"Complicated! Mostly not exactly. Not right now, anyway." Right now he's Astolfo. "But you don't need to be, you just need to be, oh I bet I can bend the medium to make this come off right to you, that sounds like something I should be able to do... You just need to be ✨open to the feminine✨! Did that come through?"

"How did you make that sound with your mouth? I don't think I could do that and I'm very good at impressions!"

"It's the genre. Or something. So when I said my magic so far is pretty meta, this is kind of what I mean, it's more about shaping the medium and the narrative around me. I picked powers that still allowed for some actually interesting stories but if someone wanted to just go ham on the they're super special nothing they ever do is wrong or goes wrong they are perfect and beautiful forever angle the notebook had options for that, too."

"That sounds so fun, I want one!"

"It's a lot of fun, yeah! I... don't know how likely you are to get one even after I'm gone, though. Probably more likely than you'd been until just before you met me? It'd be a pretty interesting, or at least kind of funny story, me leaving and you getting your very own notebook. And that's probably the sort of thing that matters, here. Oh, here, I want to check whether my thoughts about how this would work are right: am I anime?"

"You are striking in that direction but you have, like, hair follicles."

"Hmm, no, like, look really hard, especially at the edges between me and the world. Pay attention to your eyes and try to ignore what your brain was saying. At least it worked for me when I tried but maybe it'll turn out it only works for me."

"Okay, you're... fucking with my depth perception certainly. I'd think that would be uncomfortable but I suppose that wouldn't be very Mary Sue unless it made people really sorry for you."

"Oh excellent okay I'm glad you can see it too. So what happened here is that when I was choosing my powers and designing my femmesona in my head there was this specific anime character I was thinking of, and I didn't, like, particularly want to be him exactly but I think my powers or the Spirit thought it would be funny if I was. So I am. But not in a way where it matters. Unless it does.

"Sorry, I hope this isn't too uncomfortable for you."

"I'm mostly just fascinated and jealous."

"I probably can't rely on this because it would be really broken if I could but..." He looks at the camera. Or, well, given the medium, he looks through the screen. "Hey, author or uh authors I think it'd be really fun if sometimes people who met me also got the opportunity to become beautiful and powerful and special in a feminine way. ...well, you know, assuming this would all follow my narrative preferences, but we know that part."

? ??

"...sorry I don't expect this to work instantaneously. Just, it might be the kind of thing that would, you know? And I want to at least give it a shot. It would feel mean to rub it in like this and not do anything about it, even if it was an accident."

"I do appreciate the thought."

"But anyway, back on the original topic, yeah, when I just turned out to always have been a vampire hybrid I got witchcraft of the sort your world throws out, sometimes. And I am, I think, just straightforwardly a half-vampire hybrid now, so whatever inferences you were drawing from the difference between us and how it affects the power should assume that much."

"Hm. I've met one other witch half-vamp but her power wasn't remotely as quantitative as flight. It's not obvious to me why you'd be slower than me, though - possibilities include that it's directly derived from landspeed somehow, so it's based off bodily strength and agility even though those aren't in play, or that we're flying at the speed of thought, or that I'm more aerodynamic, or that your special snowflake magic thinks it's fun if you get a longer training montage."

"It's... probably not that last one. I think the personalization options here make sure that if I'm not as good as you are there must be a reason for it, there's not going to be a training montage just so that a training montage can exist. Speed of thought seems maybe plausible? How would we test that?"

"I dunno, do you have a way to suddenly think faster? Failing that we could play video games and see if I win by a similar margin."

"Does the bar have video games? What am I asking, it's a magic interdimensional bar, of course it does. Yeah, alright, let's do it, training montage time!"