"I may be able to scrounge something more or less respectable," he says.

"I should probably buy tickets at school tomorrow," muses Bella.

"Yes, good plan."

"Giles found the likely Prom Ghost. She died in 1920, there was a live suspect - haven't found out who yet - and she was strangled and drowned both, not just one or the other. So if you meet her, we think her name is Minnie and she's pissed off 'cause her boyfriend murdered her."

"Noted," says Sherlock.

"Of course, in the intervening years she's killed over sixty people, so I'm no longer particularly hopeful that she's lucid enough to be reasoned with."

"No, indeed."

"Why can't all the traditionally evil critters be more like you?" Bella asks rhetorically.

"Because I am special," he asserts.

"Yes. I don't suppose you know how to bottle it."

"Alas," he says, "no."

"Pity." She walks a few steps in silence, then says, "Do you have speculations as to what leads some vampires to - enter the service industry - instead of doing the sociopathic hedonism bit? Does it not occur to most of them, do you have to be in a guild or the existing bite shop employees will kill you, is it just some sort of psychological diversity much like how you're all special that is alas unbottleable...?"

"Some combination, I think, of it not occurring to them and it seeming undignified. Or generally not appealing."

"For that matter, there are probably enough night-shift jobs for perfectly standard gainful employment to be an option."

He shrugs. "I have no special expertise in vampire psychology."

"You have more than I do," she points out.

"And yet, I cannot tell you why it is that so few of them get jobs."

"Did you ever consider it? Getting a job?"

"Not really," he says. "Sustained lying annoys me."

"What would you have to lie about? I don't think applications usually have those 'are you a human' questions like online registrations for websites sometimes do."

"At some point, something relevant would come up. Pretending I wasn't a clone was amusing; pretending I'm not a vampire would be the same at first, but I would get tired of it very quickly."

"Fair enough." Bella muses as they walk. "I can probably keep living with Charlie for a good long time, but if anything - supernatural or otherwise - happens to him, or if I ever just plain don't want to live with my dad anymore because I have somehow made it to age twenty-seven and it's getting old, I wonder how Slaying and a job would interact. I'm thinking not so well. School I don't care about cutting in an emergency even if I haven't had to yet. If I wound up doing that with a job they could fire me."

"Alas that we can't connect me to my inheritance and solve all these petty problems."

"The issue being that you were enough of a public figure that you'd get attention if you showed up and demanded it? Or you don't think they'd give it to you? I mean, you do still look like yourself."

"It would have been too upsetting at first, and after all this time not only am I no longer quite sure where the money has gone, I am fairly sure I will be accused of murder if I turn up to collect it."