Aidou's body language spoke of nothing but aristocratic grace (and perhaps a bit of vampiric aggression), but he still met the small verbal parry with his own rejoinder. What with the exceedingly suspicious change in the tone of radio broadcasts, there was a lot of fresh material to occupy his mind--like how he perfected any other skill, the longer he spent convincing himself he could do nothing (immediately, anyway) about the past, the more he felt secure in the knowledge.

"Good dog. Don't let the sun fry you in the morning."

The first part was a true jab, the second a piece of vampire humor. A silly idiom for goodnights, like any human's, though consequently only sensible to those who woke at sundown and went to bed at sunrise.

He slipped out the door, making his footsteps utterly silent like a phantom's. Now that he was ditching the blind baggage, he didn't need to voluntarily make noise anymore.

_{[back out to here]}