Bella slips into the school by a side door; she just saw a thing and she thinks she's seen it in a book before and thinks it's supposed to be mostly harmless but before she wakes Giles up over probably nothing or kills a likely neutral demon she wants to check.
And she pushes into the library.
The library: is occupied. There is a short guy of somewhat indeterminate age sitting at the table, in the dark, with a huge stack of books. He doesn't appear to notice her approach, perhaps because he's busy squinting at the dense handwriting of this twelfth-century manuscript.
"I mean, I could just shoot first ask questions later but I have a good track record on not accidentally shooting anybody I don't turn out to have meant to shoot, and this could be relatively innocuous demon hunter research, say, and your friend could be swearing about the presence of a crossbow lady for completely innocent reasons, of which I'm sure there are lots, especially around here. Spill."
"You know, I really don't find stern imperatives from armed strangers very motivating, at least not in a friendly direction," he remarks, looking up from his book again since he evidently isn't going to get any reading done in the next few minutes. "I have no idea who you are or what you're after."
"You are like at least fifty-five percent likely to be some sort of nasty bitey creature of the night," Bella says. "Merely threatening you is below and this side of the call of duty. Hey, Sweary Second Probably A Demon, if I hear a window open this conversation gets less verbal, so you know."
"Okay, listen," he says. "I have no idea what the hell is going on here. I've been in this reality for maybe four days and I spent three of them unconscious. But you're threatening my friend, and I find that personally offensive, and I am politely asking you to stop."
In slightly better light and with his lower body no longer obscured by the table, it's more obvious that the grey-and-white pants paired with his black T-shirt belong to some kind of uniform. The overall impression is distinctly military, although of a somewhat futuristic bent, and to complete the picture he has a holster at each hip containing two slightly different futuristic weapons.
"That puts us at something of an impasse, then, because I don't think I want to give them up while you're waving that thing around," he says, nodding to the crossbow. "Look - whatever you imagine our fundamental conflict to be, surely it won't get worse if you take the time to explain it to me?"
"Depends on what your friend is up to, and it sounds like that might be 'summoning mercenary demon vampires' or something. Look, are you aware that most things that are not human and find themselves in human civilization qualify as serial killers around the third time they get hungry?"
"No! I don't!" he exclaims. "Because you've been pretty clear about the fact that you might try to kill me at any moment in response to an evaluation whose criteria I don't fully understand, and that's not the kind of situation in which I feel it is safe to unilaterally disarm! And the worst part is, four days ago I would absolutely have had that confidence! God I hate this so much!"
"So here's what I'm putting together," Bella the Vampire Slayer says. "You are some kind of demon-or-something from another dimension, which is why you are stunningly ignorant of supernatural staples; your friend back there apparently turned you, which means you were at least loosely human to start, although I can't rule out 'extradimensional human population raised as cultist sacrifices to insert Old God here' or something fucked up like that; and now you have broken into a library to correct your admittedly woeful education and think this is the correct situation in which to insist on some sort of respectful rules-of-engagement rigmarole that made sense in your original world while the Slayer has a crossbow and you are ash waiting to happen. That about right?"
"You're missing a few important details," he says. "From my perspective, it looks like this. Four days ago, it was the year 2997 ECE, humans were the only sapient species in the fairly widely colonized galaxy, and I was on my way out of the star system where I'd just successfully rescued a shipload of hostages from space pirates. I had a broken shoulder and a shattered hand from the fight. Then I woke up in an alley not far from here, looking up at Earth's extremely recognizable moon, and it was inexplicably 2005 and there were inexplicably vampires. My shy friend was the first person who found me, and he recommended vampirism as a cure for my injuries, which would otherwise have cost me the hand given the state of local medicine. I accepted the offer as described. And then it turned out I should've inquired more closely about the exact function of a soul. Now I'm - suffering a temporary impairment to my moral compass, which I hope to correct as soon as possible. Hence the research."
"The Cetagandan Empire has a persistently expansionist bent and keeps trying to conquer new territory even though it hasn't worked out for them in about a century. Earlier this year, I liberated ten thousand prisoners of war from a Cetagandan facility where they were being psychologically tortured. The Cetagandans took exception and I spent the next six months dodging assassins at every turn."
"This is a stunner. It makes people unconscious. This is a nerve disruptor. It makes people dead," he says, indicating each in turn without touching either. "Do continue mocking me for my difficulty adjusting to the loss of my soul. It is in no way unpleasant or counterproductive, and fills me with feelings of joy and goodwill."
"I do also sometimes do the crossbow-based population control," she says. "Especially if someone's trying to start an apocalypse, I hate it when people do that. The only reason you woke up is that you didn't route through the morgue; the only reason I wasn't alert to your friend's existence is that nobody turned up dead of a suspicious barbecue fork wound when last he snacked."
"Turns out all of my social skills were built on a solid foundation of genuinely liking and caring about people and valuing their well-being and personal fulfillment for its own sake," he says. "That's the reason the loss of my soul is hitting me so hard. I used to be a fucking miracle worker. I could charm blood from a stone. I raised armies and won wars and regularly accomplished the impossible on the strength of my love of helping people and unshakeable personal integrity. And now I do not have those things. But I still have the intensely ambitious nature that drove me to keep throwing myself into the kind of situation where I could accomplish such incredible feats, and the memory of being able to pull it off, alongside the knowledge that if I tried the same thing today I'd fucking die. So I am trapped in my worst nightmare, and my worst nightmare is the loss of the very skills that would most advantage me in escaping it."
"That's an interesting problem to have. Well, there's supposedly an extremely unpopular quest you can undertake to get your soul back, I told you which book it's in. You could also try to get a witch to curse you but then it doesn't stick on very snugly, it's dumb."
Zeke and Miles go back to Zeke's place (and get distracted by vampire makeouts) and dig into the photocopied chapter (and get distracted by vampire makeouts) and start in on planning Miles's soul reclamation quest (and get distracted by vampire makeouts) and go to sleep and wake up (and get distracted by vampire makeouts) and wait until sundown to go raid the butcher's again (and, on the way, get distracted by vampire makeouts). Miles wears his jacket this time. It's fireproof, which seems handy.
Apparently the vampire slayer has been attacking some large rocky-looking white thing that is not a vampire, and it flung her through a window into what fortunately turned out to be a mattress store. She's regrouping, but the thing is advancing on the broken window now. The state of the sidewalk suggests that crossbow bolts just bounce off.
That has an effect.
The thing's featureless white surface begins to disintegrate at the point of impact, releasing wisps of white smoke and an unearthly wail. Cracks spread across the creature's body, and it falls apart into multiple pieces, and the pieces into smaller pieces, and the smaller pieces into smoke, and when there's nothing left of it but a fading cloud the scream finally stops.
"Well," remarks Miles. "That was more dramatic than I expected."
"Point and shoot will probably get you as far as successfully killing things you wanted to kill. It won't get you as far as not killing things you didn't want to kill. Plasma arc training accidents are more memorable but I've always hated the nerve disruptor ones more."
So they steal some cash from the mattress shop and also a mattress because why not, right, and maybe they get a little distracted testing mattresses, it's important to be thorough, but then they go back to Zeke's place and Miles rereads the chapter and Zeke gets bored and goes to the Bronze and doesn't hunt because he's full anyway but does kiss some cute people in alleys and then he goes home and distracts Miles some more and they sleep through the day and in the evening after the sun sets they're back at the butcher's shop.
"Followed one of 'em, under an orange grove a drive from here there's some holes in the ground. I didn't jump in because apparently all the ways known to kill the things involve stuff I can't get. I don't know how many there are but if you cover me I can kill whoever's controlling 'em."
"I'm not totally sure I shouldn't just be running a solo infiltration and assassination, if all this person has on their side is lots of the big lumbering things that wipe the floor with you in a fair fight but go down to nerve disruptors," he says. "At least assuming that this person would themselves also go down to a nerve disruptor. I can cooperate with you if that's what you think would be most effective, but it sounds... awkward."
"Normally my employer doesn't take field command. Normally I'm also a genius at field command. I'm still pretty good, I haven't lost every relevant skill, but there's definitely an edge I'm missing. I am interested in discovering how to maximize our combined effectiveness and I genuinely don't know whether that looks like me in command, you in command, or establishing no firm structure and hoping for the best." Pause. "Full disclosure, even when my social skills aren't broken I have a huge insubordination problem."
"Sorry, that was uncalled for. Anyway, I can hang back and be ready to pick the thing up if you drop. I don't feel a strong need to give orders, just information if I discern information, and I consider 'duck' valid advice from most sources, including from anybody who's shooting things on my behalf, will that do?"
"If I had a soul I would be navigating our interactions better in general, but also I wouldn't need to gradually and effortfully force myself to like you and since that project would not exist in the first place it wouldn't be getting set back every time you find and push another of my buttons."
"A list in what format? I could tell you which ones you've located so far, or I could tell you that and explain in more depth why I prefer that you not do those particular things... I'm not sure I have a preexisting list of all the things you might do that would upset me. And some of them are really unlikely." He blinks, acquires a momentary distant look, and then snorts with wry amusement. "Oh, hell."
He laughs. "No, sorry, it's just - I was going to say, 'I can't imagine why you would take me prisoner and hold me in a room with the lights on all the time', and then it finally occurred to me that - you remember I told you about those prisoners who were being psychologically tortured - I spent six weeks among them before I managed to free them, undercover as a fellow prisoner, and for some reason I'd been going around all this time since then thinking that since I'd only been pretending, it obviously didn't count as real psychological torture in my case, and I have now recognized what utter bullshit that whole line of reasoning was."
He gestures a range of diameters between about two and twelve inches. "The strength of the effect varies with distance from the center, and the beam spreads out as it travels through the air. The inner beam is permanent nerve damage, death if it gets you in the brain; the outermost edge is temporary excruciating pain; in between, and after it passes beyond its maximum fully effective range, you're taking your chances."
"I'll have to recharge it every so often but I already checked and local electrical outlets present no challenge to my universal power adapters. It would stretch credibility to imagine that I might run out of charge in one battle, unless we spend twelve solid hours disintegrating statues."
Bella moves faster. She charges, dodging and weaving. Statues suffice as cover when the dude in the middle takes exception to her approach.
There is a blurring scuffle and then Bella has his implement of mysterious magicalness and he has a snapped neck.
And he hangs out with Zeke and commits petty theft and decides to scrap the whole idea of buying a plane ticket because faking the necessary identity documentation would require too much human contact and stowing away in a luggage compartment is safer. This still requires him to acquaint himself with flight schedules and pick up supplies, though. And he'll need some means of transporting himself to an airport...
"I mean, if there's nobody out there waiting for us to emerge I'm not sure why we shouldn't just wait until I can move normally, exit, optionally cooperate on finding whose idea for a reality show 'dump people in a terrible house' was, and move on with our lives."
"Yeah, that's rather antisocial behavior. It was some dude lurking in the library in place of Giles, pretended he was there to be a magic teacher for my birthday - I can't get magic to work out of books and it's dreadfully frustrating - and next thing I know here I am. I don't know where Giles is or what his involvement was."
"My Watcher. Slayers get assigned a crusty elderly Brit to Watch us, which can take the form of 'stalking' or of 'research support'. For some reason this is a large organization and ten of them don't work ordinary jobs and tithe to give me a stipend; I think they are as a group very poorly thought out. Giles is okay, though, unless he sent that asshole."
Meanwhile, Bella rests, eats most of a pizza, recovers most of the way, finds that she cannot raise Giles, and sets her dad to tracking the "magic teacher" with police resources after he drops her off to get her car (and check the library for Giles, but nothing doing).
"I saw the guy," she describes him, "and he has a British accent and was probably affiliated with the Watcher's council. I think he may have incapacitated or taken Giles before he showed up at school to drug me; Giles didn't show up to work all day so he's probably been here since last night at least. He managed to pass as a plausible magic teacher for a few minutes. He may have been loitering in the library all day if scent tracking's your thing, although there'd be lots of conflicting data. Plus whatever you know from having been vampirenapped."
"Depends on how hostile he is to having been found anything from 'citizen's arrest' to 'wait for Charlie' to 'come up with a story with Giles about how in the course of this man's felonious activities a small fellow well beyond the reach of the law came in with a barbecue fork'."
"Thanks." She relays this to Charlie, and then the call's over. "So, this is kind of an awkward question but do you need directions to the butcher shop your brother has been raiding, and if you do not already know where to find it what have you been eating?"
"When I arrived in this world I was in a room full of ominously chanting robed cultists. They deprived me of my senses by magic and I killed a lot of them anyway. Their 'god' was very impressed and offered to make me his immortal consort. I declined. He decided to make me his immortal consort anyway. When I woke up, I fought him, won, and eventually managed to kill him by cutting his head off. Then I ate some leftover cultists. Between that moment and a stop at the butcher's on the way to the school earlier tonight, I didn't eat."
"We only have the one example to go on, you understand," says Mark, gesturing to Miles, "but if the pattern holds at least for our family, you keep your skills and interests but lose your moral center. Miles's father's moral center is probably a substantial part of the reason he doesn't already rule at least a significant chunk of the galaxy."
"Well, say you wind up about the same except now you eat people, and eating people doesn't feel important, so you round to 'same person, only less uptight' or something; or say you lose basically your entire personality all in one go because it was very heavily interpolated with your soul, then you go 'that person I was is dead and they were super lame, too' - I don't think many vampires wake up and go 'I now have a mental illness which makes me very different but I retain identity with who I was before that'?"
"May we read every book in your library to get a good sense of the parameters of this new world? Longest-term I want a way home. Long-term I'm going to MIT - or wherever - to dispense engineering knowledge at some point. Medium-term I'm keeping you alive. I still don't want to give up my only nerve disruptor but I'm much less terrified by the prospect now. And short-term I'm recovering from the intense barrage of traumatic experiences that has been my life since I became a vampire."
"Library is Giles's prerogative but I don't see him objecting much. I don't come across that many things that die to nerve disruptors and only that, it's just that the rock dudes were historically handled with, like, magic sand that isn't around any more."
"I like what I've seen of your priorities and I would be personally offended on a very deep level if you died, which I understand is a major concern in your line of work. I would like to cooperate with you in making sure that doesn't happen and also the world doesn't end and so forth. Details to be determined."
He shrugs. "Help would be appreciated. I don't currently have any idea how I'm going to accomplish things like finding a phone and a place to live and a change of clothes and so forth; I just don't expect them to be prohibitively difficult when I get around to tackling them. If it would be comparatively easy for you to get me a phone, please do, it'll be one less thing to worry about and we'll have a solid line of communication sooner."
"When Miles said, 'Sure', he meant, 'Your approach to the problem of vampires is acceptable for now but someday I will figure out how to convince them to adopt a more prosocial attitude and we won't have to kill them anymore'. It's honestly not that far out of the realm of possibility, but it seems pretty intractable at first glance and our energies would be better spent elsewhere."
"I'm, uh... pretty good at convincing people of things," says Miles. "I think I told you a little about it when I was mourning the loss of my soul. It doesn't always work, sometimes there comes along an enemy whose goals and interests really are so fundamentally incompatible with mine that they need to be killed, but - what did I call myself, I think the phrase 'fucking miracle worker' may have come up - I really wasn't exaggerating. Mark wants me to decant some highly classified war stories at you to back up this assertion, but I'm not sure Mark's personal entertainment is worth the minor betrayal of certain past employers that that would entail."
"I suppose it's possible I had her and then forgot her, but - but I remember a really coherent entire life without a sister. Renée went househunting in Jacksonville and picked a two-bedroom, so I could visit, she kept a lot of my kindergarten drawings and I took all kinds of creative license with how to represent the concept of divorce but I never had a sister -"
"But first I want to talk to Giles in case he goes 'oh, that's the Thusandsuch demon, it works like so, kill it on a waxing crescent moon by making an accurate representation of your family as it was when you were in kindergarten in crayon and burning it' or something."
"Do you by any chance have an off-the-top-of-your-head diagnosis for my having a retroactively inserted sister, programmed into my phone, expecting me to pick her up from a friend's house, and turning up in other people's memories of my offhand remarks, who I can't remember having in the first place?"
"It's entirely possible that's what I need to hear right now but I swear to the Powers that Be In My Bedroom Sometimes that I don't remember her! Where would she go? Is she expecting to go to sleep in a mysteriously appearing second bed in my room or did Charlie's house morph to accommodate her or did my address change?"
"Deleting a sister from your mind: Powerful magic, I haven't heard of anything specific. Adding a sister to the universe: Much more powerful magic, I haven't heard of anything specific but it would be beyond the reach of most minor gods. There are classes of wish-granting demon that have effects this sweeping, but if this is a granted wish then I have no idea who could have wished for it... it does seem similar to a wished effect in some respects. A single central change with, with comprehensive secondary results. But in that case the only people who remembered the previous reality would normally be the person who made the wish and the demon who granted it, and I must assume you're neither."
"Mm. So obvious options seem to divide into 'here's your ride home, Soph, I will be at the library all night, Slayer stuff' to postpone diagnosis; and 'Soph, you may or may not be demonic, please come to this not-Charlie's-house location for analysis'. Is there any sort of analysis to do?"
"Analyzing purely from the motive angle, it really looks like someone tried to get themselves or someone else under your protection and failed," says Miles. "...It terrifies me to even suggest this, but under almost any conceivable circumstance in which we have any hope of handling this situation at all, I bet I could figure out whether she's complicit by talking to her. I have a finely honed sense of people's motives."
A girl who strongly resembles her traipses out, interrupted-sleepover-accessories under each arm. "Hi Bella! Hi ray gun vampire and creepy house vampire I know your names start with M but I can't for the life of me rememb- oh now I remember one of you is Miles, how'd I forget that, it rhymes with Giles."
"I was using mine for some really important functions, it turns out! It's really uncomfortable to suddenly lose the foundation of all your best skills. I don't recommend it at all. Of course, I guess most people aren't building all their best skills directly on top of their soul."
"That sounds like fun!" he says. "My favourite game is definitely Plasma Rain. You have a bunch of sources of coloured fluid and a bunch of items that affect the flow and the objective is to get all the fluids streaming into the correct destination points. In three dimensions, as quickly as possible. There's a competitive two-player mode but there is no longer anyone willing to play Plasma Rain against me."
"Yes. It's still possible that she might be putting up a front, but most people can't actually put up a front deep enough to fool me. She's either an innocent teenager, a non-innocent who has a very complete 'innocent teenager' personality to draw on, or using undetectably subtle mind control that I have no hope of ever defeating. And if it's the last one and it's failing to work on you like the memory alteration did I would've expected someone to notice - you, me, her, Mark, somebody."
"It's entirely possible there is something at work which legitimately has to go, on which her existence is ontologically dependent," says Bella, ticking off fingers, "if your hypothesis is right she might be sustainable in principle but have something nasty after her which I will have to fend off, either me or literally everybody who has ever had the slightest counterfactual causal contact with the possibility of her existence has been mind controlled, and even if this is otherwise some completely benign gosh-leprechauns-are-real-and-they-give-
"In the nobody's-dying, do-not-have-to-prevent-more-people-from-
"...I really wouldn't recommend it. Dealing with wish demons is a dangerous business. Their power is usually limited to carrying out wishes made by mortals, often ones who have no idea there is a wish demon present, and only within a specific domain - vengeance demons are the kind I'm most familiar with. But that would still mean that if you annoyed a vengeance demon, she could erase you from ever having existed the next time someone made a wish of which that was a plausible side effect."
"Not as such, no... if she was a person beforehand, though, she is now a different person. At least, so one assumes. Your vampire friend indicated that she didn't seem to have any awareness of her circumstances. Who could want to hide badly enough to erase their own memories, their own identity? And what would she have been hiding from?"
He spends some time fussing with Latin chanting and a quartz crystal and a bowl of water.
The water fills with a bright green glow. The quartz crystal glows in the exact same shade, brighter and brighter, and then shatters into dust.
"...I don't know how to interpret that," says Giles.
"At a guess, it means powerful magic," says Giles. "Powerful magic tied in some way to the colour green. But that hardly narrows it down, because we already established that powerful magic would have been necessary to delete you from Bella's memories or introduce you to the universe... I'm sorry that was so inconclusive."
He tries it. Vague shapes under the surface of the water, almost but not quite forming the semblance of a human face.
"I'm hesitant to draw any firm conclusions. I don't even know if this sort of divination is able to notice the aftermath of a wish or similar effect, and I can't rule out that that shadow might have been its way of notifying us that your memories were recently altered... but in that case, there's no explanation for why Soph was so, er, vibrant."
"The divination I'm using is very vague - I wouldn't know how to begin to refine it toward questions like 'has this person had their memories altered recently'; at the moment it's more along the lines of 'tell me one important thing about this person's nature or history', and it isn't even very good at doing that informatively. More results might just confuse the matter further."