there's only so much I can turn into

sparkly_thoughts

"Okay, good points all, where do you suggest?"

taste_tester

"Here's fine. Unless you're really feeling the lack of furnishings. Introduce yourself to the next hiker. Shake hands. Stare at their throat. If you mess up it's no big deal and I don't have to commit arson."

sparkly_thoughts

"Yeah it is quite big a deal to me I think I want some less direct-contact tests before going with that. Maybe look at someone from a distance." Pause. "And I was not expecting humans to be quite this tasty, I had expected to come back after three days, and I don't have internet here. Fudge."

taste_tester

"No cell phone?"

sparkly_thoughts

"I didn't bring it, I expected there was a very good chance I'd lose or crush it if I had."

taste_tester

"Well, you might crush mine if I loan it out, pick up a rock or a stick or something."

sparkly_thoughts

He looks around for a suitably shaped rock and picks it up.

Oops. No he doesn't. He starts laughing. "This feels like butter." He tries again, this time being very delicate, and noticing that he actually has very fine control over how much strength he exerts. He doesn't crush that one. "...I should probably still not use a cell phone for a while."

taste_tester

"Anybody you want me to text?"

sparkly_thoughts

He thinks about it then frowns. "I can't remember! Yes—my mother, my boss, and my friends—I don't remember all their names! Well, okay, some of them, the closest ones, I can remember those.” He rattles off a list of eleven names, as well as appropriately mysterious details each of them should hear, confident that Addy would remember them all.

taste_tester

"You don't remember their phone numbers, do you."

sparkly_thoughts

"Nnnnooooo but I can give you the keys to the apartment and you can maybe get my phone and do that? And I can sit here and twiddle thumbs, I guess." He sounds positively miserable about this, which, of course he does.

taste_tester

"I can do that, no problem. Are you going to cause trouble while I'm not around to rip your arms off?"

sparkly_thoughts

"Nnnnnnoooooo I'm gonna just stay here and get distracted by how pretty all these dust motes are."

taste_tester

"Okay. Be right back. Don't turn your sense of smell on."

And off she zooms.

sparkly_thoughts

He doesn't turn his sense of smell back on! And for the first few minutes, he does in fact just sit there twiddling his thumbs.

But eventually he thinks of something even more fun to do than admiring blades of grass.

He bets Addy will be interested in this fun thing when she comes back.

taste_tester

Addy comes back with his phone and other objects in the apartment that looked memory-jogging.

sparkly_thoughts

They jog his memory! He remembers people, and what his mother looks like, and that one ex-boyfriend who he still pines over but has never gotten the courage to call again since they broke up's phone number!

Also his notebooks, which he quickly devours and memorises lots of things.

Not that he needs to.

He beams at Addy as his skin gets less sparkly and becomes red, then he grows a tail and a pair of horns, and it's all pretty smooth and much faster than he could've done while human. "This is so much easier! Look!" He cups his hands and shakes them a bit, and they fill with bone powder. "But I bet you knew that, I bet you tested all these things when you were on your own already!" he accuses playfully.

taste_tester

"You caught me."

sparkly_thoughts

"Ngh!" he complains. "Well did you ever think of anything that might be expanded upon my turning other than the fact that I have basically infinite mental room and super speed and super precision and concentration?"

taste_tester

"It's a lot harder to predict what will change on turning than to predict what can change with time and elbow grease. It would not floor me if you could now shapeshift other people, or produce totally inorganic materials, or beat any other vampire you met in contests of Standard Vampire Attributes unless they had a more specialized witchcraft helping, but you might have gotten no upgrades besides the brain one, I don't know."

sparkly_thoughts

"Hm. Shapeshift other people, okay, that's something to try. Totally inorganic—well, given just how much my definitions of organic have changed over the past few days, that could maybe work, yeah. I dunno about the Standard Vampire Attributes—how are they even encoded? Is it just magic fuelling our bodies or something?"

taste_tester

"I think the current understanding is that a non-witch vampire is technically not magic, just evolutionarily inexplicable. But I don't know if you can improve on vampire venom as an all-purpose doing-things fluid."

sparkly_thoughts

"Are there many biologists or physicists turned vampire? Because I may not be either of those but what I do know of them makes me think there is no way in heck this isn't magic."

taste_tester

"Couldn't tell you, not my area."

sparkly_thoughts