Dangerous Instrumentalities: Scenes From A Night-talian Restaurant.

[alexandraerin]

Finding myself unexpectedly working on Dangerous Instrumentalities, the modern-day wizard story I teased a chapter and a half from in the second newsletter. I think I'm going to drop another preview in the next newsletter, but I find myself unable to wait on sharing part of it.

For those who don't get the newsletter, this story grew out of the basic idea in "Rhymes With Itch", though I don't know that I'd call it a sequel or an expansion. It started off as such, but I'm not sure how well the original vignette as written would connect with the way the larger the story is developing.

A few years back, some magazine did a cover story: "Night Life: The Supernatural Set's Favorite Haunts", detailing twenty-five semi-notorious hangouts for things that go bump. It wasn't exactly a watershed event in the annals of post-apocalyptic life. Most of the places on the list were already pretty touristy. That's how they made the list.

It did have one lasting effect, though. The cheap wordplay in the subtitle entered the public consciousness, and soon anywhere that werewolves and demons and such were said to chill became called a "haunt", to the point that we started using it among ourselves.

The Insomnia Cafe is my haunt. It caters to "night life" in a very real way, being open from sunset to sunrise. There are all kinds of reasons for supernatural people to prefer going out at the darker parts of the day, but this only furthers the idea that haunts are full of vampires.

And why not? They're the archetypal "creatures of the night", right?

Except a vampire isn't the sort of person who goes out for a cup of coffee, because a vampire isn't a person. A vampire isn't even what's left of a person who's died. They only resemble people in the way that an outline of a thing resembles that thing. Vampires are the hole that's left in the world when everything that makes up a person is completely obliterated. What a vampire consumes is not transformed or stored, it's just gone. Completely. Forever. They aren't supernatural, they're unnatural... walking and talking violations of the laws of thermodynamics.

A vampire's skin is cold to the touch not because the body is dead. That would make it room temperature. It's cold because it obliterates heat. They continually lower the temperature of wherever they are. When you look at a vampire, if you could see past its mind-warping powers, what you would see is nothing, a pit of pure void from which no light escapes. This is why vampires avoid mirrors: only the most intelligent and most powerful have the foresight and ability to fix their reflections, too.

The good news is that vampires are rare. They don't have many allies. Other supernatural beings have a tendency to be freaked right the fuck out by them and destroy them on sight, or try to.

You wouldn't know any of this walking into the Insomnia Cafe. A lot of what people think they know about vampires--"vampire culture"--comes from the way people act and dress in haunts. Some of them are just wannabes who assume that among the sea of similarly-dressed folk there are honest-to-moral-ambiguousness vampires. Some of them are other sorts of supernatural folk who dress that way because they know that's what the masses of humanity expect supernatural folk to look like.

I mean, I'm sure that some of them dress like that because that's the way they want to dress, but it's not like they arrived at that preference in a vacuum, right?

For background, the "apocalypse" referenced in the first paragraph isn't an end-of-the-world scenario; Riley uses the word in the classic sense of "revelation", which is what most people in the world call the point at which mundane society learned of the supernatural.