Encore

Surfacing

This time, when they step out from behind the statue, Alucard doesn't immediately put it back. Instead, he points without quite touching to the tiny detail of a ring on the left hand. "Pressing that opens the passageway," he tells them, like anyone, ever, was going to work that out.

"Oh!" Sypha says. Alucard steps back as she reaches to depress the even tinier carved stone of the ring. The statue swings back into place. "How clever. Is it magic, or like the smokeless lights?"

"Neither, it's balanced such that -"

"Who cares, none of us ever came back here," Trevor interrupts.

"You're exceptionally bad at the pretense of future knowledge," Alucard claims.

"Just because it was your plan to crawl back down there doesn't mean it happened. Even that turned out to be too much effort for you."

"It's nearly dawn," Sypha interjects. "We should get moving before the sun rises."

"I'm unharmed by sunlight," Alucard tells her. Trevor didn't believe him then and he's seen nothing to change his mind. Halfbreeds might not outright burn but they're still said to keep indoors or to nighttime, and Alucard's behavior matched up well enough.

"Oh. Good. In that case, I'd like to go to my family first. They've been hiding down in the catacombs with that cyclops all night." She adds, "Belmont suggested it."

Alucard nods. "I should see it myself. That entrance was sealed off decades ago."

Walking through Gresit's not as bad as it really had been since there's a lot fewer bodies scattered about. There's still all the corpses from the attacks in prior day, though. Alucard pauses on the bridge and looks over the side where the bodies are piled up in the river.

The sooner they get out of here the better.

Trevor is about to bring up leaving, and a wagon, and convincing Alucard to hop everything over the walls for them, when a horrible thought occurs to him. He grabs Sypha's shoulder and gestures at her to keep walking. "Sypha," he hisses. "You remember the...person, I said was going to be killed by demons."

"You mean the -"

"Shh! " He gestures frantically to Alucard, still contemplating the bodies, or the river, or fuck knows. "I just realized. What if gloating actually did something, what if he actually listened to me, and now he's still running around up here. What if that's what I fucked up. Because it's wrong to gloat." That made sense, right? Doing something God didn't like would make things worse. "Because those other ones were supposed to die in the mob only there wasn't a mob, so what if he's still around too."

"I would not think ill of anything a person might do, under such circumstances."

"No, the problem is -" He gestures at Alucard again. "Never said anything about getting - " Trevor stops and tries to reroute the sentence, because 'revenge' is pretty unambiguous. Justice? Basically the same thing. "I really don't understand what... I mean, wouldn't killing the guy be the first thing to do? But he was still here. Because they didn't know about him? Or was that on purpose, or something? I don't know if it'd be reopening old wounds or something."

"It wouldn't be right to hide it, though... Or worse, if that man shows up without warning -"

It's funny...he'd intended to drag the guy to Alucard back then. Prove a point to them all about what a vampire was, find out just how much self-control the monster he was stuck working with had. Now he desperately doesn't want to find out. "What if, you two stay here, and I go check. Make sure it's not a problem." Certainly everyone made it clear they expected it from him and weren't about to get in his way.