If you've got the blood (Twenty-one pilots)

One

Our story begins with a whimpering teenager and a flask of blood.

Now, one would normally encounter Tyler Joseph in a silenced state, supine on his bed; his mind churning out thoughts that to some would be cause for concern. To him, however, they were just thoughts, long grown used to the way his mind simply was.

Not that he could say anything about these thoughts if asked. He may be messed up, but he's not an idiot. Nothing good could come out of spilling his guts. God's been good to Tyler: sparse struggles have come a cropper in his life and he'd wanted to keep it that way.

'Wanted to', did not mean that it had.

Of course, he had tried. But this struggle was proving quite difficult to overcome, and the new mix of abilities - glowing eyes he sometimes could not control; long fangs that dropped when his instincts were aroused; longer nails that were getting increasingly harder to trim - didn't help much at all.

Humanity felt like a memory, a delusion, or perhaps just an elaborate lie, to Tyler now. It was too late: his soul has been sold and the sin clung desperately to his bones. He's saturated, corrupt - sold as a slave to his evils and unable to resist.

But we're getting side tracked. Back to our story.

Tyler curls himself up and lets his mind take him back to that fateful day when his life was altered irreparably.

Or rather, that fateful night.

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