"Lot to hate about it. Any idea when your chums'll pick us up?"

"Probably this month."

"Can't make it that long without blood. I do hope yours grows back faster than a human's."

"If I'm eating enough and I focus on it, yeah. They might come sooner, they're just doing some combination of finding the logistics complicated and not wanting to come running the instant this King says so and genuinely being kind of far away." Sigh. "I have been called a deeply unconvincing impersonation of myself a few too many times today."

"Old dolly's paint's all come away. Will his friends recognize him at all?"

Spike sighs and sits down against the back of the cell.

"Think it'd kill 'em to give us a deck of cards or something?"

"Hasn't been invented yet but you could ask for paper and make your own."

"Have half a mind to. - can't, actually, but if you could that would be just swell."

"Oh, yeah, right." He passes this along. "Ryan, you need anything."

          "Technically I am a prisoner of a hostile foreign power at this point," says Ryan after a second. "There are regulations about that."

"They're not hostile. - I guess they might kill us all, but - uh, they're not hostile towards America, they just don't super believe it exists."

          "Mmm."

Someone brings Spike and Drusilla paper.

It isn't a month. It's the better part of a week, though. Alex leaves during the day and the Elves mostly only sing songs that bother Drusilla a little and the food is fine. 

He can make it most of a week. He makes a little deck of cards for himself and mostly fails to get Dru to play anything with them. He writes poetry. It's all terrible. He keeps telling Dru that it's going to be fine, and she only sometimes snaps that he ought not lie to her.

And then the guards show them all out, through the stone tunnel and through a muddy field where two tense groups of soldiers are watching each other, and they walk through the mud and are in different custody, without any immediately obvious differences. 

"Do any of you know how to ride a horse?"

"We used to go riding when the moon was full. I didn't like the farmers. Too much gristle."

"We know how. Normal-sized horses, though, and I don't know that we should trust Dru to ride alone."

"I don't," Ryan says. 

There's a conversation. 

"Okay, everyone's sharing with someone. Drusilla's sharing with one of them if you think she can be trusted not to bite them, and otherwise she can share with you but they're going to hella overreact if you two get out of line."

Spike considers.

"Dru's with me."

"Okay."

They head out. 

These Elves sing a magic song for speed and concealment.

Drusilla whimpers unhappily but doesn't scream. She really does hope they can go back to Italy soon.

Spike rides. Takes some focus - he hasn't done it in a while, and when he did he didn't have a giant horse - but he manages.

We found someone claiming to be Tyelcormo from thousands of years in the future. He's accompanied by a human and some vampires, he reports to Karen about a week after she arrives.

(Her immediate response is an impulse to tear at her hair and yell about various aspects of the spell that sent her here. She succeeds at not doing this. Wishbone sees that she wants to, though, and whimpers at her. "S'not your fault," she tells him. "You did the best you could.")

Is he OK?

He doesn't appear to be injured.

I guess that's something.

What do you know about the people traveling with him?

Uh, almost nothing about the human. Michael said there was a staff person taken through the portal so I guess that's him. I figure he's an American soldier but I guess I don't know for sure. Someone who works for the government, anyway.

The vampires'll be Spike and Drusilla. Spike's the man. He's good at fighting. He beat me once, I'd've died if the government people hadn't saved me. I realize that probably doesn't sound very impressive, but it is, if he and Tyelcormo fought I don't really know who I'd bet on. Probably Tyelcormo but the odds wouldn't make me smile. We captured him a couple weeks ago - well, a couple weeks before I got here - and he's been in a government containment facility ever since. Or, well, he was until the portal happened.

Drusilla's the other one. She's even more dangerous than he is, I think. She, uh, also almost killed me, and I realize this is starting to make me sound very lame, but whatever. She has visions of the future and she's able to mind control people by looking at them and waving her fingers. She's very powerful but she's also insane, which makes her kind of bad at executing plans. She got tortured into insanity about a century and a half ago by this other vampire, back when she was a human, and I guess the insanity stuck. We took her down the night the portal thing happened; Tyelcormo was dropping her off at the facility and then didn't come back.

Kinda surprised to hear that they're all traveling as a unit, but I guess weirder things've happened.

Is there any reason we should be taking these dangerous vampires alive?