Four days was a long time to be chained in one place. The first half of it had been filled with primordial fear, but as the nights passed and the...<i>thing</i>hadn’t done anything to actually harm her, rational thoughts had started returning to Alice’s mind. At first she still dared to hope for a chance to get out, but as she soon realized, she had nothing to bargain with. The best she could do was to come up with some cards to play, namely Hungry Cat At Home, Boss Has Big Guns, and I Will Die Without My Medicine, but the problem with them all was that the vampire didn’t really care, no matter how genuinely she sold the lies to her.<br/><br/>Eventually, Alice realized she could do better than that, although, perhaps the momentary dumbness had worked to her advantage. She’d just have to be more careful... Starting small was the smart thing to do, and the smallest thing she could ask for, and as she suddenly realized, also the most powerful thing she could hope for, was<i>information</i>. And the best part about asking for information was that she didn’t actually need to ask<i>for</i>it. She’d just have to ask. However, when the first question that came to her mind was ‘what kind of a vampire doesn’t drink blood?’ the idea suddenly didn’t seem too great after all.<br/><br/>The more she thought of what to ask, the less she wanted to open her mouth and do it. She didn’t appear to be in any imminent danger, and any kind of interaction with the vampire seemed like poking a beehive. Or a nuclear warhead.<br/><br/>At some point, Alice realized that the woman was rushing around the room completely nude, and decided to keep very, very quiet; who knows what she might do if this was somehow an inappropriate moment to speak, or even to just make the vampire aware of her presence. Alice breathed as quietly as humanly possible, and remained as still as she could, but in the end it was all in vain. Within a brief moment, the vampire had ended up on the bed with her, and Alice’s heartbeat was rapidly quickening. Not the best thing in the world in this company, she realized, but her fear was uncontrollable once again.<br/><br/>“...we have to have a talk,” the words were spoken by the vampire, and Alice replied with the only sentence that made sense to her, “I was afraid you’d say that.”<br/><br/>It was the first honest thing she had told her.<div class="messageTextEndMarker"> </div>