Human Steve wore plaid, baseball caps, and shorts.

It’s important that you realize “caps” was not a typo. Stephanie “Human Steve” Stevens wore snapbacks in a tower of cracking plastic and embroidered sports logos, wore basketball shorts like a preteen boy forced to shovel snow, wore plaid like a colorblind lumberjack that none of the other lumberjacks ever let play in their lumberjack games. Human Stephanie “Steve” Stevens did not particularly prefer men to women, but she absolutely preferred neon undershirts to bras.

(She was, in short, a disaster.)

Today she was a disaster wearing her best dress up button up Hawaiian shirt over her most blindingly yellow tank top, and a sun hat over the three snap backs. In the hopes that you may somehow still have any respect for her ability to make simple life choices, we will not discuss what her shorts looked like.

(Reflective.)

Also today, she was going to put out the Call to Adventure! Except not as actual telephone calls like her first idea because apparently you need a license to telemarket things. So instead she puts out the Call (to Adventure!) in the form of a nice flier pinned to the public bulletin boards around town. 

She’d spent a lot of time on the flier. She’d probably spent  too much time on the flier. If she wasn’t currently hanging up the last one out of 20 she'd rip all of them down. She couldn’t believe she let Nancy talk her into using Arial instead of Wingdings for the font. How could people take a Call to Adventure seriously if it wasn’t even a  little bit in code?!

Hiding her face in sudden shame, she ran away from the bulletin board and back to her car. This was going to be the worst roleplaying game  ever, she just knew it. Not even a little bit of mystique in that flier, she’d be lucky if anyone deigned to show up for something so mundane, much less anyone interesting.

-*-

In every thrift store, there are dresses. These dresses are usually sizes that most human women do not fit into, or that most human women would refuse to wear on the grounds of good taste.

(Gallant is neither human nor a woman, and would be happy to prove her excellent sense of taste to any particularly bloody volunteers.)

In this thrift store, there are more of those dresses than usual. The population of {CENSORED} comes in all shapes, sizes, and limb numbers imaginable. They also have abnormally charitable spirits to accompany their abnormal body configurations, so the shelves were quite well stocked when Gallant approached them.

Gallant hadn’t bothered with dressing appropriately to the time period and her visible gender in a very long time. Things like that seemed to not matter as much when you were dead, she’d found. But now, she had no choice.

“YOU!” she screamed to someone she assumed worked in the store. It would seem more logical that her voice had become strained or small from over a century of disuse, but vampires didn’t have muscles that decayed and she was overcompensating quite a lot just in case they had. “I NEED HELP FINDING ‘SEXY’ CLOTHING. I INTEND TO ATTRACT A DATE TO DRINK. FOR DRINKS. A DATE OUT TO DRINK THEM. WITH THEM!”

The someone didn’t answer. On closer inspection she realized that she was speaking to a mannequin, and on closer reflection of how she’d got into the store she remembered it was closed for the night and she’d kicked the door in. For having spent such a long part of her sort-of-life nocturnal, she still tended to forget that most people walked around in the sunlight like it wasn’t a horrific force of evil.

Well. No matter. How hard could it be to seduce someone for a dalliance and drugs in the 21st century? All she ever heard about when she snuck into the nursing homes for a quick, disgustingly chemical rich drink, was the promiscuity and lack of self control in the younger generations. If she’d understood some of the ranting correctly, then she wasn’t even limited to seducing one half of the population anymore! She’d even heard more than one human inviting another out of whatever building they were currently in for a ‘drink’, and succeeding just like that.

Unfortunately, she hadn’t succeeded just like that when she’d tried it. And when she tried to daze her target with impossibly fast movements of her hands, they’d had the nerve to tell her they weren’t into people who “fidgeted” so much, even if they hadn’t been “wearing ratty old threads, what IS that, dumpster retro??”. And when she bit them they just punched her and ran away screaming! As if her venom had done nothing!

She should have listened when her community called on her to help protest against vaccinations and fast moving TV and video games. But she hadn’t, alienated most of her old contacts and safe houses over what she thought were meaningless politics and fear mongering, and now she was barely scraping by with no one to fall back on to help her figure out how to survive this new world.

By the time she leaves the store she’s managed to clothe herself in something she thinks no one could take for old fashioned. Certainly she’s never seen fashion like it before. It’s admittedly ugly as sin to her, but if wearing this many fist sized bows is what it takes to attract a decent meal, she’ll do it. She also picked up a pair of the most prevalent shoe type. They have holes studded throughout, like colorful rubber fishnet for her feet with a frightfully loud latch on the back she thinks is "velcro". They’re surprisingly comfortable even with her untrimmed claws poking at the rubber, and she can see how they rose to prevalence.

There’s a flash of red on the bulletin board outside the store, and she catches the words BLOODY FIGHTS. That more than piques her interest, and Gallant pauses to read the Call to Adventure. When she leaves, headed for the abandoned fridge in the woods she’s made her daytime coffin, she brings the flier with her.

On further perusal, it seems to be more about playing pretend around a circular table than about actually making people bleed, but there is a promise to teach anyone who doesn’t know how to use a computer at the bottom in fine print. Probably for the purpose of playing pretend better but…

Well, Gallant has heard very  promising things about how easy it is to be murdered when dating online.