Outfitter Under the Stars

Outfitter Under the Stars

A lot of modern literature leaves out that Vampires suffer from Arithmomania: a compulsion to count things. In this respect the most accurate TV portrayal of vampires isn’t The Vampire Diaries, but Sesame Street. Traditionally for defense one would carry a pocketful of seeds, like mustard seeds to scatter in front of the vampire, which would slow them down because they’d feel the need to count them all. Our original products were things like mustard and collard seeds, traditional crossbows with wooden bolts, silver crosses, garlic, etc. But then we got forward-looking and started app development. Our big one is the app that will count things for you. You snap a picture and the edge detection algorithm gives you a guaranteed accurate count. Of course we track our users and what they count. Industrial users are easy to weed out. We take special interest in users that count everything, and are mostly active at night. We then entered into a data sharing agreement with the FBI and Interpol. We correlate our nocturnal power users with suspected mass murder incidents. Did you know that the FBI estimates that at any given time in the US there are 50-300 mass murderers? Probably only about 10-25% of those are vampires by our estimates. To be clear, we don’t actually hunt those with bloodlust, we’re just the outfitters. There’s always a range of hunters from semi-pro to professional who need our supplies. We try to discourage the rank amateurs, as we prefer repeat customers. We resell wooden bullets that were designed for crowd control, and offer an increased charge behind them. A quieter option is our pneumatic-driven wooden harpoon: the Van Helsing. You do have to carry SCUBA tanks on your back to drive them, but they’re quite effective I’m told. Other big sellers are our semi-automatic and pump-action crossbows. The advent of full-spectrum LEDs had led to our new Cyclops 10 million candlepower flashlights with extra UV boost. Our users report they’re nearly as effective as native sunlight. Heck, they’ll even turn a plain-blood a bit crispy. Carry these and a six-pack of our garlic-infused flashbangs and you’ll be all set and we’ll turn a tidy profit. I hope you can tell from the above descriptions that new technologies have swung the balance of power markedly toward the vampire hunters. We were safely behind the scenes as anonymous arms supplier to the adventurous. At least we were until the day we got the email that simply read “We know who you are.”