Ridgefield Planetarium (clutch only) Occupational hazards

Beauregard had taken himself off the payroll, off every employee directory. He existed only in the sense that he had suggested his way into the hiring process.

This, sincerely, made him sad. It was no pleasant thing to remove his fingerprints from a place he adored. Now he pouted beneath it, thrown in a chair, legs sprawled to rest on a table. At his side, his purple crochet bag, neatly packed with yarn and hooks and other trinkets for the hobby.

Somewhat neatly, anyway. In his slightly new moon centered huffiness, he'd tromped down the stairs and to the couch without paying incredible attention to anything behind him. Clipped the door trying to fit through with his bag, but that hardly felt worth his concern.

What he'd missed was that a mess of purple yarn had caught in the doorway, pinched to some delicate splinter in the frame. Then, as he walked, down the stairs and through the lounge to the couch, the yarn trailed, a long and lagging line leading directly to the culprit.

Beauregard missed this, naturally. He was focusing on finishing up some hideous pattern he'd bought by mistake and now needed to make out of spite. It was currently eyeless, but he was building the left eyeball now, working mindlessly through some white yarn.

It, unfortunately, did not help him see the tangle he'd made of the lounge.

Teasing the purple yarn between her fingers, and quietly rolling to back into a new little yarn ball, Asphodel followed it down to the lounge, equal parts amused and bemused. She was surprised to find the Dominus at the end of the trail. Sprawled! It was exactly her kind of indolent drama.

"I’ve followed the string-" She announced, as if this were some game, "Has it led me to Theseus or the Minotaur?"

He sensed and heard an approach, but it was not enough to immediately tear him from his work. Mid-row, he counted with the slightest silent movement of his lips. This was not a pattern he had memorized.

But then came a voice, and he looked up to see the lovely Asphodel, always with some hint of trouble in her expression. His eyes wandered from her face to a collection of yarn, and his brows rose, then furrowed. Had she brought her own? Or-

Ah.

Beauregard huffed, smiled, a bit of boyishness in his face. "Theseus," he said, voice forced deeper. Then he lifted the eyeless, half finished crochet monster at his side. "And a beast slain."

"The hero!" Asphodel concluded, simpering playfully. For her part, she always preferred the minotaur. She identified with the monster, poetically misunderstood, because she would never not be dramatically committed to her aesthetic. As he presented the half-finished piece, she tilted her head to one side and then the other hands still working to deftly re-roll the yarn ball.

"And you've made a... hat of the monster?" She had a stall across from the Dominus at the fall festival. She knew he was no slouch with the crochet needle, despite all the slouching he was doing now. It seemed she'd caught him in some state of ill-repose.

He smirked, eyes narrowing. Perhaps sensed a bit of her eyes on him and swept his feet off where he'd stretched them to sit with slightly more dignity, shoes on the ground if nothing else. Beauregard blamed Raziyya for encouraging him into bad posture. She allowed it.

"A bit gloating, I suppose," he said, turning it to face him, as much as the thing had a face. "I accidentally spent four entire dollars on this awful pattern and thought I might as well make it."

For now he set it aside, glancing to his bag to try to determine where he'd gone wrong enough to string up half the lounge.

"Oh certainly, one would not want to let such a fortune go to waste." She noted drily, finally gathering up the last of the yarn into a new ball. Well, more of an oblong, but the wrapping was neat at least. Asphodel placed it on the table and then went to take a seat on the couch across from him, arranging her skirt just so. "The mood here feels melancholy today." She noted, leadingly.

Asphodel was very pretty. Terribly so. He thought this as she adjusted her skirt, ladylike. Beauregard imagined, based on nothing but his slimy heart, that she was a sloppy drunk. He offered a polite, lightly chuckled "thank you" to the return of his yarn, but she was on to other matters now.

And how impossible! Beauregard, a man with the ability to control the emotions of others, decidedly did not wear his emotions on his sleeve. Rather...

"I do tend to wear my mood in my slouch," he admitted, smirking some, if not wholeheartedly leaning into the expression. "Many little vampire oopses across the clutch lately lead to a cranky dominus. We are in a lull, though-"

He leaned forward to tap his knuckles twice on the wooden table.

"Feels dangerous to speak it."

Asphodel leaned forward to repeat the motion. Extra knocks, extra luck. And then, mercilessly, because she was a goddamn incorrigible gossip, "There was the the whole episode with that psychic." She carelessly threw up a finger. One. Two, "Then someone was asked to leave..." Sayed?

And then she lifted the third, paused and looked at the Dominus with a smile and a lifted eyebrow. Outright fishing for him to fill in the blanks.

Beauregard would have done the same, truly. Asphodel listed off what she knew, and he nodded.

Then, regrettably, left her mostly hanging.

"Indeed," he said. Smiled somewhat apologetically. "I cannot offer everyone's dirty laundry. But I can tell you my favorite incident, beyond needing to drag Sayed's unconscious body from the edge of downtown."

Look, already a tidbit there, Asphodel! Devour it as he would. Imagine the delightful mental image of dragging the unconscious man to a car by his leg.

"Someone perhaps informed a police vampire of my general identity. So naturally, in a fit of paranoia, I have had to erase myself from the planetarium, and creep in here like some sort of criminal, checked that I have not been followed."

Ah, dirty laundry. No matter! Beauregard still rewarded her snooping with a broad strokes retelling that had her eyes glinting. Sayed had been rude to her—obviously, his expulsion was cosmically appropriate because she was a vicious little monster.

As to the real meat of the matter though. "Oh God." She muttered, offended on his behalf. Such indignity for their Dominus, all over these stupid human whims. A moment of thought and then,"I’m amazed that fledgling hasn’t ashed himself yet. Fostered by humans, can you imagine?" She had to laugh at it all. "I wonder if they mean to... I don’t know. Veganize him."

It was best not to consider Joaquin as related to him at all. This was something he had attempted to practice, in order to hide it from Raziyya. Made it easier these days when she only heard his thoughts intermittently.

"He appears on the cusp of something ugly," he said. "I suffered brief communication with him, through another vampire's phone, no less. He screamed, snarled."

Beauregard scrunched his face. It was distasteful.

"I wonder if they're trying to feed him animal blood or the like."

Her own nose crinkled at the thought, because they were apparently two very posh peas in a pod. And then she went so far as to make an impolite noise at the idea of animal blood.

"God, all these vampire books and shows have inspired a very peculiar kind of brain rot." She opined, leaning into the arm of the couch to rest her cheek against her knuckles. "Time was, they would’ve simply stuck him full of stakes and left him for the sunrise. I am so desperately curious to see what they mean to do!" And then, as if suddenly inspired by the thought, she dropped her hand, eyes going wide and glimmery, "Perhaps they mean to make more vampire constables."

That would be terrible and chaotic. So of course, she had to put the notion out into the universe.

He realized he sincerely watched very little "vampire media." Perhaps someone like Rika could inform him as to what was out there in the world.

Asphodel spoke of something he'd considered to some extent. Vampires on a police force had potential to be truly terrifying. Brutality more subtle than kneeling on throats and shooting innocents in their beds.

"Imagine the trial and error," he mused, amused. "How many of their own might they kill for the cause? I do find it unsettling, to be truthful. If some capable vampire decided to play tell-all for the police."

Oh Beauregard, you were a potent muse. The police killing their own for the cause? Asphodel found it less unsettling and more amusing.

"Or," Asphodel started, her voice going conspiratorial with further inspiration, "If a very capable vampire were to feed them nothing but half-truths and obfuscations!"

How much fun would that be! Something of a risk though so it would likely remain naught but a pipe dream.

To that, he laughed. And successfully convinced back to his slovenly nature, he turned where he sat to throw his legs rudely across the length of the couch, arms folded at his middle as he looked to her. His back rest somewhat comfortably against a sloped furniture arm.

"Tell me, Officer Asphodel," he said, the corners of his lips nearly twitching for the absurdity of that name alone. Voice higher for his helplessness. "We have been trying and trying. How do we make more vampires?"

Feeding them blood and shooting them in the head was such a horrific, comedic image.

Oh and now he invited her to a little piece of theater. This was more or less her element and she grinned brightly. Rising to the occasion and rising herself, she clasped her hands and paced a little in a professorial manner.

"Well, Officer- Captain Beauregard. What a worthy endeavor!" Completing a small circle, she turned back to face him, and laid a finger against her chin. "Have you tried dosing them with the ashes of a newly deceased vampire? It is oh so important you find the remains of one dusted on the new moon or it won’t work!"

They’ll have then died for nothing. How sad.

A promotion from officer to captain in a moment! He smiled toothily, not his most flattering expression, but obviously delighted. Her solution was a frightening one. Would the hypothetical cops go banging down vampire doors to grate them over comrades on the new moon?

His arm stretched out, then bent in, the back resting on his forehead.

"Of course," he breathed. "How does one kill a vampire, Officer Asphodel?"

Of course!

And joke or no, Asphodel gave the follow-up question some thought. She couldn't give the truth, but she also couldn't say it was something so outlandish that it could be clocked as a lie.

"A stake of hawthorn, soaked in vervain." In tune with the vampire myths. "But the trick to stop them from coming back? A brick between their teeth." As learned from the plague-pits of Venice. The undead! Crawling around in the mass-graves! Asphodel privately thought they were dealing with ghouls rather than vampires, but perhaps it was just a clutch having a bit of fun.

In any case, neither of those methods would do a goddamn thing but maybe if they told the police, a vampire could simply play dead until they were retrieved.

---

this is a fun article!

Asphodel's fantasy was decidedly rich. He laughed, then cringed, bringing a hand up to his cheek to rub at where his molars might be.

"That would certainly deter me from coming back," he said. "You know I used to greatly fear getting staked in the chest, in my early days. I had some irrational belief I would wake up one day with a wooden spike in my sternum that I'd have to pry out."

He took both hands to thrust an invisible stake roughly into the center of his chest.

"Probably bloodlust half a dozen times in the process."

The ability to be entertaining just in conversation was so highly prized and Asphodel reveled in being able to impart some humor to the Dominus. At least to lessen his melancholy.

Grinning herself, she couldn’t help the way her own palm flew to her sternum as he so gruesomely illustrated his point. There was a flash of sympathetic pain, beneath the horror.

"I would ash of embarrassment." She declared. Reseating herself, she shared, "Myself, I genuinely avoided garlic in all its permutations for the first ten years or so. And if I had a reaction, it took me a while to realize it was psychosomatic." So, she supposed garlic did work on vampires, but just her.

Asphodel had a familiarly theatrical nature that brought out Beauregard's own, let him feel a smidge younger. (They were very close in age, he recalled.)

"Incredible what we can convince ourselves of," he said. "Information travels so easily these days. In a decade, I fear vampires won't have to guess whether or not they can drink from dogs or die of garlic. They'll just..."

He lifted a hand, then waved it dismissively.

"Google it. Such a rite of passage lost!"

Oh, that steamed her. She scowled, very nearly setting herself on a rant about 'vampires these days', but settled in. "There are, at least, things that the internet might not teach!" She gestured gracefully, (and uselessly) with one hand as she stalled, trying to think of something. "... Poise, perhaps. Vampiric elegance."

Of which she had in spades. Clearly. Disagree at your own risk.

She understood his outrage, if comically. Beauregard smiled, a man currently sprawled across a couch. Obviously brimming with vampiric grace himself.

"Precisely," he said. "And if we ever meet some darling young thing who said they learned it all online, we simply..."

He turned his head to face her, pointing to his eyes, then hers, then snapping.

"Suggest it out of them!"

An objectively rotten thing to do, but he could entertain himself by thinking about it.

Vampiric grace and vampiric indolence were one and the same! Hand in hand for a bunch of hedonistic creatures displaced from time. Beauregard's lounging hardly had her batting an eye. Rather, his utterly wretched suggestion got her laughing openly, as if that solution wouldn't inevitably lead to disaster and death. But it would certainly be entertaining.

"What a sore thing to do!" She accused, for all she loved the idea.

He laughed, called out. How rude! Looking her way, smiling with teeth. With the assistance of a hand grappling the back of the couch, he pulled himself back up to sit somewhat properly. A fidgety man.

"Of course, of course," he sighed. "That's why I would never do it."

He pulled his crochet back to his lap, looking at it, then slyly to her.

"Or at least I'd never admit it."

She did not have any crochet with which to occupy her hands, but she was quite pleased to simply sit with Beauregard and socialize. A lost art, that was.

"If you never admit to it, it never happened." She nodded sagely. They really were a pair of wretches and it was delightful.