"Am I treading on personal territory?" asks Bella. Convinced that the shape of her fist matches his, she throws an experimental series of punches at the air.

"Oh, very good," he says, reaching to correct the position of her elbow slightly. Deadpan: "And no, not at all, the subject of my sex life is open for discussion."

"Technically I didn't ask if I was treading on forbidden territory," she points out, adjusting her elbow on the other side to match and having at the air a bit more.

"My mistake." He observes another few punches. "You can go much faster than that, I'm sure," is his commentary.

"Much better," he says. "You'll find that while plenty of nasty bitey sorts have superhuman speed, very few of them put it to good use."

"Fail to put it to good use how?" she asks, throwing in a kick to break up the rhythm of the punches. The air would be tripped, if it were not air.

"As simple as that: they don't use it," he says. "I don't believe I have any special physical advantage over other vampires, but I move and react faster than they do because I pay attention and I know my own abilities. They don't push themselves. Perhaps because they don't usually have to."

Bella pushes for a little extra burst of speed, which she can achieve but not sustain, and then she starts adding more kicks to the pattern, and then she spins once to make the front kick a roundhouse. "Don't vampires sometimes get into fights with each other? I'd think that would incentivize pushing even if most of them are never going to run into me or one of my predecessors. Or successors."

"They do, yes," he says. "But judging by how easily I kill them, they don't do it often enough. Try making that more level," he says of the roundhouse.

She adjusts the angle and tries again. "Some of them manage to live for hundreds of years. Have you tangled with many of those?"

"I think one or two of the gang who turned me had a few centuries behind them."

"What makes you think that?" Punchpunchpunchpunchpunchkickpunchkickkickpunchpunch -

"How they spoke, how they moved. It is sometimes possible to estimate."

"On the other hand," (she throws in a backflip that would snap any neck attached to a chin caught in her foot's path, then resumes her flurry of blows at the air from farther back) "hearing you talk I'd figure you for English. And you also fail to look six or seven years old."

"I said estimate, not pinpoint," he says mildly.

She snickers. "Opinions on the backflip? I was so pleased when I discovered I could do that."

"Flashy, but potentially useful."

"Is it ever useful to be flashy solely for the purpose of being flashy? Does it scare people, or anything?"

"It can scare them, or make them underestimate you, or distract them. All very useful, under the right circumstances."

"The backflip would make someone underestimate me because...?" Her onslaught against the vile villain, The Air, is unslowing.

"It's flashy," he repeats. "If you consistently display unnecessary theatricality, you look inexperienced, or arrogant."

"I am inexperienced. I'm not arrogant about this." Pause. "Yet."

"Personally," he says, "I tend toward maximum economy of movement unless there is some reason to act otherwise. And yet I am probably among the most arrogant vampires on the planet about my fighting abilities—granted, not without cause."

"Yeah, I saw you, you're very good," Bella agrees. "Do you have any more notes about how I'm doing at beating up all this nitrogen-and-whatnot?"