Quicklog: Sasha & Daniel - Masquerade
[The vampire could read. He wasn't a reader, not like someone with a real soul would be, someone who had concern with how he spent his days or with whom he might pass his time, but he could read. He could read a sign that said Vampires Welcome and he could read the description below about masks and costumes. The vampire could also calculate; he could plan and he could charm to his own ends, but he could not exactly plot. His imagination was very limited, and a direct contrast to Daniel in his right mind, who was brimming with so much intellectual curiosity that he either numbed the excess with alcohol or turned it into bitter venom.
The creature who came to the party was there for food and for future food, cultivating people the way farmers cultivated crops, rotating fields and using what enticements he knew worked best: affection, the assurance of safety, the lure of the unique, and sex.
At the edge of the crowd, the vampire watched a heavy-set female with plastic teeth swing a wide circle with a plastic goblet of cheap red wine, pursued hotly by a taller man more muscle than bone. The latter was wearing a neckcloth of frothy white lace.
He blinked several times, smiled a sharp smile, and moved around the edge of the crowd until he stopped in front of a woman that struck some chord way back in his memory. He didn't try to identify the note, just stopped to look at her now. So far three people had exclaimed about how his black sclera contacts looked so real.]