Backdated somewhat: day in the life

[feels_no_love]

Who: Dracula and OPEN
Where: All common areas and the pub at at least one point
When: Monday  to Tuesday night (see below for separate threads)
Warnings: flirtation, booze, excessive partying, consensual nippiness, funny/creepy stories and weird heart to hearts

Vlad was deeply restless. His thoughts kept turning back to Aleera, suffering under her

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Monday Before Dinner: Library

[feels_no_love]

He then visited the library, haven spoken with Edward about possibly getting a position there. Now that he had lost the black mood that had affected him for his first week of captivity, Dracula was curious about what that would be like.

Monday Before Dinner: Library

[helpmejeeves]

Bertie Wooster lounged on a chair, a large Dostoyevsky novel in one hand and a lit cigarette in the other. He looked up when Dracula walked near.

"What ho, Count Dracula! Or do you prefer Vladislaus?"

[feels_no_love]

"Hello, stranger! Or, how should I call you!" Dracula laughed in amusement at the jaunty greeting.

"I may be working here soon, and if you are a regular here or work here as well, it must needs be Vladislaus." He offered a little bow. "It is always nice to be known and yet not be cringed from."

[helpmejeeves]

"Bertram Wilberforce Wooster, but please, call me Bertie." He set the book down and rose to offer his hand.

"Well, the way I see it, I know you, but not, if you see what I mean. That is, I know your name and the bits that Stoker chap wrote in his book, but between the unreliable narrator and the artifice of the epistolary form, the distortion of memory that renders any personal account suspect, not to mention the distinction between reality and fiction, I can't say I really know you at all, what?"

Bertie had spent the morning hip deep in literary theory texts and it showed.

[feels_no_love]

Vlad looked at him, then shrugged and clasped his hand, shaking it if not warmly, at least rather gently and politely. "I have never appreciated epistolary novels anyway, and the facts are unfortunately very altered in Stoker's version. In reality I have thought to write my own memoir.

"In reality, I am a vampire, yes, and first of my kind, and I was once he who protected Europe from the Turks. But I've never attempted a takeover of anyone else's country, nor fed babies to my Brides."

[helpmejeeves]

Bertie shook his hand like a gentleman and remained standing. Technically, he was in the presence of a member of the landed gentry. A foreign aristocrat, perhaps, but an aristocrat all the same, and lessons in etiquette drilled into him by ferocious aunts never entirely left him.

"They aren't exactly the bee's knees, are they? If I wanted to read some letters, I'd rather they be from birds and beazels I rub elbows with who mailed some to me. I know the form has a long heritage going back to Roman literature, but I simply can't abide the feeling that I'm reading some other fellow's epistles. It's almost like he might come rushing in any second to tick me off for snooping in his letters."

He took out his cigarette case and offered one to Vlad.

"First of your kind? Do you consider yourself a different species from Homo sapiens sapiens, or a different race?"

[feels_no_love]

"Actually this, right here, is the best of the epistolary form I have ever seen, but it is the exception, not the rule." He points out a copy of Griffin and Sabine.

He blinked at the cigarette, then shrugged and took it, then sat down in a nearby chair. "Our race has many names, but we are unique in our interdependence with humans. Because of this, the ongoing aggression between our two races didn't make much sense."