I think it’s easy to get sidetracked on “magic” vs. “law”. It seems clear to me that both of these ideas are tied up in human interpretation, otherwise we wouldn’t be able to have a disagreement about them, we’d simply look up the correct meaning for “magical rules that govern vampires”.
I suspect that we have a fundamental disagreement that we’re not going to resolve with debate, but I’ll take one more shot anyway.
I appreciate that you’ve given a pretty succinct definition of your position: to summarize, you can only invite someone to a place where you live, although you can also invite someone into a place when you are already inside that place, regardless of whether you live there.
Can a person who lives on the street invite a vampire? If so, then a vampire is circumscribed from any outdoor location where a person lives (sans invitation); and if not, we see that “where a person lives” is not actually the deciding concept.
If you own multiple homes, which of them do you “live” in? Can a vampire enter all the others? Do you have to be in the home at the time of the invitation, or could you invite a vampire to use your summer house for a month while you’re in your winter home?
All of these things cloud the idea that “living in” a place is not actually all that straightforward, and still requires the interpretation of mankind to be meaningful to the vampire. Indeed, I think the magic relies on the consent of a human, not the literal words of an invitation, and consent is innately tied to interpretation by the person consenting.
However, if anyone in the home can make the invitation, then I think the way this plays out is: the vampire cop gets a warrant, one of the other cops goes inside, and then shouts at the vampire to come inside, and then you’re boned anyway.
Some other possible loopholes:
What is a “home”? Does it need to have a roof or a door or walls?
What happens if the vampire is knocked unconscious and then the resident tells another person to bring them inside?
This is definitely more complex than I originally thought.
Now I’m very fascinated by this thread and I want to jump in, so thank you.
I would like to make a few points: 1. I think that the limitations of where you can invite a vampire into are scoped to where you reside, that is, the indoor location that you own or that you rent that you are currently occupying. 2. A warrant is not an invitation. A search warrant, for instance, gives authorities the ability to legally enter a location for a specific purpose where they would otherwise be unable to. In the case of a vampire cop they would legally be allowed to enter but physically unable as there was no invitation. 3. The only case I can think of where things would get murky (kind of) is in the case of a legal seizure of property. In that case a vampire would be able to enter, however, because the property was seized it no longer serves as the residence for the individual and so there can be no invitation in the first place.
And so I would maintain that any vampire, regardless of occupation, would be unable to enter a potential victim’s residence. If there were a vampire judge who could issue a seizure of property, that is a potential loophole that would enable a vampire to confront a victim.
Also I’d be super down to continue this conversation.
