Scrunched into the short, and not exactly comfortable, fibers of the Indian rug he kept on the floor of his private study, Abraham van Hellsing lay face-down, squinting into the gap beneath one of his bookshelves. "Nothing. Of course, nothing… I can see nothing." Grumbling, he pushed himself up and sat grumpily for a moment, scowling at his bookshelf.
He listened for a sound, a scrape, a squeak.
But he heard nothing.
With his lungs bursting with aggravation, Abraham sighed heatedly as he commenced to do exactly what he had wanted to avoid. He got to his knees and began to remove his knickknacks and the other delightful decorative objects he'd arranged in front of his books on the shelves. He had a tin army that he had painted vibrant, glaring colors when he was a boy of about twelve. Since then, he had touched up the paint and made sure the colors had never faded.
So he was very familiar with his figurines. And he knew when one of his cavalry men, who was fused to a rearing horse, was no longer leading a charge against an array of blue foot soldiers. The rest of the cavalry was bright red, with other minute details, but the missing figurine was bright canary yellow. It was a very pretty yellow, in Abraham's opinion.
Abraham began to pull out the books that had stood behind the battle scene before it had been dismantled. Taking out a large volume, Abraham spotted the thief. With a roll of his eyes and a shake of his head, Abraham sat back on his haunches and glared at the bat that huddled at the back of the shelf with the canary yellow cavalry officer. Sighing once more, he reached for the bat and promptly drew his hand back with grunted complaints in Dutch, as the bat clicked and bared its teeth defensively, clinging to the cavalry officer.
"Why?" Abraham demanded, slapping his thighs and bending down to meet the little beady glower. "What can you do with it? It's not even comfortable. What?" He gestured with disbelief, "What? Do you like the color? You can't even see color. Most likely not," the last he added reluctantly, and was quiet.
The bat's fangs remained bared.
Abraham took a moment to consider the bat and its aims, and the total absence of sense this situation seemed to have. So he extended his hand again in a more open manner, "Please, may I have that back?"
The fanged mouth closed, and the bat calmed and licked its mouth thoughtfully. Blinking, but in no other way changing his manner, Abraham reached for the cavalry officer. The bat watched his hand, but allowed Abraham to take the officer without a fuss.
Abraham sat there staring at the peculiar little beast, the tin cavalry man in his hand. He was charmed for all of half a minute, before he recalled what his true aim had been, what had brought him to the bookshelf in the first place.
He was supposed to be expelling these invasive vermin.
Abraham grunted, his expression sagging with half-hearted annoyance. He went to fetch his sack and gloves from another part of his study, and returned to try and fish the bat out of the shelf. It hissed and clicked and flapped its wings in the most menacing way it could, being such a tiny beast. Eventually Abraham wrangled this miniature beast into his sack and shut it up, after checking inside to make sure the bat had comfortably nestled itself into a cloth that had been placed in the sack for the convenience of its (future) occupants.
Leaving the sack untied, trusting that the bat was comfortable enough to remain inside, Abraham placed the cavalry man with his men on one of the stacks of books that had accumulated all over the floor – it was truly becoming something of a geographical wonder. Abraham had emptied two bookshelves so far, and knew better than to replace the books before all of his unwelcomed vermin were captured. If they were not promptly caught and stuffed into the sack, the bats tended to fly to another bookshelf and crawl behind the books. The curtains were another favorite of theirs – they refused to let go of the curtains, and always left them dirty.
But various instances of 'odd' behavior, such as a bat kidnapping a tin soldier and complying with a verbal request, had led Abraham to suspect that the vermin where not merely drawn to the vampire, or that the vampire was drawing the vermin in deliberately; it seemed like the longer the little beasts stayed in the mansion, close to Alucard, the 'odder' they became.
However, Abraham simply did not have the time needed to study these colonies of little oddities. No, he thought, as he pulled fluffy handfuls of bats from his bookshelves, no time at all. He had only just returned home from a business trip, and he had an entire infestation to take care of. Between the vermin, the vampire, and the Organization, he quite literally had his hands full.
