does not anymore work | Glowfic Constellation

she_sells_seashells

"Well, thanks for looking out for Pen. You ready to go home?" Shell Bell asks Pen. When Pen nods, she disappears. "On behalf of her mom, anything you'd like done with really quite unfair torrents of all-purpose magic as long as you have our attention?"

"...Off the top of my head...there's a particularly nasty man running around who has zero compunctions assaulting people and doing things like changing their species without their consent. We've been trying to track him down and get rid of him for years with no success." She rubs the side of her neck.

she_sells_seashells

"Get rid of him meaning?"

"I mean, if you have torrents of all-purpose magic and therefore a better solution than killing him, be my guest, but he's a Class One vampire and therefore pretty much impossible for people in my universe to keep contained.
...Pen says you have vampires that are different from my kind. We have thirteen classes of vampire. Class One vampires--like me, or my wife, or this villain--are extremely fast, extremely strong, and heal from most injuries in seconds. Human prisons don't hold us if we don't want them to."

she_sells_seashells

"...I'm getting Glass in for a consult, hang on."

thaumobabble

Another person who looks like a modestly older version of the first one and whose I AM SUPER MAGIC ambience also says (AND I AM FROM A FOREST) appears.

"Hi. ...Oh, weird. Anyway, could you open the door so I can have a look at your world?"

"Sure, no problem."

thaumobabble

Glass looks at the world.

"Whoo," she says. "That's a tangle. Lots of stuff. Fewer kinds of practicable magic than Chronicle and fewer sapient species than Sunshine but still. Slightly sheafy - maybe an afterlife? Yeah, that looks like an afterlife, I don't think we can Downside it on our own, probably would require either showing the admin a native or talking to the - something. That might be a god, that's, uh, interesting. Not all that mean, sort of Originish but without the bland, I have the sense it's trying and just sucks at it. Shouldn't hurt a Janepoint though."

"I can't say I'm surprised we have a god," says Gloria, who is wearing a cross necklace, "but I will admit to being surprised that you have magic that can tell either way. In a being impressed sense, not a disbelieving sense," she hastens to assure them.

thaumobabble

Glass looks at her necklace. "Most worlds that have Christianity actually don't," she says. "Even the one that has crosses that repel local vampires, though I'm gathering that your kind doesn't have that problem. ...And the last time we encountered a plausibly Christian mythos playing out in real life we didn't get along with it. Fair warning."

"From my point of view, that is disappointing and sad. But I hope you don't mind if I hold out hope for my universe.
...And if I haven't misunderstood you, I do think having a native afterlife is better than lacking one and hoping a more convenient one than the one you hypothetically would have will show up and rescue you from oblivion."

thaumobabble

"It's more convenient at the time when we can just attach new worlds to Downside, but having been attached to Downside before we came along is only dubiously advantageous. The question is whether you have a nice afterlife, and if Downside was dubious the other ones we've found are mysterious or worse. We'll check it out - assuming you don't mind our leaving a node in the world that will sync up its progression of time and allow us to come and go without waiting for Milliways doors."

"Sure, I don't have a problem with it."

she_sells_seashells

Shell Bell steps in and then disappears to do the honors. She's back a moment later.

thaumobabble

"Anyway, we're reluctant to kill your problem without sussing out the afterlife, but if all he has is super-speed and super-strength and super-healing he's not interestingly equipped to annoy us or interfere with our nonlethal measures. Can you be more specific about his disagreeable habits?"

"He assaults young women and turns them into vampires of various classes without their consent in a way my therapist has identified as having similar psychological aftereffects as rape."

she_sells_seashells

"If he just stopped being a vampire how much of the problem would that solve?"

"I strongly recommend also putting him into some sort of Witness Protection if you don't want one of his other victims hunting him down. And it's possible that whatever it is that makes him do what he does would then cause him to commit actual rape. It's also theoretically possible he could convince someone else to turn him back into a vampire but it's massively unlikely he could get back to becoming a reproductive vampire. ...Only the top five classes of vampire can create other vampires and most people don't even count the fifth."

thaumobabble

"...Devamp him, geas him on the rape tendencies, have a chat with him in which he may decide to stay here and risk retribution or drop him Downside? Downside also works if he won't take the geas, the ground rules will do it."

she_sells_seashells

"Sounds all right. A little involved for one guy, but it wouldn't actually take that long unless we let him monologue."

"Thanks. There's nonzero evidence he has, um, some tendencies that have made me worry about some of my friends."

she_sells_seashells

"What do you mean?"

"I mean I'm a Class One vampire. I don't know why he picked me to turn into a Class One vampire, but that is a significant allocation of resources, and another vampire of my acquaintance who used to know him back before she knew he was terrible thinks he's doing some kind of...experiment...which suggests he has some way of observing me, which means he might be anywhere near my loved ones."

she_sells_seashells

"We'll take care of it. Well, someone will, anyway, who should take point on this world - My and Glass's aura powers mean that we're bouncing around a little more than our alts and someone else should probably take your world under their wing, perhaps literally, maybe Pen's mom."

thaumobabble