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"So, do you remember we talked about how different people taste?" Zyrlyss bounced on his toes, excited to present the results of his hard work.
"Yes?" Astarion seemed unsure. "We rated them on a scale from 1 to 10, and didn't agree on anything if my memory serves me right. Why?"
Zyrlyss waved his hand, calling upon his undead slaves. Two skeletons brought out a blackboard and put it in the center of the room. On the blackboard, there was a carefully drawn graph that showed no correlation whatsoever between 'Blood taste' and a handful of different variables.
Astarion raised an eyebrow. "I'd love to share the elation, my dear, but I don't see what you're so happy about."
Zyrlyss gave him a smile and a sheet of paper.
Astarion looked at it, then at the blackboard, then again at the paper, at the blackboard and, finally, back at Zyrlyss.
"I still don't understand," he admitted. "Care to elaborate?"
"Well, I didn't find any characteristics that would indicate someone's blood would taste good. However! No one knows! What's even more important, no one could ever check, being a filthy mortal and not a vampire."
"So..?"
"Look at the paper! We could leak documents like this—that assign a random probability of being bitten to, let's say, race, class and mood. Oh, mood might be the most fun! Imagine the chaos! We could make people shiver in fear, obsessing over meaningless numbers."
"Darling, we're vampires. We don't need math to make people shiver in fear."
"But we do! Only math provides us with tools to efficiently coordinate our evil efforts. Or gain valuable insights about our cause."
"Allow me to demonstrate." Zyrlyss turned the blackboard to its clean side and wrote 'evil' on it.
"Just by looking at evil as mathematicians, we can immediately see that evil is purely imaginary. That's assuming e, v and l belong to the set of real numbers R. However, the root of evil—we'll consider a square root for simplicity—has a real _and_ an imaginary part. We can derive this by solving the equation (a+bi)²=1."
Zyrlyss did as he said. He wrote out the binomial and quickly arrived at the solution.
"Funnily enough, the real and the imaginary parts of the solution are equal," he noted. "Assuming evl=1, they are exactly 1/√2 and i/√2. But that's not all! As with all quadratic equations, there are two solutions: (1+i)/√2 and -(1+i)/√2. Which means that completely opposite things can become the root of one and the same evil."
"All right," Astarion said. "What does this have to do with anything, though?"
"Math is important for doing evil! How is it so hard to understand? It has allowed me to create a completely new way to mess with people. A math entertainment, if you will."
Zyrlyss swung the piece of chalk he still held.
Astarion tilted his head, then came closer and gently wrapped his arm around his waist.
"I'm sorry to break it to you, my dear, but your little numbers game is basically a horoscope. And we already have it on the Surface."
"What? No..." Zyrlyss' hands dropped.
"I'm sorry, darling."
"But it's math entertainment..."
"We can still do this. It does sound very fun. It's just not a completely new way to mess with people."
Zyrlyss sighed and leaned on Astarion, hugging him back. "All this talk about the Surface being so different from the Underdark was vile lies. You already have everything implemented here: slavery, war, family dinners... Sometimes with a weird twist, sometimes exactly like back home. It was my dream to make the lives of Surface dwellers' pathetic and miserable. But they're doing a great job all by themselves! I'll never be appreciated."