We still need man-things!

Their hate of men

 Everybody in this village knew what would happen to the unlucky man who entered the House Dimitrescu: he would be taken to a cellar, never to be seen again. 

Over the last fifty years, dozens of men have gone missing in this isolated Eastern European mountain range. Most of them were strangers of low social status who wandered around from village to village and city to city to find something to steal for profit, and a huge castle with seemingly no security guards outside was always the perfect spot for them. 

Not all men who got killed by Dimitrescus were thieves; there were also hikers who got lost or deserted soldiers who were seeking shelter. Usually, they all climbed into the basement from the firewood hatch or entered through the always unlocked main door. As they almost always did that at dusk or night, maids and the Dimitrescu family were sleeping, and there weren't people around who would start stopping them and asking questions. That meant it took a lot of "hellos" in empty halls and corridors for someone to show up, and when that eventually happened, it was too late. 

Dimitrescus had great hatred for men, and nobody in the village could fully explain why. The head of the house, Lady Alcina, was the greatest man-hater. She rarely came out of her castle to talk with villagers, but if she did, all men were called man-things. If there was someone's wedding at church, she was always there and asked the bride before the village leader and matriarch, Mother Miranda, made them wife and husband: Does a beautiful young girl like you really want to marry that man-thing, or do you better become her maid and have a chance to make more money than this wrench can ever provide to you? 

There was a story that somewhere during World War II, Alcina was raped by a group of drunken soldiers. Most older villagers believed that was the case and the reason the traumatized lady came here to this community, away from war and suffering, and never had a romantic relationship with someone. 

Alcina was a very beautiful woman; she almost always wore a long dress, partially exposing her breasts, and a wide black sunhat. Her yellow eyes, dark hair, and red lips made her impossible to look away from. But the most extraordinary, however, was her height and size: at 268 centimeters and 250 kilograms, or even 289 centimeters if you include her hat and shoes, she looked like a true goddess. How can a little man harm a woman like that? 

She wasn't always so large. Before coming to the village, she was a pretty ordinary woman. Her body wasn't nearly as big as today, and she was sick too. A hereditary blood disease called porphyria, which affected her for her entire life, was starting to break her down by the age of 44. Fortunately for her, Mother Miranda was a biologist and a doctor who somehow stopped her own aging after her daughter Eva died in 1918, and before Alcina's arrival, Miranda was making huge progress in her effort to resurrect her deceased daughter. She only needed a "perfect vessel" to complete her mission, and the first vessel candidate was a newcomer. 

Alcina didn't know that she would cease to exist if she happened to be a perfect vessel, so she was voluntarily infected with some kind of synthetic parasite called Cadou that was developed in Miranda's lab. For the desperate village leader, the experiment failed, as Lady Dimitrescu was quickly found to be an unfit vessel for Eva, but her porphyria was seemingly cured. However, a few weeks later, an extreme taste for human blood was developed, and if blood was not given to Dimitrescu for a few days, she would probably just die. 

But unfortunately, that wasn't all. The greatest side effect made middle-aged Dimitrescu grow: in the next seven months, she grew almost a meter before coming to a halt. In addition, she stopped aging too and developed ultra-fast regenerative abilities that made her body almost invulnerable.

No house in the village was able to fit her in, so Miranda had only one choice if she wanted to keep her alive: give her a castle. She did it because the currently unoccupied castle sitting on the mountainside near the edge of the village was the only place where she could live comfortably. This castle had been associated with the winemaking business since the 15th century, and Miranda needed someone to make money for her further experiments, so she helped Alcina first to support herself, and when her business started to thrive, she later made Dimitrescu her loyal taxpayer. Same happened for Karl Heisenberg, Donna Beneviento, and Salvatore Moreau, her next failed experiments, whom Miranda helped develop their own businesses too. All of them were given different parts of the village to rule.

Horror stories surrounding Castle Dimitrescu began in 1958 or a little later. By this time, Lady Alcina wasn't the only one who lived in the castle anymore. She had adopted three stepdaughters: Bela, Daniela, and Cassandra. 

Bela was the oldest of them. A blonde, quiet girl-being who liked to cook a lot and forced her servants to eat things they normally would never eat. Daniela was the youngest, a crazy red-haired bookworm who loved horror stories and torturing prisoners. A dark-haired girl named Cassandra was the middle sister. She was the wildest one, feared most by her maids and villagers. As her mother constantly needed blood to survive, she used to come to your house at night and steal some blood from you with a rather big syringe. All three sisters were originally women from different families who were kidnapped by Miranda for another horrible experiment. This time the experiment was conducted using insects, and the results were seemingly humans who could instantly switch between human form and a huge fly swarm with the same mass. So the daughters were actually the same age if the date of the experiment is counted as their birthday. They didn't remember their lives before and had to learn everything again. They weren't huge and tall like Alcina, but they still towered over an average man's head and were as strong as three of them. Lady quickly developed a bond between them and adopted them as her daughters, who could cure her loneliness.

When the first maids came to work in the castle, Dimitrescus no longer saw her servants as humans with the ability to feel pain. It is not sure what caused the lady and her daughters to lose empathy for most of them; it could be Cadou in their organism or something else, but when maids did something wrong, the punishments were severe. That included beatings and torture with different devices, and if mistakes were too big, like stealing or organizing a revolt, even death could occur. 

At first, inhumanity happened rarely. But when Alcina's new wine brand, Sanguis Virginis, became famous and won the hearts of the so-called Deep State ruling the world, the entire Eastern Europe became policeless and weakly controlled. Missing people, especially in the mountains, were just a thing nobody had the order to investigate, and maids suffering because of low wages, exploitation, or just being punished outside the law became more common. 

When Daniela, who was in a bad mood because of a fight with her sister, saw a maid named Adela accidentally drop her mother's bloody birthday cake, she went into rage, took a knife from the table, and slashed her face. The poor maid managed to escape by tossing herself through the window, only to die from her injuries later. Her uncle decided to end that reign of terror, and together with a few friends, he plotted an assassination against Alcina by using his family relic, the Dagger of Death's Flowers, the only weapon believed to be lethal to Cadou parasites. Unfortunately for him, he was caught by Bela before he could carry it out and tortured horribly in the basement with unimaginable cruelty. 

When he died, his body was buried with a dagger in a closed section of the castle. From that day on, over 60 years ago, almost no men except Heisenberg and a mysterious merchant named Duke were allowed to visit her property.