This need of yours to document everything borders the pathological.
Think of it as being for posterity.
Posterity doesn’t care. I should know. I live in it.
Alright, well, this is your chance!
Tell us your story. Convince me and the folks at home that you didn’t guzzle Betty like a slurpee.
I was born Mircalla,
daughter of the Count Karnstein in Styria, a duchy of Austria in 1680.
Austria was embroiled in the great war against the Ottoman Empire, but
such things meant little to a wealthy girl.
When I was eighteen, I attended a ball where I was murdered…
Murdered? Whoa,
you can’t tell it like that, like some boring history lesson!
This is dangerous! This is exciting!
This is flashback material! I know exactly what we need.
You don’t think perhaps this makes light of my tragic backstory?
Oh, get over yourself. Come on. Okay, so you were murdered at a ball…
[SOCK PUPPET CARMILLA:]
Lalalala, oh, how I love dancing! Oh, how I love balls!
[SOCK PUPPET VAMPIRE:]
Oh, how I love to eat you! Hom nom nom nom nom. Muahahaha.
[SOCK PUPPET CARMILLA:]
Oh, oh! I die, I die! Cruel fate but to blast the blossom of my youth!
[Dies]
Okay, what happened next?
Mother raised me.
Mother?
Not my birth mother,
but the mother I knew after death.
I knew nothing of her, except that she was very old and very wise
and had pried apart the jaws of death to enact my rescue.
[SOCK PUPPET MOTHER:]
Arise, arise! Oh, get up, you lazy thing.
[SOCK PUPPET CARMILLA:]
Now I’m a creature of the night. I can sleep until noon every day! Yeah!
The wide world… It opened before me in death as it had never been in life.
We danced in the mirrored halls of Versailles.
[Faint tango music]
We watched the stars
whirl over seas no man had named.
We saw the birth of a new world in science and philosophy and revolution.
Every night was a grand ball… a hunt… a feast.
But, every twenty years we would return here and perform a strange ritual.
[Music stops abruptly]
Mother would arrange for me to,
uh, meet a young girl. I’d be abandoned at a ball or there’d be a carriage wreck and
some kind stranger and his ward, like a niece or a daughter would be gallant enough to take me in.
Pretty soon, she and I would become fast friends.
Inseparable.
But of course, my new friend would fall ill.
I think you recognize the symptoms.
Strange behaviour. Weakness of the mind.
And before long it would be time for me to rejoin my mother in search of my next friend.
[SOCK PUPPET CARMILLA:]
Uh, yo, liquid diet? You aren’t exactly making a case for us not being a kidnapper here.
I-I was never an abductor. I was a lure.
And that’s how I met Ell.
It was 1872,
and the Metropolitan Museum of Art had just opened in New York and
I wanted more than anything to sail to see it.
But Maman insisted.
The game started off the same.
Carriage wreck, promise of shelter, fast friendship…
Only this time, nothing was a lie.
[SOCK PUPPET CARMILLA:]
I heart you so much!
[SOCK PUPPET ELL:]
No, I heart you so much!
And when the time came to take Ell to my mother, I-
I couldn’t bear to give her up.
So I planned our escape and went ahead to make preparations.
[SOCK PUPPET CARMILLA:]
Come away with me, and the world shall turn only for us!
But, um,
when the time came for Ell to meet me, disaster struck.
I had… taken great lengths to hide what I was from her.
But Maman went to her in secret and revealed my true nature in the most horrifying light.
Ell believed me to be a monster,
and led Maman to where I waited.
And so, my price for the disobedience was to watch Ell be taken away to some
certain doom
and to be sealed in a coffin of blood so that I may waste away my long centuries in the dark.
For decades, I rotted under the earth.
And then the war came.
The last great war of the modern world.
That ran the earth with tanks and mines and bombs.
So, my punishment came to an end and I walked off the battlefield in Austria to greet the 20th century.
Maman found me in Paris in the 1950s and
didn’t have the heart to reinter me.
I was of more use here, where the details had changed, but the game had not.
I was to
meet girls and make friends
and see to it that the blossoms were ready to be plucked when Maman decided.
So you went right back to abducting girls.
No, I pretended to go along.
I had no choice.
But I ruined opportunities where I could.
I sent girls fleeing back to the safety of mothers and fathers and fallback schools.
There can be…
great satisfaction in small revenges.
And I never knew what use Maman had for the girls.
It was always a secret she had kept from me, but I could afford to bide my time so I watched and I waited…
until I learned what I had truly been a part of all along.
What I had betrayed Ell to before she betrayed me.
All too tragic for sock puppets.
So you’ve been helping girls escape.
When I can.
Did you help Betty?
No.
So someone that she knew,
someone that she thought was her friend was really a vampire.
And they took her for your mother.
Yes.
Okay. So.
We find your mother and we get our friends back.
[Carmilla chuckles]
What’s so funny? We caught you.
Yeah. And, as humiliating as that was,
it doesn’t change the fact that my mom will scoop out your eyeballs and serve them in martinis.
You’re already terrified of her.
Already? What do you mean “already”? I’ve never met your mom.
Yeah.
Of course you have.
She’s the dean.