"Princess said you might like it. I can leave if you want," he shrugs. "Or if it looks like you're going to try to set me on fire, she mentioned that was also a valid reason to leave. Brought you some pastries," he adds, holding out the box.

"Search me. Doesn't look to be on your to-do list. It's a pretty short to-do list unless something's fouling up my magic."

"I have a to-do list?"

"I'd lay money you haven't written it down, but Elspeth said she told you I see goals and intentions and whatnot? You've got a bunch of colorshapes - they look kind of like your pet there, only more colors - and they're moving around pretty sluggishly till there's something you want right in front of you. You wanted to rack up a good chain reaction in your game, you want to pet your critter, you want to eat danishes - Mum has weird colorshapes too but you take the cake."

"Sure," says Kerron. He reaches out and scritches the poof.

The poof goes whmmmmmmmmmm and glows with a pale pink light the same colour as its fur. Felicity smiles.

"It's cute. It's an it? Has it got a name?"

"Nah," he says, to the second question. "It's just my poof. It's not like there's another one around to confuse it with."

"If I was gonna get one of these I'd probably have a hard time taking just one."

"I wasn't the one who got it," he says. Very misleadingly, but he's not concerned with that. "I don't know if I would've gotten more, though. It'd be harder to carry them all around." He pets his poof. It whmmmms some more.

"I never went in for pets anyway. When I was little I used to ask to get turned into stuff myself."

"What kind of stuff?"

"Usually blue versions of animals. Blue fox, blue hawk, blue hare, blue snake. Red cat."

He giggles.

"Was going to be a blue cat, but I was hanging out with my friend Lily at the time and she thought I should be a red cat, and she was pretty convincing."

"What'd she threaten you with?"

"She used to bite people. She has since outgrown the habit."

He giggles again.

"She's the Emperor's sister," adds Kerron. "His adoptive parents' biological kid. Technically the Princess's aunt. But adoptive vampire relationships get kind of weird and Lily'd be the first to tell you so."

"What's weird about 'em?"

"So, when Her Imperial Majesty Elspeth's Mom started learning about the exciting undead underworld," says Kerron, "the Emperor, and two other guys and two girls all about his visible age, were all passing for the adopted children of this other vampire couple, Lily's parents, who look a little older and were pretending a bigger age gap. But they're not actually related, any pair of them. The 'parents' didn't turn them all. Two sets of them are mates. The parents-and-children thing was a front for the humans - other times the Emperor was pretending to be his 'mom's' brother, or a subset of them would splinter off and do its own thing for a while and the cover story wouldn't include the whole family. The thing they actually are all together is a 'coven', but they're used to using parent and sibling relationships for each other. The Princess calls them aunt and uncle and grandma and grandpa as appropriate. But Lily thinks it's nonsense and won't hear 'Aunt' out of her mouth."

"Huh," he says. "Sounds complicated."

"Very much. More now the Emperor's biological mom's back from the dead."