(Untitled)

[stilljustandrew]

*Andrew's sitting in a booth, a half-finished plate of meatball-and-mozzarella Hot Pockets at his elbow.*

*He's ignoring them for the moment in favor of chewing on the end of his pen, and studying the half-finished list he's working on.*

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[scaredbybook]

There is a girl here.

There is a girl here in a patchwork poncho with books in front of her.

There is a girl here with a stack of hardback volumes sitting in front of her, and a notebook. She's balancing a very thick copy of Tobin's Spirit Guide on her head.

. . . Kira is an art student. She has not needed to get together the concentration required for an effort like this in some time. And she's now yelping and diving to catch it. It is a borrowed book, and she remembers Jill's last lecture on so much as dog-earing a page.

[stilljustandrew]

Whoa whoa whoa hey!

*Andrew is too late to catch the book, sadly.*

[scaredbybook]

Kira bends her leg, lifts her knee to the side, and manages to slow the book's progress to the floor by momentarily netting it with the poncho. She snatches it, and victory from the jaws of defeat along with it! There is a guilty look.

"Whew! Thanks. It's borrowed."

If it were her copy, well. . . she could get lost in the index alone, but not at all in the happy sense. It would have gone out a window a long time ago.

[stilljustandrew]

'Sokay. Sorry I couldn't is that Tobin's Spirit Guide?

*It's amazing how he can go from apology to startled question in midbreath.*

[scaredbybook]

"Yes, it is. Also four issues of Who's What and What's That," Kira brandishes them, "and I don't get this--" collected issues of THE SELBERT THEORY are hefted, "at all." She plunks it (gently) atop the rest of the stack. "I'm starting to like my 'cross tattoos' idea."

[stilljustandrew]

*Picking up a conversation in the middle is another useful geek trait, provided it's a conversation about something you know.*

What, for protection against vampires? Depends on your local worldrules -- in mine they usually only work if they're three-dimensional objects. A picture of a cross won't work much better than a picture of a stake.

[scaredbybook]

*Kira looks as crushed as if she'd tried to stack all the reading material on her head at once.*

My world doesn't seem to have rules. She turned into a vampire way after sundown and without any wierd stuff happening before--well, we found an old book, and Doug went missing, and there was a dead cat on a fence.

But besides that, most of the signs and symptoms I found? *She taps the book cover lightly with a knuckle.* Absent. I'm kind of thinking someone cursed her.

[stilljustandrew]

Could be. You gotta be careful about mixing fiction with the real thing, and even stuff meant to be the real thing is riddled with mistakes sometimes.

'S that book from your world or someone else's?

[scaredbybook]

Someone else's. I borrowed it from Ray. My world? *She motions towards a door painted with a thin, white cross.* It's kinda. . . I froze the world by coming here. *Rush of guilt!* So I can't just go to a library there. And even so--I mean, I thought vampires were mythology. And then, bam. Lilly.

[stilljustandrew]

*He starts at that name.*

...Lilly who?

[scaredbybook]

Lilly Moore? Asian-American? She's really smart, but about as big on studying as I am.

. . . was? Am I supposed to say was now? I want to. . . un-vampire her.

[stilljustandrew]

*Andrew's face goes very solemn.*

I don't know if that's possible.

[scaredbybook]

*Kira glares.* Look, if she can be vampire'd within two hours, tops, after all the stupid door-slamming things going on, and nobody even agrees on what might have happened, *she taps the books,* I can at least. . . I don't know, trap her in a corner with a cross on a stick while I figure out the source of the problem.

[stilljustandrew]

*A pause, and he smiles.*

I like the way you think.

Tell you what, if you can tell me in detail what happened, I can at least help narrow down your possibilities.

[scaredbybook]

*Kira applies her brain to the task!* I made a timeline like a book suggested, but I folded it over and stuck it in one of these and I don't know where it went. *There is digging.* Okay. We all got together to make a haunted house on Halloween. We were given some stuff by this crazy old guy I used to like

[stilljustandrew]

*He's listening. Very intently.*

Go on.