Kanimir is, as he often is, sitting in his library enjoying a book on magic and pondering theoretical innovation. He has an idea; he writes it down. It probably won't pan out, most of them don't, but it might.
There is a faint hollering sound from overhead. It gets suddenly louder as the skylight irises open like a science-fictional door and two people drop through it, one a human and one an oddly glowing and shadowed person with a sort of wing-outline she seems to be using to slow their fall. They collapse on his carpet.
"It keeps us alive, but it has--degenerative mental effects over time. From what I can tell the effect is roughly that drinking a creature's blood as a vampire pulls one closer to the creature in mind and body. With humans the effect is utterly negligible. With animals--well. The mind goes first."
"Drinking from an animal once would have no adverse effects, and if one does drink enough to have adverse effects, returning to a consistent diet of human blood eventually reverses it; as long as elementals are as intelligent as humans I have no expectation that the adverse effects, if any, would be intolerable to wait out."
"In the absence of widespread magic a great deal of nonmagical devices have been invented. For example--" he walks over to a desk, opens a drawer and pulls out a flat black object that looks like it's made of--glass? Or maybe stone? "This isn't magical at all." And he presses on an indentation on one end of it, that causes the screen to light up. A set of numerals are written across the top, and a picture of tumbled gemstones occupies most of that side. A horizontal bar, parallel to the numbers, reads "slide to unlock" at the bottom.
"This particular device is known as a tablet; it's a subset of a kind of device known as computers. Computers do lots of very small math so densely that they can do this with the results," he gestures at the screen. "There are a lot of very tiny channels of metal, and each one can represent either 'one' or 'zero'--if there is currently electricity flowing through the channel, that's 'one,' if not, it's 'zero.' Electricity is tame lightning. Electricity is also used to produce the light, although differently. Showing pictures is hardly the extent of it, though; with this I could if I so desired record a moving image of myself, sound and all, and send it to a correspondent on the other side of the globe."
"Well, right now we have a religion that earnestly believes that if you have sex with someone who possesses the same form of genitals as you you're going to be tortured forever after you die, and therefore if someone evinces attraction to the same gender one ought to electrocute them, because this will supposedly 'cure' it."
"That would be neat. I'm not aware of any research in that direction - most people just tap elementals - and it wouldn't help all that much in the case of shadow-walking in particular because it involves navigating in a way humans are very bad at, but it'd be really handy."
"I have had my life settled roughly as I wish it for the past few hundred years; aside from maintenance tasks like finding new blood donors when the old ones choose to leave or keeping up with modern technology I have had few practical concerns to distract me from pursuit of theory. You have been alive less than two decades and presumably have had more urgent concerns than pure thaumaturgy."
Kanimir explains what parts of the spell count as discrete parts and how to choose sequences to compress--"It helps to know what shows up elsewhere, see--these parts together are used in many spells involving light, so if you have a shortcut for that, you can reuse it there--"
"Oh, god, I could give you a whole lecture on why the world sucks--it's a distribution problem, mostly, the vast majority of the wealth is in the hands of a few people and they'd do just about anything rather than part with a fraction of it to make sure the people on the very bottom get fed and clothed and housed and so on."
"--Uh, sometimes someone's born with the genitals associated with the opposite gender, and sometimes people aren't a man or a woman at all, and sometimes they're both, and transphobia is the insistence that people who do anything other than go 'Okay, this is what my crotch looks like, I guess that's what gender I am' are doing something wrong. Or rather 'okay, this is what my crotch looked like when I was born,' sometimes people get surgery to change what genitals they have."
Maurabel continues to study magic and eat local food, some of which she brings to Penumbra. She doesn't stay up as long this time; deciding to aim to wake up noonish and overlap with a couple of the humans' meals and still have plenty of time simultaneously awake with Kanimir for ~magic tutoring~ in case she gets stuck with books. She solicits notepaper. She receives borrowed outfits.
She sighs.
"I was hoping to come up with a more graceful way to explain this. My brother and I have lived long and, for the most part, difficult lives. And he shielded me from the worst of it, at his own cost. My brother was never very social even as a child, but he--burned out on it, very badly. He hasn't enjoyed the company of another person besides me for its own sake in over half a millenium.
After you went to bed, that first night, he called me in a panic because he had experienced a mild positive emotion connected to you separate from your magic system and he had no idea how to handle it."
"They start as adults knowing every language in the world at the time. They can all fly. Wild ones aren't interested in the same kinds of things as humans but they get that way after a lot of time around us. They've got more magic but can only use one or two elements each, usually one - a fraction are hybrids."
"I mean, I've never met one in the wild, but the way they talk about how they were before they met humans sounds cute. They do stuff like stand under waterfalls playing with the water and tasting random things to see what's food and they fly around and they've got nowhere they need to be or anything they need to do, they haven't picked up hangups and anxieties about civilization-style stuff..."
"I don't know if you have all of the relevant memes in your world but ours has a long history of imperialism both cultural and regular, and I'm a member of one of the ethnic groups that's been one of the worst offenders, from a mainstream local point of view--it's more complicated than that, of course, but a reasonable heuristic is a reasonable heuristic."
"The short version is that a particular continent did most of the imperialism, and here, which is not on that continent but mostly populated by the descendants of settlers both of that continent and others, the natives having been imperialized very hard, the most socially salient thing is that I am obviously descended from people from that continent. The more complicated version includes the fact that there was a lot of intra-continent imperialism prior to easy access to other continents, and the country I was born and raised in was one of the ones on the receiving end, and that I was born and raised in the time period where intra- rather than inter-continent relations were what was immediately relevant."
"I wouldn't call us one. We come from dramatically different backgrounds and don't tend to cluster in otherwise extraordinarily multiethnic groups. I've known groups of vampires within human cultures large enough and sufficiently divorced from the surrounding humans that they might be called a subculture, but the set of all vampires across the globe, no."