sixthiterationlogs | Reason says I should have died three years ago...

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Reason says I should have died three years ago... | OTA

WHO: Sam Moon
WHERE: The Inn's kitchen
WHEN: January 8 (Sam's birthday)
OPEN TO: All
WARNINGS: Language, rumination on violence and death

When you didn't get older, birthdays kind of felt like a joke. At least, that had always been Sam's feeling on the matter. She wasn't really sure where she stood right now, considering the situation. But all she really wanted was to spend the entirety of her birthday in a blanket fort, watching all three of the original Space Wars movies on her iPad. Unfortunately, as so often seemed to be the case, the fates were conspiring against her. Actually, she had pretty much come to the conclusion that it was somehow her own fucking fault she'd been abducted and tossed into this Skinner Box, but Sam had a habit of passing off blame when she could. So it was obviously the fucking fates.

And Karen, of course. She loved blaming Karen for things. And visions of the night they met--her "other birthday," as Karen euphemistically called it--kept going through her head.

She rolled onto her back. The slight motion made her feel unreasonably sick. She narrowed her eyes, trying to make sense of the whirling colors above her, but she couldn't focus. It was like the whole world had been smudged with Vaseline. And something wet was starting to seep into her hair and the cotton of her tee shirt. Sam tried to lift a hand to touch her forehead, but she couldn't.

More sounds rang out above her, like a symphony of violence. But a face suddenly filled her vision, coming into sharp focus. It was the woman who she'd briefly made eye contact with, the one with the short hair. "Samantha?" Her voice echoed. "Samantha, can you hear me?"

"What's going on?" Sam mumbled, not entirely sure she'd actually spoken out loud.

"An excuse to air past grudges," the woman said. She brisky swept Sam's wig off of her head, freezing momentarily at the sight of her red hair beneath. Whatever surprised her, she shook it off quickly, probing at the damage to her forehead. Sam let out a yelp of pain as blackness flashed across her eyes. "Your cranium has been shattered," the woman said. "You're going to bleed into your brain."

To banish the thoughts--really, all of her thoughts, Sam wandered into the kitchen. In the last few weeks she'd become increasingly obsessed with trying to figure out how to build a still. They had potatoes after all. Potato vodka couldn't be that hard. Applied chemistry wasn't her area of expertise, but she figured the challenge would only help keep her mind off of...things.

So her birthday would be spent in the kitchen. Quietly humming It's My Party by Leslie Gore under her breath, she experimented with whatever glasses, tubes, and burners she could rig up. In between each attempt, she would pause to write up a full debrief in the little notebook Jude had given her. Occasionally, birthday cakes and balloons would sneak into the margins of her notes.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"Vodka would be admirable. I would drink homemade rotgut over nothing at all," Helen said. "And the production of alcohol could have other, more medical applications. But I'm a firm believer in having a stiff drink every once in a while."

She preferred whiskey, when she could get it, but this place was notoriously stingy with gifts. She looked over the apparatus for a moment and tried to see if she saw any obvious mistakes. Not being intimately familiar with the distilling of alcohol, none came to mind.

"Have you ever done this before?"

"Built a still? No. Blown myself up? There have been a few close calls." Both of the literal and metaphorical kind.

She'd shot herself in the foot plenty too.

Sam gave Helen a lopsided grin. "If I get this thing to work, I'm going to totally pretend that I built it for the medical application. No one but you will know the truth. I just wanna get plowed."

Not like anyone was gonna check her for ID. Although, now that she thought about it, today was, in fact, her twenty-first birthday.

Happy fucking birthday.

“I’m hardly going to tell anyone. There’s no reason for the amount of marijuana that Mark’s cultivated at our house,” Helen said. She indulged from time to time, remembering fonder days from the 1960s, and she knew of others who did as well. There was no shame in it as long as it wasn’t to excess.

“What seems to be the issue with it? Have you managed to get any sort of product to come from it yet or is it getting stuck somewhere earlier in the process?”

Sam frowned a little. There was pot and she didn't know about it? That felt like a betrayal, somehow. Even though she didn't fucking talk to anyone, so there was no one around for her to feel betrayed by. But shit. If she'd known about that, she would be smoking it up faster than a hippie at Woodstock.

Anything to escape.

She'd have to look into that later.

"The passages are clear," she said, turning back to the still. "But so far, I'm either getting water that tastes vaguely potato-y, or a liquid that I'm pretty sure you could use to clean silverware." She actually flushed a little at the admission. "Applied chemistry isn't my field."

Chemistry had always been John's bailiwick but Helen knew enough about it to try and do something about the issue. There had to be some sort of starter they need to make, something that could then be fermented. Then again, was liquor at all like wine? This was one of those times she wished she had a book.

"How long did you let it ferment before you distilled it? How much yeast did you use? I feel like the issue is probably in the start of the process and not your distillery, for as much as I know about the process."

There was something terribly comfortable and wonderful about being able to talk shop with someone. For all of their many faults and flaws--and there had been many--the Ordo Dracul had given that to Sam. And she missed it.

The thought was almost enough to make her smile.

She flipped back to the beginning of her experimentation in her notebook and turned it for Helen to see. "I've got the stats on each of my trials here. I have a feeling yeast might be the problem. I've been trying to be stingy with it in general. Except for attempt number 3. I think I went overboard there. Look."

"It is certainly something we try to be careful with," Helen said, looking over Sam's notes. It did appear to be the yeast, in looking at the results of each trial, and she nodded after a moment.

"You're going to want to do about two thirds of that last amount, I think. Any less and it doesn't ferment properly, any more and it doesn't have a real taste."

Sam nodded. She would have gotten there eventually, she was reasonably sure. But it all would have been a lot easier and tidier with the internet.

Holy fucking balls of fire, she missed the internet.

She gave Helen a smile, jotting down a few notes. "That makes sense. Maybe a little slower with the heat too. I've been moving too fast, in case anyone needs the kitchenware."

"I don't think anyone will begrudge you the kitchen if you're making us alcohol," Helen said, laughing softly. "We all need our vices to survive. I'm certainly interested in your results, considering we could use it as antiseptic as well."

It was difficult to maintain a sterile environment in a place like this without the conveniences of modern medicine and she was glad to see that people like Sam were working toward making their lives more comfortable.

"I keep hoping the people who have us captive here will send me opium poppies or something. If someone gets gravely injured, I don't know that marijuana will do much for pain control."

There was something delightful about the power of poppies being used for good. Sam was more used to them in The Wizard of Oz. Or, you know, among some of the crews she hung with in LA, before the end of the world.

"You know what's really fucked up about all of this?" she said. "Sometimes, I think the purpose of the whole social experiment isn't so much about us as about technology. Like a bunch of historians trying to see how people survived without the shit we take for granted."

Like being trapped in a Renaissiance Faire. Against your will.

Which was every Renaissance Faire.

"Having lived through two centuries, I can assure you that technology is preferable to none. I've lived this way before but I didn't know better than this. Now I know what life can be and I want to go back to my laboratory and my computers."

It was strange here, in that Helen had no issues admitting who she was and how long she'd lived. It seemed an advantage here instead of something to hide the way it'd been back home.

Wait. What?

Sam looked up sharply, her blue eyes bugging enough to show the whites all the way around. It wasn't that she'd never met someone who'd passed one century mark, let alone two. But this was the first she was hearing about it her.

And what the fuck did that mean?

She cleared her throat. "Um...could we maybe...uh...exposition, please?"

"Oh, yes, I suppose some explanation would be necessary," Helen said, backing up a bit. She'd gotten so used to people here being aware of who and what she was that someone who wasn't aware had slipped her mind. She leaned against the counter a bit while she decided where to begin.

"When I was a young woman, my friends and I decided to experiment with vampire blood. It wasn't any vampire, it was vampire Source Blood, and we all developed certain gifts from it. Mine happens to be immortality, more or less."

Avery, Sam thought with what little rational thought she was capable of for the moment, would have traded the left half of his head to be standing here right now. Even if Helen wasn't from their world and bound by their rules.

Vampire Source Blood?

Say what?

Sam cleared her throat. "So you were...a vampire?"

"No, not entirely. My friends and I all drank the blood but we developed different powers. One of us could teleport, one turned invisible, one gained a genius level intellect and I got immortality."

Helen smiled a bit, conspiratorially. "And one became a vampire with the ability to wield electricity as a weapon, should he choose."

A vampire with the ability to wield electricity as a weapon. In that moment, Sam would have traded, quite literally, everything she held dear for the opportunity to grant that ability to Avery. Or, as a second option, send Helen's friend back to LA. Preferably right in the middle of a Predator's haven. While it was sleeping.

Because. Seriously. Holy fucksicles.

Sam had to sit with that thought for a second.

"Wow," she finally managed to croak.

“Wow is certainly one way to describe it. I’ve had over two hundred years, give or take a time travel incident, to come to grips with it. We changed our lives and from then on our course was unpredictable.”

Helen missed her friends more than she could ever express and it had been a long time since she’d let herself remember the Five, especially in all their glory. They were so arrogant in those days, so full of hubris. Now, she was the only one left - or the only one who had come here, at any rate.

“Longevity has, naturally, many advantages. That stretch of years has given me time to learn a great many things both scientifically and in linguistics. You collect languages when you have so much free time.”

Still within the span of her mortal life, Sam had mostly managed to avoid contemplating eternity. There were moments when it would slip into her thoughts. She would shove it into some dark, cramped corner of her mind, to think about at some later time. Eventually, that time would come, but she wasn't ready for that.

Helen seemed...well, on the surface she seemed pretty well-adjusted, anyway. There was some comfort in that. Of course, she probably didn't have to drink blood or live without sunlight. So her circumstance wasn't really compatible with Sam's.

But it was a somewhat soothing thought. For a minute or two.

"I would imagine," she said. "You must have lived through some pretty badass scientific advances, too."

"Oh, I've seen the world change immensely. Some for the good, obviously, but some for the worse. The sheer advance in fighting disease has been incredible to behold. When I first started studying to be a physician, we had no way to truly visualize the body without opening it up. Now we have CT, MRI, PET...it's boundless."

Helen was enthusiastic about this because it was what she'd loved about being able to live so long. "I want to help as many people as I can."

Team Flower Crown would have loved this woman. Especially Grace, considering her penchant for science. Sam felt a pang of homesickness and guilt, like she always did when thinking about that particular set of friends.

She pushed it aside.

No point to it.

"So...does everyone here know what you...are?"

"Most of them, I think," Helen said. "Unlike in my world, I felt no need to conceal it here. There isn't an economy or a reason that someone being over two hundred would be seen as threatening. There's not the need for identification or interactions with government. These are the reasons I keep my secret in the world."

Among a few others, yes, but Helen didn't think those were relevant either. "The ones who don't know simply haven't spoken with me often enough, I don't think."

She raised a lot of good, solid, rational points. But, of course, the indoctrination into the Masquerade was more of an emotional than an intellectual thing. And too, she supposed, Sam hadn't yet met anyone here she really trusted enough with her secret.

It was something to think about, though.

Something to stew and fester about, as Sam was wont to do, by nature.

"I guess," she said, "there ain't nobody here but us humans, anyway." Still took some getting used to. Going back to referring to herself as a human.

"Very true. I have discovered that my aging seems to have picked back up since I've been here, mostly in the form of grey hair."

It was an annoying thing to deal with, honestly, and she tried her best to keep her roots dyed with herbs so it didn't show so easily.

Sam supposed that meant her aging had picked up too. But did that mean she'd somehow accelerated to the age her body was supposed to be? Or she'd just picked up from the moment she'd been frozen? There really wasn't much of a way to tell, seeing as she'd only been a vampire for three years.

Maybe her tits would still get a little bigger. That would be nice.

Either way, though, this was more of a birthday than the last few birthdays had actually been. And she wasn't really sure how to feel about that.

Then again, Sam was never really sure how to feel about most things. She was just too broken inside for that, she supposed.

"Well," she said, "my mother would say that the appropriate response is that you don't look a day over 29."

Helen laughed and shook her head. "Your mother is a wise woman, Sam. That's usually the appropriate response for anyone, normal aging or not. Still, it doesn't bother me. I gave up a long time ago on getting to have a natural span of years and now that I'm able to live out my life again like a normal person, I sort of like it."

She paused a bit, trying to decide how to phrase the rest. "When one is immortal, one finds themselves missing the ravages of age. Normal things come to be of more import than before."

Reason says I should have died three years ago... | OTA

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