"Yep," he agrees. "I think it's mostly due to the sway, though – if you didn't have that over me I would probably be inclined to ignore you while biting on someone."

"Mm. Good thing I have some of it over you, then, I guess? Even if you do have some over me due to it, too."

"Would be even better if neither of the bloodlust and the sway existed and I could just go about being all awesomely superpowered, but yes, at least it's not quite as bad as it could be."

"Yeah... I'm not sure which fictional type I'd rather be, honestly."

"Fictional type of vampire?" he asks. "Well, at least I didn't have the, like, three days of extreme burning pain or three days of having to drink some vampire's blood or whatever."

"Or the turn to dust in the sun, or the allergy to right angles."

"Or the allergy to garlic, or the horrific paleness, or the whole 'inability to empathize' thing or whatever it was."

"Or just becoming plain evil, although I bet someone could totally become evil to rationalize—this."

"I feel like I could congratulate myself on not becoming evil but I'm really not sure that's, uh, at all an achievement?"

"I'm just speculating, but." She pats him on the shoulder. "Congrats on the not-being-evil thing."

Eyeroll. "Thanks. Sorry I'm not, y'know, automatically able to nullify all the disadvantages by virtue of my super hackable brain or whatever."

"That'd be too easy, the plot would end in chapter two."

"I'm pretty sure I'd be able to fill more than two chapters with 'makes everyone, consensually, into vampires after some coincidental happenstance where they find out how turning works and find out how to do it safely and reproducibly', this being after the bit where you introduce all the main characters and also after the bit where I die and there's the sad bit before the sudden unexpected-slash-expected plot twist where I'm a vampire, but yeah, too easy."

"Hmm, fair enough. At least here you can save some people of horrible diseases, maybe."

"Yep. And if we get– I don't really want to say 'lucky' here, but if someone dies at some point after I feed them my blood and they wake up a vampire, then we'll have a nice-ish confirmation of how turning works, and if someone – uh, like your mother, should perhaps watch out for this – turns after I bite them, then that's also a confirmation."

"...yeah, true, I guess. I mean, I don't think mom's gonna turn into a vampire, but she might and I already told her everything about it."

Nod. "Not really sure why I'm able to go into my house and not yours. I mean, my house is sort of mine, I guess, and I don't know how it determines things, but I'd sort of expect it to do it based on ownership of the house and invitations into–" Pause. "Never mind, none of that is really based on anything I know about the system for sure, but now I feel like I should go test to see if I can go into Matt's house because I have previously been invited there, and I don't know if invitations carry into vampirehood."

"If house ownership distinguishes between vampire and mortal, maybe your house is owned by no one as far as magic cares."

"I mean, my mom owns it legally, and she stays in it, uh, a few days a month? Sometimes more? But I guess if it does it based on who spends the most time there, yeah, I used to do that and then I died-or-whatever."

"I mean I don't know if anyone would naively call it your mom's house, given that."

"Yeah," he says. "But I don't know that the definition of ownership works naively, or if it works off the legal definition but also includes inheritance and to vampires, or if it works off who spends the most time there and is alive and is not a vampire and then also includes inheritance and to vampires, or if vampires get a special exclusion for the last dwelling they were in before they turned, or if it's for all dwellings they spent longer than three hours in during the week before they turned, or what."

"And it's not obvious how to test it."

"Well, find out how to make more vampires and then go ahead and test them in a variety of different starting conditions, work out which hypotheses are ruled out and try to fit the data with the least ridiculous hypothesis, but that doesn't sound like a very fun plan to carry out, at least in part because it requires knowing how to make vampires and at least in part because it produces vampires."

"Not obvious how to test it in a way that's not pretty terrible, I meant."

Nod. "I think when it comes to testing things with vampires, most of the ways might unfortunately be terrible or alternatively not give much information."