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The weed dulls the pain for a while. Makes the stress dissolve along with the smoke into the cold night air of outside the VHC meeting room, around the back of the stone building.
It had always looked intimidating to Vlad, this building. Filled with all the horrors of the universe as his Dad had succinctly put it, but even inside where it was echoing halls and rooms full of ornate office desks and the scratching of quills onto admin papers, Vlad still got a bad vibe from the whole place. Perhaps said 'horrors' were the horrible amounts of dusty old files containing vampire rules and such, or perhaps it referred to the old coffin-loiterers themselves.
Becoming the Grand High Vampire slash Chosen One hadn't given Vlad much more perspective on the matter anyway. He spent the majority of his time laying around in meetings, making inane conversations with the most conservative of vampire elders about which liberties to scrap next (hopefully none, if Vlad got his way. And he often did these days), and trying to get snack-sized bottles of soy blood out the vending machine in the main lobby. It wasn't the most fun Vlad had ever had in his unlife. But it was necessary. No one else had been prophesized to conduct corporate meetings about which expensive capes were to be added as compulsory in the VHC dress code.
Lucky them.
But the smoking dulled the stress levels for a while though, that was for sure. Vlad had started on cigarettes, obviously, but they hadn't agreed with his effectively dead lungs. Coughing fits weren't fun when you didn't have the breath capacity that non-vamps had. The weed smoke didn't seem to affect him the same, thank God or whoever.
The Count had caught him smoking once, back when they were still at Garside. Instead of the long lecture on how 'the Dracula son and heir should not be smoking breather substances' and the like that Vlad had predicted, his Dad had asked if he had a spliff going spare. It was a weird night all round really. The Count tended to speak in convoluted metaphors when he was high, about immortality and the sustainability of blood in the coming centuries and all that. Not that Vlad was complaining much. It certainly beat another lecture on 'vampiric expectations' for once. But thankfully it hadn't happened again since. Vlad wasn't one for metaphors. He preferred straight speech. The vampire world was full enough with dark and twisted metaphors as it was.
He'd become pretty skilled at avoiding the question in political briefings though, just like he'd seen the breather politicians do on TV once, back at Robin's years ago. It had worked for them, Vlad was sure. And it worked for him too, for the most part. Sometimes evading the question was his best bet. Sometimes he didn't have the strength to debate on basic vampire rights and liberties, Vlad just cared that there were some. If it had all been down to the bloody elders at the VHC, unlife for many would be significantly worse, he was sure of it.