"It is honestly 100% totally and entirely something the government should be handling. They handle normal criminals. Unfortunately, the government doesn't actually know about vampires. - that's not strictly true, some branches of the government are definitely working with them. I think the national government is just oblivious, though I could be selling them short. - oh, I guess the FBI knows about the invisible kids. - man, I wonder if the X Files are a real thing. Anyway, the reason it's my job even though I'm sort of totally unqualified for it is that I inherited a magical destiny from the last girl to have this job, and now I have superpowers and I get weird prophetic dreams about impending doom. And - I guess it's just that it seems like nobody else is doing very much? And I really think someone should be doing something. And I'm a someone. So I'm doing my best with it. But it'd be better if I were a someone who had more resources and funding and stuff."

"That's really concerning. Why can't you tell them about the vampires?"

"Partly because the immediately accessible parts of the local government are deliberately covering them up, partly because I am a random high school student and random high school students can't actually get audiences with the President or the director of the FBI or whoever, and partly because - the whole thing sounds really insane? Like - I worry that I have totally elided this in the course of telling you things, but magic and vampires and stuff? They're not things that people in general believe in. They know about them as a concept, but they think they're fictional and ridiculous. If I call up anyone important in government, and they do end up speaking to me, then - odds are they'll laugh at me, and no good will come of it. The other possibility is that they already know and are deliberately covering it up, in which case I'd be worried about them trying to remove me so that I can't interfere with their plans.

" - that didn't make the situation remotely less concerning, did it."

"Magic is ridiculous and the government is trying to hide which species live here? No, it really didn't. Magic is ridiculous?"

"Yeah. I mean - not everyone thinks so. Maybe not even the majority of people think so. I didn't think it was even before I ran into vampires. But I definitely thought it was less.... common. And less testable."

"Are you telling me most people never do any magic?"

"Yep."

"But you... obviously it wasn't always like that, why did magic become...?"

"I dunno if there was ever a time when most people used magic. Accounts are conflicting. Most people don't have any innate magic - most of the things that humans can do are just requesting power from God, or from some really powerful godlike entity. And we can make magical objects, sometimes, although I think that's also usually because they're imbued with some kind of power from someone else. But - there's still a lot I don't know yet, about the world. Wishbone knows a lot more, but even he doesn't know where all magic came from, not with certainty. When he was human I think everyone just kind of accepted that it was real, but some of what they thought was magic was really just superstition. And so now a lot of people think that the entire concept of magic is a superstition. I guess most magic users think that's convenient, since it means that other people can't predict what they're able to do, but I still think someone's paying someone to keep the whole thing as hushed up as it is."

"You mean this world is full of zombies?"

" - wait, what? I mean, there are zombies, actually, but that's not what I said, so I think the necklace misinterpreted something."

"Maybe when I hear you saying 'magic' is rare you mean something else. The thing that makes people different from animals, you're not saying most 'people' here don't have that?"

"Maybe. I guess - I think the thing that makes people different from animals is that people have rational souls. Even vampires have rational souls. Part of a rational soul, anyway, or however it works when you're separated from your spirit. But having a rational soul doesn't let you do magic, not on its own. Azalea's, like, super obviously a person, but she can't do any changing the laws of physics just with her brain or anything."

A zombie just handed him food and he ate it and he complimented it, yuck.

"What's a soul?"

"A soul is like - my impulse is to say 'the thing that makes a person different than a rock', but obviously that's no help. A soul is - the totality of everything that animates something alive, I guess, both their living body and their spirit. When I use the word, anyway. Sometimes people mean different things by it. People have souls that last forever, and that have the ability to be culpable for their actions; animals don't. - I should probably get you to talk to a priest or something about this, if you want a technical explanation. - you look concerned."

"I am concerned! I just ate food made by an animal that I thought was a person! And I don't understand what the necklace is saying you're calling people but it's clearly not what I know as people!"

"She's not an animal. She just has to do things the slow and sustainable way, like most people do. I didn't have anything magical before I became the slayer, I've only had the whole magical destiny thing for like two and a half years. But - it doesn't have anything to do with her ability to figure things out, or to do good things, or to make art, or to tell stories, or to enter contracts, or use tools, or to love people, or to do anything else that people do."

"But how do you become a person without magic?"

"...everyone's like that, at first. Humans, anyway. It's why we don't have to magically bind infants. They can't fling anyone a mile in the air unless they've spent a lot of time figuring out how to channel that kind of power from somewhere else."

"But how do they - do they know how to do math, can Azalea understand the concept of other people having minds - can you understand that - are they people?"

"I just told you I had math homework to do. - sorry. Yes, I know you have a mind, and I know Azalea has a mind, and I know the reason you're freaked out by this is that wherever you come from things must be super different, and it messes with your understanding of what it means to be a person, the same way vampires messed with mine when I found out about them. So it's - I get it. But all of that other stuff, theory of mind, and storytelling, and imagination, and empathy, and figuring out how to make rockets that can reach the moon - we've got that in spades. Promise. We just have to control the temperature by manipulating matter in clever ways with our hands, not taking shortcuts with just our brains."

"So you just... do magic anyway. Like the washing machines and the climate control. You don't have any reason to be people but you just... are anyway. That's... kind of amazing... and weird and disconcerting."

"I guess that's a way of looking at it. I will take 'kind of amazing and weird and disconcerting' as an accurate summation of my life in general."

"Okay, so your technology is clearly a lot better than ours. But I can't read about it. How about enchanted things, can I buy enchanted things somewhere, is there a secret market?"

"There totally is! Or, well, secret in the sense of hiding in plain sight. It is also closed down for the next two days. Christmas really makes everything close down, it's sort of like that. Although, um, I warn you that most enchanted things are sort of dangerous? Very dangerous, in many cases? There are a lot of specific sources of power that are chill, but I think a majority of them are... not."