milliways_bar | (no subject)

She shrugs. "Thanks I get. People know who I am, and if they can afford it, they might give me free stuff, but usualyl they just can't, which is fine.

"It's not like the Slayers before me, who had to keep a secret identity."

"Hm," Boromir says, for as a noble he has rarely had to worry about provisions--only where they can be acquired while travelling. "I suppose it would be wise to hide one's identity if to be discovered would endanger them further."

"The lurks already know. Their leader... he knows me."

"Lurks." He is about ready to throw up his hands and declare himself done with this place. Nothing makes sense.

Ooops.

"Sorry. Slang in my time for vampire."

"Oh.

"Are there other kinds of monsters in your world, or only vampires?"

"No, we have other demons," she says. "Vamps are just the most common, and even they're part demon.

"And then there's primals: werewolves and the like. But they're not so bad. Just animals, really, only very dangerous ones."

"Hm," Boromir muses. "We have many kinds of monsters, some of which are older than memory. That is what I fight, mostly, driving them out of my homeland."

"Into someone else's?" she asks, frowning.

"Back into their own."

"Right, that'll work," she says. "Demons in our world don't really have a homeland as such, they're from different worlds altogether. We either kill them or send them back there. A couple of centuries ago, a Slayer sent all demons back into one of the Hell dimensions. But just recently, they've started coming back. "

"The orcs--the creatures that are trying to invade my homeland--they are from a neighboring country called Mordor. There is little there to sustain life, but that, I think, is mostly because orcs neither sow nor till, but only ravage and steal."

"What's sow and till?" Mel asks, still eating her waffle, and mentally making note of the tone of voice he used for 'steal'.

"Sowing seeds and tilling soil. Farming." He looks at her curiously. "Does your world not have farms?"

She frowns, considering this.

"Oh, where the food comes from? Yeah, I think w'eve got some farms inland. Most of it's imported though."

She gives a sheepish smile.

"I'm a city kid, myself."

"Yes, where the food comes from." He's far too polite to laugh, though there is perhaps a twinkle in his eye now.

She mock-scowls with a twinkle in her own eye.

"Hey, when you have several hundred million people living in an area fifty miles across, you tend not to see a lot of the countryside."

He blinks at her. "Why would you live so enclosed? I cannot imagine that vast a number of people, and certainly not in a tiny space. Is it too dangerous to live farther apart?"

She smirks.

"No room, is there? Lots of people, tiny little planet."

"Indeed? Is your world smaller than average?"

She shrugs.

"What's average?"

"I know we used to have wide rolling countrysides; we used to have building one or two storeys high, instead of one or two hundred; we used to live next door to each other instead of on top, but now, there's just too many people, clustered in the cities for economic reasons more'n anything else."

"I would not like to live in such a place," Boromir decides. "I like the open fields and mountains, even if they are often dangerous to cross. There is so much beauty in my world. I would hate to see it overrun." He frowns. "That is why we have been fighting in my world. To keep the land alive."

"Seems a rather extreme form of population control."

"No, not population control. The orcs, as I said, do not grow or build. They steal and they use, and when they are done they move on. They would take my city and strip it of its beauty, kill my people and eat their flesh, wipe out the race of men. And then move into the next country and do the same.

"They are parasites. Nothing more."

"Like demons," she agrees, finishing her coffee.

"So you fight them with just your weapons and training? No mystical talents or anything?"