View Flat HTML
View Metadata
Search Post
Bella wakes up in a house she's never seen before that has to violate six building codes and an air quality regulation. There's furniture - abandoned, crappy furniture - but she's on the floor in the plaster dust among shards of glass that miraculously haven't cut her. She's got her cross on her neck but no crossbow, no stakes, and she feels like she's moving through gelatin. She's not sure if she could stand - she used to be able to stand! - let alone walk, let alone kick a vampire in the chin.
Oh, fuck, what happened, the last thing she remembers is -
- her birthday magic teacher clearly not being Giles's present after all, stupid, stupid -
- she doesn't seem injured. There's a tender spot in her arm but no bruise, just - is that a needle mark. Oh, powers that be fried on a stick.
She shuffles on her knees over to the door, slowly, slowly, sneezing. She tries the knob. It doesn't work - she thinks that's a lock and not her kittenish weakness. Well, of fucking course, you don't dump incapacitated girls in houses and leave the door open, but she had to try. She tries a window. It is also locked, what the fuck kind of house locks from the outside like this, and painted shut to boot. She could punch right through the glass if -
She can't punch through the glass.
Maybe among the debris on this floor is something she can improvise into a lockpick. She's acquainted with the theory, just because she keeps having to break doors down -
+ Show First Post
cross_and_bow
cross_and_bow
"Well, it doesn't look like an insta-kill, as per your hand, so even if I assume that you're some kind of exotic breed of suicidal vampire if you change your mind mid-lasering I have a problem, and I don't know why you might be some exotic breed of suicidal vampire well enough to guess if it'd persist."
eversomuchfun
"At this range you could burn most vampires no trouble, even in your current kittenlike state. I'm not most vampires, of course."
cross_and_bow
"I did notice that. Which makes me a little iffy on killing you, at least in a hurry."
eversomuchfun
"If I had to guess, I'd say you heard about me on the news," he adds. "Probably went something like, 'gruesome murder of eighteen-year-old engineering genius Tony Stark and even more gruesome murder of family friend and former guardian Obadiah Stane; Tony's eccentric twin brother wanted for questioning'."
cross_and_bow
She blinks at him. "...British accent suggests eccentric twin."
eversomuchfun
"Very eccentric. Not technically a twin as such, but that's a somewhat longer story."
cross_and_bow
"Even if I burned you to a crisp right now I wouldn't have a way out of the building until my drugs wore off anyway," she points out.
eversomuchfun
"But by my best estimation you'd have cleared the test," he says. "Which may not apply if I break down the door for you."
cross_and_bow
"If keeping you talking until I'm at my usual strength and then breaking the door down myself doesn't constitute a win, then this isn't a test in the first place, is my point. And exhibiting this strategy will be a lot more boring if I have to sit here without anyone to talk to for that long."
eversomuchfun
"Once upon a time," he begins, "there was a lonely young genius by the name of Tony Stark, who first wrote a functioning artificial intelligence at the age of eleven and then cloned himself at the age of twelve, ostensibly to see if he could but actually because he had exhausted all other avenues in the search for an intelligent creature who would love him back. He made a laughably awful parent, so much so that the clone grew up without a name and had to scrounge one out of a book."
cross_and_bow
"This is the first time I have ever felt awkward about asking personal questions of the undead."
eversomuchfun
He shrugs.
"As you seem to have guessed, the clone was me. Sherlock Holmes, at your service." He sketches an ironic bow. "So, I was on an accelerated growth schedule that cut out as soon as I caught up to his development, around the time he turned fourteen. A little before then, his parents died in a quote-unquote car accident which, I recently confirmed, was actually a subtle assassination. It turns out that Family Friend Obadiah Stane was a little too eager to get his hands on the family business. Unfortunately for him, and perhaps more to the point unfortunately for Tony, Howard Stark left the company to his son and not his best friend. Obadiah only got guardianship of both business and child until Tony turned eighteen."
"As you seem to have guessed, the clone was me. Sherlock Holmes, at your service." He sketches an ironic bow. "So, I was on an accelerated growth schedule that cut out as soon as I caught up to his development, around the time he turned fourteen. A little before then, his parents died in a quote-unquote car accident which, I recently confirmed, was actually a subtle assassination. It turns out that Family Friend Obadiah Stane was a little too eager to get his hands on the family business. Unfortunately for him, and perhaps more to the point unfortunately for Tony, Howard Stark left the company to his son and not his best friend. Obadiah only got guardianship of both business and child until Tony turned eighteen."
eversomuchfun
"Tony actually didn't mind having Obadiah take care of the company at all, but he did plan to take it over after he graduated from MIT, so from Obadiah's perspective it was not a stable situation. I probably didn't help matters by confronting him about the assassination of Tony's parents, but then again he would've had to set up well ahead of time, so the fact that the gang of vampires he let into our home struck that night might just have been an ironic coincidence. They destroyed the AI, probably for practical reasons; killed Tony, which I'm sure was on orders; and turned me, which I suspect was for the entertainment value. And I killed them all as soon as I woke up, and then I waited for Obadiah." He flashes a very nasty grin. "I did at least grant his second fondest wish before I tortured him to death."
eversomuchfun
"Oh, he'd been salivating after Tony for years, I'd just never had sufficient evidence to convince Tony of it. So I put on my best Tony impression and played pretend. My best Tony impression is very good, but it's still moderately hilarious that he bought it."
cross_and_bow
She is now somewhat more inclined towards killing him at some point rather than looking for alternative solutions.
eversomuchfun
"And then the boys with the magic net caught me wandering by the side of the road, and I didn't care enough to defend myself, and now you know how I came to be here and vaguely recognizable and ambivalent about my own survival. Questions?"
cross_and_bow
"Why are you such a weird vampire? I mean, torturing a guy to death is sadly par for the course but killing the vamps who turned you isn't, nor is the apathy."