but oh what a year

[patrols]

Comments

[yourtype]

Tyler basically gave me the go-ahead.

[She starts to arrange the glasses and go to pour but Stephanie reaches for the bottle before she can do so and shakes her head. "You're a newbie and you have an auto-healing liver. You're not going to do the pouring."

Erica releases the bottle and leans back on the couch with a shrug.]

Fine. I will watch and learn.

[scrutinously]

That tracks, from the stories I heard about him.

( Gray smirks, leaning forward and grabbing a cracker. )

Easier to ease your way in, then to give yourself a double for the sake of it. Vodka?

[yourtype]

That's what Tyler recommended. And he said to bring a mixer.

[She appreciated the advice and she goes to also take a nibble from the plates.]

Is vodka good or bad?

[scrutinously]

It's fine. Goes down easy with a mixer. He's right. Our parents love their whiskey.

( He thinks his mom got that from their dad. )

[yourtype]

My dad was a tequila guy. My mom didn't really drink.

[So she wasn't really exposed to a lot of alcohol.]

And I'm epileptic so before I became I werewolf, my meds really weren't alcohol friendly. Not that I was invited to the parties people were drinking in anyway.

[scrutinously]

So, being a werewolf, that, like, stopped your epilepsy in its' tracks?

( That's kind of really cool. )

[yourtype]

Kind of. I mean, it's still there. If my nervous system gets overwhelmed, or if I don't take good care of myself, they still happen.

[She definitely had one or two in the vault, which is when the alphas started seeing her as a problem.]

But not as often and I don't need to worry about my meds. Which means I can do all kinds of things. Wear heels, rock climbing, drink alcohol - basically whatever I want.

[scrutinously]

You couldn't wear heels before?

( Does he understand sicknesses or women? )

[yourtype]

I could, it just wasn't recommended when your body could start seizing at a moment's notice.

[She didn't want to break an ankle having a seizure. She had enough problems in high school.]

Part of it is being a werewolf too. I just felt so much more ... confident, I guess.

[All the people who used to give her crap, she could crush like a bug. Which maybe probably wasn't her best impulse.]

[scrutinously]

I would, too. Anyone would. You get the strength. 20/20 vision. All that extra sensory crap. Was probably hard not to lose yourself in it.

( And it sounds like she might've. )

[yourtype]

[Erica nods, and then her head ducks.]

I may have done the whole vamp walk back into school the day after I was bitten as a screw you to everyone who ever gave me crap. Maybe not my finest moment.

[But she did look very hot.]

[scrutinously]

Vamp... walk?

( He turns to his sister, because vamp is a - well, vamp means vamp? )

[meanestgirl]

[Stephanie sighs as she hands one of the glasses to him, having mixed them all drinks.]

Think about pretty much any teen movie where the hot-not-hot girl is done up to her full potential and they do that pan up slow motion walk over her new look? That's a vamp walk.

[Erica nods as she takes her glass with a smirk. "Miniskirt, stilletos, full face of make up - the whole nine."]

[scrutinously]

( yes, please. )

Oh. Probably made an impression, then. ( He holds the glass out to cheers before taking a nice healthy sip. Impressed his sister can balance a drink, he hides the big brotherly impulse to ask about why. He also remembers growing up in Mystic Falls. ) Were people, like, in shock overnight?

[yourtype]

[She nods.]

Had to peel most of their jaws off the floor.

[And she enjoyed it. She enjoyed the power of it. She misses that, but she's trying her hand at being herself, at least for a little while.]

It isn't really practical long term though, even as a werewolf.

[scrutinously]

You were trying something on. You felt stronger. Better. I get it.

( He might do the same thing. Not that he doesn't have his dad's piercing eyes and jaw. But, there's always been a part of him that's just been comfortable. But not flaunting like his dad did. )

[yourtype]

[Erica would encourage it, even if she's not leaning on it right now.]

I think some of the nice thing about being in New Orleans instead of Beacon Hills is that no one's known me since we were little.

[Don't have all of your worst moments to pull from as you're trying to make friends.]

[scrutinously]

We definitely feel that, don't we?

( Mystic Falls High is not a nice high school of people. It's full of stuck up, clique-y folk. )

[meanestgirl]

One hundred percent. Small towns are so suffocating.

[Everyone has to be in everyone else's business.

Erica smiles. "Glad to see that they never change. Except not."]

[scrutinously]

It doesn't help when your mother reconstitutes the historical society and you both become poster children for every event thrown. And, then expected to go to every event.

( and your family friends aren't made to. )

[meanestgirl]

["Right. Bonnie told me how intense Mystic Falls could be with ... history." Erica didn't get it, but Beacon Hills wasn't really the same way.

Stephanie rolls her eyes.]

It's fine. They're a lot more honest about their roots than they used to be, though they still leave the vampires out of it.

[scrutinously]

For the most part. Unless a party goes late and certain people end up behind closed doors. Not everything that happened to the boarding school stayed on the grounds. There was a rumor that there was a troll in the school's basement.

( It was an after rumor when their various parents spoke to each other or informed each other. )

[yourtype]

I mean, I spent most of my junior year fighting a homicidal lizard man, so at least Mystic Falls and Beacon Hills have that in common.

[Stephanie's brow furrows. "Like a real lizard man?"]

It's called a kanima. It secrets paralytic venom and has nasty looking knife tail.

[scrutinously]

Homicidal...

( Thank you, sis, for asking. )

Where did it -- Um. We've never heard of something like that. Or, even something that might even be something like that. Fighting? Like, it kept showing up and the fighting wasn't working?

[yourtype]

So ... werewolves have alphas right? And an alpha can bite a human and turn them into a werewolf? Sometimes when they do that, the bite doesn't turn them into a werewolf, it turns them into something else. A kanima is one of those times.

Kanimas don't have alphas, they have masters and this kanima's master was using him to get revenge on a bunch of people in Beacon Hills. And given the whole lizard scale situation, they don't even look much like they do as a human so we had to figure out who the kanima is in human form and then figure out who the master was.

[It's a long, roundabout way of telling the story, but Jackson is here and she doesn't want it to seem like she's spilling all his dirty laundry to these randos he doesn't know.]