Certain things which may have been best left undone.
The house, was large, but notably under furnished. Everything stood on hard wood floors that hadn’t been polished in far too long. The old desks pushed to the walls in most rooms were littered with parchments and dust, and stray traces of dark inks and candle waxes marred their surfaces. There was a great old chimney leading down to a fireplace in the middle of the house, and the walls swelled out in one line bisecting the walls to allow the chute to lead up into open sky.
The bedroom was much the same. A littered desk, a bookcase laden with aging tomes and occult or scientific paraphernalia, and an old double bed.
There was movement. It was brief, and rough, and then it was over.
Simon wasn’t the kind of man to stop and fret over the details of something, or to attach any more significance to a bodily function than he was accustomed too. So he tried not to linger upon his own physical demands. He dealt with them, and the moment he was done? Well, he saw no further reason to stand upon niceties, especially when he had other things to be doing.
Shifting off his bed, he winced slightly, before straightening up. The adjoining room led through to a makeshift study, which considering the kind of things that Simon studied, consisted of a mostly open room, with a desk and chair pushed against one of the walls, and a floor nearly completely inscribed with the details of various glyphs and sigils. Without a backward glance he approached the room, pushing open the door and knocking a stop into place beneath it, before calling back over his shoulder,
“Your money’s on the table. Let yourself out.”
There was something highly unusual about this house. A small voice in his head yelled 'Really? Why I never!' But, for the most part, he didn't make it a habit to look around anywhere he'd been brought, much less question it. There was no point, was there? In fact, there would have been nothing he would have liked better than to just get out of here very quickly and he couldn't quite explain why. Of course, the man himself gave him the heebie-jeebies, but that was relatively normal. As much as he would have liked to think that he was getting numb to all of this, it seemed that it was only the acts themselves that he could go through without thinking about it too hard, and with that, all the compliments and moans and giggles came with the act.
Buttoning up his waistcoat, Izzy went over to get his money. Well, for all he could say about the man, at least he hadn't shortchanged him. Sometimes they did that, for some reason, even if they looked like they had the money. It was like some kind of strange little show of rebellion against - well, absolutely nothing. Or they were just being bloody cheap and thought they could get away with it in a younger boy.
He would have just grabbed his coat and left, if he hadn't bothered to look up and stare for a moment at that strange room the man was entering, and then back down at what his money had been resting on. Never let it be said that Izzy was any sort of intellectual, but he muffled his laughter when he saw the great tome, mainly because he'd seen it before. Namely, it was a book on vampire anatomy that Mr. Theralt had shown him simply to point out every single blatant mistake in it.
"Not as if you'd need it here," he muttered, "When you've got billions of live specimens running around unchecked."
Simon turned around when he heard the younger boys voice. Why was he still here? Had Simon hired him for his conversational skills? What was he even talking about. Simon raised an eyebrow, giving the boy a look that clearly said, “I’m not tipping you, if that’s why you’re still here”. After a moment, he relented slightly, and glanced down, following the boys gaze to one of his books. Oh. Vampires. To be honest Simon hadn’t paid it much mind since reading it. He’d heard the rumours of course, but you heard rumours about everything, he hadn’t paid any of them much heed.
“Children’s stories.” He stated simply, by means of explanation. Before it occurred to him what the young man had just said. Frowning, he looked up, with an expression of mild interest on his face, “Let me take a wild guess, a friend of a friend had a great uncle who rose from his funeral bed to seduce some lusty young maiden of whatever backwater town you originate from?”
Simon might have been more polite, but he had already paid this man, and he wasn’t enormously patient.
He stood stiffly when it seemed that the man had heard him laugh, or at least noticed he was still there. It had seemed that he had just gone off to do whatever he was going to and really just left Izzy in there. But, come to think of it, that would have been incredibly foolish of him, considering how much some of the things in this room looked like they were worth. Still, Izzy kept his head down, looking more or less in the direction of the book.
"Some child," he replied. Though he did remember Mr. Theralt giving a bombastic reading of one of the chapters on some over-humid day when they had nothing better to do. It was all superstitions, and human superstitions at that. When the man started insulting him, he pressed his lips together and began to crack his knuckles, still not looking up. His tone was very quiet and cold. "Yes, I suppose. You could say that. And if the maiden was my mother, yes, certainly, you'd be spot on."
Despite his tone, Izzy was a bit excited. He'd never met anyone in London who believed in vampires. "You...study them?"
Simon was going to start laughing at the suggestion that this boys mother had been killed by a fairytale monster, fortunately an opportunity to talk about himself had just cropped up, which managed to trump his instinct to be a difficult and offensive sceptic, Turning, he glanced back at the young man, and smiled for what could have been the first time since they met, “I’ve never really been struck by the urge to devote that much time towards the living dead before. There’s very little scholarly material on them that can be taken seriously I’m afraid. No, largely my area of expertise is the more reliably documented areas of the universe, which still eludes a certain intellectual rigor in its usual treatment.”
He eyed the book, suddenly curious about it, then looked up at the young man, as though a new thought had just crossed his mind, “Can you read?” It honestly hadn’t occurred to him that the young man might be educated, but he seemed to have known immediately what the book was about, and an educated man still believing in Vampires was… well, ever so faintly ridiculous to him. Still, Simon pondered, as was the image of a scholar who owned his own magic wand, and yet he no longer had any doubts regarding his own calling. Glancing up at the young man again, he asked, “…and you believe in them?”
'Reliably documented areas of the universe,' at least insofar as Izzy was concerned, included vampires. It would have been very difficult for it not to, especially since his mother had never bothered to dance around the issue with him. There were certain stories and superstitions that were around for a reason, and so far as Izzy was concerned, seeing and being for that matter was believing. "If people keep believing this kind of thing," he said, tapping on the book.
"Yes," said Izzy, cocking his head in confusion. "I'd be hard-pressed not to."
Simon rolled his eyes at that comment, and replied airily, “I assure you, people will believe whatever they like to believe, people believed that the world was flat for generations, but it didn’t spend a millennia or so being true. Reality is not decided by democratic process.” Well, maybe it was to a certain extent, but that was clearly a concept which would escape the boy.
At first, he wasn't entirely certain what the man was referring to, but decided to go with what bits of it he understood. "In that case," he replied, "I don't know anyone in London who believes in the undead, and yet, I know they exist. I've seen 'em everywhere, they're like cockroaches. So by your logic, I'm probably not just fooling myself." And despite that logic, he was also somewhat aware that he sounded absolutely mad.
Simon raised his eyebrows, okay, well, that was a new one. Either the boy was a mental case, or he might just turn out to be useful to him afterwards. Turning back to the young man fully now, he walked towards him, picking up the heavy old book and opening it in his hands as he did so. Without saying a word he flicked through the pages, until he found some of the anatomical drawings of them, of how they’re distinguished from humans, the fangs, the fingernails, the details. Carefully, he held the page open to the boy, “Okay, here’s my question then, you say you see them everywhere, but they’re supposed to be night indistinguishable from humans apart from these small features. So tell me, how do you get so close to them, over and over, and identify so many, without being killed yourself?”
Eyebrows still raised, he awaited an answer.
If Izzy had thought himself mad before, then this man was going to start agreeing with him in as soon as he opened his mouth. Considering he didn't seem to believe that vampires were actually real, he was unlikely to believe that some random whore was a dhampir. "I don't get too close to them, I don't have to," he started, "I can sense them well enough." That sounded relatively idiotic, he thought. It struck him suddenly that the man should have caught on before, with the comment about his mother. It also occurred to him that if he didn't believe him, then he should have kicked him out of the house as soon as he started talking. There were two ways this could go: one, the man believed him, got scared, and kicked him out, and two, the man thought he was crazy and kicked him out. Either way, he'd inwardly cursed himself. He'd lost a potential regular.
Well, no sense in going back now. "I'm a dhampir, see."
For a moment, Simon was silent, deliberating over this new piece of information. When he finally passed comment, it was with no elaboration on his own opinion of the boys claims, "A Dhampir? Half vampire?" There was another long pause, before finally, he asked: "Aren't Dhampir meant to kill vampires?"
"Yes," he nodded. He was silent for a moment after the man's next question, mainly because he hadn't figured out quite how to answer it for himself. There was a part of him that could have, but, "I would, but without any call for it, coppers'd have me for murder. There's the problem when no one believes in 'em, they go about in human society without anyone noticing," he looked up at the man before saying, "Sure wouldn't mind it, though."
"Hmm." Well damn. Simon had been honestly considering asking the boy to go out and find him a sample, but if he was going to be inciting a mentally ill youth to commit murder then... honestly he could see that ending with a lot more trouble than it was worse for him. Carefully, Simon eyed the young man. "All right. How about this? You know where I live, if you should... happen across anything that substantiates your claim, be it a medical anomaly, or... really anything else of interest. You bring it to me first. I guarentee I'll pay better for it than I would for your current line of work."
This said, Simon waved a hand a little dismissively, "Now you may go."
It wasn't like he had any interest in the boys name or anything.
"I will sir," said Izzy, trying to cover up the fact that he was absolutely giddy with excitement. A job, the one that he was made to do - Jesus Christ, he could have kissed the man, though it really looked like he wouldn't have taken well to that kind of thing. "Thank you, sir!" he called as he left the house, a big smile plastered to his face. He immediately started laughing once he got outside, despite the fact that it happened to be pouring rain. It was a beautiful day right now, and he was off to go 'substantiate his claim' or whatever the man had said. Things were looking up for once. Just then, it hit him all at once.
He leaned over the railing, a bit dizzy. There was no one about right now, but vampire or no, he could have gone for anything with flesh and blood. Izzy ran down the stairs and into an alleyway, trying to catch his breath and his brain. There was a ringing in his ears, it was trying to take him over, but he he couldn't let it damn, damn, damn...
Something had to remind him this wasn't just going to turn into a fantasy land.