yeah that happens if you turn into a vampire

[cross_and_bow]

(prologue)

Bella slips into the school by a side door; she just saw a thing and she thinks she's seen it in a book before and thinks it's supposed to be mostly harmless but before she wakes Giles up over probably nothing or kills a likely neutral demon she wants to check.

And she pushes into the library.

Comments

[unmarred]

"Oh."

Mark contemplates this.

"Familiar management style," is his conclusion. "If you want to kill them all, I'm game."

[cross_and_bow]

"If they take issue with my puzzle solution there might be a problem but I don't think I'll wind up killing them all, I mean, one of them is Giles," she says. "...You say things like 'if you want to kill them all I'm game' when you have a soul?"

[unmarred]

"Yes."

[cross_and_bow]

"Vampires who are weird in some way," she mutters.

[unmarred]

"I wasn't all that normal for a human."

[cross_and_bow]

"And that apparently does the trick!"

[unmarred]

Mark pauses.

"...I'm trying to imagine your mother as a vampire," he says to Miles.

[thisvorlunatic]

"I... genuinely have no idea how that would turn out."

[cross_and_bow]

(Snort.)

[thisvorlunatic]

"My guess is that either you'd hardly be able to tell the difference, or she'd be terrifying in some unprecedented, unpredictable way."

He looks thoughtful.

"Father, on the other hand? Galactic conqueror."

[unmarred]

"Yeah, I can see that."

[cross_and_bow]

"There aren't many vampire conquerors per se, it's mostly mayhem, destruction, etcetera."

[unmarred]

"We only have the one example to go on, you understand," says Mark, gesturing to Miles, "but if the pattern holds at least for our family, you keep your skills and interests but lose your moral center. Miles's father's moral center is probably a substantial part of the reason he doesn't already rule at least a significant chunk of the galaxy."

[cross_and_bow]

"Well, maybe that's what'd happen, then. But the standard case is that you keep your... style, superficially, but wind up hedonistic and thinking short-term, with attendant effects on skills and interests. You guys are weird vampires."

[unmarred]

"Now that's terrifying."

[cross_and_bow]

"Yeah."

[thisvorlunatic]

"If that happened to me and there was anything like enough left of me to realize what I'd lost, I'd probably kill myself," reflects Miles. "But I suppose the really scary part is that there wouldn't be enough left."

[cross_and_bow]

"Suicidal vampires are as far as I'm aware very uncommon, but there are ones who engage in possibly suspicious amounts of riskseeking behavior."

[thisvorlunatic]

"The way Zeke talks about it, he'd barely notice the difference if he got his soul back, except for being slightly more strongly motivated not to eat people. But he's been a vampire for longer than he was ever human."

[cross_and_bow]

"I... think there's some incentive to consider it either a complete break or a minor blip in continuity."

[thisvorlunatic]

"Mm?"

[cross_and_bow]

"Well, say you wind up about the same except now you eat people, and eating people doesn't feel important, so you round to 'same person, only less uptight' or something; or say you lose basically your entire personality all in one go because it was very heavily interpolated with your soul, then you go 'that person I was is dead and they were super lame, too' - I don't think many vampires wake up and go 'I now I have a mental illness which makes me very different but I retain identity with who I was before that'?"

[thisvorlunatic]

"I... see what you mean. Although that last option is pretty much where I'm at."

[cross_and_bow]

"Yes," she says, "and you are a weird vampire."

[thisvorlunatic]

"Apparently so."