"Dennis."

"I don't know this person? He just sits down next to me at random times to tell me that I'm being suspicious."

"Yeah, that's pretty much how it is."

"Hey, that's an important service, teaches you how to be less suspicious. Ice cream? My car's around the back."

"Sure! Bye Dennis!"

She waits until they are probably out of earshot of Dennis.

"So who exactly, uh, are you."

"I'm Michael's brother. He's good at singing and I'm good at stabbing, we specialize like that. And he was worried about you, so, backup. Until you can handle yourself, which I expect I can definitely teach you to do, if the stuff we have about slayers is true at all."

His car looks like it is thirty years old but very loved. 

"Cool. I, uh, have basically no real combat training and definitely have no vampire-specific combat training, other than I guess stabbing ten of them. I don't think any of the ten had any idea what they were doing, though."

"Most of them don't. It seems like the transformation affects discipline and motivation to self-improve, at least in many cases, so it's pretty rare for vampires to spend their immortality getting better at hand-to-hand violence. Some do, but not many."

"Huh. That... does seem like a thing it does." Zeke does not seem terribly motivated to improve himself on very many axes, which is probably a good thing. "Not that I have an extensive sample size."

"But you're much better off if you can take the rare one who stayed ambitious, or who had combat training already, or five at once, or whatever else you run into."

"Yeah. There are a lot of them running around, and I think if I do this for any length of time then I'm going to get unlucky at some point. Probably at several points. And I still need to come up with a better system than just... stabbing people who are already trying to murder someone, because I'm definitely going to be too late, one of these days, and there have got to be a bunch of incidents that I never run into at all. But I also don't think I can just preemptively try to kill every vampire I run into."

"You can get them - at least, many of them - to go a long time without murdering people just by making it really clear this'll get them killed and arranging alternative sources of blood. There are a few that don't kill people. We haven't encountered any who stably don't kill people even if it becomes convenient."

"...Yeah. But there are lots of humans who do horrible things when they're convenient for them, too, and it doesn't mean we can just murder all of them. They're... people. And people are worth saving. And, I mean, sometimes you can't, a lot of the time you can't, but you have to at least think about what it would mean to do what you can, right? That's - why we're doing this in the first place?"

"I don't have the slightest idea what you oughta do, just figured you'd want to know that when you were deciding."

"Yeah. I'll think about it. First I have to not get killed, and then I can work on getting better at making murder victims not be murder victims, and then I can work on better responses to people in high-murder demographics than ignoring or extrajudicially executing them. I think." She sighs. "So is there, like, a lesson plan?" Because she is bad at those.

"I thought we could start with archery. Because it's fun, and good for not getting killed."

Oooh. "That sounds good."

He has a selection of bows and a space cleared in the forest for them to practice, with a target that's impressively far away; he demonstrates each of the bows four or five times, explaining some points as he goes. He reliably hits the target, but usually not the center; it's not obvious until the last bow that he's spelling 'Karen' on the target. "- so what do you want to start with?"

Woah.

She tentatively selects a bow and asks permission to use it before firing in the direction of the target. She's straightforwardly strong enough to use any of them, but while her aim is unusually good for an untrained human, it's not good enough to actually hit the target from this distance.

That's good because then what would she be learning from all this practice! He has a lot of suggestions. Do slayers pick up new combat skills unusually quickly?

Slayers pick up new combat skills unusually quickly! After a while of practicing she... still can't reliably hit the target but is definitely missing it by less.

"Awesome! You're picking it up very quickly, just so you know. I think we should stop for now, because there are other things it'll be important to cover, but I'm really excited about what you'll be able to do in a month."

"OK! What else?"

"How exactly have you stabbed the vampires you've stabbed?"

"Uhh... one of them I ended up tackling, and the first one was really weird because I didn't know how much force I had to use, but I guess by default, like - "

She pulls a stake out of her backpack and stabs the air. Her basic stance is borrowed from karate lessons she took when she was nine, and is therefore not completely terrible, but her overall form is not very optimized for stabbing things with stakes.