WAR: WIIGF 15 (Patreon)

Luigi's apartment was a whole universe away from the South Docks.All brown wood walls, the place was more like a comfy suite than a regular apartment up in Bludhaven’s downtown. More than anything, it was far enough from the harbor that the fish-rot-and-vampire-dust perfume of last night was no longer stuck in his nose. 

Still had him grasping at more questions, like… a bunch of questions. One of them was pretty obvious; his best friend lived alone, which was weird now that Ken was actually thinking about it. Why's nobody ever questioned that?

Especially at school where teachers got all up in your business about everything from attendance to whether you ate breakfast that morning.

Questions for later.

Ken was all sprawled out, his body half-sunk in a lumpy armchair with a pattern on it that probably used to be cool back when Ma was still listening to Nirvana or whatever. A thick old dusty book open in his lap, the teenager had been busy reading ever since school had finished up for the day. 

The Monster Manual. 

The thing had appeared out of nowhere last week, right after he and Weeg had dusted dozens of baby vamps in that old fishery warehouse.

The book was big enough, but  on the inside too, which was still a trick his brain refused to accept without feeling like it was gonna short-circuit. The pages were thin, like Bible paper more than anything else,, filled with dense words with plenty of “thees” and “thines”. On top of all that, there were plenty of brutally realistic anatomical drawings like the ones in his mom’s nursing textbooks but old-timey.

He'd spent the last hour just... reading. Absorbing. 

Sharingan made the whole process feel like a cheat code he'd stumbled on, information not so much learned as downloaded, slotting directly into his brain so solidly it made his own memories feel flimsy in comparison. Like saving over your game file with someone else's.

He read about the nine ranks of vampire, starting from the feral stupid-as-a-bag-of-hammers Newborns even a regular gym rat could handle, all the way up to the mythical god-tier Ancestors that were over fifteen hundred years old.