"I bet he was."

"Alex! It's good to see you."

"How's God?"

"Pretty well."

"Thank you both for coming. Who are you and why did it strike you as a fantastic idea to sic a fifteen-year-old girl on whatever these things are that are out there killing people?"

"I was not actually under the impression I could talk her out of it."

"People get to care about things other than their own safety, actually. And she's probably the safest person in this town."

"Karen'll do what she's going to do, either way. And yes, she may well be in less danger with someone else watching out for her, if she insists on fighting whatever the hell is out there. But you're focusing on her an awful lot, given that she can't possibly be the most qualified person to go after these things."

"I think she can grow into it, maybe, if she survives. The Watcher's Council kills most Slayers at eighteen, so there's not a lot of information out there about how much they can do with proper support and backing. And - I was assigned to this parish. Karen came to my church. I don't understand how Slayers are called, or why we crossed paths, but I don't believe anything happens for no reason."

" - well. I guess that explains why you're not going to anyone more organized."

"It's why we're not going to them in particular. There are a lot of actors in the underworld, and the best ways to avoid trouble are either to be sufficiently inconspicuous or apparently disorganized that you don't attract much notice, or to have established relationships and lines of communications with nearly all of them. The intermediate stage, where you're conspicuous enough people want you dead and not established enough that they have a clear picture of who that would annoy, is hazardous. So for the time being, I think Karen is safest if she goes around solving local problems with one bodyguard to keep her out of anything she can't handle. When she's older and has more training and a clearer picture of what she wants, she can revisit that."

"...I suppose she's unlikely to run out of problems to solve, if half of what she thinks is happening in this town is actually going on."

"It's an unusually active place. It's on a hellmouth."

"Whatever that means." She sighs. "Look, I'm under no illusions that I can stop Karen, and I seriously doubt that I could stop you, so - if this is what she wants, fine, teach her to kill the things that go bump in the night and bring her home safe at the end of it. But the second, the second she wants out of your little crusade, she is out, she is back to being a high school student who worries about algebra and boys and recovering from the untimely death of her parents, all right? She has not enlisted in anything and you do not at any point get to accuse her of desertion."

Nod.

"I'm not here for making people do stuff."

"All right. Good talk. I'll get you people some food."

Karen comes down a few minutes later wearing something somewhat more normal. Her nephew, who is six, follows her down and silently stares at their visitors with moderate suspicion.

"So I'm thinking of joining the school paper," she says seriously, when everyone has food. "Because I'm sort of overbooked as it is but I feel like it provides a good cover story for investigating random nonsense, and I feel like there's a lot of random nonsense that someone should possibly be investigating. Possibly specifically a lot of random nonsense happening at the school."

"Sounds good to me."

"We should probably figure out a way to make the school less abysmally unsafe. - the town in general, really, but the school seems more manageable to start with. I guess turning it into something that's technically a residence would only affect vampire attacks."

"And it'd be very difficult to do. Size isn't inherently a problem - I know of a much larger castle that seems to entirely qualify as a residence - but the constant coming and going of strangers is a problem. Most likely if you tried you'd get a smaller area. If I were trying, I'd raise a little kid there, starting over the summer when it didn't have students, making sure they had the run of the whole place and liked things about most parts of it."

"He's not actually going to do that, he's just gesturing at the sort of thing it'd take."

"I don't have any kids stowed away for convenient residence magic."

(The six-year-old narrows his eyes suspiciously.)

"That makes sense. I guess you can monitor it, partially, even without cameras, but there are situations where that'd only help if it made sense for you to be in the school to do anything about anything that happened.

...I wonder if Sunnydale High requires its gym teachers to have, like, credentials."

"Oh, I can have credentials."