"Beats the alternative for sure."

"Anyway! I will see you guys… some other time? Maybe in a week?" she says. Then she looks at Theo and holds up her empty mug questioningly. "Where should I put this?"

"Oh, I'll take it," says Theo, doing as such. "It was nice to see you?"

"I'll be there! See you."

"Bye!" she responds, then off she goes.

"So the pen broke so it wasn't just a weird vampire-house thing."

"Yeah. I mean it's not impossible the mug just failed to break for ordinary reasons."

"It's not impossible it failed to break, no, but I heard when she last touched it and when it fell down and then when it hit the ground and they did not line up."

"Maybe you got distracted?"

"… Retroactively distracted in how long it takes for something to drop to the floor?"

"Distracted while it was falling so it took less time than you think it actually did...?"

"I don't think so?" he says. "I seem to be either good with times or I know I'd be guessing and inaccurate. This is an example of 'it took this long, basically for sure'."

"Okay... I kinda wanna drop lots of mugs now and see if we can't replicate it."

"I sort of want to do the same? I guess we could go buy some cheap mugs and drop them but it might turn out they need to be here long enough to – I don't know, be contaminated or something – or it might turn out it was Evelyn."

She pauses. This thought hadn't occurred to her before. "—Do you think she knows?"

"About the vampirism or the shapeshifting or her own magic, if she has it? Because I have no idea to all of the above, but she was acting sort of weird earlier? – Might've been the sway, though."

"She was, a bit," Sadde agrees. "And in a way I'm not sure was altogether caused by the sway? Like, she decided to come to your place sorta on a whim and stuff. And she's never shown any undue interest in me, but I guess that's not evidence any way about her knowing about the shapeshifting."

"And I wasn't a vampire until a week-ish ago, and have hardly spoken to her since, so I don't think she knows about that, and it's totally reasonable for her to randomly pop up at a classmate's door and bring cookies, that seems in-character from what I know of her, but… I mean, why would she purposefully do magic in front of us?"

"I dunno. I still didn't see any magic."

"Were you watching the mug?"

"Yeah, I even warned her about it!"

"What did it look like it did? Fell normally with no interruption and no slowdown whatsoever?"

"I think so?"

"… Is that you expressing a lack of extreme confidence, or just clarifying that you do in fact think that, or…?"

"Both. I do not have an eidetic memory, I did not notice anything amiss with the mug."