dongregg wrote: ↑Tue Mar 13, 2018 7:58 am
Sauvin: So, why did Eli's hands smell like gasoline?
Because it worked for JAL?
And it worked for Eli. I should imagine that a couple centuries would have taught her a number of fairly clever ways to dispose of table scraps. Some get barbecued, some get dropped into chasms or lakes, some "inadvertently lose their way" in sewer systems and maybe others stumble into a wood chipper. I'm no expert in this area, never having had to worry about disposing of this kind of evidence because virtually all my meals come in cans, bottles, boxes or shrink wrap, and the remains of all my meals wind up in a landfill. When she has to do her own hunting, given that she's more than reasonably bright, she'll have undoubtedly thought up some approaches that would never occur to me.
You've hit on the key concept: an unusual rise in murder rates within the immediate cluster of zip codes. Mind you, the murders have to be noticed, so just being deft at disposal isn't enough, she also has to be mindful of an unusual rise in "missing persons" reports. One way to do this, of course, is to keep rubbing elbows with society's flotsam and jetsam, people whose absence wouldn't likely be noticed or investigated.
And, of course, yet another way is to rely on personal shoppers like Haakan. He's a man with his own personal beast, so if he's apprehended, he can rant and rave all he wants about how he was hoodwinked into tapping juicebags for a vampire, but people (who don't usually seriously believe in vampires) would just shake their heads and mutter that here's another one who's eaten too many funny mushrooms and now they've sporulated in his brains - while Eli makes a quick and quiet exit into the night. As a bonus, the personal shoppers can also clean up after impulse snacks.
I think it's ludicrous to dismiss out of hand anything our science can't explain. Once upon a time, you'll note, science couldn't explain why it's not wise to chuck a few pounds of pulverised sodium into the family bathtub and said absolutely nothing about the common "knowledge" that maggots appeared on rotting meat out of thin air. We're still being confounded by all sorts of natural phenomena (just ask the quantum mechanics boys), and there's just no guarantee that we've seen everything there is to see. Science doesn't account for vampires because science has never documented them. I don't say that vampires exist, I say only that their existence can't be definitively disproven, and that they're not credibly documented.
I do say, however, that some of what once was "magical" to us is now merely a matter of elementary physics or chemistry. The principles governing what was once "magical" simply hadn't been encountered, studied, analysed and typified yet, and the preternatural has since become pedestrian.
Science isn't what most people seem to think it is.
What powers JAL's story for me most is that Eli is irredeemable, and found something resembling love anyway. If that irredeemability is exacerbated (magnified) by a magical dimension, so be it. Little boys don't usually go on to mark enough birthdays to bury a birthday cake with candles, or "think" themselves claws, teeth and wings. Given this, why would it be so surprising or so objectionable that there's something in the blood that loses some vital element or quality after it's been harvested and stored, something that our science hasn't detected yet let alone figured out how to preserve?
The poetry is indeed in the blood, and it's very, very dark, but the poetry's darkness is lost when it's been away too long from a warm, beating heart. It's the need for that cold, lightless poetry that places Eli forever beyond the pale of "d'aww".
However, metoo, just for giggles and titters, let's say that Eli could be cured, that the colonising Otherness could be evicted. So what? Now, she has to grow up, and she has to grow older, and a couple of centuries of her lifestyle is bound to have messed her up far beyond the imagining of it. There are plenty of kids around who'd had to endure abusive home lives for a mere decade or two who've gone on to live long, miserable lives, kids who've had to spend the rest of their lives trying to figure out how to coexist with the memories and the sequelae of their broken childhoods and failing utterly. After more than a couple of centuries, could you honestly believe that taking Eli away from the vampire would be the same as taking the vampire away from her?
What may even be worse is that she's one strange little messed up girl, but we have to presume that the evicted vampire would take all his toys away with him. No more claws, no more wings, no more fabulous resistance to injury, disease or cold Swedish winters, and no more footprints in the snow meters and meters apart. She'd be unable to defend herself, and that would mess her up even more.
I prefer Science, when there's a conflict between the two.
