MAGIC KINGDOM
Chapter 5: Caffeine and Sympathy
Disclaimer: *takes deep breath…here we go again* Raziel, Nosgoth and all its inhabitants belong to Eidos and the good people at Crystal Dynamics and Silicon Knights who created Legacy of Kain. Kurt Wagner (blue fur and all!) belongs to Marvel Comics. Lupa, the wolf-girl, belongs to me.
Venris :*munches happily on Pez* My grasp of German is mostly vague memory of school and luck. Danke schoen!
She-Smaug-Guardian-of-Tears: *pets Donovan* Awww. I'm sorry you didn't get to be in this one! Next time? (and by the way, Lupa will go ape!!)Plus, yes, I saw that movie…*sniggers*
Thanks for reading, Chalcedony Blue. I'm trying to fit everyone in as best I can! Soon!
Thanks for all the reviews from readers new & old! Keep 'em coming…
Lupa moodily stirred her cappuccino with a long plastic spoon and watched Raziel as he speared packets of sugar with his talons.
This was Vervain's, an exclusive little coffee bar on the edge of the Nexus Mall. Exclusive in the sense that it was dark, smoky, and played host to clients not normally found at your local Starbucks…Raziel felt almost at home. Yellow, feral eyes blinked at him from the gloom: people bared long fangs in laughter and played poker for kittens.
Lupa pulled the new Stetson from its box and plunked it on her head, flattening her ears. Raziel, having destroyed all the sugar in the bowl, started in on the plastic straws, ignoring his espresso.
"Raz."
Lupa had also commandeered three of the straws: one was now stuck under each arm and the third held under her chin.
"Hey, Raz. Look. I'm Dumah."
She slumped back in her seat in a parody of death.
"Oh, when will my well-meaning but kinda dumb brother Raziel come and release me from these deadly wooden stakes?"
Raziel gave her one of his "don't-mess-with-me" looks.
"Of course," the pseudo-Dumah went on, "if he chooses to torch my hideous living corpse while I am still skewered and helpless, that would be the smart option."
"I wanted to talk to him," Raziel said, flicking sugar grains about. "Besides…I'm not the type to stab someone in the back like that."
Lupa removed her straws and sat up.
"You wouldn't have had to! He was stabbed in the front, back and sides already from what I recall!"
"Not the point," said Raziel, mildly. He put one end of a straw into his coffee cup and started to feed the other end through a rip in his cowl. There was a protracted sucking noise, like a swimming pool draining very fast, and Raziel set his cup aside. Lupa was watching him with quiet horror.
"Do me a favour and never tell me how you did that," she said. Raziel's expression was, as usual, hidden, but he somehow gave the impression of grinning. "There's a guy I know at work who drinks his coffee like that, and he's fully equipped with jaw, tongue, everything."
"I'm just uniquely talented."
Lupa snorted: but before she could come up with a suitable retort, someone lifted the Stetson from her head with his tail and placed it on his own.
"Mr Wagner, that's my hat," objected Lupa, chuckling. "Well, actually it's Raziel's, he just doesn't realise how much he wants it yet."
Raziel met the mutant's eyes – very similar to his own, as they were featureless, glowing, and at the moment, amused – and nodded briefly in acknowledgement.
"I'm not staying," said Nightcrawler, "I wouldn't want to interrupt your little liason…"
Lupa and Raziel glanced at each other.
"It's not a liason, Kurt. I'm trying to change his image. You know…persuade him to dump the "I stole my clothes from medieval corpses" look and go for something with a bit more style."
"This from the woman wearing a Pokemon T-shirt," said Kurt, gently. "Still. Whatever you say. It's not a date, it's a makeover. Although somehow I don't think that makes it any better."
"I'm going for more coffee," said Raziel abruptly, and vanished into the crowd around the counter.
Lupa frowned. "Go away, Kurt, you're scaring my new friend."
"I think you're doing a very good job of that all on your own," laughed the mutant. "Like I said, I'm not staying. Just thought I'd see how you were getting on. I'm supposed to be meeting Venris at the cinema in ten minutes."
He turned, headed for the door: at the last moment turned back.
"If you really want to change his image," he called, "try this!"
Lupa automatically snatched the thing out of the air as he threw it at her. It looked rather like a watch, but the many buttons on its display and the fact that it didn't seem to show the time belied its innocent shape.
"Is this what I think it is?" Lupa shouted, but too late: Nightcrawler was gone, taking the Stetson with him.
"Excuse me, is this cappuccino for you?"
Lupa turned to see a girl smiling and cheerfully holding up a mug full of froth. "There's this guy at the counter asked me if I could bring it over to the "girl with the ears" – I guess that's you, huh…"
"Yeah, I guess," said Lupa, silently fuming. "Thanks. If you happen to be going back that way, can you tell the "guy without the jaw" that he needn't bother coming back to the table? I think I'll just leave him to go bother some girl without ears."
The girl laughed. "Your boyfriend, right?" she said.
"Why does everyone assume that? No. He's not. I don't go for the ten-years-dead thing, personally."
Raziel chose that moment to reappear, clutching a tiny espresso mug in his huge claws. "Ah," he said to the girl, "you brought it. Thank you."
"No problem. I was going this way anyhow." She held out a hand to Lupa. "I'm Syvia. Nice to meet you."
"I'm Lupa," said Lupa, shaking the hand. "This waste of good life force over here is Raziel. I apologise in advance for his behaviour."
"And I apologise in advance for hers," said Raziel, looking daggers at Lupa.
Syvia chuckled. "You guys don't seem to like each other much," she said. "And everyone knows what that means."
"I don't," said Raziel, quickly.
"Sit down," offered Lupa expansively, changing the subject without difficulty, "have some popcorn. I bought it for him but he can't seem to get a grip on it and I don't have all day to feed it to him grain by grain."
Syvia dug into the snacks, in between staring at Raziel. "Are you, like, a vampire?" she asked, eventually.
"I was," Raziel replied. "I got better."
"How do you recover from vampirism?" Syvia wondered.
"Lots of time," said Raziel, gloomily, "and a great deal of water."
Later, as they were walking back together along the south side of the mall, Lupa dug the watch-like device out of her pocket and turned it over and over in her hands, scrutinising it. Kurt's image inducer…the tiny piece of holographic technology that allowed a blue furry mutant to pass for human in a good light (as long as he didn't try to pick anything up with his tail). But what could it do for Raziel?
"Raz," she said, "have you got any pictures of you before you got the Abyss treatment?"
"This is you?"
"It was."
"Wow."
They were back in Nosgoth, standing in Raziel's old clan territory, in a small chamber set apart from the rest. Lupa held her flaming torch high. The vampire Raziel glared down at them from the wall, his yellow cat-eyes severe. The painting was old, but not ruined by time.
"I'm surprised Kain didn't destroy it," Raziel said, softly.
"No wings…"
The Raziel in the painting stood proudly, arms folded, claws gleaming. But there were no magnificent dragonish wings arching at his back.
"No," Raziel muttered. "There wasn't time to have a painting done before they - and I – were destroyed."
He turned away from the picture and seemed to be observing the blank wall opposite.
Lupa stared at vampire Raziel as if unable to tear her eyes from him. "He looks a lot angrier than you," she commented, eventually.
Raziel turned back at that and his eyes burnt from within. "No-one is angrier than me," he growled.
The wolf-girl's ears flattened against her skull: her eyes went wide and dark. In her friend's voice was all the fury of a vampire cheated of his prey, plus several millennia of just being mightily pissed off. "I'm sorry," said Raziel, almost immediately, wishing he hadn't brought her here at all. "It's just that – well, wouldn't you be angry if you used to look like that and now you look like a refugee from that film – what was it again?"
"Resident Evil," said Lupa, still looking at him warily.
He walked back to her side and put a claw on her arm. "I'm sorry if I scared you."
"Pah," said Lupa, dismissively. "You don't scare me, ya big bag of bones." She gave him a push. "Can we go back to Dumah's place?"
"We can. I'm wondering why…"
"I want to build a snowman. Can we?"
"A snowman…"
"Please, Raz?"
Raziel realised he was being steered away from the little chamber and its painting on the wall.
"No," he said, sternly. Lupa pouted.
"No? But why not? You'll love it. It'll be fun."
"This is a Lupa-ploy to try and distract me," said Raziel, allowing himself to be guided towards the warp-gate. " But I recognise it as such and am unaffected by pouting and sulking and other devilish devices designed to make me feel guilty. So no. No snowmen."
Lupa's lower lip trembled.
"But if you're very lucky," Raziel added generously, "I may throw some snowballs around."
Lupa cheered and bounced on her heels: for although Raziel had spotted her ill-disguised attempts to cheer him up, he had not spotted her carefully programming the tiny image inducer with new data under cover of her jacket. She slipped the device back into her pocket and followed him through the warp-gate without a word.
