With a skeptical brow raised, the count begrudgingly sipped from a glass of Coca-Cola, a recently invented American beverage vastly different from the Romanian wines of his cellar. “Passable,” he muttered under his breath, with a reluctant nod, betraying centuries of noble pride. Yet, as the night unfolded, a subtle smile crept over his pale face.
Damn coke used to be cool ? Now it is just average useless soda
A lot of things used to be a lot cooler. My doctor has never prescribed me opium and laudanum for a cough.
Get a better doctor! Mine prescribes meth to make my brain work better.
I would be happy to have an Adderall prescription. I’m afraid to ask for one though. I don’t want to get secretly listed as drug-seeking since that’ll cause problems if I ever need pain medication, which is likely considering the lifestyle I lead (lots of injuries).
Don’t worry, they assume it anyway so you might as well ask.
I went to the ER with no recent history of being on pain meds and was treated like I was seeking drugs when I told them the Tylenol wasn’t doing anything for the pain. Had to convince them to give me a catheter so they could get a urine sample to see if it was kidney stones before they gave me anything that worked. “Juat pee for us” they said to the guy who told them I came to the ER because I couldn’t pee and was in incredible pain.
Fuck the fear mongering about drug seeking behavior. Why do ERs care if somebody wants to feed their addiction more than whether someone is in actual pain?
Yeah
That’s why they named the company “coca” cola.
Now they should just rename to just “cola”
It’s false advertising really
After 1904, instead of using fresh leaves, Coca-Cola started using “spent” leaves – the leftovers of the cocaine-extraction process with trace levels of cocaine.[77] Since then (by 1929[78]), Coca-Cola has used a cocaine-free coca leaf extract. Today, that extract is prepared at a Stepan Company plant in Maywood, New Jersey, the only manufacturing plant authorized by the federal government to import and process coca leaves, which it obtains from Peru and Bolivia.[79] Stepan Company extracts cocaine from the coca leaves, which it then sells to Mallinckrodt, the only company in the United States licensed to purify cocaine for medicinal use.[80]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coca-Cola#Coca_leaf
So it still has coca extract, just not the cocaine part.
It’s like a non alcoholic beer
C’mon Stepan Company, you could be a bro and “accidentally” let just a smidge through the final product.
Except he can’t drink coke
Why not, is it full of garlic in a silver bottle? Is it made of holy water?
It’s called Castlevania.
But it would be very strange for an old Eastern European noble to be playing a Japanese card game and drinking a recently invented American beverage
Of any “class/type” of person to be doing something like that a noble is the most likely. High standing and money gives you easier access to things.
That is true though anyone based on Vlad Tepij isn’t the type to get super into American beverages or East Asian games. Now show me a novel middle eastern game and a German beverage and that motherfucker is in
He could travel to Baltimore for a bridge tournament.
Did Nintendo make poker decks back then? They started out making cards for traditional Japanese card games like hanafuda because Western card games had limited presence in Japan.
So this just presents the question of why someone is playing a bridge tournament in Baltimore using what would be to them weird cards they’ve never seen anything like before made by some Orientals.
Bridge being the modern version of Russian Whist, where Whist would have been a better fit, being of the right era and eastern european origin.
And Nintendo was simply producing cards so the Japanese diplomats might better understand their Russian counterparts by understanding their passtimes in an attempt to diffuse rising tensions before they lead to war…
But alas no barge knocked down a whist anywhere recently.
Any stranger than him being a vampire?
It is historically plausible for a samurai to have sent a fax to Abraham Lincoln
With a skeptical brow raised, the count begrudgingly sipped from a glass of Coca-Cola, a recently invented American beverage vastly different from the Romanian wines of his cellar. “Passable,” he muttered under his breath, with a reluctant nod, betraying centuries of noble pride. Yet, as the night unfolded, a subtle smile crept over his pale face.
He looked over to his guest, sitting opposite him on an old wooden chair. A traveler from a far away land, lost in these dark forests in this dark and stormy night, glad to have been given shelter. The man - he could not be older than thirty - had bowed profusely after his rescue from the elements.
“I could never repay you completely for you help, but may I offer you a small token of thanks for your kindness? It’s a game from my home, quite simple to play, it would be an honor to teach you. I have not seen its likeness in these lands, so it might offer you a sliver of fresh entertainment.”
" (Do) You like Huey Lewis and the News?
Their early work was a little too new wave for my taste. But when Sports came out in '83, I think they really came into their own, commercially and artistically. The whole album has a clear, crisp sound, and a new sheen of consummate professionalism that really gives the songs a big boost. He’s been compared to Elvis Costello, but I think Huey has a far more bitter, cynical sense of humor."
Ahaha 👏
“Caffeine is terrible! I was up all night!”
I do sometimes wonder what drinking the Cokaine-Cola must have been like
Isn’t Dracula canonically immortal? You could technically write him into The Expanse and be accurate. I guess the scifi people might have an issue with it.
Hrm…is it only our sun that’s a problem for him? Like how our sun powers superman but Krypton’s didn’t?
Dracula in an otherwise realistic sci-fi setting would also have some potential.
There are a few cases of mythological figures appearing in Bablyon 5. Even King Arthur shows up at one time.
Lower decks holodeck episode in the style of the Moriarty episodes?
Yup, a direct reference to it.
Dracula would have some real problems in outer space, where it’s always daytime.
His powers would be weakened a bit, but otherwise he’d be fine. Orlok would be the one with serious problems.
Well at what point in space does the sun just become a star and a different star become a sun? Is there a magnitude when it becomes a problem for a vampire. Or is only our sun the problem? Like no matter how little sun light a vampire is exposed to a problem even if the vampire is many many light years away.
Moonlight is reflected sunlight, so they can handle a certain amount of sunlight.
Mmm interesting point. This means that either reflected sunlight is fine or that the loss of intensity makes it not not dangerous. I assume most people would agree that using mirrors to reflect sunlight on to a vampire is detrimental to their health and happiness. So it seems like a safe assumption that it is the intensity that matters.
Now we just have to find out if this is a property unique to the sun or if all star light at a certain intensity is unhealthy for vampires.
Time to build an interstellar space ship and fill it with vampires. Luckily they don’t need much in the way of life support systems. So we can do this on the cheap.
I volunteer to be one of the vampires.
I think I’ve read in some iterations, super old vampires have trouble from the reflected sunlight during full moons.
Stay in a ship with no windows or just chill in the cargo area
Check out Vampire Hunter D, although I wouldn’t call it an otherwise realistic sci-fi setting there’s still spaceships and vampires.
Check out Blindsight by Peter Watts.
Fun fact, Blindsight is online free at the author’s web site: https://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm
The vampires appear in Chapter 1, after the Prologue.
How do vampires handle high g forces, I don’t believe it’s ever been addressed. Presumably the ability to turn into a bat would lower his mass and help.
Dracula has the protomolecule, confirmed?
Immortal unless he’s killed, which he was.
Somehow, Dracula returned!
Okay but what if we use the Hellsing manga/OVA version of Dracula?
There’s a Dracula “sci-fi western” in development now, and it wouldn’t be the first sci-fi film to feature vampires. Blade Trinity was fairly sci-fi and featured a resurrected Vlad III. There are also a whole bunch of low-budget independent films, because the character is public domain.
So it’s been done, but I wouldn’t say it’s been done well. Technology and the ubiquity of cameras make telling vampire stories logistically complicated. Like, they always need to come up with a bunch of handwaves to explain how coffins fly on airplanes piloted by a bunch of human familiars, and how the old legends about running water and being invited in are apocryphal superstitions.
they always need to come up with a bunch of handwaves to explain how coffins fly on airplanes piloted by a bunch of human familiars
That one is easy to explain. Either the vampire is wealthy and has a private aircraft, which is likely if they’re hundreds of years old, or they can ship themselves as the remains of a loved one. I would imagine that any competent modern vampire would have a forger, and a hacker in their household.
Wasn’t another one that Samurai, the telegraph and Lincoln were all alive in the same time period so you could have a Samurai send an electronic message to Lincoln.
Yeah, meanwhile in reality Karl Marx sent a letter to Lincoln.
If memory serves me right there were exiled samurai in California and Mexico at the same time as the Mexican-American war so its entirely feasible to have them fighting during said war. Though as I understand they were pretty universally insular and mostly stuck to themselves.
The fax machine, actually
Fax machines are an ancient and archaic magicks, we dare not meddle.
Well, yes, but I don’t think there were lines connecting the two.
That said, Matthew Perry (not that one) had already reestablished relations with Japan during Lincoln’s time
I mean the Samurai wasn’t fixed to Japan if the lines didn’t reach there. He could have made his way to America
So Chandler sent a samurai a fax which was then forwarded to Lincoln?
Dracula can’t drink Coca-Cola though…
Why?
“I never drink…Coke.”
Is Pepsi okay?
“You mean Brad’s Drink? It von’t be called Pepsi until next year, 1898. And no!”
Ingesting anything other than blood makes him ill.
the cocaine fixes that
