Don't know if anyone remembers my previous posts but this is where I now expect what I said to come into play. Laurie is either dead or turned and this is a choice that will need to be accommodated with time and resources moving forward due to the significant branching this now creates.
Im suspecting her involvement in the story to either nosedive or something, something siring rules forces her to practically bow out of the story.
Looking forward to the next update to see how this will be handled. Merrick hasn't received more than about a dozen renders since his branching which is what I expect now for Laurie assuming her offscreen death isn't a pump fake.
I mean, this is basically how CYOA works, because time and other resources are finite. It's going to be difficult for the devs to not disappoint, considering the amount of setup that went into Laurie's character arc. It's a little weird how they didn't do more with her character, before introducing a major branching.
She was introduced as the typical "slice of life" childhood friend romance. She even had this scene, where she went: "I'll give your mom a kiss for you, but you have to kiss me first uwu." That's also why I always was annoyed with how her thralling was handled without much drama. I felt like her losing agency in her love for the PC, because she essentially became physically and mentally addicted to him, was pretty tragic. But none of the characters really seemed to care.
The pieces fell into place too easily imo. We had little glimpses of her addiction and the Sharon-PC-Laurie love triangle, but nothing really major. And now everything just gets alleviated with her
either dieing or turning into a vampire off screen.
Compare her to the PC, who was left for dead by Calisto, had to be rescued from the hospital by Sharon and was out for like a week. She's already up and running again at the end of this short episode, even though it was Sharon's first time turning someone and she's not even sure she did it right. To me it seems like Laurie's character arc was set up for romance, drama and tension, but the tension never came and now her climax just happened off screen.