Path of the Vampire forum

The vampire looks bored. A breath so hoarse and so faint echoes out of him as he sits there staring into open space.The room is tasteful in a corporate way with nothing daring enough to cause offence or at least it looks that way when he’s not really there. Noir is thinking about how normal people act: what they do and what they say down to the inflections of their voice and the gestures of their hands. If there was anyone else in the room, any other candidates going up for the job, then he would be staring at them. Analysing them so he can mimic their mannerisms. He’s so far away from being human that he doesn’t remember what that means. He’s only been this way for a matter of months but it’s enough to strip his soul right out of him and make him just a walking, confused corpse. Just like Frank the zombie.

Celeste, the woman who greeted him earlier and asked him to take a seat, calls his name a half dozen times before he hears her. He cranes his neck to look up and then bursts into action and speed which looks unnatural for his tall skinny frame. He follows her into the room but keeps his distance and then sits when he’s instructed to. He doesn’t even recognise that there’s this other person in the room until he’s sitting down directly opposite her. When she calls his name in a voice that sounds truly angelic, his eyes focus on their own and the details are sucked into his brain with such blinding clarity that it gives him a headache.

“Yes, hello there.”

Back home, Noir doesn’t have an accent. In the hills the way he talks is as common as the coarse grey shingle they cover the dirt roads with, but in this foreign city, miles away from home, it marks him as an outsider. To him, they're the ones with an accent. Everything he says flows as smooth as a meadow river with inflections marbling his low voice with a sing-song quality. For the social occasions, most people love his Midland Irish accent and want to hear him sing, but the minute it comes to employment and stuffy official activities, they think he’s some backwash stray who has no business being here. They think his speech is a sign of ignorance. One look at the woman in front of him makes him anxious for other reasons though.

She is beautiful. Snowy hair and pale skin and blue eyes mark her like some mythical arctic creature. He goes as still as death under her gaze.