1.1.2. Flu
*1918*
Selene had spent the last ten years traveling. Only a few years all over Europe and since 1912 through America. She had never stayed in one place for more than a few months. She had spent the time of the Great War in America together with her growing entourage, but even here she had often changed both city and state. To protect herself was one thing, but her property and especially her slaves were too fragile, she did not want to expose them to unnecessary risks.
Meanwhile Selene had also stopped taking all her slaves with her, only a few selected slaves and her servants accompanied her. Selene had set herself the upper limit of fifty people who belonged to her entourage. After all, she did not want every trip she made to become a real migration of peoples. She left the rest of her slaves behind or sent them ahead to prepare for her arrival. They had the task of earning money for her to enable her to have a more elaborate lifestyle.
Since she still caught more slaves - on average one per day - she had over three thousand working for her. Each of them had to give her half of their income, which made her relatively wealthy, although most of her slaves had only poorly paid jobs. She was one of the few women of that time who owned more than one million dollars and invested most of her wealth, which had grown to eleven million dollars, in such a way that the interest and dividends alone financed her life. Selene did not want to attract attention and therefore usually enslaved men who had no ties and also tended to have little education. For the same reason, she spread her wealth over many small individual investments so that no one would notice how wealthy she really was.
Selene had tried to follow various vampire myths for a long time, but none of the myths concerned her. She was too different from the mythical figures. Sunlight, garlic, silver, and holy water were completely normal to her. Just as she did not manage to find out anything about her past, she did not find a conspecific. She was a woman without a past and apparently the only representative of her species. She finally came to terms with the fact that she had not existed before Tunguska and that she was the only one of her kind on this planet.
As she had noticed earlier, her saliva had a clear influence on her slaves. All infectious diseases disappeared. From malaria to cholera to syphilis she had been able to cure her slaves of all diseases. Her slaves became more persistent, healthier and worked better. And the sex at the first bite in combination with her strong pheromones made them permanently become slaves out of conviction.
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Selene often had the recurring nightmares of the burning starry sky during the war. She felt that she had to be more than just a parasite, but for a long time she didn't know what she could do except protect her blood suppliers. It wasn't until shortly before the end of the war in the fall of 1918 that an opportunity arose that turned her from a parasite into a symbiote. A wave of flu spreading from her adopted country had swept the world.
Selene had intuitively visited a hospital in Boston one night and was looking for one of the most severely suffering patients. She was out at two o'clock in the morning because she did not want to be discovered. She wore one of the doctor's gowns as a disguise, but she was quiet and fast and therefore remained undetected. She drank from a patient, and after she fed him her saliva. She continued her tour of the hospital and drank from many more patients. At the end of her round, when she had exchanged one swallow of blood for a few drops of saliva from each of the hundred patients, she passed the first patient again. Selene could see from a distance that his temperature had dropped and his breathing was more even. Her bite, or rather her saliva had healed him!