"Yes. So long as you don't take me to the back of a nightclub and drink my blood, or something equally horrible."

"If I suck anything, it won't be your blood."

Theo guffaws. "What?"

He laughs. "Nooothing," he says innocently.

"That seems a little forward!"

"Will it make you reconsider going out with me?"

...

"Well, no, but it's still forward!"

"Yes, well, sue me," he laughs. "Anyhow, let's see, good books for this..." He gets up and starts looking for some stuff in a shelf.

Theo sits there, a bit confused about how the conversation turned out.

Sadde likes causing that effect on people!

Eventually he's back with three tomes, looking exactly the way tomes of ancient magic should look. One of them is called Daemonium Arcana, with a green cover with etchings of demonic faces; another is called 4001 demons ond theyr secrets, with a solid blue cover; the third is red and doesn't have a name.

"... Those look very stereotypical," Theo notes.

"Yeah, what can you do, people aren't very creative. Anyway, the green one has general stuff on magic, some mythology including a dubious story about how the world came about, and describes some supposed ancient demons and gods. The blue one has one page per demon, it's just an overview, and it's very unclear whether it's fictional or not. The red one has some general vampire lore and history, as well as some stuff about the Vampire Slayer. There's this one tome called Vampyr which is said to be really complete and stuff but not even Sunnydale High's library is occult enough to have it."

"The Vampire Slayer? What's that? And that demon one sounds like it might be useful if this place has lots of them."

"The Slayer is supposed to be this girl, it's always a girl, who has superpowers and is meant to protect the world from the forces of darkness or some such. There's always just the one, and when she dies the powers awaken on a new one. Has been going on for a while."

"Oh. I'm guessing they don't get a choice about it? And it sounds kinda stupid to just have one, unless I'm missing some reason that'd be a bad idea."

"They don't, and I haven't been able to find or come up with a reason it'd be a good idea, but, again, Chesterton's Fence. If I ever find a Slayer or that book I'll be sure to ask or look it up."

"Yeah, okay, that makes sense. It's really annoying that you can just be dragged into this hidden world and yet not be given proper connections to find out everything," Theo says, frustrated. "Not that I'm blaming you – I mean for you too," he hastens to add.

"Isn't it just," he says. "But the books are pretty good, even if I can't really tell fact from fiction. The third book in particular, very useful, it inspired me to come up with yesterday's spell."

"If there are lots of vampires around, the red one is probably a good idea, yeah. I don't think I care too much about the mythology, at least not immediately, so I'll probably go for the information on magic to see if there's anything about weird grace, then the potentially fictional demon one. Thanks."

"There are stories of graceful demons, and shapeshifting demons, so certainly there's magic on those things."

"I meant anything on inherited human grace magic – I mean, it's pretty obvious I'm human, so the demon stuff doesn't apply."

"There's stuff on demons having children with humans, but they seem to almost invariably end up looking like half-demons and not like humans. Of course, if human-looking half-demons exist, they won't necessarily have been noticed as such by whoever wrote this book. The author's quite racist. Or speciesist."

"... You mean that even though people look human, they might not be? That's not just a vampire thing? How do you tell? Or is the word 'demon' actually just terrible itself, and they're not all, you know, demonic, despite the label?"

"I think it's probably just terrible itself, it felt like the author had to bend over backwards to find a way in which some of these 4001 demons were actually evil, ergo 'speciesist.' Somehow being unable to eat meat is proof of their wickedness, or something, for instance."

"Okay, no, that's definitely stupid. But anyway, if there are half-demons, then surely there are quarter-demons and so on? Even if the half-demons still look like the whole demons, that might get pretty diluted."