"That's not much time, aren't you even immortal?"

"We are, which is why I'm concerned about every person we don't get.  More time to lose out on."

"What in the world would you all eat if everybody were eripmavs, to say nothing of the unprecedented atrocity it would be to mass-convert everyone?"

"One, we can feed from each other.  Two, it's not unprecedented."

"Oh, pardon me, the precedented atrocity you propose to spread here."

"It's - something people write books about, the chance to save a whole world but do it right this time, carefully..."

"Right this time, huh?"

"Children don't wake up."

She gestures exasperatedly at Emily.

"Younger than that."

"Right, so, last time millions of children were murdered and this time it'll go great as long as you skip that step, never mind that it involves attacking people and altering their brains?"

"I mean ideally people are sufficiently inclined toward the idea that any 'attacking' is theatrics.  Because they know the brain altering to be favorable."

"You know what they call it when someone agrees to something, knowing that if they do not agree there will be an attack and it'll happen anyway?"

"I'm saying it is possible that we could do this slowly and carefully enough that everyone who wakes up does so without being threatened or coerced into it."

"Can you call it something other than 'waking up'. You don't have to say 'turning' if you don't want to share words with regular vampires but personally I wake up every morning."

Sigh.

"Sure.  If you can cause me to obtain a blank book and something to write with."

She hesitates for a bit, then puts her crossbow back in her bag so she has a hand free to get a blank book and a pen. She clips the pen into the spiral binding, and then Frisbees the book right at him.

- Blink.  Catch.  Blink.

It's an odd object.  Though not quite as odd as many of the other things around them.  ...He passes it to Emily.

Woahhh weird.  She dashes over to sit on the ground against the nearest vertical surface and start writing.

122.9.08

Hello new diary!  Exceedingly strange things are going to be recorded in you!

(It's not that she's not superhumanly fast at writing, but the rate at which her hand moves across the page is less than one might expect from having seen her move quickly.)

"Thank you.  - What did you want me to call it?  Turning?"

"That's what it's called with local vampires. But you can make something up, if you'd rather."

"I wouldn't.  So, I'm hopeful it could be possible to turn people into eripmavs without threats, coercion, or force, which is why I don't really feel like promising to not turn literally anyone for much longer than a month."

"I would be much more open to this idea if I thought that you would commit to avoiding threats - both open threats and ones held in reserve if you don't like the answers you get - and coercion and force, even if this, again, means you don't like the answers you get. The population you propose to turn is not, ex hypothesi, three years old, and should accordingly not be managed with strategies akin to 'do you want to wear the blue shirt or the red shirt, continued refusal will be met with an unavoidable power struggle you will lose'. Also, I'm starting to suspect that some of the mental changes involve wanting to spread your situation around, so I'd love to be confident you could police new eripmavs at whatever pace you had in mind to make sure none of them would flip off the detente."

"...New eripmavs don't have much of an offense against, for example, chains.  But it seems to me that if we've reached the part of the conversation where we're getting into details like these, we're accepting a fundamental amount of cooperation and might be better off coming to a baseline agreement on which we could build a relationship as, you know, thinking beings who aren't going to kill or shoot each other."

"Oh, that entire conversational branch is predicated on anything you say being, uh, true, I'm still attending to the possibility that it is not and that would impair relationship formation where we go sit and chat about this without me having a weapon in hand. See, from my perspective you were hanging out with a normal vampire who murdered people on the regular, and then tried to turn her victim, which again I am not at all convinced isn't worse than death, after I shot her? I did not find you innocently playing chess in the park."