"- But snakes aren't four-legged!" says the teenager in the black hoodie, leaning animatedly over the opposite side of the round table. They were apparently too focused on the guy pacing around up in front of the whiteboard, to notice the person materializing out of thin air in the seat across from them.
The other four people in the room have noticed, and are staring.
- O... K... - Toy-Mun is silent for a moment, then their face brightens. - Oh, like a powerstone! Mages charge those to later reuse when their own energy is low!
"You mean, like, some kind of chemical battery?" Translation issues incoming, ho boy . . . "Like, a box with one substance in one side and another in another, and there's a concentration gradient of something between them, and the 'powerstone' gives you a portable way to exploit that?"
Toy-Mun looks at Asic somewhat incredulously.
- Box with two substances sounds like a mad chemist's experiment, yes, but powerstones have nothing to do with that. They are usually gems. A mage infuses them with magical energy for storage when they feel well, then taps at it when they've exhausted their own resources but need to cast something. I don't think I've ever used one, but my teacher did once when a hailstorm threatened to damage our house.
"I think on the whole we really would like to see your life-clade top-level sketch, if you can make a quick one? If it's not blocking feel free to ask us questions during, too."
Toy-Mun nods and tries to make a sketch. While it is rough, it seems they understood what a clade is. The first level is two circles of "living" and "undead". "Living" gets split into "plant", "mushroom", and "animal" (which is, by Earth measures, rather progressive for a quasi-medieval society to recognize rather than lump plants and mushrooms together), "undead" - into "spirit" and "embodied".
- I don't really know where those microbe thingies would be if we have them, - Toy-Mun notices and, after a short pause, adds: - And gods… it just feels wrong to classify them under "undead", but there is some similarity between gods and spirits.
Final pool positions:
Scoryu - holds 3 shares of 'no vampires'
Henreyyah - holds 1 share of 'vampires'
Asic - holds 6 shares of 'no vampires'
Kwaiets - holds 1 share of 'no vampires'
Pel - holds 5 shares of 'vampires'
Total payout: 72gs (share price of 5gs decided at beginning by Kwaiets)
Everybody looks at Toy-Mun with some degree of obvious - fear? Wariness? Helplessness? Shock? Hard to say.
Toy-Mun has already learnt better than to interrupt their - pretty weird in their eyes - proclivity for bets. It doesn't mean they're halfway happy about it.
- Yes, humans and elves can be turned into vampires. Other races, I think, cannot. Vampires are vulnerable to silver, fire and sunlight. Why, do you have vampires? And what's up with all this betting anyway? What are you going to bet on next - whether I'm male or female?
"Immortal, feed on the blood of ordinary people, formed from a mortal by the infection of a black-box parasite that follows no familiar principles of biology and reproduces on the scale of millenia and that's why you're not one despite living in a world that has them.
You're not one, right."
Toy-Mun chuckles:
- Quite observant, Scoryu. I am not a vampire - though it would normally not be wise to trust someone on such questions, any silverware would give me out if I were one. They are quite rare, they require either magically fueled desire to live or a mutual blood exchange - so it's not like they turn everyone they feed on into new vampires. And… If you want to know something about me, just ask.
Babbles! Stops and starts! They REALLY WANT TO KNOW what the labor about vampires and DO NOT KNOW where the labor to start!
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