skritch-skritch-skritch

The gangly one scuttles past, suspended effortlessly from the ceiling in a procession of claw-after-claw. Oddly enough, this decidedly inhuman crawl feels so natural so normal. It is perhaps the most "normal" thing for the gangly one to be doing. Yet, despite himself, the vampire can't help but wince at the sight. Sufficiently caught up, the gangly one stops by a half-wall, hanging from his sickle feet, and reaches out... to politely open the door to the next hall over. The vampire has his hands full, after all!

"That's sweet of you," the vampire says, "but don't think that's getting you off the hook that easily."

"Whaat?" The gangly one whines. "I didn't even do anything this time! I was super quiet!"

"What about that tomping, huh?" The vampire asks, walking through the threshhold without looking back. He even manages to ignore the uncomfortable sound of skittering behind him as the gangly one catches up.

"Oh, was that what you were yelling about?" The gangly one asks, hovering close-too-close to the vampire's shoulder. He can see fangs in the periphery. "That was the ghosts! They're just jealous."

"Jealous?"

"Yeah, we get to play cool videogames even though they're too dead for it."

The vampire already knew that, of course, but he isn't in the most reasonable of moods. He shifts the weight of consoles to a single arm, freeing a hand, which he uses to jabbing a thumb over his shoulder. There's a scuttle as the gangly one recoils. "Yeah, well, who's fault is it that all of these ghosts are here in the first place, huh?"

"At least a few of them are your fault!"

"Oh," the vampire scoffs, "you mean like that hiker you chopped up a few years back?"

The gangly one makes a noncommital noise. The sound comes from immediately behind the vampire's left foot.

"You dropped him in an outhouse. That's, like, guaranteed vengeful ghosts. He still follows me around any time I walk past the mansion restroom!"

"Why do we even have a bathr-"

"Because we're practically squatting here, and you killed our best shot at remodeling."

"Okay, okay so the hiker was kind of tasteless, but..."

"The delivery people complained about half-eaten deer. You knew they'd be coming by today. They probably think we're mental!"

He pauses. "Well, most of them, anyway."

The gangly one groans. "What's got you so crabby? We got the consoles!"

The vampire grunts.

"Fine, fine. I'm just so excited," the gangly one admits, "it gave me the munchies."

The vampire stops suddenly, ignoring the bony thuds against his back and shoulder. "Actually... I'm having a pretty hard time, too."

"You get the munchies!?"

"I had to use a lot of compulsion thanks to the circumstances, and that exhausts energy, so yes."

"Huh."

"Doesn't help the sales rep was my type," the vampire says, "I was getting thirsty enough to be a bit... spontaneous. It was probably a good thing the ghosts stepped in."

"Spontaneous?" The gangly one says, "woah, I didn't know you had a type!"

"Well, of course I do."

"I always assumed vampires were just, you know, sort of amorous for anyone."

"By type, I mean that she was a B-negative, dumbass."

"Oh."

"I swear, all of those silly romance movies have rotted everyone's brains."

"Aww. Next you'll tell me you don't actually sparkle in the daylight."

"See? This is why I wrote out our bloody cable service. It gives you all these ideas."

"I thought you said it was too much money."

"That too. Anyway, you were so cute and innocent not that long ago... Truly, human language has been nothing but a bad influence for you, let alone the culture."

"What," the gangly one says playfully, voice echoing across the entire hall. Before the vampire can place where the sound is coming from (at least without just looking, of course,) the gangly one skitters past at a breakneck pace, from furniture to wall to ceiling. "So you really prefered this?"

The incorrigible creature hangs from the ceiling from his feet alone, stretching to full height. He sinks one set of hand-claws into the floor, and another into the far wall, strewn across the space like a spider's web. Between his height and arm length he's much too tall to stretch across the standard-size hall, and his bony, articulated legs naturally bow out, bending and rotating uncomfortably.

His neck cracks, and the gangly one rotates his head half way out of the column, parallel to the floor. There's a blur as the his jaw clicks shut, vibrating wildly to emanate an indescribable 'chittering' noise, something like a cicada's call.

The vampire takes in the sight... and smiles nostalgically.

"I hope the roof caves on you, you overdramatic schmuck," he says, "that being said, unironically yes. I do."

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"No way," the gangly one says, tone something between confusion and an odd satisfaction. "Really?"

"So, so innocent."

The vampire strides forward, ducking into the gap between the gangly one's stretched form and the rest of the floor. The gangly one wiggles a bit as he passes by, but finds that the wood won't budge easily. The vampire ignores his muffled protests as he walks away.

The dining hall is an absolute mess, but it has potential, so the vampire drops the consoles near the door. The weight sticks the landing and the stack sinks about a half inch into the old wood floor.

"No, you're a mess," the vampire says, "now help me clean this place up."

"Hey," the gangly one huffs. The sound originates uncomfortably close to the vampire's right ear. "I didn't even say anything. Yet."

The space has few windows, mostly intact walls, it's in better condition than most of the manor due to periodic use as a real living space over a great many years. Now, though, it's chock full of what can only be described as a "metric shitload" of human matter.

Bones strewn here and there, corpse wax, chunks of rotty meat from more recent victims, including the ill-fortuned auditor, in fact. Given that neither the gangly one nor the vampire really eat, the dining room turned into a defacto dumping ground over time.

"I'll dust and scrape it out," the vampire says, "you haul the solid stuff out."

"Where to?" The gangly one asks.

The vampire taps his chin. "Hmm, how about that one bedroom?"

"The one with the pink bed or the old rug?"

"Old rug, it's got sturdier floors."

The gangly one gets to work, snagging up bits here and there, and the vampire makes good on his part of the deal as well. With inhuman speed, he swipes up a broom and gets to dusting, wielding it more like a high-speed pressure cleaner than the straw-and-wood cleaning implement it actually is. By the time the gangly one returns, the pressure from the movement of the broom alone is sufficient that most bones and of the have started to roll against the one wall. He whistles appreciatively and gets back to hauling, this time moving at speed. skritch-skritch-skritch echoes down the hall as the claws propel him away.

Once the room is properly dusted, the vampire sets to scraping off the rotty bits of wood, mold, and detritus from where things decayed unevenly. Most of the furniture is salvageable, since it was properly sealed and this area didn't end up getting too humid on account of the walls being in better condition. He starts to rearrange them, filtering out the things worth keeping and putting the broken or faltering furniture near the pile of bones.

skritch-skritch-SKRITCH

"Hey," the gangly one asks, back from another haul, "I was thinking,"

"Dangerous thing, that."

"Oh eat a d-no, fuck you, but anyway... Where are all the bugs?"

"The bugs?"

"We kinda left a ton of free food for them here over the years, but... Now that I think of it, we don't really get many bugs in here, do we?"

"Any, as fact would have it. It's a benefit of sharing a house with a vampire."

"Woah, really?"

"A minute fraction of how our compulsion works is through the nature of propriety. You know how, when there's a storm coming, your hackles raise and your spine tingles?"

"I don't think I have those feelings."

"Mmh, well, intruding on the abode of a vampire, or even attempting to do so, gives you a horrendous sense of forboding. You have to muster quite a bit of courage to manage it."

"Oh! The bugs get that too?"

"That they do, and urban explorers, which is about the only reason we haven't been caught out. I have to be quite careful 'invite' people like the roofers, as it were. Otherwise, they get caught in the garden, or never come at all."

The gangly one nods and grins mischeviously, which looks more like he's growling on account of the massive, disproportionate teeth, but whatever works. Curiosity sated, he takes off another round of corpse waste.

The vampire chucks aside the broom onto the waste pile, which is now a stick and a few straw bristles and some loose string. The room still looks abyssmal on account of scuffed or peeled paint and wallpaper, but abyssmal is still an admirable improvement over the horror show it had been. Excellent work! Next...

The electric outlets themselves are old-fashioned plastic covers with a few discreet plugs. While the vampire managed to get an electrician to once-over things before they "moved in," but that was still quite awhile ago, and the mansion's age was advanced enough various parts of the place are faulting out in real time. The presence of ghosts exacerbates the trouble, the right and proper termites of the modern world.

He tests the light switch... with no luck. It's impossible to say if that's on account of the bulbs themselves dying, or the entire circuit going out.

Next, he tries plugging in one of the console boxes. They have their power lines tucked flush into the shell and ripcord out when pulled, which is very aesthetically pleasing. He plugs one into the wall... and nothing happens. He tries the next plug... and nothing happens.

The vampire sighs, this is going to be a long night, isn't it? Then he realizes that the expensive, high-tech piece of hardware they just bought has absolutely no superficial on-or-off indicator at all. They just assume that if you have it plugged in, it's working.

Swearing under his breath, the vampire speeds away down the hall, looking for one of the closets that have fresh bulbs. He passes the gangly one on another return trip on the way, and dodges around him effortlessly.

Popping open the door, the vampire sees that the closest closet does in fact have a box of them on the shelf, as luck would have it. He shoves the bleach and trashbags out of the way and grabs the box, which itself looks to be at least a decade old. He hears a rattling of the bulbs clinking together inside, tucks it to his chest, and hustles back to the dining hall.

While fixing the wiring itself is too much to ask, surely replacing a bulb is easy enough, right?

The gangly one is more or less done sorting through his last export, the haul this time around mostly consisting of old furniture and random junk. He blinks at the vampire, looking at the box in his hands.

"Lightbulbs?"

"I want to be sure these things have consistent power before we start playing here," the vampire says, "it'd be a pain in the ass to move them after we get this place all kitted out."

"Shouldn't they tell you if they're working or not? A light, or something?"

The vampire shakes his head, forlorn. Modern design sensibilities indeed.

He makes quick work of the installation, and promptly burns the shit out of his hand, since he forgot to turn off the lightswitch and this place is too old for proper circuit breaking. Not that it hurts, he is a vampire, but damn- at least the lights work.

Satisfied with effect of the lit room, as if they lived in a proper home, the vampire goes on a victory lap, replacing the rest of the bulbs. Yes, now that things are pretty much cleaned out, it looks nice. He could have had much of the place spruced up...

skritch-skritch-skritch

"Wow!" The gangly one says, "this place sure is shaping up!"

"It'll do for now," the vampire says, "and we're nearly ready to play. We're going to want to..."

The gangly one is already moving. He heaves the top console box off of the stack, setting it aside a small distance from the other, where it makes a quarter of an inch depression in the floor.

"Hold on," the vampire says as the gangly one shunts on his headset. The fact that he manages to get it on without his claws gouging ribbons of plastic and wire out of it is a small miracle, but not the main concern at the moment.

"How's this thing supposed to work?" The gangly one asks.

"You're going to want to" the vampire explains, but the other creature taps a nail on the headset's surface aimlessly.

Plink!

He collapses to the floor instantly, his body twitching ever so slightly as the now-active headset intercepts his central signaling pathways.

"to wait until we grab some mattresses," the vampire finishes, "you silly fellow."

Sighing, the vampire grabs his headset, or rather, the only headset remaining, which is defacto "his." While the idea to go fetch the bedding and necessary peripheries is frankly tempting, he is rendered much too concerned by the gangly one entering this new "game" unattended. So, he takes a seat in one of the better-maintained chairs- that way, while there was still the distinct risk he might topple off, at least he could retain some dignity. Unlike the creature slumped in the corner.

Setting the headset calmly over his head, he feels for the button. Finding it, he exhales deeply, and pushes it in...

Plink!

...and so begins the first dive.