Outside, afternoon

[witchfinder_general]

It's not even a week since Father Harman has seen the last infected person, so he feels he ought to wait at least until Monday before going home. However, spending the last week and a half mostly at the library has been very fruitful, but he feels he needs some fresh air and movement.

So, despite the occasional rainshowers, this afternoon finds him walking around the lake, with occasional inroads into the forest, or on the mountainsides. It's all not really that large, but it affords him some hours to ramble, think, and enjoy God's creation under an open sky. Yes, even though this is the magically created outside of a bar situated beyond time, space, or even reality, Father Harman still counts it as God's creation.

Everything is. Except, maybe, vampires.

Comments

[witchfinder_general]

"We caught and neutralised a nuclear physicist that they had turned," Father Harman says.

He shot the thing himself, to prove a point, after it had outlived its usefulness as a captive.

"We can't begin to tell who else they might have either turned or infected, to gain access to nuclear sites."

[street_sparrow]

"...yeah, that's what I was afraid you'd say. I don't suppose you could check everyone who'd be useful to them?"

[witchfinder_general]

"Needle, meet haystack," Father Harman says. "But of course, we have started to do so, as clandestinely as we must. Having access to the less public side of British government program is definitely an advantage."

[street_sparrow]

"Right, because of course you can't tell everyone to stay inside after dark - or would that even bother these vampires? Sometimes they have to be invited in."

[witchfinder_general]

"That is one part of the lore that they unfortunately don't adhere to," Father Harman says. "But GCHQ is instructed to give us what we ask for. They're very useful at these needle-haystack tasks."

[street_sparrow]

Gavroche nods.

"And keeping an eye on people in that line of work would be easy to sell as state security."

[witchfinder_general]

"They are not supposed to ask questions if they receive request from authorised agencies, after all," Father Harman says. "Secrecy demands secrecy; and we are keeping the Code Fives a secret for the moment. Apart from the fact that only they themselves can make people believe in them: we don't need the mass panic. The population is already worried enough about the upcoming millennium and the widespread computer failures expected to happen when the time stamp in those machines flips over. We don't want to have people randomly suspect their neighbours of being either vampires or infected. While full-blown Code Fives are easily vetted, infected humans are a much more ambiguous problem, much less easily identified, and probably more widespread by factor x. We'd have a witch hunt hysteria on our hands."

[street_sparrow]

"For what it's worth, nothing's going to happen with the computers", Gavroche tells him. "At least, it didn't in my world - I don't use them, but I would've noticed if the Upworld was suddenly all in chaos. You're right about the panic, though... can infected humans be cured, before it gets all the way?"

[witchfinder_general]

"Yes," Father Harman says. "Easily so. The sooner we catch it, the better. The infection enters through the vampire's bite; we sterilise the site of the infection with lasers. That is quite enough. And he infection never goes all the way unless the Code Five intentionally drains an infected victim. They use science, but so do we. And they are no cleverer than we are. In fact, some of their plans seem rather long gambits, easily disrupted in the middle part of their execution, once we find out what they are."

[street_sparrow]

"So they only turn people when they really mean to", he summarises. "What happens to the infected, though?"

[witchfinder_general]

"They become very susceptible to suggestion, including the one that they should forget they're being fed on," Father Harman says. "Also, they tend to be averse to sunlight and religious symbols even though they can't actively harm them yet."

[street_sparrow]

"And then the vampire keeps coming back to that one person and making them forget?" He winces. "Not pleasant, any of it."

[witchfinder_general]

"We think every fully fledged Code Five must have a number of infected humans to take turns feeding on," Father Harman says. "We can't even be sure how much they need, and how often they do, and are completely in the dark about the number of infected humans. All we have are informed guesses."

[street_sparrow]

"But it's only Code Fives who can infect humans?" he asks. "Do you know roughly how many of them there are?"

[witchfinder_general]

"No; again, we're left with educated guesses," Father Harman says. "But at the moment, we are talking hundreds, definitely not thousands, worldwide."

[street_sparrow]

"They wouldn't want to have too many", he says thoughtfully. "If they're trying to stay hidden, supply's got to be higher than demand."

[witchfinder_general]

"Supply, at the moment, is roughly six billion," Father Harman says. "Balance that with less than a thousand 'customers', and you have a few grains of uranium hiding in a sea of gravel."

[street_sparrow]

"And a very big world to hunt them down in. I wonder, do they cull themselves, or just limit their numbers by not making more?"

[witchfinder_general]

"We don't know," Father Harman says. "We merely do know that we have a few dozen of them, neutralised, in our vaults."

[street_sparrow]

"Neutralised?" He looks up quickly. "Not dead?"

[witchfinder_general]

"They were already dead," Father Harman points out. "And what's more, they can regenerate."

[street_sparrow]

"So you keep the... ashes?... contained in your vault." He doesn't look entirely pleased with the idea. "I hope they're not conscious like that, but there's probably no way to know."

[witchfinder_general]

"No way to know," Father Harman says. "We have only ever witnessed one regeneration, but before that, there had been rumours about Code Fives returning that had been 'dusted'."

[street_sparrow]

"How did it happen? The regeneration?"

[witchfinder_general]

Father Harman briefly hesitates.

"Another vampire's blood was dropped onto the ashes," he then ventures.

It's not as if they could replicate it in another world if he speaks the secret out loud. Everybody's vampires are different.