Chapter 201
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1887
The street was busy as Christian made his way along Fourth Street. Philadelphia had grown so much since his family had originally moved there, over a hundred and fifty years ago. It was hard to believe it was the same place now. Almost a million people lived there now, which was so difficult for Christian to comprehend. Electric lights and other new inventions had brought Philadelphia into the modern age. The possibilities were endless, and he was ahead of the game.
Working in his lab on Logan Circle by day, he spent most of his evenings assisting Samuel, Morris and several others in hunting down bloodsuckers. Since the establishment of the headquarters Jordan Findley had spoken to him about nearly forty years ago, they’d taken to calling themselves LIGHTS. Originally, this change was due to the building of the training building, which the Findleys--Jordan and his wife Janette, who was now the Hunter Leader--had named the Lincoln International Guardian and Hunter Training Station after Abraham Lincoln, a Vampire Hunter who also happened to be president of the United States during a Civil War Christian had largely ignored. He’d had enough of such barbary during the Revolution. Now, twenty years after the end of the war, and Lincoln’s unfortunate assassination, the nation was booming with new advancements coming faster than the citizenry could keep up.
Christian and the others who had been working on the silver bullet and weaponry had made great strides, though they weren’t quite where they wanted to be yet. Many LIGHTS team members still weren’t comfortable firing guns. It was a work in progress, and Christian was confident they’d have precisely what they needed in order to ensure Guardians felt safe, and Hunters weren’t likely to shoot and kill their teammates, within a few years. As for the other items he’d been working on, they’d developed a process for transmitting messages across great distances utilizing electric signals. In order for this specific technology to work, they would need to put large towers in place, which was proving most difficult. They’d have to determine where best to place them, acquire the land, build the towers, and not let anyone know about it. In the meantime, Christian was experimenting with the use of radio towers and radio signals. There was no way to secure the transmissions at present, though, and he was concerned that someone might pick up the frequencies. More tests and studies needed to be done. He was considering inventing a special language that only LIGHTS members would know how to speak.
Jordan’s vision of flying machines was still a ways off as well, but with the invention of the motor coach, Christian had a whole new field of opportunity to play with. He could certainly see these vehicles coming in handy in the near future, particularly if they were able to scale them so that several team members could ride to a location together. The speed was another factor he was looking forward to improving over the years. Jordan had recently purchased a Bentz-Patent Motorwagon for him to run his experiments on, and he was finding the machine quite fascinating. He was sure he’d be able to modify the engine in a way to make it more useful to the team, given the proper amount of time and necessary equipment.
Another advancement by team members was the invention of an injection that allowed a new recruit to Transform more quickly. Christian had been studying the elements within the blood that allowed the children of Guardians and Hunters to Transform once they reached the age of seventeen. He’d done quite a bit of studying the information discovered by the Swiss physicist, Friedrich Miescher and several others that led him to look at the double helix within the body's molecules. When Christian and other LIGHTS team members had made the discovery that there were specific elements within these molecules in Hunters and Guardians that were not there in regular humans, it allowed them to isolate those elements and experiment on them. The study was led by Dr. Levi Morrow, a brilliant scientist who’d come up with a way to speed the process of Transformation. Though it was still painful for most and could take a few days, it was much better than the natural process most of them went through that could be excruciating and last for several months, even a year. Christian’s Transformation hadn’t been too uncomfortable, but he knew he was one of the lucky ones, and he was fascinated with Dr. Morrow’s study. He’d had the opportunity to work with the scientist a bit while he was based in New York City, but recently he’d taken his study south to the island of Roatan where a group of Guardians had retired years ago to live in peace and relative quiet since they had put in their fair share of Vampire hunting. Those that didn’t want to ask a Hunter to kill them had little choice but to try to find a place that made them happy, and even though Christian had yet to visit the island, from what he’d heard, it was quite lovely.
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