“This is your office?” Zeia asked, peering around at the richly furnished room, “It’s a little fancy for an office.” She glanced around at the massive table surrounded by chairs, “Kind of big too.”

Kay smiled a small smile and pointed at one of the doors, “Technically, my public office is through there, and this is the attached meeting room. There’s really only enough space for me in the actual office, so we’ll use this.”

“Your ‘public office’? Do you have a private office too?”

“You ask a lot of questions, don’t you?”

“She does!” Alice chimed in as she sat down, “She never stops.” She raced herself against the table and leaned in, her eyes narrowing as she stared into Kay’s eyes, the gravitas physically palpable in the air as she raised the tension in the room, “She never stops.”

Zeia reached over and smacked Alice’s shoulder, “Stop being dramatic! But yeah,” She admitted, turning back to look at Kay, “Of course, I ask lots of questions; I want to know things. Most people can’t read minds, so they don’t go around volunteering the information I want. If I don’t ask, no one tells me.”

“What do you do if people refuse to answer your questions?” Lauren asked.

“She bothers them until they answer her, or we have to deal with a murder attempt.”

“That was one time!”

“It was five times. And that’s only since you were assigned to my team. I heard reports of three other incidents before that.”

“Six of those were incidental to my questions!” She protested.

Kay quickly counted, “So you’ve actually had two people get so annoyed at you for asking questions they tried to kill you?”

“One of them was an assassin, and it turned out my questions blew their cover, so they were coming after me to shut me up.” Zeia specified, as if that somehow made it better.

“So you’ve actually annoyed a person into trying to kill you by asking questions?”

She pouted and looked away.

“My lord,” Lauren called to him, pulling him away from his new fascination, “We did come here to discuss a particular topic.”

“Right.” He took another stupefied glance at Zeia and sat down. “To start, I don’t want to assume familiarity, but if it’s alright with you, I think we’ve been through enough together that we can forgo formalities, at least in private. Feel free to call me Kay.”

“You don’t have to call me Hunter Ravenhome all the time,” Alice readily agreed, “And I’ll keep an eye on this one so she doesn’t make any lasting mistakes.”

Zeia shot Alice a glare that promised retribution.

“Thank you,” Kay replied with a suppressed grin, getting a glare of his own for his trouble. This woman is an interesting character.

“So, what did you want to discuss?” Alice asked, “I have a topic or two of my own I want to get through, but they’ll probably tie into at least one of yours so I can go after you.”

“The first one might end up being shorter or longer, depending on you. We all got changed into a new species.” Kay held up his hand and shifted it back and forth, showing off his unnaturally pale skin. Actually, is it naturally pale? Magic is real here, and I’m not undead. Weird. “And there are changes that are part of that,” He continued, “I know Lauren’s been filling you in on what little we’ve been able to learn over the past couple of weeks, but I wanted to make sure we answered any questions you might have.”

Zeia leaned in close, her eyes glowing with desire.

“I am going to limit this to any immediate questions Alice has right now,” Kay added, cutting off the half-elf before she could get started, “I’m sure we can set up a time for you to ask me anything you want, but later.”

She sat back in her chair with a put-upon expression.

Alice caught his eye with a small grin, “Thank you. Most of the things I thought of first off were answered by Lauren already,” She nodded gratefully at Lauren, “Knowing that we both can and need to eat and drink regular food and liquids was especially relieving. To the best of our knowledge, vampyr only drink blood, and it’d been a shame to accidentally starve myself thinking I didn’t need to eat now. And speaking of,” Her face screwed up in a look of distaste, “Thank you for providing me blood. Just the idea of having to drink from someone makes me ill, and learning that I don’t have to drink directly from the vein and people’s blood isn’t a necessity was an incredible relief.”

Kay grimaced as he remembered the first few days after making it back to Avalon and the experiments he’d subjected himself to with Eleniah’s help. “Yes, well, I will add some caveats to that information that you may or may not like.”

“Ah?”

“Eleniah insisted that we test any variables that we could think up, including the blood-drinking. While we apparently can drink animal blood, we need a lot more of it to be ‘full’ compared to a smaller amount of blood from people. Also…” He sighed, “It tastes better when you drink from the vein directly. Like, a lot better.”

Alice looked at him with a hint of distaste, “You… did that?”

“Like I said, Eleniah insisted we test everything. She also volunteered for me to… drink. We also found out, with more volunteers, that drinking from lower-tier people tends to have some side effects on them. Lethargy and similar effects could be equated to blood loss, but heavier and longer lasting than the amount of blood taken from them would normally amount to. So I’d recommend that if you ever do end up taking blood directly from someone, avoid tier ones and tier twos. At tier three, the side effects lasted for a few hours, so we didn’t go lower than that.”

Alice’s suddenly stiff posture relaxed fractionally, “You tested on volunteers? How did you…” Her hands clenched as she stared at the tabletop in frustration, “This is so fucked. Vampyr change people by biting them. I get that we’re not vampyr, but…” She sighed, “Fuck it. Are you changing people?”

“No, I’m, we’re,” Kay’s gesture indicated himself and Lauren, “Not trying to change anyone else into vampires right now. I was worried about that happening as well, but Ahthia, she’s my head researcher, as well as one of my Ministers, looked up some research and found that vampyr change their victims into more vampyr through a toxin that their fangs release. We don’t have that.”

“How do you know? How do you know any of this, for that matter!?” Alice started to get worked up, her voice rising, “What is a vampire? That sounds so much like vampyr, but they’re different? What’s going on?”

“Alice.”

The distraught hunter stopped and looked to her side.

Zeia looked back at her calmly. “I get that you’re worried, and this is half a nightmare and half a miracle mixed into one confusing bag, but they brought you here to answer your questions.” She pointed across the table.

Kay nodded in agreement, “We are, and I can answer most of those, but I’m letting you know ahead of time that I don’t have all the answers, and some of the ones I do have are speculation.”

“Alright,” Alice reached over and grabbed Zeia’s hand tightly, “My apologies.”

“It’s not an issue. I know that’d I’d be in a state just like yours if I was in your situation. To answer your first question, we tested the secretions from my fangs.” Kay opened his mouth and concentrated, letting his fangs snap into place. With a following thought, he had a few drops of translucent liquid drip from the tips into his palm.

Both of the hunters jumped back in their chairs when his fangs appeared, then, after a moment to relax, they both peered at the droplets.

“There are some similarities to vampyr venom, best we can tell without having any to test ourselves, but it seems to be a different substance in most ways. Also,” He hesitated for a moment, “I don’t know if it’s a natural part of being a vampire, it might make sense for a species that seems to reproduce by transformation, but have you noticed that you have instincts you didn’t before? Like you know how to do things with your new body that you haven’t actually learned?”

Alice paused with her mouth open to answer, “I… Yes, now that you mention it.”

“Try and ask those instincts how to make another vampire.”

Her head tilted back, and her brows came down in confusion, “That’s a weird feeling.” After a moment, her eyes dropped to the liquid that Kay was still holding, “It’s both, isn’t it? Vampyr need just their bite, but vampires need our bite and to… mix our blood?”

“I think it’s a two-part transformation process.” Kay let the drops snake down his hand onto a handkerchief Lauren handed him, “Whatever changed when vampyr were created modified that, but yes, as far as I know, we need to bite someone and inject our own venom into them, then add some of our blood into theirs. Together the two substances start the transformation.”

Both of the women’s gazes snapped from the handkerchief to Kay, and their voices overlapped.

“’ When vampyr were created’?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

He held up his hands defensively to hold back their ferocity. “I have a, well, not a speech, but I planned this out. Is it alright if I do that? It should answer most of your questions, and we can come back to any leftovers when I’m done.”

“Fine,” Zeia snapped, almost snarling as she stared at him with laser focus, “Start talking.”

“Okay… Uh, well, the reason I know anything about vampires is that there were stories and legends about them back on my original world.”

“Oh, right.” Alice muttered, “You’re an Outworlder.”

“Right, there are lots of tales about powerful creatures that drink blood back on Earth, with different variations from different areas, but many of the traits match up from place to place or story to story. Some have been refined and become topics of actual deliberate storytelling to entertain, but many remain traditional legends that serve as warnings about monsters in the dark. Actually, back home, a lot of beings that exist here, including elves and half-elves,” He nodded at Zeia, “Only existed in stories. So when I arrived here in Torotia and eventually heard about vampyr, I just thought they must have been this world’s version, just on the worst end of the spectrum of possibilities I knew about.” He held out his hand and let a tendril of blood snake out from under his skin, healing the small cut with a small force of will, pushing mana into his healing Skill, “Then I found a cult worshiping an eldritch being in the tunnels inside this cliff.” The blood floating above his palm swirled into the shape of an arrow pointing downward, then back into a swirling flow. “While I was fighting them, and the thing they halfway managed to summon, I gained an ability to sense eldritch taint, at least inside of blood, plus one of my Skills evolved to purge that taint. Originally it was a Skill to remove contaminants from someone’s bloodstream to help with healing and removing diseases and such, but I guess eldritch nastiness counts enough as that to qualify.”

“What does that have to do with vampyr?” Alice asked quietly.

Kay kept staring at the blood as he answered, “They’re full of shit. Every inch of that vampyr we fought was stuffed full of eldritch corruption, and so was the venom that he injected into us. The only reason I was able to save myself, to save us, was to purge all the eldritch bits inside us with my Skill. All that was left when I burned that away was a normal vampire. All three of us were already part way through the change, and I had no way to turn up back, so I did my best to empower the leftover vampire bits and force us through that transformation so we’d live.” He left out the part where it was mostly, almost entirely, the System that’d done that part. They had a connection with Alice, both with them being part of a brand new species with no other members and through the trauma of the events they’d survived together, but she wasn’t part of his inner circle yet if she ever was going to be. Sharing about the System’s meddling was limited to people Kay trusted above everything else.

“So… what are you saying?” Zeia demanded, her eyes still bright with a severity of emotion that was mildly alarming.

“I don’t have proof, but most of the evidence backs me up. If vampires aren’t native to Torotia, and vampyr are just vampires that have been corrupted by eldritch taint, then I think the answer is easy. An Outworlder vampire ended up on Torotia, and either shortly before or after their arrival, they got corrupted by something eldritch. Whether it was accidental or intentional, they became the starting point of what’s basically an eldritch plague that creates vampyr.” He shrugged, “I think that the entirety of the insanity, cruelty, and sheer evil the vampyr get up to comes from the fact that they’ve become the minions of some greater eldritch power that corrupted that first vampire to arrive on this world.”