So, I'm a little stuck on this, because I'm worried the pace is somewhat jarring. It's not fully fleshed yet, so bear with me here. My current project has two leads, one of whom is human who gets pulled into the supernatural world, and the other is a vampire (bear with the cliché here, this is where most of it ends). He is not a self-hating kind, he'd slit someone's throat and sleep afterwards without a problem. There's a whole supernatural underground, and this guy, I'd have to describe him as formerly a hitman (against those who would threaten to make this underground common knowledge) gone cop for this world. However, being the relic that he is, he goes to a school posing as a student to update his skills (such as computing) and to generally lie low for a while. During an event at this school, he's drugged and finds himself with a human girl, who runs off in a panic when she wakes up. Being as he is, he's trying to piece things together and it's through this that this girl grows on him. In what I've done so far, I haven't had a need to spell it out, so I've just hinted that there's more to him than meets the eye. The problem I'm having is a smooth way to outright say so. In what I have right now, there are creatures who, either classically or due to the eradication of their old habitats, classically eat human flesh. To keep them sated and the underground secret, a black market has developed where organs are stolen from bodies of the deceased (in the modern day it's usually bits and pieces that would go unmissed from those who weren't sick before they're in the morgue, yes I'm morbid enough to think this much). One of his friends is such a creature, and he goes with her to a morgue to collect some organs from a motorcylcist who got himself killed. To the discomfort of the doctor there (he's involved because he's in debt), they chat about it like we might talk at a butcher shop. The conversation then goes like this. "What about you? Can't get much easier blood than what's going to be thrown away anyway right?" "Nah, I prefer something that fights back." I'm aiming to show him as he is at this point, rather blase on human life (the friend is even worse), but I'm wondering if, considering the previous chapters, which served to establish the two leads as they try to piece what happened at the starting point and does so in a school setting, that this might be too jarring and risk confusion.
I would agree... it's a bit confusing. Someone whose eyeing a corpse not as a sad end to a life, but as meat, and given the chapter at school where he seems vulnerable, doesn't seem consistent to me. What takes place between these two events that change him so much?
Good to know my gut is right. I'll try to explain what it is ok going for, maybe that will help hash things out. I want the reader to see before the other character does that, if you look from a human perspective, he's not a good person and his world is deadly. He plays a human when he needs to be and learns what modern humans know to do so, but he sees humans as the most selfish, chaotic and destructive beings on the planet and his feelings are generally disdain. I kind of want the reader to be telling the other character to run away from him because she's a total wallflower and then gets caught off guard when she finds her spine and puts him into place.
I think you need to have your guy kill someone early on, or mention early that he's killed before. After all, he is a vampire. Get it out there. At the very least, don't build up your guy as someone with feckles. There is a bit of a clash when this guy, who's contemptuous of humans to the point of eating them alive, is captivated by a human girl. Sounds like he's more likely to be furious at being outwitted by a human. Perhaps he sees her as an amusing fascination, a human that could actually able to to that to him.
There's practically no better agent of change in a character than that of falling in love. As in real life, so goes fiction.
I might be over-simplifying him somewhat, I guess you could say that he doesn't extend more positive sides of himself to humans because he's seen so much crap from an outsider perspective. He feels that there is no reason to, because it'll get you stabbed in the back (metaphorically, literally, maybe even both). The other thing is that he has to play the rules of human society while unable to deny what he is, not just because he has no desire to, but because if he ignores it, it will take over his ability to reason. He's also aware of the fact that in this modern age of the Internet, not only are people more inter-connected than ever, but nothing truly vanishes anymore. I've mentioned before my characters shoot one-liners from time to time, I'll put up a few of his. See if that helps. "Call me reprehensible, call me a monster, I don't care, but at least I have not, in the name of hate, killed a mother in front of her child!" "World War II would look like a tea party if humans learned the truth about what's out there and thanks to the Internet, it wouldn't stop until one side was dead." "Humans are very quick to look for a villain to make themselves look better than they are." "Man likes to think himself more than an animal, at least animals don't kill each other over mere ideas." Taking @Silent Lion and his comments into account, maybe combining his idea with him paying someone off to dispose of the body would make more sense...
@Iain Sparrow is right, love is a good agent of change. You have a clear idea of your character, and he seems to be charcterised (at least on one level) by a self-righteous superiority (albeit somewhat justified). This more philosophical, moralising creature would clash with someone who takes sport from eating people who fight back, unless you set it up. And it looks like you're well on the road to achieving that. Maybe that's a pointlessly long way of saying "sounds good to me!"
