"Nice dress." The bar offers Bella a drink. "Um, cherry milkshake." She receives a cherry milkshake. Slurp.

"Thanks. I run a club, and I was headed in to work when this place decided to happen instead."

"Where at? I'm pretty sure you don't operate the Bronze, and I don't think my town has any other clubs. Weird space-warping bar."

"It's called the Monster Mash. Horribly cheesy, I know, my wife never gets tired of reminding me."

"So the question is do you have that song playing all the time, or do you just constantly get requests for it?"

Gloria laughs. "We play all kinds of kitschy Halloween-type music. There was actually a period of about a month a little while ago where the DJ literally was not allowed to play that one because everyone else on staff was sick of it."

Giggle.

"Yeah, the tyrrany of compulsory education, that's my weekdays."

"Poor dear. I'm just as glad to be done with that, really, but I didn't mind high school so much. I had a lot of good friends, and reasonably competent teachers."

"Eh, mine is okay as schools go, and we have Latin, but I'm in a new school this year so I don't really know any of my classmates well and frankly that's easier anyway."

"Ooh, Latin, nice. I had to go with French. I mean, I could have taken Spanish, but does this look like the kind of dress someone who values practicality over aesthetics wears?" she plucks at the lace on her bodice. "Easier, huh? So you're an introvert, or just very dedicated to schooling?"

"I was doing Spanish before, I switched - and definitely an introvert, yeah, but I also need a lot of spare time for finding and punching lizard demons and the like."

"Do you have a lot of lizards that need punching?" she asked incredulously. "And I can't really recommend punching as the solution to you violent problems, especially when your opponent is likely to have teeth and claws."

"It's usually not lizards! I'd say it's usually vampires but they've gotten to be kind of thin on the ground in my town. I'd rather be slinging magic around but I can't get any spells to work, so I have to use what I've got."

"I...cannot recommend randomly murdering vampires, either."

"I usually manage to get them before they turn. I have a key to the morgue, I put little splinters of wood in their hearts, everything's dandy."

"You've got a reproductive vampire running around your town draining people? Honey, being a ghoul's no fun, but it's reversible. Death isn't. Do you--where do you live, I can get you the number of a nearby vampire council, they can fix the problem."

"There...are...thirteen kinds of vampire. Only the most powerful five kinds can make new vampires. If one of them just drains someone, without giving them any blood in return, they go corpselike and when they wake up they're a ghoul. Making ghouls is super illegal inasmuch as vampires have separate laws, which basically means that if someone catches you doing it they rip your head off. Literally. If you have a choice between killing a ghoul and letting it kill someone else, by all means put the poor thing out of its misery, but if you know someone is going to become a ghoul you can send for a higher-level vampire, they feed it, it gets promoted to something with higher reasoning faculties."

"That sounds very civilized but I'm afraid we're talking past each other, see, I'm talking about actual vampires and you seem to be talking about your favorite video game."

"I am a vampire," she says, holding up her glass, which still has blood in it. "I think I know how we work."