"Hmm. Why?"

"...Why is it better for fewer people to die? Because death is bad. Seriously, weren't you the person who was planning to cure death?"

"Yes, but I wouldn't mind too much if that comes along after the aristocratic class is utterly extinguished. They are all of them murderers and complicit in murder."

"What does it mean to be 'complicit in murder'?"

"They benefit from the system killing people, and they know it does it, and they could easily stop it, and they don't do anything because they aren't really bothered."

"Any individual noble could easily stop it, were they bothered? Your Elrosian friend could easily stop it? You mean not a single noble has ever complained about the way things are, and then been silenced by the more numerous and powerful other nobles?"

"They could free the slaves on their land overseas, they could stop profiting off the import of slave-made products, they could oppose the foreign wars."

"Are their any legal barriers to freeing slaves? In my world, there was a time when the Kalinago Islands had extremely entrenched slavery. The system was so self-protecting that the governments actually passed laws that would effectively fine slave-owners for freeing their slaves, as it might 'disrupt the peace'. If you owned slaves because you had inherited them, and you weren't super profitable and flush with cash, it was actually impossible to stop being a slave owner - unless you gave your slaves to someone with fewer morals.

And how possible is it to live without products that were contributed to by slave labour? Depending on how large the slave economy is, that could be the vast majority of goods. Are they even labelled as such?"

"I avoid them. It involves not eating any sugar, which some people would be upset about, but I don't even have lots of money and it's not exactly hard."

"Well, if sugar-avoidance is all it requires, my blood-drinking should suffice to keep me morally pure."

She giggles. "Yes, no one imports the blood of slaves. Yet."

"Drinking the blood of slaves would be creepy, anyway. Drinking blood from another person is pretty sexual."

"Huh. And not very sustainable, probably. Does all blood taste the same?"

"Not exactly. There are subtle differences, depending on the species and diet of the creature whose blood is being consumed. However, all types of natural blood taste more similar to each other than they do to synthetic blood. And better."

"I don't envy you there either. Food has an astonishing variety of flavors, and you can prepare it hundreds of ways, and you can make it so it lasts for years, for long journeys."

"Some types of synthetic blood are long lasting - such as the crappy stuff aid agencies send to developing countries. It's also possible to freeze blood, if you're careful about it. But yeah, historically, you either had to travel with a herd of animals or go hunting if you needed to travel long distances."

"It sounds extremely inconvenient for long sea voyages in particular."

"Definitely. We had ships hypothetically capable of long voyages long before we had the ability to actually go on them. Luckily, most of our major landmasses have islands in between them. At one point, we even started building large floating islands with grazing animals on them."

She giggles. "We'd never have been able to colonize the world. Maybe that'd be for the good."

"Ehhh, we still managed it. It's amazing how hard it is to stop people. There are currently discussions on my world of colonising other planets around other stars. We always find a way to spread."

"That, one assumes, would require better synthetics?"

"Assuming we can't figure out how to hibernate, yes. We can already do something sort of like hibernation. When we're really starved, we tend to fall into a deep asleep. This is a defence mechanism, but it's pretty bad for our health. We can survive like that for about a week. Nothing can wake us up, except the smell of blood. When awoken, we are... Not exactly ourselves. All in all, it's not a great idea. However, there are people who are trying to develop a much less dangerous, technologically-mediated version."

"Do all the other creatures on your world eat plants and animals, like us?"

"Almost all. There are some bugs and fish that drink blood, but most things that eat will eat plants or animals that eat plants."

"I wonder why your kind are so different. Have you compared your biology to that of everything else? To figure out why you can't eat things?"