And next they have invitation tests.

Turns out the invitation did not carry over from before Theo was a vampire!

Sadde is unable to invite Theo into Matt's house.

(Matt's parents are sleeping right now, quite fortunately.)

Matt is able to invite Theo in – all the drawbacks associated with coming near the house and the aversion to entering disappear, quite quickly – but then Matt can't rescind the invitation.

He tries a few different wordings. Tries intending it really hard. Theo darts out of the house and then off the property and then tries returning and is totally unimpeded.

"… Doesn't seem like it can be rescinded," concludes Matt.

"...noted. It's interesting that the game seems to be stacked against humanity, both in the sense of human beings and the sense of Theo's own internal sense of humanity."

"Vampires are usually kinda like that. In the stories. I think."

"Mm."

"I think that is probably it for today, then," comments Theo. "Seeing as it's now getting very late, and you guys probably need to sleep, and– my mom will be back tomorrow, I don't know if you guys recall? But we might not be doing all that much during the day – not that we usually do all that much – is what I mean."

"Yeah, you should probably drop us off at our places, I guess."

Matt waves.

And Theo goes to drop the others off at their places.

Willow's huge mansion (of course the largest house in the city is her family's) is between Matt's house and Sadde's so she's dropped off first.

Then over Sadde's-house-wards they go!

Gosh. Just the two of them.

Yes but unfortunately Theo is not interested so.

Terrible shame, that.

He wasn't even particularly sure that he wasn't interested, was he?

He seemed pretty sure the last, oh, fifty-seven times Sadde came onto him.

(Sadde did not come onto him fifty-seven times, he came onto him arguably-twice and got progressively more annoyed by it as Theo insisted on becoming hotter.)

(Poor Sadde.)

Unfortunately it doesn't take too long to get to Sadde's house. Plus it's perhaps a bit too late to be trying anything.

Not as far as Sadde's concerned it isn't.

"See you tomorrow? Unless you wanna stay with your mom all day? Which is probably a good idea."

"I'll call you, let you know?"

"Alright. Good night, then."

"You too," he responds, then off he goes.

Theo's mom is actually quite sympathetic and understanding the next day, and it's not wholly down to the sway – she gets the recording of Theo so that it's approximately balanced out, though not canceled, and still acts similarly.

She's not really sure she's doing the 'mothering' thing quite right – she tries, she's usually good at things she tries to do, but there isn't clear feedback on this sort of thing and she feels like she's doing a lot of it wrong because she's going against a lot of the typical pop culture on what mothers should do.

But she thinks she did okay, seeing how her son turned out.

Vampirism… somewhat included.

Theo texts Sadde a bit after six to let him know that she plans on staying around for at least a few days but 'should be cool' with them doing things, like the hospital.

He's told her quite a lot about what they've done, actually, trying to fill her in on the details of his life after his recent undeath.

Did he, ah, tell her about the. Little incidents. At the start?

He did.

This might be part of why it's now a bit after six instead of him texting a bit earlier.

That plus the crying.

Part of the 'vampirism somewhat included' too.