Leone Frasier was living the aftermath of a tragic car crash that took his mother's life and left him barely able to walk on his feeble legs. He has had to endure the loss of his mother, the wrath of an abusive father, and all the added weight that...
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"That thing look's atrocious." Ikaris coldly blurts out as she keenly observed the image displayed by the projector.
"Yeah." I quickly agree with a wince. "What the hell even is that, dad?" I ask while squinting at the monstrosity.
It looked like a bat on steroids as it was everything that made up a normal bat from nature, but times a thousand. It had four webbed wings, two thick horns that curved up from its head, brutally piercing teeth, a set of bulbous pitch black eyes, and a stronger muscular frame that looked about five feet long, complimented by a thick raven mane that surrounded its neck like a regal coat similar to a lion.
"Now you two be kind, because you might be surprised to learn that we have a lot more in common with this bat than you might imagine." Dad adjusts the frame of his glasses and presses a button to show the next slide. "It's scientific name is Volmpiraxia Daemonius but you can simply just call it, reaper bat. About sixty five thousand years ago this prehistoric bat was the unspoken apex predator of the sky. We know this through countless cave paintings that portrayed it as a formidable creature being able to feast on anything it wanted. It feasted on people, saber-toothed cats, mammoths, anything you could possibly imagine-until climate change happened and humans found a way to hunt it down to extinction of course."
After adjusting herself on her seat, Ikaris raised her hand to speak again. "So how would we have anything in common with it? Does the bat have any direct-descendants today?"
"Well not quite, but since it was around humans a lot it's hypothesized to be the origin of the virus that gives us our abilities today." My father says as I glanced up at the clock that was about to signal our dismissal. "Just like the reaper bat, our saliva has an anti-coagulant and much like the way it fed and depended on the need for blood, we do the same. Now you might be wondering how a human adjacent being can subsist solely on blood, but a side effect of the virus is the inability to synthesize PSDH-X, and if you've been paying attention in class you'd know that it's a what?"
Ikaris quickly raises her hand. "A protein that's responsible for certain aspects of our central nervous system development." She flips a few pages back on her notebook before speaking. "It only occurs in hominids so the virus makes human blood an essential component to our diet."
"That's correct, Ikaris!" He nods and presses on to another slide that immediately caught my attention, enough to make me refrain from reminding him of dismissal so that I could sit still and carefully listen. "Blood plays an important role in not only maintaining our heightened capabilities, but also determining quite a few things in our lives."
"Things such as forming a Blood Bond?" Ikaris calls out as she teasingly glances at me which I returned with a glare.
"Oh especially a Blood Bond!" My dad quickly answers.
"Dad?" I tentatively let out.
My dad closes his eyes and nods for a second. "Yes son, I know class is supposed to be dismissed, but please hold on for just a mom-"
