[lol er...I mean...thread start? *shot*]
Setting aside the December issue of Black Mask, Lestat grinned a satisfied grin. Although he'd reread this issue a million times in the six years since it's publishing, he could never get enough of Sam Spade, the unsentimental, morally ambiguous detective and his adventures. Never had a character so resonated with him, and he found that he had even styled himself somewhat after the private eye in the last few years. Oh, how Louis would laugh at that!
The thought of Louis brought a sinking sensation to Lestat's stomach, and he tossed the magazine aside in favor of getting back to work. "Work" was a loose term, truly, as Lestat's "work" bordered upon fanatical obsession. Not five years ago, while wandering the streets of New Orleans- his surrogate home who's arms he had sought once again after his life crumbled in Paris all those years ago- he had caught the tiniest glimmer of a tale from an immortal mind that was gone before he could identify its source. An idea, a snatch of image, a fragment of a shard of a thing so wildly fantastic that it could be nothing but the honest truth and with the power to change everything. With that, it had begun. Five years of research, digging around in the dustiest libraries in the darkest, dankest archives where mysteries went to die and he had found so very little. Fairy tales. Third person accounts handed down through family lines that were about as reliable as shifting sand.
An amulet, one story said. A cursed pig's hoof said another. It seemed to Lestat from using his mindgift to snatch translations from the few translators that he had met, that it was probably a chalice or goblet of some kind. An object said to be so powerful that it could bestow human life unto an angel. A gift given Arakiel, the Grigori angel of Earth before he fell. Other tales claimed other origins, other gods, but every legend that he came across held one constant: redemption. The prospect had consumed him, become his sole purpose for existence in a world in which he had given up hope. It was the only thing that kept him from going to ground now, kept at bay the sorrow and loneliness and grief that sometimes threatened to drag him down into the damp earth. He had to find it.
Lestat's latest lead had been a dead end; a Talamascan who had done research on the project and was rumored to have ancient Roman documentation of the tale in the vaults beneath the Amsterdam motherhouse. Unfortunately, the Talamascan he had been following had been adept at sealing his mind, and Lestat's trail turned cold before he could get someone inside the vault- attempting this himself not being an option. However, he had made a break just as he prepared to call the adventure a bust, when a vampire appeared in his hotel room the very night he planned his leave of the city and offered secrets in exchange for what information he had gathered so far.
Lestat learned from the vampire, who's name was Giliam, that he was not the only immortal who was searching for this item. This was unsurprising giving his first source, but that there was an ancient cabal who's very purpose was to search for this chalice and those who had spent unnumbered lifetimes in service to their cause. Competitors, he read as the bottom line. Giliam had broken from this group in hopes of finding them item himself, it seemed, and he warned of the danger the guild could mean if they decided that there was threat to their goals. This had made Lestat smile a wicked smile and made Giliam uneasy. The prospect of snagging something right out from beneath a coven of vampires and risking their wrath? If Lestat had not been enthralled before, he was now.
Now, in the expansive Garden District house that he had claimed as his own, he prepared for the next likely goosechase. Giliam had traded him a text in a language that none had been able to translate, even the vampires, who had members that spanned almost every era in human existence. A code then, he gathered, based in a dead language and encrypted. Sources pointed him in the direction of one man who could break this code. An American professor and archaeologist teaching at Princeton University in New Jersey.
***
The air was crisp and chill as Lestat set foot on the Princeton campus. It occurred to him that he had never actually been on a college campus in America, though he found it not so different from the great schools of England, where he had visited in pursuit of this same mission. It was pitch dark outside, but as he approached the offices of the professor he sought, he found that the light of his office was on.
It was an easy break, lifting the hallway window and edging inside, silent as only a preternatural being can be. The building smelled delightfully of old wood and dust and he was struck by the memory of a rented wooden room where two young mortal men had drunk far too much wine and shared their souls. Hells bells, Lestat, if you aren't nostalgic lately, he chastised himself lightly as he crept down the hallway. The office door was ajar, but he found the office to be empty. It had been recently occupied, though, as there was a half-eaten sack meal spread out on the desk and an inkwell with the lid set aside. Leaving the office, he continued down he hallway to another room where light spread orange from beneath the door but which must have no windows since it had not been visible from the outside. A classroom or a laboratory, he presumed, swinging the door open boldly and adopting the look of a lost but curious student.
It was not the professor he found, however, but a pretty girl in her twenties who turned with a start.