tampered | Log: Ongoing

Current Mood: patient

Log: Ongoing

When: June 6, evening
Rating: General for now?
Characters: Julius Belmont [

favored_son]
Summary: Two vampire hunters, a crypt, and a conversation.
Log:

The City was relatively quiet again with the passing of the latest curse. D had found the chaos of the preceeding day onerous, to say the least. First had come the parasite's incessant rambling and repeated attempts to do things he was Not Allowed to Do, and then the matter with Doris trying to get as far from D as possible, followed by the matter of what was happening to the younger version of his father.

The parasite was behaving itself now, but D knew it was only a matter of time before the creature found a new avenue for its enjoyment. As he waited at the crypt in Xanadu, he hoped that the meeting with Julius Belmont would not provide that avenue.

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D raised an eyebrow. "Howso?"

"The first is a very simple reason: Death is overwhelmingly powerful. The second is that if he appears, his master is likely to be close behind him."

"Dracula."

Julius reached into his pocket and pulled out a pipe and a small knife. "Dracula. And with him comes something far, far worse."

"Worse than Dracula?" The parasite sounded less than thrilled.

"The demon castle, Castlevania."

"I really don't like this, D ... "

"Then be quiet and go to sleep." The hunter's threat was clear in the sparseness of his words, despite the lack of emotion in his tone. "Tell me about the castle."

"Well, you're in the business," Julius said as filled his pipe with tobacco. "You know how a place can take on the emotions of it? Mass graves or killing fields, for example, can't go near 'em. You can feel the death and the murder."

D nodded. He had yet to sit down or even lean against a headstone. "I know. Even if I weren't a hunter, I would feel it."

"Imagine a place where, for centuries, a bored vampire had kidnapped loved ones to lure would-be-hunters to their deaths to provide meager entertainment. Imagine that this place then bore witness to three acts of unbelievable betrayal, one act of unimaginably tragic sacrifice, and an act of untold of heresy, all within the space of one night. Four hundred years later, it bears witness to a birth and, shortly after, a tragic, meaningless death. One so horrific that it made a vampire curse not just God, but man. Can you imagine what that would do to a place?"

"I can." D had watched his father fall into madness after Integral died, watched the rise of a kingdom that should never have been, walked the soil saturated with innocent human blood by a race that was nearly as mad as its king, drunk on their own power. In his world, that evil had been spread across the continents, a slow-acting poison. The acts Julius had described, concentrated into a single location of supernatural significance in such a relatively brief span of time, had the potential to twist it into the sort of place even the Nobility would hesitate to enter.

"The thing is alive," Julius said, lighting his pipe. "There's no way to tell if it has a consciousness or not, but it's a creature of pure chaos. It changes every time it appears, and those unprepared, those of us not in the business? It can drive those poor innocents irrevocably insane."

In a way, Julius' description of the castle reminded D of his father's captive souls. He had never seen them fully unleashed, but he had felt them, and he had heard the stories. "You don't think the City can prevent him from manifesting Castlevania if he is drawn into this reality."

Julius shrugged. "I don't know. I don't know much about this City, or its rules. But it's entirely possible that it won't matter what the City prevents Dracula from doing, the Castle will just manifest itself wherever he appears. It has become it's own entity. I often think Dracula did not control it so much as it controlled him."

D frowned, the first fully-realized expression of the evening. "Can he be stopped if the only hunter here from his world is you?"

"Well, that depends on two things," Julius said. "Whether I'm going it alone and how permanent you want him to be stopped."

"You would not be alone, not if he presented a threat to others here."

"And he would," Julius said. "He's not the peaceful type. And yes, I could stop him. The problem would be getting to him, and the more people swarming the castle, the easier it would be. Keeping him down permanently? I can't do that alone. There's only one way that's been found to seal away the castle for good, and I can't do it."

"A way will be found to subdue him should it be required. You are no longer limited to the resources of your world."

"Well, just to give you an idea as to what was required to seal away Castlevania?" Julius said as he tapped out the ashes in his pipe. "The priests of the sacred Hakuba Shrine had to perform an incredibly complex ritual in combination with the greatest exorcists of the Vatican. This had to be done on one day, and one day only, to seal it away into a solar eclipse."

"I don't think Hellsing has that in their bag of tricks, D," the parasite said.

"No," D agreed, "but it would be wise to be prepared for the eventuality. A maddened Dracula tends to have a detrimental effect on the population."

"I imagine he'll want to restart his crusade to exterminate humanity."

"He'll find himself faced with some rather outspoken opposition."

"I imagine he will. He always has. His own son has fought against him."

"Another common theme," D noted.

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