"Yes, and you can if you like but you might not get many takers. There's a lot more thrill-of-the-hunt types than there are of whatever category you might put me in."

"That's disappointing. Why are vampires and such not common knowledge?"

"Irrational skepticism is apparently very comforting, and no one has yet been sufficiently motivated to burst the bubble."

"Back on my world I was responsible for making our sort of magic common knowledge," muses Cam.

"Well, if you want to do the same thing here, feel free. That ought to stir things up."

"In a good way?"

"In an interesting way."

"I suspect we have different priorities."

"I suspect they're more compatible than you might think."

"Do tell?"

"I want things to be interesting. I'm not especially concerned with exactly how. If you have constraints on what sort of interesting things you'd like to do, I'd still rather help than not."

"I want to improve the welfare of people in general."

"Well, that sounds potentially dull, potentially not."

"I don't suppose you can make general gestures at what bores you? Like, in the pornography case, if it's porn, there will often be naked actors."

"It's a problem of - proportion, you could call it. Most interesting things are novel, but most novel things aren't interesting. And that's only the one most easily identifiable characteristic. If I came up with a longer list, it would be worse for the rest and at the end of it you probably still wouldn't have much idea of how to distinguish interesting from boring in practice. I predict it would be faster to ask me to classify individual things as you suggest them. How do you mean to improve the welfare of people in general?"

"You said 2008? After seeing to what extent my memory of 2008 on my world matches this one beyond English and VCRs, if the match is reasonably good, off the top of my head I can patch your ozone layer, bring up the more generally harmless scientific fields by about a hundred and fifty years, save the honeybees, get you good and started on colonizing the solar system, feed some hungry people after I sit down and think about how do to that without weird political destabilization, maybe do the vampire blood dispensary."

"You think big," says the vampire. "That's promising."

"It's just a pity my world doesn't have faster-than-light yet. I can make nifty spacecraft, but nothing that'll get you to Alpha Centauri in less than a hell of a long time."

"I imagine nifty spacecraft are still better than what we've got for many practical purposes."

"Oh, yes. It's just you're complimenting me on thinking big when I was listing things I could definitely do with magic I currently have in like - a month, tops, if we assume I have to break into the homes of various scientists to nefariously leave books in their living rooms because no one will listen to me if I crash conferences. This is not big yet."

"By all means, think bigger."

"Well, I don't know anything about local magic, yet. Or how it will interact with my stuff."

"Then perhaps it will be productive to find you some research material."

"Perhaps it will."

"Mildly interesting so far. Congratulations."