He's smiling at her, stretched out along the edge of her nest, shirtless in soft black pajama pants.

Oh. Okay.

The reasonable thing to believe would be that he… tricked her, somehow, into believing the vampire thing, took advantage of her heightened emotions or something, and carried her off to his apartment where he's going to, what, keep her as a pet? Murder her? He murdered her last night and it was the best night of her life. She really wouldn't mind if he wanted to do it again.

Somehow, though, she doesn't think that's really what happened.

"…hi," she says. "Is this—um—"

He pauses to see if she's going to finish that sentence, then laughs softly and reaches to pet her hair. "I figured out resurrection, if that's what you mean."

She almost flinches from his touch, but then leans into it a little. He's so gentle. And the way he looks at her, like—like she's where his heart lives. It's amazing. Maybe a little frightening, but in a good way.

"Um," she says, intelligently. "Wow. Uh. …If I ask 'how' am I going to be able to even begin to understand the answer…"

"I can give you the short version," he offers.

"Sure."

"Well."

His hand rests on her cheek. It's not really cold, but it's not really warm either. It's… a Tas temperature. He was like that last night, too. However long ago last night was.

"People have lifeforce. That's what vampires eat, that's what you were feeling when I bit you. And I, well, had all your lifeforce. That wasn't enough to get you back all by itself, but it meant I had somewhere to start when I went and got a whole lot of exciting new magic."

Oh is that what that was. She brings a hand to her neck, notices the movement too late to stop it, and blushes. Her neck… does not feel bitten, not even slightly. She remembers quite a lot of biting. Point in favour of the 'this is real' theory? Or does it just mean she imagined more of last night than she thought?

"Um. Wow," she says, and then realizes she said that already ten seconds ago, and blushes some more. "I—wow. You're… why? Why me? I can't possibly be the most interesting person you've ever… eaten."

"Don't sell yourself short," he says, smiling that smile at her. "I'd have a hard time naming any serious competitors. You're a real treat, Lynne."

Right, yes. Lynne. Is the name he knows her by. It's not a bad name, really. And she wasn't especially attached to the other one. She can be Lynne.

Lynne wiggles slightly, made restless by the weight of his gaze. Is it possible to be uncomfortably happy? So flattered it almost feels like being insulted? That's kind of where she's at right now.

"So - do you - how long has it been, even?"

"About six hundred years. A lot of stuff has happened. You don't have to get caught up all at once; I plan to let you take it easy, first day of the new life and all."

"Six hundred—?!"

She sits up—she tries to sit up, and struggles to free herself from the blankets, and succeeds after an embarrassingly long few seconds.

The… bed…? is a circular pillow-lined platform in the middle of a room with more than four walls. Eight, maybe? Looks like eight. The walls are done up in a really nice cream wallpaper with some kind of faint pattern, and there's actual marble columns set into every corner, and to one side there's a closed door - no, double doors, with an arched top - and on the opposite side a slightly more reasonable-looking glass door with airy white curtains slightly obscuring the view of the balcony on the other side. There's nothing visible beyond the railing except a cloud-strewn blue sky. It's sunny out; everything is bright and warm. She blinks and looks back at Tas.

"Don't vampires—um, sunlight—?"

He laughs, looking up at her from his cozy sprawl. "Yeah. That used to be a big problem for me. I still don't like the sun much, but I can go out in it just fine these days."

"It doesn't… look like 2600," she says slowly. "No flying cars. No hellish dystopian government. Or is there? If there is you should eat me again." She half-smiles as she says it, not fully certain of whether or not she's joking.

"The flying cars are debatable, actually. The hellish dystopian government… well, I guess that depends what you consider a hellish dystopia."

"Wow, comforting," she says dryly.

"Well, right now we're on… I'm trying to think of a better way to describe it than 'the sex planet'… we're on another planet, and for complicated historical reasons it ended up being colonized by a company that makes weird porn, so now they run this entire planet to make their weird porn on, and it's actually a pretty nice place to live but you kind of have to be careful when and where you go out if you don't want to run into any weird porn."

"…could be worse," she acknowledges. "Could definitely also be better, but could be worse. Okay. So what are you doing here? Vampire porn?"

He smiles crookedly. "Among other things, yes."

".........if we are being filmed right now—" she says, pulling the blanket up around herself in a jolt of intense self-consciousness as her lack of clothes takes on a sudden relevance. A hot flush rises in her cheeks.

He shakes his head. "No, of course not. I wouldn't bring you back straight into that. ...it'd be kind of fun, if you wanted to, but I'm not gonna do that kind of thing without asking."

"Oh. Okay. Okay. Good." She relaxes, at least partly. Why did she say 'okay' twice? Was that really necessary? It was not. Ugh.

Tas moves closer again, curls up around her, and puts his head in her blanket-covered lap.

...she's distracted from her social anxiety by how cute that is. "Aww," she says. "What. There's been a mistake. I ordered a sexy scary vampire, and I got this floppy-eared puppy."

He giggles. "Oh no!" he says, hugging her. "That's terrible! Something ought to be done about it."