Straightforward questions get straightforward answers, who could have guessed? (Even Meredith managed to, after a lot of not doing so.)

It's a good thing that Sanna has told her that 16 for her type of mermaids isn't the same as 16 for a human because Meredith certainly wondered about it for the whole half-second before knowing! She doesn't feel much guilt anymore but if she did, having stalked a teenager would be something she would be upset about. Probably. Assuming she'd have a human-like moral compass. Not that it matters since she doesn't feel guilt and Sanna isn't a teenager in the human sense!

"60? That's a pretty short lifetime. At least it's the lower bound and not the higher one. It sucks that you don't know how long you can actually live for though."

Great. Sanna describes being in acute emotional distress, and gets nothing; but not knowing how long she'll live, that's what garners sympathy. It's better than nothing, but yeesh.

"Yeah, it does. I'd prefer to have a more concrete idea, for planning if nothing else. But I'm at least glad the lower bound is as high as 60. It's short, but it's better than 40. I'd be pretty depressed if I thought I might only live to 40."

…Ugh. She prefers this line of questioning to any of the others so far, but it's bringing up some bad thoughts. Go away bad thoughts, she is busy.

(Meredith might notice a look of deep misery flash across Sanna's face as she stares into the middle distance, but it's quickly replaced by her usual carefully neutral expression.)

Sure, twenty years are a lot when they’re a third of your life but they’re still so few compared to how long Meredith has lived and she’s far from the oldest creature around. She’s allowed to think that 60 years is way too few years. At least half of her reasons to get turned into a vampire where that she wouldn’t have had enough time as a human to learn all she wanted to.

Meredith notices the expression but she both struggles to read human emotions and thinks that being upset at living for 60 years is perfectly reasonable, so she doesn’t find it surprising.

She’d like to continue asking but… it’s Sanna’s turn. Sanna might be distracted enough for another question to slip past her but Meredith will keep to her side of the deal despite her curiosity.

“It’s up to you to ask something now”, she reminds her.

Sanna was leaving the floor open for follow-up questions, because she's a lot happier about answering this category of question, so she'd like to encourage it. But she's not going to say that out loud, so if Meredith doesn't follow up then she doesn't follow up.

At the very least, Sanna can try to return the favour by asking one of her more benign questions:

"Do vampires generally need to be convinced to turn people? Are there any that just go around turning people for fun?"

If Meredith had known she could ask more questions she would have done so but she was worried that Sanna would decide she wasn’t following their agreement and stop answering.

“It varies a lot from individual to individual. It’s related to our drives and personalities. I’ve personally turned a few people and I didn’t need to be convinced of it, although I did look for people who were interested in it. Some other vampires are driven by their thirst and will usually kill their prey without turning it. Yet some others will turn people  against their will, for varying reasons. And some, like the one who turned me, will be reluctant to do so.”

Makes sense. Sanna just nods.

“If it reassures you, the reckless ones usually get killed,” she adds.

That also makes sense. Sanna's not sure why Meredith thought she needed reassurance, but that's a prosocial behaviour, so… "Thanks."

Meredith nods.

“So, how do your strength and speed compare to a human’s?”

Goddammit. Right back to probing for weaknesses, apparently! And she can't pass or glomarize this one, that would be tantamount to admitting they're nothing special and that she wants to hide that. Better to only admit the first part.

…Actually, in terms of incentives it might be better to pass. It would be admitting weakness, but it would also annoy Meredith, which might discourage her from asking more of this type of question.

…Or, she could split the difference?

"In human form, they're what you'd expect for a human that looks the way I look." (Sanna is about 5′7″. She looks fit and healthy, but not like she goes out of her way to train.)

There. If Meredith only intended to ask about her human form, then the question is answered; but specifying 'in human form' emphasizes that she could have revealed more but didn't, which should annoy Meredith if Sanna understands her at all. And if Meredith intended to ask about both forms, then this answer should be even more annoying. (In either case, Sanna has the excuse that Meredith's phrasing called for an apples-to-apples comparison. Sanna genuinely does think that's probably what she wanted, so it's not just a convenient excuse.)

Sanna doesn't want to encourage this line of questioning, so this time she'll launch straight into a question, and this time she'll probe right back:

"How old was the vampire who turned you? And do you know how they died?" (Hopefully that phrasing sounds less predatory than 'How did they die?')

(She meant to ask about this earlier and immediately completely forgot. Stupid!)

Not a full answer but, honestly, still more than she expected. Assuming that she isn’t lying, of course, but there aren’t any signs pointing to that, so she’ll take it as true.

”Around 137 when they turned me, why? And they upset a dragon, I believe.”

HOLY SHIT DRAGONS

Huh. She was kind of expecting the answer to be either 'they and Meredith had a fight' or 'a vampire hunter got them'. (Not that Meredith would necessarily tell her if it was either of those things.) This is both way more interesting and way less informative. If it's true, anyway.

"Idle curiosity. A 50-year-old vampire dying a few decades after you meet them feels less weird than a 200-year-old vampire dying a few decades after you meet them. The former feels like maybe they just weren't that good at vampiring, the latter feels like a weird coincidence. Although, I guess it depends on what an actuarial table would have to say about vampire lifespans. Now I'm kind of wondering if anyone's collected enough data to compile actuarial tables for vampires…"

It's kind of difficult to not immediately ask about dragons, but she doesn't want to look desperate. She was planning to specifically ask about other creatures at some point, and she kind of expected Meredith to be cagey! Her mentioning them on her own might be a really good sign!

“Boredom or other losses of motivation play an important role in vampire mortality,” she replies, shrugging. “Also, dragons are territorial and can be pretty determined. And I don’t think there are any actuarial tables on vampires but that sounds like a good future project…”

Small smile. "A good future project for you, or for someone else? …Rhetorical question."

That's good to know about dragons. At some point Sanna should ask about how to avoid them, but she doubts any live literally in the city, so that's far from her top priority.

Boredom and 'loss of motivation' plays an important role in vampire mortality…? Sanna can only think of one way to interpret that, and it's pretty dark. …No, she can think of two ways to interpret that, and they're both dark, but one is darker than the other.

She wants to ask about that, but… She got a lot out of that question, she shouldn't punish that by being greedy. "Your turn."

“For myself, although I won’t stop others from participating”, she answers the rethorical question anyway.

“Why are you so far from the sea?” Meredith asks after a tiny pause (in which she searched for a hopefully not offensive question). 

Yeah, she knew that was coming eventually. She's kind of surprised it took this long.

"I'm not going to go into a lot of detail, because it's personal and a sore subject, but let's just say that I had a lot of bad experiences — beyond what most mermaids have to deal with, I mean — so I left. The details on what the bad experiences were and how I set up a life for myself as a human are the kind of thing I might — emphasis on might — be willing to tell you at some point in the future. If you think they'd interest you. I kind of doubt the 'bad experiences' part would interest you."

Personal reasons, alright. This is in fact something she’s not in a hurry to learn about. A supernatural creature’s past negative experiences are obviously more interesting than a human’s but not that much more, so she’d rather learn about the magic first.

“Yes, I don’t mind waiting for that. It’s honestly not what I’m most curious about. I guess it’s… good that you could pretend to be human? Also, it’s your turn to ask now.”

"Yeah, it is good." Not for the reasons Meredith is probably imagining, but still.

Hmm, what to ask next…

She almost starts to ask a question, but then has a thought.

"Meta-question. Meaning, a question about how we should ask questions. If I want to ask you a question, but I won't want to answer that same question about myself, should I just keep that question to myself, so that I'm not making you think of it and making you curious about something you can't learn?"

“It’s up to you. I might come up with that question anyway and you’ve already warned me that there are some you won’t answer. If you never want to answer that I’ll dislike it a bit more than if you don’t want to answer it yet and might do so in the future. I obviously will ask most, if not all, questions I come up with. But then, I don’t have much, or possibly anything, that I want to hide more strongly than I want to learn about you.”

"Okay. It's a question I might be willing to answer at some point. Question is: What exactly do you do with yourself? Like, on a scale from 'I live in the woods and I basically never leave' to 'I live in a normal house and have a normal job and the only really weird things about me are that I drink blood and sometimes I stalk people', where do you fall?" She's kind of assuming it's closer to the second one, given Meredith's clothes, but you never know. "And if it's closer to the first one, what exactly do you do with all your free time?"

“Somewhere in the middle? I do live in the woods and don’t leave that often but it’s in an actual house”, not that she really needs one. “I’ve written and a published a few books and I’ve had someone doing investments and stuff on my behalf for a few decades. I had to look for something to do once there weren’t any more new supernatural creatures to travel around the world for.

“With my free time I… don’t really do much? I read and occasionally write but I’d been pretty bored until you showed up.”

…She's published books? Wow. Sanna will definitely want to check those out. Regardless of whether they're genre fiction, high literature, non-fiction… She feels like Meredith's writing would have to provide some insight into her psyche, even if it's a series of bone-dry textbooks about leaf morphology or something. Even her choice of pen name feels like it would be enlightening.

Investments implies she has, like, a bank account. A civilian identity. Identity documents. Unless she's accessing her investment income under the table, which seems quite possible if she's doing it all through one person. Collecting royalties for her books, on the other hand… Sanna imagines it's technically possible to do that without a civilian identity — for example, by letting someone else take credit in exchange for passing along a portion of the royalties — but that seems difficult to arrange in a trustworthy fashion, and not necessarily worth the trouble compared to just having an agent who's willing to keep you anonymous. You'd have to be really determined to not have a registered identity, in order for any of the alternatives to be worth it. Then again, there's no rule Meredith can't have multiple civilian identities, especially given how long she's had to lay groundwork… It really all depends on what her goals are re: being known to the government, and Sanna of course doesn't know what her goals are.

…Wait, 'weren't any more new supernatural creatures'?! Sanna's not sure whether to be impressed or skeptical. But she doesn't doubt that Meredith's seen a lot. No wonder she was curious about Sanna. Now she's extra glad she didn't try to play dumb about why she stands out…

Well jeez, no wonder she's so bored! "Amusement parks don't grab you? …That's more of a conversational question, you don't have to answer."

(Sanna might be a bit disappointed to discover, when she looks for Meredith’s books, that her pen name is the same as what she’s introduced herself by.)

Well, there might have been some creatures that she hadn’t found. If so, they were hiding very well.  Meredith searched everywhere she could, asked anyone who might know, advertised her presence to other supernaturals… anything that might lead her to more magic species.

“Well, they’re usually closed at night,” she’s letting on about the weakness to sunlight but whatever, it’s an obvious one for Sanna to guess about anyway, “and they’re not very thrilling when you’ve got vampiric speed and reflexes.”

(She would at most be mildly disappointed. 'She just uses the same name' is one of the possibilities she's considering, and she feels like that would also provide insight.)

Sanna cocks her head. "Canada's Wonderland is open 'til 10 pm sometimes." She knows, because she gets a season pass every year. "Not every year, but last year and the year before… Although, I guess that only gets you an hour-ish in summertime. And yeah, good point about the speed." She's not even going to bother suggesting the off-season events; the idea that Meredith might find Halloween Haunt or WinterFest entertaining is laughable. "But like, that's just one example, what about –"

– and then her brain catches up. "Wait, you can't be in sunlight?" She's so surprised that she's now totally forgotten about giving Meredith a turn.