'Humans here can affect the physical world in ways other than touching what they want to affect with their visual form?'

"Yes! I have a little piece of metal under the skin of my hand, and it sends information in response to a radio signal from the door and the door reads that signal, and the only chips that have that information belong to people who live in this building, and the elevator shows up in response to it. There are other things one can operate without touching them too, some computers have voice interfaces for speech to text and stuff, and there are things where one moves to block a laser and the absence of the laser does something. And there's cases where one can interact with a machine by touching it and then that interaction sets off a large set of consequences widely separated in space and time."

'Oh.  I had hoped it was some sort of magic.  Members of your species die?'

"Yes," Voli answers solemnly. "Of old age, if nothing else kills us first. There are procedures we do whenever anyone[A] dies, to preserve A's body in the hope that someday we'll find a way to heal A. . . . Does your kind live indefinitely?"

'Yes.  I was deeply disturbed to find there existed species that did not.  I expect to someday be powerful enough to resurrect beings which were even minutely magic, but the humans I encountered previously had none.  Tell me more of your preservation procedures?'

This is a sufficiently important topic that going off memory is obviously suboptimal; Voli opens the omnipedia page on brain preservation, skips the history section and explains the cutting-edge preservation methods and the ongoing work in various animal models on uploading preserved brains.

Kara asks, "You said you designed magic things. Do you have a way of--attaching a little magic to someone without messing with their biology, and then being able to resurrect them?"

'Any person[A] wholly entwined with the magic system I created automatically imparts a magictag[B] onto any living being[C] on which A uses magic.  B has no direct effect save allowing me to interact with C as a magical being, including resurrecting C.  I, however, am outside my own system, and cannot impart magictags directly except by making a person a fully autonomous member of my magic system, which does involve some biological changes.'

"That sounds like the sort of thing I want to learn a lot about before trying it, but it would have to be some pretty awful changes or some pretty lame resurrection for you to get no takers. For almost all X there is someone who X," Voli says in the tone of a proverb. "Can I get the eight-minute version, stipulating that when we introduce you to the dictator[A] A'll* want as much detail as you can provide?"

* In Convergentlanguage this use of a pronoun immediately after its antecedent is either avoided, or handled with an elegant contraction that is not unpleasant to say or type; it is left expanded here, as in new-readers media, to aid in clarity.

'Certainly.'

The gist of it is:

• The magic system Ancora created only interacts with living beings, including animals and plants.
• Ancora thinks the magic system might be metaphorically persuadable to include some electronics, especially those which interact very closely with organics, without them having to rebuild the entire system.  There isn't a way of testing it yet, without any local magic users, but in fact those might already count.
• Only sapients are capable of having their own pool of magic.
• Sapience is defined by the magic system as being (either individually, or part of a species which most of the members of are) able to understand a certain threshold of complicated communication.
• Ancora is unsure whether local parrots will count yet but the magic is capable of ensmartening.
• Vampires (people fully entwined with the magic system) acquire magic by drinking the blood of sapients.  There's a sharp limit on how much magic they can hold, and it doesn't take very much blood to hit it.
• Blood drank out of an intermediate vessel such as a cup gives only the vampire magic.
• Sangrades are people who have their own pool of magic, which they receive upon being drank from by a vampire directly.  It can be spent down completely and will run out on its own if the sangrade doesn't use it fast enough, which happens of a scale of several days to a few weeks.
• Sangrades can become vampires by following the suggestions of a helpful magical interface Ancora designed to accompany the magic, over several feedings and on a scale of weeks to months.
• This involves changing their physical appearance to one the aesthetic-based magic can sustain a hold on.
• The exact details are customizable but generally it requires most or all of: fangs; skin tones slightly evocative of corpses, on an axis largely orthogonal to darkness and paleness; more distinguished facial features; eyes in one (or more, various forms of heterochromia are allowed and encouraged) of red, black, gold, and silver; and some adjustments to one's intuitive posture and gait.
• Changes which Ancora didn't think of ahead of time (or thought of and rejected) but which fit within their aesthetic sensibilities can replace the specific requirements.
• Since there are no vampires on this planet yet, Ancora will have to find a volunteer who is okay with Ancora being the one to make changes that the two of them agree on.

(When the elevator arrives, Ancora copies the appropriate actions from their ensemble, doesn't cease in their infodumping, and displays no surprise about its behavior except that their illusory glitter gets left behind for a few seconds until they update the frame of reference.)

The elevator gets to the sixteenth floor fairly early in the infodump, but these humans are good at receiving infodumps while in motion! All the way to the end of the hall, left, six more doors and then they're at Mark's apartment.

Mark[A]'s preferred decorating scheme is navy blue with silver filigree and A's roommate goes in for fake ivy hanging anywhere it's not too much in the way. There's a giant sectional sofa that makes three sides of a square and a thing like a memory-foam-lined bird's nest and a lot of bookcases and the promised blackboardwall with seven colors of chalk neatly alternating on the chalk ledge and an eraser and a water spray bottle in little holsters to one side. Mark starts writing notes about vampires; Tren and Tona join in on different sections of board with some amount of repetition but nothing left out.

As soon as Ancora pauses in talking, Mark says, "There are definitely going to be volunteers for vampirage and sangradeage unless there's a downside you haven't gotten to yet, and it would have to be a big one to get people turning down resurrection and intelligence boosts. Can vampires drink from each other and get magic that way? What happens if a vampire can't drink any blood for a long time? Topicchange: snacks are in the pantry, through that door and on your right, don't take anything with 'Terreshe' on it and if you eat the last of something tell me. If you want water the cups are to the right of the microwave. Bathroom is yonder. Ancorabenilisifentiliane, do you eat or drink or have guesthostcustoms I should be implementing?"

Tren raises a hand. "Do you have any stims? We're definitely going to be up all night and then we're definitely going to go see the dictator[A] as soon as A's office opens."

"If you like me are one of the lucky people for whom caffeine is a stim I've got that and if you're not I've got moda, melatonin, and sellarin*. It's all in the bathroom cabinet."

"I've got phetrana** in my cloak pocket but only enough for me and one other person, if everyone wants it we'll have to send a runner to the pharmacy," adds Kara.

Everyone starts administering their food and drugs while Mark cleans up the redundancies in the blackboard notes.

*Earth has not discovered the usefulness of this molecule.

**A slow-release amphetamine.

Ancora waits to speak until several beats after everyone seems to have, in Ancora's estimation, taken care of their humanly affairs.

'I have not intentionally omitted any downsides.  Vampires can transfer magic by drinking each others' blood but not create more; the drinkee would have their own supply diminished.  I was interrupted when designing the system and no one has yet gone very long without drinking blood so I am uncertain of what would happen.  I am capable of drinking.  This room is pretty.'

"If vampires can't generate more magic from each other then there needs to be a population of humans around for anyone to use it."

"Unless--no, the sources have to be sapients. Might be able to work something out with a mixed population and subsidize whichever direction is less than optimally popular."

"How immortal can vampire magic make humans? Also I'm glad you like my apartment; the plantlikes are Shreyon's."

"Is there a way to find out what happens if a vampire doesn't drink blood for months without making someone try it?"

"If two vampires or a vampire and a sangrade or two sangrades or one of the two and a human have a kid what kind of entity is the kid?"

It's gitterraining quite densely in this apartment now.  (And also in the top three or so inches of the one below it.)

'Vampire magic can reduce and eventually eliminate humans' need for food, water, and air.  It also can make them unaging and more durable.  I could design a result for vampires who went extended periods without drinking blood but know of no way to find out what would currently happen except by trying it.  Children of any combination of the listed entity types will remain humans without their own pool of magic, although they may inherit persistent traits of their parents.'

The humans (A) all wave A's hands through the glitter rain delightedly.

"When you say you can design a result does that mean you can decide what happens? What are the constraints on that? Actually, what are the constraints on your abilities in general? Could you design a second magic system and have them both going at the same time, for example?"

The glitter rain is intangible.

'I can decide what happens within roughly the constraints of my aesthetics and taste, which dictate whether each result will fulfill or harm me.  Designing a second system is in principle possible but may be difficult or dangerous.'

"If it's based on taste you can tell if a decision will be good for you before you implement it, right?" asks Tona.

"I expect I put a lower probability on that than you do*," says Mark.

*In Convergentlanguage that takes about as long to say as "doubt dot jpeg" does in English.

The glitter pauses in the air, just for a moment.  As it resumes falling, a substantial portion of it changes from gold to black.

'I know what my tastes are but have had occasional trouble in predicting whether the results of my design choices would fall within them.  I work in a medium much more complex and autonomous than the rest of my species.'

"Big mood*," says Tren. "Probability on ['the vampire who doesn't drink blood just can't use any more magic until they've drunk some blood' works well]?"

*Literally "none novelty". Playing around with the rules of grammar is popular in a lot of worlds.

'I could not say.'

Voli looks at the black glitter and the lack of a probability estimate and asks, "Do you want a change of subject?"

'To what?'

"We could talk more about the physical changes the magic likes," says Neren (the one with the surgically pointified ears and shaved eyebrows).  "Or the humans you met on the other planet, what were they like?"

'It is somewhat difficult to compare, as I was significantly worse at human communication when I had known them for as long as I have you.  I lacked even a poor facsimile of a human form.'  And then there is, floating in front of Ancora's torso and about the size of it, a crystalline bipyramid with a five-pointed star for its base and a shadowy halo.  'My appearance was thus when arriving on Earth.'