After this chapter, this story will go on hiatus again. Life happened. I'll pick it up in a few months. Thank you for sticking with me so far.

Sorry, Minaly22, but I'm not including Dante. It's partially because I promised not to include any more non-Castlevania characters outside of cameos, but mostly because I've never played DMC.

Arikado/Alucard/Whatever

Soma's worst fears had come true. Well, not his worst fears. Soma was afraid of a lot of things. But this one was definitely on the Top 10 list.

He was sitting on a hard wooden chair in a very plain room. There was a desk with piles of paperwork and books, a potted plant in the corner, and a window. Soma kept on looking to the side, wondering at the sheer lack of decoration, to avoid what was in front of him.

For in front of him was the spawn of Lord Dracula, a tempered master of dark magic, a swordsman of great skill, and… wait, none of that really frightened Soma. It was mostly because the guy in front of him was (kind of) his boss.

"Soma," said Arikado. Soma gulped. "How long have you been doing this?"

"Since Celia's castle," Soma said in a quiet voice.

Arikado nodded. "Which ones?"

"What?" said Soma, anxiety clouding his thoughts.

"Which powers did you use?" asked Arikado levelly, futilely hiding his fury. He was a master at the art, but Dracula knew him too well.

"Waiter Skeleton," said Soma. "The… one that makes curry appear from nothing. And then the Ghoul…"

Soma then spent a long time describing all of the souls he had used without telling Arikado, how he used them, and why.

"Who else knows about this?" asked Arikado, once Soma had asserted several times that that was it.

"Mina," said Soma quietly. "It was my idea! Don't bring her into this!" he added with surprisingly ferocity.

"I never intended to do so," said Arikado. "Who else?"

"Julius," said Soma. "Hammer. Yoko. My roommates. The… SSS."

"The what?" asked Arikado.

Soma coughed. "After… well, after I found out that I'm not the only one who has to hide my powers, we—by that, I mean everyone else who has to hide—decided to have a support group, like Alcoholics Anonymous. We'd talk about stuff that we can't tell the world because we have to keep that stuff a secret—they understand that it's a secret to everyone, because they can't bring their secrets to the media, either. It kind of… grew from there."

"How… big is this organization?"

"Relative to what?" asked Soma. "Are we talking on the scale of a sports team, a school, a school club, a government organization, what?"

"How many people?"

Soma shrugged. Ignoring the subject of rule breaking helped his thought processes along. "Maybe a couple hundred, maybe a thousand. We have a master list, but I'm not the one counting. Mina, my roommates, Julius, and I founded it. Yoko joined for the networking. Leon in there, too. Turns out that lots of people can see him."

Arikado was silent.

"Do you want to join?" asked Soma. "No one would care that you're a vampire. Everyone's honor-bound to never expose the secrets of a fellow member. We're getting a psychologist in a few years. At least, if he survives college."

"You told them about Dracula, didn't you," said Arikado, cold fury returning to him.

"Yes, but they can't tell anyone else!" said Soma quickly. "I know their secrets, too! Some of them are even worse than mine! No one cares about Dracula; they're up in arms about the teenage boy who killed everyone in his universe!" Seeing Arikado's silence, he composed himself. "Besides," he said, taking a deep breath. "It's better that they find that Dracula is alive in the modern world through a support group than wherever Graham and Celia got their information from. I admit that Dracula's name carries more weight to the humans of this universe compared to others—who knows about the Demi-Fiend or the Godslayer, after all? Lots of people are descended from Dracula's victims, and some of them would like to drive a stake through my heart. But if they're serious hunters, they'd eventually find a source of information that would bring them straight to me without knowing that I'm just Dracula's reincarnation. If I'm up front about this, there's no room for misunderstanding. God, I sound naïve."

"Soma," said Arikado. "There is too much room for misunderstanding. The idea that Dracula's reincarnation is trying to coexist peacefully would spread around the hunting community. However, there is always a chance that someone will think that you are lying. They can also abuse the organization's resources to find the best way to kill you. Do you really think that telling more people would be a good idea?"

"Arikado, you underestimate how strange these stories are," said Soma. "I can't tell you much, but we're starting from the fact that my roommates are a demon and a demon summoner and getting worse from there. Besides, I can't stop now. If I suddenly stopped telling people that I was Dracula, they'd be even more suspicious."

Arikado nodded, frowning. "All right then," he said. "I will not interfere with this organization of yours. But back on the subject of your souls." Soma gulped. "Am I the only one of your… social circle of supernatural beings who did not know about this?"

Soma nodded shakily. "…Yes," he said. "The spies know, too. Don't bring them into this. I bribed them into not telling you. I was afraid that you would shut me down."

"As long as you remain responsible, you can continue."

Soma looked up. "What?"

"If I tried to ban you from abusing your powers, you would go to even greater lengths to keep it a secret from me," said Arikado. "That would have even worse results."

"Oh," said Soma. "Okay then."

After Soma left, standing up much straighter than before, Arikado suddenly collapsed. "Thank God he hasn't been abusing the power to make hot demon women appear whenever he wants!"

X

Arikado's sympathy for Soma's use of demonic powers stemmed partially from his own plight. He himself often used his vampire powers.

While one might think that an immortal vampire would gain insane interest from banks, the problem was that any bank with a hundred year old account would get suspicious. That was why Arikado lived in an apartment where the only source of heat was his Hellfire. The same went with driver's licenses. Arikado had one from a few decades ago, but since he was clearly not a seventy year old man, he could never show it to anyone.

Arikado decided that he would never get into an accident, because then the police would ask him for his license. However, accidents happen all the time to people who are not at fault. After a drunk driver crashed into his car one foggy morning, Arikado narrowly escaped questioning by abandoning his car, destroying the license plates and all other evidence, and flying off in bat form. The police showed up shortly afterwards. They came up with all these weird theories about ghost drivers and aliens, which indirectly led to an incident where two cop brothers had to handcuff an alien ghost.

Rather than driving, Arikado decided that the best course of action was to turn into a wolf and run to work every day. He made sure to always have his collar on. It was always very awkward when his coworkers decided to pet the adorable doggy that always passed by HQ, though.

Decades later, when the perpetually-teenaged Naoki told Arikado about how there was a service in the SSS that gave immortals (and kids with emergencies) fake IDs that were technically real because they were made by people who made real IDs, Arikado stood stock still for several minutes, not speaking a word.

TO BE CONTINUED!