"You slept in the desert?"

"Yeah. I ran around licking things after I got out of the hospital, I bit five people and need to be really sure I don't do that again, and I then went into the forest and hugged some sand and hallucinated it talking to me."

"What'd it say?" he giggles.

"Not much."

"Aww come on, tell me! ...wait it just occurred to me, were you naked all that time."

"Yes. Hence me getting home and having a shower. To get the sand off."

"Well now there's the mental image. You, naked, high as a kite, hugging the sand."

"Yeah," he sighs.

"Silver! That's another thing vampires are typically weak to. Do you have anything made of wood or silver that could be used to hurt you? And maybe I could go out and buy a crucifix or something, wave it at you."

"I can go get a bit of tree, like a small stick and get a splinter of wood off it or something, for the wood. For silver, um, nnno I don't think so? Uh– actually mom might have some sort of silver thing, I can check with her?"

"Yeah, and I'll go see if I can get a crucifix somewhere. Back in ten or so."

Nod.

Off he goes.

Back he is. With a crucifix. Waving it at Theo once the door's answered, saying "Wooooo!"

"Doesn't seem to be working," says Theo. "And we should test if I can cross a threshold at some point, too."

"Oh, yeah, true," he says, walking in. "Wood and silver work at all?"

"Silver didn't," he says, shutting the door behind Sadde. "Not when I tried it myself, at least – turns out mom has some silver cutlery hidden away. Haven't tried the wood yet, though."

He puts the crucifix somewhere. "Did you get any to test yet?"

"Well, we could probably break apart that crucifix and use that, might be better, but I did in fact get a small twig off a tree."

"You're the one with superstrength," says Sadde, offering Theo the crucifix.

So he snaps it in two and then uses one of the sharper bits of one end to try to dig into his hand.

They watch as it heals, very fast, without any noticeable difference caused by the fact that it's wood.

"Guess wood's a no, too. So other possibilities are various herbs, possibly fire, house thresholds... The picture thing isn't a weakness per se but it'd be interesting to test anyway, and some vampire blood in fiction has supernatural properties as well. Also it's weird that the sun only hurts but doesn't do anything else, I wonder if it'd do something after you spent long enough under it...?"

"I hope the 'something else', if it does something, is not literally catch on fire because I don't know how well I'd fare against that."

He goes into the kitchen and places the two bits of the cross onto the counter.

"Me, too, but on the other hand it's better to find this out under controlled circumstances than end up having to bet on it."

"So hopefully it's not instant death on a certain amount of time out, yeah." Shrug. "Should I start sunning myself now, then?" Eugh.

"I mean, if you don't want to you shouldn't, you're the one who's gonna be in pain."