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Quin rubbed at her eyes and yawned, she didn't know why she still did this each night when she awoke, she suspected it was more out of habit, a way of making her new existence a little less 'alien'. She'd got bored pretty quickly with the 'rise-straight-up-out-of-the-coffin' move, which had been funny at first but lacked any real impact when you were wearing ratty Hello Kitty pajamas and often slept inside random dumpsters....
"What....already?...."
...she grimaced as the growling hunger in her belly stabbed at her, for some reason she always felt like she was on the edge of starving even though it was easy for her to see that she was feeding at least twice as much as she needed. Sometimes she couldn't even finish off a kill for being so gorged with blood, but even then her body would still be screaming out for more....
*sigh*
Quickly changing into her street clothes she stashed her pajamas under the cardboard flooring inside the dumpster, with any luck she might be able to grab a bite within a few minutes which would help to improve her mood a bit.
Lifting the lid of the dumpster a fraction she peered out the gap to be sure the sun had really set, so far she had never been up before well past sunset but she didn't fancy finding out the hard way that she could wake up before it had set properly. For all she knew sunlight was harmless to her in this new form, but she wasn't keen to test the theory. Besides, she'd always preferred to 'hunt' at night even before she had sprouted a set of fangs and a true taste for blood, it was generally a lot easier to evade the cops when you could slip down a shady alleyway....
*All clear...time to get a wriggle on....* she flipped the lid up and hopped out onto the street, she could smell 'fresh blood' already, this was good, she wouldn't have to search to far first thing.... shutting the lid she started scenting the air...."Oh......yummy...." she frowned, 'dinner' was served all right, some hapless wino had decided to curl up right next to her dumpster, if it hadn't been for the filthy hand protruding from what looked like a pile of rags she might have walked right past him....
The hunger gnawed at her harder as she wondered if she might scare up something with less filth encrusted on it.... sighing she bent down and got to work.....

Quin squinted in the darkness puzzled....the last thing she remembered was walking out of the club and spotting a couple of cops...after that...it was kind of hazy.
"Oh man....what is that stink?!!"
snatching her wig off her head she used it to try and block out the revolting stench, from above a few small lumps of broken concrete sprinkled down onto her bare scalp.
"Wha....?"
Peering upwards she could make out a rough hole, a few pin pricks of light were visible at the other end which seemed a very long way away....this made no sense....nothing made sense much anymore but it was all starting to get to her, and the constant gnawing in her belly was NOT helping things. She took a step forward and promptly fell face first into water...but it wasn't nice, clean river water...oh no it was not....
"$£$%$%?!! I'M IN THE SEWERS?!! £$"£$$£ REALLY?!! WHAT THE...."
...for the next few minutes the sewers echoed with screams and hair curling curses as the young vampire punched fist sized holes in the tunnel walls....the lesson learned here today was that digging into the ground was a poor escape plan....

Quin went in for another bite only to find her attempts some how evaded yet again...
*What is it with these humans?....wriggling away and sassing me....*
A little annoyed she stalked off toward the bar, if blood was going to be such a pain in the *** to come by out here she'd just wait for some unsuspecting john to come along and work from there. Having encountered a 'blood thief' earlier she was starting to get a bit cranky...well...more cranky than usual for a vampire the suffered from 'insatiable hunger'. Not long ago she had stumbled upon a interesting looking vampire chick how unlike most, had stopped to chat for a while and had turned out to be a well of information. The first thing she had noticed about her was her amazing long white hair, it seemed to almost shimmer at times and had drawn her in like a moth to a flame. Being a 'wig' wearer Quin had had designs on scalping the woman and adding it to her collection, but when she slithered up by their side it became clear that this wasn't a human, and judging by the way she held herself, not a fresh fledgling ripe for the picking....

The night had improved a great deal after that, she had a name for the 'constant hunger' that gnawed at her and reassurance that she didn't need any more blood than usual for her kind (no matter what her insides told her) and to be careful about who you nibbled on as some of the humans around there were more that walking blood bags, some of which could lay her low with a nasty 'tummy ache' from some trick they could do to their blood.... Quin liked this woman, something about her made her feel more at ease than she had done since her 're-birth'....she hadn't even got a look at her 'sire' (another new term she had picked up from her new friend) and had been generally clueless as to how she was supposed to 'live' as a freshly turned vampire. Her old life was gone, not that it had been much to brag about, the last explosion in the 'kitchen' had made her homeless and the things found in the rubble by the Cops meant she was going to have to keep very low profile for a long time. Thankfully Quin was used to that, and being able to flip looks with a quick change of clothes and a new wig made her un-life a bit easier....but to be able to talk to one of her own kind that had been around the block a few times was better than being 'let off with a warning' for speeding when you had a kilo of meth stuffed under your passenger seat....

She couldn't say she understood a lot of what she was being told, but it was clear that her old 'hobby' might need to take a back seat for a while, or she'd need to refine her methods. You couldn't leave body parts just anywhere, there were some crazy humans that went out of their was to ice vampires that liked to make sculptures out of other peoples internal organs....let alone the odd 'secrecy' thing that was some kind of golden rule of their existence... as with most great artists, it would seem Quins would remain unknown in her considerably lengthened 'life' time...everyone was a critic....

"Ugh!"
...Quin sat bolt up right holding her stomach in the oddly clean room...
"Where the heck am I now...?"
As with every night since her turning and the last 4 years of her life she had been woken up by her own body yelling out for something, it may be blood now but it didn't seem much better than when she had been at the height of her meth habit. To top it off she was half slumped on a couch, in what looked like a hotel lobby with some half cut drunk stumbling toward her....
"%$% of man, I'm not in the mood..." she snapped at the drunk shuffling toward her, she was hungry and the last thing she wanted to do was rip someones throat out in a public place because she had the vampire version of PMS....though..... something about the place seemed rather off.... not that it mattered, she was more concerned about the long string of bloody drool hanging from the 'drunks' lip.
"Dude, I swear if you get any of that nasty looking goop on me I will cut off your £$"£^ and feed them to you..."
Sassy as she was being, she was starting to feel slightly worried... this whole place wasn't right somehow, and the 'drunk' looked totally waked out of his mind... was he wearing face paint?....it was late for Halloween by 3 months....

Suddenly out of nowhere some lunatic appeared and started shooting at the drunk, it seemed at first that the guy was missing but when the 'drunks' head exploded like a melon spraying brain matter like a lawn sprinkler it became clear that the guys aim hadn't been off.....the drunk had just been ignoring the wounds!....
*He must have been drinking drain-o or some s$%t!*
It had all happened so quickly Quin hadn't even had time to move and as quickly as the shooter had appeared he had disappeared...this place was NOT a good place to sleep.... it might not be a cramped dumpster in a filthy alley that stank of urine....but at least there she didn't wake up to get brain matter spattered on her dress there...most of the time.... *speaking of which* she thought.... as she gingerly picked a bit of the dead drunk off her shoulder...
"Eeeeeeew! Brains matter doesn't smell this bad this quick!?...."
looking carefully at the glob she saw something moving in it...
"What the heck?....is that..."
to her disgust she saw a couple of maggots wiggling half exposed.... and to think she'd had to keep a straight face when the long haired vampire woman she'd been chatting too the night before had mentioned 'Zombies'....like really?....do I have gullible tattooed on my forehead? she had thought figuring that the woman had been yanking her chain... boy was she wrong.
Grabbing her jacket she headed out the door, somehow she had to get a shower, with any luck 'breakfast' would provide one....

*hmmmmmmmmm....it's missing....something....*... standing back from the canvas she cast her eye over the effect, it wasn't half bad by her opinion but it lacked that certain Je ne sais quoi... her 'materials' sat slowly bleeding out in the corner, they'd passed out about an hour ago and where most likely in shock. Not that Quin had much of a clue about real medicine, she'd heard it said often enough in trashy TV medical dramas so figured the bit where they starting passing out and going strange colors might as well be called 'going into shock'. It's not like she'd done anything major to them yet, and they certainly weren't wounded so badly as to die from blood loss...well...not yet anyway, it was barely a trickle and would probably stop soon enough. She just had to resist the gnawing sensation in her gut and not eat her art supplies like the last few times. It wasn't helping her concentration that was for sure.
***** it....time to move onto the main event, I'll come back to this later...*
she turned her back on the blood spattered canvas and pulled her filleting knife out of her belt, maybe she'd try to skin this one alive? It'd been a long time since she'd tired that, so what if it'd failed each time she'd tried it? Maybe her new 'gifts' would give her the edge she needed to make a success of it this time....

Twenty minutes later she looked down glumly at the mess she had made, to be fair it had gone a little better than the last time she had tried this, but she'd sliced though a main artery half way up their leg and it had all been over rather quickly. Once they started to cool they became a complete nightmare to try and work with, so she'd quickly opened them up and harvested the organs before the heart had stopped pumping. She'd put the kidneys straight on ice and made a call to an old friend of hers, he'd probably be there soon so she'd better get a move on and finish up. She hadn't seen Anton since her turning and was keen to give the impression that it was all business as usual, so throwing a blanket over the cooling hollowed out corpse she headed off to grab a shower before he arrived.

The hot water felt wonderful on her cool skin, it had been nice with the guy she'd picked up at first too, he'd been more than happy to lend a hand soaping her down, but as was expected he started getting far to excited before she'd had enough time to get herself properly washed and she'd had to knock his lights out with a quick headbutt. It was hard to enjoy the rest of her shower with some half conscience guy twitching and gargling on the bathroom floor, she'd been tempted to just eat him and get on with the night...until she spotted the low grade wall art in his bedroom. It was generic rubbish, nothing special, mostly modern....it had got her inspired that was for sure, she hadn't had a chance to do anything artistic since her 'kitchen' had exploded an left her sleeping in dumpsters at night. It hadn't been all bad though, she no longer owed D.man as she'd supposedly gone up in smoke with the apartment (dead people aren't generally expected to pay their bills after all) and had wound up getting a set of fangs to boot. Anton was smart enough to keep his mouth shut if her old boss came asking about her, and he seemed to appreciate her 'sculptures'....He was one of the few that got to see them when they were 'fresh'....

"....Quin, honey, how many times have I told you you can't just hack out a set of kidneys?....what a mess..." Anton sighed as he looked over the mauled organs, though generally intacted he'd be lucky to get more than half the usual rate with the damage to the renal artery....
"What can I say Anton? I was on the clock, hit an artery and had to work fast..." Quin walked out of the bathroom towling herself dry, she felt a hundred times better now she was squeaky clean.
"What do you think?..." she nodded toward her 'work' as she started to gather up her clothes scattered about the floor....
"I think I call this one "passions in red"..." she giggled a bit at that, she had been a bit silly at the end and had decided to work the guys severed member into the piece. It had added the touch she was looking for but it gave it a rather comical air *ah well..I'm in a good mood tonight* she smirked to herself taking her clothes into the bathroom and throwing them into the still running shower, she still had a few spatters of zombie brain to deal with, not that her short lived partner had noticed a minor detail like that thanks to nearly a entire bottle of bourbon.
"...it's...errrr....pretty good Quin....is that a closet door this time?...." Anton's muffled voice replied from the living room, had Quin been more sensitive she'd have been able to detect his discomfort, but Quin was Quin, and she had about as much empathy as a breeze block. If the words were in the right order she was happy, subtext was lost on her and aside from feeling that people were always trying to get one over on her somehow (even if they weren't) she drifted through life almost completely unaware of the deeper feelings of those around her. She didn't have many 'deep' feelings or thoughts of her own, so why would she even consider that people had hidden depths?
.....Quin only had hidden shallows.....

*this was a bad idea...what was I thinking* Quin thought grimly as held herself as flat as possible against the wall, she could hear the guards footsteps drawing closer and silently cursed her bad luck for choosing a place to bust into with a security guard that did the job they were actually paid to do. Most times she be able to be in and out by now as they sat watching their shows, munched doughnuts and drinking gallons of cheap sludge like coffee....but not tonight.... even the security system had taken longer that usual, but she'd ignore that bad omen and carried on. This place was supposed to hold some very nice cosmetics, just the sort of thing a girl like Quin needed to pull off her ever changing array of looks. By now the powers that be would have worked out that the collection of human remains in her burnt down apartment did not amount to one whole body, and that the person that had 'collected' these things must still be on the loose somewhere in the city. So Quin flipped looks sometimes two of three times a week, which meant she got through A LOT of make-up, which she of course had no interest in paying for. It wasn't like she could just dash into store and grab armfuls of different shades of nail polish/eye shadow/lip stick without drawing attention, let alone if she then ran off with them whilst being chased by store detectives.

The footsteps began to fade again, the guard must have taken a different turn taking them away from her hiding spot...*phew...time to go*....the haul was pretty poor, but at least she wasn't going to leave empty handed...slipping down the hallway she made a few turns and headed out the exit, next time she'd trust her instincts and leave before wasting several hours playing 'dodge-the-guard' in a rather low end warehouse.....

Wading through the ankle deep 'water' Quin tried not to think about what she might be walking through. It had been one of her less than brilliant ideas to hide in the sewers when the sun started to peek over the horizon, but she'd been out and about seeing what the city had to offer and had ended up in oddly dumpster free area. The place she had been strolling around in contained mostly derelict buildings, which would normally would have been a real boon, but some of the buildings had backed onto some scrub land and having heard about the nasty creatures that popped up in those sorts of places she made for the sewers before she developed a serious case of sunburn. She'd been mauled not long after her turning by some horrible creature she'd barely got a look at. Quin had made the mistake of messing around with a strange looking alter in a morgue, it seemed like the thing to do at the time but it hadn't gone very well. What ever she did with it resulted in angry rumblings, wisps of smoke and a growing sense of unease, she none the less carried on determined to see if she could get it to do 'something'.... she really had no idea if the rumblings were good or bad, it seemed that some of them were less 'hostile' than others, some of her actions seemed to have no effect at all. After about five minutes of this she had almost given up when some 'thing' had darted past her mauling her arm in the process.... Quin decided that not only had this been a complete waste of time but that it outright sucked. She vowed she would NEVER bother with strange alters again that day. It was a painful lesson to be sure, and she'd rather wade through sixteen miles of muck than risk tangling with something like that again. If it hadn't been for a friendly fellow vampire patching her up later that day she could have been carrying around that injury for quiet some time.....

Quin carried on wading through the sludge of the sewers, she had been looking for an exit for a while now but so far all she had found was a few rats, a barrel of chemical waste and a dead clown floating face down in the 'water'. To add to the oddness of the scene the dead clown had a balloon attached to his hand by a string, it hovered a few inches from the top of the sewer tunnel and bobbed now and then as his body drifted with the ebbs and flows of the water. Looking down at the odd figure she could see that their head looked like it had been caved in with some form of blunt object. Nudging the corpse with the toe of her shoe, she noticed in the water next to it was a large book....carefully she fished it out with the edge of her shoe....*some bird watching ****?....well that's weird...* she frowned, strange as the whole scene was she couldn't imagine why a sewer dwelling clown would need a book on bird species...or what would possess them to shove a asthma inhaler up their butt.... if life above ground wasn't odd enough, it seemed that it was even more so down here....

*Well....here goes nothing....* Quin thought as she carefully stepped out of the Mausoleum. She'd been grumbling to a fellow vamp the other night about her slim pickings hunting in the area she had been in, there was very little challenge left in bopping 'zombies' and she wasn't able to find much else that didn't attempt to twist her arms out of her sockets when she tried to nail them. The vampire had kindly offered her a chance to poke around some place called 'The Catacombs' with their own little patch to retreat to if things got too heavy and she had jumped at the chance....thinking about later (as was usually the way with Quin) she figured she was lucky they had turned out to actually be a decent being, and not something like her. It could have ended up with her becoming some decoration for their lair, or even a late night snack if what she was hearing about some vampires feeding on other vampires (an idea that had at first surprised her but grew to make a bit more sense over time) was to be believed. As it goes all was well and she now had new area to crush skulls in.

She hoped that her adoptive sire wouldn't be angry that she had upped sticks and gone off to hunt some more challenging game, but the vampire that had suggested this venture was a friend of hers (unless she was wrong on that front, which was always possible) and she really had got to the point where she could be sipping a cocktail and chatting to someone whilst bopping a zombie with her spare hand. She'd never improve her combat skills if she spent her time 'swatting flies', she needed a bit more of a challenge.

Several hours later, tired and battered Quin retreated to the Mausoleum much happier with the new game she was finding. Admittedly she had to retreat a lot more than she would have liked, but she was slowly improving and could take a few of the things down with luck and a fair wind behind her.....