"Huh. Your clothes don't have their own hhikiiias, I didn't notice until yours started talking about them."

"Course not, they're part of me. I can change 'em the same way I could with my deck, see?" He inverts the black and white parts of the colour scheme with a shimmer of rainbow mana.

"Now they're talking about the colors they are now. That was a pretty - magic thing you did."

"My magic's pretty!" he says cheerfully. "Wanna see something else?"

"Yeah!"

He giggles, puts his hand on the table, deploys a magical diagram, and lifts his hand away from it. The centre of the diagram fountains tiny glowing spheres in a dazzling rainbow of colours; they rise into the air in a streaming column and then drift away like soap bubbles, slowly fading as they go.

"What's that spell for?" asks Leekath, watching the spheres float away. (The display attracts a little attention from some people nearby, too.)

"It's not really for anything, I just made it up on the spot."

"It's pretty. Is it easy to make up spells that do kind of complicated things like that on the spot?"

"It's easy enough for me. I don't know how easy it'd be for somebody who wasn't a Device."

"Are you planning to just stay in Elcenia forever?" asks Leekath.

"I dunno. I don't even know if I can come back when the spell that's holding me here breaks. I think I can, but it's hard to be sure."

"I don't see why you couldn't, if somebody else summoned you," says Leekath.

"I mean come back by myself. Using my dimensional transfer magic. So I don't have to keep getting somebody new to summon me every time the last one dies."

"Maybe a dragon would summon you. They live a long time, that's why they're so tasty."

"I'd still keep needing new dragons for as long as I wanted to stay."

"Hm?" Leekath tilts her head. "Oh, you're immortal." Pause. "You don't have normal blood... but you have some..."

"Mm? Why, you want some?"

"Not right now. I just ate. But I'm curious."

He shrugs. "You can if you want."

"I'll find you in a couple weeks. It sounds like - if you are biteable you'll be able to make lots of blood, so you wouldn't need a waiting list like the dragons have."

"Yeah. I can self-repair; as long as I'm not wasting huge amounts of mana on other stuff, I'm not gonna run out of blood."

"So I want to try it but I don't know if you'll want to tell absolutely everyone if it turns out you're biteable and also taste good."

"Sure, why not?"

"Well, everyone would want to bite you, then, and there aren't that many vampires just in this one school but there are plenty of us in the world."