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For years I've sworn I'd write a Vampire Hunter D - Totoro crossover. Well, I've finally done it, but I had to cheat: neither D nor, properly speaking, Totoro appears. I hope I've nonetheless managed to capture the wonder and magic of Totoro's universe. The story takes place in the same continuity as my earlier fanfic, "Meier and Charlotte: A Beginning"; having read the earlier story helps but is not a prerequisite. (It is available at the fanfic page.) Having seen My Neighbor Totoro is also not a prerequisite, but that, too, would probably make the story clearer.

This story is rated G and contains no sex or violence.

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Death. It need not be any concern of the vampire-kind, or at least that was what Meier's parents had tried to impress upon him -- Meier's parents, and the contemporaries of his youth. But the vampires he had sported with in those long-ago days were gone, his mother dead, his father departed. And the little life that had sprung up in the darkness of his existence was gone too, snuffed out like a fallen star.

The starship had an efficient A.I.; what it lacked in initiative, it compensated for in thoroughness once it was given an order. They had been in transit for the better part of a day when it occurred to Meier that Charlotte's remains couldn't be allowed to just lie untended, not unless he wanted to watch her putrefy to bones. Numbly, he discussed options with the A.I. and elected cryogenic preservation as the course to adopt at least in the interim, as that would effectually hold her in stasis with the least disruption to her body. Frozen like the coldness of space...

Stasis was an increasingly attractive choice for him as well. The ship was well equipped for a long journey, with books, electronic forms of entertainment, and viewing screens, but these held no attraction for Meier. If Charlotte could have oblivion, he could have it too, at least for a little while, and that was usually the choice of Nobility who traveled into space. After all, what was the loss of weeks or months or years when immortality beckoned?

Consequently Meier had no idea how much time had passed when the warming and freshening of the air in his coffin slowly brought him to consciousness. It took him some minutes of increasing wakefulness to slowly orient himself to his present circumstances. He was not in his castle but in a spaceship, and the events preceding his journey came back in sorrowful fragments. Charlotte was dead like so many of the Nobles, and he was going through the motions of keeping his promise to her -- that he would take her to the City of the Night, where they could be together.

Meier sat up, rubbing his eyes. "Computer, current location?"

"Stationary orbit approximately two thousand kilometers above the City of the Night. Please select a perimeter docking station."

The nearest viewing screen showed a schematic of the city; glowing dots represented the dozen available ports, and Meier touched one at random.

"Selection confirmed. Docking process initiated. Four hours, forty-seven minutes to touchdown. Approximate ETA oh three hundred hours, eleven minutes local time."

"Display realtime."

The schematic was immediately replaced by a view of their destination, the City of the Night and its immediate surroundings. The image was of course partially synthesized: vampires could see in the dark, but their technology was hampered by mundane physical laws; where visible light was insufficient for imaging, it was supplemented by infrared or replaced entirely by radar or sonar. Meier found this sort of reconstructed view very unsatisfying and made his way to the ship's main viewing window, where he could see the City of the Night with his own eyes through its reinforced but extremely clear glass.

What he had told Charlotte about the city was merely hearsay, although among his kind it had been considered common knowledge for millennia. Now he learned the truth of it. It WAS a domed city, exterior pale to reflect back the light of whatever sun shone on this world. The dome was entirely featureless, and Meier's gaze was soon drawn to the surrounding landscape. It seemed to be a vast, unbroken forest, and Meier began scanning it for signs of habitation before mentally giving himself a shake; of course everyone here lived in the confines of the city. The atmosphere might not even be safe to breathe. In any case, what was the point of traveling to the City of the Night only to set up housekeeping in the trackless, artless wilderness?

All the same, there was beauty to the gentle rise and fall of the treetops. The expanse of the planet grew larger and larger, its orientation changing as the ship positioned itself to be received at the docking station. Meier wondered about the history of the landscape, and the domed city. Had its creators deliberately set it in the midst of this greenery, or had the area changed over the millennia? Reports of the City of the Night had described only its interior, not the surroundings. And indeed, why should the Nobility concern themselves with untamed, chaotic nature? They had created magnificent technology to support themselves and fulfill their every need or desire; why would any Noble forsake what pertained and belonged to the Nobility by right?

But it was at the woodlands, and not the smooth, sterile city dome, that Meier gazed as the ship touched down at last.

There was an almost cosmic insignificance in arrival at the City of the Night. Meier delayed entering it for some time; somehow it almost no longer seemed worthwhile. When he finally passed through the airlock joining his ship and the dock, he walked through a long, smooth-walled tunnel and passed beneath an archway into a beautiful but unliving city.

From the first moment, Meier was struck by its deadness. It was utterly silent and still. There was no breeze, no birds or insects. The subtle lighting must have been accomplished by some form of chemical reaction or phosphorescence; there was no hum of electrical power. Only Meier's footsteps, his breathing and heartbeat, resounded in those streets of stillness. Carmila had said she had heard that the city was deserted, but the full implication of that possibility had not struck Meier, and he still found it difficult to assimilate. How could a place be so still? It was nearly as sterile as the space between the stars. At first Meier had wanted to call out with a halloo to see if any would respond, but after a time it seemed almost a sacrilege to think of breaking the silence. So he remained as quiet as he could and all but crept back to the ship when he felt the lethargy that signaled dawn approaching.

When he rose the next evening, he vowed that he would spend the night properly exploring the city, one way or another. Surely not all the Nobles who had come here had departed, or been slain, or withdrawn into stasis. The ship's computer downloaded and displayed a schematic of the city but had no information regarding its inhabitants. It was, however, able to tell him that no other ships were at the docking stations that dotted the city's periphery.

Meier's heart sank at this information. Of course, a ship could have brought several vampires and left some when it departed, but that seemed unlikely. But the notion that he was the only living being in the City of the Night also held an aura of unreality. At the archway where he entered the city proper, he tensed his shoulders, stretched his arms into cape-wings, and leapt into flight, counting on his preternaturally keen senses to pick up any trace of life that might be present.

Meier remembered what he had told Charlotte about the City of the Night: that it was a place of beauty, filled with structures like his own castle but decorated in a rainbow of colors; ornamented with parklike places wherein there grew exotic trees and flowers of every kind. Half of this proved true. It was indeed a city of castles, and some of them were elaborately ornamented. There were fearsome gargoyles in gleaming obsidian, gilded towers -- some even with belfries -- magnificent stonework, sometimes mosaic-like in its use of color and form. Meier couldn't help being impressed; he occasionally slowed and circled to better observe particularly well-appointed buildings. But even in his most rapt fascination it did not escape him that all this beauty was set in a world utterly devoid of life. Not only were there no animate inhabitants -- no Nobles, no humans, no horses or dogs, no birds or insects -- but not even living plants. There were plants, but they were the product of artifice. Some appeared to be real ferns or flowers or trees, but there was no life in them; they had been carefully preserved

[like Charlotte]

like the proverbial flies in amber. Others were in fact works of art, silk flowers and paper leaves. Meier wasn't sure why this left him disappointed. The jewel-like blossoms were the pinnacle of artistic achievement, and it was a vampire's supernatural sensibilities, not his eyes, that told him that the green and gleaming leaves they nested among, or proudly sprang from, had been wrought by Nobles' skills and preserved through Nobles' technology. The same technology had made it possible for him to flee the earth, had created the City of the Night...

In all its sterility and elegant silence.

It was a huge city. Its extent of course dwarfed the castles it contained. It would have been embarrassing to construct a castle that could be described as modest in any way, and just as embarrassing not to give those magnificent edifices room to spare. From end to end or side to side (all the same, since the city was circular in outline) was a lengthy flight. One thing that Meier did early on was find the city's very center. Its heart was a bed of soil, a perfect circle sunk through the pavement of what might have been called a park. Of course nothing grew there, and indeed it was dry as dust, for it was the stuff of vampires' replenishment, earth exposed for the refreshment of any traveler wearied from traversing the city's extent. Meier scooped up handfuls of it and let the dust trickle down between his fingers. Its real benefit to vampires, he knew, was derived not from its touch but from actual contact with or immersion in the substance of a planet. Even standing or sitting on a surface like this could act as a conduit for the mysterious flow that made the earth the Nobles' shelter and comfort.

Meier so wearied himself exploring the city that flight back to his ship seemed an excessive effort. As the buildings were evidently untenanted, there was surely no harm in sheltering in one for the day. His choice was a great gray hulk with rough-hewn foundations that rose up into elaborate towers, truly an earthy-looking edifice. Entering was as simple as walking in the first door he encountered. Had Meier been less tired, he might have enjoyed exploring the hallways. As it was, he made his way to the lowest level he could find and, absent a coffin, wrapped himself in the folds of his cape and curled up in a welcoming corner.

Waking up in a strange place was a bit disorienting; Meier felt almost naked without the familiar confines of his coffin. He also felt a bit like a trespasser, even though there seemed to be no one else to lay claim to the castle. Experimentally, he tried a voice command: "Computer, report."

This was met with the same vast silence as all his other efforts. Surely the castle was not without a central A.I. -- it was unthinkable. Perhaps it was programmed to respond only to certain voices, or certain commands.

Meier explored parts of the castle in desultory fashion on his way to an outlet. There were no furnishings, unless one counted the unlit sconces and chandeliers that lined the walls and dotted the ceilings. Meier made no attempt to look for light sources; he could see in the utter darkness -- though indeed, he reflected, there was little enough to be seen in this abandoned pile of stones.

He left the way he had come in but stopped at the doorway, taken aback at a scent that had been absent the morning before. It was unmistakably water -- rain.

Rain?

Meier closed the door behind him and leapt into flight. Rain in the City of the Night was unthinkable. The Nobility detested water in any form, and particularly moving water, whether a current along the ground or precipitation from the sky. The technology that had created the City of the Night would control its climate in a way that prevented meteorological events entirely. And indeed, the odor was faint -- surely not the result of rainfall from beneath the dome. But the city was sealed off from the planet's atmosphere -- where else could it come from?

A few minutes of following his nose gave Meier the answer. Behind a row of elaborate synthetic espalier-trained trees was -- Meier winced at the sight -- a breach in the dome. Where the gleaming surface touched the ground was a rent -- taller than he, jagged at its darkened edges. And outside in the darkness, rain poured down. Meier hesitantly drew nearer, then leapt back as a sudden gust of wind spattered water into the dome. Meier shook himself like a dog, although what he had met was barely a mist. It didn't matter. He was no more fond of water than any other vampire -- especially water that leapt forth to assault him.

Meier drew his cape around himself and assumed a wary stance at a respectful distance from this horror. How had the dome been breached? And given that it had been, why had repairs not been effected? If the planet's atmosphere was indeed poisonous ... but Meier's senses told him this was unlikely. He was certainly inhaling it and feeling no ill effects. And the hole ... Meier studied it from where he stood, then edged closer when he was sure the wind had slackened. The hole wasn't new. There were vines creeping in at its center, green, living vines -- the first live plants Meier had seen up close and personal on the planet. And they were invading the dome. Surely robots should have repaired it long ago.

Meier reflected then that he had seen no sign of maintenance robots. Their absence was impossible; even products of the Nobles' technology needed to be checked now and then for structural integrity. A structure like the dome would have internal security-type circuitry that would alert a central computer at the first sign of a failure. Or so Meier expected. Did the dome contain no such devices, or was the central computer not functioning? Come to think of it, Meier had seen no sign of computer surveillance or availability the whole time he'd been in the city, which _was_ strange. The Nobles relied on A.I. devices even as human nobility had relied on their servants in centuries past.

Meier watched the rain for a long time with something like morbid fascination. It made him shiver fearfully, and yet there was something powerful about it and ... Meier was surprised to realize that the sound of it was somehow soothing. He rationalized that it was a relief to hear anything after the tomblike silence of the city, but in his heart he knew it was more than that. The rain _belonged_. It belonged on this world, belonged with the plants. However terrible it might be for his kind, it was right to fall. And it did make such a peaceful sound...

When another wind gust hit him full in the face, however, Meier decided it was best to hear the rain at a somewhat greater remove. He took shelter behind the espalier row and shook himself off again, then took wing for "home": his spaceship and, more to the point, its blood synthesizer. (Although surely the city had functioning blood synthesizers; living without them was as unthinkable as living without the computers that operated them.)

After a very welcome breakfast, Meier drew more information from the ship's interface with the city's central A.I. Were there other inhabitants of the city? Were there A.I. contact points? Blood synthesizers? And could the dome wall be repaired before vines started climbing the espalier trees?

The central A.I. concerned itself with demands for its services, not the presence or absence of inhabitants. There had been no such demands for over three hundred years local time. (Closer to five hundred years Earth time.) Meier stared. Three hundred years, or five hundred? The city had been deserted for that long?

He skimmed the protocols for establishing residency, which would enable him to access his chosen castle's blood synthesizer. Raw materials were transported via a complex underground network. One could report damage to one's residence, or even request remodeling, but there was apparently no mechanism for doing the same with the dome itself. It was intended to be self-sustaining and had no provision for failure of its native maintenance mechanism.

Where Meier had hoped to at least achieve tranquillity, he was instead sliding into despair. The Nobles' technology intended to make this place a haven for his kind was crumbling at the edges, and he was utterly, utterly alone. The nearest thing to company available was ... Charlotte, and Meier retired to the side of her cryogenic chamber to gaze at her for what must have been the first time in months. The sight of that beautiful face was not a comfort; it only reminded him how close they had been to realizing their dream, and how it had truly come to nothing. Meier didn't even have the comfort of familiar surroundings. His castle, his lands, his planet were all behind him -- a lifetime away, it seemed in his solitude and helplessness. What would Charlotte have thought of this place if she had lived? Would she have seen only the emptiness and desolation? Would she have been frightened at the breakdown in technology that the breach in the dome represented? Meier certainly was, insofar as it is possible to be frightened when life offers no future prospects and death is at least an avenue to symbolic victory. Many vampires, Meier knew, had succumbed to just such sentiments on Earth as they saw their own race dying, their own futures stretching into a desert eternity. Meier had sometimes wondered why he too had not chosen some final step. Cowardice, his father would have said. But when he had told Charlotte that -- one of the very few times he had spoken of his father -- Charlotte shook her head. "You're not a coward for wanting to live, Meier," she told him. "Humans think suicide is cowardice -- to kill yourself instead of trying to solve your problems."

Meier half-smiled at her. "My father wasn't human, dear."

By that time Charlotte knew him well enough to indulge in good-natured familiarities, and she gave his nose a playful tap with her forefinger. "That doesn't mean he was right. Anyway --" and here she linked her arm into his and drew close to him "-- I don't want you to die, even if you do it being brave. Promise me you won't die, Meier."

"Charlotte, that's a great deal to ask, even of a vampire."

"Then at least say you won't kill yourself. Even if something ... even if something happens to me." Her voice dropped to a whisper. "I don't want you to die."

Meier's throat had gone tight even then, and the memory brought him dangerously close to tears.

"And I gave you my word," he told her, reaching out a pale, taloned hand to touch the cold glass that separated them. "I thought I would want to die if you died, and I never dreamed it would happen so soon. But we would both hold it against me if I were to break my word..."

Sunrise found Meier open-eyed in his coffin, wondering what honorable course he could bear.

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End part 1 of 3
Continue on to part 2