"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."

"What are vampires like, anyway, besides immortal and mentally capacious?"

"Pale. If you're already pale for a human when you turn you wind up almost pure white; people who were darker stop getting paler only just short of that. Eye color changes, depending on recency of turning and diet. Thirsty. Volatile for the first while, although that shortens and attenuates considerably when people know what they're getting into ahead of time. Very strong, tough, fast, precise. Perfect recall. Turning symmetrizes and smooths out, so many people like their looks better afterwards. Vampires don't sleep. It often improves or sometimes even adds de novo witchcraft. Vampires can completely heal from any injury without scarring as long as the injury wasn't inflicted by another vampire's teeth, all the pieces can be found, and they're brought into contact with their missing parts soon enough that they haven't completely dried out. They smell bad to werewolves, and vice-versa. Female vampires can't bear children. And they're about room-temperature, a little colder."

"Huh. What do you mean about eye color?"

"'Newborn' vampires have bright red eyes. A diet of animal blood or golden bubbly will turn them gold eventually; a traditional diet of human blood makes them dark red. A particularly thirsty vampire of any persuasion has black eyes."

"At risk of being tactless, your kind of vampire has a great number of features that don't entirely make sense."

"Yes, I know."

"Mutants are kind of arbitrary too, but it's a more...random sort of arbitraryness."