"Slumming it?" I turned around and tried to school my features. I probably should have been spending my time trying to track down where those photos had come from, or perhaps trying to get an audience with Arachne. But honestly, for my own sanity, I needed to be among friends, away from it all. Sadly, the vaguely taunting voice wasn't someone I considered amongst them. It was high, catty, and full of contempt. It belonged to a vampiress I did my very best to avoid, named Madeline. Her voice was like claws down a chalkboard for me. I had hoped she'd have opted out of coming to this particular gathering, though I had known it was possible she might be in attendance.
All cultures and subcultures had their tropes about some sort of vampiric, demonic or otherworldly creatures. Every religion, demonization, and spiritual path. And the wide and varied subcultures of the human world harbored small havens of refuge among humans that found our habits less unusual than their more genteel brethren might. And it wasn't just true for the vampiric sort. A number of Crypti had sought the refuge of LARPing, Cosplay, Goth, BDSM, Cirque, Burlesque, Sci-fi, Furry, Horrorfest, Ren and Fantasy Faire... any number of off-beat subcultures of human society by pretending to be exactly what they were. It allowed them to lie about being themselves.
Older Crypti resented this method of human interaction. They called it both dangerous and foolish, saying it took only one unhinged human to actually forget we were all supposed to be "pretending"... or worse, we would. But most of the Elders were thinking of The Dark Ages where humans were a whole lot more gullible and naïve than they were now, and their natural inclination toward skepticism and banality would never allow them to accept anything less than an elaborate fantasy.
All those television shows where some supernatural creature outs itself to a girl have varying levels of believability. Take that tween vampire/werewolf angst fest that was popular not too long ago? Boy says he's a glitter-pated disco ball vampire and girl is like "take me now!" Yeah... no. Same series: other boy fur-bombs in front of her from cut cutie to snarling ball of razor-fuzz and she's like.. "Cool trick, broseph." I'm sorry, no. She would have had a heart attack. Or fainted. At the
very
least there would have been a clean-up on aisle five! Closer would be that one show where the humans actually do know people like us exist... and they're so filled with horror at all the ugliness they see, they're a little brain-dead from all the conditioning, mental manipulation and straight-up mind-fucking that all they can do is either be polite little puppets or twitching little stress moppets.
But if you're not on the greatest of terms with your own people, you know that telling the "regs" (regular, non-Crypti people) that they'd either think you're insane, want to murder you or go utterly insane themselves, if only from the pressure of that knowledge
alone
, where do you go to just be you? Why, a place where a fictional version of you still exists. I knew werewolves, undead, human and mage alike that were huge online fantasy game fans. They got to sit behind an avatar that was very like them, and get to be addressed as their true selves, with no one the wiser of who was on the other side of that computer screen and keyboard...
Those of us who could "pass" (for human without betraying what we were on sight), we indulged ourselves in more hands-on environments. And for most of us, it wasn't merely a way to connect and be seen as we truly were. It was also our own, private, carefully tended picnic basket and hunting ground. At least, that was how creatures like Madeline saw it. I didn't get involved with her hunting because she was careful and didn't overly indulge and made sure that none of her feeds ever remembered anything more than a simple roleplay scene that seemed eerily realistic.
Don't get me wrong... I wasn't comfortable with it. I tried
