Lana can handle 400mL/m from her normal dialysis sessions, so we try that. Higher rates can be hard on a living heart and also cause a ‘dry zone’ between the two needles, and we were both used to 4 hour down time. For the next four hours we talk about the war, family, and life in general. She never asks what blood type I am or why trading blood will help her and me. Somehow she has faith, but I am suspicious this is actually an influence side effect. I do not think I am steering her wrong, so I don’t offer any vampiric information. Lana and I also sleep quite a bit, but four hours later we are both awake and alive. Lana has a blood test tomorrow (we both do them every week, except mine are faked), so we will know how well this worked for her. The blood tests come back completely normal for her weekly dialysis regimen. I can’t commit to doing just her every other day, but I do commit to doing this once every four weeks if not more often. That way we will work out any kinks with the process. Ultimately I have to figure out how to support multiple people of the same blood type and then multiple people of different blood types. At scale (multiple vampires, with each focused on a single blood type), this will be easier but the process has to bootstrap on me until then. Lana’s blood type is ‘O’, so we need some more ‘O’s to scale up.
THE RING It is my anniversary A year ago today I woke up to the vampiric April Fool’s day prank. Amusingly it is also Friday, so I have a normal dialysis session before my weekend off, although Sunday is a cave dialysis day. We have finally reached twelve people, all of whom are homeless, do dialysis, have Type-O blood, and know Lana. She gets the commission for all of them. I visit homeless people fairly often, - 48 -