‹Freddie› There wasn't much for Freddie to do, and nothing much he HAD to do. It was as if there were some creature in his head doing the account keeping, filing different things in different directions, knowing exactly what its vessel needed and didn't. Access to a bank account was vital for proper living, and so Freddie had access to a bank account. Although he had learned his real name when he'd rediscovered said bank account, however, it was a name, over time, that he had again forgotten -- like Lancaster d'Artois was some kid from school that he'd only ever known at a distance, had never met, and had no reason to remember. The account Freddie had access to continued to grow, and then decrease, fluctuating like any business account might. But it always took two steps forward and one step back. Every time he looked, there was more there than there was the week before. Freddie had become a kind-of trust fund leech, using the money not for extravagance but to just... live. Like now, he found himself in an out-of-the-way pub, simply enjoying the atmosphere. It was quiet, and he played a game of pool by himself, a bottle of ice-cold beer nearby. It was his second of the night, and probably his last.
‹Bjorn› Bjørn threw his head back just as the manila folder came down—hard. He flinched, unprepared for the assault on his face, and haphazardly caught the folder before its contents spilled over him. Roxette walked out the office laughing at his expense, and he couldn’t bring himself to care. On any other day he might have threatened with a lawsuit for insubordination, wailed about assault or whatever other ******** he could make up on the spot, but his mood didn’t cater to their blossoming camaraderie tonight. No, he was bordering livid.
Usually this would fall under her duties, but she’d made too good an argument against doing it. In fact, she’d made more than one, pinning Bjørn with a task he wasn’t looking forward to, at all. Still, it was better than taking any of the guys’ places behind the counter, forced to serve the bustling Saturday crown for hours on end. No, he much preferred to drive across town and pick up the stock. Which is what he did. All the way to Gulls-*******-borough.
Leaving the car parked across the mouth of an alleyway, Bjørn took the manila folder and made for the establishment’s front door. In nearly two years of living in Harper Rock, he’d never been into the country pub. According to Roxette, they were expecting him. All he had to do was rock up to the bar and show them the paperwork, which was exactly what he was doing when the unexpected veered him off path.
He slammed the folder onto the green felt, blocking the shot.
‹Freddie› The gangly vampire was doing quite well, even if he only had himself for competition. He was practicing his game, and his aim, though given how well he started he assumed he’d done a lot of practice in the past. The cue was smooth in his grip, manhandled by hundreds of people before him, no doubt. He’s started by sinking all the smalls, and had now moved on to the bigs – he had only three left on the table, along with the black eight ball. A glance was spared for the space behind him, to make sure he wasn’t going to inadvertently whack some other punter with the tail end of the cue – or his skinny backside. The stick was drawn back, focus steady upon the white ball and its planned trajectory when…
… Freddie looked up at the man who’d slammed his paperwork down on the pool table, blocking his shot. As soon as his cool blues absorbed the angry visage of the paperwork’s owner, a knife-like pain seared through his frontal lobe, causing him to hiss and pull up. The cue was released, the smooth wooden stick rolling from the table and clattering to the floor.
“Something I can help you with…?” he asked, one eye squinted and a hand pressed to his temple, as if that might somehow keep his skull from falling apart.
‹Bjorn› There was no means of anchoring oneself in this storm. A rush of far too many emotions set ablaze his insides like an expanding pool of effervescent lava - incomprehensible and immeasurable. Fury. Frustration. Confusion. Anger. Hurt. Indignation. Humiliation. Rage. It seared every fibre of his being, consuming him. The sheer intensity of it left him powerless, unable to contain his wrath.
The telepath’s face dropped at the man’s reaction, his left brow arched high. For a moment, he looked as though he’d only just been released from a dream, a sleepwalker rousing to find himself already on his feet. Every storm was preceded by an eerie calm. Elliot’s question was just the spark that ignited the flame.
Without any consideration for their surroundings, the patrons, or the consequences, Bjørn exploded like a shrapnel bomb. The wood splintered under the force of his grip as he sent the pool table tumbling to the side. The resin balls clattered to the floor, along with the papers. The beer bottle smashed against the floor.
“How can you ******* help?”
‹Freddie› The rage hit Freddie before anything else. Raged mixed with everything else, a heady concoction that he could feel from where he stood, emanating from the other man like pure radiation. Freddie could taste it on his tongue like an electric current. It clicked, then. The sudden migraine, the rage. This was a face Freddie should recognise but didn't. Where his mind groped for answers, for a name, for a relationship, it instead kept slamming into walls and locked doors, only exacerbating the stabbing agony in his skull. The pool table toppled and there was a gasp and a shout from somewhere to the left, but Freddie was too nauseous to pay it much mind. "Whoah, mate. Calm down. I don't know who you are, right?" he said, now holding out his hands, placating, resisting the urge to run as far and as fast as he could go.
‹Bjorn› The commotion he’d instigated didn’t hold his attention, the focus of his rage giving him too good a show to look away. Elliot should win a ******* emmy for this performance. It was almost believable.
“Really? That’s what you’re going with?”
Curling his hands at his side into white knuckled fists, Bjørn took a step forward. He furrowed his brow and narrowed his gaze, pouring into Elliot’s mind a barrage of images, sensations, sounds, smells, tastes... He vividly remembered the night they met, when he’d been caught out behind the pub feeding. The memory was laden with confusion, fear, desolation, shame, and every other emotion that had only been further compounded by the sensory overload. The music had been too loud. The crowd too dense. The smells abounding, dizzying. Just remembering them made his balance waver. The man that sat before him then, barely stood before him now. It wasn’t that he wanted to harm Elliot. He wanted to ******* bury him.
Grunting, Bjørn attempted to shake himself off, staggering sideways.
‹Freddie› The last thing the lanky vampire expected was what came next. There was still so much he had yet to learn, his knowledge on vampiric power limited only to what he and Hannah and stumbled across by accident, and the vague and broad explanations that Iris had given them so long ago. It felt like so long ago, anyway. In this new life, Freddie hadn't encountered any other telepaths -- true telepaths, capable of the influx he was now at the receiving end of. The other vampire didn't need to pull out a dagger or a gun to bring Freddie to his knees. As the memory played as if on a movie screen in his own broken mind, that silent and devoted bookkeeper living inside did its best to shut it down, to burn the film, to shove Freddie out the door so he could no longer see. It felt like an axe, now, lodged in his skull. And the axe was being tugged and pulled, its metal grinding against flesh and bone. Stars danced behind Freddie's eyes and he screamed as he went down, knee cracking against hard floor. Without knowing what he was doing, the experience was projected outward, directed straight at the other. "...STOP," he shouted, unaware that he was doing whatever he could, mentally, to force the other to quit.
‹Bjorn› It was only recently that the telepath had discovered his capability of projecting both imagery and memory through the psychic link. There were many other things he could do with his mind, more than he could have ever conceived possible. That said, the psychic door swung both ways.
An ice pick sliced through his frontal lobe. He staggered backwards, unprepared for the force of it. His hands grasped as his forehead. He expected there to be a weapon sticking out from his skull, but there was nothing but skin and the bone beneath. Bjørn cried out, pressing the heels of his palms into his temples. Given the choice, he’d prefer a bullet to the head.
Huffing and puffing, the telepath bent forward and pushed back. He pooled all of his energy into pushing against the pressure and projecting into the world. The pain ebbed, releasing him long enough for him to stumble out of his own projection as the air around him shifted. [You create an illusion of yourself and trap the area with psychic energy.]
Reaching for the nearest thing he could throw, Bjørn swung a half-empty bottle of Heineken in the Allurist’s general direction.
‹Freddie› It wasn't in Freddie's interest to hurt anyone. It never had been, though that wasn't something he knew about himself. For all he knew he could have been an axe murderer in a past life. The imagery ebbed and Freddie pulled in a lungful of stale air, spittle flung from his lips as he let it go, hands digging into the beer-sticky ground as he swayed, there on his hands and knees. When he glanced up to see two of his attacker he just assumed he was seeing double; it was easy to do, given how blurred his vision was due to the tears that had sprung, stinging, to his eyes. He barely had time to stumble away from the makeshift projectile; the bottle smashed nearby, splattering the Allurist's arms with tepid beer and glass. "I didn't forget you on purpose you ******* wanker...!" he shouted, voice cracked and tremulous. "...******* unreasonable millennials," he grunted, then, under his breath as he tried to crawl away, to put some distance between himself and the memories his mind was doing its best to shield him from.
‹Bjorn› Bjørn came to stand with his feet shoulder width apart, a metre behind his decoy. He cradled his head in his left hand, casting a glance about the emptied establishment. This wasn’t the habitual way in which fights progressed, not in his playbook anyway. Then again, he rarely picked a fight with someone, let alone in such a crowded place. His usual opponents were generally somethings, and to be hunted in empty sewers or warehouses.
“The **** you mean you forgot?”
Dropping his hand to his side, the telepath reached into his pocket for his phone. Roxette would need to be kept in the loop, and if he was booked overnight, he’d have no access to a phone.
‹Freddie› Freddie groaned. The place had emptied, alright, and he wondered if police had been called. If anyone had been called. How long did they have? Anyway, no one had picked Freddie as a vampire, yet; the guy did really well at playing human, and no one was every any the wiser. He hadn't done anything to outwardly give it away, either. Although he had some idea that he was behind the pain inflicted on the other, he didn't know how he'd done it, and was ninety percent certain it wasn't a visual display. The other had flipped a heavy table with ease, however. Or maybe no one saw how that had happened and regular police had been called to deal with a regular bar brawl. "Please tell me you're smart enough to know the meaning of 'forgot'," Freddie croaked. "Forgot. As in, I don't remember. I'm supposed to remember you, aren't I? Or are you just ******* insane?" he spat. He had found a bar stool and was doing his best to haul his tall frame to his feet, already eyeing off the whiskey behind the counter.
‹Bjorn› And what was he supposed to do with that? Scrubbing at his face, Bjørn singlehandedly scrolled through his phone and typed a quick message to Elliot’s thrall. Found him. Whether he was talking about Axl, their boss, or some else was for Roxette to figure out. The clock was ticking, and there was little doubt in his scrambled mind that the cops would be here. The question was, on a Saturday night, would that be sooner or later?
“How long have you been back? Actually, don’t answer that. I’ll ******* tear your head off if it’s as long as I think it is. I guess you also forgot that you’ve got businesses to run? A ******* faction that… well, whatever, it doesn’t matter anymore. You--”
The anger, indignation, hurt-- it bubbled uncomfortably in his chest. “You’re a sack of ****, Elliot. Thought you might have been fucknig killed or something. What the **** have you been doing then? Didn’t look like you were trying to remember.”
‹Bjorn› Bjørn threw his head back just as the manila folder came down—hard. He flinched, unprepared for the assault on his face, and haphazardly caught the folder before its contents spilled over him. Roxette walked out the office laughing at his expense, and he couldn’t bring himself to care. On any other day he might have threatened with a lawsuit for insubordination, wailed about assault or whatever other ******** he could make up on the spot, but his mood didn’t cater to their blossoming camaraderie tonight. No, he was bordering livid.
Usually this would fall under her duties, but she’d made too good an argument against doing it. In fact, she’d made more than one, pinning Bjørn with a task he wasn’t looking forward to, at all. Still, it was better than taking any of the guys’ places behind the counter, forced to serve the bustling Saturday crown for hours on end. No, he much preferred to drive across town and pick up the stock. Which is what he did. All the way to Gulls-*******-borough.
Leaving the car parked across the mouth of an alleyway, Bjørn took the manila folder and made for the establishment’s front door. In nearly two years of living in Harper Rock, he’d never been into the country pub. According to Roxette, they were expecting him. All he had to do was rock up to the bar and show them the paperwork, which was exactly what he was doing when the unexpected veered him off path.
He slammed the folder onto the green felt, blocking the shot.
‹Freddie› The gangly vampire was doing quite well, even if he only had himself for competition. He was practicing his game, and his aim, though given how well he started he assumed he’d done a lot of practice in the past. The cue was smooth in his grip, manhandled by hundreds of people before him, no doubt. He’s started by sinking all the smalls, and had now moved on to the bigs – he had only three left on the table, along with the black eight ball. A glance was spared for the space behind him, to make sure he wasn’t going to inadvertently whack some other punter with the tail end of the cue – or his skinny backside. The stick was drawn back, focus steady upon the white ball and its planned trajectory when…
… Freddie looked up at the man who’d slammed his paperwork down on the pool table, blocking his shot. As soon as his cool blues absorbed the angry visage of the paperwork’s owner, a knife-like pain seared through his frontal lobe, causing him to hiss and pull up. The cue was released, the smooth wooden stick rolling from the table and clattering to the floor.
“Something I can help you with…?” he asked, one eye squinted and a hand pressed to his temple, as if that might somehow keep his skull from falling apart.
‹Bjorn› There was no means of anchoring oneself in this storm. A rush of far too many emotions set ablaze his insides like an expanding pool of effervescent lava - incomprehensible and immeasurable. Fury. Frustration. Confusion. Anger. Hurt. Indignation. Humiliation. Rage. It seared every fibre of his being, consuming him. The sheer intensity of it left him powerless, unable to contain his wrath.
The telepath’s face dropped at the man’s reaction, his left brow arched high. For a moment, he looked as though he’d only just been released from a dream, a sleepwalker rousing to find himself already on his feet. Every storm was preceded by an eerie calm. Elliot’s question was just the spark that ignited the flame.
Without any consideration for their surroundings, the patrons, or the consequences, Bjørn exploded like a shrapnel bomb. The wood splintered under the force of his grip as he sent the pool table tumbling to the side. The resin balls clattered to the floor, along with the papers. The beer bottle smashed against the floor.
“How can you ******* help?”
‹Freddie› The rage hit Freddie before anything else. Raged mixed with everything else, a heady concoction that he could feel from where he stood, emanating from the other man like pure radiation. Freddie could taste it on his tongue like an electric current. It clicked, then. The sudden migraine, the rage. This was a face Freddie should recognise but didn't. Where his mind groped for answers, for a name, for a relationship, it instead kept slamming into walls and locked doors, only exacerbating the stabbing agony in his skull. The pool table toppled and there was a gasp and a shout from somewhere to the left, but Freddie was too nauseous to pay it much mind. "Whoah, mate. Calm down. I don't know who you are, right?" he said, now holding out his hands, placating, resisting the urge to run as far and as fast as he could go.
‹Bjorn› The commotion he’d instigated didn’t hold his attention, the focus of his rage giving him too good a show to look away. Elliot should win a ******* emmy for this performance. It was almost believable.
“Really? That’s what you’re going with?”
Curling his hands at his side into white knuckled fists, Bjørn took a step forward. He furrowed his brow and narrowed his gaze, pouring into Elliot’s mind a barrage of images, sensations, sounds, smells, tastes... He vividly remembered the night they met, when he’d been caught out behind the pub feeding. The memory was laden with confusion, fear, desolation, shame, and every other emotion that had only been further compounded by the sensory overload. The music had been too loud. The crowd too dense. The smells abounding, dizzying. Just remembering them made his balance waver. The man that sat before him then, barely stood before him now. It wasn’t that he wanted to harm Elliot. He wanted to ******* bury him.
Grunting, Bjørn attempted to shake himself off, staggering sideways.
‹Freddie› The last thing the lanky vampire expected was what came next. There was still so much he had yet to learn, his knowledge on vampiric power limited only to what he and Hannah and stumbled across by accident, and the vague and broad explanations that Iris had given them so long ago. It felt like so long ago, anyway. In this new life, Freddie hadn't encountered any other telepaths -- true telepaths, capable of the influx he was now at the receiving end of. The other vampire didn't need to pull out a dagger or a gun to bring Freddie to his knees. As the memory played as if on a movie screen in his own broken mind, that silent and devoted bookkeeper living inside did its best to shut it down, to burn the film, to shove Freddie out the door so he could no longer see. It felt like an axe, now, lodged in his skull. And the axe was being tugged and pulled, its metal grinding against flesh and bone. Stars danced behind Freddie's eyes and he screamed as he went down, knee cracking against hard floor. Without knowing what he was doing, the experience was projected outward, directed straight at the other. "...STOP," he shouted, unaware that he was doing whatever he could, mentally, to force the other to quit.
‹Bjorn› It was only recently that the telepath had discovered his capability of projecting both imagery and memory through the psychic link. There were many other things he could do with his mind, more than he could have ever conceived possible. That said, the psychic door swung both ways.
An ice pick sliced through his frontal lobe. He staggered backwards, unprepared for the force of it. His hands grasped as his forehead. He expected there to be a weapon sticking out from his skull, but there was nothing but skin and the bone beneath. Bjørn cried out, pressing the heels of his palms into his temples. Given the choice, he’d prefer a bullet to the head.
Huffing and puffing, the telepath bent forward and pushed back. He pooled all of his energy into pushing against the pressure and projecting into the world. The pain ebbed, releasing him long enough for him to stumble out of his own projection as the air around him shifted. [You create an illusion of yourself and trap the area with psychic energy.]
Reaching for the nearest thing he could throw, Bjørn swung a half-empty bottle of Heineken in the Allurist’s general direction.
‹Freddie› It wasn't in Freddie's interest to hurt anyone. It never had been, though that wasn't something he knew about himself. For all he knew he could have been an axe murderer in a past life. The imagery ebbed and Freddie pulled in a lungful of stale air, spittle flung from his lips as he let it go, hands digging into the beer-sticky ground as he swayed, there on his hands and knees. When he glanced up to see two of his attacker he just assumed he was seeing double; it was easy to do, given how blurred his vision was due to the tears that had sprung, stinging, to his eyes. He barely had time to stumble away from the makeshift projectile; the bottle smashed nearby, splattering the Allurist's arms with tepid beer and glass. "I didn't forget you on purpose you ******* wanker...!" he shouted, voice cracked and tremulous. "...******* unreasonable millennials," he grunted, then, under his breath as he tried to crawl away, to put some distance between himself and the memories his mind was doing its best to shield him from.
‹Bjorn› Bjørn came to stand with his feet shoulder width apart, a metre behind his decoy. He cradled his head in his left hand, casting a glance about the emptied establishment. This wasn’t the habitual way in which fights progressed, not in his playbook anyway. Then again, he rarely picked a fight with someone, let alone in such a crowded place. His usual opponents were generally somethings, and to be hunted in empty sewers or warehouses.
“The **** you mean you forgot?”
Dropping his hand to his side, the telepath reached into his pocket for his phone. Roxette would need to be kept in the loop, and if he was booked overnight, he’d have no access to a phone.
‹Freddie› Freddie groaned. The place had emptied, alright, and he wondered if police had been called. If anyone had been called. How long did they have? Anyway, no one had picked Freddie as a vampire, yet; the guy did really well at playing human, and no one was every any the wiser. He hadn't done anything to outwardly give it away, either. Although he had some idea that he was behind the pain inflicted on the other, he didn't know how he'd done it, and was ninety percent certain it wasn't a visual display. The other had flipped a heavy table with ease, however. Or maybe no one saw how that had happened and regular police had been called to deal with a regular bar brawl. "Please tell me you're smart enough to know the meaning of 'forgot'," Freddie croaked. "Forgot. As in, I don't remember. I'm supposed to remember you, aren't I? Or are you just ******* insane?" he spat. He had found a bar stool and was doing his best to haul his tall frame to his feet, already eyeing off the whiskey behind the counter.
‹Bjorn› And what was he supposed to do with that? Scrubbing at his face, Bjørn singlehandedly scrolled through his phone and typed a quick message to Elliot’s thrall. Found him. Whether he was talking about Axl, their boss, or some else was for Roxette to figure out. The clock was ticking, and there was little doubt in his scrambled mind that the cops would be here. The question was, on a Saturday night, would that be sooner or later?
“How long have you been back? Actually, don’t answer that. I’ll ******* tear your head off if it’s as long as I think it is. I guess you also forgot that you’ve got businesses to run? A ******* faction that… well, whatever, it doesn’t matter anymore. You--”
The anger, indignation, hurt-- it bubbled uncomfortably in his chest. “You’re a sack of ****, Elliot. Thought you might have been fucknig killed or something. What the **** have you been doing then? Didn’t look like you were trying to remember.”
