Path of the Vampire forum

Pi didn’t get out much, she had very little reason to. She had what she did nightly and was comfortable with her little rituals. Life was full of them, things a person did each day (or in their case, night) to consume the hours that ticked by. She wondered if there would be a time she’d grow bored of those hours and minutes, when they stretched out in a long line in front of her and she realised just how much she had to fill. And would come to hate it, hate each minute and each hour and her inability to fill it with anything meaningful. To become bored, lazy, dangerously so. That hadn’t come, but the potential was there. Even now. She was immortal, and she accepted that was the case but it was sometimes hard to envision what that meant when she was still living a life that was, for all intents and purposes, the same duration she’d be living if she hadn’t been turned into what she was. The different being, is now she didn’t have to live, in order to sustain a life. She didn’t have to buy food. She didn’t have to work to pay rent. She didn’t have obligations and necessities of life that had to be met in order to survive as a human.

Those changes in her being had shifted her sense of necessity. She thought this life, the one of a vampire, could be compared to what the super rich felt like. The level of rich that required very little input from the people who earned the money, than to live and let the oceans of cash roll into their bank accounts. She had often wondered what she would do in the same situation, with all of that time, all of that money, and none of the responsibility. It was surprising it took this level of change to give it to her. What it meant, being a vampire, was that she had to fabricate responsibility and necessity. She worked in Lancaster’s not because she had to, but because she wanted to. She didn’t have to care for the lineage she brought together, but she did, because she could, and had time, so why not. She had built a small isolated ‘human’ life inside her vampire one in order to give those minutes and hours more meaning.

There was something Freudian in her need to do that, but she was not the type to dwell on it. What she did dwell on, (at least for these few minutes and hours) was the message she’d received from Skylar. Pi wasn’t antisocial (something she told herself all the time, and convinced herself was true, even though she regularly saw little need to be ‘social’) but she also wasn’t up to being masochistic about why she disliked Skylar and subjecting herself to the ridiculousness she was convinced was the woman’s modus operandi, seemed to be exactly that ‘masochistic’. Except she’d told Elliot she’d try. To be fair, she’d told him she’d try not to shoot Skylar but Pi figured, Elliot being Elliot he rather took that agreement to mean she’d also get to know the twit and attempt some sort of … truce. The text was just as obviously her opportunity to do it. She groaned instead, kicking her legs back onto her desk and considered the very real possibility of just not going.

Her office smelled like chlorine, not too astringently so, but it was there. It was hard to get away from considering a thin wall was all that separated her from the lap pool in the training room beyond. Well, that and she’d just indulged in an hour long lap swim so the chemicals clung to her hair and skin like perfume. Au du Chlorine. Pungent stuff. Her hair was still damp, finger combed off her forehead to fall in a messy damp wave off her face. She wasn’t dressed for the casino, mostly because she’d had no intention of going to one when she’d chosen her wardrobe for the night although she could probably pass with her dress that reached just past her calves. She should probably change for the meet but no prior warning usually resulted in just this, people arriving not quite dressed for the occasion or location. (and Pi, just really didn’t feel like going to the trouble.)

It wasn’t far, the casino and she took her time heading that way. Taking her time meaning she left right away but walked, throwing on a jacket and a pea green scarf, wrapping the soft cashmere around her throat and bundling up against the cold, even if she didn’t need to. The black jacket was short, stopped just above her waist, covering only her chest and down the long length of her arms, the mandarin collar high, swallowed completely by the scarf and the two lengths Pi had gathered in a knot and swirled to cover her neck up to her chin. Her damp hair blew in the winter chill wind, drying quickly, haphazardly.

She found Skylar at the bar, wearing next to nothing. Pi was overwhelmed at the complete lack of surprise at the woman’s unreasonably short get up, in the middle of winter. Inwardly Pi sighed. It was going to be a long night, she could tell. Missy show my legs dangled like a Christmas ornament off the barstool, her ample leg show attracting more than one male stare and Pi had to sit next to her and engage the chippy in a conversation that was meant to mend bridges and foster a firmer sense of welcome to the ‘lineage’. She’d stopped calling their group a family, because they weren’t, not really, despite her rather fervent inner wish that they would be one day. It saddened her, that she’d given up the hope of it, but it hadn’t become what she’d hoped and she had wondered, not for the first time, if that hadn’t been her fault anyway. Much like the fractured relationship with her and the chippy on the bar stool beside her, she didn’t play well with people she felt threatened by and she had felt plenty threatened many times since creating d’Artois and much like any product of the foster system she invariably blamed herself for what went wrong. And did now too.

“Bonjour"she greeted quietly, her gaze reserved. She didn’t have much to say beyond that, figured since she hadn’t called this awesome meeting she could safely let Miss Chip lead the reconciliation charge.

I am not anti-social. I am not anti-social Pi repeated over and over in her mind.

The quacks were wrong, repetitive mantra like repetition of ones goal didn’t do **** for adjusting an otherwise negative outlook of her current situation. Saying it over and over again didn’t reinforce positive behaviours and she sure as hell wasn’t finding herself suddenly inclined to be nice to the woman. At least she wasn’t frowning, but she sure wasn’t jumping on the conversational lures Skylar threw out and reeling in an as yet absent feeling of discovered connectivity. The thought made her smile at the sheer absurdity of her thoughts.

Pi hoped Skylar thought the smile was for her. That would help. Smiling always helped, as long as it wasn’t the shredded glass sharp kind of smile, all jagged edges and cutting pointy bits. Pi sighed. It wasn’t a big sigh, because sighing like a little kid who’d just been told they’d have to sit through a Coronation Street omnibus was not going to be helpful in this situation. This was a smaller one, one she carefully followed with her answer to Skylar’s questions, her own short and to the point.

“No, I don’t drink.. and… no I don’t gamble.” Not that Pi had tested out the first in a while, not since she’d tossed her guts up in the Necropolis nearly four years ago (and witnessed other vampires do the same untold times afterwards). She couldn’t remember who was there that night, Simon, and a couple others she’d never continued an ongoing relationship with. Hell she wasn’t even sure they’d made it this far, so few did. Maybe only Simon, but her swiss cheese memory couldn’t connect the familiarity dots with the rest. It didn’t matter really. Even though she loved to cook (bake specifically), she’d never tasted what she’d made, only assumed they were good when Elliot (and those she’d offered to feed) didn’t spit it back out again.

And gamble? She took a moment to look around her, scanning the place she found herself in. No one could call her a gambler. She’s not even sure she’d been in here in two, maybe three years, potentially more. The thought didn’t even cross her mind. She found casinos depressing and sad. The people who came here were washed out and grey, as if the glittering machines they sat at had leeched what little colour they boasted from them and used it to power the flashing lights and spinning wheels. Their wide eyes stared sightlessly into the flickering kaleidoscope, hypnotized by the belief their luck would turn with one more pull of the handle. Dazzled and dazed.

Along the bar, behind the slouched twenty something-year old nursing a merry coloured cocktail she spied one such people. He sat between two machines, hair slicked back by gel (or sweat), his shirt ill fitting and hanging loosely over muddy coloured pants that might have been khaki in another life, but now took on a greenish olive hue. An umbilical cord dangled from the loop in his pants with a simple clip, the other end plugged into the one armed bandit, the credit card, gladly supplied by the casino, acting as the conduit between casino and his dwindling bank account pumping life into the machine to keep the wheels spinning and the hope soaring, all the while sucking what life it could from him and his ability to buy food for the children Pi imagined he had. Abandoned children, forgotten children.

She imagined she could see the cord move, like a throat swallowing, gulping down the man’s spirit, lying to him, feeding him hope but taking all he had, sucking him dry to leave a husk behind. This was legal vampirism, couched in rich red upholstery, fake gold crenulated accents and heavy plush carpets.

“No…” she said again, quietly, turning her gaze away from the man and the despondency he represented to her. There was no hope here. “I don’t gamble.”

But she would if Skylar asked, because what she did do, is love the man who had sired this woman standing in front of her. What was it about her Elliot that he tortured himself with emotional needy women with tendencies towards emotional outbursts (her included). He had enough on his hands with the one, surely he could give himself a break and attempt not to bring anymore into the fold. Except he had. And here she was.

It’s not even that Pi couldn’t get along with any woman he’d sired. She got on perfectly fine with Charlie, but it seemed to her Charlie was sensible enough to know when not to lay her hands all over the man who had chosen to take her under his wing. Skylar, not so much. It was like she was missing a ‘sense’ chip and chose instead to be the giddy irreverent trollop Pi was quickly assuming she was. Except, trollops didn’t make such excellent swords did they?

She didn’t sigh again, but she thought it, a big one this time, in the comfortable annals of her own mind. It didn’t really matter what she thought, or how much she wanted to dismiss her, she just couldn’t and because she couldn’t, effort (real effort) was required to build a ******* bridge.

“But I can… if you'd like.” She offered magnanimously. Ha! There, see? She thought to herself, she was damn oak, that’s what she was. She could leap tall buildings and swing from vines with the best of them. Her inner movie reel (featuring her and tarzan type swinging) made her smile again, and this one she hoped Skylar believed was for her too.

Cause smiling helped.

Pi hadn’t thought of herself as the sort of person who ‘wasn’t’ stuff. Until tonight when she started to compile a mental list of things she wasn’t. She hadn’t considered the fact she looked at situations like these and counted the ways she just WASN’T (in capital letters and potentially bold). She wasn’t anti-social. She wasn’t a touchy feeling sort. She wasn’t into chattering about like a muppet. In fact, she realised, she looked too much at what she was doing in terms of what she wasn’t, which seemed odd, and defeatist.

When had she become that person, the sullen one starting out from the shadowy corners eschewing what she deemed was beneath her with this ever increasing list of things she wasn’t and didn’t. Obviously, it had been a while, because her mind still wasn’t done with counting the things she wasn’t. She wasn’t a chatty sort. She didn’t like being hauled about by the arm in a pretense of closeness she didn’t feel and she wasn’t keen on hearing what Skylar may or may not be doing when it came to Elliot. She just wasn’t, and didn’t and was happily grumpy that she in fact… was, doing all of those things right at this minute.

Too many wasn’t. Way too many don’ts. Too many sullen thoughts racing through an uncompromising mind. Is this how it would be for her? How she would continue to look into a future that spread our far longer that a mere minutes and hours? Would her eternity be measured in the repetitious “I don’t”. What a thoroughly depressing thought.

Except, Good Lord, Skylar was talking like a rabbit on speed and Pi was tempted to slap her to shut her up. Which wasn’t an option, but it was a cheerful mental picture which made Pi smile again. She aimed it at Skylar, loathe to waste the expression and hoping it helped stave off a bout of ‘shut up’ she was leaning towards speaking.

“How old are you?” Pi asked instead, because Skylar made her feel ancient and frail, and rickety as if her ‘those were the days’ opinions were two generations removed from the peppy flibbertyjibbet at her side. And because she was curious. Pi wasn’t old, not in age, but sometimes in her mind she felt eons older, her life experiences stretched out before her in a long road of moments where she’d had to grow up faster, decide her fate earlier than most. She couldn’t remember a time when she’d ever been as giddy as the girl at her side.

It was telling that the person Pi had considered one of her best friends in the city was the head of the most hated killing faction. Friends being a term she used loosely. Pi didn’t consider herself bad ***, but she had a very hard time being… soft. (which is probably why she got along so well with Velveteen) Except with Elliot. He had been the sole reason for many of her exceptions, for so many of the changes she had undergone. She’d never grabbed his arm and dragged him somewhere like Skylar was doing and the image in Pi’s mind of Skylar doing the same with the man she loved made her jaw clench. Cause Pi wasn’t that person, had never been. She didn’t throw herself into anything with wild abandoned (except maybe killing things, efficiently and skillfully) and just couldn’t wind down enough to even try. It wasn’t in her make up, it wasn’t how she was hard wired.

Yet, here she was, wasn’t she? Despite her Eeyore type gloom in her inner thoughts, she hadn’t bashed the woman’s brains in to shut her up and she hadn’t hauled on that arm trapping her own and using it as available leverage to break it. Such a vulnerable position, all snugged up with someone, so easy to take advantage of. So, no, she hadn’t done those things and she had let herself be pulled hither and yon (hither being the roulette table, yon being this casino) and she stood at the end of that same table her gaze tracking the clicking clap of the white ball bouncing over the red and black wheel.

The table was closed, no more bets, all eyes were trained on the bouncing ball, all but Pi’s, hers roamed the faces of people, noting their locations, assessing them, quartering their mannerisms and clothing and filtering them through the little computer program in her brain and slotting them into little categories, all of them harmless, but none of them escaped her notice. Not the middle aged man with his ill fitting slinky silk shirt (what was with middle aged men and casinos), nor the small clutch of excitable chippies with their eager eyes, low cut dresses and flashes of breast flesh. Pi rather thought Skylar would fit with that lot. Pi, however, did not.

Skylar smiled back and Pi rather thought it meant they were getting somewhere. They weren’t not really, not yet anyway but the night was young.

“No, you don’t look twenty eight at all.” She replied, watching the ball finally land and then searching the people ringing the table as they seemed to let out a mournful moaning, deflated at their losses. Idiots, she thought, the lot of them. She was listening to Skylar chatter, but only with half an ear. Lucky genes, wasn't that the truth. She had lucky genes too, too lucky. They'd been genes that had been clearly apparent, even at eight. She hated her face, and was rather glad, in a spiteful way, that it wasn't possible for her to look into a mirror and see it daily.

It would help immensely if Pi were drunk, drunk would have helped quite a bit. A lot of Pi’s bigger mistakes in her misbegotten youth had happened at the hands of some clear spirit, but at least she had some fun while she made them. They were not your usual fare. Mistakes for Pi meant broken bones of some sort, usually hers. Her poison of choice, tequila. Tequilla had proved a fickle ***** and for too many years she’d attempted to keep up with the guzzling of the toxic substance with many of the men in her unit. They’d done it to get into her pants (unsuccessfully – her psychosis about sex remained strong… even paralytic) and hers was to drive out demons hounding her and making her crazy.

And she had been crazy, in her way. What Skylar believed to be unconscionably demented now was in no way her at her worst. She’d been her worst, done worse still as a human that being a vampire seemed almost anticlimactic. If her old unit could see her now they would whistle at the pacifist she had become, ask her what the **** was wrong with her and had she hit her head and completely lost her ****. She wondered too, if that hadn’t really been the case.

“I’m thirty three.” Pi answered, wondering really if there should have been much difference in their outlooks considering how reasonably close they were in age. Only five years, but that still felt like a chasm between them that at the moment, was made bigger by her own inclination to span the gulf. Pi sighed, thinking maybe her monotone answering of the questions thrown at her was proving unhelpful to her goal. “I’ll be thirty four next month.” She expanded, giving the other woman a sliver of an opening into her real self.

The fact she was here at all, being dragged around this depressing **** hole was testament to the well of reserve she had developed since her early twenties. But maybe too, that could be attributed to the fact her frontal lobe had finally developed and she had stopped trying to pull her penis out and wave it about like she was just one of the guys. That Pi, had long since fled the building and what was left in its place was something a little less volatile surely, a little more reserved, and she actually wanted to try.

Try to mend the bridge. Attempt to understand the inner working mechanics that seemed to drive the woman beside her.

“Elliot is seven years older than I am.” She said, still trying, saying more in the hopes that at some point she’d feel more comfortable with Skylar. She didn’t hold out much hope, not really. And that too didn’t feel right. Elliot’s age. Her ancient soul had lived to match his in her mind. Their experiences had forged them together in a way that seemed to negate the differences in ages and experiences. Despite him being older, he was less encumbered, freer. His days of roaming, a musician gypsy, had given him a soft poetic soul, even if the vampire side had hardened it, toughened it up and made it a sinewy thing, darker, deeper, with hidden rages and murky areas of questionable justifications. She loved both aspects, his two faces, one called to her, wanting her to be better (or why the hell else would she be here) and the other helped her come to terms with her own darkness, seeing it reflected in his eyes, knowing that there was inherent goodness behind the rage and that it was possible to be both.

“Do you… still have family?” She wondered if she should know this about Skylar, wondered if Elliot had told her and she’d (in)conveniently forgotten. But she was making small talk, even has she leaned forward, chips Skylar had given to her laid simply on the black. Fifty/Fifty. Better odds than the rest. Less return, higher likelihood of success and Pi wasn’t here to lose. She didn’t play any game to forfeit and fold. She played to increase her chances to profit and then, afterwards, if her altruism dictated. Then she’d donate, but she wouldn’t purposely lose, just to satisfy (even a Charity’s) need to make money off the backs of the useless bastards lining the casino shelling out their money in the hopes the big break would come and they would win big and never come back. The sad truth was. They always came back. Win or no.

Cause the house always won.

Pi had no idea what her star sign was, hadn’t been one of the types to check her horoscope in an effort to gauge what fate had in store for her life in that month or week. She’d always been a person ruled by her own actions, building the blocks of her life piece by piece, each moment carefully orchestrated by herself to ensure an outcome she dictated. Until Harper Rock. Until this small town on the *** end of nowhere Canada had thrown the veritable wrench into her life and made her question every part of her existence.

She doubted that any horoscope man had ever invented could adequately intuit this eventuality her life would take. “I don’t know what my star sign is.” Pi replied, her small smile widening as she won, the small pile of chips she was given by Skylar multiplying in front of her. Pushing the seed chips Skylar had given her back to the woman at her side, Pi played with her winnings, choosing black again, all in. Fifty fifty was higher odds, and black was as statistically likely to win as it was in the first round.

There were no fickle fates to dictate the roll, merely inference on likelihoods determined by mathematical bell curves. Nothing magical about, nothing lucky or unlucky, merely mathematics, and the rolling vagaries of a bouncing white ball. In this, no talent was required, and Pi showed little urge to either earn money or lose it, but if she was going to play… she certainly wasn’t going to play to lose.

“The object is always to win.” Pi stated quietly. “Charity events rarely give adequate monies directly to the charity of choice. This charity will first need to pay the cost of this casino, whatever house cost required to use this facility. Exorbitant I bet. Then overheads, staff costs and other expenses and whatever is left over… and there will be precious little of the original thousands they’ll rake through this place.. will be sent to their charity of choice, which will then take another cut in overheads, expenses, staffing and expenses before the people they were meant to help see a cent of it.” Pi finished, her speech long, but quiet, not looking at Sklyar at all, but the croupier with his deft fingers and strident voice calling for last bets.

She knew how the system worked. She wasn't sure how much money the foster family's raked in to take care of her, but she knew she never saw a cent of it being spent on her. As a child she had seen precious little of these 'charities' when she was young and had learned to disdain the 'do well' people with their insincere smiles and ulterior motives.

“I bet a gold guinea I could give the money I win directly to the Methodist church in Newborough, and they’d do a lot more with it than this crackerjack charity would.”

“Black five,” the croupier calls and Pi’s smile widens.

She could come to like this rather simplistic form of gambling. Apparently, she was rather good at it. Pulling her winnings towards her she waved away another bet, choosing instead to finish what she was saying to Skylar, this time giving the woman her full attention. “I don’t gamble,” she said again, as if reiterating her stance was necessary. “So I doubt I’ll be back unless you manage to drag me here again.”

Pi had listened to Skylar talk about her family, so normal sounding, with its mother, father and sibling units. Most people had the same familial makeup, because that was the norm, the usual case of parenting and children as if spitting out one child wasn’t enough, when you could repopulate the world, one three child family at a time. Pi felt a pang of jealousy at the recital of Sky’s connections, it was brief, leaving as fast as it had come, leaving a sense of remorse at how little her own childhood compared. “I am an only child,” she shared, “and both of my parents are dead.” Or good as dead. Pi had no idea who her father was (and her birth certificate didn’t enlighten the situation with its ‘unknown’ portion where the father’s name ought to be. For all intents and purposes she’d become an orphan when her mother had died.

Pi was still coming to grips with the likelihood that her mother’s death is what had ultimately saved her from turning out exactly the same way. Dead too young, jacked up by who the hell knows what, comatose on the couch while the building she was sleeping in burned around her. Yes, Pi was an orphan, but that was one of the good things in her life. (so sayeth Pi).


“Do you see them then? Even now? How do you manage?”