Sunday, November 3, 2013

Arrival: Russian Vampires & Jack's Secret

Nico talks Dr. Gruber into giving her a couple tattoos. A few blue dots in a curving line from the eyebrow around the eye socket to about two thirds of the way in to represent clarity of vision. A Chi-Rho below her ear in dark red to represent luck. And a black wristband tatts with an Eye of Horus over the inner wrist itself to represent wisdom.

Dr. Gruber also apologises for his rather crude way of trying to hit on her earlier, and invites her into the cinema room to watch movies (for the first time ever!) in one of the smaller university theatres. He also implies that perhaps she could base herself out of their university. She's not so sure about that. She still believes he's a demon.

While watching the movie, she has another Infernal Vision while watching the Wizard of Oz about Allan McCormack, the demon she'd confronted. As the curtain was pulled back, she could see herself standing and facing the camera with a man and a woman facing her with their backs to the camera. Suddenly the other two twitch and spasm as some unholy energy drifted from them towards her but at the last moment she is saved when McCormack strode forward and shot them both dead - leaving Nico alive. Then Allan and Nicky smiled at each other - and the scene seemed oh so very familiar.

Weird.

Nicky went to the cafeteria to eat and met Jack there. Apparently he'd spent his spare time visiting some feral woman in the outer suburbs. He offered to go with her to pick up her payment from St. Helios and suggested that afterwards they visit the location he believed to be the initial location of the giant demon which blasted Manhatten by diving onto it.

Oddly enough, though she didn't mention this, her own guilt over killing that girl had unlocked a new power - Scent of the Unrighteous. She now had the right to sense sin by concentrating for a minute or two on her own sins. To her power, Jack came off as mildly sinful. Nothing dramatic. The sensation to her of other people's sin was like ants crawling beneath two spots on her forehead, through her gums, and beneath her fingernails.

While the two walked, Nico related her growing agitation toward all of the infiltrators around her. It was like not a single society could get by without having one or two at the top. Jack seemed to feel a little bit guilty about her concerns surrounding infiltrators and he made her the most irritating offer. He would give her a well-written Game Guide for the "The Longest Journey" if she would give him a single day. He would tell her something about himself and she would wait a day before doing anything ... drastic.

She wanted to tell him to get $#@!ed rather than hear it but when someone says something like that to you, they've kind of let the cat out of the bag anyway, so she relented.

Jack told her that he wasn't demonically possessed or anything like that ... he was *simply* a werewolf. Completely different to a demon. She was none too pleased at this but she didn't immediately draw her silver sword so he seemed grateful for that. She walked in silence for hours, avoiding the matter intellectually, and spent the night awake even through his shift.

The next dawn, just to dig at him for giving her such terrible news, she asked him what time it was. He only had a day, after all.

But at around the right time of day, she'd successfully buried that cognitive dissonance so that Jack = Not Sinful, Jack = Werewolf dilemma slipped to the back of her mind. So instead of kicking him out or even, y'know, talking about it, she returned to the Nosferatu's home to see if she could get those binoculars (which were gone) or track where McCormack went. She got Jack to become a wolf to sniff him out, refusing to turn her back to give him privacy - which ironically seemed to perk him up as it was an obvious dominance play and that was something he understood. He tracked McCormack for a short distance before the scent and footprints suddenly ended. The man must have taken to the air at that point.

The next step was to meet up with the St. Helios agent, whom she figured wouldn't arrive until nightfall. So they set up at the meeting point and Jack revealed that he was changed under the dark of the moon and therefore was a stealthy sort of werewolf. If he sat still, no one could see him. She asked him to prove it, then immediately spent a magic point to be immune to any mind controlling tricks, but she did note that he did sit quite still when using his power. Jack also explained that werewolves were hereditary rather than infectious. The conversation made her feel uncomfortable but as she still couldn't get those final gun shots out of her head nor the sound of the blade hacking through the vampiress' neck, she was hardly going to do anything about it.

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