"I am not those things, except very slightly the last one. This is working out far better than I would have guessed if you told me this morning I'd be teleported to a random dimension. Let's go find a werewolf, then."

"If you don't mind going among unimprinted male werewolves you could have dinner in the wolf village and Jake, my wolf, can announce that you need an escort. Anyone who's not willing to risk it will eat in their homes."

"I'm willing to risk it... And dinner sounds very nice right about now."

"All right, this way. The wolf village is a ways away from the coven part of the compound because vampires and wolves dislike each others' smells, and because not all the wolves want Dad reading their minds."

She follows. "Mind reading is a bit of a loop. But again, only surface thoughts, and I'm not thinking anything particularly private right now."

"A lot of people don't feel like they have enough control over their thoughts to avoid thinking private or embarrassing things."

She shrugs.

There is an underground tunnel between the coven and the village. Elspeth sticks to a human walking pace.

"Benjamin made this one too?"

"The tunnel? Yes. He likes using his power for building things. He used to belong to a coven whose leader wanted him to use it in combat a lot; he's happier with us."

"I'd imagine so. Freya would much rather use her power to chat with random folks instead of coordinaing Neuroi fights, but sometimes you have to fight anyway."

"Yes, but the Golden Coven has enough witches with combat-applicable powers that we don't need to use Benjamin, whose options are mostly too lethal for our tastes anyway."

"Good for Benjamin and good for you, I suppose."

"Anyway, if a wolf imprints on you that one will be your guide by default, but if no one does, you'll probably be escorted by Beatrice or Kelly. Also, you'll notice that almost no one in the village looks like they're between the ages of twelve and twenty-five, nor do many look older than twenty-five, even though there are plenty of children. That's because wolves activate when they're about twelve or thirteen, and then they mature physically very fast. They don't grow mentally any faster than humans, though, so you should be aware that people who look like adults could be children."

"I suppose your magic system isn't any weirder than mine. Witches all get their magic during puberty, and lose it sharply as they age. At age 20, you're still close to full. At age 25, you're significantly weaker. By age 35, you have so little as to be useless in combat."

"Half-vampires stop aging when they turn - turning children has terrible results - and hybrids grow up very fast. I've stopped growing but I'm actually eight years old."

"Maybe I should turn. I wouldn't put it past the world for that to not actually preserve my magic, though."

"Well, Alice should be able to see, and I imagine your application would look pretty appealing."

"I mostly want to go home. But that seems unlikely... If I manage it, no reason not to try and come back stronger."

"...There would be a problem with turning you and then you going home, in the sense that you'd probably find it very tempting to turn lots of people for increased durability in the fight with the Neuroi and Mama would not like an uncontrolled explosion of vampires in a world she couldn't monitor and enforce important vampire-related laws in."

"The Neuroi need to die, one way or another. They regularly turned cities to ash before the UDF got itself organized."

"Vampires, unchecked, eat several people a week until someone manages to kill them, and they are hard to kill."

"Neuroi, unchecked, kill thousands a day and spawn scheduled hurricanes that likely starve a similar number due to crop damage. The total death toll from direct Neuroi attack or the fires or floods they cause last year was an estimated 483,000. We still lose ground steadily. If you won't give us vampires, at least give us weapons tech or something."

"That's probably more negotiable. It isn't that Mama doesn't care about forms of death and destruction that aren't vampire-related, it's just that the size of the vampire project is already a little ambitious and she doesn't want to spread thin. The ideal would probably be for there to be sufficiently reliable interworld transit that she could just have jurisdiction over both worlds' worth of vampires."

"I just want the damn war to be over already. Then everyone could go home. Not that I don't like my squad, but it's a bit sad that a common enemy is all that holds us together."