By: Carter Hemion, Peak Associate
We already know there are vampire hunters among us — some of whom are our own classmates (looking at you, guy in my English class who only turns on his mic to argue against whether Frankenstein was the monster or the scientist). They do especially well with Gothic literature courses shoving Samuel Taylor Coleridge down our throats (if I have to read “Christabel” one more time, I might lose it); they have garlic in everything they eat (ugh, sure, they visited Italy when they were 16 and it was “life-changing” or whatever, but I still pronounce pasta as “PAH-sta”, and you pretentious kids can’t stop me); and they show up to classes looking exhausted after a long night of preying on innocent vampires, saying they’d been up all night “studying.” Sure.
More importantly, we have vampires among us, and they deserve the same equal rights to safety as the pathetic mortals— er, the rest of us on campus.
For starters, just look at the design of the walls, ground, and benches: everything about Science Courtyard is meant to trap vampires. Folklore has noted for centuries that a spilled bag of rice or seeds forces a vampire to count every last morsel. As a modern equivalent, there’s a handful of “star charts” that serve to be dozens of tiny lights sprinkled across the walls, just waiting to be counted. It’s time-consuming, I tell y— well, uh, that’s what I would say, of course.
Meanwhile, it’s common knowledge that vampires can’t be seen in mirrors, nor can they touch silver. Do you remember what every concrete bench there is lined with? Shiny strips of metal, likely an alloy with some silver in it, that distort your reflection in them. It’s inaccessible — truly in-character for SFU.
Lastly, since vampires can’t go out in the sunlight, the vampire hunters have placed an array of lights across the area so that they can clearly see the vampires at night. Who else would need to see at night? There is no way that all of these choices are a coincidence.
In a cruel turn, there are a handful of small trees in the observatory’s courtyard, obviously planted to use as wooden stakes. It’s clear that they’ve been luring in my kin— er, our kindred peers, just to kill them.
It’s no wonder we’ve seen a lockdown on campus with no in-person observatory nights happening right now! The vampire hunters are coming down hard, and unjustly.
After all, a vampire only harms out of necessity to live, but a vampire hunter goes out with the intention to kill. If people still suck face and risk dying in a pandemic, why can’t we — sorry — vampires suck blood to live?
