...sway is scary.

"If I can, yeah, that'd be good," he smiles. "And I don't know if you need anything to clarify that I am in fact alive? I should be at my house for, uh, most of the next while anyway, so if you do need to contact me it should be possible to get me at my address."

"Noted. Do you want to get your belongings now...?"

"Yeah, would be good."

"I'll... have them brought here," she says, and gestures towards the chairs over there.

"Thanks," he responds, and then over to the chairs they can go!

That they can!

"I really do not like this sway thing."

"It feels creepy," he agrees. "Plus it seems like I could probably do– oh, a lot of things that I really shouldn't be able to."

"Yes. Kinda explains a lot of the myths, if they were based on this."

"Yep," he agrees. "Or if it was some contagious thing I got from you, then it would be really confusing that I happened to turn into a vampire."

"Maybe I'd already left a werewolf, a ghoul, a lich, a goblin, and a fairy trailing after me."

"Possible, and you got– slightly inconvenient shapeshifting?"

"It's actually pretty inconvenient, had to change towns a bunch because of it."

Nod. "Fortunately it doesn't come with a side-effect of making you want to, I don't know, perform non-consensual plastic surgery on people or something."

"...wow that'd be pretty awful."

"I mean, luckily this doesn't seem to come with anything that makes me want to turn other people into vampires, but yeah, something like that would be pretty bad."

"No, just eat them. Which... is awfully self-destructive, now that I think about it, I mean, either you'd be taken down or you'd eat everyone and then you'd die so, like. Terrible?"

"I'm not sure I could actually go around eating, like, literally everyone. With a large enough number of vampires, sure, but just me I'm guessing the global birth rate would be higher than how quickly I'd kill people." Pause. "Plus if I'm that high I'd probably, like, fall over giggling or get distracted by another wall, coated in blood and whatever." (Shudder.)

"Something like that, yeah. Thinking along those lines, there must be some built-in way to contain the problem."

"I mean, the sway thing is sort of built-in but I guess not directly or automatically made useful against the bloodlust, and the 'must be' thing only holds if there are in fact other vampires or the system cares to make me naturally long-term viable, I think?"

"Well, why wouldn't it? It seems... tragically self-defeating for it not to."

"Right, but if the system is literally 'by the way there's contagious magic' then there doesn't have to be anything added into it of 'and all the magic produced ensures that the magic receivers will live long, happy lives' or anything? If it, I don't know, made me run after a few people and bite them and just go near other people in really quick succession, and that spread the magic, that might be more efficient than making me do things slowly, I dunno. Or it might not be like that at all, because it's magic."

"Oh, right, if this kind of magic is contagious like that this might actually be—"

A doctor arrives, looking serious and not carrying any of Theo's belongings. "Mr. Owens?"

"Yes?" he asks. "That's me."

He also looks over the doctor quickly – not in a flirtatious way – in case it helps the sway for him to have a better picture of the person.

The doctor visibly pauses once Theo does that. "I understand there's been a misunderstanding about your medical situation a couple of days ago, would you come with me for some more exams?"