Path of the Vampire forum

Never did Elliot ever listen to a story without trying to put himself in the other person’s shoes. And, by their shoes, he tried to adopt everything they were thinking and feeling. Never did he sit there without really listening; never did the words shift through one ear and out the other. Never did he nod and make dismissive grunts and ‘mmhms’. At least, never when the subject mattered. He could be distant when talking about the weather, or mundane crap that didn’t make a difference. This wasn’t a question that Elliot had asked out of politeness. This was something that he’d asked out of avid curiosity; and Keara was answering with honest to god genuine truth.

‘Enamoured,’ she said. Such an antique word, but a beautiful one. It meant so much more than just ‘together.’ ‘Enamoured’ felt like colours blending, intertwining—two colours that are bland by themselves but which create something bright and vibrant when combined. It’s exactly how Elliot felt about Pi. He was completely and utterly enamoured with her, body and soul. Of course, he admitted this to her, not really in words. He’d hardly admitted to anyone. There was a bond there, though, between them, something indefinable. Just as Keara had said – indefinable. Why bother trying to admit a feeling to anyone if it cannot be defined? It’s why he preferred music over everything else. Music could always illuminate what simple words could not.

Elliot tried to imagine what it would be like if he lost Pi. If the world crumbled around them—if they were banished to a realm of shadows and despair for centuries, if he had the strength of will to remain something solid, an entity that could not be crushed or thrust into nothingness. He tried to imagine what it would be like if, after centuries, he were to come back to find out that Pi had not. That her will had not been as strong. That he would have to live in a new world, where he knew nothing and no one, without her. How would that feel?

He couldn’t imagine it. Even in trying, he was filled with a fear so grand and a despair so black that he forced himself to stop thinking about it. To quit imagining it. It couldn’t do him any good.

For a while he didn’t say anything. He watched Keara as she worked, let her get on with it without disrupting her. But he sat there, full of emotional turmoil on her behalf. He wrangled his emotions into some kind of order—it really was an embarrassment that he could be so affected. That he could imagine a sadness so bitter when the woman across from him wasn’t outwardly showing anything like it. Sure, he could hear it in her voice; could see it in those tiny little facial movements. But she wasn’t a mess. He cleared his throat.

”I admire you, you know. For keeping…keeping on, like you do,” he said. He didn’t explain what he meant. He assumed it must be obvious. If she was as enamoured by this Ven as she said she was, then surely she must struggle.

"No other option do I have. One cannot turn back time to retrieve what lost has been, as much as one might wish so to do."

She couldn't allow herself to succumb to grief in front of another, especially when there was a task to be done. Such moments, while not always private, were few and far between these days. It would seem that while time was not healing the wound that Ven's death had left within her heart, it was at least, giving her the fortitude of mind to be able to deal with it without always losing herself in time and space.

As she scrolled through the programs on the computer she could see nothing out of the ordinary and so she closed down the window and called up the hard-drive, looking for hidden files and the like. She was searching for anything that might be out of place or perhaps taking up more memory than was necessary. She took the information in rather quickly and was able to deliberate and dismiss most things in a matter of seconds.

"And your sire?" she asked after a few minutes of comfortable silence had passed. "Who are they? See you much of them?"

They did not know each other too well and this was a line of conversation she did not remember pursuing back when they first met. She would have likely have asked him of his lineage eventually, though in the back of her mind she was sure she already knew the name of his sire from accidentally appraising during the first meeting, something that at the time, she was not always consciously able to control.



OOC Disclaimer: I am not a hacker/computer expert irl, so please excuse any misinformation found here or in the coming posts. Thanks.

Although Keara referred only to herself and to the things and the people she had lost, her words nevertheless struck a chord, deep down inside Elliot. That was his problem the majority of the time, wasn’t it? Nearly everything that he did, everyone that he met, everything that he heard—it all clashed with the humanity and the life that he remembered. He got so damned angry and frustrated all of the time because the two halves of himself could not be reconciled. The half that wanted only to go back to normal, that wanted only to feel at ease in the life that he was living, because everything had a silver lining and an optimistic outcome. Such was not the case anymore, and he could not understand how the majority of the people he now associated himself with could look at death with such a blasé and dismissive attitude. Sometimes he wondered if he had actually died in that alleyway; if this was hell, and everyone in it hell’s demons.

But of course, that point of view did not last, nor did it stick. Of course this was not hell, and of course there still existed a multitude of silver linings. Silver linings only existed at the whim of the creator, and if the creator did not believe in them, then of course they would remain elusive.

The notion that one could not retrieve what one had lost still stung, but it was not as much of a twist of the knife in the existing would as it could have been. Elliot had begun that long road that led to coming to terms. It was a very, very long road paved with bones and near-insanity, but he was doing okay so far. And all because of one woman.

Elliot couldn’t help but grin when Keara asked about his sire; though it was a grin that he instantly tried to soften, to make less bright. Keara had just related the death of her own sire, a man who meant the world to her. And here Elliot was about to gush about his own. It seemed insensitive. And so he tempered his words, and only gave what information was necessary—the information that he assumed was sought.

”Her name is Pi d’Artois,” he said, not knowing whether Keara would have heard of her or not. ”I see her every night. Sometimes, maybe just for a few minutes before sunrise. Sometimes all night. But every night, anyway,” he said. Assuming, perhaps, that this might hit too close to home for Keara, he moved on to the technicalities. ”We’ve sort of got our own little bloodline thing happening. But originally, and still are I suppose, a part of Grigori. Under Mircea. Do you know him?” Elliot asked. Because that, too, was a point of curiosity—these Ancients, these old ones. Do they all know each other? Or is it all just random?

When her cursory search of the programs installed on the laptop failed to yield anything unusual or suspicious, she decided to look at the files of the software Lancaster was using to keep his accounts. She momentarily maximised the window in which it was running and looked for the programs name. Then, without even so much as a glance at the figures themselves she minimised the window once more and went about looking for the issue.

She listened to his words when he talked about his sire and while she only looked up occasionally from the computer screen, she could tell there was a deep connection between the two of them from what was said. While she would have loved to have seen her own childer on a nightly basis, most seemed very independent and quite happy to go about their nightly business without her interference. His relationship with his sire seemed to echo that of her own in some ways, though of course there were times then when they had to be parted for the sake of a mission. In those first few weeks after re-emerging into the world, she went back on nightly basis to the place where she had emerged, hoping in vain that he might step through and join her. In her heart of hearts, she knew he had died outside the boundaries of the city and yet still she went night after night, a cloak in hand just in case. She'd of continued with the routine longer but the necessity of survival and the fact that she had sired already meant that she had duties to perform. She had much to learn back then and even now she found that she was still living behind the times in certain aspects of her life.

When he mentioned Mircea, she nodded. She knew a little of him. She'd not known any of the other elders for very long before their demise, accept for Staus that was, and having returned from the Shadow Realm she had, had the briefest of encounters with them once more while the council was operational. She had no real emotional response to his name as she held no grudges against him but neither could she bring herself to claim him as anything more than an acquaintance. For the most part she remembered him being intelligent and pleasant to talk too.

"Know your sire I do not I am afraid. As for Mircea, met him on several occasions I have since returning to this world. Know not how well he fairs in the city though, that much I must admit. Little to no contact have I with the Elders of this city these days. More through their choosing than my own. After the first council disbanded was, ignored I was and dismissed because my lineage not of sufficient size was. Least this was my understanding of events. Since none with me spoke after that, assumed I did that, that rang true. Mind I do not these days that, that was done, as better I am with those that my blood share. Present company excluded that is. Making an effort I am to know more from other clans but process slow is, as seek out such opportunities I do not.

Sure I am that quite social you are. What with the business you run. Perhaps also your path that easier makes too. Am I right?"

The whole process intrigued Elliot. That there was some council in the beginning, that has since been disbanded. That Keara was ignored, or dismissed because her ‘bloodline’ was not big enough. What kind of obnoxious snobbery is that? Reminded him of some episode from one of those upper class, white people TV shows that the Americans seem to enjoy so much. First world problems, and all that. He knew the history, vaguely, but only from what Pi had told him, and the very little that he himself could discover via research. The vampires took their secrets very seriously.

One would think, having survived death and come back relatively unscathed, these Elders would have stuck together—would have clung to each other given the people they must have lost. Just like Keara has lost her sire, the others had to have lost people they cared for as well. And yet… and yet that mustn’t have been the case. Elliot was almost ready to lose himself completely to his own train of thought, when Keara’s question broke through the much.

”Hm? Oh, yeah, I suppose so. Not really… well I suppose the path we land on has something to do with who we were before, right? I’ve always been a social kinda guy,” he said with a shrug, loathe to admit that anyone should be lured to him for any special reason. Over the course of the couple of years that he’d lived amongst vampires, Elliot was given the impression that most people thought ill of his path. Thought allurists were a bunch of smarmy tarts, their only interests in seduction and charm. Elliot wanted to slap the damned lot of them.

Because, well, a lot of them had no bloody idea how difficult it was to be subject to one’s own emotions twenty-four-seven. They could be crippling, sometimes. Add to that a kindness and desire for empathy? Not only was he sometimes crippled by his own emotions, but he was crippled by the emotions of others as well. He shook his head. He had questions, and they didn’t pertain to his path—nor did he think Keara would be interested in hearing all his gripes.

”So why should the size of one’s bloodline have been so important?” Elliot asked. He wasn’t really watching what Keara was doing. He didn’t really have any reason to trust her, and that she herself wasn’t planting viruses in his system. But that was one of his flaws, he supposed—he could be far too trusting. And he doubted he’d ever change, regardless of the many times he ought to have learned his lesson.

His last question gave her a moment's pause and while she could answer the question immediately, the words just didn't seem to come. She'd thought long and hard on that particular question herself, as if the number of childer had anything to do with how useful she herself could have been to any sort of process. In the end she had surmised that it was all very much to do with power; the more progeny you had, the more influence you had which in turn meant that you held more power. The bigger the bloodline, the bigger the threat. Her lineage was modest to say the least and had therefore been dismissed as being insignificant in the grander scheme of things. At the time it had stung to be ejected from the council but more through the fact that she was removed by one she had considered a friend. It was perhaps true to say that he was her only real friend. These days she rarely thought on the situation, as she had no real contact with any of the other Elders and so she no longer held any grudges. If anything she was thankful not to have been given a seat at the second incarnation of the council as they had failed in their endeavours as much as the first incarnation had. In the years since she had been able to concentrate on what mattered most to her, her lineage and her own development.

"Know for sure I do not," the words of her reply not distracting her from the task at hand, "Believe I do that they power sought. Since the number of my clan did not number their own, I was of no use to them. Like one day perhaps I would to hear their explanation for myself. Though expect such a day, I do not, to come any time soon."

She was digging through the programme files when she found one that didn't seem to belong. It was hidden and she had had to drill down through several files to find it. She looked through the data it held and tried to make sense of the programming. While each hacker had their own style which made their programs unique to them, she was not familiar with the work of any other hackers to be able to point Elliot in the direction of the perpetrator. Having found the offending file, she turned the laptop in Elliot's direction.

"This the problem appears to be. Believe I do that if delete this you do and restart, that no further issue you will have. Though good idea it would be if back up your hard drive you do first as precaution. Perhaps also an idea it would be, to increase security. At very least, look into upgrading the antivirus software that installed you have on here."

If she was right this additional file was the thing screwing with the output on the screen. Luckily for Elliot it was to be an easy fix and the virus was meant to be more of an annoyance than anything else. There were far worse viruses out there that could wipe the hard drive clean or even copy and send specified data back to the hacker. If that had of been the case, she'd probably have had to ask to take the laptop away with her so that she could work on at home, where she had better resources at her fingertips to deal with the situation and she wasn't sure she knew Elliot well enough to actually walk out of the pub with such an expensive piece of equipment.

Again, Elliot found himself pondering the specifics of time. How they’d all come unstuck, somehow. They couldn’t go backwards and forward, and in that way they were all still subject to the limits of time. But the past would begin to stretch further and further away, until the events that might once have been significant become mere blips, as if one was destined to watch their life as a repeat television show—seen so many times before, that it becomes dull and meaningless, all knowledge and usefulness already gained. And nor were they obligatory passengers—they did not have to travel the road that time dictates, the road that would inevitably lead to death. They could stand, unmoving, and watch as time ravaged the world around them.

This was the impression Elliot got from Keara as he watched her, and listened to her. Although she seemed slightly curious as to why she might have been ejected from the council due to an insufficient bloodline, she didn’t seem to be wholly affected by it. As if it were an event in her past that had no bearing on her life now. It was easily able to be forgotten, or rewatched only as background distraction. A thing to wonder at every now and again, but to never really care too much about.

Elliot accepted the woman’s explanation, and all questioning about the specific requirements of this non-existent council ceased. Because, in the end, what did it really matter? The people that they were then might not be the people that they are now. Even as mere witnesses to time, they were all subject to its changing ways—they were all liable to change. What might once have been considered a necessity might now be rendered dismissed.

Anyway, Keara had moved on, and was now showing Elliot what the problem was. Elliot was both annoyed and glad that she had found something. It meant that he wasn’t imagining things, and that he wasn’t just useless at his job. He was doing it right—there was just virus there hindering any forward progress. He eyed the offending file, and would have deleted it then and there were it not for Keara’s suggestion to back up the computer first. He nodded.

”Duly noted. Will do. Thanks so much for the help,” he said, with a genuinely thankful smile. ”Anything I can do to repay you?”

"Nothing for me need you do. Happy I am of assistance to be."

Keara's words were sincere and in a world where everything came at a price, she was happy to buck the trend and do someone a favour just because she could. Such moments rarely came along for her since she had a habit of keeping herself to herself, so in moments like this she took full advantage of the opportunity she had been afforded. If there was a modern day phrase that would explain her way of thinking it was 'paying it forward,' not that Keara knew that expression herself.

"Entered this place I did with no expectations. Just wished to call in upon you I did. See that you well were. Too easy it is to be distracted in this age and wish to cultivate friendships with other I do. This I cannot do, if make no effort I do to maintain them." She was stating the obvious perhaps, but then she was the sort to share the inner workings of her mind.

"Moved premises you have since saw you last I did," she commented. She could have perhaps phrased her statement as a question and push for the details as to why he had moved the pub half way across the city but she wasn't sure that such a question would be appropriate, and so instead she let the statement hang in the air, as if he wished to share details on the move he would do and if not, then he would likely change the subject.

Elliot couldn’t really insist. In Keara, in that moment, he saw a bit of himself—one of those people who sometimes want to help others just for the pleasure of helping them, not demanding a whole bunch of ******** in return. Elliot did it all the time—helped people, because he could, because he had the means to do so. Keara’s motives were different, he supposed. She even admitted to it. She wanted to cultivate and keep friendships, and this was a way of doing so, maybe. Elliot grinned, and flicked some of the hair from his yes.

”In me you’ll find a friend without having to give me stuff to keep it that way,” he said. He knew that’s not what Keara meant; she’d come here wanting to see how he was, and that was where she’d made the effort. He hardly expected that she could have read the future, knowing that he might need some help with his computer. But he thought that it was worth saying, anyway. Too many people thought that money, or valuable skills could buy friendship. Elliot hates those people, and derided most materialism. It took a lot to get him out to buy new clothes—he only did so these days because those he had kept getting ruined in the raids, or in the catacombs, or wherever it was he might go to let off a little steam.

Elliot then nodded, gaze drifting from Keara to the establishment set up around them. It all looked exactly the same. They’d moved the majority of the fixtures and furniture en masse from the old location. He nodded, slowly.

”Yeah. We found that setting up shop next to a nightclub—one that really had no similarity whatsoever to our own establishment—wasn’t really good for business. We ran in to a bit of a trouble with staff, and some of the patrons were just…” he shook his head, as if he couldn’t find the words to explain, exactly, what about the patrons were off.

”This neighbourhood might not be the best, but I think it works for this kind of place. We’re better off, here,” he said with a nod, and a congenial smile.

It pleased her greatly that Elliot didn't expect anything from his friends in order to maintain his friendship. As much as she hadn't judged him to require anything of that nature, she had met people in her many years upon the Earth that did require such things. She recalled more than a few vapid females with whom she'd crossed paths that could only conjure up a kind word about her if she'd recently done something to keep them appeased. Not that she was mentally comparing Elliot to a woman or anything, it was more a passing memory that was recalled due to the conversation they had been having. This thought quickly faded to the back of her mind though, as he began to tell her about the reasons for moving Lancaster's across town. It all made perfect sense to her. A business partnership was like a marriage. If those involved could not happily co-exist, it was better for everyone involved if they went their separate ways and judging from how busy the bar was, Elliot had definitely made the right decision.

"That true does ring," she said glancing around at the clientele. She hadn't noticed anything untoward in those around her, no more than those she'd seen in the pub when it was back in the Gullsborough area but then she wasn't in the position to argue with Elliot's observation; after all, she'd not spent anywhere near as much time in the bar as he had.

"So...now that done we are with computer complications. Ask I should how life of yours is. Hope I do that not all your evenings here are spent."

She had just purchased a business of her own and so was getting to grips with what it meant to be business owner. Not that she really considered herself to be one after just a single day in charge. Her employees had no idea who she was, as she had yet to introduce herself or make any real staffing changes. She was planning where possible to employ more of her kind but then the human staff would remain essential to the smooth running of the store, as she would be unable to attend to the business during the daylight hours. If Elliot was to tell her that he spent every waking hour in the bar, she might have to reconsider her own involvement in her clothing store, as she was adamant that it would not take over her life in any way. While she was prepared to put in the hours to make her business successful, she wasn't prepared to give up her hobbies of hacking and monster hunting.

"Perhaps a Bloody Mary I will try once more. If the name of the beverage correctly recalled I have that is."

She didn't really know how best to attract the attention of any of the waitresses about them and seeing as how they were busy, she didn't want to try making her way through the crowd to the bar. By voicing her desire for a drink, she was hoping that Elliot might do the gentlemanly thing and order one for her.