"Totally reversed? That… should work if I can notice that point, shouldn't be too hard?"

"I mean it's kinda practically designed to be undetectable, yeah, and also a single picture is enough so even the shortest video should already be, that's probably not a very good test, hmmm..."

"… I don't think I can put my camera down to a low enough quality that it'd affect that, unless it's seriously affected by a change in quality? Should probably try that before we rule it out, just in case."

So he puts his phone to have 480p quality, wow, kinda surprising it goes that low, and then takes a short video of Theo!

It's not enough. Pretty instant.

He deletes it. "Okay, well, I don't think I can set it to take particularly low-quality photos either, so that probably won't work. Uh. Do you have a microphone attached to a computer? We could record you and then lower the quality different amounts and send me them and see how that works?"

"I have a computer and a microphone and can probably save it at different qualities, yeah? Then, since e-mail is potentially horrific, I can just copy it onto my phone and bluetooth it – slow but hopefully, you know, less risk of being horrific."

"Do you have a USB key?" he asks Matt.

"I don't think I have one on me?" he says, but looks through his bag to check.

… It turns out he does in fact have one! Probably with school work on so please don't damage it, thanks.

"So we don't need to worry about slow transfers, then, you can just send stuff to your computer then to the USB key, since it's technically Matt's."

"I might need to be able to see it or something, but testing the USB sounds like a good idea."

So Theo gets his laptop and then they can record his voice and copy over the full audio clip to the USB to check if it works properly.

It does! Matt doesn't even have to see it or anything.

"...I wonder if this could work if someone had a recording of someone else and just—didn't know it."

"Oh, so I should possibly be careful around people who have taken photos involving me at parties or something, that's– ugh."

"Does it even work with pictures from before you were a vampire? You could try putting one in Matt's USB key?"

So he goes and finds a photo from before he was a vampire and puts it on Matt's USB key, removing the audio recording as he does so.

Works again! But it's noticeably weaker than a brand new photo.

Theo relays the results. "That's kinda weird unless it decays with time. Should possibly take a photo of me now and keep it somewhere safe and try it at some future point, see if it's just because I became a vampire or what?"

"That sounds reasonable, yeah."

So Matt takes a photo of him, confirms it works, and then hands his phone to Theo to copy it onto his laptop.

Theo does so, then deletes it from the phone and stores it away somewhere. Presumably somewhere safe.

The photo stops working the second it's been deleted from Matt's phone.

That's as expected! "I'm gonna go get another phone, see if we can do ownership with a quick trade or something."

So he disappears and then he's shortly back with an old brick model that still fortunately has a camera.

"I'm not sure I understand what you want to do with that?"

"Take a photo of me on it, see if I can 'give' it to one of you so you have ownership over it and therefore get– sway over me."

"Oh, yeah, good test. I'm not sure how to convince the—whatever it is—that you're really giving us it."