"Yes. We go as fast as we can. The anesthetist works full time and the witch who copies powers takes his for occasional shifts too."

"Anesthetist?"

"Turning into a vampire hurts a lot." (This is an understatement.)

Shiver. "Aha. Venom indeed."

"Someone who needs to jump the line and can't displace a pending batch may choose to turn without Alec or Addy helping, and that used to be what anyone who turned had to do anyway, but it's not advised."

"I can imagine it would be preferable to dying..."

"Not during the process. Rates of regretting it afterwards are pretty low, though."

"Close enough. If I know I'm going to regret something I'll refrain even if it feels good while it's happening."

"Makes sense."

"So unless literally every vampire turned before your mother took over had it done without consent probably there are emergency circumstances where it would be warranted."

"...Most vampires turned before Mama took over were without consent, or at least without informed consent, but not all, and plenty of them would have died without it."

"I suspected most. I did specify literally every."

"Well, Mama herself was a consensual non-anesthetized turning."

"I'm not sure if I should be offering my congratulations for the consensual part or my condolences for the non-anesthetized part."

"She did spend some of it in an induced barbituate coma to skip part of the process. So it wasn't as bad as most were."

"That sounds better than not."

"Morphine was also tried but that didn't work."

"I imagine if synthetic bones get eaten away then drugs wouldn't have much of a chance, no."

"The entire process takes three days, so the drugs don't get obliterated right away, it just turned out morphine was ineffective."

"Ah."

"And paralytic."

"Really? That seems vaguely arbitrary..."

"A little, yes. We've hesitated to experiment more with 'what effects do drugs have on turning people' for the obvious reasons."

"Yes, that would be a problem, wouldn't it. Well, I suppose my powers are no less arbitrary, really, and it's not terribly important to know why an unlikely-to-be-relevant combination of chemicals would produce a particular effect."

"Yeah. On an already turned vampire drugs in general are pretty much shrugged off like they're water, and they're hard to introduce to the system in the first place."