"Now, back to the grownups' conversation. Which is, what is the planet is if not spherical?"

(Here's the side room with the stairs down to the play room.)

(The Vatore siblings follow along, one with superspeed and the other by becoming mist.)

And Red vaults over the back of the sofa to take Cor's seat.

"The world is a connection of non-continuous spaces." He grabs his wand from his inventory and starts waving it around to create a little holographic illusion to illustrate. Here's a little 3D model of Forgotten Hollow, which fades out into nothing at the edges. "Forgotten Hollow is one such space." And then another floating model of a village elsewhere. "As is Glimmerbrook." Now a tiny model of a walking Red appears in front of the model of the Vatore mansion and starts walking south in fast forward. "When you approach the edge in the right direction intending to go somewhere specific," and tiny Red disappears from the edge of the model of Forgotten Hollow and reappears on the Glimmerbrook model, "you get there, but there's no intervening space."

Thunder follows, the magical powers are so cool.

Blink. "I don't know why I was expecting something like, the world is flat, I guess I am still foolishly clinging to the notion it might make sense?"

"Is this like... teleportation or something? Does time pass at all between the two points? Does the direction you leave in matter at all, for the direction you arrive in at the other place?"

"Direction does matter, yeah, to some extent," and now the two models shrink down and many others (which the Brights might recognise as other towns or cities they have been to or heard of, including the town their grandparents live in) appear, in specific directions from each other and with specific distances. "There seems to be a standard direction most of these places are from each other, and time does pass when you cross the thresholds, but you go less-than-NPC when you do it because you don't even keep the memories of crossing the distance."

"Yikes. Filming or recordings still work? Hunger or need for sleep still move on?"

"We experimented with that actually! If you try carrying a phone with you or something and filming your walk, the film cuts just after the threshold. However—" And right then a little basketball-sized and—shaped floating robot with a smiley on its screen and a small camera on its forehead emerges from downstairs to float around the living room. "Yes, Caleb, thank you for the prop," Red calls as he dismisses his illusory model of places.

"Drones still work?" Fenris completes the thought.

"They don't, actually! They vanish for a while and then emerge on the other side without having recorded anything. That's what makes us think there is probably nothing between places. If there is something, it's not something we've been able to get to at all. Trying to teleport anywhere beyond the thresholds that's not some specific place also fails."

Fenris makes a face.

"The same is true of NPCs? ...I guess they can't be trusted. Do you have some estimate of how big is the not-planet?"

"The number of places that exist is minuscule and probably doesn't cover everywhere that can exist. Especially with how entirely new people seem to be created, it should probably be possible for new places to be created too. ...Count Straud is meant to have founded this town but he is, as we've mentioned, evil, so we have not been able to get anywhere with him."

Nod. "His situation is probably more urgent. Which, what exactly is the situation with him as far you know?"

"The official history is that he is the great-grandson of Count Vladislaus Straud I, who was part of a 25-person party that founded Forgotten Hollow many years ago and then all died in mysterious circumstances that the original Count was too distraught to recount to anyone. Now Count Vladislaus Straud IV lives in the creepy mansion and is a vocal activist against vampire rights."

Caleb zooms back into the room, with a boner, and says, "'Vampires need to get back to their crypts'," with a scoff before disappearing again.

"That's something he likes to say," agrees Red. "Now, Caleb and Lilith's memories are that they got turned by him and one of his offspring over eighty years ago because he wanted their family's wealth to stay in this town and thought offering them promises of power and immortality would seduce them, but he didn't count on the two of them being fucking decent people so they instead moved the hell away from here. Then they came back a few years ago to try to make Forgotten Hollow less of Straud's personal sandbox where he feels like he can do whatever he wants, and soon after that I met them. ...Cor met them."

"I guess I would read that book. And I guess because... of the way the world is there are no more characters to the vampires in that story. No more children by Lilith or Straud' spawns."

"Correct."

"How long ago did he turn PC? And how hard is it to turn people into vampires? He might have created 'spawns' since."

"We're not really sure. It was probably after we got Caleb and Lilith, but we don't know how soon after. And yeah, he might've, but unless they moved in with him they're still NPCs. It's not very hard."

"I guess it depends on how hard it is to command them. But I am concerned that he is a malicious agent with a lot of power and far smarter than most people around him."

"He might be smarter but not necessarily strategic or willing to... dunno, have a secret vampire army in Selvadorada."