Once upon a mindnight dreary[Lady thorn]

[sbs]

It was a chilled evening, clouds drifted infront of the moon every so often as the rustle of the cars and busy night life drowned out the blissful serenity of the park. A young looking man wearing a black hoody and trip pants walked the stone path in his right hand was a Mow Kum, a wooden samurai sword used for practice. In his left ear hidden by his long auburn hair was a headphone that played system of a down. The man had just moved to New York simpky weeks ago working at a dinner as a dishwahser durring the swing shift. The hours he worked were slow and grueling and he rarely had to do any work at all, most times the dinner was empty and he'd simply sit out in the front chatting with the servers. So these nightly strolls were a great releif from the stress at work.

He hummed along to the beat of the song, making sure to not sing along to it so that any passer by wouldn't hear what he believed to be his horrid singing voice. He sta down upon a park bench to let his feet rest as he looked up into the sky. "This place is just like Tampa... Nothing to do... at all. I wish there were a dojo or something here..." He mumbled.

Truth be told Frosty was out here at this hour of the night in hopes to meet someone of the supernatural. He could recall in incredible detail that night he was attacked by a vampire, the pain and sting of the bite... and the amazment that went through him when the vampire bursted into a plume of fire and ash after only recieving a small dose of his blood.

After that night he had a dreded facination with Vampires and Shifters. Though the main shifter he was curious about was the Lycan... It seemed like a half witted obsecion to most. However to Frosty... He knew they were real, he had the marks to proove it.

[Lady Thorn]

Once upon a midnight dreary, while she wandered, weak and weary,
Passing many a quaint and curious shadow in night's cloakèd claws,
While she nodded, nearly napping, suddenly she heard a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping feet upon the floor.
`'Tis some wanderer,' she muttered, `tapping gently on the floor -
Only this, and nothing more.'

But she turned and looked around her, hoping fighting had not found her,
And that death would not yet drown her, through the last and final door,
Eagerly she wished a stranger, any fool who brought no danger,
Nothing that would now endanger her long life that wanted more,
After living so much longer than a man she wanted more
Immortality and more.

Damn that infernal alcohol, she thought, as her mind swam away from a Poe poem and back towards the tapping she could hear in reality. It was the tapping that had badgered her booze-addled brain towards the poetry in the first place, and it took a moment for her to cast her mind around and work out what to do about it. Looking around, she saw a man walking towards her... or was it away... her senses swam with the slippery sussurration that the cider left behind.
So slippery, in fact, that as the man came closer, she slipped her footing and was forced to grab on to maintain any semblance of balance at all. After a moment, she could stand herself again, and the world ceased its spinning.
She flicked her hair from her eyes, concentrating on feeling more sober than she felt.
"Sorry... I had a little drink about an hour ago, and it's gone right to my head... forgive my unladylike grabbing..." It was quite out of character for her... but she'd had more than one drink, and many of them hadn't been little. Had she been human, she suspected toxic shock might be lurking right about now.
Swaying resumed, and she lurched forward, white hands clutching black hoodie as the universe did loop-the-loops inside her head.
"Not... good..." she moaned.
Poor guy... the thought flittered through her addled mind. Not really a pleasant experience on a pleasant night- an unpleasant drunken woman.

[sbs]

"Wow... Are you sure it was one?" he asked in a joking manner as he grabbed her gentley to support her from falling. "Here, sit... and drink this." He said guiding her over to the Bench and handing her a water bottle. He looked at her oddly, her vibrant red hair was the most apparent feature on this woman. "Just one of those nights huh?"

Frosty tieing his hair back with a cloth rubber band he kept in his pocket. His icey blue eyes surveyed the woman checking to see if she was alright and wasn't harmed durring her drunken walk... or more correctly... stagger through the park. "Are you sure you're alright?" He couldn't help but ask looking at this woman, He knew she hadn't had just one drink. There was no way that one drink would leave such a strong smell of alcohol on ones breath but he shrugged it off, she was possibly having a bad day... He though better than to pry. Instead he simply introduced himself. "Well... Nice to meet you... The name's Frosty."

[Lady Thorn]

She sat on the bench, head in hands for a few moments, waiting for the spinning to stop. She forced herself to sober up, forced her mind to grab onto reality and cling there. It worked, better than she had hoped in fact, and she swigged from the water with eager gulps, trying to wash the toxins from her pickled system.
"Thanks..." she murmured, barely remembering why she had managed to fall into such a state in the first place. It had been just one drink, then someone had bought her another and... the pieces fell into place like dominoes, scattering across her mind until she remembered properly. "Yeah... one of those nights..." A rueful smile snaked across her lips, a little sardonic snigger. It was only one of those nights for a dead thing. Living, breathing people couldn't abuse their bodies so badly. Her gallant helper was a human, she knew. She could hear it in the beat of his heart, feel it in the warmth that he cast about him, smell it in his living flesh. Lucky she wasn't hungry. It would be terribly rude to drink from someone who'd helped her.
"Lady Thorn," she responded to his introduction, flipping her hair from her cloud-grey eyes and looking up at him with a proper, steady gaze. Her white hand, white as snow and bone and porcelain, dry as the latter two and cold as the first, held out to him in her polite, parasitically English manner. She certainly sounded English, except for that little twang at the back of her accent... the little tell that marked her not quite true.
"Thank-you most kindly for helping a lady in distress," she murmured, her lilting voice soft. "I'm much obliged. I think I had rather too much for my health." The bottle of water, now half empty, was held back to him in a barely shaking white hand. The sleeves of her black shirt were slightly damp from before the jitters had stopped. "And I don't suppose I can stand right now either..." a crystalline, sharp little laugh accompanied this pronouncement. She found herself too hilarious sometimes. "Would you do me a great favour and keep an old drunk company?" That last phrase sounded incongruous. She barely looked eighteen, despite her many years. Even her eyes didn't betray much beyond her looks.

[sbs]

"Sure, no problem." He responded sitting next to her on the bench and yawning, "God... this City is exactly like my old one... boring..." he mumbled but then looked at her, "So... how did you get into this particular perdicament if you don't mind me asking?" he said. He stood up quickly infront of her a few feet back and pulled out a cigerette from his coat pocket. "Don't mind me, I just got up so that the smoke wouldn't come near you." he explained as he lit up a cigerette. "Sorry if you don't like smokers... I just, had a really tough time at work today." He replied.

Frosty took a deep inhale from his cigerette, and then paused. "You sound English... What part of the U.K. are you from?" he asked curiously as he smoked his cigerette trying diligentley not to let any smoke near the red headed woman. Something was weird about her eyes, but Frosty was leiry about meeting beautiful women at this time of night especially after his one encounter... So Frosty strayed away from looking directly into the females eyes.

[Lady Thorn]

She shrugged, letting the smoke waft in with her breaths and out with her cold, dead words. Smoke couldn't harm her, barely irritated her. She liked the feel of it inside her, but she wasn't so keen on the taste, the smell.
"I'm..." how to sum up so many lifetimes worth of wandering? "I'm from London," she said at last, since she had spent so many years living there. Rome aside, it was where her heart felt at home. "Sort of... an immigrant... but a long time ago." Her smile was older than her face, and weary. She was homesick... timesick. That was what the booze had been for, she remembered now. The pangs of longing had been worse again, and she'd wanted to drown them out... it obviously hadn't worked. Or at least, not for so very long.
"As for my predicament, call it simply a long-lost wanderer trying her best to forget she's not at home." Again, her words were older than her features. A bad habit, and one she never could seem to slip. "I drink to forget, and I always forget first, that it takes a lot of drink for me to forget." She smiled, stretching, cat-like.
"But enough of my folly and foolish-ness. What brings you out on this streets at so inhospitable an hour?"
As she spoke, she attempted to tidy herself, finger-combing her hair back to neatness, straightening her black shirt, neatening her leather coat, twisting her necklace back to face front. Thankfully, she wore no makeup, her red lips and white skin naturally so. After a few moments, she was once more presentable, and felt all the better for it, able to curl her feet beneath her as she sat up on the bench.

[sbs]

Frosty just shrugged, "I guess you can say like you I am too homesick..." He replied simply and then averted his gaze towards the empty park. "I come here often to escape memories... Pains... and stress." He mumbled taking a drag from his cigerette then blowing the smoke aimlessly upward. He looked at her with a chuckle now relising the way she spoke. "Either you're somewhat loopey or really prefer an elder version of propper english. Or... something else. But you'd think me a fool if I dare say it." he responded with little laugh.

He sighed remembering his old friends back in Tampa, the way they made him laugh, the way they brought happiness to him with simply the most randomest things... and also his least favorite memory of finding them slaughtered in his home. Hence it was the reason he left Tampa, not becuase of a change of scenery but more for a saftey reason. He placed his hand over his face and shook his head trying to block out the gruesome images burned into the back of his head.

[Lady Thorn]

She laughed her sharp little laugh, a breeze wafting the threads of ginger hair from her feline grin. "I should think I'm a little of both, though I feel the older forms of the language are the purer. I'd be intrigued to hear your third thought... I promise not to call you fool." She'd been called loopy before, among other things. Perhaps it was true... after all, the ancients did tend to get a bit unbalanced as the years wore by, and the world changed around them, little by little. There was something deeply unsettling about looking up at the sky and seeing that, if only by the tiniest fraction of a touch, the stars had changed from the constellations you remembered as a child. It could certainly bring a touch of fever to a weaker mind.
"But where's your home, for you to feel its distance? My knowledge of American accents is deplorably lax, I must admit, so forgive me for not identifying you at once."
Sobriety was returning, and fast. It was one of the benefits of her age, she'd found. Alcohol rushed through her system, barely touching the sides, so even when she drank enough to truly intoxicate, the feeling didn't last for very long, and soon enough her mind would return in full force. It was a blessing for her safety, though a curse for her wallet.
Looking around her, up at the light-polluted sky, where the stars were stained with the orange glow of humanity, and on all sides, where the trees whispered the breeze, and a pall of shadow hid any impurities on what could never be true nature, she sighed, her cold breath leaving no mist in the cold air, and smiled.
"I can see why you come here," she murmured, eyes flitting back up to the stars. Sideres... She'd always loved the stars. They'd called her home when she'd been lost, before the age of cars and 'phones and GPS... before the age of proper road signs. They'd sang to her through the barred window in the years of her imprisonment. She had been loopy then, she knew. No sane or sensible person would ever dream to think to hear the subtle singing of the stars. carmen subtile stellarum. That had been it. She'd lost the words to the memory of millenia. "It's beautiful... a little haven of peace within a city." She was a city girl, in all honesty, but a girl of a type of city they rarely built these days. She needed sky.
"It's so good to see the heavens, once in a while, don't you think?"

[sbs]

Frosty simply shrugged, "No worries, people from Tampa really don't carry an accent... Unless they choose to, I don't but sometimes a little southern slang will pop out here and there." He said with a smile thinking about how he was so used to Tampa, the humidty, the pleasent summer nights. The not so cold temps durring the night... He laughed a little inside and out as he himself found himself looking up into the black heavens. "Man once asked... Are stars simple wholes within the nights sky... Look how far we've come since then..." He mumbled to himself, or what he thought to himself.

He sighed, "I don't know if you'll beleive me, But I've had an encounter with... uhm... Homonie Nocturna. Back when I lived in Tampa, yes, a vampire..." He said exposing his neck showing the scar of the two puncture marks. He shook his head, "It was weird, the moment my blood was being drawn the woman stopped and exploded into ash and flames... Ever since then I've been taking notes. And like... No offence but the way you talk leads me into a suspicion... I mean I'm not going to do anything I promise, I have no reason to really if you are." He said sitting back down on the bench next to her. "I'm not like a vampire slayer or anything either... just a normal human that was accedentally thrown into this supernatural world." He chuckled.

[Lady Thorn]

She smiled a predator's smile, but without conviction. She'd fed this week, and had long grown past the point where she needed blood so much she couldn't control herself.
"Homo sapiens nocturnus..." she murmured, the Latin flowing from her lips with an accent shaded in dust and memories. "Far too oxymoronic a term for my kind... vampire will do just nicely, thanks all the same." She flicked the hairs from her eyes with a pale gesture, fixing her eyes on him for a moment to think. Her brain was pretty much back to full speed now, and she was beginning to wonder. She didn't trust him, but that meant nothing. One didn't get to her age by trusting people. But she was intrigued.
"As to my mode of speech, this is incredibly modern compared to that which I would speak were I to return to the language of my home..." The language of her dreams. "Even the classical scholars would have trouble deciphering me." There was a hint of a grin about her with that. She liked to be an enigma.
"Do not fear me," she murmured, too, "I'm not out for your neck, before you worry." She realised she'd been staring at him for a while. "Hm... you're not scared. You interest me." Frank she was and tactful she wasn't. "Tell me more about what happened to this vampire."

[sbs]

Frosty just shrugged. "She seduced me, I was mexmerized just by looking into her eyes, That was untill her pearly sharps went into my neck. I could feel the blood being pulled from it... And then suddenly she stopped." He paused remembering it as if it were yesterday. "She starting grasping her throat and coughing, chocking, turning really red." He explained, "Then she started screaming about an intense pain and heat from inside, then her skin started to melt off, she started to cook then... BOOM!" Frosty explained doing a small explosion motion with his hands.

"She caught on fire, like spontaneously combusted. There was a big flame for a few moments before all that was left was nothing but a pile of ash and really rank smelling black smoke." he said rubbing his nose even though the smell had long since vanished whenever he thought or even talked about it, the smell came back to him mentally. "After that I returned home to find my friends all slaughtered in a way that humans nor lycans could do..." He paused, shaking his head. "I'd rather not think of that part... But the odd thing is... before that Vampire died she called me a... Methusela... I tried doing research on it and came up with squat... what does that mean... Methusela...?" He asked.

[Lady Thorn]

Another short laugh. She didn't intend to try taking a bite from this one, but Lady Thorn harboured doubts that she could be killed in that way. Fire wouldn't harm her... it was part of who she was. She found it very difficult to fear the wrath of something with which she had lived and fought for a thousand years, nearly. But on from that. It was an abstract question she didn't intend to answer, since her sources of food tended either to be wrapped in plastic and humanely removed from their owners, or those from whom she had no qualms to take a little blood.
"Methuselah..." she rolled the word around her mouth, the old, old accent twisting it around. "I only know of the Methuselah of the Christian" the word was spoken with not a little distaste, "Holy Book. What that has to do with vampires, I have little clue. My Christian knowledge is sparse and varied, but I can think of only a few of my kind within the pages, and all appeared in the new testament, or far beyond Methuselah's time, at any rate." Perhaps she should have spent more time looking into Christianity... but it was so alien to her own beliefs, to the gods and heroes of her childhood stories, that she could not bear to pay it much regard at all. In some ways, she was far too much a Roman for her own liking.
"But why trust the words of a dying woman? And why trust the words of a dying woman who tried to feed from you?" She shrugged. "She may have been rambling, after all."
Her mind was ticking over. She knew people she could ask about this... old people, old vampires, who would perhaps have answers to such a strange conundrum. Not that she intended to share those answers, she barely knew the young human before her, but that was by the by. She needed to gather as much information as she could before disappearing into the night. She knew how science worked, after all.
"But tell me more... is there anything else strange about you?" Earlier infirmity forgotten, she stood and walked around him, her metal boot-heels clicking on the surface of the road, loud in the silence, backed up by the distant roar of cars. Grey eyes flickered across him, searching for anything unusual... in his stance, his posture, in his physical form... anything that might be of use.