Stars in the Sky and Famine in the Land of Plenty

[Freyja]

W E A R I N G

The impossibly tall Dane laughed, the sound a musical chime in the ever living din of the city that never slept. New York was a joke, compared to the nightlife of Harper Rock, with an entire community that lived their entire lives under the cover of night. Nightlife was literal here, and it showed when one strolled down the right parts of town, neon and street lamps plentiful enough to make night seem like day, and enough bodies that it appeared that the entire city was wide awake and ready to party in the wee hours of the morning.

The sharp click of her tall heels accompanied the melodic lilt of her laughter as she walked, one hand tucked into the pocket of her dress as the other was held out to steady herself against the redhead at her side. Even the simple laugh made her head swim, the world taking on a spin, a tilt, and a dangerous lurch that made her nearly stumble into the woman. With years more practice that she’d happily admit, Freyja had mastered the art of traversing a public sidewalk while she was higher than a kite. Tonight, though, she felt like she could reach out and pluck a star out of the sky.

And so pretty the stars were tonight, too.

She lifted that hand from her progeny’s shoulder to try and reach for one of the tiny specks of light as they moved, spinning in her vision as her fingers closed around empty, frigid air, and earned a scornful pout of her lips. “Caligirl, have you ever really just looked up at the stars, and just really… wanted one?”

She turned to the girl at her side, and wrinkled her nose, the light speckling of her freckles mostly hidden beneath the makeup on her nose becoming more prominent with the way the skin bunched with the expression. “I would get you a star, you know, Cali. I would pluck them all, if I could. Just for you and me.” She laughed again, and nearly slumped into the woman at her side. It was obvious that, whatever the cocktail had been tonight, it had been plenty to knock the amazon on her ***. Almost, anyway. And she was having a hell of a time, even with just a brisk walk in the icy cold of the Northern winter air. It was obvious that the chill didn’t bother her, the flesh of her legs bared up to the tops of her thighs, without so little as a pair of hose to shield her from the wind.

She didn’t make a single sound of complaint, however, as she took the hand from her pocket and pushed it back through the thick golden mane of her hair as she made a half-serious mock of being shocked by a thought that she had just had. “We should find a way to get one. But… maybe after…” she placed a hand to the flat of her stomach as it gave an empty gurgle. She still wasn’t used to feeling the gnaw of hunger in the throes of a high, and the feeling was disconcerting. It worried her about how horrible it might feel if she were to ever let herself go hungry and sober. She shuddered at the thought.

“What do you think, sweetheart? Hungry?”

[Caligrace]

A T T I R E

“I think you had too much,” the redhead laughed, the sound carefree. It wasn’t often that she said those words to her sire, but as the blonde reached for the stars, manicured nails clawing aimlessly at the sky, she knew that she had finally crossed that threshold. Shaking her head, she waited until the Amazon swayed into her side before sliding her arm around her middle, fingers wrapping into the impossibly think material of her dress. “When the sky finally falls, we’ll gather the stars together, Frey.” Her own words were spoken with a slur, the vowels rolling together as each spoken word felt heavy on her tongue. There was the briefest of moments when she wasn’t entirely certain her sentence had made any sense. Of course, none of that mattered.

With her present company barely able to walk on her own, causing both of the women to teeter on their heels, she knew that she wasn’t about to receive a letter grade for grammar. Pushing the thought to the back of her mind, she straightened the woman and pulled away, only to reach for the strap of her bag. Pulling it around to rest against her toned stomach, she dropped a slender hand inside, fingers rummaging almost aimlessly through the hidden contents. After a few seconds, she finally gave up the fruitless search – and having not remembered what she had been looking for – she let her purse fly back to her side, only to have it smack into the nearest lamppost with a loud clang.

“Shh, people are sleeping!” Directing the stage-whisper to her bag, she nearly doubled over in laughter before shaking her head. How had she been able to lecture her sire? Whatever the cocktail they had been served – she had consumed just as much. Running her tongue along the strawberry shimmer that glossed her lips, she crinkled her nose up and quickly shook her head. It was a stupid question, and she was nowhere near intoxicated enough to fall into the same song and dance. “I’m not, doll, but if you want to eat, by all means…” Her voice had dropped into a genuine whisper as she nodded up ahead, where a door had just opened and a pair of girls stumbled out into the night, fingers clutching their jackets to their throats to block out the biting wind.

[Storyteller]

==========AUTOMATED RANDOM EVENTS SYSTEM==========

Caligrace will soon find themselves separated from the rest of the group.

[Freyja]

“Too much? Too much? Cali, sweetheart, I think you forget who you are talking to. I can never have too much.” The Amazonian blonde laughed again, her head shaking, sending loose, golden curls bouncing freely from her shoulders as she sighed, her thin fingers resting across the redhead’s shoulder, giving her a firm squeeze as she looked down at her. In those deep, glossy blue pools, a storm of emotions crashed and rolled, threatening to pull the entire world under with the weight of the things that the Danish vampire was feeling. She could feel herself getting lost in the weight of their complexity, and her lungs burned for air that she didn’t need.

She remembered too late that the woman at her side was a product of her own madness; of her own voracious hunger, and a gaping hole that had been left inside of her once. She was a patch for that hole, an answer to the pain that had threatened to tear her apart, the mere ghost of its memory threatening to unravel her even now. Now, in the wake of all that she had accomplished, of all the things that she had done for herself, for the family that she had built up from the ashes of her life, and still, the old ghosts came back to claw at her.

She closed those baby blues, and took a deep, sharp breath in through her nose, and held it for a long moment, taking in the scent of the prey that the woman had pointed out to her. She was tempted. She was mightily tempted to lure the both of them into a dark alley, to tear out their throats and feast on the waning bit of life that they had left while they died in her arms. That was her way of doing things. Messy, violent, cruel. If she was anything less, then unpleasant things happened. Things that she would have to dispose of in much more creative ways.

She sighed, the breath long and drawn out as she let her fingers slip away from the redhead’s flesh, her eyes opening again to the woman’s beautiful face, and she smiled. “No, Caligurl, I think I’ll be alright until morning. I can make arrangements.” She took a moment to right herself, standing tall and pushing a hand back through her hair, her mind swimming as she tried to make sense of where they were. They couldn’t be far from home, the night was still far too young for them to have ventured far… wasn’t it?

[Caligrace]

“I could never forget who I am talking to,” she countered, her eyes alight with mischief as she pressed her hand once more through her hair. It was too smooth beneath her palm, and she found herself enchanted by the way the moonlight made each strand shimmer like fire. With a gleeful laugh, she wrapped a single curl around her finger and released it, the buoyancy enthralling. Is this what it felt like when she sapped the will from her thralls, only to make them follow her every command? Of course, she didn’t make them obey her, nor did she mean to enslave them. It just happened, and she never could figure out exactly why. It was something that just was.

With a quick shake of her head, she forced her intoxicated gaze from her hair. There was something she was meant to be doing, wasn’t there? “What in the world did you use against me?” The question hung in the air, only to be unanswered. Where she had expected to hear her sire’s musical laugh, she was met with silence. Spinning in a slow, uneven circle, her smile disappeared. Where she had just been surrounded by brick and neon lights, she was now standing alone in the forest. Every where she looked was another tree, another rock, and another field of darkness.

“Freyja? Freyja!”

Her sire’s name tore from her throat in a fearful cry as she stumbled forward, heels sinking into the damp ground. When her foot caught on a root, she fell to her knees, the snow dampening her jeans. She barely felt the chill – she was always cold, always frozen. No, it was the fear that kept her down. She was lost. Something had happened, and she had been taken from her best friend. Had she… no. She hadn’t run there. She would have noticed the blur of the city, the roar of wind in her ears. She would have gone to a location she knew, not in the middle of the wild with only the moon for company.

[Freyja]

She laughed, the sound a musical lilt that filled the night air as she stumbled to one side, still coordinated enough to keep from rolling her ankle as she reached out for Cali’s shoulder, expecting the woman’s weight to halt her sideways drift. Instead, she kept stepping, listing off to one side as her hand swiped aimlessly at the empty air, until she impacted with the brick wall of the building they’d been walking alongside, the grit catching and tugging at her skin, the bare flesh of her arms scraped against the grainy brick as she shook her head, her gaze sweeping the empty street.

Cali had been there seconds ago. She had been right there. So where did she go?

The fog in the tall Dane’s brain was heavy, the concentration she tried to focus on solving the problem of her missing progeny, trying to wrap her head around what had happened. She had just been right there. The blonde’s brows furrowed in frustration and confusion as she drunkenly swiped at her bag, pawing through her things until she found her phone, using the building to keep her balance as she turned about, heading back the direction that she had come, hoping to find Cali toppled over in an alley someplace out of sight.

Her thumb tapped at the screen of her phone without so much as a glance, the motion of dialing her best, dearest friend engrained in her brain so deep that even the insane high she was still rolling in couldn’t throw off the muscle memory. She lifted her phone to her ear as she walked, black heels offering a faint, uneven echo of clicks along the mostly empty street as she guided her hand across the rough surface of the brick and sought out the first corner, before she’d try peering into the darkness.

“Cali? Where the **** did you go?” she called out as the phone began to ring, her voice bouncing back to her the only answer she got, the redhead’s ringtone nowhere to be heard.

[Storyteller]

==========AUTOMATED RANDOM EVENTS SYSTEM==========

Somebody bumps rudely into Freyja. Perhaps it was an accident, but...

[Jack Diddly]

Wearing

It had been a fun gig, though not a very lucrative one. Promised a solid one hundred dollars, the bar’s proprietor only coughed up fifty. The stout, portly owner chalked it up to the cost of the open bar that the musician had been offered. It was a joke really, Jack hadn’t had a drop to drink all night and he was beginning to feel it. He was sure to give the closefisted, jerk the Jersey Saulte as he stepped out of the establishment and into the night. It wasn’t the first time he had been stiffed at a hole-in-the wall, in fact it was something Jack had come to expect, but what kind of man were you if you didn’t put up a fight about it?

The streets in this part of town were still rather crowded for this time of night. As Jack slung his guitar case across his back he happened to catch a glimpse of the sky. It was particularly clear and filled with stars. "We’ll dance among the stars one day…” her voice sent a bitter chill through his being. It whispered throughout his mind, but he was sure he could feel the warmth of her breath as if her mouth were pressed against his ear. Forgetting where he was for a moment, he nearly stepped out in front of a car as it sped by. He was saved that trouble by the protective tug of a passing stranger, who asked Jack if he had a death wish. Her laughter swam sweetly through his head. Jack tipped his blue, grey patchwork, ivy cap in a gesture of thanks to the old man. He really needed to feed.

There was a certain sport to it, hunting. In life, Jack had never been much for it, but something about the peculiar state in which he now found himself craved it. It wasn’t just the blood, which, for the young vampire, could still provide the greatest of highs. There was a certain thrill to it. Perhaps it had more to do with the comfort he could find in the kill, an outlet for a vengeance he’d never been able to extract. Jack had always enjoyed a bit of cloak-and-dagger anyway, which was so characteristic to the whole thing. So he escaped from the hustle and bustle of the lit bar crowd as they crawled under the neon lights and found himself wandering down a nearly empty street. He could hear the approach of dizzy laughter and the clatter of heels against the pavement. “Bingo…” he said under his breath with a slight grin.

The woman was rather tall and seemed to be stumbling down the walk, grabbing at the brick of a nearby building as if it were a crutch. She was walking away from him now, so he couldn’t make out her features. Jack wasn’t one hundred percent, but her apparent disorientation screamed mortal...and perhaps dinner or at the very least a bit of coin to make up tonight’s losses. He quickened his approach. She was yelling into her phone now as Jack went for her purse, running himself into her towering, yet slim frame as a form of distraction. It was a fruitless effort. He feigned a stumble into her line of sight.

He tipped his hat, "Apologies, Miss,” his voice was soft, yet gruff and he threw the blonde his most charming and innocent of smiles.