Where Matt is in fact still awake!

"...you should probably catch a wink."

"Yeah," he says. "Possibly should."

"Are you gonna go back to your place, or would you just like to sleep here somewhere…?"

"I think my mom is home right now and she prrrobably expects me to be at school, so um." Pause. "Here?"

"Sure," says Theo.

"And Willow can be our spotter meanwhile."

… He nods. "Yeah."

"Should we experiment with blood, then?"

"I guess? Should probably get my blood available, first."

He goes and grabs a small container.

"I meant you drinking mine, but I suppose the order doesn't matter much."

"Right, but getting this available for then in case you end up woozy or you get injured worse than expected – though I guess maybe your shapeshifting would help with that. It's probably safer than having to get me to produce it afterwards anyway."

"How does your shapeshifting even work?"

"Not much of a clue, honestly, it reacts to and only to my emotional state and I've only been guessing that it would let me survive a vampire attack. I think it's a good guess, don't get me wrong, but my magic's the darnedest thing to experiment with."

"Obviously has drawbacks if we try to test it." And the blood-cup is done! "So. I am sort of guessing I should not bite your neck, because that sounds more dangerous than necessary, but I don't know if or how well or what it works if I bite, like, your arm."

"We should also, like, probably develop some better safety precautions."

"Any particular ideas? Having someone around who's got sway over me so they can tell me to stop, that's probably a good start."

"Yeah and Willow does, a bit, although maybe she should, like, have super sway over you with a recording or something and then we tone it down from there?"

Nod. "Probably better than the current thing, yeah. I'm not sure how much it'll matter, though, if I pull away without her telling me to – like, if we set it so I only feed for a few seconds or something."

"'Set it so'?"

"I mean, if we say beforehand that I only feed for a few seconds or something, and then I aim to do that, then if I actually do go ahead and do it without her telling me to stop, it shouldn't really matter what level of sway she has unless the mere noticeability of a nearby human helps me to think of people as people? Which is possible, but, I don't expect it to do it that much if I'm feeding – I'd expect it to be mostly just whether I can stop myself or not."

"But given that you can notice someone with sway over you from a mile off, there's no non-gradual way to test whether their presence is relevant to whether you can stop yourself or not."

"– I don't understand what you mean," he says. "I expect that if I can stop biting you while Willow has high sway over me, I can probably do it while she doesn't, because I don't think her simply existing in my presence with high sway will cause me to remember that people are people any more than I would otherwise, unless she specifically tries to convey that to me while I'm swayed by her." Pause. "Not that we shouldn't try it more carefully, see if it does in fact affect it, I'm just registering the fact that I don't think it'll have much of an effect."

"Right, and I think we don't have enough information to know how the presence of a high sway person affects your bloodlust but my guess is the opposite of yours."

Nod. "So Willow should probably take a video of me, then…?"