Vampires
TriadCity vampires faint at the sight of blood.
While they portray themselves in their Disney-like theme park as predators at the apex of the apex, for the most part they hire humans to prey on other humans. They’re extremely vain, extraordinarily charismatic, for the most part fabulously wealthy, horrendously elitist, and not in the least bit interested in anyone’s well-being apart from their own.
Vampirism in TriadCity is a thinly wink-winked allegory of Neoliberalism, where the Vampire Pater is Fred Hayek and the vamps erect statues to his epigones Milton Friedman, Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, Ayn Rand, the Mont Pelerin Society, the Chicago Boys, Sam Brownback, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and the American Bipartisan Neoliberal Consensus. It’s not subtle, unless you suck at Google.
The Vampire Theme Park is one of the oldest concepts in the TriadCity universe. I wrote special procedures for it in C in 1997 using the CircleMUD code base. Finishing it now is appropriate, as Neoliberalism unravels before our eyes everywhere in the world. The Theme Park feels like a fitting tombstone. Or a fitted tombstone. Some kind of heavy fit. Or heavy-handed fit.
Hints and cluelets in the Theme Park are meant to suggest subtle questions. Are the Vampires truly native to NorthEast? Or are they just now trying to muscle-in from their secure control of the South? The South is a Neoliberal utopia: everything’s for sale, the police are omnipresent, the streets are clean and free of homeless, and you never see poor people except when they stagger down from their hillside favelas to sell their kidneys. NorthEast satirizes an earlier capitalism, the 19th century Dickensian universe of corruption and cronyism which Neoliberalism idealizes. Mashed-up in our TriadCity way onto both ancient Rome and Nazi Germany. There Blackshirts rule, Elves are driven out or into camps, Orcs organize underground, slaves do the work and provide the entertainment. I think the Vampires are invaders from the future, but I could be wrong.