Intriguing to see this young man express some abilities common to vampires. Unlike D, he's human, fully human (or as fully human as any Sleeper can be; as D told him, he can smell the difference between a human that is a Sleeper and a human that is not), so the gift comes from another source, be that the blood running in his veins or something of the universe he hails from.

"It is a strange but not entirely foreign concept," Mayerling admits, "though I would not consider most the... trials, such as they are, designs anyone"—here, he means the Sacred Ancestor—"would make whence I came." What purpose does the lack of sleep serve? Its biological functions have clearly not been overwritten in their squid biology. If it were supposed to, this world's Pthumerians ought to return to the laboratory.

"A year is but a short period," Mayerling notes. Any place that can hold D for half a year surely holds more mystery than a decade's study could reveal. "The more one learns, the better one understands how much they do not know."

Such as coming to this place at all after so many thousands of years. He had not expected such a journey in his lifetime. His eyes turn toward the bright bone moon and the being also occupying the sky. Mayerling exhales, melancholic fo all the wonder. "I shall learn little at all should I lose my faculties," he says, and worse for everyone else.