It's not revenge if it wasn't against you

Jude had never thought he'd find someone on the island who would rub him quite that way, and yet he had. He'd happened to run into a very specific combination of traits that had set him off in a very bad way: An eldritchian creature that was the personification of hunger, who had consumed entire planets and all those on it.

If he was this universe's version of Phokrus, he was a particularly shoddy imitation.

Jude helped Syrra along, a particularly awkward state of affairs considering her height, and then simply scooted her into a hole in the wall restaurant he'd been to once before, grabbing a booth in the very back.

Her pain was relatable in a way he hadn't thought would ever be relatable. How many people on the planet could relate to such a specific set of criteria? Only he'd run into one within his first month.

Lucky him, if you could call it that.

He slid into the booth after helping her get to eat, and then he went straight to work.

"Listen," Jude said. "Altizica will come back from the dead if you kill him. Your revenge will be for nothing, and depending on your power set, it might be far harder than you imagined." He had no idea what she could or couldn't do. Could she even beat Altizica? Who knew?

His plan didn't count on things like that.

"I'm going to do what I can to ensure that Altizica doesn't come back. And no, before you ask, that's not murder."

Jude couldn't help but note the very large amount of food she'd just ordered, and similarly couldn't keep himself from wondering if he was going to be expected to pay for that. He had money for it, but that was supposed to be emergency money. Probably the school provided, right?

Right?

"He's allowed sanctuary because the island pardons the crimes committed before they arrived. You can't blame a vampire for assaulting people to drink their blood if they had no other alternative." Would she even get that metaphor? How much did she know? "But it's stretched in cases like him, or even Malara."

Jude didn't agree. He really didn't. But that was a side point as he ordered his own food, little more than an appetizer.

"He got in a fight with a little girl, and he lost. But he didn't come back right away. He took almost a day before he showed up again. So there's a limitation there, something to exploit."

Oh good, so she did know the basics, and he wasn't going to have to explain all that stuff.

"I agree," Jude said. "The scale's all different." You couldn't really compare consuming entire planets to a vampire who messed up a few people. "The issue is how they act, really. Malara's done similar things, but she did so within her purview as a god, to her own people. Altizica was an outsider, consuming others. And he doesn't understand the most basic of human interaction. Things like 'don't say what he just said to someone."

Jude's food also arrived in record time, no doubt just because he was sitting at the same table, but he was far more cautious as he ate, watching her whip with a good deal of caution.

"I haven't finished my plan yet. I'm working on it. Altizica has a cult, and I couldn't figure out what the advantage was. Drawing strength? Only there's another cult on the island too, and they exist so they can summon him back to life. So my theory is that Altizica has a cult of his own worshippers so that they can summon him back."

Frankly, anyone who joined that kind of cult was an idiot. Jude was wary enough about Dionte, and Dionte was pretty up front about what he wanted his cult for.

"Can you beat him?" Jude said, mostly skipping over the plan. Because that was the lynchpin, wasn't it? "And if you can't, are you going to be one of those people who won't accept a resolution unless it's you doing it?"

"That wasn't underestimating," Jude said pointedly. "It was a genuine question."

Only his brain was abruptly sidetracked by the fact that the table just kind of picked itself up, scooting a few feet over and settling it down.

Jude reached down, grabbing his own dish and sliding it back in front of him.

"I don't know what you can do, and even if he got beat by Dalia, Dalia's really good at what she does. I know he's super physically strong, and can obviously come back from the dead, but I don't know enough about his capabilities. He needs to eat? But that doesn't help much, and..."

Jude paused, looking over the absolute mess of food she'd devoured. "So do you," he finished.