"I have yet to see him pass up an opportunity to drink tea. I ended up collecting Vampire Two when Tea identified him as being about to eat someone and talked his name out of him for me, because apparently I didn't have enough vampires."

"I heard something about a sunlight ward," Vampire Two puts in.

"I came prepared to ward Tea," says Castle. "I could be talked into warding you too without a whole lot of trouble, if Royal okays it."

"Convince me," invites Royal.

"...I'm totally on board with not eating people anymore if I get a sunlight ward out of it, and I really want to be able to, like, do things without Promise having to specifically let me do them, this is a very awkward situation to be in and I don't like it at all," he says. "I can be on my best behaviour, watch me, I won't eat anybody, I won't even kill people to take their stuff."

"Answer the following question honestly and completely," Promise says. "If I rescinded all of your orders now, under what circumstances might you harm other people in the future?"

"...If I thought I was definitely never going to see any of you people again and no one was going to care, I might go back to eating people, but if I was used to the alternative by then I might not even bother," he says. "Otherwise, I mean, it seems like what you want from me is to not murder anybody, and if it gets me out of the kinky fairy magic I can totally do that, so I'd stop eating people and go out of my way not to kill them if I can help it? I might still get in fights and stuff, I'm not turning into a total pacifist over this, but I hope it's okay with you guys if I defend myself, it's kinda unfair otherwise. But I don't get much of a kick out of violence for its own sake. So I might hurt somebody if they attacked me or looked like they were definitely about to, or if something came up that I can't think of right now that seemed like it would be basically acceptable to somebody with their soul still attached, and I guess I'd still bite people, like, consensually without killing them, if I found somebody who was into that? Is that a complete enough answer, I think it is but I'm not sure...?"

"That will do." She looks at Royal and Castle. "Does that sound good enough to you? It sounds approximately good enough to me but you will know more about vampire psychology than I."

"It passes as far as I'm concerned," says Royal. "Congratulations on collecting some unusually benign vampires."

"If it's good enough for Royal it's good enough for me," says Castle.

"I rescind your orders," she tells Vampire Two.

"Cool. So how about that sunlight ward?"

"There are two possible versions of the ward," says Castle. "The short version will work, and it'll be permanent on what I might call the human scale, but there's no guarantee it would last you hundreds of years if you live that long. The long version will be much more reliable in the very long term, but it'll take longer to cast and part of the setup will involve your cooperation in a spell that'll show me a general overview of how your personality works. Preferences? And who wants to go first?"

"Vampire Two seems more eager about the whole thing; he can have the first shot," says Tea.

"Thanks," says Vampire Two, eyeing Tea with slightly grudging appreciation. "And sure, whatever, I'll take the long version."

"Tea? Long version or short?"

"May as well go for long."

"I've got my materials set up over here," she says, crossing the hall to enter a classroom. "I don't mind spectators but anyone in the room should sit where I tell them to sit and not move around while I'm casting."

"I'm curious. Where should I sit?"

There is a large flat space cleared in the center of the classroom, with desks and chairs stacked against the far wall. Castle unstacks some chairs, sets them at the back of the classroom, and indicates them. "Non-participants over here," she says, and then starts checking a compass and laying out a geometric figure on the floor with masking tape. "Participants are just me, Royal, and Vampire Two for the first round."

Royal assists her aunt with the masking tape and also asks Vampire Two, "If you were a chess piece, which one would you be?"

"...Is this a trick question?"

"What's a chess piece?"

"Chess is a very old and widely-played game involving a number of pieces defined to have different abilities and characteristics," Castle explains. "The pieces are king, queen, rook, bishop, knight, and pawn. The kind of magic I practice involves setting up metaphors in which spell participants are represented by various chess pieces. I'm very strongly a rook, also known as a castle, hence the nickname; Royal's strongest pieces are king and queen, though she can take knight in a pinch. The setup spell here is a pawn promotion, which references a move in chess where a pawn, normally the weakest piece, can be transformed into a queen, knight, rook, or bishop. I'm going to represent Vampire Two as a pawn in the spell and then ask the magic to show me which of those four he has strong associations with. But it can be helpful to have an idea ahead of time."