Well, ten years passed and it was my turn to go up again. They came annually and grabbed a different group once a year. That same group made a return trip in ten years’ time. We typically knew it was time, because we would see The Great Mammoth the night before. Then, everyone would say goodbye to loved ones and head off the next night with the aliens. But then something happened. For a couple of nights, we saw the spacecraft over the Black Island. A few days later, the aliens were briefly over our island. I went with a group of people, some of them from the last trip and some new, and we were abducted. I was sixteen--"
"Sixteen! At what age did you become a vampire?"
"Sixteen."
"But...why do you look thirty five?"
"I'm half Neanderthal. We age quicker than humans. Humans also aged quicker back then but not as quick as us. We hit puberty at a young age. I would say puberty started around seven or eight and between nine and ten we typically finished the process. We reached the height of an average modern human by the age of ten, but sometimes it was closer to eleven or twelve. We were lucky to not be dead from old age by thirty five. Neanderthal bodies are very ephemeral. Even without the harsh conditions of the Paleolithic, I don't know that we would have ever had the long life spans that modern humans ended up achieving. I read an article that there is evidence that our Neanderthal brains were fully formed at adult sizes by the time we were just small children of five. Obviously, modern humans have and did have a very different development."
"That makes me see you in a whole different light. I always thought of you as older. But you're actually two years younger than me."
"Believe me. I'm not sixteen anymore. I may look the same as I did at sixteen, but I have mentally grown quite a lot since the Paleolithic. Anyhow, back to my story! I was abducted and put back in the little room I remembered so well. The little woman was there, but she was very sad. She explained that they had done an experiment on the Neanderthals of the Black Island. And it had gone terribly wrong. They were being instructed by their superiors to immediately leave our skies and go back farther away into the stars. But, they felt they owed it to the people of my island to inform us to beware the Neanderthals. They had the power of wild beasts, and the aliens were unable to reverse what had happened. Their experiment was so new and unstudied that they didn't even know how to kill the infected vampire Neanderthals that they had created. All they could do was advise me to flee my island with my tribe and avoid the Neanderthals of Black Island at all costs. She didn't render me unconscious. I was suddenly beamed back down to the shore, with the rest of the group, and we went back to warn our people. And that was the part of this whole vampire business that I didn't want to tell you about. It sounds ridiculous saying that vampires are a result of space aliens conducting experiments on Neanderthals. But there it is."
"I don't have any problems with that story," Elizabeth assured him. "This whole situation I'm in seems ridiculously impossible." However, inwardly, Elizabeth did wondered if may be he was telling her a yarn. This was his way of disingenuously reassuring her that the aliens were friendly.
"Tell me something no one knows about you," he asked Elizabeth.
Elizabeth thought for a moment. There wasn't anything in her past that could rival Aaron's alien abduction story.
"I blamed myself for the death of my parents. I felt I didn't deserve the love or the money my grandfather gave me. And I felt like a burden to my brother. But now I don't feel like that anymore."
"If you don't mind my asking, I know people probably want to talk to you about this subject all the time, but what was the comic book character that your grandfather created?"
"You don't know?" Elizabeth asked in surprise. She thought everyone on the planet knew. She had never known anyone who didn't know the name of her grandfather's comic book character. More people knew the name of the character than knew the name of her grandfather. "The character is Sabertooth Kat. Her real name is Katherine Smith. She's a woman who formerly suffered from agoraphobia and lived at home with her ten cats until the age of thirty. She stayed with her parents in her little home for fifteen years when there was a giant earthquake. She lived out in the middle of nowhere, so the only building that could come crashing down on her was her home. The house actually split in half and she ran outside for the first time since she was a teenager. When the earthquake was over, she went back to her house and saw the ground had opened up. Inside the ground, she saw a giant, magical sword. And the blade was actually bone. It was a fang from a saber tooth lion. Whenever she held that sword, it gave her the strength and agility of a saber tooth lion. So she decided to go into the city and anonymously fight crime every night. She put on black spandex and a black eye mask every night while she wielded the sword."