"It's not like I do it that often," claims the person who Trevor has repeatedly seen very nearly climb into the fireplace and that's really sounding now like it wasn't accidental as Sypha continues to interrogate Alucard about the fact he apparently did mean he preferred setting himself on fire more than drinking one extra drop of blood. More evidence for dhampirs, or maybe just Alucard, being so unspeakably annoying to raise that even Dracula couldn't handle a second one. "It's why I wear gloves."

Obviously that's why vampires wear gloves and such when out and about pretending to be people! It's still fucked up that Alucard thinks literally setting himself on fire is a viable plan B. If Trevor had known this was the sort of brilliant problem solving his shitty vampire mind came up with, he would have put a lot more effort into actually talking through their plans. What did Alucard think the backup plan for fighting Dracula was, stabbing themselves? No wonder Alucard got the shit beaten out of him as soon as he was out of Trevor's line of sight. In fact, did Alucard even get the shit beaten out of him? Did he just beat the shit out of himself?

Still, good to know. Vampires, or at least dhampirs, not only can cheat with fire magic but think that's less weird than just being a normal temperature by eating a normal-for-vampires meal. Trevor pulls out his journal again and jots this down.

Alucard leans slightly to see. "That's not what I said."

Trevor adds, And they're pedantic assholes about how you phrase things. If disarmed, talk so you can die knowing you pissed them off.

"Weren't you paying attention when I told Sypha? Vampires aren't good at this kind of magic."

"We know you're completely awful at it, yeah."

"Vampires as a whole, not just me. My father is the only vampire who bothered with it and it's only because he was affronted to discover there was such a distinction between vampire and human magics. It's why he came to focus his research exclusively on the sciences."

"And upon hearing you'd suck at it you knew to add it to your list of hobbies, because you're only interested in things you're terrible at," Trevor says. That does make sense.

Sypha frowns at him, because nothing is ever fair. "Alucard looked like a perfectly good wolf."

"Yeah, well, you had to bully him into that and he immediately turned person-shaped again so that just proves my point that Alucard only wants to do stuff he's utter shit at it. If he was worse at making a dog -"

"Not a dog," Alucard mutters.

"- he'd be one all the time. We'd have woken up a dog shedding all over the fancy coffin, if we could even tell whatever fucked up pile of bones and fur Alucard made was supposed to be a dog."

Sypha bounces the flame in her hand and then finally, finally is satisfied by dawn and puts the damn thing out. "That reminds me…Alucard, if you think God didn't make dogs," Sypha says, "then who do you think did?"

Alucard says, "I respect your opinions."

"Oh, come on, you can tell me, I hate dogs too! We outnumber Belmont." Alucard doesn't respond. "Belmont. Dogs: awful, awful animals, don't you think?"

"They're great. Platonically and nonsexually great," he adds, giving Alucard a meaningful glare.

"What a very normal thing to say," Sypha says. "We all believe you."

Trevor ignores that to continue, "God definitely made them. They don't eat people."

"They bite people all the time!"

"But they're not vampires, Sypha, biting's not eating." Admittedly, he's seen some scavenge corpses, but he's not going to judge, and better than wolves eating the bodies and turning into werewolves and then biting living people and making more werewolves and so on. "It's not like they - well, actually, Alucard ran around with his magic sword when he was a dog -"

"A wolf," Sypha says, because she is a goddamn traitor.

"- but regular non-Alucard dogs just have their teeth. If they want to do anything it's mouths or nothing."

Sypha shudders because she also likes being dramatic over nothing. "Mouths full of slobbery tongues."

"For all you screamed about it not one of my fingers got bitten off." Of course, this is before that happened, so she'll have to take his word for it. He insists, "It's cute. You'd realize it was cute if you stopped thinking they were going to tear your hand off."

"They do that because that's something you wanted dogs to do?" Alucard says, apparently appalled for some idiot vampire reason. Maybe vampires are weak to dog spit. "I thought it was all the inbreeding."

"Oh, so stuck-up dogs are too good to do that?"

"Wolves don't lick random parts of your body!"

"So that's proof those are the Satan ones. The ones that are good are the original kind God made for us."

"Maybe Satan made dogs," Sypha counters.

"You don't believe in Satan. You can't pretend to believe in Satan to win an argument."

"We believe in an adversarial -" Sypha starts.

"You believe in calling God's right hand man 'Satan' because Speakers like being really annoying and making conversations a chore. No one made you use the same word for your not-at-all-Satan-who's-working-for-God-because-they-both-hate-us. I'm not even saying you're wrong God's got someone like that! How the fuck would I know! But I'm talking about actual Satan and you know it."

"Alucard," Sypha says, "did Satan make dogs to spy on humanity because so many humans are stupid and think dogs are nice and don't suspect them?"

"Alucard," Trevor counters, realizing that actually, he can completely win this argument, "are you actually just pretending to hate Godly dogs because you're like that fox who can't reach the delicious, delicious grapes? And before you answer, I saw your precious stuffed dog toy."

Alucard groans. "Dogs. Are domesticated wolves. You made them. Badly."

"You mean, like pigs?" Sypha asks.

"And geese and cats," Alucard says.

Trevor points out, "Cats are wild animals."

"How could they possibly -"

"Also, don't change the subject."

"This is what we're talking about," Sypha tells him.

"No, we're talking about how Alucard had a fluffy toy dog in his room so he secretly agrees with me that dogs are great and is just mad he never had any pets so you're wrong because we outnumber you."

Alucard stares at him in shock. So, he's totally right.

"I did have pets," Alucard says instead, sounding badly thrown. "I'm… I would have thought that was commonly known. People died."

What. "How fucking bad are you at pets!" Trevor shouts. "What is with you and picking hobbies you're the worst at? You don't even have the excuse of just being bad at everything, this is deliberate! Were you keeping like, like hellhounds, no, hellwolves? Wait." Aw shit. "Were the skinned things really yours and you just lied when we asked if Sypha burned your pets because you didn't want her to feel bad?"

"You think I skinned my pets," Alucard says with the exact same mixture of disgust and disdain as he did when Trevor brought it up last time.

"It's not like I just assumed you'd do that. Some undead dogs and cats attacked us at the castle. They must've belonged to one of the vampires there, you'd been a vampire who lived there. It's reasonable to check!"

"Vampires don't keep undead animals." Under their continued stares, Alucard sighs. "Bats. When I was younger."

"So it's not owls, it's bats vampires like," Trevor says. One mystery solved.

"No," Alucard says sourly. "Vampires do not like bats, it turned out."

Dracula murdered Alucard's pet bats.

Huh. You'd really think Alucard would remember shit like pet murder when trying to brag he had the better childhood. Then again, Alucard was just insisting ice ghosts are fine because if you stay far enough away, their inevitable murder attempts won't actually succeed. Alucard's judgement is shit. Which is understandable when you're raised by Dracula, admittedly, and also understandable when you're a complete moron.

Also, "Wait, how did Dracula killing your bats get people killed?"

Alucard stares at him.

Time to guess then! "Dracula got other people to murder your bats because your mother made him promise not to kill them himself, but your horrible monster bats killed most of them back?" Alucard keeps staring. "Dracula dumped your horrible monster bats on a nearby town to get them out of the castle. Dracula was so enraged he had to follow up the bat murder with human murder to relax. Dracula -"

"He did not hurt my bats. We collected them together. They were -" Alucard cups his hands together to create a mouse-sized hollow. "Just bats. An unusual species, but there was nothing supernatural about them. And I vaccinated - they were completely harmless to humans."

And that's… "Uh," Trevor says. "When you say they weren't supernatural, do you mean like Dracula's bullshit pile of stuck-together floating castles isn't supernatural?"

"They were ordinary animals."

"Are they the 'ordinary animal' bats in that magic book about magic bats you had?" Trevor asks.

Alucard considers him. "What would you consider a magic book?"

"Weird picture runes instead of real letters."

Alucard's expression disappears.

So the book's important, then.

"Right, that magic bat book, the one in your room. Also, those didn't look like any bats I'd ever seen."

"It wasn't a magic book, those weren't weird runes, and I caught the bats in a jungle on the other side of the world." Alucard claims, both looking away and ducking his head. Then, "That was a book I wrote about them."

"But there's legible drawings in it. Good, even. That's how I know it was about bats, I could actually make out what the fuck the pictures were supposed to be... Alucard, did you kidnap someone to draw for you? Did Dracula lock some poor guy up in his dungeons because you wanted illustrations?"

"No," Alucard says flatly.

Yeah, if his mother didn't want the people who actually murdered her to face consequences she probably wouldn't have let Dracula torture art out of some innocent guy. Probably.

Which leaves... "So did Dracula draw those? Did you make Dracula draw pictures of your stupid pet bats?" Trevor's intense desire to mock this further slams into the horrifying picture of Dracula doing something other than murdering people. Whoops. He should really take his own advice about mouths and shutting them.

Alucard does not seem to be really listening. "I wonder if you actually saw it," he mutters, casting a very quick glance at Trevor again.

"I just told you what it looks like."

"I can't believe they'd have difficulty figuring out what I wrote. If they described it to you I'm sure they wouldn't have been able to keep from editorializing." Alucard sounds very irritable about this. So whatever's there is hugely embarrassing. Maybe Trevor should've tried harder on the apparently not magic cipher.

Wait. Holy shit. "Is it poetry?" Trevor asks. "Is it poetry about how majestic you think bats are."

"Bats aren't majestic," Alucard says.

"Mean thing to say about your pets."

Sypha says, "Is it poetry about how cute bats are?"

"It was a record of my observations, not poetry."

"Ones so embarrassing you had to write it in code." How bad does something have to be before vampires get embarrassed? Did Alucard fuck the bats? Is it a bat-fucking journal? Is it a journal of bat-fucking poems? Maybe Trevor was spared by not being able to read the entries.

"Just because you can't read something doesn't make it code," Alucard tells him. "I wrote it in the language of the people where the bats are from."

Trevor considers this. "Why the fuck," he decides on.

"It was the language where they lived. Not one they spoke because they were, again, ordinary non-supernatural bats. But I felt it was more fitting to use that for them than a foreign language."

"It's not and you're weird."

Alucard sighs. "I suppose it doesn't matter."

"Also, I may not be able to read it but I know what writing from the other side of the world looks like and even if your penmanship is as bad as your drawing skill, that was definitely not Chinese."

"I didn't mean the other side of this continent."

"Oh! Africa has special bats?" Sypha asks. "I've heard they have a lot of strange animals."

Alucard shakes his head. "It's a separate continent. I'm not sure how to… If you were to head to the west, you reach the ocean. If you continued to sail west, you'd reach land again."

"I'd be dead because that's, what...twenty..." He glances at Sypha questioningly and gets a nod. "Yeah, twenty thousand miles. I suppose the boat itself might make it to run aground on land," Trevor says. "In China. These were absolutely supernatural monster bats you summoned, weren't they."

"There's other continents."

"What would the point of that be?" Trevor asks. "God's not going to make peopleless copies of all this just to fill it with bats. Bats aren't even that great."

Alucard snaps, "I already said there were people."

"That was before you tried to say those people were on some mythical other continent nobody's been to."

"Well obviously the people there have been to it!"

"There can't be," Sypha says. "I have heard speculation about the possibility of other landmasses, but for God to have created humans more than once…" She shakes her head. "I can't believe that. If they didn't fall, then would they even be human? And if they did, if the same thing happened to them as happened to Eve and then Adam, then it was all just a perverse trap. Even for God, that seems terribly cruel."

"Also, Jesus," Trevor adds, because God knows Sypha won't be considering that part of it. "Like, I guess he could get there, who am I to say what Jesus couldn't do, but what the fuck would he have to say to them? They didn't crucify the guy."

"Most of us didn't crucify anyone," Sypha retorts.

Trevor groans. "Look I don't know how it works, don't argue with me."

"What are you both talking about?" Alucard demands.

"There's not other continents because there's no point in things existing without humans and there's no humans on them because if there were they wouldn't be from Eden and if they're a separate unrelated batch then what's even the point of Jesus," Trevor tells him.

"Of course they - you're all the same species," Alucard says in a tone of voice that suggests he's never spoken to anyone so stupid. "How could there possibly be unrelated humans, that's not how - you can't have unrelated members of the same species -" Trevor watches with some amusement as Alucard actually pauses to take a breath before continuing curtly, "The oceans were lower in the past, rendering the continent more accessible, and also boats do exist. But in one respect, you are correct."

"Wow, one. Thanks."

"I didn't speak with anyone on that subject but I'd imagine they would find your story of Jesus rather perplexing and dull," Alucard continues. "Still, you might like it there."

Surrounded by godless damned people. Fuck, God, that's a mean thing to say.

"My father was unsure if it was some deliberate working of magic or not, but he said there was a wrongness to the soil. Those exposed to vampirism do not successfully transform. It's rather violent, apparently."

"And where would I find this great anti-vampire dirt? Like, an actual physical location."

"West," Alucard says. "And south. It's not as if I went by boat, I think I've made my feelings on those clear. I don't know the precise distance. That's not how the castle works."

"Right, so, you got demon bats and Dracula lied to you about it for some reason."

"Why those bats?" Sypha asks. "There's bats here."

"They had some traits that interested me," Alucard says with a hesitance that suggests he absolutely knows that is not actually answering the question and he absolutely knows Sypha knows it.

Well, Trevor's great at helping. "They had fucked up monster teeth," Trevor volunteers. "Assuming the artist got it right, and they weren't Alucard so I'm willing to believe they did. Like extra fangs, but bucktoothed. Maybe he just wanted something around with stupider teeth than him. Which raises the question, how did your freakish bucktoothed flying mice kill people, Alucard? Do they fly down people's throats and stab their organs? Tiny torture demons?"

"They were very nice animals," Alucard says stubbornly.

"Your judgement is shit," Trevor points out.

"When I said people I wasn't referring to humans," Alucard says. "Vampires died. I assume that's acceptable to you."

"That just raises further questions!"

"I would also like to know how your tiny bats killed vampires," Sypha says. "Venom?"

"Their venom wasn't -" Alucard slumps. "They were blood-drinking bats," he mutters.

"Vampire bats?!" Trevor shouts.

"And I tried to explain that there was a difference -"

"You made bats into vampires?!"

"- and that they were regular animals - "

"I didn't think animals could even be vampires!"

"- and only humans can become vampires -"

"There are no ordinary bats that drink blood! I would know something that fucked up!"

"- but no one wanted to listen to me," Alucard finishes.

"And then the vampires exploded from how wrong you were?"

Alucard regards him. "That's...more or less how it went, yes."

"I knew it!"

"I do not believe you," Sypha says. "If being wrong around vampires was enough, Belmont wouldn't need to carry any weapons."

"Fuck you Sypha, I am right about everything."

She gestures at Alucard. "See, Alucard is completely unharmed. Not even a sizzle."

"Miss Belnades?"

God. God fucking damn this place.

"Rozalia?" Sypha says. He already knows! Fucking Speakers and their fucking name fetish like he wanted to know who dead people were. "You don't need to call me -" She looks back at Trevor and frowns, then whispers, "She wasn't one of the people who…"

"Stayed inside," Trevor says.

Sypha smiles. "Oh, that's -"

"You think it went better for the people who stayed put," Trevor growls.

Sypha just ignores him. "Right, so just Sypha's fine," she tells the woman. "What's going wrong now?"

"They're going to burn the church this morning, as the Lord Belmont said to."

"For the record, I did not, I just agreed, and it's not a church anyway," Trevor says. "It's like a hemlock growing in the middle of a bunch of carrots. Just because I think we should burn some poison doesn't mean I've got anything against carrots, all right? Carrots are fine. Carrots are great, in fact."

"I don't mind about the church but I'm concerned about the fire spreading to other buildings," Rozalia interrupts. "Ones that matter. But you can make walls of ice if things get out of hand."

"I can," Sypha says, sounding only a little smug. "Yes, you've right, I'll come to keep an eye on things. Do we have time for breakfast? I think Belmont needs to eat something."

"I don't need to eat something."

Rozalia fucking nods and says, "Because you're a gjenganger."

"I am fucking not!"

And Alucard makes a little choked off snort, like this is hilarious.

"I am not!" Trevor snarls at Alucard. "I didn't fucking kill myself!"

"Yes, yes, obviously you're not a gjenganger," Alucard says, rolling his eyes. "Gjengangers are coherent, and focused, and reliable, and clean. I don't understand how anyone could mistake you for one. "

Trevor flips him off. "A gjenganger would've gone berserk and killed you first time you disagreed with me."

"I have the sense not to directly refuse a gjenganger's request. As long as you do that they're perfectly pleasant conversationalists." Then the fucker gets a look of mild concern as he looks down to Rozalia. "Do none of you know these things about them, really?"

"Er," Rozalia says.

"How do you deal with them safely, then?"

"They're not safe!" Trevor yells. "What the fuck is with you, they're horrible vengeance monsters who kill you if you won't help out with it!"

"Of course basic civility would strike you as impossible."

"Basic civility," Trevor repeats mockingly. "Basic civility!"

"On second thought," Sypha says to Rozalia, dropping to the ground, "I think it would be best we leave them here."

"Basic civility!"