They make their way out the emergency exit unmolested.
"So presumably we try make a new one," says Theo. "We don't even know that she's for sure dead, I'm not sure she even got the blood before she died, my turning took something like twelve hours so hopefully hers won't take longer than 24, if necessary hopefully one of you can drive and take my car."
"Potentially convenient." Sigh. "Should we be keeping watch on her, perhaps, in case it's 'if you're dead and have vampire blood in your system and it's been at least five minutes since you died and it's after dusk', because that sounds vaguely vampire-like and would mean we should."
"We are kinda lacking in terms of bodies that can heal people, so I could, like, let some blood into some containers but then we have an issue of transportation… So, yeah, planning is probably a good idea." He shrugs and does his seatbelt up. "Right now we should possibly get back, though, it's getting a bit late."
"You might be," he agrees, "but since I'm going to be running around holding my breath and using echolocation for the first bit, hopefully meaning I don't lose focus, then running around with one of you afterwards while I'm not, you might be of some help or at least reduce the worst-case scenario."
He does! And, shocker, his projectile intuition is better, quite dramatically noticeably so! Throwing a stick far into the air in a big field and then running to stand almost exactly where it's set to land has never been so easy!
Running into the tree is slightly less fun but he is quite a bit less breakable than he used to be. He runs into it a few times, confirms this, and then decides he doesn't want to break any bones (which he still seems to have, at least) nor does he want to take it down – just, apparently, damage it quite a bit – and so he stops.
(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"… Doesn't seem like it can be rescinded," concludes Matt.
"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."
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.
The next few days are uneventful. Sadde meets Theo's mother, and is awkward, but they like her alright. They perform some more tests, visit that hospital and others, Theo eats animals daily, and Sadde continues to pine silently.
By the third evening following Victoria's arrival, news of the Moorstone Miracles, as they're calling the mysterious recoveries of people in the environs of the town with the larger hospital nearby, have spread enough that some of the braver—or more desperate—souls are making their way there, hoping to find salvation. The fact that cancer has been the only malady not cured thus far does not seem to deter some of its more able victims or their loved ones.
"Could be," she agrees. "In which case it's sorta sensible – clinical trials are important – but they're not going through the regular channels, which is kinda worrying." Shrug. "I mean, if they have good reason to keep secret then– well, I don't know the reasons, so I can't really judge them, but still."
"I'm not trying to shame them for not releasing it open-source or whatever, I'm just saying that… they seem to be doing clinical trials on patients without permission, which while it seems to heal them and that's better than the alternative, isn't following the regular standards for this kind of thing. Like, FDA and whatever."
"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?"
"If I stayed indoors during the day it might work, but I probably can't go out swimming for much? I mean, if people are sort of going in and out I could probably do that, wouldn't get too bad in a short time in the sun, but I'd probably end up staying inside to try to be careful."
"… Sort of? It was more 'I can't think of basically anyone! Like, I would say her because of her reputation, but I don't know her', but yeah, I get you." Shrug. "It's possible she was dropping subtle hints and we didn't respond appropriately. Or maybe she doesn't know. Or maybe I'm wrong and it's some weird vampire thing, but we don't lose much by telling her, no."
"Perhaps my supersenses interact weirdly when I'm more than ten meters away from the source of what I expect will be a loud shattering noise. Or something. I'm not expecting it with any high chance, it was just that we have a potential magic thing here and then a clearly screwed-with magic thing, so we shouldn't necessarily be too sure there is other magic involved."
"Or just that the previous vampire magic doesn't extend as well as we thought and it turns out my memory has a bunch of weird perception flaws in that I haven't noticed yet. Which is possible, so long as I'm enough better than a human that it typically doesn't matter and so long as that doesn't preclude the other memory things we've noticed."
"I honestly have no idea how to apply Occam's Razor to some things that I previously thought were… pretty much impossible? Because it's a choice between 'more, similar impossible things occurred' and 'previous impossible thing manifested slightly differently'. Which to me suggests that the previous impossible thing wasn't as we expected, I think, except we have two instances of magic so I have no idea how to adjust for that?"
"Because we expect they won't collectively believe us, because we expect they might attempt to exploit us, because we expect there might be a really bad fear reaction, because we don't know what else is out there, because we're still at the preliminary stage and don't know how well these things can scale? I think?"
"He woke up after dying, remember? But sure, except, you know, the sun is pretty unpleasant and even the shade only offers mild protection. So, uh, better not offer some proof outside. Although, hmm, Theo, do you suppose you could just appear here fore a second then go back to your shade? ...possibly your house?" She does not raise her voice to be heard.
"Usually? Not always, but it's usually, like – I'd been trying to get this pair, two of my friends, to stop bickering over pointless things and getting worked up and they had a major blow-up, obviously not great, and then I realized I'd have to go clean the mess up, not usually fun, and about two hours later I find out that they'd both agreed to coincidentally go apologize to the other."
Another conversation. Same person says they totally forgot but they were wondering if their boyfriend from out of town could come too? She sort of assumed yes but she didn't actually ask and she was totally planning to and she hopes she's not interrupting Evelyn while she's busy or anything.
Again, a brief conversation.
"Foggy until mid-morning works I guess? There should be other tests you could perform to—try to make someone else call you, and then try to make a specific person call you. Someone who's likely to call anyway. And then... try to make someone who's unlikely to call you do?"
"It is probably quite unlikely. But it might not be absolutely unlikely if they were in fact scheduled to do it tomorrow anyway." He shrugs. "Maybe you should try doing things like making some medical breakthroughs more likely to occur, if you can just do 'more likely' instead of 'have it happen'."
"I don't think it'll matter if I can't do any of them? But it might turn out that when I can't do something I'm still doing something, just not – immediately visible things, when it comes to floating pens." Shrug. "And if I can do them then I should probably get around to doing them, trying the general one first because a wider variety of breakthroughs is probably better? If I have a stamina thing?"
She's not sure! She's just trying to check over each of her senses and see if there's anything quiet that she previously overlooked, like a weird fuzz over certain things in her vision, or a quiet sound in her ear, or light taps on her skin. If she notices any sort of internal pull to something, that could be interesting, but it might just be her wanting to talk to people.
"It... I don't think it would be like something you would normally just notice? Like, if I hadn't actually paid attention explicitly for a magical thing making me pay lots of attention to Theo I don't think I'd've detected it as a thing-that-was-going-on-in-my-brain by just looking for any ways my brain was misbehaving."
"I had at least passing acquaintance with him, he died, he was apparently not dead, he came into school and– it felt like a thing I should do? Go say hi, reassure him the social scene is still available if he wants to get back into it, people aren't permanently frightened or superstitioned away from him, I should know, and if he wants to get back into the swing of things I can help? … Plus cookies."
"Hmm. Okay, see, if there was any magic making you... more likely... to do this, for some subconscious reason, you might not have noticed it, and what I meant is that... Like I said, I wouldn't have noticed the sway thing if I weren't looking for it, specifically, or something like it. So if you have anything like a passive aspect to your magic, like a new sense, or something that influenced you to come here today, you should first think about what it could possibly be, and then try to look for it."
"… So it could be a weird sense that I haven't noticed, or it could be me getting sort of – pulled towards certain things, maybe unlikely events, I'm not really sure, or… uh, I'm not really sure. There's a huge number of things that are 'potentially magic' and 'not currently noticed', and I'm not sure how to narrow that down with 'unlikely' or 'linked to luck'."
Well they were always possibilities but if she wants to constrain to that, she sure can! She could pull on this thread and bring to fore an urge of Theo's to bake—she could pull on that one and make the AC unit misbehave and make the room really cold—she could entwine a couple of those threads to something that would make the oven turn on on its own—
"It is entirely possible that I haven't paid attention before strongly enough but usually – it's." Pause. "I'm not sure how to phrase it? This is sort of like if I were going for 'stereotypical but powerful evil mastermind, plot all the ways I can possibly direct people into my system under my command', instead of – busybee-organization-ing?"
She thinks about her party planned for next week and how she's going to manage people and keep things from getting out of hand… and realizes she mostly has a cached list of steps to take, people she watches out for, signs something's going to go badly, ways she can reduce this with convenient timing of food and so on…
If she tries replanning, ignoring what she already has cached?
Well then she can obviously rethink those things—she has them cached for a reason, it's because it's useful that's the reason—but she knows all the ways she can act, or not act, and everything she needs to set up and organize to make this more likely than that, and if this happens then she can do that but if something else happens then she can do that other thing instead...
The possibilities are endless, really.
"Well, Theo became a vampire a few days ago, I've had my magic as long as I can remember—I wonder if I should try doing something to it now, maybe it's changed, too—but maybe you just never noticed it before. People have managed to fail to notice my skin was literally ruby red."
"It's like a lot of pieces of inspiration for what I could do and then I can think more about that idea and think of ways to implement it. Like, oven – if the weather were cooler and the heating were broken, it could be used, or if I asked Theo for some muffins to see if he can still do that while he presumably doesn't eat human food."
So, practice at paying attention to the less important things. Okay, she needs to take up meditation and mindfulness or whatever, sounds like fun.
Are there any current things she could do in her situation she'd probably find beneficial? Or is that too broad a search…?
"Just – I'm confused, hold on a second."
She specifically wondered if this was just like the lucid dreaming thing again, general mindfulness, and the response was no and that the specific threads are what she should pay attention to, which should only be if they're important or as a general technique, but there shouldn't be the exclusion of other things if it's just a general technique—
"Why are we doing this again? Apparently drugs will help some, I think ADHD medicine."
Mm there's definitely a difference between the different threads, even those connecting the same things. Something beyond how boring or thick they are, almost a flavor. The flavor doesn't actually explain itself, though.
(And 'threads' is inaccurate anyway, they're laid out in many more than just one dimension each and several of them connect more than just two things.)
"Rehealing that hasn't been thoroughly tested but appears to work on flames, sharp objects and blunt impact trauma; memory is not-literally eidetic but yeah that's close; there's also the – biting thing – and blue eyes, they weren't so blue before; and possibly don't need to breathe, mostly but not totally tested? Plus I don't need to sleep as much."
"It was just that there might be limitations on how the magics interact, or that turning is impossible, or that you need enough information to know how to start doing it," says Theo, helpfully. "Trying to find out how to fly with your power, if you mean magically, is probably not going to work as I'd expect flight to be another power. It probably works fine if it's just that turning is impossible, and it probably fails if you need enough information to know how to start, unless 'messing with chance' is enough to get you to fly."
"I guess. Anyway, if she tries it and fails we get absolutely no information—it could fail even if turning is impossible, or if she needs more info, or if it's another problem—but if she succeeds it could still be that there's another power that does flight but she found some other way—unless she finds a way to get it—or that she has more information about flight than turning into a vamp."
Okay so she'd rather not on the panic, and if she gets arrested she is okay with that so long as she gets released just fine from it, and if people are suspicious… what are they suspicious of? She doesn't care about people finding out about vampires or magic, but she'd care if they were suspicious this was some evil plot and correspondingly wanted to start witch hunts.
(Click here to skip the explicit content.)
He facepalms. "Really? Alright, then," he says, and starts unzipping his pants.