"Nope! The one who moved is a human, the one who he moved for is a vampire - not the kind we have here, a different kind with better perks and fewer inconveniences and no soul-losing. I'm sure the vampire would be happy to turn him but he hasn't taken him up on it. They have a kid."

"Cute," says Val. "But I mean, if that kind of vampire is made out of humans, chances are there's humans around in their world."

"There are some, yes, but the plan to gradually supplant the population with vampires and various species of hybrid and also werewolves is underway. I'm not sure whether they're going to replace that with resurrection-based solutions to death or not."

"Solutions to death," Val echoes.

"Yes. Not a fan of it, I gotta say, and I speak as someone who vividly remembers dying. Neither is the vampire empress of that world in favor."

"You know, I get the impression that solutions to death don't usually work that well. But maybe you're lucky."

"On net, I am sort of lucky. Also, hello, I am dead," says Bella, waving, "my solution is working out okay for me. I just have to pave the way for everybody else so I can scale it. That one scales easy, now, I have what you could call a software solution."

"Do you wanna, like, explain any of that?" wonders Val.

"Which bit? Because explaining all the stuff I can do would be a loooong story."

"Like, what in the name of crystallized fuck does a software solution to death even mean?"

"I mean, me and some other people went to the afterlife, deemed it not good, got management attention and worked out a deal, and installed our computer friend Jane who can do inter-world teleportation to handle stuff. And now if I want a dead person I tell Jane so and she fetches me the dead person."

"Okay," says Val, "see, that's informative. 'What you could call a software solution' is not informative."

"Sorry."

"'Sokay," says Val. "I'm gonna grab some cookies, you want?"

"Sure, I'll take a cookie."

"That," says Bella, swiping a cookie, "is a neat party trick."

"Yep," says Val around a mouthful of cookie.

"D'you suppose your mom is going to want to talk to me?"

"Probably not," says Val. "But if all you wanna do is talk about Siathe, I can do that too."

"Sure," says Bella. "Let's hear about Siathe."

"...You might have to get slightly more specific," says Val.

"If I knew what I was looking for," says Bella, "then I would be more specific. And if I wanted to just turn invisible and fly around in the place for a while, then I'd do that, but I would like person-filtered information to guide me. You are totally a person."

"Okay," she says, "so like - what do you already know?"

"The books on this subject are really terrible, except for all having consensus on the species not being anthropophages and not leaving me completely stunned by your party trick. I speak fluent Kiessa? My kinda magic is good at languages. I'd need to sit down and really dig at the implanted vocabulary to learn any culture from that, though."