May
Lucy's Age: 4
It has finally started to happen. Venice doesn't realize it yet, but she's started breaking. She's still being difficult in many ways, but I can tell that she's just going through the motions now.
Imastious continues to paint himself as the villain of the piece by the simple fact that he can't seem to control his baser instincts. I, on the other hand, have started providing Venice with tiny luxuries whenever I'm able to do so without arousing Imastious' suspicion. It's still very slow going, but it's only a matter of time now.
Given her increased reasonability over the last few days I've decided to begin teaching her the beginnings of unarmed self-defense. It's possibly a little earlier than normal for me to begin doing something like that, but it will give her a defense against Imastious, which will go a long way towards binding her more tightly to me.
This will also mean that I'll need to start her on the meditation and visualization exercises required for her to be able to keep Imastious out of her mind. In a perfect world I'd be able to rely on the fact that her defenses would be successful, but at this point it would be foolhardy to do so. That means that I'm going to have to be very careful to cloak my instruction in such a way that Imastious won't have proof that I set out to have her injure him.
I've already increased her rations slightly, not enough for her to start putting weight back on, but enough that she's coming back from the edge of starvation. She's going to need to rebuild muscle mass if she's going to have any chance of landing a blow hard enough to give Imastious any kind of pause.
Her being in better shape physically will go a long ways towards increasing her mental defenses as well. Speaking of which, she's only taking in the minimum amount of blood that she needs to survive. Considering that it's all been bagged blood so far that doesn't bode very well for her long-term survival.
Given the sheer number of vampires in New York it is difficult, if not impossible, to guarantee a consistent supply of bagged blood. The hospitals and the Red Cross have even been known to use armed guards in some instances.
A very powerful mentalist can usually still manipulate his way into the supply rooms, but I'm not to that point yet. Doing a working on someone with whom you don't have regular contact, who's already suspicious, and who is healthy or otherwise not run down by starvation or torture is very difficult.
Imastious seems to be able to manage it on occasion, but I suspect that most of his successes are because he ingratiates himself with his targets beforehand in some form or fashion. It's just another way to get around the obstacle of a healthy mind. I tend to, instead, generally choose targets whose self-interest would already lead them to do whatever I want them to do in the first place. That way all I need to do is give them a slight nudge rather than rewire something critical.
All of which is a rather long, complicated way of saying that it's generally just cheaper and less effort to kidnap a living person rather than trying to get your hands on bags either by force or subterfuge.
Someone like Venice won't have any problems getting men off on their own once she's back to her normal weight. Any number of hot-blooded males would be eager to take her back to their place where her superior strength will make them easy victims. That of course is predicated upon her getting over her squeamishness first though.
As I've considered the problem I've realized that this is the perfect way to hide much of what I'm doing to prepare her to injure or even kill Imastious. I'll tell him that I've decided it's time to break her of her blood aversion. Blood-starving a vampire is always hard on their system, which would explain giving her higher-calorie rations, and I can tell him that I started running her through some basic defensive techniques as an illustration of what she'll need to know later on once I start introducing larger victims into her cage.
Of course the first human I feed her will likely have to be small so that she doesn't overdo it because of the hunger, but given how quickly she's going to move from kids up to adults it's a reasonable precaution to start right now.
As far as the mediation and visualization exercises go, I can bill them as something designed to help her focus on something other than the act of actually feeding. Again it's a stretch as a better solution would be for her to just grow to love feeding, but it's workable.