snowblindrpg | [network] Event: Long & Lost [NIGHT 217]

Hey, I don't know. Part of what originally stirred up the vampire mythos was the illusion of hair and nails continuing to grow after death.

What you mean is, vampires have used human misunderstanding of the decomposition process to encourage mistaken perceptions about themselves.

Sure, if we're assuming my world has vampires. My point is that my PhD isn't in vampire facial hair studies.

Medicine, I assume? Based on the messiah complex, though it's common enough here not to really be a clue.

Yeah. I was a neurosurgeon.

[He's grown a little more comfortable with that was over the last year or so.]

Now that's different. [Sudden interest there. They didn't have that kind of doctor before.] I see why you'd be having an interesting time of it, what with all the, I believe the term is "mind-fuck".

Considering I'm aware of at least one period of major alterations to my own basic cognitive functions since I got here? Uh, yeah. This isn't exactly my first rodeo, though.

You've mentioned, yes. Multiple deaths. They must have been either creative or gruesome, to leave an impression after the first few.

[Here in Norfinbury we are very casual about discussing multiple deaths.]

[There's a pause as he swallows, throat dry. Any other night he'd shrug off the comment, redirect the conversation back to what he'd meant to bring up, the good memories of knowing what the hell he was doing. Tonight, though...there's something in the air tonight that has it all spilling out into the open, even for a stranger.]

Not all of them did, I guess. I don't...I don't remember how many times he killed me. I wake up from dying all night in my dreams and I can't tell if it's a memory or if I'm imagining things that never happened.

[That strikes a chord, a subtle one. Beckett is an intimate friend of nightmares by now, and of muddled, meddled-with memories, even before Norfinbury. Curiosity pulls him like a spider's line of silk hauling up trussed-up prey. Not good news for the prey, but one of the strongest materials in nature, it turns out.]

I know that feeling. [Softly spoken, the confession almost permitted, he tells himself he's building trust.] And who is "he"?

Do you?

[That surprises him. What gives a vampire nightmares?]

Dormammu. He's a...I'm not going to say god. He wanted to consume the Earth, and I...decided he wasn't going to do that.

[Beckett gives a dry-throat chuckle, as if that takes the edge of what he just knows he'll find himself saying next.] When one of my kind finds themselves dreaming, you can know something's gone... very wrong. It's rarely a harmless exercise in the subconscious. And here, of course...

[He remembers his first real nightmares - nightmares that were just that, the writhing of a traumatised mind. They weren't much better for the lack of metaphysical context.]

But you wanted to say god. What were you, to him? To challenge him?

I was someone with a lot of time and patience. Time wasn't something he was familiar with. Looped time even less. He agreed to my terms, eventually.

[He's told this story on the network before...rather, he's told the sanitized version.]

[It takes a moment, but Beckett thinks he gets it. His voice is low and reluctantly impressed.]

So essentially you tricked him. No match of power or unique gifts of any sorts. Nightmares sound like a small enough curse to get away with in return for that kind of feat.

I bargained with him. His freedom from the loop for my world.

[Just to be sure they're absolutely clear. Trick feels like something less than what he did; there was no bluff in his claim that Dormammu was his prisoner. As for the price...he already paid it. Still, the bill comes due again; he hasn't known peace since then.]

The loop you controlled - I see. So you did have some power. Some equal footing. [He mulls on that for a while, an uncertain note in his breathing. They're skimming dangerous territory again.]

And now here you are. Yes. I see how it is.

Some power. Enough.

[There's not much to add. He's already said much too much, good as it feels to get it off his chest.]

And now here I am.

[Yes, he knows that feeling. It runs ahead of him, bursts and leaks out -]

There's no getting away from it, this, this unmaking - it's like no helplessness I've ever known. It shouldn't be possible.

No. It shouldn't.

What about you? What've they done to you?

They made me a living man again. They made me mortal.

[Normally he tries not to put it that way. Suppressed my nature, neutralised my abilities, these are nice sanitised ways to put it. This is the filthy, ragged truth.]

...Huh.

[In a distant way, Stephen can sort of imagine how that's probably a great blow to someone for whom it's not the default state of things. It's hard to feel as much sympathy as Beckett probably feels he deserves, though.]

Like...living, living? Not just...less vampire-y?

[Beckett does, admittedly, feel that he deserves quite a bit of sympathy. When he isn't feeling that he deserves what he got. It's a complicated mindset.

He glances at Stephen from under his tinted glasses, a spark of anger at the question.] Living enough to be hungry and cold. And sick more often than not. Feeding feels good but it does nothing. Breath, a pulse, the lot... and it isn't a gift. It was never what I wanted.

Didn't say it was.

[But okay, the whole thing where he's still apparently really into "feeding"? Not the most endearing admission.]

I gotta imagine it makes the whole only-allowed-out-in-daytime thing easier, though. Unless that's another myth.

Oh, no. That one is the unvarnished truth, and going about in daylight never gets comfortable, let me assure you. Though the fact that that "daytime" has no sun to speak of is a help.

[Cold comforts. As it were.]

Oh, yeah, it would be. I mean, apart from how you're probably just as prone to vitamin D deficiency as the rest of us now.

[Stop enjoying something he hates.]

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