For years, Reynaldo has had a crush on someone he saw once and will never see again. This crush has persisted through several dates and flings, a few relationships, and even Isaac.
Isaac knows about it. He thinks it’s hilarious.
Evelyn has several pairs of gloves. They have two general purposes: blocking sunlight and looking goth. There’s a lot of overlap between them, but some of the ones for blocking sunlight look too utilitarian to fit goth fashion, and some of the goth ones are fishnet, lace, or otherwise see-through.
Naturally, she wears them on the appropriate occasions: the utilitarian ones when she wants to go out in sunlight without being burned, and the fancy ones when she wants to look like a human pretending to be a vampire.
Every so often, she wears them for no apparent reason.
In both Reynaldo and Evelyn’s worlds, the Homeland Security Advanced Research Projects Agency created a project called Inquiry, the goal of which was to study the supernatural for potential applications in homeland defense. The project expanded, and eventually became a splinter group.
In 2020, the Inquiry started several long-term experiments on nonhumans, studying their powers in the hopes of being able to create defenses against them. They kidnapped thousands of nonhumans across the country. The subjects all had one thing in common: they couldn’t pass for human.
The reason for this was that non-passing nonhumans are less likely to have legal identities and tend to have fewer humans who care about them. It was easier for the Inquiry to make them disappear without legal ramifications.
In 2020, Reynaldo was enrolled in a public school, and knew dozens of supernaturally unaware humans.
In 2020, Evelyn was homeschooled, and only knew supernaturally aware humans who were used to working outside of human law.
By the Inquiry’s standards, Evelyn was an acceptable candidate for their research. Reynaldo was not.
Utahraptor there could be speaking for Reynaldo. Except instead of preferring charity to kicking an evil kangaroo in the bum, he prefers charity to murder. (And also to repeatedly kicking evil kangaroos. The world being what it is,1 they’re probably out there.) And instead of not getting it, he thinks about it and tries to counteract it.
When people in the demonfighting life say they can’t get out of it, his default reaction is about the same as his default reaction to T-Rex in the last panel.
1 In other words, me being the author I am. I HAVE THE POWER! (No, seriously, I recently came up with a sapient library. Would you put it past me to make an evil zoo?)
Ryan and Emma tried using amnesia magic on Emma exactly once.
Ryan ended it after fifteen minutes.
They never tried again.
Isaac wants at least two children. He’s not entirely sure how many, sometimes he thinks three or four, sometimes he just thinks “lots,” but he’s sure that if he has children, he wants at least two.
He has a specific reason for this: He saw how isolated his mother and Reynaldo felt, being the only ones of their species. Even Isaac sometimes felt strange, not quite being the same species as either of his parents- but he had his siblings.
Whatever species his children are, he thinks they shouldn’t have to be the only one of their kind.
Evelyn has attacked and fed from unwilling humans (though she left them alive).
Not only does she feel guilty about it, she found the experience completely repulsive. The blood was good- the blood was everything she’d been craving and everything her body needed- but the attack was both physically and mentally unpleasant in ways she doesn’t know how to describe.
At first she was confused, then she remembered what her parents had told her (so long ago, when she was so much younger) about the alternate reality that led to her birth, and the species of her alternate mother.
Bridgeport vampires don’t bite as an attack. They can’t. It doesn’t occur to most of them to try. Evelyn’s mother reasoned that this is a different manifestation of a vampire’s need for invitations.
When Reynaldo was six, he overheard Ryan telling someone that Emma only liked real butterflies, not things shaped like them.
He was crushed.
It took his parental figures a few days to get him to tell them what was wrong. After that, it took Emma a few days to convince him that she really did like all of the butterflies that he and Sonya had drawn in crayon, fingerpainted, cut out of construction paper, and glued together out of flower petals.
When she died and he inherited her possessions, he discovered that she still had some of them. Even a crude flower petal butterfly, which by all rights should have disintegrated years earlier but had been preserved with magic.
He wondered if Jibriel had done the preservation, but Jibriel was dead and Reynaldo couldn’t ask him. He spent a lot of time studying the magic, looking for something of Jibriel’s style in it, but it was such a basic spell that it could have been done by anyone.
Ryan became furious when asked, deeply grieving for Emma and angry with Reynaldo for her death. The conversation ended with both of them breaking down crying over the pain of the broken blood bond, Reynaldo offering his blood, and Ryan viciously taking it.
Reynaldo doesn’t know how much of that was genuine and how much was Ryan’s lies. Regardless, Ryan never answered the question.
Reynaldo still has the flower petal butterfly.
Not all of Thracia’s slaves are sentenced to slavery for life. They are to be slaves for as long as required to aid Thracia exactly as much as they damaged it. Sometimes that’s a mere matter of months or years.
This leaves the question of what to do with the slaves who are set free.
Some can simply be let go. Some, however, would be far, far too risky. Demon hunters and champions with allies, vampires from powerful clans, anyone who’d be likely to seek revenge and have the means to be more troublesome than Thracia wants to deal with.
(Some slaves are let go with the expectation that they’ll seek revenge and can then be re-enslaved. Some are let go with the expectation that their long enslavement has left them with nowhere to go except back to Thracia.)
The solution is simple. Thracia can do anything it wants to its slaves. Including mind control. Before the risky slaves are freed, their memories are often altered, and false memories are implanted that the slave will accept as an explanation for what happened to them.
It’s possible to have been a Thracian slave and not know it.
Thrace once considered using Vaccaei as a shell for either himself or someone in his family. He’s changed his mind. He realized that being able to die is an asset, because an Old One who dies can be risen into a new and possibly more powerful shell.
Whoever is risen into Vaccaei will remain in that shell forever. Unless someone else is risen into them, destroying them in the process.
This, Thrace has decided, is the shell’s purpose.
When he wants to permanently dispose of an enemy Old One, he can kill them and then raise them into this immortal shell. The body is already incapacitated and controlled, and the mind of the victim will inevitably be damaged by Vaccaei’s insanity, incapacitating them further. The insanity will likely increase as more and more fragments of Old One minds collect within the shell.
In the meantime, he can use Vaccaei’s extracted womb to experiment with breeding a shell with acceptable levels of invulnerability.
He’s told Vaccaei this, through touching her brain.
Her sanity is now deteriorating even faster.
Ryan is secretly looking forward to seeing whether Shelly embraces the “pink for a baby girl” thing as an excuse to have more of her favorite color around, or rejects the gendering of the color and all the baggage that comes with it.
This is a secret because he hopes she’s torn about it in a way that will give him openings to annoy her.
By the time Evelyn was kidnapped by the government, Ryan and Denna had worked out all the legalities of Angel’s fortune, and who should inherit it.
By the time Evelyn escaped, she was the only one left alive to inherit it. It took her some work and shady deals, but she was able to access the money and spend it all on loose diamonds, which she figured would be easy to transport and valuable in most dimensions and realities.
She’s sold a few of her diamonds in this reality, and has been living off of the money from them.
To find out what Jibriel said in his Latin message to Shelly in the bomb shelter, all Ryan would have to do is make a deal with Satrai to have Imortaes copy the memory, implant it in the mind of someone who speaks Latin, and have that person translate it.
To find out what Jibriel and Reynaldo talked about in Arabic during the siege, all Emma would have to do is find someone in her group of contacts who knows someone who can translate it, call in a favor or two, and send the recording of it.
They’ve already decided not to pry into Jibriel’s goodbye message. They haven’t made up their minds about Jibriel and Reynaldo’s conversation.
While the “e” sound in the Hebrew word “ema” and name “Emma” are different, the “ma” sound is very similar. It’s also similar to the “ma” sound in “mama.” It’s also a fairly normal way to address one’s mother.
When they were first learning to talk, Evelyn and Reynaldo often called their mothers “Ma.”
As he grew older, Reynaldo mixed in “Mom” and “Mother,” largely because people usually referred to her as “your mom” or “your mother,” and used those terms for their own mothers. Also, his pronunciation of Hebrew improved, and “ema” became easier to say. “Ma” became something of an in-joke: a way to address her in two languages and by name, and a callback to his childhood, all in one syllable.
When Evelyn was ten and captured by the government, people stopped referring to her mother as “your mother.” If she was mentioned at all, it was as “another subject” or by a number. In general, the people she was allowed to interact with didn’t talk about moms or mothers. “Ma” became something she screamed in desperation whenever an experiment required them to be exposed to each other, and whispered as she cried herself to sleep alone.
Isaac is a competent melee fighter (best with hand-to-hand and swords), and decent at using his powers in combat, but his real strength is in tactics and strategy. This led to him collecting obscure maps of demonic places and learning to draw his own, because knowing and controlling the terrain is excellent advantage in battle.
After some convincing from Reynaldo, he took up cartography as a hobby and then a career. He found that he enjoyed exploring, and that there was a market for maps in the demon community- people like knowing how to find things. He was even hired sometimes by business owners who wanted people to be able to find them more easily.
He mapped a large portion of the Los Angeles underworld before he died.
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Appearance of Rory’s linked journal.
1. While Emily does in fact keep a list/calendar of where she’s been and for how long, attached to a magical touchstone so that she can access it from anywhere/anywhen so...
I broke my computer. I’m not sure how, but it won’t even turn on now. All signs point to the power supply being blown, but I can’t tell for sure. Need to have someone else look...
