Ahead of me stretched row upon row of ornate, garish machines, flashing and chiming while clients dropped coins and tokens into slots, or eagerly scooped up rewards that tumbled noisily into trays. Gambling devices, I realized, recognizing the basic idea from museum exhibits, back home. One-armed bandits. Robotic shears for sheep. During Earth’s wild and wooly Twenty-First Century, tremendous ingenuity and energy had gone into creating gadgets that could read a person’s iris dilation, flush tones, heartbeat, electrical tension and even neuronal reactions, finely tuning the rate of winning-rewards – along with sound and light – in order to condition users, keeping them transfixed, hopeful, reluctant to leave, even while their wallets lightened.

Only now, imagine it happening on a planet where predation is the rule of daily life? Something felt deeply compelling about the rhythms, drawing me toward the labyrinth of glittering lights – a seductive pull that felt eerily related to the hypnotic glitter that the undead-demmie, Gala Morell, had aimed at me, a while ago. Only here I was immersed, submerged in a spell cast by relentless, remorseless machinery.

A little numbly, I recalled how things went during the similar phase back in my own species history, a few centuries ago. When laws and regulation and moral appeals proved useless, it took a wave of medical interventions – mass inoculations – to overcome this commercial variant of mind-suasion. As the throbbing sensory enticement pulled at me, I couldn’t help wondering if those booster shots I had taken at the Academy were still any good.

Nearby, a fellow with slicked hair and a widow’s peak dropped coin after coin, as if hypnotized, into a machine that rewarded him with bloops and beeps and whirling flashes… and an occasional trickle of change.

Who’d have figured. Vampires and the undead… just as vulnerable to this sort of thing as the living. I guess some character flaws transcend even life and death.

Tearing my gaze away, I turned around, trying to focus my thoughts.

Aha, that looks like a hotel front desk or information booth. Maybe I can simply ask where to find Earl Dragonlord.

It sounded risky. I had no way of knowing whether that fellow had been part of the ambush, guiding me and my comrades into a trap. And yet, I was feeling as impatient as a demmie who had missed lunch. Sometimes the direct approach is exactly what’s called for.

On my way to the hotel reception center I strolled past a Cineplex theater, showing pre-pared entertainments in crude 3D format. A poster for the main feature showed slathering mobs of normal-looking Standards, armed with torches, pursuing a dwindling band of terrified vampires. “Night of the Living” was the title… apparently winner of a Golden Golem Award.