good morning starshine!

[DIANA EVELYN AMBROSE]

[/i] powerful and she thought she pulled it off quite well.

After she had sat up and looked down at Ricky she realized his eyes had not opened. "Hey, I know you're awake there's no use pretending, get up!" she ordered as she threw her bat onto her immaculate bed and walked over to her closet where she pulled clothes out to dress for the day. She'd showered in the a joining bath last night and threw her clothes over the screen that served as her dressing room. [/ul]


this post is for RICKY!

[RICHARD BRADLEY BOONE]

Ricky did dream. He didn't do it often, but when he did, the dreams were vivid and uncontrollable, taking their own course even when he experienced them in the full awareness that he was dreaming. It was as if someone flipped a switch inside his head that turned on a television set, and he couldn't make it go away unless the dream played itself out. Disturbing, perhaps, but he was almost used to it by now, and it took a pretty disturbing dream to bother him.

Nevertheless, the fingers of the hand Diana was holding were tightly closed around the edge of the hand she had somehow placed around his, and when he first opened his eyes and hers were closed, he shut them again tightly, waiting for her to stir. He always felt so alone when he was awake and she was sleeping...like she had left him for her own dream world and all he could do was wait for her to come back to him. Once she spoke, though, he let his eyes slide open again, and sat up in bed in a freakishly abrupt manner, almost (ironically) like a reanimated corpse rising out of the grave.

"I'm up, I'm up." he protested, reaching up to unbutton the shirt of his pajamas. They were a little old-fashioned (read 'hopelessly out of date') and were white with mint green and blue plaid print, and a moment later, they were on the floor. "Di, don't look, I'm not dressed." Like she was going to look anyway. "Quit looking!" He knew full well that she wasn't looking, but as he pulled on his pants, shirt, and fastened his suspenders, he cast a furtive glance over his shoulder anyway. Well, she was behind that screen of hers. She was such a girl, seriously. Like he was going to start ogling her while she was dressing or something.

Because that wasn't what he used the nightstand for, or anything, to peer over the screen. Not today, anyway. He peered around the edge of it, shielding his eyes with his hands in an entirely inefficient manner that did nothing to keep her from his line of sight.

"Golly, would you hurry up? You're taking forever. And those are probably the ugliest underpants I've ever seen. People don't wear those these days, Di. What if you got in an accident and they had to cut your clothes off and..." Well, that wasn't making much sense, so he stopped. It had been sound advice when his mother had told it to him some sixty five years ago, but it really didn't apply to vampires.

[DIANA EVELYN AMBROSE]

[/i] cut off my clothes they won't live long enough to tell anyone what I was wearing under my clothes..."[/color] she cast a look in the mirror anyway, she hadn't thought her undergarment were that bad, but they didn't look anything like what the underwear models wear. Still, no one was looking under her clothes today. She'd just have to go to Ze'Posh later and get something more...age appropriate.

After tossing her night shirt at his face she pulled on her dress slacks and buttoned up her charcoal colored oxford. Next came her shoes and finally she was dressed, pushing Ricky out of her way towards the door so they could get on with their day. "Not to rub anything in or something like that, but you do realize that you are wearing suspenders right? I'm just saying that the rock and roll hillbilly look is totally out, you should go for the suit and tie crooner jive..." She was always trying to get him to dress more respectable. It hadn't worked yet. But she decided that the day he actually started dressing the way she wanted him to marked the day he stopped hiding under her counter which marked the day that she could wear a proper skirt! She knew exactly what she wanted to wear, she'd bought it on sale and it was so fabulous looking she knew that she would look fantastic in it. She knew the shirt and shoes she was going to wear with it too, it was going to be a time to remember! For now though she would have to do with what other staples were in her closet.

Shoving him out the door she started walking down the long hall to the stairway passing other rooms. "Ugh I am hungry" she said as she stretched again and grinned as a hand strayed under her shirt to scratch her stomach mouth opening to reveal sharp canines driven out of hiding at the prospect of blood. "I couldn't do an animal diet, I need humans, fuck deer I want a truck driver I think..." she said more to herself than anyone else, but knew that Ricky would comment on it anyway and that was fine with her. "Are you going to the club today or the soda fountain?" she asked, not remembering what he told her yesterday before they went to sleep. Usually her memory was fantastic but right before sunup she was notorious for forgetting things. She did remember that he wasn't working in her shop today because he was working there tomorrow...unless she could talk him into another shift....[/ul]

[RICHARD BRADLEY BOONE]

Hmph. Maybe she didn't look, but she should have. Ricky was sure of it. There were all those crazy teenage girls back in the fifties who would have traded their poodle skirts to see him walk around in nothing but his boxers (yes, he was into normal person boxers now and not whatever weird thing they had been wearing back in the fifties, a lesson he thought Diana would do well to learn.) She threw her shirt at him, and it landed on his head before he pulled it off. It smelled like...um, it smelled like Diana, which was...comforting, or something. Whatever. He threw the shirt across the room, where it landed on the dresser.

She really did have impeccable fashion sense or something. Whatever it was, Ricky appreciated it, primarily because his own idea of a 'cool' outfit usually involved either a. suspenders, b. feathers, or c. shoes with heels way too high to be worn by a heterosexual male. Honestly, he probably would have been shunned by the fashion police long before now if it hadn't been for Diana's advice, which he outwardly scorned, then adjusted his wardrobe in response to (most of the time. He wasn't willing to give up the suspenders yet).

"Hey, if I didn't wear these," he pointed out, "how would I be able to do this?" He tucked his thumbs under the suspenders at his waistline, and rocked forwards onto his toes, then back onto his heels. Why anyone would want to do that, he did not elaborate, but it was true enough that you couldn't duplicate it without the suspenders. He waited before she finished dressing, then looked her over. "I like your shirt," he said, finally, because for all his shortcomings, he could be nice every now and then.

He wasn't sure where he was going today, but he wasn't going to tell her that. If he didn't know where he was going, she'd make him work in the store. And he'd done that yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that, practically his whole life.

"Soda fountain," he replied, smiling. "There are tourists coming in tonight. They reserved eighteen seats." He looked at the ground, and rubbed at the back of his neck before looking back up with a rather mischievous expression on his face. "Maybe they'll only need seventeen." He could grab someone right after they got out of the bus, or when they went in the bathroom alone...the possibilities were endless. "You should come with me," he suggested. "Maybe they'll only need sixteen."

[DIANA EVELYN AMBROSE]

[/color] she grinned. "A little anemia never hurt anyone and I think I'm craving some olives...and french fries..." she said as she raised her eyes towards the ceiling, feet traveling with grace and precision down the stairs. "I am not looking forward to tonight at all, I hate it when the tourist season starts, everything just gets crazy and why do we even have a tourist season for that matter?!" she added in disgust as she walked past a few other coven members. She wasn't an animated speaker but rather used her voice to convey several different emotions at once...usually annoyance.

She didn't stop to talk to anyone else but rather walked out the front door onto the porch and down to the sidewalk. "What time do you have to be at the soda fountain? I just want to make sure if I need to move this box I put under the counter in your space..." she shot at him with a smirk, when Ricky was working with her it was easier to keep him out of trouble than when he wandered around himself. "Oh which reminds me, if you are singing tonight try and not do any of your songs, last time you did that I thought the others were gonna kill you. It's bad enough that that book came out!" she muttered. That book was just...well it wasn't BADLY written it was just bad news for everyone on Mercy, and sensibilities, she should know, she was the record keeper and it annoyed her that the facts were all wrong.

Especially the parts about Ricky, they were just trash because frankly he would never fight off ten lycans at once with just a guitar. No one had fought off ten lycans single-handedly, hell the most she and Acheson had handled together was six! The book was dribble and she'd have burned the copy she read except it hadn't belonged to her....but she still really wanted to. In fact some days she felt like she would buy every copy she could find and just have a huge bonfire. Not that she normally endorsed the burning of books but when it had anything to do with her family...then yes...yes she did.[/ul]

[RICHARD BRADLEY BOONE]

French fries, interesting. Ricky had lost his taste for french fries a long time ago. Mainly because he'd had a mouthful of french fries when he'd headed outside the diner to have a smoke the night he'd been stolen away from his life and brought into all of this. Not that he resented that, particularly, it was just that...he was okay with his life after that night but that night itself wasn't one of his fonder memories. He'd had plenty of good times as a vampire, but becoming one was far from the most pleasant thing he'd ever experienced.

A box. In his place. He wasn't sure which bothered him more, the fact that she assumed he'd come over there and just park under the counter (he only did that when someone was bothering him, for heaven's sake) or that she would put a box in there. What was he supposed to do if he was in some kind of danger? what if someone was chasing him and he ran in and then all of a sudden there was a damn box where he was supposed to be hiding? He could die! Then she'd feel bad, wouldn't she? Yes. She would. He told himself that emphatically.

"Hey," he protested, following after her, "That book is not my fault. I did not stalk that girl's dreams. I didn't. She dreamed it up on her own. Or someone told her or something. I didn't say anything. You know I wouldn't say anything."

And it was entirely unfair that he couldn't do his own songs. It felt so...amateur to do someone else's music. Like he was some shabby cover artist not clever enough to come up with his own material.

"But they like my songs," he said, his voice trailing off in an almost-whine. "What about Radio Smile? Can't I do that? I can do the acoustic version, they won't even get it. Please?"

[DIANA EVELYN AMBROSE]

"I know you didn't." she said quietly with a smile as they kept walking. "I don't imagine that you would lurk at some poor girls window like some big, giant lurking thing." she grinned. She would have been more eloquent but she was hungry and a bit distracted by his whining. Why did he have to look like such an adorable helpless kid when he whined? If she had any more motherly instincts she'd embarrass herself by pinching his cheeks. Yes, even though he'd been older than her when turned and was 80 years old as a vampire now he was still such a kid. Yes, a kid. She thought for a moment about his request. "Why don't you just write new songs? You're a singer right? Then write something new and you can sing your old songs again." she told him. "The last time you sang a song of yours I swear to god everyone was claiming they saw a ghost and by everyone I mean all those horribly old tourists that want to relive their youth." she snapped.

"Maybe I'll chomp one of them, old people die on vacation all the time right? Besides if I don't kill them then they'll suffer and that's just mean." she reasoned out loud as they continued down the street towards the shop. The keys jingled in her pocket as she continued towards The Crypt and wondered how many gawking kids would walk through her shop. She hated that more than anything, really she did. Stupid tourist kids with their...well, usually their parents would buy something but often it was hard to steer them towards something they NEEDED to be rather than wanted to buy. The last time she had sold something to someone when she knew it didn't belong with them they had ended up murdered and the object had come back to her anyway. She hadn't felt bad about that sale because she was ready to kill their obstinate ass anyway so it really just worked out.

"Oh hey, is that the bus you were talking about?" she asked curiously looking at the large tour bus proclaiming that it was a "GHOST TOUR" and promised "spooks around every corner!" She snickered at the ridiculousness of it all. She was dead that didn't make her a ghost.

[RICHARD BRADLEY BOONE]

Hah, Ricky, lurk at someone's window? Not likely. He was normally too busy worrying over whether there was anyone lurking outside his window. Sad, yes, but true. The fact was, Ricky hadn't ever found anything that had put the fear of God in him, anything that had ever made him feel like he could lose everything he had. Nothing that had taken him to that borderline and left him teetering on the edge until he finally got up the courage to step away from it himself. He hadn't found that bravery yet, because it hadn't been required of him. Even when his immortality had been questioned, there had always been something to stand between him and the darkness of real death. That something was usually Diana, and thought it is sad to say so, there were definitely times he took that for granted, that protection, that insulation that kept him from the harsh reality of the older individuals of his kind.

"But," he protested, "Old people taste gross. Like perfume and cough syrup and that shellac stuff they put on cars. It's disgusting." Plus, he liked it, just a little, when people thought he was the Real Ricky Boone. More than that, he liked it when people shared their fond memories of the Real Ricky Boone. He didn't have so many of those that he'd made for himself, after all, before his chance to make them had been stolen away.

He followed her glance towards the tour bus, which was, in fact, the one he'd had in mind. Really, it was. Odd coincidence, that.

"Yeah!" he agreed readily, "see, if those people go missing, the only people who are gonna wonder where they went are the people who are already so crazy to begin with that nobody'll take 'em seriously when they say 'Oh, heavens, Jocelyn was on her way back from the soda shop and a terrible vampire leaped from the shadows and stole her away!' even if they did see enough to say something like that. You know what I mean?"

[DIANA EVELYN AMBROSE]

"Indeed..." Diana answered without really listening to what he was saying. Her eye had been caught by a not so elderly older man that she was contemplating on making her first meal of the night. She tried not to kill anymore, that would just get awkward and mess with the terms of the treaty set down after the war. Still, in her mind some people just needed to die. Criminals, the terminally ill, and the small, annoying children that touched everything in her store. But the older man wasn't dying he just looked tasty and she had an odd affinity for older men, she blamed Lionel. It was hard to like men her own age when he made being older look so damn god. Still it could never be so she sought attention elsewhere, from Howl mostly. It hadn't occurred to her that Ricky was technically "older" since he acted like he was way younger than her anyway, it must be a time thing, she felt far more mature than a lot of people these days.

"Well, lets go then, remember, don't kill anyone or we'll be in trouble, there's a younger woman over there you can chomp on." she pointed to a rather pretty young woman holding the door open for the shuffling seniors. "Why are they even up at this hour? I thought octogenarians went to bed at like four in the afternoon..." she said with some disgust, completely ignoring the fact that she of course slept all day and was far older than any of those people would ever wish they could be. What she didn't add was that if Ricky did anything else with the girl she was going to kill her regardless and dump the body in the lake, with weights on, so the fish could eat her before the bones sank into the muck....like perhaps some other women that might have gone missing around the town over the last eighty years. She knew she had issues, she just didn't want to do anything about them.

As the two neared the soda fountain regardless of the fact that they were originally heading for her shop she looked over and up to Ricky wondering what he was going to do. Then she wondered what she would do later if he was going to be at the soda fountain. Get some reading done most likely, and she had to catalog some pieces that just came in last night, but first she had to do down to the post office to get them since they couldn't very well deliver at night. Good thing she had the inventory sheets in such good order, it was easy to find and mark off what she no longer had. The important thing was to start out from the beginning with a system that worked. Now she didn't have to worry about scattered notes, or misplaced items...at least until Ricky played a prank or something which he was known to occasionally do.

[RICHARD BRADLEY BOONE]

He could have been offended, or whatever, that she wasn't actually paying that much attention to him, but to be honest, a whole lot of people didn't pay that much attention to Ricky. He was fine with that. He thought it made him much more dangerous in the long run if people just dismissed him. If no one expected you to do anything noteworthy, you could do some pretty ballsy things in a sneaky manner and chances were nobody else would even notice. At least, that was what he told himself. If he spent too long dwelling on how people underestimated him, he might start to get some kind of inferiority complex, and really, no one wanted that. If they thought he was irksome now, it could only be infinitely worse if he was walking around, moping about feeling sorry for himself.

He glanced in the direction Diana indicated, considering the girl in question. She didn't look familiar; maybe she was a tour guide. She looked tasty enough, he thought, pressing his lips together. But if he killed the tour guide, then all of these aged folks would be milling around in Mercy until another tour guide could come along to drive them back to whatever nursing home they'd come from, and everyone would probably blame Ricky for it, especially if these were seniors who could recognize him at any point in time. With his luck, they'd all start asking for autographs and then he'd have to spend three days straight under Diana's counter.

Maybe it was just best to wait and follow her lead. Such was the case in a lot of Ricky's pursuits. If it weren't for Diana's example, he (and a lot of other people, come to think of it) would probably be dead by now.

"It's only dinner time," he told her, although it was, in truth, pretty late. Early for them, but more...bedtime snack time for the masses. The days were getting shorter, and darkness was coming sooner and sooner in the evenings. That was one of the perks of the cooler months, although Ricky himself had always preferred summer nights to any other time of the year, probably because summer nights were shorter and therefore seemed more valuable.

He felt a little twinge of guilt at having misled her before - he didn't actually have any particular plans at the soda fountain, and that would become apparent if she stuck around more than a few minutes. Maybe he should at least offer to help her with whatever thing at the store. If Ricky had been inclined to breathe, he probably would have sighed, but he wasn't, so instead, he just tucked his hands into his pockets and looked at the ground.

"Do you um...need any help? I could...just wait. I'm not that hungry, and I don't want to feed on her anyway," he said, nodding towards the girl holding the door open. "They'd probably miss her if something happened and then they'd all be stuck here."