"Huh. How does the translation spell work exactly -"

"It's not a spell, it's a magic ring we purchased once—I'm not using its magic right now, I've already learnt the language—and it offers us translations for the things we hear and read and want to say."

"That must be terribly useful. You've learned the language already?"

"Amongst the improvements granted by being a vampire is an eidetic memory, extremely enhanced senses, and lots and lots of brain room. This extends to me as well."

"Now I am terribly tempted. Those are quite some improvements."

"We like being a vampire, but our personal magic helps us cheat out of most of the drawbacks. ...it is also why we are very miserable."

"Oh?"

"When a vampire sees someone they are mutually romantically compatible with, they fall in magic unbreakable love with them. That... usually can only happen once, but my Sadai saw five people she was compatible with.

"And then there was a portal accident and we have not seen them for the past few hundred years."

"Ah. My - condolences. Are there prospects of finding them again -"

"The world-finding magic is going to eventually lead us to them. But it will—fail to work—if we try to ignore everything else we believe, we tried that once, it doesn't work."

" - huh."

And he makes conversation until they are home, where his boyfriend is asleep and he slips into bed next to him.

Crystal will stay out of the way and miss her vampire and her mates.

In the morning he has a hushed-but-still-audible-to-vampire-hearing conversation with the boyfriend, explaining, and digs up a prettier glass carrying container for Crystal and asks if she'd like anything to eat.

"I do not need to eat, but thank you."

Then the cook will bring Aitim and his boyfriend waffles with cream and berries and they will both work from home and look out at the snow.

"I'm curious about what you actually believe, Aitim."

"If I assure you that I believe reds are as capable and worthy citizens as anyone else and that our treatment of them is appalling and that the first priority of any leader should be doing right by them, would you have any reason to believe me? Amentans will bend pretty far for a planet, and blue's the caste that's good at lying."

"We do not care about reds more than we care about the other castes, but they need more caring. And we do not actually care if you do or do not ideologically agree with us."

"Reds are mostly more expensive to help than, say, purples, contamination procedures make everything pricier and that's before one even accounts for political capital. You don't care at all what I believe? It seems that someone who agrees with you is a more valuable ally than someone who can see where their incentives lie, because you can expect less - tendency for their cooperation to be conditional on the power you currently have over them."

"I should rephrase—we would prefer if you agreed with us but that is because we believe we are right, we do have enough power that things change very little for us in terms of what we should do depending on what the answer is."

"'not pleasantly anticipating shooting them all' is very much an understatement. I think it's good you got them all home though possibly not worth the chaos it'd have caused those stores and the police if I weren't able to straighten that out for them. I think you - really don't understand the experience you're trying to work around - and would be more able to do right by the people of Amenta if you did, but there are also probably some things you can see precisely because you don't experience it. I'd find touching one about as aversive as taking the lid off a outhouse toilet and jumping in but I am very self-disciplined and can do either if it gets my people magic. Does that get at what you're asking -"

"I believe so. My Sadai... was very distressed, yesterday. I advised her against being reckless but... it's good you were around, yes."

"I'm not mad at her. I have a brother who'd have done something like that. It'll get him killed someday but she doesn't even have that reason to worry."

"She would be much more distressed by having caused others to die than by her own death, at any rate."

" - it could have gone badly if she'd given them all stolen goods and then someone had run across them and thought they'd stolen them."