#glow worm

Glow, Worm gives 5,000 vampires as the vampire population of Britain, but I’m definitely interpreting that as unreliable in the same way a lot of pre-modern censuses are unreliable.

The vampire world is still feudal! A census is a tool of centralizing power!

Thralled vampires are probably way under-counted. You think a typical boss vampire wants the Directorate to know how many thralls they have? The whole premise of the cross-over is Elle has a bunch of thralls the Directorate doesn’t know about. Cooper’s vampire brides probably aren’t registered. It’d be very on-brand if part of the reason Smyth-Farrow needs all those bloodbags is he’s been a naughty boy and transitioned and thralled a lot of unpleasant upper class twits and swastika tattoo thugs without telling anyone and him and Elle have a MAD dynamic going where they both bloody well know the other has a bunch of unauthorized thralls but neither one narcs on the other because doing so risks drawing heat to themselves.

And there’s probably a lot of “lone wolf” vampires and small groups of vampires who keep varying levels of off the grid because they’d rather not risk the Directorate deciding to send someone like Gemma after them, thank you very much.

I think I’ll model 5,000 as something approaching an order of magnitude under-count. Let’s say the real number is more like 30,000. That makes vampires a bit less than .05% of Britain’s population; a bit less than one person in every two thousand people is a vampire. I pegged Annaliese as able to live sustainably off the blood of eight people, four of them children, so that’s a pretty generous potential donor to vampire ratio.