here is a door

[alicornucopia]

And now this door is not itself any longer, not quite.

Comments

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"I meant more along the lines of not being assaulted or abused or virtually enslaved. Problems specific to sex workers and not, also, people who have lots of casual sex that is not a transaction. To be honest, the STD and pregnancy thing hadn't even occurred to me. My kind of vampire don't work as vectors for those either."

[cross_and_bow]

The stake goes back into her messenger bag. "I mean, their immunity to that is largely predicated on their willingness to use violence, since if they don't there's no material advantage in the situation to being a vampire except maybe lesser emotional vulnerability? But I imagine the customers think twice, anyway."

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"Using violence in self defense to prevent someone else from using violence on you is something most people are willing to do. I'm not sure how vampirism is different from having a tazer in that regard, aside from being more effective."

[cross_and_bow]

"They're vampires - my kind - so I bet it's pretty available to them on an emotional level, but some people with souls freeze up in violent confrontations."

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"Vampires don't have souls where you're from? Well, I guess that would explain the sociopathy, if not the point one percent."

[cross_and_bow]

"Oh, my boyfriend just turned out to be using his soul for a smaller set of things than most people," she shrugs. "Like, he's different, but still personable. He may technically be a sociopath, I'm using the word very much unadvisedly and have not looked it up as a psychiatric condition or anything, but he's nice and he doesn't eat people because it would bother me."

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"I guess someone who was already a high-functioning sociopath would probably be better at sociopathy than someone who had lived their life with more empathy," Gloria said. "I suppose technically we haven't proved that souls exist in my universe, but I've seen some things that would be hard to explain without."

[cross_and_bow]

"I'm not actually sure how it is supposedly known that soul loss in particular is part of the vampire-becoming process, but it's a convenient shorthand if nothing else and I don't have a strong reason to doubt it in the context of vampires and such existing to begin with."

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"Makes as much sense as anything else does," Gloria says. "I'm very glad I'm my kind of vampire and not your kind."
"Oh. I just had a thought. I'm not at all sure it's not a terrible thought, but it's a thought."

[cross_and_bow]

"...What?"

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"My kind of vampire is not terrible. We're stronger and faster than humans, and we don't have a set expiration date. There's no actual reason, as far as I can tell, why you couldn't drag a gallon of my blood back to your world and set up my kind of vampire in it.
Except, of course, that your kind of vampire is terrible, and you have no evidence save my word that my kind isn't, and if I were terrible I would have no reason not to hang out in bars pretending not to be terrible and persuading people to take my blood home, so it really would be a bad idea, probably."

[cross_and_bow]

"I mean, even if your kind of vampire happen to all be saints, which isn't the case, it could interact really badly with my kind, or with some sort of demon, or with brain-melting magical powers, or something like that. I'd be tempted to take it for myself but I'm already upgraded and don't want to fiddle with that lest that interact horribly - a lot of things in my world are just sort of disposed to be horrible - and I can't make avoiding death by old age a particularly high priority until I'm sure I can do better than all my predecessors at not dying of violence."

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"Predecessors at what?"

[cross_and_bow]

"You called me a monster hunter, my title is technically 'slayer'. Bella the Vampire Slayer, at your service, although I slay other things and do not invariably slay vampires, as discussed. There's only one of me at a time."

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"So you're upgraded in order to fight anything that isn't human, but mostly vampires, and there's only one of you at a time. If your vampires were anything like me and mine, I would express the hope that that meant no one else was hunting us, but as it is I can only assume that your world was the work of a particularly malevolent Creator."

[cross_and_bow]

"If there's anyone doing the job, they're doing it badly. There are some, you know, things, but nothing that seems definitely responsible for the whole shebang."

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"So why are you wearing...oh, lovely, your world's vampires are allergic to crosses?"

[cross_and_bow]

"Yeah. And holy water. You're not? I forgot I was wearing it or I would have asked if it was bothering you. My boyfriend's trained away the reaction to an impressive degree but I still take it off when we spar."

[maggie_of_the_owls]

Gloria fished under her collar for a moment, before pulling out a cross necklace of her own. "No. And I go to church on Sundays, too. I wear this under the dress when I have a high enough neckline for the chain not to look out of place, because a vampire 'costume' with a cross would look odd. But the fangs haven't impeded my Christianity at all."

[cross_and_bow]

"Good for your Christianity. I've painted crosses all over my town to make it difficult for more vampires to move in to replace the ones I nab."

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"Clever. Of course then you have a problem with those vampires continuing to exist outside of super-powered stabbing range, but no system's perfect."

[cross_and_bow]

"I travel a bit on weekends. And it's actually particularly important that fewer nasty-biteys congregate where I live, because it has a Hellmouth and boy does shit ever happen there. I'm not sure of the exact mechanism, but shit is very intent on happening around Hellmouths. I would like the shit that is trying to happen to be poorly staffed."

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"I suppose since you have a calling and a boyfriend and whatnot you're probably not interested, but is there anyone within earshot of your door who might be interested in moving to a universe less intent on trying to kill them?"

[cross_and_bow]

"I'm in a low-rent shopping center on a slow Tuesday and since I killed the lizard demons it's all humans, most of whom probably don't know there's anything more magical than fraudster Tarot readers out there."

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"Being abruptly educated still seems like a better deal than living in the Elemental Plane of Murder."