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((Err, continuing from p550 of the main thread, where LP gets Iden to tell her 'bout her resident vampire. Umm, so then...))



"It was cool for all of a couple of months, 'til he turned solid. Since then, things have sort of gone..downhill, I guess you'd say. Though that's part of the long version. As for meeting him, well...I think that's one of those 'be careful what you wish for' things." She chewed thoughtfully at her lip. "Err, it's not terribly long, actually. Just..weird, and something less than pleasant."

"Do you? I've only yet found one book that talks in a lot of detail about his life. And I've got the novel, of course." She grinned a little. So she liked vampire books..it was a little higher up than having a stash of trashy romance novels, right? "No worries. Just gimme a sec to figure out how to put it, so I don't scramble it and make things confusing, and I'll be good to go.."

She had to stifle a surprised chuckle when LP confessed to being a klepto. It was a sort of blunt honesty she hadn't quite expected. "If that's possible, that..that would be really, really fantastic, if you don't mind." Iden took a breath and let it out. "Right, well, I guess I'm ready, then."

"I'll only bring him if you're sure you an' Nax want him around. Well, at any rate, I guess you can decide once you know more about him."

Then, with a half-smile and a nod, she started, "Right. Back around this past Halloween, the day after I guess, some woman I'd never met before, and haven't since, showed up at my door. I know now that she's the head of something called the 'Archeos' project, though I'm still not entirely clear on what exactly it is, aside from slightly less than legal. All I know is that it involves the finding and research of historical artifacts with ghosts that somehow became attached to those artifacts in death. But then, I didn't know that; she didn't tell me much of anything, really. What she did do was give me an old, beat-up and bloodstained spearhead from a certain castle in Romania, and told me to research it, who it could have belonged to and all that. So I did."

"Anyway, a couple of weeks later, I had the craziest, most real dream, and I hope I never have another like it. It started off outside of a castle, and there were stakes all around, everywhere, all with people impaled on them. It was awful. I went inside, into the chapel, where the altar had been pushed back to reveal the hollow underneath. I went right up and looked down into it, and he was there--the most beautiful, most frightening thing I'd ever seen. He was lying in a coffin, the fitting for a spear sticking out from his chest, and ashes there from when the shaft had burned away. As I stood there, looking at him, he opened his eyes and smiled, and told me to take it, to free him." Iden shuddered, recalling the tone of his voice exactly, that lover's whisper. He still did that to her sometimes, could nearly drive her mad and make her forget everything with it.

"That's when I woke up, and he was standing in my room. He was see-through, your stereotypical sort of ghost, but he was there." She stopped to take a breath and think out what to say next, looking to LP before she continued.

"Well, for the most part, after the initial sort of shock of having him there, not much really eventful happened for awhile. We got to aggravating each other in a real hurry, though. That's why I started calling him Drac, actually--just to annoy him. But it sort of stuck, and anymore it's pretty much how think of him." She grinned a little, lifting her shoulders in a shrug. "Not that arguing or getting on each other's nerves is all we ever did. He can be nice, when he feels like it. Even when we did get into it, it wasn't like much of anything could happen, since he was a ghost. The most we could really do was yell at each other."

"But then, err...around the end of January, I guess it was, I came home to find that he wasn't a ghost anymore. That was..something of an unpleasant surprise, to say the least. Anyway, that's..umm, that's how I ended up with Dracula hanging around my house. That's about all there is to it." Without muddling through the more personal stuff to it, at least. Iden gave another shrug, not sure what else to say.

"I don't know. I'd say maybe it has something to do with his being a vampire, but that can't be it. Like I said, the Archeos thing seems to be about finding those artifacts with ghosts attached; I've met two others who've turned solid, Puck and Flidais." She furrowed her brow, thinking. "Neither of whom are human. Maybe it's something to do with that? Or perhaps they're all still ghosts, just a special sort? Well, I don't know. I guess it doesn't much matter, in the end."

"Aah, it's alright." Iden nodded, and gave Willow a few soft pets.

"But who's to say ghosts aren't real, in one way or another? What makes a ghost a ghost, anyway? Are there requirements for it, or something? I mean, a poltergeist is as much a ghost as one you only see, or even one you only smell, or hear. They're just different kinds, is all. Maybe the Archeos ghosts are just another kind of ghost." She shrugged, frowning. "You..died twice?"

"But has anyone ever proved they can't?" She chuckled, rubbing at her forehead. Ohh, they might just start talking in circles, like this.

"Aah, I see. It was just an odd thing to hear you say, is all. You don't have to talk about it if you don't want to."