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In the middle of self-recriminations about preparing stupid spells, Blai appears in a cemetery.
It's dark, so it takes him a Light spell to notice that it's a cemetery, but while the range of headstone styles is unfamiliar the spacing and the inscriptions give it away. It doesn't look super actively haunted, so it's not an emergency, but he keeps one hand on his holy symbol and one on his mace as he picks his way across the grounds, looking for buildings or something.
"The story goes that when someone turns into a vampire, an immaterial evil being from the vampire plane displaces their soul and wakes up in their body with all their memories, usually believing itself to be the same person they were in life. I haven't verified most of that, but turning into a vampire certainly does have psychological effects that would readily be explained by replacing one's human soul with an evil being."
"Does that mean that the souls themselves are... fine? Move on to the afterlife at whatever rate of fineness would otherwise be expected, anyway?"
"Hmm. And they disintegrate into dust after they're staked, or at least most of them do; I've seen a really old one leave an intact skeleton behind. Would that interfere with the spell?"
"If it still had a jaw it would be harder to understand but still be able to say some things."
"I'd be limited to asking a handful of questions and it might be cagey, especially if it doesn't care for - whatever information it is it gets about the caster, I'm not sure what precisely that is. Once a week limit per corpse."
"What's your guess about whether it would be likelier to access the original human soul or the incorporeal vampire part?"
"Because it doesn't work on actively undead undead I would guess the human soul - or, the human soul's knowledge. I'm not sure it contacts the actual soul; the standard use case is for questions like 'what kind of demon killed you and which way was it traveling', not 'how did you fare at your soul trial' or 'what is Hell like'."
"Hmm. In which case we probably couldn't ask a vampire skeleton what happens to the souls of people who become vampires."
"Unless it counted as not having died until the vampire did. Which it might; undead on Golarion are generally understood to contain the original soul even if it's not effectual in any way."
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