Man am I hungry.... (Journal)

[Mannequin]

Her hunger never seemed to ease and this made her a bit grumpy at times. She now knew that is was just an unfortunate thing that could happen when someone was turned and that even if it felt like it, she wasn't going to suffer any real negative effects from the hunger that constantly gnawed at her....she would just be lot more cranky than someone who wasn't always looking for their next meal, and as she knew all to well it could lead too 'over indulgence,' which in turn lead to projectile vomiting....
....chewing on the blood pack she felt slightly better, she might have to figure out a way of making some sort of 'blood lozenge', much like the ones smokers use when trying to quit their habit at times. She wasn't to sure on the chemistry involved in such a venture, she had been a meth cook not a real chemist in her life before turning, but she could already see a decent revenue potential is she could produce something that helped to take the edge off a hunger like hers..... looking down at the now empty blood bad she frowned...it was never enough....not even close....the moment it ran out the hunger had come back with all its usual force. On the plus side, it did add degree of extra violence to her killing....

[Mannequin]

"This is really starting to get on my frikking nerves now..." Quin grumbled as she tried to blink mascara out of her eye. Trying to apply make-up when you didn't have a reflection was mostly a case of trial and error....well....mostly error...... sure she had no reflection and weirdly this seemed to effect any clothing she wore as well, but she could see the mascara brush and even though the make-up did a vanishing act the moment it was on, with a steady hand and bit of concentration she could just about apply it. Of course she had to go by 'feel' as to if she had got it right....judging by the reaction she got from people on the street the first few nights after her turning she wasn't getting it even close to right, but she still tried when ever she had access to a mirror...for what good it did. Large sunglasses drew even more curious looks after dark so she had given up on them by and large, unless she was rocking the goth/punk look that night and then it didn't matter so much, smeared make-up was just part to 'the look' when you added in the ripped tights, assorted chains, spikes and leather combat boots.
Glumly she used a wet-wipe to rid her eye and the surrounding are of the rogue mascara, she'd got the other eye right (or at least it 'felt' about right) but she was starting to get very hangry having spent nearly a full hour trying to 'putting her face on' so to speak. She'd all but given up on eye shadow these days, lip stick was relatively easy and eye liner was a case of 'hit and miss' most nights.
"**** this, close enough.." she quickly scooped the assorted tubes, brushes and used q-tips into her bag, making sure not to leave anything of hers behind she looked the small room over to make sure she hadn't forgotten anything. She didn't think there was much chance of her being picked up with her new found ability to dig into the sewers at a moments notice, they were bound have come across her DNA at one of the 'crime scenes' by now as she hadn't really taken the time to cover her tracks. Quin wanted her art to be known through out the world, but so far they had kept the real details of her work out of the press, simply describing the scenes as looking like 'slaughter houses'....she may not be the sharpest tool in the box but she knew that this was their attempt to draw her out. She'd pitched a fit the first few times before she had figured that out...well, Anton had really....he really seemed to appreciate her art and when she was freaking out over the lack of detail in the news reports he'd calmly explained that it was just more cop tricks and not to sweat it. It hadn't really improved her mood much on the matter, but sooner or later photos of her art were bound to end up leaking out.

She was going to miss him, it just wasn't a good idea to have a loose end like him around though and her adoptive sire would probably not be pleased if she'd let him carry on running about the human world freely.
It was a real pity, she'd really liked his eye for her work...she was sure he'd have been pleased with how it had gone tonight... taking one last look at the skinned body of her old friend she walked out into the night, her high heels clicking into the distance.....

[Mannequin]

Sitting at the bar Quin stared into her beer watching the bubbles rising and eruption from the surface.
It had been slow night...very slow....she'd hit three bars and so far and hadn't even had a sniff of 'business'. She couldn't think why, her make-up was on pretty well (no one had stared, giggled or even looked twice for once), she was dressed in the tightest most revealing dress she owned and short of having a sign above her head with the words "Come and get it boys!" written on it she'd done all she could to look 'availible'.
If this kept up she'd have to go poking around the slums for her breakfast, an idea that didn't really appeal but seeing as the cops were crawling all over town since her last artistic venture there wasn't much choice. She knew she didn't have to feed every night, but she found that if she didn't she became so monumentally hostile that she'd find herself ripping someones throat out by the end of the night anyway, so she might as well just find some guy or gal before this happened and feed in a more discreet manner. With all the crazy humans she'd been told about by her adoptive sire it was unwise to go running around leaving severed limbs all over the place, she had to be quick, quiet and clean up afterwards. Of course she carried on with her 'art' on the side and never fed from the person who was going to be her materials for the evening, though she might have to put serious thought to giving it up with her new 'lifestyle'....it depressed her a great deal that she would have to remain unknown now that she had grown a set of fangs. Sure the perks were great, but now she couldn't just retire to a cell in a maximum security prison with three squares meals a day and an actual bed to sleep on. As retirement plans go it was the best she could have hoped for in her old life, and you never know, she might have even had a chance to practice her art a few more times on the inside before she landed up in solitary for the rest of her natural life. She'd hoped to go into 'live art' whilst in general pop, create a few interesting pieces to walk the halls after she was whisked away to a single five by five foot cell, but that was out of the question now.
*This bar is dead....time to blow...*
Shrugging on her bag she left a ten on the bar and made for the door, maybe she would find someone to nibble on at the next one?

[Mannequin]

This bar was no better than the last.
*Where is everyone tonight...* Quin wondered sighing, the night had been a real bust. She'd hoped that she might not have to dine on winos tonight, for once she didn't fancy a gut full of tainted blood. Usually she sought out the cities assorted chemically dependent denizens as her preferred choice, but tonight she felt like a change. It's not like she was expecting to stumble across some vegan fitness enthusiast or some muscle bound beach body that only drank mineral water as there beverage of choice...hell someone that just stuck to eating organic once a week would do....
*...four bars....forty bucks....geeze I should have stuck to the slums...at least then I might have snagged a bag of meth in the process...* she stared into her cocktail wishing she'd ordered a beer, at least then she could have watched the bubbles rise.

She generally didn't miss much from her old life, to be honest waking up with a new aversion to sunlight had been just the thing she'd needed after the last batch had blown. Her habit had been off the scale for a while, she had barely made the 'expected' amount the last few times because she had done so much 'quality control' and then *KABOOM!* the kitchen had turned into a pile of smoking rubble....if D.man had caught up with her she'd have owed him more money than she could have ever pay back and he would have known it.... so she'd probably be at the bottom of a river by now, she'd wouldn't have been able to hide for long with a habit on the level she'd had at the time. Sooner or later word would have got around that his 'cook' was alive and scoring, then someone would sell her out for a couple of shards. Not that she would have held it against them, she'd have sold out her own mother for a quick hit back then.
Maybe that was why she was always feening for blood?
Maybe her brain had been so fried by her habit that the wires had become locked into 'screaming addict'?
She didn't know and right now she didn't care, all she wanted to do was sit and mope for a while before she had to make the all too familiar trip to the slums....

[Mannequin]

She'd been on her way down town when she'd stumbled cross a street performer doing magic tricks on the sidewalk.
She figured the guy must be high as a kite or out of his mind to be pulling rabbits out of hats at 3am in the 'bad end' of town, either that or it was the most elaborate way to peddle narcotics she'd seen in a long time.
Stopping to watch for a minute or two she soon ended up giggling when the poor fool had sent a deck of card flying in all directions, but rather than scurry around gathering up the spilled deck he shook his sleeve a few times and the cards sprang back into the palm of is hand 'Hey Presto!'....Quin had been so delighted she squeaked with excitement which in turn caused the night magician to laugh and give her with a goofy smile.
A few hours later she was picking her clothes up off his apartment floor with a warm glow inside her. She hadn't had any 'action' since she had been turned and was pleasantly surprised to find that everything still worked down there....it did help that the guy seemed to know his way around a girls body with some expertise and wasn't freaked out by her complete lack of hair...anywhere... in fact he seemed to find it rather pleasing which was a first in Quins experience.

She carried on flipping cards into the top hat as her magical lover snored loudly next to her, though her hunger was no weaker than usual she'd decided she like this one so she'd finish up her game and leave. Looking down at him she wondered what he was dreaming about...and if she should leave a note...? Probably not, what was she expecting ....romance? HA!
Quin sighed and started putting on her shoes, she might bump into him again some night and see if he was up for a second round, but for now she needed to get a wiggle on if she wanted any chance of quick nibble before sun up.

Quietly she let herself out of the apartment making sure the door locked behind her, if she hoped to meet up with the guy ever again it would have been unwise to leave his door hanging open...
...Someone like her might walk in...

[Mannequin]

The club was noisy, just they way Quin liked it.
She'd been invited by a close friend to this little diamond in the rough of a club a few years ago and had been blow away by what lay behind the lack luster grey door. Sure she'd had to blow the guy on the door but that was all par for the course in her life at the time, it was only after she'd got inside that she'd found out that it hadn't been strictly needed and that twenty bucks would have avoided the bruising to her knees and bad after taste in her mouth. The doorman had gone missing a couple of nights later not even stopping to pick up his pay check, which didn't so much as cause a batted eyelid from the management staff of the club. It seemed they had a high turn over rate for staff at this kind of place, which when you took into account the sort of 'floor shows' they put on wasn't a surprise.

Tonight show was pretty tame all in all, just some naked chick in a cat mask crawling around on all fours and rubbing herself up against people in the front row...oh....from the crowd a guy wearing a pig mask pushed his was into the arena, a doberman barking and straining at the leash leading the way....
Quin decided that she'd rather skip the show and headed to the bar, she'd seen plenty of strange things in her time but she wasn't interested in adding what ever the hell was going to happen for tonights entertainment to the list.
Even if she couldn't stomach booze anymore she liked the act of ordering a drink, it added a sense of normality to her life that she craved, a sense that even though she wasn't strickly human anymore that the world was still as it was even if she wasn't. Over the din of heavy metal music she could hear the screams of 'cat woman', from the sounds of things she must have upset he wrong sort of people somewhere along the line. She probably thought she was going to be doing something else with the pooch in question (it wouldn't be the first time in this place) but judging by the kinds of scream she was hearing and the growing metallic scent in the air an all together different act was taking place.

The ever present hunger in Quin roared inside her veins as the scent of blood grew stronger, pushing it down hard she stared into her drink watching the ice cubes shine in the whiskey. Soon enough the screams stopped and the cheering crowd parted to let the clean up crew onto the floor. She liked the way they were dressed as evil clowns, it added a much needed element of 'fun' to the proceedings and never failed to make her smile a little. Maybe the one she had found in the sewers a few nights ago had been one of them?....she hadn't wanted to hang around too long to find out that night, the sewers were full of random weirdos and some could be dangerous to a person like Quin. It was hard to believe that she had been in the city so long and hadn't had a clue about all the 'monsters' that lurked in it. Sure there was the QZ, but she hadn't paid much attention to anything out side of her meth lab back then. By the end of her career as a cook she barely left the apartment, spending most of her time strung out or waiting for D.Man to show up with something to eat. It was getting to be a running joke near the end that if she ate anymore dog food she'd start barking at the moon. She hadn't seen the funny side, but she was far too messed up to go out and get food for herself by then. If that last batch hadn't blown she would have probably had a heart attack by now....thank God for fanged mercies....

[Mannequin]

Quin looked down at her belly again.....*no way...no way...it can't be*....she rub the small bulge of her stomach and tried to remain calm. She needed to find her adoptive sire fast, if anything just to reassure herself that what she thought was happening wasn't possible...because it wasn't possible....right?
When she had been turned she was the thinnest she'd ever been. A diet of meth and the odd can of dog food had taken her weight down from 'about average' for a modern woman in the western world, to runway model not-quite-a-walking-skeleton-but-close-enough thin. Her belly as a result was usually slightly sunken and she could have probably shanked someone with one of her hip bones...so to wake up one night to find she'd developed a slight pot belly was a surprise to say the least.

Quin had been pregnant before, but thanks to her 'lifestyle' none of them had made it to full term. The longest she'd stayed 'in the family way' had been four months, and that was only down to her trying to get clean and put her life back on track. When she had miscarried that time she had gone off the deep end in a big way, less than an hour after she had dumped the deformed mess that had come out of her into the river, she'd been scoring from one of the many dealers down town were her credit was still good. It was just her luck that a rather handsome guy going by the name D.man had been hanging around the shooting gallery knocking back beers and selling his wares. He'd offered Quin a free taste and she'd thought "Why not?", she'd never tried crystal before and after the day she'd had she was more than happy to try something new that might take the edge off.
Fast forward a few months and she had been set up in a nice apartment (well nice when you compared it to the usual run down squats she usually lived in), she had a fridge full of food, tons of new clothes, jewellery and even a frisky young Pitbull called Daisy that was forever chewing through her couches. All she had to do was 'cook' and she'd have all the crystal she could want...as long as D.man had X amount waiting for him when her turned up three times a week. For the first time since she'd dropped out of med school things were coming up Quin.

Med-School had been total bust, it turned out you could only get so far on blowing your professors before actually ability was required. She'd ended up switching over to chemistry, something she was only a little better at than her previous major and it had of course required a lot of 'oral exams' to get the transfer. She'd inevitable failed the exams proper when they came up...repeatedly....and not long before she'd finally decided to leave a fellow student had introduced her to what would become the new love of her life for many years.
Five years was by no means a long habit, she'd still had some good veins and could get bar work now and then when she got tired of standing on street corners or had to lay low after an arrest. Without a pimp not only did she have to worry about sickos and cops, she had to watch out for the other working girls and their handlers.

Now she had a bigger problem than addiction, debts, D.man and all the crazed street walkers life had thrown at her so far....she was a vampire....and it looked like somehow she had got pregnant.... and not just pregnant in a way she'd been before, this was a whole new level of ****ed up.... it had only been a few days since she'd knocked boots with a random street magician and her belly looked like she'd swallowed a whole grapefruit.

With any luck it was just another odd vampire thing, maybe a result of feeding on 'tainted blood' or their version of a stomach bug...she really hoped so, lord only knows what would pop out of her in her current condition.... she needed to find her adoptive sire, she'd know what was going on....

[Mannequin]

Scrawled on the stall wall of a particularly dingy public toilet:

" There once was a man from Leeds,
Who swallowed a packet of seeds,
And out of his arse grew blades of grass,
And his ****s were covered with weeds.... "

[Mannequin]

Quin kept up a fast pace as she headed out of the slums. She'd managed to grab a bit to eat and was feeling a lot better about her not-so-delicate-condition... calmer and thinking more clearly she had pretty much managed to convince herself that it was 'all in her head'....there was no way she could get pregnant in her new form, it just didn't make sense. She had originally thought to find her new 'adoptive sire'...but she wasn't entirely sure how she stood with the white haired vampire.
She didn't want to seem needy or lord forbid weak, but just because the vampire woman hadn't just ignored her like the vast majority of other vampire had so far, it didn't mean that she'd really found someone willing to take her in and show her the fanged ropes so to speak. Sure, Quin liked to think of her half jokingly as her Step-Sire or Fanged God Mother, but she didn't feel confident enough that if she managed to summon up the courage to outright ask to her 'take her in' that she might not just laugh in her face....it had happened before with her foster parents and more boyfriends that she cared to remember.... she'd learnt the hard way that most of the time unless you have something to offer you weren't likely to be received with open arms, and right now Quin had very little to offer. A fledgling with a ferocious thirst for blood, a side line in black market organ harvesting and serial killer 'habit' weren't things that were going to stand in her favor as 'childer of the year'....add to that that she might have got herself pregnant from a random guy she found on the street and things looked even more bleak.

She stopped for a moment, having been so deep in thought she had lost track of were she was going...
*...of all the **** luck....here....I end up....here* she sighed glaring at the sidewalk....
Without thinking she had wandered back to her old digs. The damaged brick work had been covered over with tarps and a few random bits of scaffold that hadn't been stolen yet sat against where the door to the flats had been. It was all still blackened with soot and rubble still littered the burnt out hallway that had lead up to the flats. It looked like someone had started to clear up the mess and then given up half way through. Listening carefully she detected no sounds coming from the building....what could it hurt?....checking to make sure she wasn't being watched she slipped into the building.....

The stairs were still in good shape considering, she crept up them listening hard....being the dim bulb that she was at times she didn't seem to think that wandering around her old haunt was a bad idea, so she carried on up the three flights and felt her was in the pitch darkness to her old apartments door.....
The door of course was gone, as was most of the wall....a few pieces of what must have been police tape was strung hap hazard across the gaping hole where the door used to be. She cautiously entered the flat making as little sounds as possible, assorted debris crunched under her shoes as she went deeper into the apartment.

"HEY! WHAT THE **** ARE YOU DOIN' IN HERE?!!"

A flash light came on and shone right into Quins startled face, raising her arms to shield her eyes she caught sight of a hunched figure.... quickly she turned on her heels and raced out of the apartment, tripping over something in the hallway she stumbled and fell flat on her face. Picking herself up again she staggered toward the stairs in the darkness her arms out in front of her....she grabbed the railing at the top of the stairs as she tried to get out of the building as fast as she could, but as was her luck, the heel of her shoe got stuck in a random crack or bit of burnt carpet and she fell arms wheeling over the edge and into the darkness below....

A couple of minutes later Quin emerged from the building on all fours looking like she'd been in a serious car accident. One of her knees was bent the wrong way and both her arms were bent in multiple directions...swearing up a storm through her broken dentures she dragged herself to a nearby man hole cover and after a small battle she flopped down into the rank water below..... until she could put her bones back into something resembling there normal shape she wasn't going to have much of a choice as to her sleeping spot...
....the sewers that night echoed with curses few hard ever heard proclaimed with such venom before...

[Mannequin]

Quin sat back and closed her eyes contentedly in the comfy armchair.
After a rough few days resting in the sewers while her injuries healed this had been just what she had needed.
She'd quickly found a suitable person to nibble on when she had finally emerged, 'suitable' in the way that they were roughly her dress size and had a decent amount of cash on them, but man oh man had they tasted bad!...when she had been digging through the poor wretches handbag afterwards she had found a container of prescribed anti-biotics, which might have gone to explain the revolting taste the womans blood had had. When she finally got herself a 'crypt with a view' she would have to run some tests to see what made for better tasting blood and what didn't. She was by no means fussy, with the hunger gnawing away inside her all the time blood was blood, but it wouldn't hurt if it didn't taste like juices squeezed from a hobos sock or the slime you got at the bottom of a sea food restaurant dumpster when no one had bothered to wash it out for a few days.....
So far the nicest blood she had drunk was from some jogger she had nabbed coming out of a late night smoothie bar, they'd got through half of their pineapple and peach drink before she had decided to leave and had only got a few paces before Quin had swooped in and dragged them into nearby alley.

She look at her nails and smiled as she relaxed in the chair, it had been a stroke of rare good fortune that had lead her back to the womans apartment. After a hot shower and another change of cloths she flipped through the local phone book until she found just what she was looking for....
Twenty minutes later a small woman called 'Flo' had arrived at the apartment door with a hold-all full of cosmetics.
She'd had the works done, even a set of nice new nail covers and a little threading (not that it needed it really). The woman had been a little confused by Quins insistence that she not use anything mirror related, having passed it off as a 'personal superstition' of hers....a roll of bills had quickly resolved her confusion and things had gone smoothly after that.

Now she felt like a princess, warm, clean and wearing smudge free make-up for change.
Even her hunger didn't seem to bother her too much at that moment...