Chapter Three

It turned out that the taxi was not taking me to my vampire castle, instead I was dropped off and directed to some filthy apartment. There wasn't even a coffin!

There was no time to complain about that, though, as I had been given a quest by my beloved: to find mercury. Since I had a degree in chemistry, which I acquired along with all my other scholarly degrees when I not only hacked my school's servers, but then used my powers to write my own diplomata and printed them out myself, I knew that mercury was another word for quicksilver. I might have heard that in a film, too, I think. At any rate, I assumed that my new vampire friends needed the quicksilver so they could use it against the werewolves, so I knew how important my mission was.

First, however, I had an even more important mission. I dashed to the computer to e-mail every single person I know, so that I could gloat about my new, fantastic powers. Before I could do that, though, above the digital avalanche of profile updates and notifications from my blog, there was a message from mercury itself, telling me that it lived at 24 Main Street, and that I should come on over.

However, things were not as they seemed. Using my smartness, I quickly realised that this was an elaborate trap! My first clue was that whoever wrote this had misspelled "mercury" as "Mercurio". Secondly, mercury is not a person, it is an element. It could not get a job, and thus would be unable to afford a house. The author of this message was just pretending to be mercury, and this message was supposed to lure me to that address, possibly for some sort of surprise vampire party! I set off for 24 Main Street immediately.

I left the apartment and made my way to the place. Before I got there, I saw a man dragging himself up the steps to the door, leaving a trail of blood as he forced himself into the house. I assumed he was the vampire equivalent of a cake, and one of the guests got greedy and couldn't help having a taste before the party started. Silly vampires.

I got to the entrance, and prepared to pretend to be surprised when they would all start cheering at me. However, when I entered, there was no one, just a trail of cake blood. I followed it, and it led me to a room where the injured man was squirming in agony and bleeding profusely. I wondered where the guests were hiding, but then the man started talking.

"Those mothers... ripped me off... I'm dying here!"

"Are you the cake man?"

"Ah, shit, you're Malkavian, aren't you? Damn, that's the last thing I need. I'm bleeding all over the carpet, and I can't even understand what the hell you're saying."

For some reason, they were continuing to hide the party. I decided to play along with their little game, to see where they were going with this.

"I am looking for mercury".

"Mercurio, yeah, that's me. Ah, shit, the astrolite! Listen, it ain't here, it's gone. Those junkie pricks jumped me at the drop and took the money and the astrolite for themselves! You've got to get it back; they live in a dump on the beach, go through the parking garage and it's on the right. And please, don't tell anyone about this!"

Suddenly, it all made sense.

There had been a change of plans, and the party was by the beach instead. Strange that they had left the cake here, though. Not wanting to let on that I knew about their surprise, as that would disappoint them, I subtly excused myself.

"Well, then, I shall go to this completely ordinary beach house where nothing interesting could at all happen. And if something interesting did happen, it certainly would not be a surprise vampire party; that would be very unexpected indeed. In fact, if there happened to be a surprise party there, I would most certainly consider myself thoroughly surprised, and my expectations would be proved very wrong indeed!"

The man looked as if he had witnessed a confused puzzle in a purple and yellow-spotted dress give birth to a question mark, which had proceeded to hit him in the face with a mallet.

"Goodbye, mercury! I know radon has more protons than you, but you will always be my favourite element!"

With that, I left for the beach house.