Comics: Irrational Numbers

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Written by Hannibal Tabu
Art by Giancarlo Caracuzzo
Colors by Flavia Caracuzzo
Letters/Production by Josephine Roberts

Spanning a thousand years, Irrational Numbers is the story of four people whose disparate hungers -- for knowledge, for freedom, for power and to be remembered -- led them to a deluge of bloodshed and anger.

Irrational Numbers: Addition (zero issue)

Pythagoras was a skillful mathematician and philosopher who saw something special in a rebellious slave named Zalmoxis. Together they traveled the ancient world looking for answers, and along the way they were joined by another freed slave and a powerful priestess of Hecate, and together they founded a nation that stretched across centuries and a legacy that was a blight on mankind.

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Irrational Numbers: Subtraction (1 of 5)

Once, Zalmoxis was a slave taken in by Pythagoras, one of the greatest minds of his era. Pythagoras freed Zalmoxis, made him an apprentice and took him around the world. Zalmoxis gained knowledge, love and respect. To repay his master, he sought ancient wisdom to mix ancient legacies into a new kind of monster: the vampyr. The year is 1948, and centuries after his master rejected everything, Zalmoxis stands between two vampyr tribes warring through the eras -- his Dacian countrywoman Sofia's Akousmatikoi and the Mathematikoi run by the former priestess of Hecate named Medea. Can he pull the broken vampyr nation together to stop a threat to everything they've built?

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Irrational Numbers: Subtraction (2 of 5)

Zalmoxis devised the immortal vampyr nation as a way to preserve the teachings of Pythagoras, the fabled mathematician who took Zalmoxis from slavery and gave him enlightenment. Alongside another emancipated Dacian named Sofia and an ambitious priestess named Medea, they tied together numerous traditions and magicks, including the lamia and the worship of Hecate to become something else.

Pythagoras rejected all of this, seemingly walking into the hungry sunlight, leaving Zalmoxis caught between two jealous rivals as Sofia formed the Akousmatikoi to nurture mankind as feeding stock and Medea created the Mathematikoi to consume as they pleased. He discovered an enemy at the gates, a mysterious threat called The Reaper, after centuries of keeping up the messy internecine squabbles out of the public eye. Finally, Zamoxis decided burning in the light of day was better than enduring a cold war through endless nights. Without him, the war could do nothing but heat up.

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Medea and Sofia were problems for each other: respectively running about half of the immortal vampyr nation under the banner of Mathematikoi or Akousmatikoi, locked in mortal combat ever since the frustrated suicide of their love, the nation's founder Zalmoxis. In cities around Europe, Medea and Sofia commanded forces reinventing slaughter in the streets.

Unfortunately for them, the mysterious threat known as The Reaper stalked vampyrs regardless of affiliation. The danger was at their backs during the June Mineriad in a tumultuous post-communist Romania, and both Medea and Sofia barely escaped the swing of the Reaper's falx, shocked to learn the threat came from a single person. They desperately agreed to a truce on the Stari Most, trying to come to terms when the Reaper almost caught them again and revealed his true identity after hounding them for centuries. What, exactly, had he been doing all this time?

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With their true enemy revealed, Akousmatikoi leader Sofia and Medea, head of the rival Mathematikoi, try to find a safe haven. He spent years using his powerful gift of mesmerism to create a network of disposable sleeper agents around the world, allowing him to keep an eye on the reckless vampyr nation and stymie their efforts on a global scale.

Unwilling to task the significantly more fragile human lives against the threat of vampyrism, Pythagoras travels constantly, moving from threat to threat and always keeping a vast mathematical model of the vampyr nation in his head, to track his quest to its completion. How will he address the challenge of finding his prey when they are trying to hide?

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It all comes down to this. After centuries of murder, pillage and unbridled expansion, the once proud vampyr nation is now a huddled mass of cripples, children and the weak hiding in the ruins of the Romanian Athenaeum in 1992. The Reaper, revealed at last, has cut off all avenues of support and comes to finish off the abomination of vampyrism. After this confrontation, nothing will be the same.

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