kore_logs | Is it the welcome wagon

The night air was pleasantly cool against her skin, the bite of chill rendered merely refreshing by the irrelevance of temperature to her body's functions now.

A part of her (the part of her that was strange and fey and even she wasn't quite sure how old) wanted to run for the sheer joy of it, but she kept herself disciplined: sprinting about like a dog off its leash would, after all, ruin her hair. She just wished she had something prettier to wear; makeup raided from the pharmacy only went so far, and her crisp button-up shirt, cuffed trousers, and leather boots were all so depressingly practical. Still, there was a shivery sort of thrill to it all — social visit or hunting, and was there really any difference?

The rapping of her fist against the door of Shonsu's house was a sharp one, two, three.

Ah, there. Wallie opened the door at once, all boyish smiles on a face originally meant for more serious expressions.

"You must be Anna. Come in, come in. Make yourself at home."

It had been... a while... since he'd seen a woman in long pants, and the thought almost made him want to laugh. Still, she was lovely in his opinion, and Shonsu would have agreed, even if he might have disagreed with Wallie's method of being friendly. It was fortunate he had no say, because Shonsu wouldn't have cared very much about Jja waiting back behind him, and Wallie... definitely did.

"Did you want a cup of tea?"

He was so tall. Tall, and broad, and she couldn't find herself it in herself to complain about the...eclectic combination of his clothes (was that a skirt?) — not when his shirt was providing such a perfectly pleasant view of his torso. Though of course, if she was struggling to find satisfactory clothing, she could only imagine the difficulties a man like Shonsu must be having.

She returned the smile, and if there was an edge to her — something subtly predatory in the way she held herself — it was probably nothing of significance, coming from someone so petite and so slender. Lit by a combination of moonlight and the light from inside the house, her skin looked even paler against her black-brown hair.

"You're too kind." She stepped inside, brushing her fingers against his arm. "I'm not much of a tea drinker, I'm afraid, but thank you for the offer." It was sweet of him, really, but she didn't much fancy the idea of vomiting all over the carpet.

The layout of the house looked to be more or less identical to that of the one she shared with Jones and Mina; it made it easy to find the living room. She crossed her ankles tidily as she sat.

"Getting settled well enough, then?" Still the smile hovered around her lips.

"Yes, I think so. It's comfortable. All the modern conveniences a man could want."

Wallie sat down opposite her. There was something fascinating about the way she moved, something that put him in mind of Lady Doa, who had been beautiful and fascinating and probably a little bit mad in her glamour.

"And lovely company to boot. Are you sure I can't get you anything?"

Credit where it was due: he knew how to flatter a lady.

"Oh, it's quite alright; I'm perfectly comfortable. I'm pleased enough just to be around these modern conveniences, myself — and with charming company of my own." Still just small talk, but she enjoyed these little social niceties.

She leaned forward, resting her chin on her palm. "Besides, just about the nicest thing you could do for me right now would be to tell me a bit more about yourself and where you come from. You're clearly a fascinating man, Lord Shonsu — all those tattoos, and you've already said you've been a plaything of gods. It doesn't take much to guess that you're even more 'not from around here' than most of us; maybe not even from the normal world at all." That was a useful bit she'd picked up from her conversation with Mina: that there was even such a thing as multiple versions of the world. But it certainly helped to explain some things.

"We're all 'playthings of the gods,'" Wallie observed, a little more soberly. "Whether we're aware of it or not. That's what gods do."

Still, it was a valid question, and he couldn't blame her. He expected he would have to explain this more than a few times, and he would probably meet at least a few people who would think he was off his head. Which was, he had to admit, probably also fair.

"If by 'normal world,' you mean Earth, then yes and no." He shrugged his broad shoulders. "My name is and isn't Shonsu. Shonsu is from a very different sort of world, yes. Primitive, you could say. My name is really Wallie Smith, and I'm from Edmonton." He gave her a bashful sort of smile. "Actually, I was born in Saskatchewan. Either way, Shonsu and I are sort of the same person now."

He shook his head. He sounded like a lunatic even to himself. "Are you sure you want to hear this? I promise I'm not crazy."

Well, she like to think that there was just one God, as she was a good Christian woman — or vampire, rather. Six of one, half dozen of the other. But that wasn't really the point; and besides, between the True Fae, angels from other worlds, and whatever it was Shonsu (Wallie?) had experienced, it was becoming increasingly clear that — what was the line? she'd had it quoted to her once or twice, and she thought it was from some important author or another — there were "more things on Heaven and Earth." Kindred were really just the tip of the iceberg.

She was really shit at geography (at most subjects, really; she'd barely spoken English during her five years at an American school), but she was pretty sure that Sasketchewan was in Canada. It sounded sort of Canadian, anyway. And Edmonton was...maybe in Canada too? Shonsu — Wallie — would probably have a different accent if it weren't.

Geography, though, was hardly her focus right now. Her eyes narrowed, focused, and she looked at this man with two names and two selves very closely. They had more in common than she ever could have imagined, or hoped.

"Yes — please. Go on. You may be surprised at how I can believe... Wallie." She debated using Revelation to urge him forward, to make herself seem even more trustworthy... but it didn't yet seem to be necessary. Better to see what he had to say to her on his own.

"Okay."

Wallie ran a hand over his hair, wondering where to begin. With the god? With Shonsu? With his death? "Well. For starters, I got bit by a mosquito on a camping trip, caught encephalitis, and died miserably in a hospital."

He flashed a brief, tight smile. It was probably a good thing that his memories of the hospital were confused and fevered. There was likely nothing good to remember about it.

"When I woke up, I was somewhere very very different, and I looked like this." He gestured to himself, giving a sigh. Not that he could really complain about looking like Shonsu. Wallie Smith hadn't been nearly so attractive. "I discovered that suddenly I was Lord Shonsu, swordsman of the seventh rank. That's what the tattoos mean, incidentally. The World is preliterate -- was preliterate -- so this is my ID, so to speak."

He shook his head. "I'm no swordsman, or I wasn't before. I'm an engineer. I ran a geochemical plant. Slight change of vocation, there, but you don't really argue with gods."

"So you...died?" Funnily enough, she could relate to that too. Or, well, given what that had been like, she supposed it wasn't actually very funny. "You died and you woke up as someone else, because... that's what the gods wanted." Despite the strangeness of the story, her tone wasn't skeptical; to the contrary, it was only more intensely, carefully focused.

She paused, considered; ran the comparisons through in her head. She didn't understand a lot of what he was talking about, and she wasn't certain if that was because of differences in their worlds or in their times or simply because of her own shoddy education (she had no idea what a geochemical plant was; it sounded halfway impressive, at least), but the important things in Wallie's story were clear enough.

"It's not such a bad body to wake up in," the corner of her lip quirked, "but I can imagine that would be...disconcerting." Then for the question mattered to her most. "If you don't mind my asking, Wallie — I assume that's the name you prefer? — how much of you is Wallie, and how much of you is Lord Shonsu? From the way you carry that sword around, you seem to know how to use it, so he... doesn't seem like he's completely gone."

"Shonsu isn't completely gone, no." Wallie shook his head. "What the gods wanted was a swordsman who thought like an engineer, I guess. I have Shonsu's knowledge, his skills. Not his memories, not his brain, but I'm as good with a sword as he was."

The main difference there being that he was a lot less inclined to use the sword than Shonsu had ever been, and that was fine.

Wallie leaned back in his seat, trying to think how to word it. "I've also got a few of his emotions rattling around in my head. His temper, particularly. He wasn't exactly a very nice person." Frankly, a murderer and a rapist.

She nodded, her expression thoughtful.

"I'm surprised you're willing to tell me all this." Her voice was slow, measured. She tilted her head at him. "I'm used to secrecy; I've been taught not to reveal anything...unusual to anyone who isn't...like me." Talking like this was, she knew perfectly well, slipping her hand a little, but she found herself wanting to see how he would react. Most kine — most people, she mentally corrected herself — had all sorts of mental defenses in place, because most people "knew" that there was no such thing as the supernatural. But then, Wallie clearly wasn't "most people."

She paused another moment — just long enough to let him turn those words over in his head a bit — and went on. "Normally, I'd expect to have to, ah, convince someone to tell me the kind of things you're sharing. And yet you seem — well, I suppose you could be lying, though I'm not sure why you would, about something like this; surely there are easier lies — you seem so open."

After all the time she'd spent lecturing Mina about the Masquerade, Anna found herself wanting to tell him— everything. An idiot idea, to be sure, she berated herself. And yet...

He'd told a lot of people. He'd had to, really; his behaviour was so... so unconventional, so unacceptable for a swordsman of any rank, much less a Seventh, it almost needed to be said.

"I've never been much for secrets," Wallie said easily, and that was true enough. He'd always been an honest person. "Not my own, anyway. I'm no good at it."

After a small hesitation, he ventured to ask, "What do you mean... people like you? If you don't mind my wondering."

There it was — the question she'd practically handed him on a silver platter. She felt as if she were standing on the edge of a precipice, both wanting to jump and terrified of the fall.

Kindred were the wolves nipping at the heels of the kine, reminding them what happened if they strayed. If the kine were given light with which to peer into the darkness, would they fear it any more? And, more to the point, breaking the Masquerade was a very good shortcut to getting yourself killed by a mob with stakes and torches. She'd reminded Mina as much.

...She was such a damned hypocrite.

"If I tell you... Wallie, you have to promise not to panic, or try to hurt me."

That was an unexpected request, and Wallie raised an eyebrow, frowning slightly. He couldn't imagine what sort of confession she might have.

"I'm a man of peace," he said, as calmly as he could. "Or at least, war only as minimally as necessary. I can't imagine wanting to hurt a lady as lovely as yourself, anyway."

By this point he was hoping she wasn't a mass murderer or... he didn't even know.

"Fine, I promise."

"Thank you."

Belatedly, it occurred to her that she should have backed the words with her will — made a pledge of it; then there would actually be a way to enforce his promise. How very nice for her that she was apparently succeeding in not thinking like the Huntress, but now she'd well and truly gotten herself into this and she was just going to have to actually trust him.

...Or else get Mina to wipe his memories, and then she'd never live this whole thing down.

She made herself take a deep breath — in, out. Completely unnecessary, but it was...steadying.

"Wallie, I... well, it turns out that we have some things in common. A lot of things, actually, or I would never share any of this at all." A small grimace. "For one thing, I've also died — in 1927, five years before I got kidnapped here. Unlike you, though, I didn't get put in a nice new body — sharing my mind with someone else came later." She smirked humorlessly. God, but there was so much to tell — he was one to talk about worrying about sounding crazy.

Easier just to show him: she let her fangs extend, leaving her lips parted so that the effect would be obvious. "...And, unlike you, I'm still dead, technically." The fangs retracted; no sense in making this experience more unsettling for him than it had to be. "Vampire is the, ah, popular term, but to each other we're Kindred."

Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ.

Wallie did not believe in vampires, or he hadn't five minutes ago. He wasn't sure what he thought now. For all that he'd been through, for all the sorcerers he'd met and dealt with, there had never been anything really supernatural, other than the gods themselves which were a class of his own. Magic was not really a thing that happened.

"A vampire." Okay. He knew a bit about mythology -- more about actual history, but sometimes they went hand in hand. Maybe magic didn't enter into it. A subspecies of humanity, a disease, a delusion -- no, that was ridiculous. What sort of dentist could make fangs like that? He needed information. "All right. Let me get the obvious question out the way, then. You drink blood? As in, that's the major source of your nourishment?"

And, frankly, did he have to be concerned about his own well-being at the moment?

Alright, so he didn't look... precisely pleased to be hearing this. She really shouldn't have expected any different.

Anna sighed, and sat up a bit straighter, clasping her hands carefully in her lap: probably for the best — for his own comfort — that she didn't lean in quite so close, that she put on as much a display of self-control as she could manage. The uncomfortable truth of the matter was that she was hungry tonight. Not so hungry that she couldn't control herself if she needed to. But.

"If I'd tried to drink that tea, I'd only keep it down for a split second before hurling it back over your carpet."
Another humorless smile — as if acknowledging how strange and uncomfortable this had to be for him would somehow make this conversation less of either of those things. A girl could hope. "Blood is only thing I can eat."

"Well, I should probably thank you for turning down the tea, then."

Wallie sighed, resting his forehead against his steepled fingers, thinking hard. Vampires. No one had ever said anything about having to deal with vampires. There were a lot of questions he wanted to ask her, and what she'd mentioned about sharing a body particularly interested him, but he didn't know how many questions he might get to ask, here.

"Should I be concerned for my own safety, then? Since I seem to be a prey species. Let me just get that question out of the way before anything else."

It seemed to Wallie that if she were really a threat, they wouldn't be having this conversation at all.

"I don't intend to hurt you, if that's what you're asking."

A "prey species," he'd put it. It was an uncomfortably accurate assessment, at least when it came to how the Lancea Sanctum had taught her to think of things. And the Lance were hardly the only ones to use the term kine — cattle. For her part, she'd adapted to that idea contentedly enough; after all, it made the things she'd done so very much easier to stomach when she could know that she only did them because God had damned her to be a wolf, nipping at the heels of the faithful, reminding them what would happen if they strayed. No wonder she killed: it was only natural.

But she needed to reassure him, somehow. She couldn't really think of Wallie as just another mortal anymore: he'd been through too much strangeness, and they had too much in common for her to shut off her empathy.

"I don't kill the people I drink from — I don't want to. I've seen... too much death as it is. I'm not going to make it worse, if I can avoid it." And it was true. It avoided some of the uglier parts of her history, but it was true.

Edited (tweaking wording, don't mind me) 2012-12-10 00:03 (UTC)

That made a certain amount of sense. It wouldn't be practical for them to kill off their food source so completely, and humans bred slowly. More like leeches, then, or mosquitoes. Not that Wallie had good experiences with mosquito bites.

"Okay. I can... I can live with that. I don't understand it, I don't know what to do with that information, but... I can live with that."

What -- who was she eating? Still, if her experience was anything like his own, he had to know more.

"If you don't mind, and we can back up a little, I wouldn't mind hearing about what you said about sharing a mind."

Anna leaned forward again: this, at least, she did want to talk about — desperately. Mina hadn't understood, but maybe Wallie would. He said that he still felt Shonsu's emotions; he'd even introduced himself as Shonsu. If her story was mad, so was his, and really above all she just wanted to hear that if she was crazy (all the True Fae probably were, so maybe she couldn't help it), then she wasn't alone in it.

"Yes. That." A pause, and she closed her eyes, gathering herself. "That doesn't have anything to do with being a being Kindred, to, ah, clarify. But... a lot of things went wrong, in Chicago, before I came here. If there are different worlds, then maybe this didn't happen to your Chicago, but for me, in my Chicago? In 1931, the True Fae came. They're fairies, I suppose, but nothing like the ones in children's stories. They probably have more in common with your gods than the cute little winged children I'd always pictured."

She sighed. Her eyes stayed closed: somehow it made telling the story easier, if she didn't have to watch his face while she told it, didn't have to guess at what he must be thinking. "The True Fae are...reality warpers. Creatures of dreams and glamour and emotion, and we—" she caught herself, "—they were having a competition, right in our city, over the right to claim it. And it didn't seem that there was anything we could do: they were just too powerful.

"Some were worse than others, though, and the worst one of all — his title was The Baron — seemed to be the front-runner. One of them, the Queen— she had three aspects. Queen, Crone... and Huntress." Her words were stunted, uneven; the whole thing was hard to talk about. "She summoned me to a party. By then I was trying to avoid the Fae — we all were — but I didn't seem to have a say in it. And, well... "

Anna paused again, opened her eyes, and looked directly at Wallie. Her expression was imploring. "You have to understand: I thought we were doomed — that the best we could possibly hope for was to defeat the Baron, but that some Fae taking over was inevitable. So... I told the Queen that I thought it would be better if she won. And she wanted to give me a gift — free of charge, she was insisting. Since it didn't seem she would let me go until I took her up on it, I asked for a weapon — a weapon that would defeat the Baron.

"So... she gave me a lightning bolt. I— I thought that was it — the weapon. And it was a weapon, in a manner of speaking. But it was also more than that. It was a fragment of her power — and of her personality: it was the Huntress."

Anna looked away again. "And now, well... I'm both. The Huntress and who I was before."

It was a very different story from Wallie's. In some ways, it struck him as an inversion of his own story. Still... there were familiar aspects. The sharing of personality... Shonsu was overwhelming enough, sometimes. He couldn't imagine what a Fae mind, a godlike mind, might be like. To hear that anyone had an experience even a little like his own was... well, pretty fascinating.

Wallie leaned forward a little, for the moment forgetting to be disturbed at her being a vampire. "That's... well, that's incredible. If I can ask... do you feel a clear line between both personalities, or is it blurred?"

"It's... complicated."

Well, he didn't seem to be panicking — that was something.

"Mostly, they're distinct: I'm either myself or —also myself, but the Huntress instead of Anna." A pause, and her lips twisted wryly, "...You see what I mean by 'complicated.'" The half-smile was more performance of humor and ease than anything; in reality, the subject was painful and confusing, and she could feel the tension that remained around her eyes, despite her effort to keep her expression mild.

"Fortunately, being —her doesn't happen often; mostly there's just... her self-assurance, her brutality, sometimes sort of hovering at the back of my mind. But I can't fully make myself think of either personality as not 'me" — not because I can't tell the difference, but because what 'me' means is...a matter of perspective, I guess."

She made herself exhale a long breath — she'd been holding it without meaning to; old habits died hard — and added, "I've only been like this for about a month. It's...a lot to deal with, and it didn't exactly make me very popular among the rest of the Kindred: they'd had more than enough to do with the Fae." And that didn't even begin to get started on what the whole thing had done to her relationship with Leander.

Wallie nods. It is different from his own experience, he suspects; it sounds like this Huntress has far more presence than Shonsu does, but if she was something else, something more than human, maybe that's not surprising.

"I've been Shonsu for about a year now. For the most part, I can say I've been myself, with differences, but there was a time when Jja -- my wife, although she wasn't then -- when Jja wanted nothing to do with me. She could see me becoming Shonsu, and frankly, Shonsu was no gentleman."

Which was a polite way of saying he'd been a murderer and probably a rapist. And Jja had been, technically, his slave, and bound to accept his advances regardless. It had been... pretty awful.

"I can... I can understand, a little. It wasn't the same, but I can understand."

"...Thank you." Anna rested her forehead against her hand a moment — a very human gesture of exhaustion, though there was no sigh or breath of air to accompany it.

"I swear I didn't set out to tell you all this — even though as soon as you started telling me a bit about your own experiences over the communication contraption... I admit I was curious." She could probably stop referring to it as a contraption, but how else was she meant to express her disgust with the newfangled thing she was suddenly supposed to master?

"There seemed to be so many parallels between our stories... and I guess you could say that it's been suddenly rather lonely. The other Kindred wouldn't trust me, and... I don't know, maybe they were right not to." It wasn't something she ever would have admitted to anyone within her own social circle — too much personal pride was at stake — so for once Wallie's outsider status made him seem a safer confidant. "So, if you can believe me, it's actually a relief to me to hear that you know what it feels like to, well, feel yourself becoming less than a gentleman. Or a lady, as the case may be."

She smiled, then — somewhere between bright and sad.

"I didn't think I'd ever meet anyone with a similar experience," Wallie confessed. He also hadn't thought he'd ever meet a vampire, but life was apparently full of surprises. "Thank you for telling me, though. I don't know much about Fae, or vampires, but I'm glad you told me. It's... nice to meet a kindred spirit."

Wallie gave a small, tired smile as he remembered what it was she's called herself.

"So to speak."

"Ha, yes." Anna let herself chuckle a moment, before allowing her expression to fall into something a bit more somber. She leaned forward, placing her hand on Wallie's (or would it be more accurate to say Shonsu's?) knee, tilting her chin up to meet his eyes.

(She knew exactly what she was doing, of course, the predator playing at damsel in distress, and if he were smart he wouldn't buy it for a minute — or so a nasty part of her conscience reminded her, and she wasn't sure if it was Anna or the Huntress who did the reminding — but none of that made it false, exactly. Just...deliberate.)

"Please, though, Wallie," her expression was imploring, "you can't tell anyone about me. I mean, what I told you about what I am. I trust you because you're different too, in your way, but if the others found out..." She averted her eyes; bit her lip: her meaning was clear enough. "Being what I am brings its share of weaknesses, and I'm sure I'd be killed if they learned." Well, she was already dead, but the final death was a true enough fear, if a group took it upon themselves to burst into her room during the daytime.

A flicker of her eyelashes, and she looked up and met his eyes again.

Oh, Wallie knew what she was doing, though that didn't make him -- or Shonsu -- any less susceptible. Well, maybe knowledge made him a little more cautious, but her request wasn't unreasonable, if she were really vulnerable.

"I think I can promise that," he said, "but I'd like you to tell me something."

It was, he thought, a delicate question, but he needed to know. Not just for his own sake, but for the sake of everyone here.

"You subsist on blood," he said, picking his words carefully. "And nothing else, you said. You must be eating, but I don't think it's out of place to ask... what."

Or whom. Either way.

She straightened, letting her fingertips trail to the edge of Wallie's knee as she leveled her gaze with his. A moment's hesitation, and she withdrew her hand with an almost sudden motion, let it hover in the space between them, and then placed it back, neatly, on her lap, as if reassembling her dignity.

Her eyes still had that wide, half-desperate expression — maybe now a bit wider: hurt.

(Still Anna knew precisely what she was doing; wanted so badly for him to believe it all the same.)

"You don't trust me." She looked down at her folded hands. "But I suppose that's only fair." And her eyes glanced back up to meet his again. "Still, you should know that I've been feeding on animals — I'm still very young; I can do that. There may be others here who could easily recover from...assisting me, if it's true that I'm not the only, ah, non-mortal here, but until I can confirm that, I— I won't hurt anyone."

Animals, then. Well, he couldn't have any moral reservations about that, not if he was being honest with himself.

"Maybe I don't trust you," Wallie said, with as genuine a smile as he could muster, "but I did just meet you, and this is still very new to me."

To be fair, there were a lot of other things he wanted to ask her about vampirism, how close was it to legends and which legends, but now maybe wasn't the time.

"Your secret is safe with me, Anna. I can promise you that."

"That's true," she admitted, almost but not quite returning the smile. (It hovered at and then faded from her lips.) "It's...hard for me to trust you as well, as much as I want to. Secrecy is normally paramount among the Kindred and... well, I'm a bit shocked at myself for telling you so much, so quickly."

That, at least, was complete honesty. There was a part of her — well, most of her — that was utterly panicked at the notion of just how thoroughly she'd broken the Masquerade for this man she barely knew. She wanted him to...well, she wanted him to like her. Entrancement crossed her mind, of course, but...it felt like cheating.

She sighed, ran a hand through her hair. "Thank you for listening."

"Thanks for listening to me, too." Wallie gave her a smile. "Look, I'm guessing there aren't any more... anyone else like you, here." He'd been about to say "any more like you" and then thought better of it; it sounded kind of insensitive, not to mention demeaning. For that matter, was what he actually said any better? Maybe, maybe not, but it was as good a save as he could come up with on the fly.

"But either way, I think I can easily promise not to reveal your transgression to your Kindred, if it matters to you. If it comes up." He shrugged easily. "I won't lie and say this is easy for me to accept; it isn't. But I have some practice at coping with previously impossible things, so."

Is it the welcome wagon

gah, sorry for the delay

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it's like a "whose life is more batshit" competition

Re: it's like a "whose life is more batshit" competition

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