Sounds nice. Not misleading people all the time, I mean.

Soon she will not even have to let random people on the street at home assume she's a human! Almost there!

Oh? What's the timeline on that?

It's a percentage of the population in the know thing, not a specified date, but projections suggest five to ten years.

Exciting. 

Space Arda has immortality solutions for dozens of species by now, but humans are an annoyingly tough nut to crack. They now have two kinds of magic that does it, but neither one scales. Wish's dimensional neighborhood is the only one that's ended death. They are sort of considering hopping a lot of planets into Space Arda so at least the kids of currently existant people will live forever. It's nice that at least Aurum will have a solution for most of its existing people pretty soon.

Yup! Being a vampire is great but not unalloyed greatness; what Mama is actually hoping for is a higher fraction of hybrids and there are various incentives to encourage that, because while hybrids are not as strong/fast/etc. as vampires and do have to sleep and breathe (at least sans magical solutions) they are also not thirsty all the time and no less likely to be witches and pretty firmly immortal, and don't require help from outside the species to reproduce if they want. There are werewolves too but Mama is not so much encouraging those, although they do fine without any encouragement.

Werewolves seem complicated. His reaction to imprinting at least is very loud internal screaming but that's his reaction to lots of things, it's not a very useful guideline.

Loud internal screaming is not an unreasonable reaction. It's pretty freaky. And the precog doesn't work on wolves so they can't even be protectively matchmade. A Problem. (Vampires do a similar thing but at least it has personality filtration. Hybrids don't do the thing, yet another advantage.)

At least it's apparently only women who have to worry about this, because otherwise he'd probably vaguely worry if he ever set foot in Aurum that a wolf would end up mind-altered into complete obsession with him. Now it is only vampires that can happen with, and could be foreseen, and -

 - he should probably just not go to Aurum.

Yeah probably not. The only wolf who leaves it is safely imprinted on Elspeth and the vampires who leave it are all mated already, except Dwi that one time and he didn't talk to anybody he was theoretically compatible with. (Addy really really wants to go and really really cannot be trusted so she's working on being trustable and isn't mated but probably can't mate? It's complicated.)

Probably can't mate?

Well, it filters for all kinds of things including orientational compatibility and Addy thinks squishy feelings are gross. Sometimes vampires who think sex is gross fall in love hard enough to get over that and sometimes vampires who think romance is gross fall in lust hard enough to get over that but Addy is probably in the clear. They think.

He's glad he's a magic rock and probably couldn't have anything to do with magic soulbonding even by accident. But Aurum sounds like it's at least being run very well.

Mama's good at it!

Yes, probably, it seems to come with the skillset. He double checks to make sure he thinks that for reasons other than Elspeth thinking it; he does. Thanks for stopping by. I should probably get to work.

Bye.

And she pops off.

And he writes up a report on the crystal ball. 


Enemy probably couldn't do Elspeth. Enemy probably wouldn't do everything-else-recent. He doesn't think the new him will find this combination persuasive.

So, that's useful to have, but probably not a great place to start with Maedhros.

Waking up after a few thousand years (it was four, for him) hurts. Even for people who don't have all Maedhros's triggers. It's a very intense long-lasting form of sensory overload and after that much isolation it's hard to be around people, to remember how to interact with them...

If sensory overload is the problem they could grab Alec, but that's kind of an extreme option, as he's normally full time on anesthetizing turning vampires.

Were the spellbinders unable to come up with something else that'd work for Aurum, he feels like that was at some point on the project list -

They have a oneshot spell which works just fine but has to be cast per subject. No luck coming up with a hex version that casts a field of it or anything so far. Aurum has hired some extradimensionals (coupla Flat Elves to osanwë entertainment to turning people, spellbinders to do that) but the volume's not great.

Well, a one-shot would work for this at a lower opportunity cost than Alec.

The spell was intended for vampires-to-be, not general sensory deprivation; it's a painkiller, not anything else. Maybe the spellbinders can come up with something more Alecy on short notice.

Well, the conversation's happening in public channels, they can weigh in if they've got any ideas. While we're customizing, total sensory deprivation sounds terrifying, maybe something that just tones everything down? What is Mandos like, what have the last seven thousand years been like -

Not conveniently described over text, anybody interested is welcome to stop by. Most relevantly for Maedhros you can't talk to other people there. You occasionally get a vague sense they're nearby, but not that nearby, and heading towards them doesn't make them any closer. You can relive your memories at the pace you lived them, you can't really review them otherwise. If you were very close to someone in life you can approach them more closely, sometimes; he tried to find Maedhros and never got anywhere on that.