Hello, my ever faithful readers. Thank you for joining me today as I at last adorn my blog with a new ‘most recent article’. Of course, there is only so much meaning to such an act, but I must admit I feel drawn to a certain spiritual appreciation of the new beginning it can imply. Here, now, I hope to shift this manifestation of myself into an era of desperately necessary progress, and in the same key-stroke, displace what I must desperately also hope will be known going forward as my nadir. It is a tentative step, but that is the nature of anything which is attached to reality. Tentative, but promising.

That is to say, I have done my job. I have worked with the rest of the Paranormal Studies department to develop a study of enthrallment, I have made use of this transformation which I might euphemistically describe as ‘peculiar’ to aid its aims (and to force my begetter to aid its aims), and I have followed through every step, from the ceaseless torrent of blood sampling to the yet more ceaseless torrent of data analysis that has followed. Indeed, I struggle to explain the raw sensation I have endured for this— I suppose a human might imagine the experience of manning one of those ‘free sample’ booths all day, while also being required to consume an unrelated charcuterie board once per hour. Or, perhaps, while engaging in sexual relations with a perfect stranger, once per hour. For a week.

It may be better to simply leave it at ‘sensory exhaustion’. The point is, this was a difficult project, but barring a minor intrusion that was handled without casualties, the whole exercise has thus far gone off without a hitch.

It is difficult to overstate my satisfaction at this. To accomplish such things was the purpose of my turning, and even still that purpose burns deeply within my heart. It is a sort of progress which in all my years toiling away at this downright Sisyphean career I had lost any ability to hope for. And, despite my unwieldy metaphor earlier, I cannot even say it was altogether unpleasant.

There is certainly a strange satisfaction now, as I carry out followup interviews and data collection throughout this week, in sitting with people who have shared with me this terribly intense thing and seeing it through new eyes. There is satisfaction, too, in dutifully attempting to make the participants who relocated feel comfortable in their new dwellings such that we may study that comfort in relation to the ‘home’ factor. There was also a much more expected satisfaction in following up with one of them personally last night.

…I will maintain the wording of that line for the sake of openness, but I should clarify that it is not a euphemism for some back-alley assault. I mean that I had a date with one of the participants the day after her course in the study was completed, and that as a part of that date, I drank her blood. After which I released her, of course, without concern for any self-destructive decisions we had the potential to make. I have grown quite adept at this process by now, so such restraint is far simpler than it once was… but I digress. I know those less charitable of you have already begun shouting your ‘doth protest too much’es just loudly enough to be heard over the screech of grinding axes.

The point is, with this act, I draw ever closer to the dream of stability. I have 5 regular, unenthralled donors out of the 7 I need, and I have proven my capacity to behave reasonably in a crowded and professional scenario. It would be naïve to suggest that I am beyond failure, of course, but I at least now believe myself when I say the worst of my fledgeling instincts can be averted. Or, at least, I believe that it would be reasonable to believe myself. The gap between evidence and belief is forever wide, but it can begin to close.

I am sure, for those of you who latch so viciously to every minute detail of my life, that that would be enough of an update. However, that is all only incidental to my true purpose here. Yes, much as I still remind you that these are only preliminary results for further investigation, and lest I rant about the replication crisis again, data has emerged which I could have never expected. There is something here of extreme interest.

Our study procedure was rather complex, and the full details are best left for the more comprehensive paper I have already begun to draft, but what is important at the moment is that we made extensive use of MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging, or Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Imaging as it used to be called). You’ve heard of it before— it is responsible for generating the sorts of image you might call a ‘brain scan’. Perhaps you know the machines we made use of as ‘those big tube ones’. Skim Wikipedia if the knowledge still does not come to mind.

What’s important for our purposes is that the MRI machine operates by generating a large, oscillating magnetic field, which excites the hydrogen atoms prevalent in water, fat, and of course, blood. These then radiate energy we can detect, telling us much about the underlying tissue and its activity.

There are a number of ‘sequences’ with which we can apply this technique, each adapted to particular scenarios and used for diagnosing particular conditions— in our case, we chose to perform a ‘functional MRI’, which uses Blood-oxygen-level Dependent (BOLD) imaging to track the movement and distribution of blood in the brain. This, when pared down with absolute mountains of statistical analysis, is the way many studies over the past decades have watched the brain ‘light up’ with activity (and how many have too-confidently asserted the same).

There have been numerous attempts to compare such scans between enthralled and non-enthralled humans in the past few decades (Engelbert, 1979; Leone, Rawlins, and Pike, 2001; Henderson, 2009) and numerous infamously failed attempts which were initially passed off as actual studies (Jackson, 1984; Rawlins, 2002; Henderson, 2009), but none have found any statistically significant difference. It is the same story as ever: thralls are obviously subject to some form of impairment, but by all accounts they have the same brains, the same blood, the same hormones, the same DNA, everything. The lack of any specific physical evidence of impairment is infuriating for everyone except insurance companies who don’t want to pay for therapy and slutshaming AM shock jocks who don’t want to consider thralls victims at all.

My vampiric status and the begrudging yet well-behaved cooperation of my begetter, on the other hand, have allowed us to look where no one ever has before, and where no one but the late Dr. Rawlins has ever tried to. We’re able to image the brain not only before and after enthrallment, but also while enthrallment is sinking in. We had no way of knowing if that advantage would pay off, but despite all odds, we might be onto something.

I’ll get to the headline already: if the fMRI data comes from the interaction of magnetic fields with blood, then what could it possibly mean that certain parts of the brain radiate nothing while enthrallment is setting in? What, indeed, could it mean if those parts return to normal afterwards?

I phrase this as a question to remind you all that I do not know the answer. All I know at the moment is that this ‘blackout’ effect was not the sort of thing we would expect to see in an fMRI scan, at least not so prominently¹. What’s more, the effect was observed near-exclusively in structures associated with the limbic system, and it was consistently observed across all test subjects, irrespective of age, body type, sex, gender, race, bite location, and almost anything else we could think of. The only exceptions were that it was less pronounced in subjects I bit who were previously familiar with my work… and that it was even less pronounced in all subjects who were already enthralled.

The way I understand it, with the data we have right now, this should mean that the ‘blacked out’ areas (particularly the nucleus accumbens, the fornix, the amygdala, and a few others) were, in proportion to enthrallment experience, either subject to:

1. A dramatic decrease in blood oxygenation, meaning also a dramatic lack of activity;
2. Some unexplained magnetic shielding with no clear source which caused total isolation; or,
3. A very consistent equipment or measurement error with no precedent, which also was less prominent for a very specific subset of people.

I was thinking that the first option could have led to something like brain damage, but with around half of the followup resting-state scans in now, it’s looking like we’ll be able to confirm existing results on the question of whether anything changes post-enthrallment. All the scans we have so far match up very cleanly with their respective pre-enthrallment resting-state scans in terms of physical structure—rendering ‘brain damage’ an implausible explanation—and none display the ‘blackout’ effect or anything like it. This also may provide some assurance against the possibility of the third option, though certainly not total assurance.

As I said, this is completely up in the air. Whatever we’re dealing with is not something I think anyone has ever seen before. But in a field where no one has conclusively discovered anything in the past two decades (myself included), that is the best news I could have possibly hoped for. Even better, the correlation with enthrallment status and the focus on parts of the brain associated with decision making, reward response, addiction, fear, and emotional familiarity would seem to suggest a clear connection to enthrallment, even if we have absolutely no clue what that connection is.

Indeed, there’s no need to jump to conclusions yet. In terms of the scientific method, we haven’t even reached the point of a hypothesis; what we have here is essentially a great big observation and nothing more. It is certainly a new one, though, which is why I wanted to spread this information to the world now. Perhaps the rest of the data we have collected will give us more context— I can hardly comment much on all that before we’ve even finished our followups.

That will be done at the end of the week, at which point we should have much more information with which to compare the efficacy of the three deprogramming recordings I created for this. Those differ mostly in terms of how focused they are on myself versus being focused on the subject—mostly to confirm what intuition has shown me so far—but they also differ in a few other ways. It will certainly be lovely to have some actual data to back up what I have already said, if such data would exist.

Then, we’ll mostly just be focused on the ‘home’ aspect of things, which will be a longer-term matter. Only a fraction of the test subjects involved in the enthrallment study were rehoused, and there were only a handful of people willing to rehouse but unwilling to participate in the enthrallment study, so the data will necessarily be of much lower quality than I’d like. There will be data, though, which is more than we had before.

There is even data now— a few people have already begun to feel ‘at home’ by their own reckoning, which has corresponded with moments when I suddenly found myself unable to analyze their data. These were all people who were moving to the Bay Area anyway, but I couldn’t speak to the significance of that with incomplete data. Besides, if the psychological perception of a ‘home’ indeed is the trigger for the ‘home’ phenomenon somehow, I would suspect that any study of it must necessarily pollute the data on onset time of ‘home’ status.

I’ve experienced it before, a long time ago, when I was still struggling to recover from Violet Russel-Gray’s influence. I would spend much time in those days worrying over whether some place was ‘really’ my home, ‘really’ safe from her kind, and the only likely effect of that sense of unease ironically would have been to make the onset of ‘home’ slower. So it must be in a situation like this, where the needs of the study demand a timely onset, and the participants know that.

This is already a great pressure, and on top of that, some participants lack a sense of place in the world after some traumatic event, some fear of attack by myself or my begetter (given I could find out where they are staying), and some simply have OCD. To our collective frustration, these are things which easily instill that same persistent unease and block the very thing we are all hoping for. Meanwhile, participants without these difficulties may be able to unblock themselves deliberately and force ‘home’ status through for the study's sake. In this way, we probably won’t be able to rely on the onset time to tell us almost anything about anything, so we'll have to rely on the other data and hope that's enough for now.

But enough about all that. There are numerous ruminations about blood flavors and charisma and any number of other things I could share now, but I don’t think further ruminating will do anyone any good. I have an awful lot more data to analyze, so it will be best to get back to that. Until next time, please stay safe, wherever you are.

1. Some other applications of MRI, such as Inversion Recovery in cases of Multiple Sclerosis, would create extreme contrast between tissues which would show up as black spots in the scan, but even those would return more data than we saw here, and the results would not change on further scans. Also, we surely would have noticed by now if enthrallment consistently caused the development of otherwise diagnosable neurological issues. Or, I would have noticed, at least.

Comments

cakegirl
wooooah that’s weird 😯 do u think that makes vampires magnetic or smth?

📝Dr. Luma
If it were that simple, someone would have noticed this by now. However, I’m certainly happy in light of this that our ‘home’ recorders happened to be equipped with magnetometers. Perhaps we’ll see something else.

cakegirl
ooo interesting…

seeker_of_knowledge
Did you also equip them with a bullshit detector? No, as usual, you’re far too much of an absurd parody of yourself to even attempt to come up with compelling lies. I don’t even know why you bother to make up new ones every time.

DEUS_VULT_420
hte SCIENTIFIC stylings are but a paath to THE TRUTH of THE LORD! Decades o fSTRUGLGE andyet we find THE LORD'S PARTICEL hidden inside mere matter… your path must be the same, THE PATH of THE ADVETSERY… may light find yuo

Gerogero
cool

ThisThrallObeys
Your fangs were so lovely, Dr. Luma… I only wish I didn’t live so far away! But don’t worry, I’ll be taken care of, hehe. Also, are you sure my brain isn’t just damaged in a way the MRI machines can’t detect? My Mistress is always very insistent that she's damaged me, so…

📝Dr. Luma
I understand your position, and the ultimate uselessness of saying this, but you are no more ‘damaged’ than an unripe apple. Do not trust anyone who tells you otherwise.

ThisThrallObeys
Ok but my Mistress told me otherwise

📝Dr. Luma
Then perhaps that is something to ruminate on.

seeker_of_knowledge
So you finally admit that you don't care about the damage done to the victims of enthrallment? Beyond parody. At least you're being honest for once.

DEUS_VULT_420
yes you are DAMAGED, but there is hope… THEREIS HOPEP! ALL canb e HEALD in the power of THE LORD! you must have FAITH…

ThisThrallObeys
Yeah I know I just don’t care lol

Mistress Evelyn
Indeed, this one is beyond saving by the pitiful powers of the Christ… for she has been taken as a virgin! Your invocations have no purchase here, pathetic knight!

DEUS_VULT_420
No… NO… there is always HOPE… ALWAYS!!!!!!!11

Mistress Evelyn
You will die for your false hope.

DEUS_VULT_420
NO! Hope will never ddie… she shall be SAVED!

Mistress Evelyn
Hope always flickers to dust in the end, you bothersome do-gooder.

⯈ Show 45 More…

CrinchoJinjo
I mean, what is there to say? That sounds like it must have been such a hard time for you in that room all day… And that must have been nothing BUT wall-to-wall, endless, day-in-day-out, unceasing, constantly streaming, basically forever and ever-lasting, basically, like, an infinite number of SEX FREAKS. I’m just glad you’re okay now! And the other people, too, even the SEX FREAKS, I mean, everyone deserves peace, right? I think you said that once and I’m ALWAYS thinking about it.

ch
Woah that’s kind of wild. Do you think you’re genuinely onto something here? Like, we could actually figure out how people get enthralled? How far does this go, then? Like would you be able to help people suffering from that? What else could you do? Sorry my mind’s kind of racing at the prospect, like god, imagine. People getting freed without hunting, being able to defend yourself, talking to a vampire without it being such a whole fucking thing. It's fucked up

📝Dr. Luma
I’m happy you share my dream on this matter, though I should caution that anything substantive is a long way off. Even with everything going perfectly, I expect it would take years before any of this knowledge could be applied in any way. And of course, there’s never any guarantee that knowledge gets applied towards righteous ends.

ch
That’s fair. It’s just nice to imagine I guess

Mistress Evelyn
Ah, yes, Mistress Stoica. Always so eager to spread these peculiar mistruths… I am fascinated by your level of detail, truly. It must be so lovely just to be in the room where you construct them.

seeker_of_knowledge
Finally, SOMEONE is making some sense here. See, “Luma”? It wouldn't be such a bloody FARCE if you would simply ADMIT your deception!

Octopussy46
Wait dude who are you what the hell are you on about

Mistress Evelyn
Oh you need not worry yourself about such things as that, supple virgin…

Octopussy46
Ok so some weird larper got it

Mistress Evelyn
Believe what you will!

Dr. Linda Ashford
I’m happy this ordeal is wrapping up for you, Luminita. I can certainly imagine it being a great burden to endure.

BloodyMary
It wouldn’t be such a burden if you people would just get real for five seconds! This could all be so easy!

SmallManForYou
just wanted to Say. You Know. it’s good Work you’re Doing. thanks

BloodyMary
That’s it? You saw some weird stuff in a brain scan? After all this time, that’s your precious ‘knowledge’, Luma? Brain scans are weird all the time! Especially ones you got off freaking WIKIPEDIA??? Don’t you know that people can lie on Wikipedia?

📝Dr. Luma
I only asked that people skim Wikipedia to remind themselves what sorts of scans were done. I accepted long ago that people will do so anyway, and it’s hardly a bad resource for a quick refresher on common knowledge. The brain scans themselves are unrelated, obviously, and the ‘weird’ phenomenon is less the ‘weirdness’ of an optical illusion and more the ‘weirdness’ of an apple flying upwards.

BloodyMary
UGH, whatever. “Blah blah blah it’s like apples not pictures Mary” of course you don’t get it.

📝Dr. Luma
I see no need to defend myself further.