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She knew she should’ve stayed in.

Ever since returning from the Shadow Realm, Cassandra had kept herself safely between the walls of the Dusk Sanctum. It felt safer there; visitors were few and things were blessedly quiet. Still, she worried about her sudden and complete lack of desire for interaction with others, and eventually that worry got the best of her. She finally put her foot down and decided to force herself out of the sanctuary and into the public demesnes, one step at a time. She picked someplace small to start, the “Interwebz Café” – she’d logged in there a few times back before her powers started developing, though she was much more partial to the Honeymead Library. Still, it was a destination she felt she could manage, so she had tossed a coat across her shoulders and made her way through the portals to the outside world.

As soon as she’d stepped foot outside of the Crypt, a blast of wind had nearly taken the slight girl from them. The gusts were insidiousness frosted over – reaching a hand out to balance herself across a patch of ice that seemed to appear out of nowhere, her coat flapped open and arctic air sizzled across her skin with little regard for clothing. Regaining her footing, Cassandra had secured the coat tightly around her, zipping and buttoning it shut resolutely. The weather reports hadn’t mentioned anything close to the conditions that surrounded her, lines of snow dancing across the pavement like a monochromic aurora borealis. It was early in the evening, but she could tell the weather was only beginning to sink its claws into the night, so she hurried along to her destination.

The café was a cozy little building, boasting a small cluster of computers and what Cassandra remembered as some pretty tasty scones. (She hadn’t tasted them or any other normal food since shortly after her turning, but the things lost always seemed to burn the brightest in memory.) The coziness was one factor she hadn’t planned on favoring so heavily when she planned the outing, but her trip to the café had changed her mind pretty fast. She gratefully, wordlessly exchanged a couple of bills for a cup of steaming coffee and a passcard from the attendant, and took her place at one of the computers. The coffee wasn’t any more digestible than the scones, but it smelled delightful and people didn’t tend to pay as much attention to the level inside the cup as its presence.

She hadn’t spoken to anyone as she sat there, idly tapping and scrolling away at the compact desktop computer, only occasionally glancing up at her surroundings. Simply being there was the larger accomplishment, and the inane time-wasters on the screen were modest help at best. She barely noticed as most of the patrons made their way out into the storm, opting for someplace safer than a public café, nor the one or two lone figures that slipped in instead of out, finding refuge from the ever-worsening conditions outside.

What did capture her attention, and quickly, was a loud crack and sudden pitch blackness covering the room. The lights, the computer screens, even the gaudy neon sign advertising the café’s presence to the outside world - all had gone out. Ordinarily, the streetlights outside would have provided some measure of illumination to the café’s interior, but they had gone forebodingly dark as well.

Small noises generally aren’t obvious when they’re low-level background material, but when they’re suddenly absent, few things could be more conspicuous. The hum of the neon, the whir of CPU fans, the drip-drip-drip of the coffeemaker – these were all swallowed in complete and utter silence for a long moment, before something took their place. It could have been anything at first: a heavy breather, an SUV of some sort driving past, or even the wind abrading the commercial roof overhead. The wind was doing its own work and making its own sounds, though, and as the noise grew, it became obvious that this was a different animal.

The noise grew to a rumble, and became palpable beneath Cassandra’s tense feet. The word never graced her silent lips, but it flared brightly within her mind just before the vibrations became violent.

“Earthquake.”

It was the last thought that she had time for before chaos ensued. A cracking, crumbling sound surrounded her, the young girl was thrown head over feet like a rag doll, and the darkness became black.

Green eyes stared intently at the screen before her as she huffed to herself, lips mouthing the words that continued to appear while occasionally trying to say them aloud beneath her breath. Since talking with Lancaster, she’d tried to improve her English to surprise him and to surprise Aidan. The woman had made her lazy, never speaking in English when at home and she’d not gone out enough to warrant practicing otherwise. So, to keep it a surprise, she’d wandered out to Interwebz for a little one-on-one time with the computer and her new “Babel” subscription.

“Nai, Nai I know that is ‘apple’,” the Greek sighed beneath her breath. “That is not the solution. Give me something more hard.”

As it would turn out, she was still in the noun stage, which had her increasingly more aggravated. She knew what a chair was. She knew what a door was. Why she needed to learn all of these before being taught to conjugate and actually form sentences was beyond her. Pushing back in her seat, more of her native tongue came tripping off of her lips as her eyes stared hard at the task set before her. Yet another noun was given and she let out a growl of frustration.

“Oxi! Not need this bit of sh-”

Her hand connected with the computer’s screen and everything went black. Wide eyes graced her features as she held still, her hand still connected with the computer as the darkness descended and near silence overwhelmed the room. “Oxi…oxi oxi oxi oxi…” Hitting it again, she prayed the lights would come back on and everything would be normal, but it only seemed to be emphasized as a rumbling started, building up from the floor and leaving her hugging the computer. “Sorry! Sorry! I am sorry I to have breaked the screen of compute!”

But the shaking only grew worse. Was this a mystic wreaking havoc? Releasing the computer from her near vice grip, she pulled out her phone to get a hold of Aidan, being met with static. A laundry-list of swears came next as her phone was shoved back in her pocket and her tome was brought out but she didn’t change location. There was no Den, no common room that she’d been expecting to see, just the dark of the café that yielded no familiar faces.

The shaking grew worse and worse as things began to crash around her. The computers were tipped off of tables, baristas were getting burned by the hot coffee they’d been attempting to deliver, chairs were being flipped. Crawling along the floor, she headed toward the counter, trying to get to those that had been working before everything went sideways, but she was just met with new obstacle after new obstacle, including one such coffee pot—albeit empty—that came crashing down on her hand. Glass tore through her skin as the glass shattered, but she pushed through.

“Is hurt, who all need much a lot the help??” she called out over the ruckus while holding herself up on the counter's edge, hoping her English was intelligible enough to be useful to someone.

Blurry shapes in coruscating shades of orange flickered in and out of Cassandra’s vision. Woozily, she reached one hand up to stop her eyelids from blinking, before realizing that the light itself was the reason for the flickering. Some indistinguishable piece of debris lay on the rough-hewn stone a couple of yards away. It was on fire, giving off an intermittent orange glow and an acrid electronic smell. If her eyes weren’t so accustomed to the dark from long hours in the Sanctum, it wouldn’t have been enough light to read by. As it was, Cassandra could make out some basic details of her surroundings.

The space she was in seemed much larger than the café. It extended nearly as long again toward what she estimated to be the south and the east, though it was irregular in shape. The floor was some sort of irregular cobblestone, and the walls were coated in what appeared to be a glazed white tile. The surfaces that must have once gleamed white and polished had gone rheumy with age. Many had cracked and fallen off of the wall, revealing old clay beneath. Some of the broken edges were dull with age, but others gleamed in the flame-light. They were scattered among large broken slabs of concrete laying on the cobblestones, some with shattered shards of rebar poking out of their sides.

The young girl stirred. She lay on her side on the floor, legs curled beneath her. A quick mental checkup was reassuring – she could feel her legs and toes, though they had that tingling feeling which seemed to remain shortly after her vampiric abilities had healed minor wounds. She propped herself up on one elbow, and felt bone grate against bone. That’s where most of the impact from the fall must have gone, some analytical portion of her enhanced mind told her, as her features screwed up into a wince.

Wait…the fall?

She rolled onto her back, shoulders thudding against the floor. The sub-basement had high, vaulted ceilings that – at points – were as tall as the room was wide. At the arch’s apex, faint ambient light outlined a ragged hole in the structure, leading to the café above. The section above her had obviously fallen in, and Cassandra with it. Next to the hole, spiderweb cracks outlined what must have been the rest of the café’s floor, and they were spreading. Concrete dust cascaded down from the underside, and it was obvious it wasn’t going to last more than a moment or two. She’d been lucky – even though vampires could take quite a beating and heal quite fast, a big enough chunk of that concrete could send the fastest healer back to the Shadow Realm, Vambrace or not.

Cassandra’s mind raced. She hadn’t been able to speak normally for months, since her last death and return. She could manipulate wireless technology, but it was pretty obvious the power was either out to the whole building, or fried internally. She could broadcast a mental message to everyone above, but there could be humans above. Tipping them off to anything supernatural would be a gross violation of one of the basic tenets of her faith, so it was unthinkable. The same went for any of her other powers. There was one other option – one she wasn’t very keen on, but would be the most explainable while at least giving any of her kind above a chance of survival.

Cassandra’s eyes closed, and pale lips peeled back from diminutive fangs barely bigger than human canines. Her back arched away from the masonry floor as breath surged into lungs that saw less use as the days went by. Her jaw dropped open, and using everything within her, Cassandra screamed.

The sound wasn’t deafening, but nobody would ever mistake it for human. A cacophony of electronic warbles, screeches, and static overlaid each other in an ear-piercing symphony, moments before the remnants of the floor above collapsed. Ceasing her otherworldly howl, the girl lurched to her feet, clutching her wounded shoulder, and dashed toward a sheltered corner of the room as the pieces fell.