For those who couldn’t guess from the thread title, I’m a goin’ vampire hunting!
Now, what always bothered me about watching people kill vamps is that they tended to use a wooden stake. That puts me much to close to the vampire for my personal preferance. Sometimes a crossbow is used, but I have no experience in using one of those, and still doesn’t have nearly the range of a gun. So, is it possible to get wooden bullets to work? I know that many people make their own rounds, so would it be possible to just substitute a wooden bullet for a metal one? Would the force of the explosion just destroy the bullet and possibly cause debris to get lodged in the barrel, making the gun dangerous for me to use? Could I just use less gunpowder to compensate?
The second part:
To make sure that I myseld nver get turned into a vampire, I want to have a small piece of wood implanted in my heart. So,
a) Is there a way to do this that won’t kill me? It doesn’t have to be big. I was thinking perhaps get a regular stent implanted and on the outside of the stent have a small piece of wood, so when the stent in inserted, that piece of wood is ushed up against the coronary artery, or some other large enough blood vessel in the heart.
b) would there be any doctor willing to do this? I imagine that pesky hippocratic oath might get in the way.
And the third part:
I also plan on injecting myself daily with holy saline. This way, if a vamp bites me, he will get essentially a mouth full of holy water. Will this work? Are there rules about what kind of water can be blessed and become holy? Will it lose it’s effect if I mix it with my blood?
Unless you can ensure that the bullets won’t come out the other side of the vamp, you’re in trouble. The stake doesn’t kill them, it just immobilizes them. If someone pulls out the stake before the job is done (by filling the mouth with garlic and cutting off the head), the vampire will regenerate and live to kill again!
There are British Practice rounds chambered for the .303 Enfield that have a wooden bullet. They are available in mass quantity at surplus prices. In the Buffyverse this alone would be enough to kill a vamp…the garlic and beheading isn’t necessary.
You should read The Cowboy and the Vampire. It’s a very funny book in which a female newspaper reporter from New York travels to Wyoming to do a story on “the last real cowboy.” The reporter turns out to be the prophesied queen of the vampires, even though she doesn’t know it. She and the cowboy fall in love, and they end up battling against a whole horde of vampires from rival clans.
The cowboy’s buddy is a real weapons fanatic, and he modifies a gun to shoot wood-stake bullets (among other entertaining weapons).
The thing about wooden stakes is that the stake’s purpose is to make it impossible for the reanimated corpse to get up out of the coffin. Wood is a natural object, and so would have some extra juju against the unnatural living corpse that is a vampire, but really what you’re doing is clamping that sucker down so it can’t get up.
Some B-movies have done what you suggested with wooden bullets. I see no reason why they shouldn’t work except perhaps the ballistic quality might not be that great.
Blade uses silver bullets which I always thought was for werewolves.
A friend of mine who was also concerned about this experimented with wooden bullets. Even with the hardest wood he could find, any powder charge powerful enough to kill somebody would kill the bullet first, i.e., splinters were all that came out of the barrel, in a cloud that dispersed quickly enough to be ineffective against anything except eyes at point blank range, and the gases from a blank would work just as well for that.
In a similar vein (heh!), he found that if you take crosshatched bullets and line them with silver, the silver burns off when the gun is fired and would probably be ineffective against vampires or werewolves. Solid silver bullets were deemed too expensive for purposes of the experiments.
As Cecil explains the method of killing a vampire varies greatly depending on which country you are in. So if you are going vampire hunting you might like to include the following in your kit: Vinegar, wooden steaks, axe, coins, poppy seeds and a lemon. However, make sure you don’t go to sunny Spain on your world tour of mythical slaughter, those suckers don’t fall quite so easily.
Part one, a bullet could be made strong enough by vacuum infusing it with a binder, Thompsons water seal works well. You have a very tough material similar to Micarta. Problem is even the most dense wood is far dense than the least dense metal used in bullets so it will lose velocity quickly and have littler target energy.
What fail-safe do you have in place to ensure you’re staking a real vampire and not an ordinary living person who just happens to be sleeping inside a casket?
Depending again on the mythos, that would only be effective (possibly) if the star-thrower was Jewish. The idea that a “holy symbol” by itself is sufficient would make it impossible for vampires to operate. Look around at all the cruciforms. I have a cement block wall in my apartment; does each meeting of four bricks make a vampire-repelling “cross”? So relatively recently it’s been attached to the mythos that faith in the symbol is required for it to be operable against a vampire. See for example “Fright Night” and the issue of X-Men with a vampire-huntin’ Kitty Pryde.
And if we’re talking Buffyverse, crosses have very little/no repellant value. Good for burning if brought in contact with vampire flesh but the old-school cape-over-the-face cowering at the sight? Not so much.
;j