"I generally like people to stay alive rather than dead, yeah. Kind of a thing."

"Well, thanks, but I'll be fine."

"...I'm not sure how you're sure of that. I'm really not joking about the death thing, you understand. Teenagers aren't exempt."

"I'll let you think about it for a minute."

"There we go."

"I don't mean to be rude, it's just that I'm kind of doing a thing, keeping the vampires honest and all that, and I don't need them slain. So we're kind of at cross purposes here. Unless you've taken it on yourself to revolutionize the Vampire Slayer industry to not involve vampire slaying?"

"Well, you'll notice I haven't burned down the blood brothel. 'Is a vampire' is not that great an approximation of 'needs to be killed immediately', as far as I can tell. There's plenty of overlap, but it's very possible to be one thing and not the other."

"Thanks for that; the brothel's a major success story. You seem a lot more reasonable than I'd expect from a Slayer."

"Are we known for being unreasonable? I haven't had the job for long."

"More the support staff. The Council's a bit... zero-tolerance. Stab first, ask questions of next of kin before stabbing them, kind of thing. And a lot of the potential Slayers get secreted away to training facilities by them early on, so they end up as mini-Watchers themselves."

"I did not come out of a secret training facility."

"I'd worked that out! You didn't really seem like the type."

"What gave me away?"

"Mentioning that you knew about the bite shop and hadn't set fire to it, really. The Watcherspawn don't really do subtle."

"I see."

"I guess you probably have a Watcher anyway, though. Kind of mandatory, or so I'm told. What's that like?"

"It could certainly be worse."

"Very likely! I've had run-ins with Watchers who made Torquemada look like Officer Friendly. And it's not like they're the rule, but they're less of an exception than I'd like."

"I get along just fine with mine."

"Seems reasonable. How have you been handling things so far?"

Ari pulls out his phone and, after some back-scrolling, comes up with a neatly color-coded map and hands the phone over. "Try not to swipe to any other photos. Anyway, a friend of mine came up with a set of routes. I pick one at random and patrol that way. Way I'm thinking, maybe we'd take it from opposite ends and meet up in the middle, tell each other anything suspicious we may have seen?"

"Ooh, colour-coded. I like your friend already. Also, I want a copy of this map. What route were you thinking of taking this time?"

He points out his route. It is a reasonable route for the purpose of canvassing a moderately sized suburb, which, conveniently, Sunnydale is.

"Sally's great, yeah. Color-coding is her passion. And if you want to give me your number I can text you it, and also call you up if something desperately needs Slaying."