"I mean that given that airships are common, I'd expect there to be market incentives for better engines, and for it to not be niche."

"The world, the laws of economics, and the history of innovation will surely realize it is not making sense to you and retroactively change thanks to your well-reasoned arguments."

He raises an eyebrow. "I don't expect it to, but that's why I'm questioning it, if my well-reasoned arguments don't work there must be a reason why they're failing!"

"I don't know the intricacies of the engine industry, unfortunately."

He shrugs. "Well, we can make money off market inefficiencies there, too."

"Hm, needs more research to tell if there really is a market inefficiency to take advantage of there..."

"Yeah. An alternative possibility I've thought of is that oil is somehow harder to get here than on Earth—which is possible given that I have no idea how oil would even arise here in the first place."

"So much stuff to learn, so much time to do it in given eventually turning."

"Best of both worlds."

"This conversation has inspired me and I am going to go read up on thermodynamics and engine making."

"Care if I join you?"

"Please do, well, if you like."

He grins. And fetches books. Several books. And glances at Terel's pages whenever he turns them, then returns to speed-reading his own books.

This is actually vaguely annoying. How he's so much faster.

He ignores this and studies up on the proud tradition of engine manufacture.

Eventually Terel will learn much faster, too—

"Er, it. Occurred to me that, ah, you will forget a lot of stuff when you turn possibly but not necessarily including everything you study here."

"How... Irritating. Fair warning, Sadde, I think I'm entering a rather bad mood. Probably the tension between wanting to turn and wanting to wait to turn, thanks brain."

"Do you want me to not talk about it or" his voice doesn't even crack even a little bit "go away for a while?"

"I once again futilely wish I could become a half-vankire. At any rate, you don't need to go away but not talking about it and trying not to overtly display vankiric abilities for the rest of the day would help."

"O... kay," he says, sounding uncertain.

He goes back to studying engines, discussing various insights with Sadde - part of why coal engines are popular is because most ship engines are really huge - 

The bad mood does not improve but it doesn't devolve into an outright funk at least.

Sadde tries to be as unvampiric as he possibly can without outright reverting his DNA back to his baseline human.

Which helps, and so does having interesting research, and eventually he's still sort of pensive but not stressed-looking and wants to go get dinner and then chew on some homework alone.

So Sadde guesses he'll slip off and perhaps return to the library to continue consuming all the books on everything.

This is a university library. They're open 24/7.

They do eventually get suspicious about whether or not he is, in fact, a student...

He will perfectly truthfully explain his enrolment situation if asked.