Sephora Forrest
Vampire
Dhampir
Enjoys a bite to eat from time to time...
Posts: 145
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Post by Sephora Forrest on Jul 30, 2009 10:36:41 GMT 1
Sephora watched warily as Silas filled his glass by tapping his twig against the glass and letting the water flow from it as though there was a hose attached to the other side. Despite what he said; she doubted very much if there was anything one of those magical branches couldn’t do.
“The long version is fine with me,” responded Sephora, “It’s not like I have anything better to right about now.” Well, she supposed she could sleep; an attractive concept since usually she was fast asleep right about now. And those damn curtains were still being distracting by only letting a thin line of sunlight in which was shining directly in her eye… Hastily, she reached out and grabbed a handful of curtain to shut it, only to cause a very ominous squeaking sound to be issued from the curtain rod. Sephora immediately stopped pulling and let go of it as fast as possible; afraid that it would break which would leave the room flooded with horrible sunlight.
Aware that her behaviour was somewhat random, she felt the need to say, “Carry on then,” before Silas could comment on anything.
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Post by Silas Rosier on Aug 1, 2009 14:27:55 GMT 1
Silas didn’t pay Sephora’s behaviour any mind. Instead he was alternating between drinking the water and eyeing the fridge. Just being in the kitchen was causing his stomach to remind him painfully that it had still been twenty six hours since his last meal and human bodies needed food to survive. All he was running on was empty calories from the booze he’d been drinking, and he could only last on that for so long. What difference was there between eating here and eating at home? Well, aside from the fact that anything he took from herewould undoubtedly cost him more money.
Oh, fuck it. Seph had gone and gotten dinner from him the night before, twice, and given him the marks to show for it, so the very least she could do was buy him breakfast.
“The amount of magic a wizard has the capability to perform depends on a number of factors.” Silas began, turning so he could lean against the counter while finished off the water. He didn’t like water as a general rule. Tasteless. At least vodka had bite to it. “The first two are, obviously, training and experience.” He put the now empty glass down on the counter to his left. “In the hands of an untrained wizard a wand can’t do much but shoot sparks. Each spell has to be learnt, practiced and perfected separately, which takes time and effort.
“In the same vein, there are only so many spells that can be memorised and practiced in a lifetime. What a wizard chooses to learn depends on their needs, interests and career. Every wizard’s arsenal of spells will vary as much as someone’s address book, as will their proficiency.
“Breakfast, thankfully, is a relatively simple matter,” he added with an extra hint of liveliness, and moved away from the counter to start searching through the fridge for anything edible. As he reached inside the bruises on his chest gave a sharp ache of pain.
“Natural talents also have an effect,” Silas continued as he shuffled through the available food, ignoring the way the world was deciding to start lurching from side to side. Yogurt. Milk. Eggs. Cheese. Standard stuff really. “If you’ve ever been bad at math or good at art, it’s a similar situation. Some wizards will never gain the knack for certain fields, while others will go above and beyond. Every wizard has their strengths and weaknesses, and when you hit a weakness, there’s only far you can progress.” Like himself and healing spells; something that desperately needed fixing. Perhaps he ought to start slicing up the rats in the cage in his garage. Thankfully there were a few spells to stop them thrashing around.
Finally he rested some yogurt, a square portion of butter and a pair of eggs on the counter. Silas gave the remaining two eggs in the fridge a glance. Hmm, he could always throw them on there for Seph. She needed to pay for breakfast eventually so all he was doing was saving her the effort of making the stuff herself, and it wasn’t like it would be any effort on his part. Any extra endearment he could work up might function in his favour when it came to getting information. He plucked them both from the fridge and looked at the girl seated on the bed. “Fried eggs?” he offered, and at her assent he put them next to the others and shut the door.
“It gets more fiddly when you throw wands in the mix,” he continued, holding his own light brown one up as he spoke and flicking it in the direction of the counter. Immediately a small ball of bright blue flame burst up of its own accord, hovering harmlessly over the wood. “These things have a personality of their own, so to speak. As well as what you’re good at, wands have their own sets of strengths and weaknesses. One might be good at transfiguration but have trouble with even simple charms.”
A wave of his wand later and a saucepan materialised out of thin air and moved to hover over the flame. With a second flick and the stick of butter unwrapped itself and dropped into the centre of the pan while the wrapping vanished into thin air. He stepped back to the other side of the kitchenette and resumed leaning his back on the counter, right hand on the wood and the left keeping the wand trained on the pan.
“Each wand also varies in power and ease of use. The rule is, the more powerful the wand the more difficult it is to wield. If you get stuck with a weaker wand it tends to balance out by learning spells faster, just don’t plan on doing astounding feats of magic any time soon.” The pan started tilting back and forth to spread the melting butter evenly as though being pulled on invisible string. “They’re also fussy bastards. You need to be compatible with the wand you’re using. A wand that works perfectly for one wizard won’t as well for another.
“Moods can also alter spell casting ability. Too much stress, or even depression, can sap a wizard’s power. An angry wizard’s spells tend to carry more strength, but are also less controlled. Frustration and anxiety can also make casting difficult. A rule to go by: never sneak up on a wizard and grab them by surprise. Magic can be unpredictable sometimes, and if you alarm a wizard, if you’re lucky you might only get a moderate electric shock for your trouble.
“You also need to be careful of who, or what, you’re casting at. Some creatures, such as giants, have a natural resistance to enchantments. Few, if any, wizards on their own would be able to take one out and even then they’d need a fair amount of ingenuity, but that’s really more of a footnote.”
With the butter melted, all four eggs followed the movement of Silas’s wand, hovering up in mid air, breaking themselves one by one on the edge of the pan and pouring out of their shells. The dull sound of sizzling started to fill the room. A sharp flick of the wand and the empty eggshells vanished.
“There are, of course, a few things that can’t be done, period. Gamps Law of Elemental Transfiguration covers the physics of what can be conjured by magic, and the Five Principle Exceptions are ‘Life’, ‘Love’, ‘Food’, ‘Information’, and ‘Money’.
“You can multiply food if you’ve already got it, summon it if you know where it is, but it cannot be made from nothing. You can force information from someone if you know they have it, penetrate their minds for it, but you can’t magic knowledge into your head. There are ‘Love Potions’ to be gotten if you know where to look, but they do not create real love, only feverish infatuation. ‘Life’ is a tricky one in that you can create it-” and to demonstrate his point he jabbed his wand in the direction on the lampshade which immediately turned into a rather surprised looking spiky lizard “-but no matter what you try, the dead cannot be resurrected by magical means. As for money, well, if everyone could create galleons the wizarding world would have a rather unique economic crisis.
“Some places also have other spells in activation preventing others from being cast. A place like The Three Brooms for example, would likely have a block on Refilling Charms to stop people purchasing only one drink and holding onto it for all the rest of their stay.
“The general rule is, the more complicated the feat, the fewer wizards you find with the ability to pull it off. No wizard could do something absolutely insane without the use of highly specialised trinkets and Ministry permission. Speaking of the law, it has restrictions on a number of different spells, as it does on murder and anything dubbed a ‘Dark Art’, which covers most curses. For everything else, such as medicines and day-to-day beauty, there are potions.
In summary, magic depends on: the amount of spells memorised, how much training a wizard has received, their experience with the spell in question, their talents, the wand they’re using, their target, the casters emotional state, the spells legality, if the spell is even possible, and the magnitude of what is trying to be accomplished.”
The lizard, meanwhile, had decided the bedside table was not a safe location and was peering down to the floor, trying to find a way down. Silas only gave it a glance.
He summoned the pan closer so he could check the eggs progress. Dissatisfied, with another wand movement it hovered off on its own to sit back over the blue flame. “Give the eggs another few minutes,” he continued, and crossing his arms comfortably.
“While these cook, we might be able to find out what else separates you from normal vampires. Anything you can tell me that might sort this mystery out?” The information, of course, would be more for his benefit than hers.
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Sephora Forrest
Vampire
Dhampir
Enjoys a bite to eat from time to time...
Posts: 145
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Post by Sephora Forrest on Aug 5, 2009 10:13:01 GMT 1
Sephora listened intently to every word Silas said; absorbing it like a sponge. She now realized that if she really wanted to integrate herself into wizarding society, she was at least going to have know the basics. This was all going to be very useful if she ever had to come up against a wizard again.
Silas offered her eggs, and she silently accepted. She watched with fascination as a blue flame appeared out of nowhere and hovered over the bench at the flick of his wand. He then proceeded to get a pan and have the eggs sizzling away without so much as laying a finger on them. It was just downright unnatural. Not that she was exactly one to talk.
She jumped slightly as the lampshade beside her suddenly turned into a large, fat, spiky lizard… thing. As if everything else she had seen today wasn’t weird enough. She had to resist the urge to move further away from the lampshade… lizard. Luckily, her attention was diverted again by Silas’s speech - he seemed to be quite good at making them. Surely he didn’t have all of these memorized.
“Hey; I only just found out that I wasn’t an actual vampire ok?” Sephora replied haughtily, but at the same time feeling obligated to give him something at least to work with after that impressive amount of information. The truth was; all that she had worked out about herself had just gone out the window… or had they? Her main problem was that she had never had anything to compare herself to; how could she have been expected to suspect that she was anything but a vampire? She had never been born into the wizarding world, nor had she been all that interested in all of that supernatural stuff, so when she started changing, she mostly made it all up and played it by ear.
“Obviously, I drink blood, but I can still eat human food too. It’s more of like a very meat orientated thing with blood as like an extra actually, since I don’t tend to feed all that often. The sun burns me; and I hate light, loud noises and really pungent things like garlic. I can throw quite a bit of weight around now, and go much faster yadda, yadda, yadda…” she listed, thinking of everything that had changed since she had first started changing into a vampire, “But to be perfectly honest, I’m not sure that’s all, because everything changed really slowly, so slowly that I didn’t notice it happening at first. It’s been my own half life for over ten years now.”
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Post by Silas Rosier on Aug 6, 2009 12:01:05 GMT 1
Silas kept an ear out for anything important as Sephora started talking. He didn’t really expect much. After all, if she was as clueless as he suspected she was hardly going to be able to give him an in-depth seminar on the biological differences herself and full vampires. But, still, any clue that would eventually make it easier to kill her if the need came about would be useful.
So. Blood was liked but not strictly necessary. Sunlight had a moderate effect. Strength and speed: Hah, no shit. He didn’t need telling twice, although specifics would be more helpful. Same or less than a regular vampire?
“Hmm, yes. With regular vampires the changes are abrupt. Get killed, wake up three days later, surprise, you’re a full vampire,” he added, remembering Dacian’s little changeling hiding out in the Hogs Head. Yeah, Sephora didn’t need to know about her yet. The more isolated Sephora stayed the easier time Silas would have keeping track of her. They’d probably find each other inevitably but he wasn’t going to help speed things along.
“Full blood diet, sunlight is fatal, and their speed and strength varies depending on age. For comparison, how much can you think you can lift?” he added, trying to run though all the points she’d brought up already. “Oh, and they tend to be deadly allergic to religious symbols. Same for you?”
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Sephora Forrest
Vampire
Dhampir
Enjoys a bite to eat from time to time...
Posts: 145
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Post by Sephora Forrest on Aug 6, 2009 12:40:42 GMT 1
Ok, Sephora was feeling a little ripped off here. She had spent over ten years getting to the point she was at now. And proper vampires got to change in just three days? What was fair about that?
“Lift? Not entirely sure - it’s not like I decided to lift weights one day just to see how strong I am,” she replied, mentally thinking that this wouldn’t be such a bad idea, “Although, there was this one time, before I left Australia, when I was trying to get to sleep in the morning, and the neighbors dog wouldn’t stop barking after the postie came around, so I went down stairs and shut it up by squishing it with a car.”
Sephora raised an eyebrow at the mention of religious objects. She’d never been into religion, but that seemed a little… extreme. “What do you mean by deadly allergic?” she asked suspiciously, “I’ve never been a church person. Although; now that you mention it - holy objects do give me the strangest of feelings. It’s not exactly pleasant, but I thought it was just like static electricity or something. You got one on you? Pass it here; I want to check something.”
She caught the small crucifix with both hands, and instantly felt that tweaking sensation you get as if someone gave you a minor electric shock. It actually made her jump a little, and the sensation was unpleasant enough that she loosened her grip on it and held it by the chain. “Is that what you’re talking about then?”
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Post by Silas Rosier on Aug 7, 2009 12:02:25 GMT 1
Wait, squashed a dog with a car? Silas laughed half out of incredulousness and half out of amusement. Good grief. Well, if you were going to do something you might as well do it with style. If the implications about her strength and her temper weren’t so problematic he might have been downright impressed. How exactly had the muggles explained that little wonder in the morning?
“You got one on you?” she asked in reference to any religious items, and Silas gave her a curt nod. He’d still kept the crucifix necklace he had pilfered to employ against Dacian. Hey, the muggle curator wouldn’t miss it; Silas had left him a nice little replica. Even though the vampire was dead he’d still been wearing it as a force of habit.
“I’m surprised you didn’t run into it last night, actually,” Silas remarked casually as he slipped his hand down his collar and yanked a chain free from around his neck. He held it up for a moment to regard it then tossed the small tarnished silver crucifix in her direction. It was visibly aging and the finer details had started to fade. “True vampires can’t even stand look at one. It’s caustic to their skin on contact and causes huge stabs of pain as well as permanent disfiguring scarring,” he explained, watching the way she handled it relatively painlessly. Damn.
Oh, right, the eggs. They ought to be done by now. Silas flicked his wand and the small blue flame beneath the pan vanished. With a rattle, one of the drawers opened and Silas quickly sent a knife and fork flying over to drop onto the bed beside Sephora. One magically conjured plate later and there were two neatly fried eggs sitting next to her. Silas repeated the same process for himself.
“Okay, I have to ask,” he smirked, looking down at his eggs and prodding them experimentally with the end of the fork. “How’d you get the dog with a car?”
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Sephora Forrest
Vampire
Dhampir
Enjoys a bite to eat from time to time...
Posts: 145
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Post by Sephora Forrest on Aug 8, 2009 13:56:05 GMT 1
She studied the crucifix for a while, keeping her skin a safe distance from it, wondering how a little metal cross could cause so much damage to beings who were supposed to live forever. Actually, that brought up an interesting question; if she was only a half vampire, then was she immortal?
She didn’t have time to ponder this however, because her attention was diverted by a plate appearing beside her, along with two fried eggs. Warily, she picked them up and sniffed them delicately, not ruling out the possibility that they could have been poisoned. Detecting nothing out of the ordinary, she picked up her knife and fork and cut herself a small piece. Experimentally she put it in her mouth, chewing it slowly before swallowing and declaring, “Wow, these are really good!”
Sephora smiled slyly when Silas inquired about the car. She got the inkling that she had somehow impressed him with that. Or possibly scared him. Or both.
“I rolled it on top of it. I was never much a fan of dogs; or cats for that matter. This one was one of those really annoying ones that always barked in that never ending high pitched voice. The problem intensified as I … well changed, and I had had enough. It didn’t even see the car coming towards it; it was so stupid. Then again, I suppose it didn’t expect a car to flatten it either. I left the dog on its owner’s door step and turned the car up the right way again; and I think the police thought some vandals or something had done it. I was lucky that our neighbors didn’t report me, but I think it was just their five year old son who saw me do it,” Sephora replied, happily recounting the memory. God she had hated that dog. There was something overly satisfying about squishing it, and reliving the memory was almost as good. Violence had been the only answer in this case.
She finished her eggs hungrily; she hadn’t thought it was possible to be that hungry the day after feeding, but then again those were amazingly good eggs. He was a pretty good cook, she’d give him that. Or at least, his magic was, or whatever had just made breakfast.
“Who are the other vampires in the area then?” she asked curiously, leaning back against the bed again. She wasn’t sure now that she was somewhere to meet others who were at least similar to her, whether she wanted to meet or avoid them. She had no idea how they would react to her; being a somewhat in-between species. She had nothing to gauge this off; she had never met a vampire in all her travels. They may not be exactly pleased to find someone like her; and if they had superior abilities to her, than it might be in her best interests to stay out of their way, or possibly view them from a distance.
It was strange to think that a sleepy little village right next to a school could attract any sort of unusual magical creatures at all; but then again the students could have been considered easy prey if you were into that sort of thing. Sephora could simply not bring herself to drink the blood of women and children. In her mind, she did not think they deserved it in the way that men did.
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Post by Silas Rosier on Aug 9, 2009 14:58:24 GMT 1
As Sephora explained the story about the dog, Silas wandered back over to the couch with this food. It was starting to become an effort to ignore the headache pulsing behind his forehead. Sitting down at least made the exhaustion somewhat more bearable and he leant forwards, resting his elbows on his knees to stop himself getting too settled. He was going to fall asleep at work if he wasn’t careful. As an afterthought he glanced back at the kitchenette, but there was no sign of any shakers.
“Not a fan of dogs either,” Silas laughed when Sephora finished her story with an unusual relish. The only thing he accomplished by that was a sharp reminder of the bruises all his chest. Yeah, that was going to need fixing too. Who was it- Right, Connery Younger, war medic. Maybe he’d know something.
In any case, Sephora had managed to answer his question in a roundabout way. She wouldn’t have brought the anecdote up unless it was the heaviest thing she’d recalled being able to lift. Right, so how much did a car weigh exactly? His knowledge of them was basically limited to: they have four wheels, are controlled by a steering wheel and pedals, the engine makes them go, and they’re a horribly inefficient means of transport. Fuck it, he’d guess.
“I’d say you can lift about half the weight of a regular vampire,” he mused finally, cutting into the eggs with the fork and lamenting the lack of cracked pepper. “Last I checked changelings could bench about a ton, so by the looks of it you’re doing everything in halves. Half the strengths, and lucky for you, half, or even less than half of the weaknesses,” he said, lifting the fork to his mouth and nodding at the crucifix still on the bed. If she had of been Dacian she would have been cowering in a corner by now instead of pleasantly devouring a pair of fried eggs.
They ate in silence, and Silas himself was almost finished when Sephora piped up with her new question. Silas absently tapped the prongs of his fork against the plate as though trying to remember. Fuck, the place was practically crawling with them. “I’m not sure exactly,” he replied slowly. “The two that I knew aren’t here anymore-” if you wanted to put it that way “-and I never had much to do with the rest. They’re a secretive, paranoid bunch as a rule, so to be honest I’m not sure how they’ll react to you showing up. No offence intended, but, well, you’re quite a rarity.”
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Sephora Forrest
Vampire
Dhampir
Enjoys a bite to eat from time to time...
Posts: 145
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Post by Sephora Forrest on Aug 10, 2009 11:18:46 GMT 1
Well; that comment would have been flattering, had it not sounded suspiciously like sucking up. Well; there was that and the troubling news that came with it. Sephora frowned, suddenly concerned for her own safety. It didn’t even occur to her that she could be sitting calmly in the same room as a person who had very recently tried to kill her himself. To Sephora; the bigger worry was the unknown number of unknown vampires who may or may not be looking to get rid of her as fast as possible.
Perhaps it had been a stroke of pure luck that she had not run into any other vampires until now. Silas seemed to know what he was talking about; and with the tables suddenly turned against her, Sephora felt vulnerable. She hated feeling vulnerable. Anything that put her at a disadvantage to others she felt the need to rectify or reverse, but this particular problem seemed a little harder to negotiate. The fact that Silas was with holding facts didn’t help either. How was she supposed to know who to avoid? Well; there was a simple answer to this question. She’d just hang around Silas.
He knew who to watch out for, and at this stage was the person she was most likely to trust. Whether or whether not this was because she hadn’t met anyone else to trust was irrelevant. There was the possibility of a swarm of hostile vampires and her life at stake here! He could give her all the information she needed to know about vampires and how to protect oneself from attacks.
“You won’t mind me hanging around will you?” she asked, realizing that this entire plan would require him to actually comply to some extent, “I don’t know anyone else here…” No need to add the fact that she was being paranoid… NO cautious. Cautious was the right word. It would be stupid at this point to go and walk around in such a potentially dangerous town without some inside information at least.
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Post by Silas Rosier on Aug 12, 2009 11:36:13 GMT 1
“You won’t mind me hanging around will you?”
The last of the eggs on their way to Silas’s mouth stopped in their tracks. Wait, what the hell did that mean? Hanging around where? She had better not mean-
“I don’t know anyone else here…”
Crap.
He bit off the last of the egg and put the fork back down on the plate, brow furrowed thoughtfully while he used the chewing time as an excuse to think. Well, it wasn’t like having a vampire around wouldn’t have its advantages, but if you wanted to go on the stupid pun trail of thought, ‘one bitten twice shy’ was an applicable one.
If his experiences had taught him anything, it was to never trust a vampire, ever, and Sephora with her little stunt the night before hadn’t exactly earned herself any points to warrant being marked as an exception to that rule. Suffice to say she wasn’t going be let out of his sight again. He jokingly wondered about his chances of slipping a tracking bracelet around her ankle without her noticing.
“What did you have in mind?” he asked, putting the plate down on the small coffee table. With a few flicks of his wand in several directions, the plates vanished and the knives and forks flew themselves into the sink, lathered themselves in detergent and began to self-rinse underneath the water from the tap.
The lizard, meanwhile, had been able to slip off the table without being spotted and hidden under the bed.
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