"We could skip the part where you need an excuse for that and just get to me right now."

Caleb zips over to inches away from Peter's face and flashes a dangerously toothy grin. "You need to think very carefully about what you are asking for."

"I am asking you to show me your vampiric skills in bed. And then to lend me your book."

Caleb does have some vampiric skills in bed. Super speed is not his only superpower, and he can use those fangs to great effect.

Peter is such a fan of people who fuck on the first not-a-date, like himself.

He's also becoming rather a huge fan of Caleb in particular, and in the afterglow in one of this mansion's multiple beds he starts pestering the vampire about himself. How old is he, how long has he been a vampire, who turned him, who turned his sister (or were they both born vampires?), what does he do for a living, all of that.

Caleb seems to rather enjoy being the center of attention like that. Peter will get the strong impression that Caleb loves talking about himself, in that way NPCs have of talking about things they are interested in in which they say lots of sentences about it that could with some effort and creativity be constructed into a narrative.

He was turned eighty years ago—

 (—which makes Peter almost choke on his spit, since according to his calculation most NPCs live for 13 to 16 years at most and his own life expectancy seems likely to be around like another forty-five to fifty—)

—by a vampire called Miseya Hellic (stage name Miss Hell), who herself had been turned by Count Straud. His sister was turned shortly after by Straud himself. They were the heirs of a rich family that had recently moved to Forgotten Hollow and Straud wanted to seduce them into staying by offers of immortality and power.

He didn't count on Caleb and Lilith actually, you know, caring about people and not wanting to kill others, so that backfired and the siblings moved out soon after.

They've only recently returned, wanting to work towards turning this place into a little bit less of Straud's personal playground and maybe a place where vampires and mortals can coexist in harmony.

Also, Caleb is a Simstagram fashion influencer who's trying to make it big and eventually he wants to start his own brand.

...is it vampirism that makes these people more ambitious and interesting than anyone he's ever met? Maybe the fact that NPCs' lives are so short just curb anyone's desires or something and you do need immortality to fix it, but holy shit this conversation has just placed Caleb and Lilith at the top of Peter's list of people to turn into real people as soon as he figures out how.

It does sort of throw a wrench into his plan of "causing interesting events to happen so that more of them will be caused by other people" because Caleb's ideas are pretty interesting and he's still an NPC. But Caleb hasn't succeeded yet, so maybe not entirely.

Peter is not going to lose hope.

It starts getting late, and although Peter doesn't need to sleep, Caleb actually does. He's mostly diurnal, since he's actually one of the vampires who made himself immune to sunlight, while his sister is mostly nocturnal, because she has not.

Well, really, his sister is whatever she's feeling like at the time with a bias for the night, but whatever.

So Caleb gives Peter his number and lends him his copy of Encyclopaedia Vampyrica, Vol. 1, and restates his threat of hunting Peter down, but this time it's definitely flirty.

(Peter did have to sort of fool around with questions to understand Lilith's situation, there. "My sister isn't immune to the sun." "Then why was she awake during the day?" "Only direct sunlight hurts vampires." "So she's not nocturnal." "Most of the time my sister prefers being awake at night." But good enough.)

He thanks Caleb for the book, says goodbye with a kiss, and transportalates back home to spend the night reading about vampires.

The main relevant things he cares about, there, are:

• Vampires can either be born or turned.
• A vampire will stop aging once they reach the age NPCs call "young adult", which for normal NPCs is around 6 years.
• Any vampires who are turned after that will freeze aging wherever they are but they will not rejuvenate.
• Vampires have some default weaknesses, such as being burnt by sunlight or repelled by garlic or needing invitations to walk into someone's home or turning to dust when a wooden stake is driven through their heart, but a sufficiently powerful vampire can work to overcome most of those.
• Vampires need to drink either blood (human or otherwise) or the juice of a specific species of plant that evolved to mimic it in order to survive.

There are probably more details in the other books, but honestly this is a pretty good introduction to get going. And Caleb was right, a lot of the book is dedicated to narrating the life of a single, specific, unnamed vampire, who probably is in fact Count Straud. It's interesting, if kind of creepy when interpreted as an account of real facts that really happened, but the information is solid.

One thing he is curious about, though, is why there is nearly no overlap between communities of vampires and wizards.

"Vampires can't be wizards, and wizards can't be turned into vampires," Caleb explains when Peter asks him about it.

"...huh. Really? I hadn't expected you to actually know the answer, to be honest, but do you know why?"

A shrug. "No, not really."

"Guess I could ask one of the Sages about it."

"What are Sages?"

"Sages are very powerful wizards that can turn normal people into wizards. They also know a lot about magic in general."

And thankfully Peter can return to the Realm of Magic whenever he wants. He doesn't even need the glimmerstone anymore, he can just transportalate.

He hasn't been spending so much time there, lately. He will need to, soon, to practise potionmaking and eventually learn more stuff, but he lucked out to find a scroll for the Potion of Prompt Resurrection at one of the stores one day, and while he's still not powerful enough to be able to learn it, he's keeping it close to his heart in his inventory.

Also, since he apparently won't be able to turn into a vampire, he'll need to pull for a Potion of Rejuvenation to keep from growing old, but he has a while.

Regardless, when he goes to visit the Realm of Magic he learns that Sage Cara Lane has retired and passed her mantle on to one Ethren Reyes as Sage of Practical Magic. Since he's always had a soft spot for that school of magic, Ethren is the one he asks about vampirism.

Unfortunately Ethren is not much help, either. The long and the short of it is that no one knows why it doesn't work. It is a known fact, for sure, amongst the very very few people who have been interested in it, that vampirism and spellcasting are incompatible, but the reason for it is elusive. There are various hypotheses but no one has a mechanistic understanding of either situation and so no one really "makes predictions" so much as "record observations".

(Not that he used that many words, of course, but Peter is getting pretty good at piecing these things together by now.)

Peter has very little hope, but he decides to talk about the subject with the other Sages, just in case. Sage Faamoana of Mischief Magic is somehow even more useless than Ethren, not knowing about vampires at all, so whatever. Now, Sage Dyer of Untamed magic is... a whole other beast.

She's kind of kooky is what she is, head in the clouds all the time, talking about chakras and spiritual alignment and a bunch of bullshit that he's pretty sure is actually bullshit rather than legit forms of magic. But also, the other two Sages do respect her a lot, she knows more magic than anyone else alive, and she's the most powerful spellcaster in the world. So.

"Peter!" she says when he finally finds her on a broomstick waving her hands around trying to catch space dust. She doesn't look at him but somehow she knows he's there anyway. "What brings you to the clouds?"

"Sage Dyer, hi," he says from his own broomstick. "I've been meaning to talk to you."

"Oh, I know, Petey. I saw it in the dust. Congratulations on the boyfriend."