"Liches get that way on purpose, vampires make more of themselves and have automatic control of whoever they create as a vampire spawn till they're destroyed, ghosts seem to mostly happen when people have certain attitudes about how they died or are remembered afterwards so you get practices like letting dying slaves decide what recipe they'll go in or something though I don't know if that would look helpful if you took lots of statistics or not."

Don't dying people usually have diseases or old age or something that makes them very poor eating Tanya sternly tells her brain that bequeathing your body to a purpose is a noble tradition, and keeping other people fed is a noble purpose, and really the only problem is that they were slaves up to that point.

...well, no, there is also the problem that people might kill and eat their slaves in a famine. But that's priced into slaves having no rights; slaveholders will stop feeding their slaves in a famine, even if they don't get to eat their bodies later.

Ghosts being created when people have a certain attitude in mind as they die makes as much sense as anything, which is to say it doesn't really explain anything but Tanya doesn't know what would have. She is certain ghosts don't exist on Earth, at least, unless they're all obsessed with secrecy for some reason, because it would be very easy to prove someone really is a ghost (or some other novel phenomenon) and the evidence wouldn't just go away like a convenient end to a parlor magic session.

Focus. What else matters about this? She can keep thinking about novel uses of her magic against intangible ghosts but without a way to experiment she probably won't get far. Liches are - whatever happens when someone deliberately sets out to become undead when they die, possibly as an intelligent zombie or a more true-to-life ghost. Any deliberate process people iterate on is bound to produce better results than the natural one they're imitating, so liches are presumably the most prosocial undead; unfortunately they're also the rarest, at least around Noctimar. (Not that the local baseline for sociability is very high.) 

"Can you say more about vampires having 'automatic control' over other people they turn into vampires?" If there's a magical spell for controlling other people, somehow, then it's rational for vampires to apply it in exchange for making other people undying (because they don't have contract law!) but it would also be rational for everyone else to use it whenever they could get away with it. This is a scary thought but the world is clearly not a pyramid of magically 'controlled' people so Tanya must be wrong about something.

"Oh, uh, it's like a - do you remember when you were flipping out over Charm Person and I said, Charm Person doesn't do that, that's Dominate Person, or something like that? Vamipres have that on tap and they also automatically get it if they drink somebody's blood and turn them into a vampire spawn."

"...what exactly does it do, and why hasn't this led to everyone important being mind-controlled by someone else, concentrating power with one or a few rulers? Regardless of whether they are vampires."

"I've never been Dominated but I think it's basically total control of and insight into what the subject's up to? It's not everywhere because it's fifth circle, a first-circle protection spell will prevent it if anybody sees you coming well enough to time that, you have to re-cast it periodically and beat a save both to land it and to get the subject to do anything especially objectionable to them, and also I think it doesn't work if you're on different planes but there might be a trick for that, which matters because really heavy duty casters spend more time on other planes."

Tanya rotates this in her head to try and fit it to the observed world.

Only rare and powerful spellcasters can do this. However, all vampires can do it, and they can turn other people into vampires, and then those other people can do it too without having to become powerful. Vampires may have some limits imposed on their numbers due to requiring blood, but Noctimar doesn't seem to be ruled by even a small vampire clique. (They're also vulnerable to sunlight, which is why you'd expect to find them in Noctimar!)

It's possible that a small group of vampires can't outfight the somewhat larger group of people who can defend against their magic. However, the thing about vampires is that they can make more, they're like a species that breeds almost infinitely quickly. As long as there's even one vampire left they can find a defenseless village and tomorrow you have a hundred vampires again, and under that original survivor's control to boot. And that survivor doesn't care that a hundred vampires can't support themselves off the local population; he will keep creating more and sending them into combat as long as he can find defenseless people.

Against this, count the fact that the domination spell can be 'thrown off' whenever the subject is given a 'particularly objectionable' command, and being sent to fight and likely die for a stranger must qualify. And then you have an uncontrolled vampire, putatively with all the powers and magic you have yourself (seriously, they can just grant magic to people? Tanya has to explore that - later -) ...this is clearly not something you'd want to risk. (But is everyone here truly so rational as to not take stupid risks that end with a hundred newly uncontrolled vampires?)

Similarly: assume you start with a hierarchy of mind-controlled people, or better yet a reinforced lattice. Sometimes some of them throw off the mind control. (Assume they throw off all the controllers at once, otherwise this would be a perfect counter and Belmarniss would have mentioned that.) Most of them are then motivated to escape, and some to sabotage or take revenge. Some of them might control large sub-organizations they could use against you (although here, lattice control does sound like it would help?) or that they could simply order to self-destruct to hurt you. Sabotaging operations might not count as a distasteful order because everyone is being mind-controlled and wants them to be sabotaged?

Building an organization purely out of mind control is the antithesis of everything Tanya believes in. It's worse even than a chaotic world of universal non-cooperation, because islands of cooperation can arise and spread in chaos but the mind-control organization will organize to wipe them out, like magical communism on steroids. Tanya is enormously grateful that such a thing clearly doesn't exist, even as her mind insists on trying to come up with ways to make it work. If mind control follows a symmetric graph that doesn't have a head you can cut off, not even in a sub-organization, and any one person throwing it off is attacked by entire rest of the organization, and they can all check each other for mind control and fix any lacks... Or maybe a decentralized network of cells, each too small to matter much but using mind control tactically to enable shorter-lived operations - that probably wouldn't work, you'd need the cell leaders to be loyal anyway -

...

Alright, now she can do some mental screaming about the existence of absolute mind control and reading magic aaaaaaah!!!!!

"I have several questions but the only urgent one is how likely are we to encounter someone with that spell, what does it cost to use the protection spell you mentioned, and whether there are ways to make it permanent in your magic system." 

"I think the vampire has to bite you to land a Dominate that way, so your shieldy thing is probably very good in that way; if one gets me, killing the vampire should do the trick but if it doesn't for some reason, try stuffing me in the bag of holding because that's extraplanar and might work. A non-vampire caster is not necessarily harder to talk past than any other sapient we run into. I don't expect either, it's the sort of thing that attracts adventurers if someone's setting up as a warlord bloodsucking or otherwise and I'd most likely have gotten rumors about it if not actual party recruiters sniffing around the wizard school. I don't think you can make Protections permanent on people - maybe you can build them into hallowed ground or something but you can't just walk around with one on forever. Might exist an item that has expendable reactive charges that go off when someone tries something but I've never seen one for sale so it's probably hard or obscure or both. The spells don't have expensive components so it's just one of my wizard slots, but it only lasts a few minutes."

"Oh, the vampires can only mind control people when they bite them to suck their blood? That's much better than I feared. In that case the only danger to me personally is normal mages." And fifth-circle mages are very rare, which might enough to explain the state of the world.

"I'm still not sure why there aren't many more vampires around. Especially since it seems rational for them to live underground. Any one of them can create many others very quickly, if they don't care about being certain to maintain control, some people might use that to sow chaos and others might just be stupid. And they live forever. If there are too many I suppose they might starve for lack of blood, but the non-vampire population would go extinct first."

"Also, if a vampire can make another out of anyone, that sounds like a shortcut to giving someone extra toughness and magic abilities for free, and I'm not sure how that could be used reliably but I suspect that with enough thought and research and testing something might end up working. And then, again, we'd see a lot more vampires. Does this not happen because vampires, like other undead, are not quite the same people they were before and don't follow plans or agreements they might have made before and are likely to hate the vampire who made them one even if they didn't mind-control them? For example, is it definitely not a winning strategy for an army, or just a company of men, in an otherwise unwinnable scenario to all become vampires?"

"I think that is the case but have not specifically studied vampires and nothing actually stops a vampire from also being a caster. It would make sense for vampires to live underground but if they make it obvious that they're around, somebody will go kill them, so the ones that want to take advantage of the immortality are not super obvious or else try to have a buffer of neighbors who for whatever reason want them to be around. Like, they're not unkillable, they'd ruin my day but there exist people who can wreck them and call it Toilday, and building up a power base is inherently a somewhat stationary activity so they don't get to choose the time of such engagements. Everybody volunteering to be vampires to turn the tide of a war and then abide by their preexisting arrangements sounds like Lawful behavior? So maybe some Lawful people somewhere are doing it but drow're Chaotic. You would definitely need one of them to already be a vampire to start with. I'd read a novel with that premise though."

"...when you say someone would kill them, do you mean because they're vampires and have mind control or because the drow tend to assault all outsiders?" Tanya doesn't want to once again mistakenly assume that mind control is frowned upon in local culture, even though how could anyone tolerate any chance of that happening to them.

('Lawful' and 'Chaotic' translate as approximately those words, but with much more cultural weight behind them. Like they have and need and deserve capital letters. Which makes sense, and drow society certainly doesn't seem at all lawful but at least they have the concept of it, and books.)

"...because they're scary. I think a vampire who used to be a drow could be tolerated on that axis, one who used to be something else less so, but they're scary and unless you can predict one reliably you probably don't want it next door and if you can predict it reliably and don't want it dead the rest of the way, that's because it's got a track record of behaving in a way that does not include for example mind-controlling you and yours. We do not at this time have an openly vampire resident with a tolerable track record, nor rumors of a newcomer vamipre people are scared of, in the environs of Noctimar."

It sounds like they wouldn't band together to kill a powerful drow wizard just because they were therefore scary. This isn't material and Tanya will leave it be. It does mean that the only thing that stopped them from killing Tanya in her sleep was that they (even Belmarniss) didn't realize how dangerous Tanya could be, but that's not an entirely novel realization. (They probably didn't realize Tanya has no reason to slag their city and so can be relied on not to do that. 'Attack your neighbors for being too powerful' is how the War started.)

"All right. It's very unfortunate that there's no permanent protection or hard counter to mind control spells, I expect there's a long history of failed attempts to create such since everyone who could afford it would buy one... In the longer term I should find opportunities to record these spells so I can recognize them and react before the casting completes."

"If you can find someone to let you watch them land a Dominate, sure."

"I'm not under any illusions that this would be easy or cheap. Which is a good sign since it means it's unlikely to be used against me, but best to be prepared." Tanya wants to become a peaceful civilian with all her heart and also isn't going to give up any means of defense against mind-control magic.

...if she finds a useful and profitable civilian niche, she might want to give up (or sell?) her orb, in order to stop being either a threat or a valuable mind-control target to anyone. But it would be very hard to make sure everyone believed she did it, since local mages don't depend on implements they can give up or destroy. Also, she has a duty to go back to Germania if she can, and as far as she knows she can't but she doesn't know everything.

"Cool, same page there."

Good! They can proceed upstairswards on a course that takes them upwards on net.

When they're setting up to camp, a lone bat flaps into the cave where they're doing that, and then out again.

"We don't want any trouble," Belmarniss calls after the bat. "- suspect it's a familiar," she adds to Tanya.

"I couldn't detect it as magical. For what it's worth. ...so familiars understand language? Does that mean they're people, I thought you said they were animals?"

There's nothing in particular Tanya can do about this except follow the bat and she can't even do that without lighting herself up. She'd become alert, if she wasn't always alert when awake in unsafe territory.

"Familiars are people but most of them can't speak, only understand - this one will probably be nodding and shaking its head at its caster. They start as normal animals but become smarter in the familiarization process."

"Do I misremember you calling them animals or is this a translation problem? I thought 'animals' excluded 'people' but that might be a cultural assumption. ...How can I avoid killing someone by accident if they look like an animal? Aside, yes, from not killing animals without need, I meant in a combat situation but actually it might apply more broadly, is there a way they can quickly demonstrate being a person regardless of what they look like? This might be a badly posed question if they become people gradually, I'm not used to there being gradations of people since we only have humans."

"I mean that they start out as animals. I would also idiomatically say that someone who has a shapechanging spell 'turns into an animal' so as to avoid having to say 'assumes the outward appearance of an animal but is of course still a person the whole time'; familiars are animals sort of that way. I have never had a familiar so I don't know how gradual it is while it's happening, but they'll usually be with their casters, or doing something kind of weird for a normal animal like in this case scouting, and I guess if one is a spy it might be deliberately hiding among other animals of its kind but then it's kinda taking its chances, right."

Someone who pretends to be an animal invites the treatment due to animals. The problem is that some of the actual animals are also people! Well, Tanya already had to watch out for animal-looking alien people, she might as well be careful of pigs and horses too. ...and bats apparently. She doesn't need to deal with animals in her daily life anyway, she can just trust anything she's served at a restaurant is fine - UM.

...maybe she should temporarily become vegetarian until she's better oriented? 'Farming slaves for meat' sounds horribly plausible, you can get them to follow orders easier than farm animals!

Tabya puts that thought firmly out of her head. It is a future potential problem, revisit in a week.

"I was worried about - suppose I concluded centipedes were useless and dangerous vermin, and started shooting them on sight, and then it turned out I killed someone, or even just someone's familiar. Now I need to check if every animal is actually hostile, which - is good practice, really," because Tabya is not at war with the animal kingdom and is not working for animal control and needs to start adjusting to civilian life! Seriously, 'shoot on sight'? She has a lot of work ahead of her.

"So there may be a wizard within quite a large range of our campsite. I don't see anything we can or should do based on that alone, do you?"

"That is certainly a problem you invite by shooting at random things but if you pull your hits a little you might not kill a familiar, they get a little tougher than the source species. The caster could be a sorcerer or something weird, familiars aren't wizard-exclusive. And no, I think we should wait here and obviously not want any trouble."

Tanya is dubious about her prospects of exactly calibrating optical shots for every individual member of every animal species known to man drow. She will take Belmarniss comment about 'shooting at random things' in the spirit it was intended, even thought Belmarniss was earlier asking her to shoot any giant centipedes that came close and it clearly falls within Tanya's duties as the professional security guard for the trip.

They will make camp and one of them will stay on watch and not invite any trouble and hope trouble doesn't seek them out.