A Good Place to Put Your Feet Up

[whatamithinking]

There is a woman at the bar. She's drinking some sort of coffee beverage, and grading papers.

Comments

[her_imperial_radiance]

"That's reasonable. I don't have an alternative form of immortality to peddle, unfortunately."

[whatamithinking]

"Oh well. There's time yet before it's urgent."

[her_imperial_radiance]

"Maybe if you get enough doors you'll find one you like more than mine."

[whatamithinking]

"Hopefully, yes. How often do you get doors, if I wanted to indulge my curiosity with your aunt?"

[her_imperial_radiance]

"Pretty often. I get large quantities of a tasty non-blood substance here for R&D to try to figure out how to make and everybody else to drink."

[whatamithinking]

"Convenient."

[her_imperial_radiance]

"I bring home other things too, but if I overdo it I don't get new doors for longer than usual, so I try to keep it to the essentials - yes golden bubbly and interesting feats of materials engineering, no parts for spaceships that break the speed of light."

[whatamithinking]

"My sister and I usually bring home medical technology a little more advanced than what we've currently got."

[her_imperial_radiance]

"I brought home some stuff on limb regeneration once. Turning into a vampire can't do that. But things that turning into a vampire can fix are less the focus - Mama approves of public health measures and I've brought vaccines and the like before but I haven't found anything that will do proper immortality besides vampirism and we're already doing that as fast as we can."

[whatamithinking]

"Not that it's relevant anymore, or that your mother would be any more likely to approve for turning other people who are also telepaths, but can turning into a vampire fix paraplegia?"

[her_imperial_radiance]

"As long as everything still exists, yes. It just can't generate body parts out of nothing."

[whatamithinking]

"Huh. Well, not really relevant anymore, but theoretically good to know."

[her_imperial_radiance]

"And the process will dissolve anything that isn't organic body part or glass, which can be inconvenient for some people who've been injured and had that addressed in ways other than turning first."

[whatamithinking]

"I imagine it wouldn't dissolve the wheelchair."

[her_imperial_radiance]

"No, the wheelchair would be fine. But hip replacements come up pretty often..."

[whatamithinking]

"That does sound inconvenient, if it doesn't make new ones."

[her_imperial_radiance]

"It doesn't. So now we have expensive, hard-to-maintain extradimensional tech to handle re-replacing those hips with bone. And it has to be a genetic match, not because they'd have time to reject the bone but because if the hipbone turns with the rest of the person and it's different it'll generate different vampire venom and that will create mildly uncomfortable scar tissue."

[whatamithinking]

"Sounds unpleasant. And it can't help matters that the people most likely to have gotten hip replacements are the ones with the least time to get turned in."

[her_imperial_radiance]

"Yes. We go as fast as we can. The anesthetist works full time and the witch who copies powers takes his for occasional shifts too."

[whatamithinking]

"Anesthetist?"

[her_imperial_radiance]

"Turning into a vampire hurts a lot." (This is an understatement.)

[whatamithinking]

Shiver. "Aha. Venom indeed."

[her_imperial_radiance]

"Someone who needs to jump the line and can't displace a pending batch may choose to turn without Alec or Addy helping, and that used to be what anyone who turned had to do anyway, but it's not advised."

[whatamithinking]

"I can imagine it would be preferable to dying..."

[her_imperial_radiance]

"Not during the process. Rates of regretting it afterwards are pretty low, though."