Many of them do remember, some more vaguely than others; virtually all of them assume that they just had a really weird dream.

That's all right, then. He wants to do something special but he'd have to prepare it in advance for it to actually be special to more than thirty percent of the population so they do their normal thing. He reads Cory Daniels all day.

Cory Daniels is a little depressed - a little upset about his Spanish grade, in particular - but he's not anywhere near suicidal today.

He keeps expecting Maitimo to interrupt him but Maitimo doesn't. 

She swings by the gym after classes as per usual. 

"So I checked on Billy this morning before school, and he's good - little scared, still, but he's better. Wishbone says Lurconis is a real thing, so I put that on the list of things. He does in fact live in a really deep hole beneath the sewers that leads to a hell, although he's pretty sure it's not the hell, and we should not deal with this right now because he can in fact only be lured out with babies. Also the talent show was definitely a part of the mass hallucination, which, you know, not the top thing on the agenda, but honestly pretty relieving."

"Makes me think a little better of Snyder. I don't think there is a the hell, for the record, I think there's just lotsa bad places."

"I dunno. Anyway, I'm not gonna leap down into this one with a sword, 'cause personally when I get a natural twenty I like to not reroll it, even if the the session gets erased from the timeline later."

"Divine intervention is usually pretty - one-time-only-when-it's-narratively-compelling."

"Yeah, that's what I figured. So - are you handling the getting Billy's coach into prison thing?"

"Called in a tip. I guess I should check and see if they acted on it. Billy can confirm, right, so it shouldn't be hard? I don't know much about the legal system we don't control."

She nods. "Yeah, Billy can confirm. That's all I've got on my end, then. I guess I gotta go thank Zeke at some point. Other than that, though."

"Are you doing okay?"

"I'm - I'm not having the best day ever. But I'm pretty OK. I got some sleep, and I snuggled my weird ancient dog, and - I think I might wanna wait another day to go over various points that we failed to handle the horrible nonsense in optimal ways, just to be really stable for it, but - yeah. Solid six out of ten. Maybe five point five, but, you know, in there somewhere."

"Okay."

"Are you doing OK?"

" - "

"Yeah, I'm good."

"OK. I'll see you tomorrow?"

"Yeah."

"OK. Then today," she says, very seriously, "I am going to skip training to go play video games with my nephew. Catch you later."

"Yeah."

Okay, can we get this over with?

I'm not mad at you.

Well, that's great. Honestly all of this has involved way more reassuring everyone about everyone else's feelings than I was really planning on. 

I'm scared. The mayor knows that you two are people of interest and that all of us will go after the Silmarils at any cost. There are probably magic means which could enable recovery of the real Silmarils if a lot of people decide that's an interesting thing to try. This was caused by a random kid's random injury and there's no reason to think it won't happen again. It looks like Sunnydale is more dangerous with you two in it.

It's pretty damn dangerous either way.

Yeah, I'm also scared for you, but I was expecting that to be a less compelling argument. Sounds like if the dream nonsense had shaken out a bit differently Sunnydale would be gone by now and I'd be crafting a terrible cover story about an earthquake.