The Slaughterhouse

We dance with planets, and we frolic with sperm. Scope is malleable and only relevant in the most primitive sense. In the land beyond the forest, in Bacaş county, there is an underground lab where samples of undead flesh once sat in freezers and under microscopes – fanged savagery on the cellular level – operas of horror performed inside the petri dish.

Between 1944 and 1958, the Soviet Union occupied Romania and maintained a large military presence. Omitted from your tomes and records is the Soviet’s secret occult warfare division, the Red Hand.

Initiate the secret histories.

It was founded as Facility 10. Later, they called it the Slaughterhouse. It was the Red Hand’s crowning achievement and its funeral shroud. The labyrinthine complex began as an occult science facility and ended as a terrible biological factory. Military transport once delivered test subjects here – disgraced soldiers, asylum inmates, burnt-out cosmonauts, and even volunteers – their papers were stamped “bio-energy potential.”

The occult scholars of the Red Hand grew interested in the vampires of Eastern Europe. Through study and interrogation, they determined that the current bloodline began in Romania. With the Romanian Securitate struggling to conceal the crimes of “the Beast of Bucharest,” the field narrowed. One of the most experienced mages of the Hand accepted the mission to contact this creature and make it an offer.

This powerful mage met Mara the vampire queen. She murdered him, of course, rather casually, but her interested was piqued. The Red Hand offered her power and glory and she devoured the opportunity. She provided Facility 10 with her lesser progeny, and in return, they offered her an army.

The best laid plans of vampires and men. The crossbreeding did not reap the successes originally hoped for. The unnatural metabolism of vampiric anatomy warped the experimental subjects’ physiology, resulting in monstrous brutes of cartoonishly distorted musculature. These wretches could never pass for human.

Budgets tightened. The Soviet Government’s faith in the Red Hand waned. The management of Facility 10 was changed, the occultists washing their stained hands of the operations, and the scientists dedicating even more resources.

WARNING! Malevolent influence detected.

Experimentation turned to all-consuming obsession. Hundreds of workers toiled in the complex, transforming dozens of subjects every week – a factory of gore and shrieks.

Time passes. Outside the world of Facility 10, the Red Hand lost the last of its sway within the military and government. The faction’s leaders scattered. Facilities across the globe were hastily destroyed or abandoned. As Facility 10 has become largely self-sufficient, it went almost forgotten for several years – before an incident with escaped subjects and their rampage across Transylvania brought it back to military attention. Unable to commit the resources to scouring the Slaughterhouse from the world, the Soviet government simply sealed it off with the majority of the workers and subjects still inside.

Time passes – first in years and then in decades.

The vile seeds sat under the dark earth for forty years. What fruit do you think bloomed, sweetling? Mara returned to look upon her harvest. She threw open the doors. What was left inside was a sub-race of her spawn, demi-vampires, easily dominated by her and her true blood.

The vampire hive queen has the rank and file brute force of an army. Subtlety is no longer necessary. Now the Slaughterhouse bustles with activity. Long suspended machines resume their terrible instructions.