It is afternoon, about 103F(39C) degrees, and the sky is covered by dark grey stormclouds. It’s raining. The mist is heaviest At Mayflower and Prospect/span

The rain pounds against the ancient stone walls of the alley, but something feels wrong about the downpour here in Highgate. Roberta stands beneath the carved cornices, water streaming off the intricate reliefs above, when a woman’s voice cuts through the storm from deeper in the narrow passage.

“Please, I can’t… I can’t make it stop!” The voice cracks with desperation, followed by uncontrollable sobbing that seems to echo strangely off the smooth walls.

Around the corner, a figure hunches against the far wall – a middle-aged woman in a soaked business suit, her hands pressed against her temples. She rocks back and forth, tears mixing with rainwater on her face. Around her neck glints something silver, catching what little light filters through the storm clouds.

But it’s not just her distress that’s unsettling. As Roberta watches, she might notice her own emotions beginning to fluctuate oddly – waves of inexplicable sadness, then sudden spikes of anxiety that don’t seem to belong to her. The very air in the alley feels charged with more than just the approaching storm, thick with an emotional weight that presses against the mind like a physical presence.

The woman looks up, her eyes wild and unfocused. “Can you feel it too?” she gasps. “Everyone’s pain… it’s all inside my head…”

Roberta says “Elliot. “

Approaching steadily, hands in full view, Roberta makes her way towards the woman. Dressed as she is, Roberta is out of place here, ball gown and opera gloves, but in this situation, she’s the aid this woman has

That may not be so good for this poor unfortunate. Never the less, Roberta steps closer.

Emotions are interesting to Roberta. Her vampiric state makes them interesting at the best of times, but here, they are amplified. Roberta smiles. It’s almost friendly, but not quite. Never the less, Roberta offers the suited woman a hand. “I feel it.” Roberta assures her. “The pain, the sorrow, the confusion. But before I can help you, I need to know when this started. Can you do that for me? Can you tell me?”

Naturally, Roberta thinks it’s the woman’s jewellery. That silver piece is too obvious for it to not be, but there’s a story here, and Roberta needs to hear it to try a resolution.

The woman’s eyes lock onto Roberta’s face with desperate relief, as if she’s been drowning and just spotted a lifeline. Her breathing hitches as she tries to compose herself enough to speak coherently.

“Six days,” she manages between ragged breaths. “It started six days ago when I found this.” Her trembling fingers brush against the silver locket at her throat. “I work at the estate auction house on Elm Street. Someone brought in a collection from an old sanitarium that closed down decades ago. This was mixed in with some medical equipment.”

As she speaks, the emotional pressure in the alley intensifies. Roberta can feel layers of sensation washing over her – not just the woman’s terror and confusion, but echoes of other emotions that seem to come from nowhere. Grief that tastes like copper pennies. Rage that burns like fever. Joy so sharp it cuts.

“At first it was wonderful,” the woman continues, her voice taking on an almost dreamy quality despite her distress. “I could understand everyone so perfectly. My daughter’s teenage angst, my husband’s work stress, even strangers on the street. I felt like I was finally, truly connected to humanity.”

She presses her palms harder against her temples. “But now… God, now I can’t tell what’s mine anymore. I feel every heartbreak in a three-block radius. Every argument, every moment of despair. And there’s something else, something hungry that feeds on it all.”

The carved symbols on the shutters above seem to pulse faintly in the storm light, and the rain itself carries whispers of emotion – phantom sobs and sighs that drift on the wind.

Roberta nods understandingly– The albino is all sweetness and light, the innocent observer– The hero come to save this woman.

Another step closer and Roberta’s smile widens. The pain, the anger, the joy. Roberta’s fangs bud. They’re all too ready to extend at this sensation. Roberta enjoys all of it. This is a game for Roberta, and she’s having fun playing the heroin.

Roberta is not a hero of any kind. Soothingly, Roberta holds out a hand for the woman to take. It’s a tender gesture, kind, thoughtful, considerate. It’s an offered lifeline, and unknown to the woman, a threat.

“What’s your name?” Roberta asks her, an eye on the locket. “And as a followup, have you tried removing the locket?”

The woman reaches out instinctively toward Roberta’s offered hand, her fingers shaking violently. “Sarah,” she whispers. “Sarah Chen. And yes, God yes, I’ve tried to take it off.”

Her free hand claws at the silver chain around her neck, leaving red scratches on her skin. “The clasp won’t budge. It’s like it’s fused shut, or… or like it doesn’t want to let go.” Her voice drops to a horrified whisper. “Sometimes I swear I can feel it moving against my skin, like it’s alive.”

As Sarah’s fingertips brush against Roberta’s palm, the emotional maelstrom in the alley suddenly intensifies tenfold. The locket flares with that pearl-rose iridescence, and for a moment, both women are hit with a crushing wave of overlapping sensations – decades of accumulated anguish, longing, and desperate hunger all compressed into a single instant.

But there’s something else now, something that seems to recognize Roberta’s nature. The hungry presence that Sarah mentioned stirs with sudden interest, as if it’s detected a kindred appetite for human emotion and experience.

The rain begins to fall in strange patterns around them, droplets seeming to curve and spiral in the air before hitting the ground. The carved reliefs overhead shift more noticeably now, the winged figures appearing to turn their stone heads toward the two women below.

Sarah’s grip tightens on Roberta’s hand. “There’s something in there with me,” she gasps. “Something that’s been waiting so long to feel again. And now that you’re here… it’s excited.”

the same woman screaming, clawing at her throat, orderlies restraining her as she babbles about “feeling everything, everyone, always.”

The emotional pressure becomes almost unbearable. Sarah doubles over, still gripping Roberta’s hand, as waves of foreign feelings crash through both of them. But now there’s a voice threading through the chaos – ancient, weary, and desperately lonely.

The carved symbols on the shutters above begin to bleed a thin, silver substance that runs down the stone walls like tears. The wildflowers growing between the cobblestones wither and blacken in seconds, as if something is draining the very life from the alley.

Sarah looks up at Roberta with eyes that are no longer entirely her own, the irises flickering between brown and silver. “It wants to trade,” she whispers in a voice layered with harmonics that don’t belong to her throat. “It’s dying in me… but it could live in you.”

“It’s nice to meet you, Sarah.” Roberta smiles again, that grin slightly too wide, fanged and fae in nature. It’s a capricious thing, playful, interested and sadistic in equal measure, all hidden behind a careful mask of confident gentility.

Roberta’s fingers squeeze Sarah’s hand gently, not strongly, but with comfort, and Roberta’s gaze, even hidden behind Roberta’s sunglasses as it is moves to the locket.

“Something in there with you, you say?” It’s delivered as a question, but Roberta felt it. Roberta wants to know more about it. “Let’s see if it’ll let you unclasp it if I offer to look after it. I’m a member of the Illusium Court, you know.”

The words remain gentle, soft spoken and kind, but the court is fae and vampires. There are experiences to be had, and Roberta is hoping what ever is in the locket will appreciate that. “Let’s see if I can help take it away, but you need to be brave for me.”

A step closer to Sarah, and Roberta motions with Roberta’s free hand for the woman to try to remove the locket again. “If it lets you go, you can go free. Nothing to worry about at all.”

It’s a lie, but Sarah Chen doesn’t know that. Roberta is no saviour for this woman.

“You have a husband and a daughter, you said?” Roberta asks, another gentle grip of her hand to ground her, even as my focus is laser focused on the locket– Roberta really really wants that locket. “Let’s try to remove it again, it can come with me, and you can go back to your family. How does that sound?”

Of course, behind her back, Roberta has pulled her revolver and is more than likely going to shoot the other woman and take the cursed object anyway. In this downpour, in this place, isolated as it is, who would notice? There is already magic about. There are those carvings and the statues, but outside of that, no witnesses.

“Vampire child of shadow courts… you understand hunger, don’t you? The endless appetite that gnaws? I am Pathos, once-god of suffering, now reduced to this… this parasitic existence. But you… you could be a willing host. We could feast together on the rich emotions of mortals.”

Sarah’s body convulses as the competing wills battle within her. The silver veins spread further, and her breathing becomes labored. Behind Roberta, the carved reliefs begin to weep that same silver substance more freely, and the sound of distant sobbing echoes from the storm clouds above.

“Choose quickly,” Sarah/Pathos whispers urgently. “This mortal vessel fractures. Soon there will be nothing left to save… or to bargain with.”

“I’ll choose then. What is the name of this being I am speaking with?” the vampire asks Pathos, the being within Sarah Chen.

There’s the cluck of the tongue as Roberta looks around to see the drama of the silver tears, the sensation of sorrow that makes Roberta so so happy inside– But conflictingly sorrowful herself. Emotions are so fleeting.

Roberta makes a choice though. The revolver comes around, Roberta raises it, she cocks and shoots Sara through the forehead– It’s quick and clean, but Roberta wont waste the experience. Even as she shoots the woman in the temple, right between the eyes, Roberta leans in, biting into Sarah’s throat, drinking her blood.

The blood is welcome. It’s invigurating, and once Roberta kills Sarah, the being within her has the body to itself.

Roberta ignores the hole in the woman’s head. She ignores the rain and the silver tears from the symbels. She simply lowers the body to the ground, exsanguinating it of all of its blood, and reaches for the locket. Roberta wants to remove that locket and take it for herself.

The gunshot echoes through the alley like thunder, but as Roberta’s fangs pierce Sarah’s throat, something goes catastrophically wrong.

The moment Sarah’s heart stops, the locket erupts with blinding silver light. Pathos, suddenly cut off from its host’s life force, doesn’t simply dissipate – it explodes outward in a desperate bid for survival. The ancient entity’s consciousness slams into Roberta with the force of a freight train, but instead of finding a willing vessel, it encounters the complex supernatural nature of a vampire.

The collision is violent and chaotic. Roberta’s undead essence rejects the foreign divine presence like a body rejecting a transplant, but Pathos clings with the desperation of something that has been starving for decades. The locket burns against Sarah’s cooling skin, its chain beginning to smoke and hiss.

Around them, the alley transforms into something from a nightmare. The silver tears from the carvings above turn to blood, raining down in thick droplets. The stone walls crack and split as competing supernatural forces clash. The very air shimmers with visible emotional energy – ribbons of silver and crimson that twist and writhe like living things.

Roberta finds herself caught in a feedback loop of sensation. Every emotion Sarah ever absorbed through the locket floods through her simultaneously – six days worth of concentrated human feeling compressed into seconds. Joy, terror, rage, despair, love, hatred – all of it crashes through her vampiric consciousness at once.

But worse, she can feel Pathos itself – ancient, alien, and utterly desperate. It’s not malevolent so much as starving, like a drowning person who will pull their rescuer under in their panic to survive.

The locket’s chain finally snaps, the cursed jewelry clattering to the wet stones. But the damage is done – the entity is loose, no longer contained, and it’s trying to force its way into the only available supernatural vessel in the area.

The feedback loop suddenly intensifies as Pathos realizes what Roberta truly is. The ancient entity’s voice resonates not through Sarah’s corpse, but directly into Roberta’s mind with desperate excitement.

“A creature that feeds on life itself! Yes, yes… we are kindred spirits, you and I. But you misunderstand – I do not seek to possess you, vampire child. I seek partnership.”

The emotional maelstrom around them begins to stabilize, but not in a comforting way. Instead, it forms a swirling vortex of silver energy centered on the fallen locket. Roberta can feel her own vampiric nature being analyzed, dissected by something far older than herself.

“You hunger for blood, for life force. I hunger for emotion, for the very essence of feeling. Together, we could be so much more than either of us alone. Your victims would not simply die – they would experience every emotion they’ve ever felt in their final moments, feeding us both beyond measure.”

The rain stops abruptly, leaving an unnatural silence in the alley. The carved reliefs above have gone completely still, as if even the stone figures are holding their breath. The locket on the ground pulses with a heartbeat rhythm, and with each pulse, Roberta can feel waves of temptation washing over her.

“Pick it up,” Pathos whispers seductively. “Not as my host, but as my partner. We could remake this entire district into a garden of exquisite suffering and transcendent joy. Every mortal would become a symphony of sensation for us to conduct.”

But there’s something else stirring now – the divine protections woven into Highgate itself are beginning to respond to the supernatural disturbance. The symbols on the shutters begin to glow with a different light, warmer and more golden, as if the neighborhood’s celestial guardians are taking notice.

As Sarah Chen’s corpse drops and the divine entity is set free, Roberta seems very pleased with herself at first; Overjoyed at winning. But of course, something goes wrong.

As the sensations flood into Roberta, there’s a buckling of Roberta’s knees. Roberta drops down beside the body, a hiss escaping Roberta’s lips. It’s not human. It’s animal. It’s the hiss-growl of a monster, of the undead that Roberta is. And of course, Roberta fights the alien entity.

That all said, Roberta is incompattable. Death is not what this being needs, and so Roberta does what she can. Hissing through her teeth, Roberta snatches for the locket. The words that follow arn’t considerate any more. They are alien and violent. They’re the serpentine hiss of a being of the night who will not give in to this -thing- trying to invade.

Roberta isn’t allowed to give in. The vampire belonds to her sire, and she is compelled heavily for self preservation. “Get in the locket and I’ll get you a body.”

The promice isn’t empty. Roberta will very much take one of the Hand’s pet humans and let this entity enhabit it. After all, Doctor Eliza Kuan would love to study this, and it would be a fun and interesting rumour for Vivienne to spread. Political capital, as it were.

“The experiment… must be… completed. The emotional circuit… must be closed.”

The phantom figures press closer, their need palpable. They want to complete what the locket started – to create a permanent conduit for experiencing human emotion. And Roberta, having disrupted their carefully maintained prison, has become their only hope for continued existence.

I am not some mere trinket to be studied. I am a fragment of divinity, diminished but not destroyed. Your scholars may learn from me, but they will also feed me.”

The golden light from the protective symbols above grows brighter, and Roberta can sense that Highgate’s divine guardians are preparing to intervene if the disturbance continues much longer. The locket pulses once more, then goes dormant, its surface returning to that innocent pearl-rose sheen.

Sarah’s corpse lies drained in the rain-soaked alley, but already the supernatural forces at work are beginning to obscure the scene. Mist rises from the wet stones, and the carved reliefs above seem to shift their gaze away, as if granting a moment of privacy for the cleanup.

“The bargain is struck,” Pathos whispers one final time before falling silent. “But remember – I have tasted your nature now, vampire child. Should you fail to honor our agreement, I know exactly what kind of emotions flow through your victims in their final moments. Such exquisite terror and despair… it would sustain me for decades.”

The threat hangs in the air as the supernatural storm finally breaks, leaving only the mundane rain and the weight of the cursed locket in Roberta’s palm.

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