Great! We can go with that then. And I was thinking short-term adaptation rather than long term (kind of like how animals adapt to their environments if they need to), since they're not so biologically dissimilar that they would need that much time, haha. The fact that they can interbreed proves that. They would just have had an isolated group somewhere that bore mutated offspring for whatever reason. As a nod to vampire lore, we could say they came out of Transylvania!

I like both of those ideas! Especially the introduction of new characters. That's always fun cx I think I'm partial to Vail being the one to turn Victoria (forced or willing) because I was thinking about including something about the turned human being tethered to the vampire that turned them. I'm not sure what that would look like yet, but it could add another level of intrigue. Maybe we could combine the above two somehow? Say Peter forces Victoria to leave the Hygrace manor when she's well enough to make it back to her own home, she has her encounter with the French clan, and then something happens that would cause her to be fatally wounded before she has the chance to be turned by anyone else. It could be that the Wynters (or even specifically Spencer) attack her because 'if they can't have her, no one can.' Or something else entirely. What do you think?