Someone else walks in! Someone also seventeen, and someone definitely a girl.

" - well this is neat."

...Yeah, people don't just walk out of buildings without walking into them. Maybe if she's a recording from somewhere else. So now he's pretty sure this is a predatory alternate universe that devours people who are trying to walk out the front door.

"Hi, I'm Valanda, I'll tell you where I'm from if you'll tell me where you're from?"

"Hi! I'm Karen. I'm from Earth. Sunnydale, California, if that helps. Most people from Earth would be freaking out right now, I am weird and just so happen to have seen dimension doors before."

"Oh, so one of us knows what's happening, that's convenient. I came here from Thelm Ret, Ehima, in the Hari Empire, and I haven't seen one of these before. How much do you want for the explanation?"

" - I'm sorry?"

"I'd like to know what a dimension door is and why it's here and what I can expect it to do. It seems like you know the answers to those questions. What's your price?"

" - OK, one, I make no promises as to the accuracy or relevancy of my information, dimensional portals are different from each other and they behave in different ways, I just know that dimensional portals exist and that they take you to different universes than the one you were in, so it's not terribly surprising when it happens at this point. And two, why on Earth would I want you to pay me for the answer to, like, a basic safety question? That's, like, common decency? - I guess it's pretty America-centric or something to assume that my understanding of common decency applies everywhere, though. Uh. On Earth - in America, anyway - we ask questions and sometimes people answer us even if we don't have anything to offer them. - if I ask you questions are you gonna demand my watch or something? - does that count as a question?"

"Well, not if we're trading information for free, I'm not. That's absolutely how it happens at home by default, though. What's common decency?"

" - oh boy. So, there's being a good person - or, well, that's not right, nobody's entirely good - except - no, focusing on this, there are some actions that are good, right? And within that class, there are actions that are, like, really going above and beyond - donating half of your paycheck to take care of orphans, or jumping on a grenade to save other people in the room, that kind of thing. Heroic sorts of goodness. And then there are things that are less difficult, less above and beyond, things that some people will judge you for not doing but which are still definitely on the good side of things. And then there's, like, just not doing blatantly evil stuff, doing the really really basic things that aren't even hard to do, and those things we call common decency, and you get zero good person points for common decency because it's really just not being evil. You know? Like, seeing a puppy and not kicking it, that's common decency."

"We don't have common decency or puppies in the Hari Empire. Or grenades. We do have people who spend a lot of money buying orphans."

"Thaaaat's either a poor magical translation or definitely not what I meant at all and very concerning. - I mean, I've met demons who have totally different systems of morality, so I get it, and some of them are really nice anyway - not to say that you're a demon necessarily - not to say that being a demon is bad, either, if you are - of course most of the things people call demons aren't real demons anyway, which is where the confusion comes from - "

She takes a deep breath.

"You'd think after this long I would be better at not blatantly insulting aliens. My total bad. I was getting dressed to go to Target and then my closet was a dimension door and I guess I just didn't have my work hat on right this second. Which is really no excuse. How about you tell me what it means to be a good person in the Hari Empire, and then we can go from there and I can say fewer stupid things."

"Oh, so this place is translating, I hear you speaking Ilan but that's probably the translation. Okay, so, 'demon' isn't translating, but we have seven - actually eight species and I can describe them all in case you recognize them. I'm... not sure what you're asking... we have laws against murder, theft, trespassing, vandalism, assault, perjury, breach of contract, interfering with someone's use of a public place, or causing someone to be free who can't follow the law. And it's rude to look at people or call someone 'nobody' and it's dangerous to look like you belong to one of the clans if you don't. I'm not sure if that answers your question, though."

"I figured it was translating - I used to not assume, but it turns out that English is sort of an earth-specific language. Latin is not, oddly enough, but that's neither here nor there. We - and I mean America here, my country, I dunno about all of the other countries on Earth - have laws against all of those except for maybe the last two. Second to last seems like something we might have laws against but I don't know the specifics, and I'm not sure what the last thing even really means, so I can't very well say whether we have something analogous. Um, it's not rude to look at people in America but I think that one is actually culture-specific, I am sorry if I am looking at you a weird amount and I promise it's not intentional. But those aren't even really the same thing as what I mean at all, it's like - so it's possible to pass an evil law, right? It's possible to, like - hm. So certain rulers on Earth have in the past, like, tried to wipe out certain races of people they didn't like? And that was definitely evil, even though they controlled the laws? It's really not hard to find examples of evil laws. So goodness and legalism are really different things. - do you mind if I write some of this down, I feel like I should be taking notes, meeting someone from a different dimension and being all first-contact-y."

"Yeah, go ahead, I guess you can't scry the conversation after you leave the universe. I don't know what 'evil' is and it's not translating usefully. The last law I mentioned us having is mainly things like not freeing someone with certain kinds of brain injury or someone under the age of majority for their species, I bet you have something similar."

" - oh you mean abandoning dependents. Yeah, that's - probably a civil courts thing and not a criminal courts thing, but yeah." She pulls out a notebook and starts scribbling. "Um - man, it's so much easier to explain this to vampires, vampires had the concept and have just forgotten how it works. Hm. Goodness is like... the things that you should do, as a person. Fulfilling your duties, and doing things that make other people stronger and that make the world better, and respecting sacred things, making the world more what it's supposed to be. - really you can mostly just round it off to things that make the world better, unless you are doing advanced morality jiu-jitsu. And evil is the opposite, it's hurting people and making the world worse. To a first approximation."

"What makes the world better and worse? And what does 'sacred' mean?"

" - oh man. OK. Forget sacred stuff for a second, I feel like maybe it's important to hold off on the evangelism until everyone in the conversation knows all of each other's important words. So - OK."

She draws a picture in her notebook, of a little house that's totally devoid of anything else on all sides. She gives it a little potato field and a water well and puts a few scraggly bushes out in the wilderness surrounding it.

"Say you live in this house. It's just you. There's nobody around, anywhere, just the house and the field and the water well, and you have to work ten hours a day growing potatoes to live, otherwise you will starve to death. Is it a place you want to live?"

"Me, personally, or people I know, or what?"

"You personally."

"I wouldn't be happy, I like hugs and there's no one else there. If I had someone else that I liked there it would be okay."

"OK! So, say you have the option of living in this house, or living in a different house that's just like it, except - " she draws another house, " - there's another house over here, and it has someone who likes hugs, and who grows strawberries and tomatoes in their garden. Which of those houses do you want to live in?"

"The one with the neighbor, unless the neighbor wants to eat me or enslave me or something. I notice there's still not a government in the picture."

"Yeah, governments have nothing to do with this. Or, like - they are a related concept, governments are supposed to try to make the world better, but if we can borrow D&D concepts without our brains melting, whether you do lawful things or unlawful things is a different question than whether you do good or evil things. Alright, so. Good things are like, if you find a lonely person who needs to be hugged and told that they matter and are valuable, and give them that and maybe also give them strawberries or something, I dunno - that's helping people and making the world a little bit better, it's doing a good thing. And if you go around killing and eating people, that's hurting people and making the world worse, and is evil. You with me so far?"

"Lonely people find it comforting to know how much they'd sell for and don't like being eaten, I'm assuming strawberries are a random example of food and you wouldn't given them to carnivores - do you give the strawberries away for free - do you not have money?"

"'Valuable' in this instance does not mean the literal cost to buy a person. We have money but we don't use it to buy people because that is slavery and is frowned upon. Selling strawberries is totally fine, but giving them away to people who need them is one of those above and beyond things I was talking about earlier.

"But what I mean is like - people are what it's all about, you know? And it would be excessively simplistic to say that goodness is doing whatever makes people happy, because people care about things other than happiness, but - the process of making the world better is taking an empty and broken and heavily flawed world, and fixing it up and filling it with nice things, so that we're always moving away from worlds that are more like the first house and the house with the person-eating neighbor, and towards worlds that are more like the house with the neighbor who hugs you and gives you strawberries. Moving in that direction for every single person, as well as we can, even when there's nothing in it for us apart from the chance to become better people ourselves. And - I guess I think we should do this because I think that people are inherently valuable, on like a whole different level than everything else that exists in the universe, and so the universe should be a place that lets people be the best versions of themselves, all the time. And we won't ever get there, not on our own, because a lot of the time it's easier to be evil, and so not everybody is going to help you with moving in that direction, but it's important to have things you're working towards. - I don't really know if that made any sense at all? I've never really met anyone who had never ever heard of good or evil and who was also interested in stopping and chatting about it."

"I... like that. A lot. I wish there were people like that at home. How is slavery bad, though?"

" - OK so this is like a complicated ethics question in the theoretical form, because like, maybe there are versions of humans who are responsible enough to do slavery without being horrible about it? But mostly in real life it seems to lead to people raping and torturing each other and abusing each other horrifically? And I think that even if you were doing it in a way that wasn't obviously horrible then it would still be kind of horrible in itself, because it goes against this whole idea that people're all valuable in themselves, regardless of their value to other people."

She considers.

" - are you, like, OK? I should've thought to ask if you were OK, I'm really slow about things sometimes, are you like, safe and happy and - are you where you want to be? When you're where you come from?"

"I'm not really happy but I'm safe and I'm where I'd be if I wanted to be good. So if you don't have slavery what do you do with people who can't follow your laws?"

"We have their family members and people look out for them? Like, my niece is one this year, so her mom is responsible for her? If that's what you mean? But also if her mom were really horrible to her then the government would take her away and give her to someone less horrible. - this is actually a sort of broken part of the system, it turns out it's really hard to respect the rights of children and really disabled people, but I think it's important in principle that you can't just be as horrible as you want to toddlers with no consequences, even if we are not perfect at making the consequences materialize correctly. - unless you mean what do we do with people who break the laws, those we mostly lock up. This is also a flawed part of the system. We are working on it."

"...So, where I'm from, the only way we know of to prevent a baby from accidentally throwing their mother a mile in the air and letting her fall is to magically bind them. And doing that to unconsenting free people is assault and it's illegal. I don't understand what you do instead."

"Well! That sounds like a situation that would complicate the question immensely. Where I'm from babies just sort of flail their arms and pee. Mostly. Depends on the baby. The laws were written with the assumption that babies mostly just flail their arms and pee, and this is near enough to correct that it works out OK for the most part. I guess if I were writing a story where everybody has destructive magic from birth, and I wanted it to be a good place to live, I'd probably have them bind everyone until the age of majority but not have that tied to any other lack of rights? Because, like, it's one thing to keep a baby from tossing their mom in the air and killing her, and it's a totally different thing to hit a two-year-old for crying, you know? But I'm literally just now thinking about this, where I come from you can do magic by accident but you can't do it so accidentally that babies are at any risk of doing it ever. Mostly. So I mean, maybe your world is doing the best it can, you know? Mine hasn't had to deal with that. I just know that in our world slavery has consistently been way worse than not-slavery."

This barstool is not a spinny chair, but Karen is trying to spin around on it anyway, because she sort of feels like this is a spinny chair sort of conversation.

"Our babies also can't be trusted to enter contracts even for a while after they learn how to say 'yeah, that sounds like a great deal' and the ones who are really young literally don't know what the laws are. Even if we just made it illegal to assault them... no, that wouldn't work, sometimes you have to grab them to keep them from running off and getting hurt or hurting someone else. I guess if their parents were good people they could be trusted to only do that when it's for a good reason?"

"Yeah, that's why it's so hard! Because small children do have to be controlled sometimes, to protect them and to protect other people. But I think it's important that there are things you can do that will cause people to agree that you are an unfit guardian, mostly, and then your kids can be taken away. And - it's really hard, you know, to do that responsibly, because it turns out it's really hard to legislate goodness? But I still think it's really important that parents don't have unlimited license to do anything they want to their kids. - also when Earth had legal slavery it was mostly not about children, it was mostly kidnapping people from other regions and then forcing them and their children to do whatever you told them or be beaten or killed, sometimes for their whole lives, and then we decided that that was bad, actually, and everyone was important even if someone had a piece of paper saying that they owned them."

"That all makes sense, thank you. It would be nice if I could see it in action but I don't know if the door works that way."

"Yeah, it'd be super cool to visit either place, but I can't risk leaving my world, so I totally get why you might not be able to risk leaving yours. We can't all be as ready to leap into unfamiliar magical realms as the Pevensies were. - I actually haven't checked whether the door even goes back home, it totally might spit us out in Narnia. Or someplace weirder and worse and more extant than Narnia."

"I've never heard of the Pevensies or Narnia but if the door leads back to my world I can try to help you learn the imperial language and the laws."

"Thanks! But also your world sounds super concerning and if the door leads back there I am totally going to throw all of my effort into figuring out how to open another dimension door and go home. Man, I should have been carrying my survival bag - I guess I can't just walk around my house carrying my survival bag all the time - I should've grabbed it when I saw that my closet was all portal-y, though, that was dumb. - we should see what we're dealing with."

She puts her notepad back in her pocket, gets up, crosses the room, and opens the door onto her room again.

"So that one's my world. - I guess that's maybe not great for you. Maybe because I came in after you did. Whoops."

"I wasn't here long before you, you should maybe go back now before it changes again."

" - yeah. I guess. It'd be - problematic, for more than just me, if I couldn't go home. - uh, do you wanna stay, or - I dunno if all the worlds it opens to are nice ones - "

"I want to go home but if that's not an option I'm probably better off moving in with you if you'll have me. But I don't know your language or which of your plants are edible or anything."

"Yeah! Uh - I have this magical translation necklace that I bet'll work on you, it's one of the things I keep in the survival pack and one of the reasons that I'm really dumb for having come in here without it. Um - I'm not really supposed to invite random people into my house, but also I sort of do it all the time and it will actually be fine on my end, promise. Um - I mean I want you to be able to go home, too, I just don't know if - some worlds are nicer than others, and some worlds are harder or easier to open dimensional portals to, and my world is much, much nicer than most of the ones I've seen - for humans, anyway - and is much, much easier to open portals from than most of the others. So - I'd worry that if you waited for it to spit you out into a different world then it'd be harder to get from that world to your homeworld, and I think if we're on Earth we at least have a shot?"

"Okay. That sounds like my best option. Do you want me to do anything to make up for hanging out in your home and eating your food while I'm figuring out how to get a job?"

"No no no, it's fine, or like - we can talk about that later, maybe? But this must just be super stressful for you, especially since you've never dealt with anything even remotely similar before? And I want to help because - uh, it's the right thing to do. So. Yeah."

"Okay. Anything I need to know before I go through?"

"Ummm - I am not really sure how to sum up all the relevant traits of my world in a timely manner. We have the internet, and we have cows, and we have superhero comics that you can get at the public library, and sometimes people get bitten by vampires and then they turn into vampires and then they work really hard at making the world worse, and it's super concerning in some ways, actually, but - we're trying to fix it. Oh, and I'm this thing called the slayer and I have this whole mystical duty to fight vampires, and to protect and help people, and - if there is a way to get you home and it is possible to find then I will find it, probably, because that is what I do.

" - also we have a baby but I promise she can't hurl you in the air, she just flails her arms and looks concerning sometimes. Also it might be hard for you to get a job because the government doesn't know that you exist, but that's true of like half of my friends and we'll figure something out, if it means you not waiting to step through into a series of progressively more horrible hell dimensions.

" - this is honestly such a concerning situation. I am probably freaking you out more. I'm sorry. I really will figure it out."

"You'll have to point out which species the vampires are if we see one." He walks through the door and looks around.

Karen lets her door close, and then opens it again, and yep, there is her closet.

Her closet actually contains her survival bag, so now she feels marginally less stupid, but only marginally because she didn't actually know where it was. She murmurs some totally unintelligible things while she sorts through it. She fishes out the translation necklace and hands it to Valanda, pointing to her own necklace in an attempt to indicate that he should put it on.

He puts it on. "This does translation somehow?"

"Yeah! Super neat thingamabob. Far superior to most of my other thingamabobs. Occasionally I run into ancient magical artifacts that aren't about to end the world or anything, and then I get to keep them. - oh, you can understand me, right?"

"I can understand you! So what could you use a defense mage for while I'm staying here?"

"I have no actual idea how defense mages work, but it definitely sounds super useful given that my number one pastime is fighting vampires and other very concerning people."

"Would you like to be immune to fire and freezing?"

"Yes I would. Does it cost anything, is there upkeep, are there side effects - "

"Usually I don't do wards for free but I'm not going to charge you for this one. There's no upkeep, it won't go away even if you regret it. I can do it so it'll break if you lose a limb or I can do it so if you lose a limb it'll be really awkward to cremate your severed limb, there's no convenient option where it definitely keeps working for you and definitely doesn't do anything to any dead meat. Which way do you want it?"

"Hmm. I think I'm good with not being cremated, you can do it so it doesn't break. - wait a second, how immune to fire is immune to fire, can I be warmed by fires, am I gonna be handicapped the next time I try to roast marshmallows? And conversely does it only shield me from tissue damage and not the sensation of extreme heat, or - I'm sorry to ask so many questions, I just like to know, you know, before deciding stuff?"

"No, that makes sense, I'm used to people having more background knowledge. I'd set a range of acceptable temperatures and then you'd be unable to get hotter or colder than that range - oh, I should actually ask, you're human, right? And you're an okay temperature now?"

"Yeah, I'm human and I'm at - I think this is pretty close to an ideal temperature, yeah. I guess degrees won't mean anything to you. I wanna be able to feel down to almost but I guess not quite the freezing point of water, and then like, if you set the upper bound at a little less than halfway between the freezing and the boiling point? That's probably good? Does that make any sense?"

"If you're the kind of human I'm familiar with, that's much too broad a range, people like I'm familiar with can't survive being colder than... about a quarter of the way between freezing and normal human body temperature."

"Ohhh, that makes sense, I'm dumb, you want to limit it to things that you can survive at indefinitely. I guess this means I'll have to give up some of my marshmallow roasting skills. Definitely worth it, in my line of work, but that's sad. Alright, you set the range, you're the one who knows about this stuff."

He frowns at her for a while. This is slightly complicated and not something he can do well in a second, better to give it a full minute now to get the details right than make a mistake that Karen will only notice in the middle of a fight.

She figures he's probably figuring out a thing and waits for him to be done.

"There you go! It should be safe to test."

"Just like that? Huh, we usually have to say a thing or do a thing or make a thing. Neat, though! - do you need anything first? Are you OK, beyond the obviously not OK elements of the situation? I think if I were in your position I would be sort of terrified."

"I'm scared but it wouldn't do any good to cry about it. So anyway what are marshmallows and why do they need to be roasted?"

"Marshmallows are these things made of sugar and if you roast them they get all warm and gooey on the inside and and golden on the outside, and I think maybe that doesn't sound good if you've never had it, but it is. But, um, it's OK to say if you need things? Do you need - I don't know, a hug or something?"

"I would love one. Please."

So she hugs him. Karen is pretty good at giving hugs. 

"M'sorry I got you stuck here," she mumbles.

He's bony and clingy but he's very enthusiastic about getting a hug.

"It's not your fault. I'm honored that you invited me into your home."

Aww. Poor person. Hug hug hug.

"We'll get it sorted out. Until then - I think your world's really different than mine, so I think I'm not going to be able to think of all the things you probably need on my own? So if there are things you don't have going forward that would help you, then it'd be good if you could tell me about them. D'you think you can do that?"

"Humans where I'm from need a hidden room to sleep in for at least eight hours every day, food, water, soap and... I don't know what kind of bathroom facilities you have..."

"We have indoor plumbing, don't worry. A hidden room - I guess we have a basement? It's not furnished to be a bedroom but I guess we can set up a cot in it. I can show you and we'll see if it works? - I should probably introduce you to my sister at some point. She's. Uh. Making Christmas cookies right now. I think. Because Christmas is in like two days."

"Basement's fine, I just mean unscryable. What's Christmas?"

"Iiiiiii have absolutely no idea how to do that but maybe Wishbone does. - I have completely forgotten to mention anything about Wishbone. Anyway. Christmas is a religious holiday where we celebrate the fact that God loved humans so much that he came down from heaven to be born as a human and ultimately offer us a way to be saved from our own sins, but that is like this whole other kettle of fish and I will probably explain it all better when we are not, like, adjusting to all of the - everything that happened over the past hour."

"Your house isn't hidden? People could watch you sleep? ...Do you want a hug?"

" - I guess in theory? There's probably a way to block scrying, I just - it didn't really occur to me to prioritize that, we've never had any problems with it as far as I know? But I can work on that if it's important? It sounds like it's really important."

"I don't know why it's not your first priority. What happens if your vampires watch you at home?"

" - alright, so, I know the word 'scrying' from books - I don't even remember whether I actually just know it from fantasy novels. I've never run into a real person who could do it. It's the sort of thing that it wouldn't surprise me if a person could do it, but it's not easy, and it's certainly not common. When I worry about people spying on me, I worry about them hacking my computer or sneaking into my room and planting cameras. - Vampires can't do that, by the way, they can't enter houses uninvited. I'm not worried about magical scrying because I don't know that anyone even has scrying powers, so it hasn't occurred to me to look for a counter. I can, though, if it bothers you."

"Where I'm from about one person in every twelve could just watch and listen to everything happening in any unwarded place. But I never heard of this place so maybe they can't see here. I guess if magical scrying's out of the picture a bedroom just needs to be soundproof and opaque. Why can't vampires come inside uninvited?"

"It's a magic thing, they can't enter permanent residences. They can burn the house down, technically, but if they do we'll leave the house and beat them up, so I don't feel like they think this is a great Friday night activity."

"Do you want your house to be burnable for some reason? Because if I'm going to be sleeping in it I won't charge to fireproof it."

" - that actually totally makes sense, fireproof the house, that makes us all significantly safer."

"This will take a little longer than doing you, I need to see where all the walls are. And I don't know if it might conflict with some other ward you've already got in place - how are you doing climate control in here?"

"The climate control is nonmagical, we have like a - I actually don't know the specifics, someone else came and installed it. We do have a secondary ward on the house that interferes with violence enacted by nonhuman sapients. If you need to see all of the walls then we should go down and meet my sister and niece and nephew and Wishbone, we kind of have to get that out of the way at some point."

"Yeah, that does sound important." Oh no, more people who could object to him being in their home and decide to kick him out.

"It'll be OK," she says, and hugs him again, and then leads him downstairs.

Downstairs is decorated with various Christmas-themed things - there's a fake tree in the corner that's been decorated with glass icicles and tiny churches and angels and nutcrackers and a series of Star Trek characters, a nativity set made of sturdy wooden blocks that are safe for a toddler to handle, and a caroling soundtrack playing quietly in the background. There's a dog sitting on the sofa with a book open in front of him. 

He's just going to stare at the tree forever.

Awwww.

"Azalea!" she calls, before actually making it to the kitchen. The kitchen smells of cookies and peppermint candy. "I found this framling named Valanda in this inter-dimensional bar that used to be in my closet, but isn't anymore, and we couldn't figure out a way to send her home, so she's staying for Christmas and then until we can figure out how to get her back. - this is a real summary of a real situation and not an absurdist skit."

Azalea stops frosting cookies.

"Your life is weird. I just want you to know that. If you were a fantasy protagonist, and we lined you up next to all the other fantasy protagonists, your life would still be weird."

"Totally agree."

"I'm not very clear on which things you're expected to pay for here, will it cost me to have you call me 'him' instead?"

" - oh gosh, are you a guy? I'm sorry! I really shouldn't guess about alien people even when I think I know, I'm just so bad about remembering."

Yes. He's alien. That's clearly why he doesn't look like he should.

"Oh, it's okay, I get that sometimes even at home. Anyway, hi Azalea, you can let me know if you need wards done while I'm here, I was a working defense mage for a couple months."

"All right! I have only the vaguest idea what that means, but we have more than enough cookies. They are free. Karen, I remind you that we have zero free bedrooms."

"He's gonna take the basement, I can set it up for him. The cookies are good, you should try them. If you want."

He tries one. It's not the least edible thing he's ever had in his mouth so he'll finish it. "Thank you for the food. What's it made of?"

She shuffles some papers around for her recipe. "Uh - eggs, all-purpose flour, granulated sugar, butter, salt, vanilla and almond extracts, baking powder. I think calling it food is a little generous. At risk of becoming my mother, I think I have to insist that we get something other than dessert into you at some point. D'they feed you, on your planet?"

"On my planet you do a job, then you get paid, then you take the money to the market and buy something. I usually get nuts or peaches. I've never heard of butter or baking powder or all-purpose flour."

"You poor soul. That's how it works here, too, although I don't think you can live very well off of just nuts and peaches. Eat a turkey sandwich. Unless you're a cultural vegetarian, then eat, uh - Karen eats peanut butter and banana and honey sandwiches a lot, I can make you one of those?"

"There are humans here who aren't omnivores? I can eat meat, it's just expensive compared to fruit."

"Everyone can eat meat. Well, I guess probably some people have medical conditions that mean they can't, but almost everyone. It's just some people have ethical objections to killing and eating animals. - he's never heard of ethics, he's from one of the planets that's like that."

"Well, as long as he's not planning on being a serial killer," says Azalea, making a plain turkey sandwich for him. "I have a strict 'no current serial killers inside the house' rule."

"I've never killed anyone and if I got attacked I would try to pick something reversible to do to the person who attacked me. Why are people confused about whether eating meat is ethical?"

"Well... sometimes people disagree about what the right thing to do is. They've all got mostly the same ideas, underneath it all, but the details are fuzzy, and sometimes the details turn out to be important, you know? But don't worry about that stuff until you've got down, like, 'murder is bad' and 'sharing is caring', all right? Here, eat this."

"Thank you!" Hey, it's much better than the cookie! "I've never had food this nice."

"That's horrifying. Karen, put turkey and ham on the - oh, you are. Good."

Karen is scribbling down things to add to their grocery list. "So I think it'll be hard to do very much in the way of getting you home before Christmas, but we can ask Wishbone about where to look, and - maybe you just wanna take a couple days off anyway? We can get more foods for you to try, and we have a Nintendo 64, I bet you don't have a Nintendo 64 at home. Tomorrow I gotta break up a vampire Christmas party down in LA before it starts, and then I gotta go to the Christmas vigil mass, but you can just hang out here probably? Unless that sounds super boring."

"Staying here sounds good. I hope the vampires don't hurt you, I really like you."

"I hope so too! I'll have backup and stuff. Also we're gonna have a party over here in three days, so some more people and some food, is that gonna bother you? You can stay in the basement if you need to - I realize this is like a gazillion things - "

"I like people! And I appreciate the basement! I should probably look at it and see if it's habitable but you seem pretty human so it should be."

"Oh, yeah, let's check, it's this way - "

The basement isn't really decorated - it's got one room that's almost entirely full of storage boxes, and the other has a washing machine and a dryer and a card table.

"So - we do the laundry there about once a week, but we can do it only when you're not using the room, if you're OK with that. If not then maybe we can go through the boxes and get you set up in that other room. It doesn't have its own bathroom but you can use the ones upstairs, I think? And we can set up a cot with some blankets over there or somewhere."

"Can I have a little box to put stuff in, if just putting it in the room isn't going to hide it? If I can have that then the laundry room is fine."

"Sure, yeah." She is silently sort of delighted that these specific alien needs are both alien and very easy to address. She comes back from the other room a minute later with a decent-sized cardboard moving box. "Like this?"

"Thank you! That'll work! So how do you do your laundry in here, is that what those boxes are for?"

"Those big white ones over there! It's - I can show you, I have to do it anyway."

She leaves and is back in less than a minute with a hamper full of clothes. "So this one washes - you put the clothes in like this, just darks or whites or colored ones at one time, and you put in some detergent - there's a mark on the cap that shows you how much - and you set the temperature and size with these dials, and then you shut the top. And now it'll spin them around for a while with the water and the soap until they're clean, and then we put them in the dryer to be blasted with hot air to dry. They make noises, so we'll make sure not to run them when you're sleeping. Make sense?"

"That sounds convenient! It's impressive that you can set the temperature, at home we don't know how to do all the things you do with your magic."

"Oh, this isn't magic! Our magic is way less reliable than this, most of the time, the translation amulet is really special. This is engineering. I don't know exactly how it works, but I bet we could look it up if we wanted the answer enough. At least if the library weren't closed tomorrow."

"If the library is open while I'm here, will your translation work on writing?"

"I dunno." She pulls her notebook out of her pocket again; the letters are completely unrecognizable. "Can you read that?"

"No. Well, even if I can't read about your technology, maybe I can get a job and buy some to take home."

"OK! If you want anything specific read I can read it out loud to you, though. I mean, not anything-anything, I guess I have some stuff to do, too, but in general."

"Thank you! You're really, really... I guess it's just ethics but it's really nice of you. I don't suppose you happen to want another hug?"

"Hugs are good!" She hugs him. "And - hmm. I don't want to make it sound like everyone here is good all the time, or that they always make the world better, even when they know how to do that. No one does good things all the time. Nobody here, anyway. Being nice to people who are nice back at me, that's super easy. But some things are hard, still. Like - it would be easier, I guess, to skip out on stopping the Christmas party in LA, and just have my own nice Christmas party at home. But I won't do that, because it'd be wrong to let people die when I know I can stop it. And then some things are way harder than that, like - studying for math class, or trying to figure out what to do with vampires you've captured and can't figure out how to rehabilitate? And those things it's - we don't manage to do it perfectly. We're not really strong enough. It's really hard, sometimes, to keep trying to do only good things all the time. It's so hard that nobody manages it. But - I think the trying gets us a long way, sometimes."

"...At home when we can't rehabilitate criminals we enslave them or kill them, is that evil or just not possible with vampires?"

She sighs and pulls herself up to sit on the dryer. "So people disagree on this one. Most people think there are situations where the best thing you can do is to kill someone, like if they're trying to murder a bunch of other people and you're not strong enough to stop them other ways. Some people think that there are things you can do that are so bad that it becomes OK to kill you because you did them. I think - I guess I think that everyone is just really really important, you know? Even criminals. Even vampires. So - sometimes I have to kill vampires. Sometimes it's the only way to stop them from hurting and killing lots of other people. But if I can stop them without resorting to that, then I want to do it, because - because they're mostly awful people, but they're people. Twisted, broken, often really terrible people. But people. And I think that people are worth saving, even when they suck."

She stifles the urge to end with 'and that's what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown'.

"That sounds really hard. ...Actually, it sounds like something a government should take care of, why is this your job?"

"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."

"How are they dangerous?"

"A lot of the entities that are handing out power are not aligned with human goals. Some of them are intentionally evil, some of them are just concerned with totally different non-morality things, and some of them have really alien conceptions of which things are good. A lot of them want to be worshipped as gods. Contacting higher powers is not a thing to be done lightly, even if you do it without any idolatry, and picking up stuff that they've enchanted is only a couple steps shy of contact. The necklace is OK, though, I checked on it, the worst it'll do is give you excessively idiomatic translations of things."

"Or so the necklace tells me you said! So you don't have any way to enforce truth-in-advertising laws on higher powers, huh?"

"Not generally, no. It's very buyer beware. Also the government - it would be incorrect to say that the government is not aware of the concept of God or lesser gods, a bunch of them are religious and we all learn about some of the lesser entities in school, but they think the lesser entities are fake and think that God is..... less likely to act on the world in concrete ways than He actually seems to be. In my experience. Anyway, even if they knew about them, I don't think it would occur to anyone to try to bind Thor to a particular human legal system, and I don't expect it would work if we did."

"I don't know who God is and I don't feel like going and threatening him for you."

She bursts out laughing.

" - sorry - sorry, I know that was serious - I think it would make celebrating Christmas hard - "

"Yeah, I've heard that wars are awful for the economy and stuff."

" - no, I - oh, man - "

Eventually she is able to get ahold of herself and stop giggling. "I'm sorry. OK. From the top. God is the being that created the universe. Probably all universes but I'm not super clear on that. Some people are not super clear on the God thing at all, but then some people are not super clear on vampires and magic, so - working with what we have. Doctrine is that He's omnipotent, so I guess you could declare war on Him but I don't think it would go very well."

"Doctrine?"

"The word doctrine refers to the formal teachings of a given religion. In this case I mean the doctrine of the Catholic Church - though all Christian churches are agreed on this point, plus I think Muslims and - I don't know enough about Judaism to say a hundred percent, though they totally agree that He created the world. I am going with what the Catholics say because I'm Catholic and because Catholic religious things are the only ones that consistently repel demons. - wow you are gonna be missing so much context on so many of those things."

"...Yes. I have no idea what any of that means."

"OK. So. Hm. A lot of people think that God created the world. It used to be more, before people decided magic was all superstition, but now some of them think God is a superstition, too. Most of them still believe in Him, though, on some level, even the ones who think magic is fake. But people disagree on the specifics of what He's like and what He wants, and we group the people with similar understandings of this into classifications called religions. Did that make sense?"

"Yes. And you can't just find out because you don't have knowledge magic. Wait, why can't you just ask God what he wants? Did he go away?"

"I think He talked to people more in the past, yeah. He still talks to people today, but not as clearly as He has at other points in recorded history. At least not for most people, I guess I've totally heard that George Washington Carver had regular extended conversations with Him. But not everyone can, even if they try. For me He just, like - sometimes He'll tell me things. But not, like, in a conversation like the one we're having right now. It's sort of like - like I know something, really certainly, that I shouldn't be able to know. But it's hard, sometimes, to know what He's telling you, and a lot of people don't know how to listen to Him. If you don't think He's real, I guess you'd just think it was your brain playing tricks on you."

"Okay, and you don't think it's your brain playing tricks on you because the things you somehow just know are right?"

"All the times I was really sure of them they were. But I also separately have magical prophetic dreams, which is apparently a slayer thing? I am deeply unclear on whether slayer things come directly from God or whether there is some other entity involved. I think the dreams are a different thing, than, like - you're going to die but then you pray and suddenly you know where to go and wind up at the exit of the building you're in, it just occurs to me that I am not the most straightforward evidence case. I know a lot of other people who've heard things, too, but it's.... personal enough and in some circles looked down on enough that people don't all go airing their stories to everyone."

"Where I'm from lots of people can just know all kinds of things. Like where the nearest exit to a building is, or what color something behind a wall is. They're always people who don't have any of the other kinds of magic and they can generally decide what they want to know and when they want to know it."

"Huh. It super doesn't work for parlor tricks, though, it's very need-to-know. For me, anyway, I dunno about whatever George Washington Carver was doing."

"That sounds less useful than the kind we have but I'm glad you can do magic after all."

"I mean, it's not me doing it, really? It's God giving me stuff. Anybody can get superpowerful entities to give them stuff, it's just usually ill-advised."

"But if you have to specify what you need from him carefully enough maybe it's basically like doing magic."

"Maybe sometimes. I guess I could see situations where it would be kind of comparable. I do have to vote against declaring war on Him, in either case."

"Yeah, that doesn't sound like a great idea."

"Yeah. You need anything else?"

"Not that I can think of. Ready to show me the outside of the house now?"

"Yeah, let's go!"

There are lights around the roof and a wreath on the door. Other than that it's about what ordinary two-story houses look like all the time.

And now it can be an arson-resistant ordinary two-story house.

"I did the ward but I will understand if you don't want to take a torch to the house to test it."

" - it does sound potentially bad if your magic works differently in this universe. I should totally test the one on me, though. - can you defend people against other stuff? Can you defend people against bullets? Do you know what bullets are?"

"Yes, I know what projectiles are. I'm not sure how you power them without magic and I don't really know how to protect against them but that's because I don't know how to do everything I could theoretically do, not because I don't have the power to."

"We set off tiny little explosions inside of tubes that propel the projectiles in the desired direction. We call them guns, and I bet one of them's gonna kill me someday. So I thought, you know, if you knew. I'd find a way to pay you for that one."

"I can try experimenting on myself in case something works."

"OK! It's cool if it doesn't, it'd just be nice if it did. Thanks for the fireproofing."

"Yeah, of course. I mean, you let me sleep in your house, did you expect me to not care if you die?"