Personal Log: Vampires and Werewolves?!

Posted on Sun Nov 8th, 2026 @ 9:56am by Lieutenant Kate Kono

710 words; about a 4 minute read

Personal Log, Lieutenant Kate Kono

I keep thinking that if I arrange the facts in the right order, they will become something I recognize.

We went to this terrible planet expecting a survey, a conversation with the locals, perhaps a few odd readings to explain the storms. Instead we found a town that emptied before nightfall, a forest full of stakes, and things from old Earth stories moving under the moon. Wendigo. Lycans. Vampires. Dracula. The words still feel absurd in a Starfleet report. They sound like categories in a library, not things that can chase you through the mud or take the people standing beside you.

I keep looking for the mechanism. A pathogen. A telepathic field. A technology we do not understand. Some environmental effect that changes perception and physiology. There has to be a rational explanation. There always has to be one. That belief is not just training. It is the handrail I use when the universe gets steep.

But I watched a silver stake strike a creature and saw a person where the monster had been. I watched a dead signal move beyond the reach of our sensors. I heard people speak about curses as if they were weather reports, and then watched the night prove them right. I can call it an unknown mechanism. I can call it an anomalous transformation. I can write the words in a calm, precise hand. None of that changes what I saw.

Mina is gone from us. I keep trying to phrase that in a way that leaves room for a better outcome. Her combadge vanished from our instruments. Dracula said she was dead, then said he would keep her in his domain. I do not know what that means, and I hate that I cannot make it mean something simple. I hate more that some part of me is still hoping she can hear us.

Lucy is gone too. She was new to the team, and I was the one who brought her down. I vetted her file. I thought I knew what I was looking at. Then the planet took her and returned someone with fangs, a voice I recognized, and a face I could not reconcile with the woman I had recruited. I keep replaying the moment she stood over Mina. I keep hearing her speak to me as if we were still friends. I do not know what I should have done differently. I only know that two crewmen went down with us, and neither came back as themselves.

I am sad. That seems too small a word, but every other word feels theatrical. I am angry, too. At the planet, at the people who knew what waited after dark and could not or would not tell us plainly, at myself for thinking preparation meant understanding. I am angry that grief has to share space with duty. The captain has to notify families. Sam has to recover. The rest of us have to write reports and answer questions. The ship keeps moving because that is what ships do.

I am supposed to accept the supernatural as the explanation because that is what the people there call it. I cannot. Not yet. Maybe not ever. I can accept that the phenomena are real. I can accept that silver worked when our phasers did not, and that the dead do not always stay where we leave them. But calling something a curse does not explain it. It only gives the unknown a name, and names are not answers.

I know how that sounds after everything we saw. I know the distinction may be useless when something is trying to kill you. Still, I need to believe there is a reason, a process, some piece of reality we have not measured yet. If I stop looking for one, then the universe has become a place where anything can happen for no reason at all. I do not know how to stand in that kind of dark.

There is a joke about personal logs. They are never personal unless you simply do not write them at all. I used to think that was funny. Tonight it feels like the closest thing I have to a private truth.

End log.

 

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