"What is art? Can we truly call this art?"
Mari Ohara sighed into the dark velvet of the night. What is art, her fellow vampires asked? Any freshman graphic design major could ask that. She sat against the balcony railing, watching her clan mates bicker. Unlife as the undead was a bore, and if she could have done it all over again she would have fought the sire- a flashy, impossible man with violet sunglasses and a taste for wealth- who decided to turn her due to her "aesthetic fluency." Art collector. The stupid blonde vampire wanted the word art collector. He still appeared, now and then, to show up and show off his paintings of jesus and alien birds. (Sometimes Mari wondered if the man was truly a malkavian.)
Her money did make her popular with the scrapping artists who had been paid pennies for their clickbait articles and artist commissions on The Internet. The Clan did not Approve of course- the last artist she'd turned had been an especially gifted furry artist whose lighting resembled Rembrandt's, the furred faces turned upward at the viewer in solemn spirituality, mouths open and moist, awaiting their salvation. She saw that he was doing well, and defending her decision, calling them all cowards who would rot in their unvisited galleries and unfinished paintings, forever withering in mediocrity.
In the mansion, someone threw their glass of blood on someone else's priceless Dior gown.
That was going to take forever to clean up. Why did she let this rabble into her home?
Something moved towards her and Mari steeled herself for the inevitable lecture or request for money.
"The blood was spiced all wrong. Tainted. With innocence. I couldn't keep it down. I need a twist of seawater in it."
The creature in a Halloween cloak coughed, sputtering black feathers. Mari raised one eyebrow. "Is seawater good for you?"
"Oh yes. The dead dinosaurs in it give it a special tinge that I…." The creature was a girl, maybe. White hands rose, as if to pull invisible cobwebs from the air. Her purple eyes blinked. "Oh dear, what was I saying? I was going to K-Mart for a nerf gun and now…"
"And now?"
"I was following the smell of plastic, oh yes, some girl who smelled of burned plastic and came here and…" Oh yes. The burned plastic artist whose art was huffing the smell and giving poetic impressions of the sensation. (Mari may have turned the artist just to piss off her sire.) The goblin girl spun around, her nylon cloaking spinning with her. Her voice was somehow deep and singsong at the same time. "Are you a vampire?"
Mari smiled for the first time that evening. "What's a vampire?"
"It's when the sun is mad at you."
Mari tried not to focus on the girl's beauty, but being a species of vampire that was prominently focused on beauty, that made it hard. Her outfit underneath the cloak was atrocious, but it had a certain charm. Tight red leggings and top, with a black lace bustier and skirt, direct from a Halloween store. Her black hair was down, except for a small bun on the side of her head. Moonlight shone down on her, giving the gremlin a high contrast of light and dark- chiaroscuro, she had heard, in an art history class once.
"But the moon is in love with us, isn't it?" Mari said, "We are her children."
"Yes. Children of the night."
