“They shouldn’t be one unless they think you’re a threat to them. Just make it clear that you aren’t such.”

"Alright."

…Should she ask this…

"Can I assume there's a natural limit to your curiosity about me? That eventually you'll have learned enough that you'll lose interest?"

After all, presumably she isn't still actively questioning members of all the other species she's found… But then again, she knows Sanna's different from all of them…

“Based on all previous cases, yes, I should run out of questions I really care about at some point. I might try to find you again after that if I don’t have some way to contact you and I come up with something else but I’ll be mostly done.”

Although she really really hopes this won’t happen soon because not having a target for her curiosity absolutely sucks.

Internal sigh.

"If at some point I were to say to you, 'I don't want to see you again or interact with you again', would you honour that even if you still had questions or you came up with more questions later?"

Meredith presses her lips tightly together. 

“Probably not”, she admits, “it would go against my nature.”

There’s magics that could ensure a deal is binding but she’s certainly not going to bring that up when she hasn’t even been asked about it.

There's a heavy silence, for a moment.

"So, earlier, when I was laying out my conditions for having this conversation, and one of them was 'I might just decide I never want to see you again after tonight, and I will expect you to honour that, so the things I tell you tonight might be all you ever learn', and you replied, 'Understood', in what sense was that not a fucking lie?"

“In the sense that I will really try my best to avoid bothering you if you don’t want to see me again. And that I hope that I’ll learn enough not to feel the need to do that. And, also, I probably didn’t listen to much beyond getting to learn things because I was very much overtaken by my drive at the time.”

"Not that I don't appreciate the hypothetical effort — assuming you're being honest, which is now very much in question — but you just said yourself that you probably wouldn't honour it. The fact that you'd try isn't nothing, but the condition was that you'd honour it, period! Not that you'd try your very best to honour it but realistically would probably fail!

"And if you straight-up weren't listening in the first place, then your answer would have been a lie even if it'd been coincidentally accurate! You just said what you thought I wanted to hear so that I'd tell you things! It didn't mean anything!

"Which means I just told you a fucking mountain of deeply personal things under false pretenses! You were already on thin ice thanks to the sketchy way you approached me, but I gave you the benefit of the doubt and gave you a chance to earn my trust, and you spat on it. Just when I was starting to think you might be trustworthy after all, I find out you got what you wanted out of me by lying to me!"

She takes several deep breaths.

"So." She drops the twig on the ground and grinds it under her shoe. "I'm going to be the one asking the rest of the questions tonight. When I'm done, we can talk about contacting each other later and maybe somehow reaching the possibility of me answering more questions. And the only reason I'm even leaving that possibility open, instead of just walking away right now and refusing to ever say another word to you, is because you at least admitted what you did, instead of leaving me in ignorance forever.

"And just so we're clear, it will not take much to make me withdraw even that offer, so this would be a bad time to push back."

Luckily, Meredith’s ‘don’t kill the interesting thing’ instincts still override the ‘violence upon being upset’ ones! In fact, she even mostly manages to smooth her expression after a second or two, closing her mouth over her eager fangs. She now kind of wishes she hadn’t replied to that question.

 (Fortunately for Sanna, she doesn’t have time travel nor is she willing to try to compel her, although it couldn’t make the situation much worse now.)

She tries to reassure herself with the possibility that she’s being offered for the future but it feels so frail. She’s been making mistakes this whole time, what’s to stop her from making yet another one and losing that too? But she still has it.

So, she will slowly nod and she won’t even ask if she still gets to decline answering certain questions.

…Okay. Well, Meredith hasn't lunged at her, so this is already not going literally as bad as it could have gone. That's something.

She hates gambling. Gambling is scary. She was supposed to be done gambling. She fucking hates this.

She keeps taking deep breaths until she feels calm again.

She sighs. Out loud, this time. "I'm worried you're just telling me what I want to hear again. Obviously I don't have a truth serum or mind-reading to verify your answer, but… Can I get some kind of indication that you were listening, that you understand what's going on now?"

Meredith won’t also take deep breaths but that’s more because vampires don’t need to breathe than because she isn’t upset. Instead, she bites the inside of her lips and then focuses on making her fangs retract (and her eyes and claws return to their ‘resting’ appearance too).

“I’ve upset you and caused you to think that you can’t trust me. Because you’ve told me a lot about yourself and feel betrayed,” does she understand these feelings anymore? She’s not sure but she thinks she can understand their impact enough, “you want me to answer your questions only. And if that helps you feel slightly less uncomfortable with me, you might sometime answer my questions again.”

"…That's about the gist of it, yeah. Close enough, anyway. Okay. So."

She exhales slowly.

"What's one of the books you've written?"

“I think the one you might find most interesting is ‘A Hidden World’. It’s somewhere between a travel diary and a field journal based on my experiences, although it’s presented as a work of fiction. Which it mostly isn’t.”

Oooh. That sounds fantastic.

Sanna Googles "a hidden world" "meredith baines". (She's guessing about the spelling of the surname.)

Huh. She publishes under this name. Interesting. Well, apparently she's not nearly as paranoid as Sanna.

The book's only about a decade old. Does Kalette Public Library have… It does have a copy! A couple, even! They're not at this location, but she can put one on hold for pickup here. Boop.

If it's as informative as it sounds, she should buy a copy for Miles and Neil to read if she ever sees them again. They'd love to have an account of another world's magic and mythic creatures. And Miles loves epistolary novels

"Neat. Thanks.

"Have you written any books under different pen names? Have you written any that are too old to be by 'Meredith Baines'? …You don't have to tell me what they are, if you don't want them connected to you or whatever, I'm just curious whether you have or not."

“I did write one before picking up this name but, one, it was pretty terrible, and two, it’s from a bit over a century ago and I really doubt there’s any copies of it left around. Anyway, all my other books are under the same name, yes.”

…Okay well now she's super curious about that century-old book, but this isn't the rabbit hole to go down right now. Time to change tack. She's put off the important questions long enough. Too long, really.

"This isn't a trap, I'm just curious: Do you drink blood, if so do you drink human blood, and if so then how do you get it?"

“I do drink human blood. I can live on animal blood and various other foods but human blood is much tastier. In fact, I was in town when I noticed you because I was looking for a human to feed from. As to how I get the blood, there’s a few people who know vampires exist and don’t mind if I occasionally drink their blood but that’s boring. So, I like to look for people out during the night and then just follow the mood. I don’t kill them, nor turn them. And when I’m done, they can be compelled into forgetting.”

…Ohhhh that's concerning. Ohhhh boy is that ever concerning.

But not concerning enough to be her main priority. Meredith could be lying about not killing or turning people, but Sanna has no way of finding out. Not yet, anyway. And if she's telling the truth, well, attacking people and then compelling them to forget is still bad, but if they're left alive and unharmed then Sanna isn't going to lose sleep over not addressing it immediately.

The fact that Meredith finds consensual feeding 'boring' is separately concerning, and also means it'll be a lot harder to steer her towards a more ethical alternative to attacking and mindwiping people. Sanna was vaguely hoping that she could just suggest Meredith advertise herself as a sanguinarian in search of some willing donors. But she already has willing donors, she just finds consent boring. Great. That bodes so well for the possibility of establishing any trust between them

Makes for a good segue though:

"Earlier you mentioned that 'Boredom and loss of motivation plays an important role in vampire mortality'. Can you elaborate on that?"

“We’re not particularly easy to kill but it can be easy for us to get bored or otherwise lose our drives. If it lasts long enough, we get suicidal. That’s pretty much all there is to it.” She’ll end that sentence with a shrug and pretend that it does not remind her of having lived through similar times which she’s glad are behind but which still feel very close sometimes. She could have died so happy if she’d done so while still exploring the world.

…Well, shit. It is the darker of the two options she had in mind.

"That… really sucks." She doesn't really know what else to say. She's not going to offer Meredith a hug or anything. Definitely going to brainstorm ways for her to be less bored, though. (She was already going to do that, now she just has even more of a reason. She knows what it's like to be so bored that she kind of hates being alive.)

She sighs, in a way that she hopes comes across as sympathetic rather than annoyed. She doesn't say anything else yet, in case Meredith wanted to… talk about it more, or something. She's probably humanizing Meredith too much, but, what else is she supposed to do. She doesn't know her well enough to guess what else would work.

Meredith really doesn’t want to talk about it. Nope. The faster they can move onto something else, the better.

She wishes she was still allowed to ask Sanna questions. She has magic that’s new to Meredith and she wants to learn more about it and she can’t and -

She’s not, though, so she’ll wait for her to speak. She can remain still enough to look like a statue (which unfortunately doesn’t need much of her attention and therefore doesn’t stop her from continuing to think about other, more unpleasant, things).

…Okay, stony silence seems like a pretty good indication that she doesn't wanna talk about it.

Moving right along…

"How did you suddenly appear behind me at the bus stop?"