taxonomites | 012 [ accidental video | location: hyperion hotel ] a kick in the teeth is good for some

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012 [ accidental video | location: hyperion hotel ] a kick in the teeth is good for some

Spike is sitting on the floor in the Hyperion lobby hunched over and concentrating hard. He's holding a deck of cards, and several other piles are in front of him on a foot stool in the solitaire set-up. He moves an ace up and stares at the cards for a little while before flipping three down. Then he moves the cards around again. This continues for a while until finally, he shifts into his vampire face. His forehead wrinkles up and his eyes turn yellow, teeth lengthening.

He growls and knocks over the table, sending cards flying. He smiles for a minute. It's vaguely satisfying, but it doesn't really help anything.

Spike sighs and lets his features go back to being human, then turns to the tablet. He notices it's already recording, but at this point it's really too late to do anything about it. He picks it up and speaks into it.

"Anyone want to fight? I'm this close to seeing if I can hatch a demon to kill, I am so bloody bored."

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...well, that was interesting. Stefan will never complain again about his eyes going bloodshot when the blood rush hits him. At least his face doesn't do that. He'd already caught wind of there being a significant vampire population in Taxon, but a vampire presence doesn't mean he's about to shed his seventeen-year-old kid from Virginia act. It was default, instinctive to hide and blend in to the best of one's abilities. Outing yourself meant outing others; it was taboo. Stefan liked rules and abided by them. (Most of the time, anyway.) So, although his interest with this accidental video feed lies in how curious he is as to just how different this vampire is from the kind he and Damon are, he feigns the simple wonder of a normal kid getting yet another dose of something that's supposed to be strictly fictional.

"Whoa."

Oh, fantastic. Now he gets to deal with someone who's new to Taxon and from the looks of it, new to vampires in general. At least he's not screaming in terror. Spike's not great at comforting strangers. He scowls at the tablet.

"Yes, I'm a vampire. A real one. But I don't eat humans seeing as how I've got a soul and it's really not worth the mind-numbing guilt. Name's Spike. Did I miss anything? And who're you?"

In the back of Stefan's mind, he's laughing at the irony while outwardly doing well at keeping a straight face. ...or was. He breaks into a chuckle, then waves a hand at the screen to quickly cover that up. "Sorry, sorry. I just... This is all still a bit too trippy for me. It's like being trapped in Universal Studios with actors who are stuck in character."

The soul thing, now that was a little odd. Other vampires didn't have them? He could turn his emotions off if he wanted to, but just because he was capable of acting soulless didn't mean he was in the literal sense. 'Soulless creatures' was another one of those vampire myths that didn't line up with reality where he was from, like crosses and no reflections.

"I think that's it. Maybe? I wouldn't really know. I'm Stefan."

"Well, this isn't Hollywood, and I'm no actor." Spike crosses his arms and leans against the front desk, slowly relaxing. It's hardly Stefan's fault he doesn't know about vampires, and talking to someone is a hell of a lot more interesting than solitaire, so growling at the kid is probably counterproductive.

"Anyway, I generally keep my fangs in cause they're not all that attractive. They only come out when I'm..." he gestures at the wreckage. "Killing playing cards, apparently."

"Yeah, don't blame you with that whole..." He gestures around his own face with one hand. "...thing. What's up with that, anyway? I thought vampires were just supposed to have retractable fangs, not retractable...whatever that was. No offense, of course."

Stefan understood perfectly, though. His own version of a 'vampire face' would come out to play whenever he got angry or generally emotionally intense, when he was feeding or when there was the scent of blood on the air. It was instinctive and sometimes took a moment to shut back off when something turned it on.

"None taken, seeing as you obviously know nothing real about vampires. We're not like what you see on TV, you know." Though the other vampires here are different. "Look, I've got no idea why I'm the way I am. It's just how it is."

It takes every single ounce of will power Stefan possesses to stop himself from caving to yet another fit of laughter. Somehow, he manages to keep a straight face and that curious, amazed look in place.

"Are all vampires like that?"

"In my world? Yeah. Though the really old ones can't look human." The Master, for instance. Ugly, ugly vampire. Spike shrugs. "I'll probably die before I reach that age."

"Can't? Like...it's literally impossible to? That sucks."

That...was a little unsettling. The oldest vampires he knew were Katherine, Pearl and Anna, and neither of them were stuck in a permanent state of veins and bloodshot eyes. ...or had been, in the case of the had-been-staked Pearl and Anna. Lexi, too. There was a slight pang of remorse at the thought, followed soon by the ever so familiar flash of hatred for his brother.

But, let's get back on topic, here. "So they get stuck in that face thing or as bats?"

"What? We don't turn into bats." Except Dracula, but Spike doesn't feel like getting into that. Especially since Stefan seems to grab onto everything he says and ask more questions. "And very few vampires last long enough to end up like that. I've only met one." And a host of Turok Khan, but that was an entirely different breed of vampire, and it didn't count.

"Mainstream media says otherwise," Stefan points out. "You're the first I've met who could counter it. Not that I ever expected to, 'cause c'mon, vampires? Not supposed to be real."

Spike raises an eyebrow. "Mainstream media barely gets the non-supernatural things right. Why would you trust them on vampires? Look, there might not even be vampires in your world. I mean, you might be one of the blind idiots who thinks all the bloodless dead people with neck wounds had an interesting accident with a very sharp fork, but you could also live somewhere where they really aren't real. I don't know."

"Depends on the channel you're watching. CNN's likely to have more reliable information than Fox News, for example. I'm just a kid, but even I know not to rely on a network that provides Glenn Beck face-time."

Perhaps it would've been better for him to reference a show that hadn't appeared on Fox News starting in 2009, but Stefan's unaware of the time difference present here in addition to the vampire one.

"I think the obvious ruling is that my world doesn't have them. Or if they do, someone's doing some good clean up." ...like late nights spent burying the bodies of his brother's victims. Fun times.

"Glenn Beck? Thought he did radio." Not that Spike watched the news back home very often as it was. They tended to ignore the things that had anything to do with the supernatural, so he mostly just watched when he was bored and nothing else was on.

Spike shrugs. "You'd know better than I would."

"He used to, like five years ago," Stefan corrects (or thinks he is, for he's genuinely unaware of the time difference here). "Something like that. He's been on Fox News since last year."

Spike frowns and looks him over for a moment before speaking. "What year is it?"

"2010, of course," he answers. "Why?"

"Cause it's 2005 where I'm from," Spike says.

Stefan stares at the tablet for a moment, then scoffs and shakes his head. "Now it really is like Universal Studios. Back to the Future and all."

"You're telling me. Coming across people from your world and having them remember you as someone you're not anymore..." He trails off. Stefan doesn't need to hear about that. "It's bloody inconvenient."

Stefan has to fight back the urge to frown. He understands that more than he's capable of saying. He was form a point in time after his brother - even father from the one his girlfriend had been pulled from. There were things he understood and knew... Views of them and ones he expected them to hold of him that weren't there, because for them, they hadn't witnessed certain things and hadn't had their opinions hadn't been curbed in certain directions. It was frustrating, disappointing and oddly, something of a relief all at the same time.

"I can imagine. Must suck."

Spike shrugs. "Sometimes." And then there were people like Fred, Cordelia, Tara, Wesley, and Anya who wouldn't be around at all without the time displacement thing. "There are upsides, though."

"Upsides?" He asks. "What kind of upsides? Seems like a big mess to me and those hardly ever have any ups unless it involves someone else taking the blame."

Like Damon doing that when they were kids. Upside to a point, with Stefan scowling at him for claiming it was better to take the blame, because their father would never believe he didn't do it, anyway.

"Sometimes people you'd lost back home show up. I'd get out of here in a heartbeat if I could, but... can't deny it's nice to see them again."

Nice enough that he knows Angel and Cordelia don't want to leave. And if Buffy were dead instead of just on the other side of the world, Spike might feel the same.

Stefan indulges, for a moment, in the possibility of seeing Lexi again. But, the younger Salvatore knows better than to get his hopes up and immediately banishes the thought.

"Being abducted by aliens aside, yeah. Guess that would be."

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012 [ accidental video | location: hyperion hotel ] a kick in the teeth is good for some

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