delta v over delta t when there is no t

[ertia]

In a bar, there is a girl.

She looks like she has saved up all of her decadent and slothful impulses for a solid decade and is indulging them all at once. She is sprawled on a couch with a book she's only half-reading, and an ice cream sundae, and smiiiiiiling.

Comments

[first_and_final]

"Suits me."

[ertia]

"Is there anything else we'd want to know? For instance, why are you offering?"

[taste_tester]

"I'm a magic nerd. If I keep you around for three days - or call it six, I suppose - then I have all that time to interrogate you about what you've got back home, and then there's always the possibility you'll turn up with something new and exciting after. Dunno if it'll work on people from other worlds but back home sometimes people have magic, and it sometimes gets better after they turn, and sometimes they don't but they do afterwards. Idiosyncratic per-person powers. Called witchcraft."

[first_and_final]

"Oh, how charming," says Milan.

[ertia]

"What's the procedure?"

[taste_tester]

"I fill up on finest vintage from this kind lady," says the vampire, tapping Bar, "so that I'm in reliable control of my faculties, and then I bite you and the show's on the road."

[first_and_final]

"And control of one's faculties is a potential problem here?"

[taste_tester]

"Well, it varies. I can reliably pull the trick off, I've done it before, but sometimes vampires try to make more vampires and instead make corpses. Blood's tasty stuff."

[first_and_final]

"That sounds inconvenient, but inconvenience can be handled."

[ertia]

"How bad is this going to be if sorcery won't touch it...?"

[taste_tester]

"Can you get blood, wherever you're from?"

[ertia]

"Yeah..."

[taste_tester]

"Then you'll have a learning curve before you want to go downtown and inhale but you're all set to handle it and go about your business."

[first_and_final]

"But we should perhaps test how well sorcery can handle your unquenchable thirst, just to see."

[ertia]

"Yeah, may I?"

[taste_tester]

"Be my guest!"

[ertia]

Kithabel is her guest.

[taste_tester]

"Oh, there it goes, that's very nice. I could probably go kiss a tuberculosis patient on three weeks' hunger and leave them alive."

[first_and_final]

"Well, there's an image. Okay, so sorcery can solve this like so many other problems."

[taste_tester]

"I'm impressed. How do you get it?"

[ertia]

"You hang out in my world for years doing smaller versions of it constantly and in wide variety."

[first_and_final]

"I'm cheating outrageously and I still can't fly yet," Milan contributes.

[ertia]

"You'll get there soon."

[taste_tester]

"Anyway, you up for your three days of incomprehensible agony nowish?" Addy asks Milan.

[first_and_final]

"I might very well be. I'm probably having a reckless moment, but Kithabel is a much less reckless person than I am and she's interested too, so I'm not that worried."