Stupid bookman. Didn't any of the underworld creatures know not to let a
Tremere free rein in a book shop? Standards these days were falling faster
than the human president's pants!
Not that any of that was Elena's issue. She was here for one reason and one reason only. The book. It was in her possession now. Taking a quick glance up towards the front counter, Elena saw that the bookman was currently engaged with another customer. He would never notice if...
Smoothly as any underworld creature, Elena swept out of the store with the book safely encased under the black, three quarter length jacket that she always wore. Not much further. A few shops down the road and she was home free.
Turning the corner with a triumphant grin, she pulled the book out from under her jacket and opened it. Before she could so much as begin reading up on the foreword, she heard a shout from behind her.
"Hey! Stop, thief!"
She should have known it was too good to be true. He wanted her to stop, did he? Very well then, she'd stop for him.
Placing the book back into the safety of her jacket, Elena turned to face the vampire who ran the book shop. He didn't look too hard to take. One could even go so far as to say he was beneath her, as far as fighting standards went. But what the heck?
"Oh come on, you don't really want to do this, do you?" she asked, one eyebrow raising as she looked down on him.
"You've made a big mistake right here," the bookman said in what Elena supposed was supposed to be a menacing way. Only narrowly did she stop herself from laughing outright at him.
"Really?" she said instead. "Well then, let's come on then and just see who's was the bigger mistake out of the two of us."
Falling back into a semi crouched position, from which she could move easily and swiftly into almost any of her regular attack modes, Elena waited for the lunge that she was sure the bookman would take towards her. Instead, to her surprise, he appeared to be looking between some of the shop fronts on either side of them, as though waiting for something else to happen. Elena narrowed her eyes at the unexpectedness of it.
Almost before she knew what was going on, she was facing several other vampires, none of whom looked particularly accomodating to the idea that she had a stolen book under her jacket. You would have thought that they might have taken the fact that she was Tremere into consideration! After all, they she have known what to expect from one. But no. There was nothing giving in any of their expressions, and what was more, most of them looked considerably less ludicrous than the bookman in regards to fighting.
Elena wasn't stupid, however reckless she might be. She knew a losing battle when she was face to face with one. This was one such battle.
Lifting her chin pridefully, she stepped back slightly, shifting all of her weight onto her back foot. There was only one dignified thing to do in these situations.
Run.
With little thought to anything but getting away with her book intact, Elena sprinted through the streets of inner city Melbourne, ever conscious of the group of vampires in pursuit of her. Scaling the sides of buildings in the attempt to lose them, or at least put some considerable distance between them, Elena found herself leaping across second storey tops of buildings, running, zigzaging this way and that. They were still behind her, she realised a little while later, just not so close now. She was beginning to out run them. Still, she needed to do some serious out manouvering if she wanted to lose them anytime soon.
Deciding that it was time to disappear from their site immediately, Elena figured that the best way to do so was to jump back down to ground level. Glancing down, she saw that there was a cluster of humans a little way off. All she had to do was jump down from here without being seen by either humans or her pursuers, and mingle with the humans until they passed her.
It was time. She jumped. Falling...
Something beneath her broke her fall. Elena's eyes widened at the thought that she might have just crushed a human and in doing so, broken one of their laws. Looking down at him, she realised immediately that she had had the better luck of almost crushing another vampire. All of this happened in just a moment, and before he could grab her or detain her in anyway, she jumped back up to her feet, glancing up at the top of the building she had just jumped from. She had to get out of here quickly.
"Thanks for breaking my fall," she uttered to the fallen vamp, before leaving him to deal with the vampires that would soon follow in her wake.
*
Stepping off the train and setting a fast pace towards her Westgarth squat, Elena didn't dare take out the successfully nabbed leather bound book again. Reaching the broken down wooden fence that marked out 'home' for her, she turned in and went around to the back entrance. The front was inaccessable, even to her.
Inside, the rooms were filled with floor to ceiling books and candles scattered all about. Since there wasn't any electricity in the house, she figured that since she didn't smoke, candles could be her fire hazard of choice. Setting down her jacket across one of the plush sofas, Elena reverently held the book between her two hands and just looked at it a moment in stiillness.
Who needed people or other vampires when one beheld such beauty as this?
Turning the book over, she was just about to move to open it when she noticed a large lock sealed against the back of it, connected to a thick strip of leather that bound the front of back covers together. Damnit! She hadn't even looked to see if there had been a key nearby in the store. Hadn't even thought to look at the book more thoroughly, more focused on the getting it and herself out of there. Stupid! Now what was she going to do about it?
She knew the answer to that even before she had finished asking herself the question. She would have to go to others for help. Damn this was, she knew exactly where was the only place that she was likely to actually get the kind of help that she was after.
The Alter.
*
Sam opened his eyes, back in his apartment with the house phone ringing. He picked it up, still feeling the effects of diabrelia.
It was another vampire of his clan, Nydra, calling.
"Yo dude, Ravnos meeting in five minutes... you're expected"
Sam murmured his reply into the other end of the telephone, still more than half asleep. ".....kay"
Hanging up the phone he then closed his bedroom door, took a deep breath although he didn't have to breath and opened it again. Before him now was the Alter, 20th floor where the leaders of the Ravnos clan met. Sam took his seat at north, the one that headed the entire clan...
"This is about the weak gen Ravnos.. isn't it?" He opened to question. The rest of the clan elders, 7 others, sat and agreed with Sam.
Nydra spoke up from one of the chairs nearby him. "We should make them no lower then 10 generations away from Caine."
"Then make it so," Sam replied. "I'll leave the organisation of that to you Nydra... don't fuck it up."
Sam left the table; the meeting was over. He then headed down to the bottom floor where the public were allowed, and walked calmly to the bar to get a drink.
*
Elena looked disdainfully around the lowest level of the Alter, where she had been waiting for the past 5 minutes for somebody with the information she was after to conveniently drop it into her lap. After so long of waiting, she was finding herself getting right irritable and sick of the whole scene. As always, there were way too many humans who didn't know any better, and quite frankly, Elena couldn't be bothered mingling with them.
She wandered over to the bar, wondering if perhaps finding someone to buy her a drink would help her mood and pass a few minutes. She was wearing skin tight, black leather pants with high heeled clogs and a blue halter neck top. She looked good as she swept across the room with her unnatural grace, and she knew it.
"The usual," Elena demanded, with no please or thank you. She found that guys seemed to react better to her abrupt manner, and besides, she had a reputation to uphold here. She wondered if the barman himself would offer to pay for her.
She looked up as another vampire claimed the stool beside her. There was something strangely familiar about him, something that was annoying as it kept nagging at her. There was no reason for any such sense to be going off, Elena thought in annoyance, unless of course this vampire was good for giving her information that she had come here to get. If not, she had no use for him whatsoever.
Sending covert glances in his direction, but without being obvious about it so that he would realize what she was doing, Elena attempted to find out what it was about him that was so nagging at her. Then she realized. He was the vampire that she had landed on earlier that afternoon. Obviously he had gotten away from her pursuers. Go him. But what the hell was he doing here?
"Hi Sam. You're usual?" the barman asked of the vampire.
Elena's eyes widened, although she attempted to take a mouthful of the drink to hide her reaction. Sam? As in The Sam? Sam of the Ravnos clan? And she had landed on him today? Hmm, that might make it a little bit difficult to get around if she wanted him to give her information on the piece that she had stolen today, which she certainly wanted him to do. Who better to ask? She just had to think whether he had gotten a chance to see her face before she had run off that afternoon. If not, she still stood a chance here.
"You're Sam," Elena asked, going for a neutral tone.
Sam barely looked up at her. She figured that being as well known among vampire circles as he was, he was used to being approached with just anybody's stupid questions. Except that this wasn't stupid. This was Elena, a Tremere on a very special mission for self gain. Of course Sam would have to understand that.
"Yeah," he muttered, giving away nothing of himself.
Apparently he remained uninspired by Elena's inner musings. As she tried to find a way to voice the words that would have the other vampire giving her the answers that she sought in the most convenient way possible for her, the Ravnos happened to look her way for the first time since sitting down beside her.
"Hey, you're the vampire who fell on me today," he realized. "What the hell was that about then?"
Elena tried to hide her chagrin at being recognized. Ah well, no chance at getting the information she needed out of him now. She might as well just get out of here and cast the night off as a ride off. The squat she lived in was more comfortable than this stuffy atmosphere anyway.
"Needed to get away from some people," was all she answered him with, refusing to look at him.
"Yeah, so I found. Used to being followed by them types. Usually it's because of something I've nicked," she heard Sam continue.
"Well, this time it wasn't," Elena muttered, moving to stand up. "Get over it."
From her side vision, she saw the barman standing up to remind her rather firmly that she was still owing money for the drink she'd just finished and not yet paid for. From that same vision, she also saw when Sam stood up after her, and held a hand out to the barman behind them both. Next thing she knew, he was grasping her arm in his rather strong grip and leading her away from the heavily human populated areas of the Alter.
*
Sam led Elena to the dance floor and they began to dance very seductively and close so that they could talk.
"Just what the hell was going on back there?" Sam asked in opening.
"Just a little miss understanding that's all," Elena tried to dismiss it with.
They did a little spin number, then they were back close together, and continued to vampiric whisper.
"What was so interesting about this book that you had to steal and forget that it needed a key to read," Sam questioned her.
Elena at this moment paused. It then dawned on her that she didn't know what was in this book or what was in it. All she knew is that she wanted it and was curious to find out. This was going all through her mind however she was very careful not to show any of this in her face or body language. They continued to dance.
"I need the key to open the damn thing can you get it for me or not?" she demanded of him testily.
"I see no reason for me to get it for you so I don't think I'll even bother finishing this dance," Sam replied, totally unaffected by her outburst. "And your not looking for a key to open that book. Besides no good came from opening a book and reading a book."
Elena was furious at the rudeness displayed by Sam. She tried to storm of when the song finished. As Sam left for the bar Elena tweaked to what he had just said and followed him to the bar.
"What am I looking for to open that book?" she asked him cautiously.
Sam was flippant and unapologetic. "If you want to know about a book ask a Tremere. But if I were you I'd put that thing back from where it came."
Sam left then leaving more questions than answers. Then Elena thought about something that Sam said put the book back from where it came. She figured why not put it back from where it came from originally.
Elena left the Alter and head for the vampire archives, to find this book and its history. She spent hours searching for anything remotely connected. But there was nothing. Disappointed she returned home, to find Sam there casually reading her book.
*
Not that any of that was Elena's issue. She was here for one reason and one reason only. The book. It was in her possession now. Taking a quick glance up towards the front counter, Elena saw that the bookman was currently engaged with another customer. He would never notice if...
Smoothly as any underworld creature, Elena swept out of the store with the book safely encased under the black, three quarter length jacket that she always wore. Not much further. A few shops down the road and she was home free.
Turning the corner with a triumphant grin, she pulled the book out from under her jacket and opened it. Before she could so much as begin reading up on the foreword, she heard a shout from behind her.
"Hey! Stop, thief!"
She should have known it was too good to be true. He wanted her to stop, did he? Very well then, she'd stop for him.
Placing the book back into the safety of her jacket, Elena turned to face the vampire who ran the book shop. He didn't look too hard to take. One could even go so far as to say he was beneath her, as far as fighting standards went. But what the heck?
"Oh come on, you don't really want to do this, do you?" she asked, one eyebrow raising as she looked down on him.
"You've made a big mistake right here," the bookman said in what Elena supposed was supposed to be a menacing way. Only narrowly did she stop herself from laughing outright at him.
"Really?" she said instead. "Well then, let's come on then and just see who's was the bigger mistake out of the two of us."
Falling back into a semi crouched position, from which she could move easily and swiftly into almost any of her regular attack modes, Elena waited for the lunge that she was sure the bookman would take towards her. Instead, to her surprise, he appeared to be looking between some of the shop fronts on either side of them, as though waiting for something else to happen. Elena narrowed her eyes at the unexpectedness of it.
Almost before she knew what was going on, she was facing several other vampires, none of whom looked particularly accomodating to the idea that she had a stolen book under her jacket. You would have thought that they might have taken the fact that she was Tremere into consideration! After all, they she have known what to expect from one. But no. There was nothing giving in any of their expressions, and what was more, most of them looked considerably less ludicrous than the bookman in regards to fighting.
Elena wasn't stupid, however reckless she might be. She knew a losing battle when she was face to face with one. This was one such battle.
Lifting her chin pridefully, she stepped back slightly, shifting all of her weight onto her back foot. There was only one dignified thing to do in these situations.
Run.
With little thought to anything but getting away with her book intact, Elena sprinted through the streets of inner city Melbourne, ever conscious of the group of vampires in pursuit of her. Scaling the sides of buildings in the attempt to lose them, or at least put some considerable distance between them, Elena found herself leaping across second storey tops of buildings, running, zigzaging this way and that. They were still behind her, she realised a little while later, just not so close now. She was beginning to out run them. Still, she needed to do some serious out manouvering if she wanted to lose them anytime soon.
Deciding that it was time to disappear from their site immediately, Elena figured that the best way to do so was to jump back down to ground level. Glancing down, she saw that there was a cluster of humans a little way off. All she had to do was jump down from here without being seen by either humans or her pursuers, and mingle with the humans until they passed her.
It was time. She jumped. Falling...
Something beneath her broke her fall. Elena's eyes widened at the thought that she might have just crushed a human and in doing so, broken one of their laws. Looking down at him, she realised immediately that she had had the better luck of almost crushing another vampire. All of this happened in just a moment, and before he could grab her or detain her in anyway, she jumped back up to her feet, glancing up at the top of the building she had just jumped from. She had to get out of here quickly.
"Thanks for breaking my fall," she uttered to the fallen vamp, before leaving him to deal with the vampires that would soon follow in her wake.
*
Stepping off the train and setting a fast pace towards her Westgarth squat, Elena didn't dare take out the successfully nabbed leather bound book again. Reaching the broken down wooden fence that marked out 'home' for her, she turned in and went around to the back entrance. The front was inaccessable, even to her.
Inside, the rooms were filled with floor to ceiling books and candles scattered all about. Since there wasn't any electricity in the house, she figured that since she didn't smoke, candles could be her fire hazard of choice. Setting down her jacket across one of the plush sofas, Elena reverently held the book between her two hands and just looked at it a moment in stiillness.
Who needed people or other vampires when one beheld such beauty as this?
Turning the book over, she was just about to move to open it when she noticed a large lock sealed against the back of it, connected to a thick strip of leather that bound the front of back covers together. Damnit! She hadn't even looked to see if there had been a key nearby in the store. Hadn't even thought to look at the book more thoroughly, more focused on the getting it and herself out of there. Stupid! Now what was she going to do about it?
She knew the answer to that even before she had finished asking herself the question. She would have to go to others for help. Damn this was, she knew exactly where was the only place that she was likely to actually get the kind of help that she was after.
The Alter.
*
Sam opened his eyes, back in his apartment with the house phone ringing. He picked it up, still feeling the effects of diabrelia.
It was another vampire of his clan, Nydra, calling.
"Yo dude, Ravnos meeting in five minutes... you're expected"
Sam murmured his reply into the other end of the telephone, still more than half asleep. ".....kay"
Hanging up the phone he then closed his bedroom door, took a deep breath although he didn't have to breath and opened it again. Before him now was the Alter, 20th floor where the leaders of the Ravnos clan met. Sam took his seat at north, the one that headed the entire clan...
"This is about the weak gen Ravnos.. isn't it?" He opened to question. The rest of the clan elders, 7 others, sat and agreed with Sam.
Nydra spoke up from one of the chairs nearby him. "We should make them no lower then 10 generations away from Caine."
"Then make it so," Sam replied. "I'll leave the organisation of that to you Nydra... don't fuck it up."
Sam left the table; the meeting was over. He then headed down to the bottom floor where the public were allowed, and walked calmly to the bar to get a drink.
*
Elena looked disdainfully around the lowest level of the Alter, where she had been waiting for the past 5 minutes for somebody with the information she was after to conveniently drop it into her lap. After so long of waiting, she was finding herself getting right irritable and sick of the whole scene. As always, there were way too many humans who didn't know any better, and quite frankly, Elena couldn't be bothered mingling with them.
She wandered over to the bar, wondering if perhaps finding someone to buy her a drink would help her mood and pass a few minutes. She was wearing skin tight, black leather pants with high heeled clogs and a blue halter neck top. She looked good as she swept across the room with her unnatural grace, and she knew it.
"The usual," Elena demanded, with no please or thank you. She found that guys seemed to react better to her abrupt manner, and besides, she had a reputation to uphold here. She wondered if the barman himself would offer to pay for her.
She looked up as another vampire claimed the stool beside her. There was something strangely familiar about him, something that was annoying as it kept nagging at her. There was no reason for any such sense to be going off, Elena thought in annoyance, unless of course this vampire was good for giving her information that she had come here to get. If not, she had no use for him whatsoever.
Sending covert glances in his direction, but without being obvious about it so that he would realize what she was doing, Elena attempted to find out what it was about him that was so nagging at her. Then she realized. He was the vampire that she had landed on earlier that afternoon. Obviously he had gotten away from her pursuers. Go him. But what the hell was he doing here?
"Hi Sam. You're usual?" the barman asked of the vampire.
Elena's eyes widened, although she attempted to take a mouthful of the drink to hide her reaction. Sam? As in The Sam? Sam of the Ravnos clan? And she had landed on him today? Hmm, that might make it a little bit difficult to get around if she wanted him to give her information on the piece that she had stolen today, which she certainly wanted him to do. Who better to ask? She just had to think whether he had gotten a chance to see her face before she had run off that afternoon. If not, she still stood a chance here.
"You're Sam," Elena asked, going for a neutral tone.
Sam barely looked up at her. She figured that being as well known among vampire circles as he was, he was used to being approached with just anybody's stupid questions. Except that this wasn't stupid. This was Elena, a Tremere on a very special mission for self gain. Of course Sam would have to understand that.
"Yeah," he muttered, giving away nothing of himself.
Apparently he remained uninspired by Elena's inner musings. As she tried to find a way to voice the words that would have the other vampire giving her the answers that she sought in the most convenient way possible for her, the Ravnos happened to look her way for the first time since sitting down beside her.
"Hey, you're the vampire who fell on me today," he realized. "What the hell was that about then?"
Elena tried to hide her chagrin at being recognized. Ah well, no chance at getting the information she needed out of him now. She might as well just get out of here and cast the night off as a ride off. The squat she lived in was more comfortable than this stuffy atmosphere anyway.
"Needed to get away from some people," was all she answered him with, refusing to look at him.
"Yeah, so I found. Used to being followed by them types. Usually it's because of something I've nicked," she heard Sam continue.
"Well, this time it wasn't," Elena muttered, moving to stand up. "Get over it."
From her side vision, she saw the barman standing up to remind her rather firmly that she was still owing money for the drink she'd just finished and not yet paid for. From that same vision, she also saw when Sam stood up after her, and held a hand out to the barman behind them both. Next thing she knew, he was grasping her arm in his rather strong grip and leading her away from the heavily human populated areas of the Alter.
*
Sam led Elena to the dance floor and they began to dance very seductively and close so that they could talk.
"Just what the hell was going on back there?" Sam asked in opening.
"Just a little miss understanding that's all," Elena tried to dismiss it with.
They did a little spin number, then they were back close together, and continued to vampiric whisper.
"What was so interesting about this book that you had to steal and forget that it needed a key to read," Sam questioned her.
Elena at this moment paused. It then dawned on her that she didn't know what was in this book or what was in it. All she knew is that she wanted it and was curious to find out. This was going all through her mind however she was very careful not to show any of this in her face or body language. They continued to dance.
"I need the key to open the damn thing can you get it for me or not?" she demanded of him testily.
"I see no reason for me to get it for you so I don't think I'll even bother finishing this dance," Sam replied, totally unaffected by her outburst. "And your not looking for a key to open that book. Besides no good came from opening a book and reading a book."
Elena was furious at the rudeness displayed by Sam. She tried to storm of when the song finished. As Sam left for the bar Elena tweaked to what he had just said and followed him to the bar.
"What am I looking for to open that book?" she asked him cautiously.
Sam was flippant and unapologetic. "If you want to know about a book ask a Tremere. But if I were you I'd put that thing back from where it came."
Sam left then leaving more questions than answers. Then Elena thought about something that Sam said put the book back from where it came. She figured why not put it back from where it came from originally.
Elena left the Alter and head for the vampire archives, to find this book and its history. She spent hours searching for anything remotely connected. But there was nothing. Disappointed she returned home, to find Sam there casually reading her book.
*