"—you have? When?" He sounds delighted.

"Hm? Oh, when we were cuddling, mostly. I did it in sections, I didn't have to do it all at once, I can remember where I left off. Aurene was much trickier, but fortunately she is also very small, so there wasn't as much to copy. Less fortunately she grows very quickly."

"I do wonder how their healing works. Half-vampires', that is. Since they have a heartbeat and all."

"Yeah, me too. I suppose I could experiment with copied bits of Aurene and see how they go back together, but." She makes a face. "I am more than a little uncomfortable with doing mad science experiments with copied pieces of my daughter. I probably should, more knowledge is better than none, but."

"And it is better than finding out too late."

"Mmmm." Face: still being made.

James hugs her.

She hugs him back.

"I should probably try to get over it, it's just. Mad science experiments with witchcraft. Bits of my daughter. Copied bits, but still."

"I feel the same, my love." He tightens the hug and kisses her forehead.

Snuuuug. "I'll. I'll work on it. She's an extremely unique baby, knowing details about her biology could turn out to be very important, later. Mad science experiments with witchcraft to understand and help her as much as possible. Just. Probably in small sections with lots of cuddles in between."

"I am happy to provide said cuddles."

"I would be quite astonished if you flinched away and hissed instead of cuddling me."

"Maybe I got vampire rabies."

"That is absurd and as far as I'm aware impossible." She nuzzles him. "... Mmm. Distract me?"

He can do that. They have most of the night.

Typical mate activities are so nice for getting oneself away from unpleasant mental states.

Blair, meanwhile, is working on his witchcraft.

It feels unrefined, to him. For some reason, he is reminded of being out of shape when he was human. It's the same type of annoyance. The same kind of 'I am not leveraging myself as well as I could, I could be better.' To remember this feeling, but not his own father without prompting is definitely something. Human memories are so weird.

He can use it to find people, and not just ones he's met before. He can ask it for people that meet certain criteria, and sometimes, it'll oblige. Other times it will give him false positives that are often various flavors of odd and unhelpful. He doesn't understand why this happens at first, but it starts to become clear that it is better at finding people that are passionate about something. Some sort of strong moral or philosophical reasoning for them to care about whatever vague topic he's searching for. They might not personally know anything that could possibly help him with whatever goal he might have, but they will care about it if he brings it up in conversation. That's... odd.

Witchcraft is supposed to be an extension of the witch's personality, and Blair cares about people. The whole thing is based around getting to know people. After some thought, this turns out to include getting to know people secondhand. Asking someone to talk about someone they know can get the spoken of person to register to his tracking, even if he hasn't met them personally a single time. He knows a bit about them, and this turns out to be enough.

He sweet talks and bullies it into giving him a 'find all' function. From there he claws himself something that tells him where people are in a certain radius of himself, even if he hasn't really met them first. Woefully smaller than he'd like, and he's pretty sure James has him beat on range, but whatever. He is becoming a better tracker, and also keeping very distracted during the Forbidden Aurene Sleeping Times, which is important.

James also works on his witchcraft, although he does not have a dedicated Forbidden Aurene Sleeping Times uninterrupted slot like Blair does. He mostly does it while multitasking, and it's really most effective while he's sparring (especially when he occasionally 1v2 Blair and Yvette) and has reason to actually pay attention to his surroundings; otherwise it is intensely boring.

Range is the bit of his power most amenable to change, but it's also pretty much just a grind; puuuuush and keep pushing and it slowly goes, like molasses. It's not very intellectually stimulating, but also not very hard to do while doing literally anything else so he's basically always got it in the background.

His power is also very helpful towards telling him when a vampire—well, does anything, but especially when a vampire walks into his range, but it needs to be coaxed into telling him about other things. He seems to need "categories" of things that he wants to check for, like animals or buildings or "things that make a sound" or whatever. If he can focus on one such category enough he can sort of install a "trigger" in his power that permits him to immediately notice as soon as they do something interesting—like move, or enter his awareness, or leave his awareness.

That last one is intriguing, because how can he notice that something left his awareness exactly if it's not just a combination of remembering that it was there a milisecond ago and then seeing it's not? And it's not just that, he can almost actually see the things beyond his range when he's paying attention to them and they leave. He feels like there's something there that he's not getting, some other mode of awareness, but it's really difficult to figure out what and very specific.

He keeps working at it, though. Being a witch is really cool.

Predictably, Yvette spends just about every possible free moment poking at her power. She has a library of expanding materials and the ability to push them onto other materials, and absolutely nothing will stop her from figuring out the ins and outs of it as much as possible! Transmuting wildly different materials is harder than transmuting similar materials, and she works on doing that faster. Her library starts out with no organization system to speak of, but she decides very quickly that this is offensive and she won't stand for it. So she gives it one. How would it really be her witch power if it didn't let her categorize, organize, and compare copied materials and sort them into different tidy systems depending on what she's looking for. That's just obvious.

There are some constraints she still has to work under, though. She needs to actually copy materials into her library, for one. For another, all transmutation space has to be directly connected by touch in some form, but she can make a super thin line of it and then blob it out later to make something like reach. Intermittently, she tries to pinch the thin line to nothingness to get a transmutation space that is completely divorced from her body, but that keeps not working. Instead she expands it from more than just her hands; she'll transmute with her toes, with her elbow, with her ears. Neither hair nor nails work, unfortunately, but she'll live in hope that she can push it at some point. The hardest is trying to expand the size of her transmutation space, which is very hard and actively uncomfortable on top of being boring, but she takes a page from her husband's book and makes the attempt whenever she's not doing anything else. Even though: augh, it is very annoying, and not nearly as much fun as everything else.

So, in summary, she works on approximately every single thing she can think of, every single moment that she possibly can. She got a great witch power and she's going to do science to it!

And if Aurene works on her witchcraft at all, it's not obvious where or how she does it, or how any of it works.

But one night, just before she goes to sleep, she tells her mummy, "Don't worry! You'll do great."

.... Her mummy is very confused, but okay. She looks questioningly at James.

—James laughs and smiles fondly at his daughter. "Well, we've been getting you more and more used to humans lately, right, so I figured you are about ready to actually go be around one, in person."

"Oh. Oh I see. Um. I'd ask if you're sure I'm ready for that but." She looks down at their daughter, too. ".... But apparently I am???"

"I would say so, yeah."

"Okay. Well. What's the plan, then? Is Blair in on it and luring a human somewhere?"