1y ago

"Coked-up Dracula playing poker" could actually work

82 comments

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.
- Dracula has the protomolecule, confirmed?
- Dracula in an otherwise realistic sci-fi setting would also have some potential.
  
  Check out Blindsight by Peter Watts.
  
  Check out Vampire Hunter D, although I wouldn't call it an otherwise realistic sci-fi setting there's still spaceships and vampires.
  
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dracula_3000
  
  There are a few cases of mythological figures appearing in Bablyon 5. Even King Arthur shows up at one time.
  
  Dracula would have some real problems in outer space, where it's always daytime.
- 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.
- 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.
- Hrm....is it only our sun that's a problem for him? Like how our sun powers superman but Krypton's didn't?
  
  That was the colour of the sun, I think. Ours is yellow, Krypton's was red.

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
- 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."
  
  "Caffeine is terrible! I was up all night!"
  
  He never drinks... wine.
- It is historically plausible for a samurai to have sent a fax to Abraham Lincoln
- Any stranger than him being a vampire?
- 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.

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.
- The fax machine, actually
  
  Fax machines are an ancient and archaic magicks, we dare not meddle.
- Yeah, meanwhile in reality Karl Marx sent a letter to Lincoln.
- 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?
- 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.

Damn coke used to be cool ? Now it is just average useless soda
- 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.
  
  C'mon Stepan Company, you could be a bro and "accidentally" let just a smidge through the final product.
  
  It's like a non alcoholic beer
- That's why they named the company "coca" cola.
  
  Now they should just rename to just "cola"
- 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.
  
  Or Pervitin. I think you could buy it OTC as pills
  
  Yeah