ShadoGal Mai Chronicles II

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ShadoGal Mai Chronicles II: Fay and the Scroll of Dhakr
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One thing to keep in mind is that Mai us a supernatural being. She inherited a vampire hypnotic gaze that can paralyze humans with ease. After a “love bite”, they become addicted to her highly arousing ways and will tend to come back for more at regular periods, which is very convenient for both sides. It's like the next step in the vampire symbiotic evolution, which is described in the “Unification Prophecy”.

Mai doesn't like fighting and in most cases she never has to. That's the nature of vampires. She can paralyze any human just by looking at them in the eyes, no matter their physical strength - the gaze paralyzes a human (or even animals) by freezing their souls right at the core. Besides that, Mai has the strength of 10 men, which means trying to defeat her by brute force is unlikely to work by all means. It’s not physical strength, but rather a supernatural power.

But Mai is not almighty. One weak side of her is that her supernatural powers are maintained by regular feeding on human blood. Abstinence or a bloodlust crisis aftermath will render Mai as weak as a human - pretty much helpless. During a bloodlust, though, Mai is a terrible foe and compassion will not hold her back. She will attack whatever moves or squeaks with all she's got and it's not pretty. After that she drops drunk for days, and whatever happens to her is on God's hands. This only happened to her when she was younger and she learned never to let it happen again, for she believes humans have abused her body while she was drunk. She doesn’t blame humans for that, for she knows how weak and helpless the poor little things are.

As opposed to most vampires who are shape shifters, Mai doesn’t seem to have that ability, but on the other hand she was born with fixed bat wings on her back and amplified senses like those of a bat. Her pointy ears can hear through thick walls, she can “sense” movement even in complete darkness, and she has a mysteriously accurate sense of direction. Vibrating her wings can be compared to a sonar effect, and it enables Mai to see through solids if they are not too dense.

To her personal taste, bats are disgusting creatures but she was born with some strange natural affinity with them. She can strangely communicate with bats, but unfortunately they are not “thinking” anything useful as far as she knows. One curious thing from this is that those rather yucky creatures seem to be able to foresee near future danger before it happens. If there is a bat nearby, Mai will be automatically “notified” by the collective. But again, in numerous occasions Mai couldn’t care less about silly things the bats are afraid of, like hawks, falcons, owls or sunrise. Mai especially likes watching the sunrise, because she knows how precious that would be to her dad if he could ever see it. Nonetheless, this bat affinity may prove useful some day.

Sunlight will not harm Mai in the same sense it would harm a vampire, but it does harm her pale skin in the sense humans can get sunburned. As Mai strongly believes she’s gorgeous by all means, she doesn’t want her immortal skin to be damaged by sun, so she prefers to stay away from it during the peak hours. She also noticed that sunbathing can often reduce her supernatural senses and cause her to need to feed on humans more often. That is not a problem in particular, since human pets come to her for a “love bite” more often than she actually needs it. Anyway, this is where her “ShadoGal” nickname came from, for she once got sunburned while trying to tease her vampire friends when she was little.

Although “love bites” can cause ecstatic reactions on humans, it doesn’t have that effect on her. Of course, feeding has a whole different meaning to her, but it is still far from how humans conceive it. When she was little, she would only feed from Fay, her human mother. Fay would not allow little Mai to feed on anybody else, for she was not proud that Mai was not born as human as she would wish for and was afraid humans would see her as some sort of monster.

Not knowing how to handle the situation, Fay did her best to deal with Mai’s supernatural needs she understood very little about. Besides from that, Mai was a “normal” child on the eyes of her mother. In an attempt to help Mai to merge with humans and make friends, Fay has cut out her daughter’s wings for several times, but they somehow grow back in a matter of time. Later on, those wings would become larger and stronger and removing them would require actual surgery, and Fay could not handle that alone. It would be too traumatic for Mai, like cutting out one of her arms.

It is not known what happened to Fay in the late years when Mai grew up to adolescence. She only remembers she came to live with her vampire dad, because he would know how handle her better than her mother. For some reason, Mai could no longer “sense” her mother’s presence, and she never saw her again. For the next 480 years, Mai lived with Khalmour, her dad, who raised her as a vampire instead of a human. Khalmour didn’t understand humans very well in the same way Fay didn’t understand vampires, so that was the only way he would know how to raise a daughter. He never understood how he could have a daughter anyways, since that doesn’t seem to be possible in theory.

But the truth was there to be seen – Mai was very alive and she was neither human nor vampire. But Khalmour always suspected this would have something to do with the “Unification Prophecy” that had been carved on stone many millennia ago by the “Ancients” (from whom the vampires believe to have descended from). He believed his daughter was something special, like a miracle in vampire standards. The very fact that she doesn’t suffer from what vampires fear must be a sign of that. That’s how Mai ended up being terribly spoiled by Khalmour, who obviously had no previous experience raising a daughter – not that any other vampire would have that kind of experience anyway.

There was one thing that tormented Mai for a period of her life, though. How come Fay had disappeared all of the sudden and why? She was a good mother and taught her to be compassioned about humans, even when they seem to think of her as an abomination. She would let Mai feed on her own blood, which is the kind of sacrifice most humans would never agree with. Mai never fed on any other human but Fay – until the day she was taken to live with her father. That’s when she realized the terrifying nature of a true vampire, and how cruel they were to humans.

That was the moment Mai decided to deny her vampire side and sympathize with the humans. But that’s also when her first bloodlust emerged. After weeks of refusing to feed on humans, she experienced something terrifying taking over her mind and all she could do was sit and watch it happen. The first one was terribly violent and many humans died by her own hands. In the aftermath, while helplessly drunk, Mai was taken to prison, tortured and raped many times by the surviving humans. She took the punishment as if she really deserved it, for she knew she did something so terrible that Fay would never forgive her.

What came of this was a feeling that she would not fit in either the world of humans or that of the cruel vampires. Siding with humans can get them killed, while siding with vampires hurts her feelings and get even more humans killed. After a period of conflict and meditation, Mai decided to be on her own side and keep a safe distance from the rest.

During this period, she desperately sought for her mother, but Fay was nowhere to be found. People would not tell her what happened to her or where did she go. Mai could not get the truth out of anybody – they seem to have some sort of code of silence about this. After many years, Mai thought that Fay would possibly be too old or already dead. In any case, she never knew what happened to her and why she couldn’t sense her presence anymore. During that period of Mai’s life, this was worse than death itself.

She started to suspect she might have killed her own mother during a bloodlust without even knowing it. It’s hard to remember what happened when she wakes up with a hang over. But how could that happen? Fay would always let Mai feed on her so this could never have happened. Somehow she tries to find ways to blame herself for whatever happened to her mother. It is very strange, for even people who knew Fay, it’s like she never existed - she simply vanished. Even Khalmour would not talk about this - especially about this.

Even knowing that Fay could not have possibly survived the centuries, Mai never gave up trying to find out what really happened that dreadful night when she woke up on a chariot, where she was being taken to Khalmour’s castle (yes, he’s a little retro) at the age of sixteen. What happened when she turned sixteen? Strangely, Mai couldn’t remember this at all. She only has vague and fragmented memories look more like a faded dream. One day she was home with her mom and in the next one it was all gone like magic. Now 500 years later, Fay still lives in Mai’s heart and mind.

And then, one day Mai heard that there was a rumor about a strange woman called Fay, who walks with an unknown clan of vampires. They are seeking for the sacred Scroll of Dhakr, which most vampires believe to be a myth.

The Scroll of Dhakr? Mai’s heart jumped out of orbit by the simple sound of that name. It can’t be a coincidence! With a determined expression in her face, Mai suddenly jumped out of the chair, opened the window from the 13th floor apartment and jumped out spreading her wings in the way down.

With tears flowing over her cheeks and a smile in her face, she headed west at full speed. Now she knows where her destiny lies. That must be it!

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