He looks at her.  Raises an eyebrow, seems to be on the verge of saying something, decides not to say it.

If he, like, really wants to make the comparison, they could do that, but it doesn't seem productive. Suffice it to say that turning is sufficiently not fun that people should not have to do it unanaesthetized just to be vampires.

"As I said, it's on the list."

"Apart from reasonableizing Valar and mind-shielding, it's possible a couple things from my world, which I have decided to call Aurum, might be useful and nonredundant. Nathan, the timer witch, seems able to time things across worlds at a range that at least equals demon informational conjuration, and while his power is very narrow it can be leveraged quite incredibly if you know how. Alice can't see things outside Aurum, even when she tried leaving it, but she can see people who are not from Aurum, therein, and dangerous experiments that could be located there she'll be able to look ahead at the results. Siobhan's witchcraft is making plans which work; she doesn't actually work for me, but might be convinced on her own recognizance to participate in occasional this-and-that. I have a communicative telepath with unlimited spatial range, who's willing to be stationed outside Aurum if that's ever useful. Eleazar detects witches and can get extremely grainy information on out of universe magic too. Pera's power hasn't been tested out of Aurum yet, but she can shunt people and objects into a sort of background reality - it's complicated, Elspeth can explain it -"

Elspeth explains it.

"- and there's my husband's power, which I'm circumspect about it but it's one-mile surface thought reading that doesn't respect a privacy distinction like yours does. And there's one of my bodyguards, a half-vampire whose power is to seem really unimportant; you'll be able to pay attention to me talking about her because you haven't seen her doing that, but if you ever meet her you'll only be able to consider her important enough to think about when she happens not to be using the power and it's on by default. Loki and Cam were fortunate enough to show up on her day off."

"All of those are useful to keep in mind. Most of what we're doing is very boring things like industrial production of Elven goodies to sell the galaxy to pay xenomedical teams to treat diseases on planets that aren't at that tech level yet, and occasional coups which I don't think we could relocate and terraforming places with the Valian ecosystem. Do you know if only humans are witches, do you know if humans on other worlds could be witches, do you know if someone's alt will be a witch given that they are..."

"All the sapients native to Aurum can be witches. Hybrids and wolves have to be born with it, humans are sometimes witches while human but turning can bring out a witchcraft that was not present before. I was a witch as a human, so clearly alts are not guaranteed identical witchcraft, but it might be that if Iobel turned she'd match; I can have Alice check."

"And are there plausible avenues to bribe Siobhan for help planning complicated things?"

"Inconveniently, what she mostly wants is the right to control the vampire population's comings and goings as relate to a particular island, and I've already guaranteed her that. But she's not immune to interesting problems and may even have been off human blood long enough to ever be motivated by charitable impulses."

"demon-supplied blood wouldn't solve your ethical sourcing problems, then?"

"It'd solve the sourcing, all right, but drinking human blood - haven't tested with offworld sapients; hybrids don't smell like food and wolves really don't smell like food - has undesirable psychological effects, including making it harder to resist continuing to do it in unethically-sourced circumstances and making it harder for us to live in groups larger than like three or four."

"Sensory stuff is the kind of thing our magic can do pretty trivially - might be able to get something that makes any liquid taste like human blood, if none of the problems stem from the taste..."

"We're not sure what causes it. Worth a try, at least with someone who's already had human blood. We're working on synthetics but they taste pretty awful."

"Added to the list!"

"I'll make sure you get the writeups of what we have so far."

(Elspeth tricked Evil Maitimo into making synthetic blood instead of a nuke. It was fucking hilarious.)

"Do you mind if we just have a demon steal them? Or more generally, is there content you'd prefer we be careful not to have a demon conjure?"

He thoroughly enjoys Elspeth's memory. "You know, I almost want to give him a little bit of credit - when he realized he was going to have to give up Findekano to get the weapons to stop the Enemy, he was sad that it was going to be necessary to do that, he did not even think about whether it was worth it."

"We've all got eidetic memories. We usually don't write down a whole lot unless we happen to be communicating by text over long distances," Golden says. "What I meant was I will have someone write it down for you. I assume you're appropriately conscientious about people's personal notes and such; there are no confidential Imperial documents to worry about."

He did kind of try to weasel out of it but yeah.

"I'd have been very surprised if he didn't. Given."

Well, he got his nuke. Didn't really help but he got it. And then he pulled that ridiculous emotional blackmail stunt.

"I don't think the blackmail was primarily emotional, but yes."

Political blackmail, then. Poor Findekáno.

"I considered talking to him. I would need to do it to know whether it was a catastrophically bad idea or not."