"Yeah, lots of things," she says, gesturing at the tome with a few hundred pages. "Even if this includes lots of useless details there's still a lot of information."

He blinks a couple of times. "Yeah, lots of things like what?"

That might have been a bit rude. He's had a few shocks today and he's not in the best of moods.

"Psychology, reproduction, society, physiology, powers, aging, feeding, weaknesses, and general trivia, I told you. Do you want me to just give you a summary of the entire book?"

Sigh. Slightly guilty expression. "Yeah, that'd be nice."

"Psychology is evil. The demon that invades the body of the person doesn't really have a personality, it's just the lack of a soul that does the changes, apparently. It's theoretically possible for humans to not have a soul and they become just as evil, if not all fangy," she says, using her fingers to indicate fangs.

"When you say theoretically possible for humans not to have souls, do you mean to be born without them naturally, or have it removed through some other method?"

"Both."

Sigh. "What else?"

"Ummm, the sire and their children have a sort of psychic link? This is more or less speculative, though." She leafs through the book a bit. "Vampires tend to do stuff on their own, with very small covens at most. There's some historical stuff on the evolution of covens, but this book is five hundred years old, it's a bit out of date."

"Oh, okay. Are there no more modern books? I mean, I expect it would be difficult to publish them nowadays, but you could just pretend they're fictional or something."

"There isn't a whole lot of modern information."

"They could at least recompile things to be easier to understand or something, but okay. Presumably some things have been found out more recently? Then again, if there's any nice, cohesive network to get information from, Sadde already said he didn't know of one, so nevermind."

Stupid magic system. Addictive and annoying.

"My theory is that there's a conspiracy."

"That sounds plausible and also kinda horrifying."

"Not more than usual."

That's true. This is all horrifying and terrible.

"How are you feeling?" he asks, trying to move off the depressing conversation topic, and instead moving onto a different depressing conversation topic.

"Getting better. Gimme another half hour, hour tops."

Theo smiles a bit, trying to seem... reassuring? Then he turns back to Willow. "Is that the end of the info dump, then, or is there more?"

"There's some more. Let's see..." Leaf leaf leaf. "They can growl, all of their teeth are sharp not just the canines, their face looks fugly when they make it, they don't need to breathe, they heal much faster, they don't show up in mirrors, they're immune to mind reading, they can move without making noises, they can't have children, they have super strength, super speed, super hearing, super vision, super sense of smell, innate fighting skills, hypnosis skills, they don't age, they're weak to wood, garlic, holy symbols, sunlight, decapitation, fire, when they turn to dust everything attached to them does too... Oh, they need to be invited to get into a human's private property but that can mean lots of things..." She has finished leafing through. "That's all."

"Oh. Right. That's quite a lot. ... I have quite a few visible things in common with them, then, I guess? But there are a few differences: I show up in a mirror, I'm not exactly allergic to Christianity, and I can deal with being near garlic and/or in sunlight. Plus I don't need the invitation to enter a home. But it's still kinda weird."

"Vampires are still demons after all. And they're also allergic to other religions."

"... I'm kinda curious about how 'religion' is defined. And why that is a drawback they have – why religion?"

"No one really knows, but there are theories about symbols interacting with human faith."

"I mean, I sorta want to see if pastafarianism counts – I don't even know if they have a 'holy symbol' – or if someone has a symbol they deeply treasure, if that works, but it's probably not tied to the individual since the Christian stuff works for me."

"Pastafarianism...?"