"It was entirely his choice to speak in the third-person. But okay, I guess hiding his face is a good idea, except maybe not a good enough idea, if you wanna hide why are you even walking around, and why am I acting like I believe he's a vampire I totally don't."

"I can show off some superspeed if you want?" He sighs. "I'm not super attached to hiding, just didn't want to conspicuously announce my presence after my having died before being surer about some things."

"Please do show off."

So he runs up and down the sidewalk rather quickly and hopes that's sufficient.

"Okay."

"Feel free to think you're hallucinating or something. I won't be offended."

"...no thanks. So do you, like, burn in the sun, drink blood, are allergic to garlic and right angles...?"

"Right angles? – Burn in the sun yes, nowhere immediately fatal, potentially not fatal at all to vampires, do drink blood, not allergic to garlic."

"Crosses," she explains. "Why are you out right now anyway with these two, then?"

"We're lovely company, you know."

"Yup," he says. "Oh, and I woke up in the morgue yesterday, spent– a while doing things and then slept in the desert and then panicked and called Sadde in the morning after I got a, um. Note. From him."

She raises her eyebrows at Sadde.

"I was sad he was dead, I left him a note in his house about it, then he called me."

"Then he decided it might be a prank, he came to check, and he found it wasn't and we spent the day testing things and then got Matt in on it after school."

He still hasn't uncovered his face.

"Yyyyup. Then we had some nice food and now we're going for a nice stroll in town – sounds fun, doesn't it."

"We're performing more tests."

"Woo," says Matt. "Magical testing."

"Do you want a seat or something?" Matt asks. "I'm sure there's a bench around here somewhere."

(Sigh.)

"Didn't look like you were running experiments that require standing still. What are you experimenting on, anyway?"

"They did not in fact require standing still, no."

"Echolocation," says Theo. "Or, like, mapping an area in my head by using echoes not necessarily produced by me vocally, if that's a different thing."

"...that's actually pretty cool."

"Kind of weird, though, because it's just – sort of 'obvious' that things are in places and I get some other feeling about it too, so I'm not actually consciously doing it, which is, yeah, weird."