He hands Wishbone a meal. "Michael's. He's got the dungeon."

She nods solemnly and takes over feeding-Wishbone duty so that Alex can drive.

Wishbone happily scarfs down his food.

Michael's home is in a nice neighborhood right near the church. It has a garden, which is flourishing. It's a little cottage; it looks like if it has two bedrooms they are both small bedrooms. It has a one-car garage which opens as they pull up. 

The garage door closes behind them. The garage moves, like an elevator, down and then down some more. It's glass, so as it moves they can see an enormous amphitheater and a waterfall and a swimming pool and stained glass not-windows-since-this-is-underground and a hall of musical instruments and a glorious wide winding staircase. The next level appears to be a library. 

The level after that is the dungeons. It's still pretty, but the walls are lined with bars, and Michael is standing there waiting for them.

"Hello, Karen, hello Alex, hello, Wishbone. Welcome."

She waves uncertainly, with the hand that isn't cradling Wishbone. "Uh. Your Batcave is neat. It's only the third weirdest thing I've seen today, but it's neat."

"Thank you!" he says cheerfully. "It's a mortal sin. What did you see today that was even weirder?" 

They start unloading kids from the car. The cells have two sets of doors which cannot both be open at the same time, which makes dragging kids into them a bit of a hassle.

"Well, uh. The thing where my classmates apparently ate our principal, that's pretty weird? And the thing where Alex says this dog is, like, a former knight of the round table or something? And your underground mansion thing was just not going to top those."

She thinks at this point she might just be storing additional weird things to be processed later. This is sort of convenient, she'd probably be kind of nonfunctional if she were processing it now.

"That's what he said, I can't vouch for it at all, I don't have any information on whether the legend of King Arthur is real -"

"Oh, I'm sure it is." He checks that all of the cages are secured. "We're confident these are all the possessed children?"

"I did not, uh, actually know that they were possessed until just now, so I think I am not the person who should answer this question."

"Not confident but I have a theory about when it happened and if so it would have been them plus one additional kid who is currently walking home thinking about how it's awful about the principal but on the other hand he can spend the whole afternoon playing video games, so I think he's fine."

"When did it happen?"

"They ran off somewhere they weren't supposed to be, at the zoo. They don't otherwise hang out together - well, Mercy doesn't otherwise hang out with the other four. They were trying to throw Lance into the hyena pit."

"Seriously? Why -"

"''Cause they're little pieces of shit. I bet this wasn't the intended outcome, though. Did the guy who fixed Madison for us leave town?"

"Yes. I can invite him back."

"Are they gonna be OK? Apart from the... I guess they're not going to be the most OK people ever."

"It seems likely they had a pretty awful experience. Depending on the flavor of possession they may not remember it much, though. We can clean them up before attempting to fix it."

"Yeah. OK."

She thinks about asking whether she has to go back to school today, but there's no way to ask that that doesn't make her sound twelve.

She thinks about asking whether she can sit down somewhere, preferably somewhere with a toilet in case processing makes the nausea come back, but, well, ditto.

"I guess we should clean them up before they wake up? Depending on how much longer that's going to be."

"I'll handle it."

"If you'd like to change your clothes and take a shower, there are guest rooms upstairs."

"Ah. Yeah. I guess that might be good." 

She doesn't throw up. She does give up on not crying. She'll only have to do it the once, probably, so it's fair that she has to do it once, she can live with that. She breathes and washes her face, after, so that it's hard to tell.

She's a slayer. Slayer slayer slayer. This is her job. Sometimes she doesn't do her job the best way it can possibly be done, maybe - not that Alex had any idea that kids were going to eat Flutie either - but she always does it, or always tries, and she is not going to complain about being someone who that falls on.

It's OK, on her end. It's a lot. But it's OK.

Eventually she emerges and asks if they have any sort of game plan for handling the fact that the kids have disappeared and that they're going to start remembering things the second they get un-possessed.

He glances at Alex.

"Uh....they all had some kind of weird flu today, which manifested as behaving strangely when Flutie interrogated all the students about Herbert's murder...Flutie called them in on suspicion of letting some animal into the school to attack Herbert, they heard wild animals in Flutie's office and fled, not realizing he was in there - that doesn't work as cover for Mercy, maybe she ran to get a weapon - and they collapsed since they were sick. I guess this obliges us to take them to the hospital, and ideally to get them unpossessed before they wake up - ugh, what a mess - 

- d'you suppose we can get a cooperative principal now -"