"...Oh, hello," the woman at the bar says, turning around.

"Hi! I'm Elspeth." (This is true.) "And this is Jacob." (This is also true.) "What's your name?"

"Oh, that's interesting. How do you do that?"

"Telepath. What about you?"

"Witchcraft."

"Nice. What kind? You get all sorts of magic users calling themselves witches in Milliways."

"In my world some people are born with, develop over time, or acquire after turning into vampires idiosyncratic personality-based powers. Mine is telling the truth."

"Um, that depends on what you're sensing. I'm a half-vampire, but you might just be getting a strong magical sense from my witchcraft. Even non-magical people get that. And I'm also carrying extremely detailed life histories of a large number of other people."

"I might not be getting that last thing, I don't typically read minds without permission. And it's...the truthy thing is separate from the thing I'm thinking of. If I were going to try to describe it using synaesthetic terminology I might say big or bright or something."

"...That was weird but it didn't turn off."

"Okay, then you're probably detecting the fact that I'm a half vampire and this has brain effects. My witchcraft, on the other hand, pitches a fit if I tell lies. I used to be able to get away with it if I was talking to people who'd never heard me tell the truth, but that's gotten harder over time."

"It's strange that the truth effect is still there when you're asking questions instead of telling people things. So what's up with your friend? I'm getting something latent off him that's a little like being a telepath but not quite..."

"Even if I don't say anything, or state anything, there are facts about myself that are communicated through body language, or for that matter choosing to be silent - goes the theory. It's not especially scientific theory, as there's only one of me. Jake's a werewolf, and when he and other wolves in his pack are in wolf shape they're telepathic with one another. Doesn't do anything when he's shaped like so."

"Huh. That would explain it. It's still different from my kind of telepathy, but then, most kinds I've encountered in Milliways are."

"What's yours like, then?"

"D'you want a verbal explanation or sensory summary?"

"I'd happily take the latter but you should know I'm not good at keeping secrets."

"It's not a secret. There are several telepaths in my world and we all work basically the same way."

"Okay then."

"I don't mind if you read my mind. Jake prefers to reserve same for pack and in principle me. That having been said, I contain the unabridged memories of a lot of other people, some of whom are alive to object, and while keeping those genuinely private is a lost cause by now it'd on the whole be better if you didn't look at any memories that aren't mine in the first person."

'Looking only at specific things is not difficult.'

"Cool."

If she has permission, she's going to sift through the top layer of surface thought. "In principle you, meaning you can't but if you could he wouldn't mind?"

"Right." (He's her wolf, he loves/trusts/needs her with a devotion that is quite beyond reason, this is complicated but for them the complications are long enough ago to have settled into the background, it is quite unlikely that there are any forms of intimacy-with-her that he would not want.)

"You are closer to someone than I am with my sister. Congratulations, I don't see that every day."

"I'm not sure if it's a 'congratulations' sort of thing. It just happened." (She was five. She was scared. As imprintings/matings go it wasn't so bad -)

"...Your world is kind of messed up."

"Yes, I know."

"The immortality thing seems decent, though."

"Yes. I can't turn you into a vampire from here, though, there's a procedure - if you really want it you can come back to my world and hope you get a door out to go home again, though."

"...I think I'll skip it. I think I caught something about genetic changes...?"

"Yes. Vampires have more chromosomes. The originals remain as-was though."

"Hmm. My telepathy is genetic, and I have it because of genes other than the one that activates it--" '(impression of how the X-Gene works, granting powers according to the information in seemingly useless and unrelated genes)' "--and I really do not even a little want to risk losing it."

"Ooh, a princess."

"Well, that's what happens when one's mother usurps the shadow government."

"Nice. My world doesn't have any governments that definitely need usurping at the moment or I'm pretty sure my parents would have done it."

"This one needed it." (The Volturi -)

"...This Chelsea person is already dead, right, it's not feasible to kill her again?"

"Yes. She's dead. Although Mama's general dislike of things that remind her of Chelsea might make her unfavorably disposed if you did apply to be turned, so I definitely can't guarantee results. It doesn't help that you're from another world and would probably wind up outside her jurisdiction eventually."

"I would never do anything like that," she says vehemently.

"I understand. And she has exceptions. My father reads minds less voluntarily than you do; she's careful about making sure no one is in his range without being okay with that, outside of extreme circumstances. But she might decide you'd make a dangerous vampire she'd have no hope of containing if it came to the necessity. You're much stronger and more general and longer-ranged than Chelsea was, and you don't work by witchcraft so Mama's immunity might or might not cover you."

"That's--fair. And I don't want to be a vampire anyway, I'm not planning on asking...I'm curious enough I'm tempted to ask your precog aunt, but I don't think I'd actually go through with it even if your mother had no objections."

"That's reasonable. I don't have an alternative form of immortality to peddle, unfortunately."

"Oh well. There's time yet before it's urgent."

"Maybe if you get enough doors you'll find one you like more than mine."

"Hopefully, yes. How often do you get doors, if I wanted to indulge my curiosity with your aunt?"

"Pretty often. I get large quantities of a tasty non-blood substance here for R&D to try to figure out how to make and everybody else to drink."

"Convenient."

"I bring home other things too, but if I overdo it I don't get new doors for longer than usual, so I try to keep it to the essentials - yes golden bubbly and interesting feats of materials engineering, no parts for spaceships that break the speed of light."

"My sister and I usually bring home medical technology a little more advanced than what we've currently got."

"I brought home some stuff on limb regeneration once. Turning into a vampire can't do that. But things that turning into a vampire can fix are less the focus - Mama approves of public health measures and I've brought vaccines and the like before but I haven't found anything that will do proper immortality besides vampirism and we're already doing that as fast as we can."

"Not that it's relevant anymore, or that your mother would be any more likely to approve for turning other people who are also telepaths, but can turning into a vampire fix paraplegia?"

"As long as everything still exists, yes. It just can't generate body parts out of nothing."

"Huh. Well, not really relevant anymore, but theoretically good to know."

"And the process will dissolve anything that isn't organic body part or glass, which can be inconvenient for some people who've been injured and had that addressed in ways other than turning first."

"I imagine it wouldn't dissolve the wheelchair."

"No, the wheelchair would be fine. But hip replacements come up pretty often..."

"That does sound inconvenient, if it doesn't make new ones."

"It doesn't. So now we have expensive, hard-to-maintain extradimensional tech to handle re-replacing those hips with bone. And it has to be a genetic match, not because they'd have time to reject the bone but because if the hipbone turns with the rest of the person and it's different it'll generate different vampire venom and that will create mildly uncomfortable scar tissue."

"Sounds unpleasant. And it can't help matters that the people most likely to have gotten hip replacements are the ones with the least time to get turned in."

"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."

"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."