone away from whatever was inside, her dainty little hands tearing the cement to pieces like she was some sort of freaky Godzilla.

It didn’t surprise me- we all acted like that when we were frustrated or when no humans were around to see us.

None of our family even remotely resembled each other. Simon was pale as death since he was born in Northern England, and Katerina was a tanned Greek-Italian beauty. Adrian had brown curls and French features, Daphne was African-American and tall, and I was a petite Latinx girl with curly black hair.

Or I presumed I was, at least. When we became vampires, our memories of our previous lives were erased. The only reason I knew certain things about my human life was because of what Simon and the others knew.

“I found the treasure!” Daphne exclaimed, looking down into the mess of a treasure chest if you could even call it that. We all swam over to her and watched over her shoulders.

The lump of stone did have treasure in it. It was deep and wide, with several square feet of gold in it. It was the size of a dresser, really.

All in all, it had to be worth over five million.

“Wow!” Adrian said, staring at it. “What are we going to do with all this money?”

Simon straightened his back. “We shall donate it. To carcinoma funds, to feed the destitute or anything else we desire to do.”

I frowned. “Don’t we, like, hate the humans?”

Simon fixed a gold-eyed gaze at me. “Of course. We despise them, but they hast only prove to be a hindrance and mild irritation in the long run, Leila. Thou must attempt to understand.”

Seriously. A thousand years and Simon was still stuck on Shakesperean talk? He claimed that ‘it was the most poetic of all the ways of speaking that he had ever lived through’, but I could wager that there were better first impressions to make than a total medieval Romeo-and-Juliet style accent when Simon went to a parent-teacher conference.

Yes, I had attended my junior year of high school eight times. It was horrible each time, yet also intriguing.

“I think Matthias and Su would be quite interested in learning more about this,” Katerina remarked, studying the heaps of treasure.

Matthias was twenty-four (well, not really- he was actually around five hundred but he passed for twenty-sevenish) and scientist for a well-respected marine biology institution across the country. He would love to see the treasure Daphne found, that’s for sure.

Su, on the other hand? Su was thirty-passing and an upcoming politician with a blind hatred for all the idiotic things humans did. She would absolutely love to donate millions in her name and get elected.

“Come on, Leila, we need to get these up to the surface,” Simon commented, nodding at me. “You can get rid of the rock-backpack.”

I sighed and dropped the rocks in my backpack down, grabbing handfuls of treasure and stuffing them into the backpack instead.

Suddenly, my stomach growled and I was certain that everyone could hear it, even above the gurgling of the ocean.

“Sorry,” I said sheepishly. “I’m just hungry.”

Adrian rolled his eyes. “When we get to the surface you can just drink more coconut water, I guess.”

Coconut water was first used as an alternative to blood in life-saving transplants by and for humans in the early 2000s when I first became a vampire. Immediately Simon was drawn to the idea of not relying on blood anymore.

That meant that never in my life had I tasted an animal’s blood, let alone a human’s.

Plus, coconut water was just so damn good. It also meant that wherever we lived, the grocery store clerks always thought that we had an obsession with coconut water. It was worth it, though. We were vegetarian vampires- crazy, right?

My head broke the surface of the water several minutes later, and I felt the cool air on my face.

“Wow, we did it!” Daphne exclaimed, spitting out water.

I grinned and paddle my way over to our speedboat that is casually rocking on the waves. We climb in.

“So we’re gonna be rich, huh?” I say out loud.

“I say after we donate or whatever, we should backpack to Mongolia for a few decades or something! We’ve been in the USA, going to school, for much too long. It’s getting boring. The last time I spent a full decade somewhere other than the States was probably in the 1800s before we got Daphne or Leila.”

Simon looked up, running a hand through his sopping wet hair. “Your mother and I have been pondering traveling to a highly radioactive location to conduct experiments and scientific investigations. Fukushima, Japan, to be explicit. We might not have any association with the outside world for numerous decades, hence thee must be prepared for isolation.”

Adrian’s eyes nearly bugged out. “Three decades in Japan? Rad, I can’t wait to move! I’m so sick of damned Wisconsin,” he groaned, and I could understand him.

We usually spent around three years everywhere that we lived and we had traveled between four Wisconsin towns for the past decade. Before that, we spent some years in California and Colorado, which is where Simon and Katerina found me.

“Japan- here we come!”

I hope you enjoyed this story! I’m kiND OF obsessed with ALL the amazing vampire options there are and Stephanie goes with ‘tHeY sPaRkLe’ WHYYYY (as you can see I am MAD).

Tomorrow’s our last day of the challenge, WOW.

Have you watched the Twilight movies? Team Edward, Jacob, Mike, Alice, no one, or any other ships? Do you like vampires?