"You can ask Alassëo about it. Or get publications from Bar, they have newspapers. I was sort of envisioning a scenario where I got as far as saying they were dead because I destroyed their planet and not all the details before the murder attempt but it's not like hypocrisy is outside my hypothesis space, I don't know you that well and have not been reading your essays."

"I imagine you can fake an awful lot of evidence outside of time, I don't have a way to confirm that Bar isn't in on it, and I only have your word that you have not been reading my essays.  There's presumably an amount of evidence that will convince me but I haven't determined where that threshold should be yet."

"Uh-huh. You did see me bring Alassëo in."

"Yep.  - Want my side of things now; seems only fair and I don't have an issue telling you things you'd already know if you were being evil about it."

"Sure. If vampires are an existential risk that seems important to know."

"Yeah, no kidding.  So, uh, this last spring I was in a car crash, lost a leg."  She knocks on the side of her right calf; it makes a not-flesh noise.  "And like the crash itself was pretty bad but I don't supes mind being a cyborg, and I cannot emphasize enough how little I care about high school popularity contests but it was looking like I was going to get prom queen because everyone felt bad for me or whatever.  Other people care - more, about high school popularity contests, apparently, and one of them in particular cared a whole lot, and happened to be a vampire, and for vampiric reasons decided that the solution to this was to rip my throat out with her teeth."  She curls into herself a bit tighter and puts a hand on her collarbone.

"Uh, I don't know if vampire media is different in your world, but - that's the sort of thing that you'd expect a fictional vampire to do but not a sane real one; if I drink somebody's blood straight from them without an intervening vessel then they get magic too - that's why I specified it should be in a glass earlier but it didn't seem worth getting into when you were going to be dead soon anyway - and magic is very helpful about letting you know what you can do with it.  And there are safeties for malicious intent for pretty much anything you can do to other people but not on the mind control -

"So I spent everything I had on making her like me and care about me, and apparently this either saved not only my life but six others, or you guys were lying to me about that for flattery or whatever."

"All I have to go on is what Ancora told me. ...do you want a leg."

"No.  - If I get convinced you're alright I might want like, a cool future prosthetic later."

"My cool future doesn't actually have all that much in the way of prosthetic improvements because we can just put in organic limbs but if you eventually get a brain computer they can hook up to that. - I did ask Ancora about what powers vampires had and got a different picture of the mind control situation. I suppose it's not a great surprise they didn't communicate very clearly about it."

"What was your impression of the mind control sitch?"

He consults his notes. "I summarized vampires as I was familiar from pop culture, including 'sometimes psychic powers'. They said there were some psychic powers but they avoided unethical ones - just being able to model people better and decide how much to care about them - I don't think this was grammatically ambiguous enough to cover altering how someone else cares about oneself. And they mentioned the unconsciousness thing. I didn't pursue the line of questioning very far because the context was whether I should maybe be a vampire and I didn't want to risk any of my demon traits. - thing I am is called a 'demon'."

"Yeah no you can totes do it to other people and I think you should count that as having been lied to.  - If it turns out you're okay and were just misled you should be glad I timefroze them, and - I don't immediately see how I'd be of much use to whatever you're doing, but I would defs help out with your thing, if I had the means to."

"Ancora's bad enough at communication that I'm not ruling out that they're sincerely confused somehow and would fix it if they could but it could be that you acted correctly. Uh, noncon mind control shit is horrifying and everything but you said existential?"

"I'm not concerned about a single extinction event so much as like, a slower zombie apocalypse type thing, but with vampires - Sara was not a great person growing up but she wasn't like, murder-someone - or, uh, murder-seven-someones-over-prom evil.  There's definitely additional mind-stuff, aside from the affection control, which - I'm pretty sure she wasn't actually entirely sapient, when - you know - and I'm worried about there being some sort of intermediate step that got her to do the thing that does that.  And then apparently the first group of vampires also had a murder spree, and - I don't know how to count my thing; I couldn't use it to reason because if I was getting more murdery then that was all the more reason to take drastic action to weaken vampires as a whole - "

"Ancora was upset about the murder spree. Or pretended to be and also pretended to be very bad at pretending. But yeah, that's - statistically suggestive... Who wasn't sapient?"

"Sara, the girl who - " gesture.  "I mean, while she - " gesture; " - she's fine now.  Ish.  Like I mean I still don't like or trust her but she's a person and stuff."

"So there's some issue where under some conditions vampires go, uh, feral, and get murdery?"

"Yeah, um - can you make me my phone - or like, my phone but without a cracked screen and the same case but as if it were new, if you can do that?  I have pictures of a thing."

"I can do that." Phone.

She starts scrolling through her photos app.  "So, in most vampires media I know about, turning is a pretty instantaneous thing?  Or like it might take three days or whatever, but it's fairly binary, and it's a thing that happens to you, with its associated effects.  Whereas in real life, you just get magic you can do whatever with if you get bitten.  But there's like - I mentioned the magic tells you what you can do; it also tells you what you need to do in order to become a vampire, and once you've done enough of that then you can be one."

She does not un-nook or hand Cam her phone, but she holds it up in his direction with a selfie on it.  "Uh, so this is me a few months ago, and you can see that there's no fangs, my facial structure's less pointy, and - okay so maybe with the lighting difference you can't tell but my skin is in fact tinted differently.  And there's like posture stuff and whatever that's not so much discernable from still photos.  And these are all factors you have individual control over, separate from whether or not you're a vampire.  You follow?"

"Think so."

"So, once you're a vampire - which is itself a binary thing, once you've got all the reqs - you can still control all those things, but if you approach the minimum of what you need to vamp it feels - very aversive.  But you still can.  And if you do, then - now you're feral, apparently.  But part of the aversiveness is that it feels like that's what's going to happen; it seems totally predictable, and I didn't receive an explanation I found satisfactory for why Sara would have done that anyway.  So I'm suspicious that there might be further mind-stuff that caused that."

"...that's such a weird design.

Do you like being a vampire?"

"Uh?  I certainly pushed really hard to become one?"

"Okay, because if you didn't the security guy could probably safely devamp you."