undergrounds | open to hillingdon.

Sometime in early June, some posters start appearing in the halls of Hillingdon house. They read CLAN MEETING at the top in big bold letters, with the date, time, and location of the meeting below. Arthur's not looking to give a lot away here, but he tells a few people about it and how important it is to attend, hoping that the word will spread through the faction.

Arthur doesn't know what to anticipate. So far it's been a lot of stand-offish hunters and shifters, and they might not be eager to participate in an initiative that unites them and begets communication. Arthur was like that too, but now there's a need to be prepared and a need to act; getting the information out there is important.

JUNE 7

People are late, of course. Arthur waits until it seems like people have stopped filtering in to start, waiting patiently at the front of one of Hillingdon House's grand ballrooms. He doesn't like being the center of attention, but he's been the lead on more than a few military briefings and debriefings in his day, so he's not totally out of his element in front of everyone there.

He starts with a small introduction, explaining that he's been with the clan for about a year and a half and before that he was in the US military. He leaves out the bit about his special-ops vampire-killing team, of course, but the fact is that he was trained to kill by the biggest military complex in the world.

He then goes on to explain why he called the meeting, telling everyone that Millicent has been murdered - just to get them all on the same page - and that she's been replaced by a far worse leader. Raymond Harris' new rules that Islington's vampires are allowed to feed on locals and that shapeshifter kills are reason enough for Hillingdon to start getting a little more pro-active, not to mention the fact that he'll allow children to be turned now. It's critical for Hillingdon to be prepared, not only for the inevitable rise in bounties, but for a more aggressive vampire population in general.

Not only that, it's critical for the faction to start sharing information between members a little more freely now. Information and skills.

He invites anyone who has more information to speak, and says that he'll offer anyone who wants them some extra training on marksmanship, shooting, hand-to-hand combat, any of the skills he has. He makes it clear that he's not looking for Hillingdon to go on a hunt - they don't need to be tracking down innocent vampires and killing them for sport - but it's time that they become a little more unified so they can use their skills to help deal with this if it gets worse.

[Please use the appropriate headers below if you character wanted to speak up during Arthur's presentation or for mingling! You can also start threads if you want to consolidate any threads that come up as a result of this, so skill sharing etc. If you have any questions feel free to PM me or to plurk me at

dreamalittlebigger!]

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Faolan nods in greeting. He's spoken to him once or twice before, when he'd been trying to get the general sentiment of the Clan. Back before he'd taken part in the defense against the vampires. Back before the Guardianship had been revealed. At least, he thinks to himself, Roddy hadn't been one of the ones to be outspoken in his displeasure in that. Which didn't mean, of course, that he couldn't still be displeased.

"Alright," he responds. "It's Roddy, isn't it? What sort of experience do you have then?" Because it's better to start from the ground up, in Faolan's view.

"Um...I got in a fight at school once. Other than that? None."

He was a shifter, not a hunter, and he was a scavenger at that. While a rat might hunt the occasional insect or bird, their instincts mostly revolved around fleeing and finding easy food, not around fighting. At least, not until they had to. That didn't mean Roddy couldn't learn to fight, of course, it just meant that Faolan would be starting from scratch.

Faolan shakes his head slightly. It's experience, but it's nowhere near the same as being out on the street, faced with a vampire.

He figures he should take another tactic. "Have you ever met a vampire?" he asks the young shifter. "Seen them hunt? Or what they're like in a fight?"

"I saw a vampire once," he commented. "On the subway. But I didn't exactly stick around long enough to see her hunt or fight."

That was a while back, before Millicent's demise. It was also on a crowded subway, and said vampire had been taking a train to the Redbright Institute, so circumstances there, while still being scary to Roddy at the time, were not as dire as they could have been.

Faolan tries to keep the expression on his face neutral, but seeing a vampire once on the subway isn't exactly the same as fighting one on the street either. This kid -- Roddy. He's going to need a lot of training if he wants to start going up against them.

"Alright," he says, after a long moment. "So. I think it's safe to say that we'll be starting from scratch here then..."

"Yeah," Roddy agreed. "That's what I figured."

Roddy was well aware that he didn't have the experience it took to deal with vampires, which was why he was going to Faolan. He wasn't even planning on going up against them so much as not dying if they decided to go up against him. His plan was to learn how to handle himself, get some basic tools for fighting a vampire, then hope he didn't actually encounter one. It seemed like a fairly sound idea, in his opinion.

Faolan nods in response to the younger man's deduction, before doing his best to sound out an explanation both coherent and useful to a beginner such as Roddy himself.

"Vampires are... Strong and fast. They have better senses than most. The trick isn't to try to outrun them or to outmatch them. It's to outsmart them. Making sense so far?" he asks, raising an eyebrow at Roddy to try and gauge whether he's being too simple or not simple enough in his explanation as such.

Roddy nodded. Outmatching them wasn't something he'd even consider a possibility, but he could definitely see himself trying to outrun them. Mostly out of sheer terror, which was why he wanted to learn to fight them. That way he'd be able to keep himself from acting like prey.

"Got it. So how do you outsmart something with centuries more experience?"

Not that all vampires were centuries old, but he figured it would be a good idea to assume all vampires he encountered were of the ancient and powerful variety. It might help him, at least, that he and the hypothetical vampire would have very different goals. The vampire's goal would be drinking Roddy's blood. Roddy's goal was simply to survive.

Faolan keeps himself from using the word 'luck', because that's hardly confidence-boosting, considering the fact that he's supposed to be giving instruction to this new Hillingdon member. And besides, Faolan himself isn't very lucky, and he's managed so far. Though he supposes you might be able to say that it's a certain kind of luck, not getting yourself killed.

"You have to be observant," Faolan says instead. "Know your surroundings. Use them to the best of your ability. But moreover, while a vampire is strong and fast, they have weaknesses. And you need to use those against them if you want to stand a chance. Sunlight, silver, wood..." he lists off. "No matter how fast or strong they are, none of them can get stabbed or shot with those materials and not feel it."

Roddy nodded. "Got it."

Part of him was tempted to make a comment about shooting them with sunlight, but seeing as he might need these lessons to survive and he wasn't sure how Faolan would take it, he decided not to.

"I'm used to being a small prey animal. Noticing predators is what I do."

Although typically, attempting to run away and find the tiniest hole to crawl into was also what he did, if they were going by his animal instincts, so it wasn't like being a prey animal would always be helpful in surviving vampires. Still, his hearing and smell were incredibly acute, and it made it more difficult to get things by him.

Faolan wonders at that comment, before he remembers exactly who he's talking to. He tries to keep a note of everyone in Hillingdon, and while he's not so good at the social aspect of it all, he can remember the facts. Shifter, if he remembers correctly. A rodent?

"Good," he responds, nodding. "Use that to your advantage, then. You've got natural instincts to be wary of your surroundings. Of the creatures around you, yeah?" He isn't a shifter himself, but he imagines that that might be the case. The skills don't work only when they are in animal form, although they are certainly stronger then.

"Yeah."

It sometimes made him and some of the other rat shifters he knew feel a little skittish, but in this case it wasn't entirely a bad thing. Not when there really were predatory creatures out to get them.

"And to pay attention to anything that seems off, or is focusing on us too much."

Granted, the instinct that came after was to run and hide, and he couldn't do that with a vampire, but that was the advantage of human intelligence. He could ignore it.

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