Light of May ::: an original roleplay

Who: Carter and Athena.
Where: Across the street from the school, to start with.
When: Early evening.

Considering he’d gone toe to toe with a vampire -- presumably one of significant age and with a decent amount of strength and experience -- Carter didn’t look too terrible. A little haggard, certainly, but not nearly as bad as one might expect for an individual who had engaged in physical combat with a powerful immortal who’d had every intention of ending his life. On the outside Carter didn’t look all that different to how he normally did and to perfect strangers there would be no sign of anything being out of the ordinary. It was to those that knew him that the differences would be telling: the slightly untidy hair, the darker shadow of stubble around the lower half of his face, the slight shadow under his eyes that betrayed a lack of sleep over the last couple of days. It had been difficult to sleep with the wound being where it was and as tough and experienced as Carter was he was still just a mortal man, just as susceptible to pain as any human. Painkillers dulled the senses and compromised reaction times, things he couldn’t afford to risk, and in the short time he had spent here in Scarlet Oak he had already heard and seen enough to know that he also couldn’t afford to take a night off.

So there he stood, dressed ready to hunt when the light failed completely, weapons concealed beneath clothing, out of sight and out of mind of the people around him, when by all rights he should have been back in his room at the Lodge getting some rest. Carter had rested enough, he found it difficult to stay still at the best of times, let alone when something significant was going on, and the incident at the local high school certainly fit the bill.

There wasn’t much he could tell from where he stood but he listened, took in little pieces of conversations all around him, working out enough of the story from those snatches of dialogue to know that there were a lot of people trapped inside and no one could make any kind of contact, let alone get close enough to any of the building’s points of entry to figure out what was going on. Magic of some sort, it had to be, but this wasn’t Carter’s area, it never had been and likely never would be. His family had steered clear of this sort of thing, sticking to vampires and demons and the threats and dangers they posed. This was another world entirely.

All the same, Carter had felt compelled to come and investigate, if only to see with his own eyes just what was going on. If nothing else it served to convince him that he had made the right decision in coming to this town. He’d heard and read so many stories about this place, and what he saw before him now was proof that Scarlet Oak needed as much help -- not to mention protection -- as it could get.