Devil's Nest, Monday

[arboreal_priestess]

Tiny was still in trouble from the little 'prank' he'd been playing on her, calling himself a vampire to get out of having to anything outside. So Verity had decided that today all the windows in the bar needed to be cleaned. Thoroughly. With no streaks. Oh, and the outer walls needed to be power washed clean. And while he was doing all of that, she was going to come up with as many other outdoor tasks as possible.

"You should wear this," she added, tossing on a heavy peacoat she'd discovered in lost and found. "To protect you from the sun. All day. Have fun now!"

[No OCD]

Comments

[2_old_for_this]

Peter wandered by, saw Tiny, and...utterly failed to get any sense out of him. So he stuck his head in and hooked a thumb back outside. "Is there a reason that guy's cleaning the sign in a winter coat in eighty degree heat?"

Sue him, he was curious.

[arboreal_priestess]

"He knows what he did," Verity said, arms folded. "I'm protecting him from the very dangerous sunshine."

[2_old_for_this]

"His head is still uncovered," Peter pointed out, "and he doesn't seem to be hurting. Does he need help?"

Hey, he was understandably protective of folks who couldn't do sunlight.

[arboreal_priestess]

"Oh no, he's fine," Verity assured him. "Much better than he said he'd be, oddly enough."

She pitched her voice a little louder to make sure Tiny could hear. "It's better than the punches he'd be getting otherwise. Isn't it, Tiny?"

[2_old_for_this]

Peter looked between her and Tiny, then shook his head. "Okay, I'm clearly lost. Do I even want to know, or should I just chalk it up to the island?"

[arboreal_priestess]

"Tiny told me he was a vampire to get out of doing any of the stuff outside," Verity explained. "Washing windows, taking out the trash, carrying in orders off the truck. All of that stuff. So now he's making up for that."

How was Verity supposed to know what he was? She'd taken him at his word!

[2_old_for_this]

"Ah." Peter gave Tiny an arch look. "You know it's not nice to fake something like that, right? What happens now when she meets a real one and doesn't believe them?"

He thought he was funny.


[Bedtime for me. SP?]

[arboreal_priestess]

"Oh, my boss thought it was hilarious," Verity told him. "I don't think he's worried about me disbelieving in vampires though. He signs my paychecks after all."

[2_old_for_this]

"That'd help," Peter said. "I didn't realize the boss here was a vampire."

Though it'd go a way toward explaining the whole Tru Blood thing.

[arboreal_priestess]

"I don't believe he hides it," Verity said, with a shrug. "I don't know though. My world has a lot of things, including werewolves, but I don't think vampires have shown up yet."

[2_old_for_this]

"Maybe they're just better at hiding," Peter suggested. "In my world, anyone that didn't got killed. Until recently, anyway."

[arboreal_priestess]

Verity smiled a little. "Back home, we're the people who help hide the folks that need hiding from humans," she said. Which wasn't the most accurate way of putting it, but probably the easiest. "I'm not sure we would have missed vampires. And the people with the stakes and garlic or whatever most definitely wouldn't have."

And since the Prices had been very high up in the echelons of those people with stakes and garlic until just a few short generations ago, it seemed unlikely the Covenant knew something the Prices didn't.

[2_old_for_this]

"It's easier to hide when most people don't believe in you," Peter said. He shrugged. "Then again, it's also easier to get away with killing people most people think don't exist. Hiding's a double-edged sword."

[arboreal_priestess]

"The Covenant of St. Thomas has been hunting everything that doesn't fit in their narrow definition of 'natural' since before the Crusades," Verity said. "Hunting, killing, capturing, identifying, exterminating. Assuming they know about the existence of every cryptid, sapient and not, that exists in the world might be hubris, but assuming that they don't is hubris and also likely to get people killed. If there are vampires in my world, no one knows they exist. Not humans, not people like my family, not the Covenant--" she couldn't help the reflexive distasteful expression when she said their name, "--not even other cryptids. Keeping things from humans is easy enough. Keeping things from Aeslin mice, bogeymen, hidebehinds, and dragon princesses? That's a several orders of magnitude harder."

[2_old_for_this]

"I've never even heard of most of those, so I don't know if they exist in my world," Peter confessed. "Vampires - or, well, Shadows, yes. And there used to be a lot of different demonic entities before the church got rid of them."

Back when the church was actually useful and helpful.

[arboreal_priestess]

Oh, there'd been a time?

"Perhaps you got our measure of vampires and we got the everything else," Verity said. And then realized she'd never bothered to introduce herself. "Verity Price, hi. I'll be your bartender this evening, what can I get you?"

[2_old_for_this]

There had been, yes! Before they'd lost sight of things.

Peter laughed. "Sorry, Peter Octavian, hi. Suppose it's not a huge shock if I order TruBlood, then?"

Well, maybe except for how it was still light outside.

[arboreal_priestess]

Verity's eyebrows raised, but she didn't otherwise look terribly shocked. "At this point, I just assume everyone is some flavor of cryptid on this island," she said with a smile. "Any preference to flavor? I hear B negative is tasty if you like a tang?"

[2_old_for_this]

Peter shrugged. "I'm not really picky. What other kinds of people are there?" he asked, curious. "I've only met humans and a couple aliens, so far. Oh, and the girl that works for me keeps a plant demon."

Okay, and some of those humans had some pretty strange mutations, but still - human.

[arboreal_priestess]

"Aliens, vampires, whatever Tiny is, the guy at the Fantasy Costco is an elf, I hear..." She was pretty sure that Jenkins was also something beyond the curmudgeonly old man he pretended to be, just as she was something beyond the pretty bartender she pretended to be, but that was just a suspicion--and not her place to speak of anyway.

[2_old_for_this]

"Huh. I haven't met the elf yet." Peter shrugged. "And I'm not really a vampire, just..." He snorted. "It's complicated. Short version, I'm a vampire. Long version, I can go into it if you're interested."

[arboreal_priestess]

"I'm always interested in the long version," Verity said, grinning a bit. "There's so rarely a long version to get."

[2_old_for_this]

Peter grinned back. "In that case, I'll take a beer, too." He sat and got comfortable. "True vampires in my world are demonic creatures that look nothing like humans. They're really strong, really nasty, and most people haven't even heard of them - they got kicked out of the world and back to Hell about two thousand years ago."

[arboreal_priestess]

"Which hell?" Verity asked, turning around to grab a B-negative Tru Blood from the fridge under the counter and a bottle of some European brand from below the bar. "A specific one, or just some hell dimension in general or...?"

[2_old_for_this]

"Hell." Peter shrugged. "It doesn't have a name beyond that. The demons that used to bother Earth came from a lot of different places, but the worst of them came from the place the biblical Hell was based off. It's...pretty accurate."

He nodded his thanks and opened the Tru Blood first; he didn't have a problem in theory talking about this, but Hell still brought up some pretty nasty memories, and probably always would.

[arboreal_priestess]

"Huh," Verity said, snagging a beer for herself. "Interesting. We don't have a specific Hell, not really--we have various hell dimensions. Any of them can be a standin for the Biblical hell, because most people have no idea that there are more than one. It's a dimensional thing, though, not a metaphysical one."

Her grandmother had been traveling through various hell dimensions searching for her husband for decades now.

[2_old_for_this]

"That sounds a lot like mine, too," Peter said. "But yeah, most people don't know there's more than one, at least until they go messing around with them. There are nicer dimensions too, apparently, but I've never been to them. Until here," he amended.