"What are you testing—I wonder if there's a way to cancel it out rather than just passing the buck, maybe if I take a picture of you and you take a picture of me...?"

"Should I go get a phone then? We haven't even confirmed that it works like that for me, just that I get a thing over people by default."

"I was just checking my thoughts."

"Yeah, let's test it," he tells Theo, and then to Matt, "Reach any meaningful conclusions?"

Theo goes to get a phone and is back shortly.

"A bit too much creepy 'his face is so pretty oh my god' but other than that I think I mostly acted how I would have normally."

"It's not just the prettiness, though, I definitely feel more—charitably inclined? Towards him. Like, I'm pretty darn charitable already, but without this is more pragmatism and general sense of morality whereas here there's a very strong empathetic thing going on."

"Yeah, I– um, I wasn't happy about the murder thing but I'm pretty sure Theo wouldn't do that intentionally, not unless something were majorly screwing with his head, so I was guessing that was the bloodlust thing? That he probably has? I'm not sure you've actually mentioned that."

"Compulsion to chomp on people's necks? – I did tell you about it," says Theo.

"Oh."

"So anyway," says Theo to Sadde. "Does the following sound like a good idea? I'll take a photo of you, see if you feel different, then you take a photo of me, we check if it's balanced?"

"But like, it's one thing to understand on a verbal level that it wasn't his fault and it wouldn't be productive to dwell on this fact or spend emotional energy on it, it's a whole 'nother to be actually feeling stuff like 'oh poor thing he's an angel.'" He looks at Theo and nods. "Yeah, sounds reasonable."

Matt frowns then shrugs.

Theo takes a photo of Sadde! The phone has a pretty good camera.

"Well that made it worse."

"… If it's at all easy to quantify, how much worse?"

"It's not at all easy to quantify."

"Okay, so you should probably try taking a photo of me now, like you agreed on before?"

Click.

"...back to the same point it was before either of us had photos."

"… Okay, so, vampire love thing based on photos, sounds kind of specific, it might be a bit more general than that? I haven't been videoed, as far as I know, see if that does something – or me videoing you, since it seems to work that way around."

Sadde records a few seconds of Theo.

Theo looks at Sadde and after a moment says, "I think it's quite a lot stronger."

...delete.

"Thank you," he says. "I'm sorry that the default seems somewhat in my favor, that seems sort of imbalanced and like it makes me even more of a terror. And I don't really actually want to be in magical whatever with anyone, but it might be safer that way on account of the whole person-person-person thing."

"I didn't wanna say that, but upon reflection that was at least partly because of it, yes."