"I'm selfish. I'm just not that selfish."

"...Do you really want to learn magic?" he asks, taking off his glasses so he can rub the bridge of his nose.

"I really want to learn magic insofar as it will not eat my brain or otherwise have drastic consequences. I acknowledge that you are an expert at least relative to me at this time," Bella replies at once.

"It could very well eat your brain," he says, putting his glasses back on. "But it might not. And I am definitely not the best teacher you could ask for, but I might be the best you can find."

"What precautions exist against brain-eating?" Bella asks. "I'd like to get the risk somewhere down to car-accident-in-the-rain levels, although I'd settle for worse, since not being a sardine is slightly more important than being all out of milk and really wanting pancakes and running out to the convenience store."

"But you do magic," she says. "Or at least you've done magic."

"When there is a problem that can't be solved any other way, yes."

"Were you involved in the thing with the cheerleader?"

He nods.

"What was that about?"

"The girl's mother was a witch. She stole her daughter's body. I reversed that; the witch came after me; she cast a curse and the curse rebounded on her."

"How do you make curses rebound? That sounds useful."

"Luck and a handy mirror. But mostly luck," he admits.

"...A mirror? Heck, that's useful against magic and it's not even magic. What other tricks are there like that? I'll start carrying a compact," says Bella, grinning. "Low risk high return, I'm sold."

"Tricks like that don't always work," he cautions.

"Do they work better than standing there being a sardine? Because that's the baseline they're competing with, please remember."

Mr. Giles smiles tentatively back.

"There sure are a lotta kinds of demons," Bella remarks, returning to the book she's working through and resuming notetaking. "There might be more kinds of demons than there are kinds of beetles. Haven't they got any psychological diversity or will they really all try to eat me?"

"There are plenty who won't," he admits, "but I have fewer books about those."

"Why not? Mightn't they be friendly and have interesting, helpful abilities? I could rely on magic less if I had demon friends who could do anything on the order of - make force fields or send their scary guardian spirits after people who attack them or even just grow scales that are made of diamond and occasionally shed one so I could annoy the DeBeers cartel and buy a house with a really good security system." These abilities all in fact belong to unfriendly demons that she has just read about.

"Unfortunately," he says a little sharply, "the world is not divided into creatures who want to kill you and people who want to be your friends. Researchers, especially several centuries ago when most of these books were published, tend to think that the best thing to do with neutral demon species is leave them alone."