"I always wanted to go to a karaoke bar with you," North offered shyly, looking at her sister. "And maybe get our nails done at one of those fancy salons. Oh! And go to the movies! The renovated theater in Cascade has those nice reclining seats and..."

  South stared at her sister like she'd grown a second head. "Karaoke? Really? You want us to sing pop songs badly in public?"

  "It could be fun," North insisted with a small smile. "We could also go shopping for clothes that aren't just... functional. Maybe try on ridiculous outfits at the mall? Have a spa day? Learn to bake cookies together? I saw this Giktok about friendship bracelets—"

  "GikTok?" South chortled. "Really?"

  "It's... never mind. The point is, we could do normal things. Fun things," North offered. “Like we used to… before you became grandfather’s fetch-quest girl.”

  “We can all go!” Nexxali smiled. “Girl outing!”

  “Woo! CIRCLE BONDING ACTIVITIES!” Shady yelled.

  “None of you can go anywhere with the vamps,” Kawathra pointed out. “A single skilled Scrut would smell two crystalloids from a mile away.”

  “Right,” North’s expression soured. “So much for that plan.”

  “We can start with a BBQ picnic at my house,” I offered. “As for the Scrutimancers, I’m certain that we can figure out how to disrupt or confuse their senses. They wouldn't find the smell of two Symbiote guns suspicious, right?”

  “Correct,” Kawathra said.

  “So maybe we can simply make our vamps smell like guns,” I said. “There’s gun units all over the place now doing jobs for you, right? That’s not a suspicious smell.”

  “True.” The magpie tapped her silver rings together. “I can theoretically design special hexasuits covered in immovable gun plates they could wear. I don’t know if it would work though. We’d need a talented Scrut to test it on.”

  “We can recruit Linari for it,” I said. “Make her conduct Scrutimancy tests or something for Division 881 as training. Cover her eyes and make her sniff out our two vamps. Right? Tell her she’ll be sniffing the thralls we’ve captured recently to optimize one of your data charts for how well… Linari can smell vamps from far away on my planet!”

  “Right,” Kawathra’s face lit up. “Yes. A test of vampire detection. Yes, this can be organized!”

  I considered the problem some more, spinning it in my head as I stared at the vampire sisters. I thought of how magicians worked by redirecting attention to the crowd and then it hit me.

  The solution was right in front of me. The cube of vampire thralls!

  “What's the difference between a vampire and a person who's been infected by a vampire, but not converted? Can Scruts and symbiote gun scanners and Corpse Seekers even tell the difference when someone's a vampire versus someone covered in vampire residue?”

  “A general scan or a general sniff would produce some false positives,” the magpie said.

  “If Shady chugs a bottle of vampire blood or swallows a thrall, would she register as a vampire?” I added. “If we all cover ourselves with a layer of thrall blood would we all smell and show up as vampires?”

  Kawathra opened her beak, staring at me.

  “We don't need to hide our vamps if we all smell like vamps,” I said. “We’ve thirty crushed thralls at our disposal. I say we use them to fuck with Scruts and gun scanners.”

  Kawathra's talons clicked rapidly as new holographic charts materialized around her. "Processing probability matrices... Oh. OH! That's... actually rather devious." Her eyes lit up with giddy excitement. "If we spray crystalloid residue on multiple targets, general scans would produce... calculating... 33.6% false positive rate depending on residue thickness!"

  “Seems like a waste of overpriced thrall juices,” Nexxali chortled.

  “We can make more thralls out of animals,” I said pointing a finger at the direction-named sisters. “We have two thrall makers right here.”

  "Wait, wait! It gets worse," Kawathra continued, charts multiplying around her like blossoming flowers. "If subjects ingest inert crystalloid material, the false positive rate jumps to 41.2%!"

  "Ugh," Nexxali wrinkled her nose. "Thralls smell like rotting meat marinated in formaldehyde. I'm not eating that shit. Who would even…?”

  I looked at Shady.

  “Thralls tasty square!” she commented, making Nexxali gag theatrically.

  "I can fix that! Get rid of the bad stuff, amplify the good stuff," Kawathra said, stepping toward the crystalline wall where the compressed thrall cube was stored. "Corpse Seeker Kappa, initiate base thermal processing of storage compartment one. Temperature: 4000 degrees Celsius."

  The wall section containing the thrall cube suddenly blazed with white-hot light. Through the transparent crystalline panels, we watched as the organic matter instantly carbonized and vaporized, leaving behind only ashes and glittering crystalline fragments that sparkled like crushed diamonds.

  "Separating crystalloid cells from carbon," Kawathra narrated, manipulating holographic controls to separate the sparkly crystals from ashes.

  Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  The remaining crystalline material pulsed with a faint inner light, becoming compressed into a far smaller, shinier cube.

  “Can the processed-vamp stuff be modified now to smell even more like vampires?” I asked. “Amplify the vamp-ness part instead of turning it into gun microchips?”

  “Absolutely,” the magpie affirmed, silver rings flashing. “Modifying the crystalloid strata resonance," she continued. "Amplifying the Astral broadcast signature... 3498% by binding the strata to itself in a syntropic loop with Seeker dragonheart cells. There! This should theoretically make even microscopic amounts register strongly on our scans. The final result should be completely harmless to consume and extra syntropic, meaning it will only smell more like the vamps with time!”

  She giggled to herself. “Time to create the delivery methods.”

  She bobbed, fingers dancing on the control for a few more minutes.

  “There! I’ve modified the strata to act like a completely harmless, syntropic fungus. In open air, it will feed on local Aether and slowly grow on its own into microscopic bloom that will be spread by the wind. Very slowly. Sadly can’t make it replicate any faster. Now for physical delivery!”

  Within minutes, the Corpse Seeker had processed the material into two forms: a fine spray that looked like glittering mist in glass bottles, and small crystalline wafers that resembled fancy breath mints.

  "Ta da! Vamp-rad snacks and perfume!" Kawathra announced proudly, distributing the items. "The spray provides surface contamination lasting… pretty much forever until it's all scrubbed off. The wafers will create internal contamination which the body will slowly purge over time!"

  She immediately sprayed herself with the mist. Then she crunched one of the wafers between her beak. We all stared at her.

  "Corpse Seeker Kappa," the excited magpie commanded, "perform detection scan. Target: myself. Use standard, enhanced, and deep resonance modes."

  The Seeker's sensors swept over her in waves of red light.

  "Standard scan result: Crystalloid signature detected. Classification: Vampire, confidence 97.24%," Kappa reported.

  "Enhanced scan: Crystalloid signature confirmed. Confidence 99.98% Unable to differentiate between surface contamination and actual conversion."

  "Deep resonance: Crystalloid presence verified. Host appears to be in early stages of vampiric transformation/infection."

  Kawathra bounced excitedly. "Now scan North and South for comparison!"

  The Seeker's beams swept over the vampire sisters.

  "Identical signature strength on standard scan," Kappa noted. "Enhanced scan shows... marginal difference. Deep resonance required to confirm actual crystalloid consciousness, and even then, uncertainty margin is 23.64%. Only visible difference is interior structures detected via a visual scan.”

  “Slayer!” Nexxali burst out laughing, grabbing and chewing a wafer and spraying herself giddilly. "This is going to fuck the Scrut sniffers sideways! Can you imagine? Every human who uses this spray, every person who eats a wafer—they'll all register as crystalloids! Once this shit spreads around, they'll be detecting vampires EVERYWHERE!"

  "Abyss! We could accelerate the process, distribute this across the planet," Kawathra said excitedly, pulling up distribution model charts. "Disguise it as breath mints, perfume and dietary supplements. Take a glider and spray it across populated cities like Tokyo, Moscow, New York! Within weeks, millions of false positives would completely overwhelm all detection capabilities! Wow… I scare myself sometimes.”

  "The boy who cried vampire," I mused. "When everyone smells like a vampire, no one does."

  "GENIUS EMPEROR CIRCLE!" Shady declared, grabbing a few wafers and crunching them loudly. "Mmm! Tastes like... square minerals! Sparkly yums!"

  "Don't eat them all," I said.

  "SHADY IS NOW MAXIMUM VAMPIRE! FEAR MY CRYSTALLINE MIGHT!" She yelled, spraying herself and me.

  North stared at the spray bottle wielded by the Wendigo. "Emperor… You're going to make the entire human population smell like vampires… just to hide us?"

  "Not the entire population," I shrugged. “Enough to make detection statistically meaningless."

  Kawathra produced more holo-spreadsheets around herself. "If we achieve just 0.1% population coverage, that's 8 million false positives globally. The Scrutimancers would need years, decades, centuries to sort through them all! The more time passes the more the syntropic fungi particles will spread across the population producing false positives all over the place!”

  “Which will boggle the fleet on this Earth… forever!” Nexxali laughed.

  “Jobs for everyone… forever,” Kawathra said with wide eyes, staring at the bottle in her hand, looking like she’s finally realised the Frankenstein she’d just unleashed on the world. “An ever escalating, multiplying data curve of false positives. Abyss! I've just doomed the Third fleet. We're never leaving this place. This is it. I'm… I'm going to be living here forever!”

  “If you can't beat the sensors, break them with too much data,” I smiled. “This stuff won’t, like, evolve into a more horrible version of itself like the flu virus, right?”

  “Nope,” Kawathra shook her head. “The dragonheart syntropic alignment makes sure it stays exactly the same.”

  “Perfect,” I relaxed. “I’m already picturing prad Scruts on their knees scraping microscopic particles off sidewalks, tails wagging.”

  Kawathra’s giggling escalated into mad supervillain style laughter, eyes filling with tears. She flopped onto the crystal couch. Nexxali joined her, both of them hugging, looking at each other and descending into bubbling laughing fits.

  Shady hopped around the Seeker interior, spraying everything and everyone including the vampire sisters with her bottle.

  I looked at the shocked faces of North and South. "See? You won't have to hide anymore. Soon, you're going to be just two more drops in an ocean of false positives. As long as you stick with one of us, my people will confirm to the Scruts that you’re not vampires, just ordinary humans contaminated with a new kind of vampire fungi.”

  South’s baffled-looking face gradually shifted to a hopeful smile. It was the first genuine expression I'd seen from the grumpy eternal teen. "Holy shit, Emperor. Grandfather would never have thought of such a thing. This is… Absolutely mental!"

  "Your grandfather would never cooperate with pradavarians like I just did. He thought in old vampire terms trapped in a box of his understanding of reality," I said. "I'm always thinking in human terms. Specifically, in 'how to troll alien invaders' terms."

  North’s eyes filled with tears of joy.

  She suddenly stepped towards me and hugged me fiercely. “Ash… I was wrong about you,” she let out. “So very, very wrong. I thought you were a necromancer mageling at first," she sobbed into my shoulder, sparkling tears soaking through my shirt. "Then I thought you were a genocidal bastard who sold out my entire family to the Frontenachii! Then I thought you were a psychopath who tortured me with a crazy Wendigo for fun! Then you interrogated my sister… I thought that you were the Emperor of Earth orchestrating humanity's resistance! But you're... you're none of those things!"

  "Well, technically I am kind of the Emperor and stuff—" I pointed out.

  "No!" North pulled back, her silver eyes flooded with an ocean of emotions. "That’s just a mask. You're just... you're just a guy, an ordinary human… trying to help everyone! You saved those college students, you're protecting Earth, you're even protecting us—the monsters who tried to kidnap you! You’ve simply combined Wendigo, pradavarian and vampire skills together into one unexpected package, one that’s going to change this entire planet! You're kind and clever and—"

  Shady's head suddenly whipped toward North, silver eyes flashing. "Mushroom vegetable... I taste something very suspicious in your thoughts!"

  "What? I didn't think anything suspicious!" North squeaked, releasing me. "Totally empty head! No thoughts! Ignore me!”

  "LIAR!" Shady prowled closer sniffing North. "Your mind tastes like... like warm honey and—" Her eyes went wide. "NO! UNACCEPTABLE! MUSHROOM HAS FEELINGS! NO FALLING IN LOVE WITH EMPEROR MINE!”