"Welcome, my child."

Maybe if she pretends to be brave. She crosses herself, and -

"Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been - three months, ish, since my last confession. I - had some other things I wanted to say, but I've forgotten them, because I'm mostly thinking about the fact that I killed nine vampires in an attempt to keep them from killing other people, and they didn't really cover this possibility in depth in my confirmation classes, so I'm not really sure whether this is a sin or not."

" - ah," he says.  

"It is not a sin to kill in self-defense, or in defense of another. It can still weigh on the soul, though, so I'm glad you mentioned it. Are you all right? Are the people you were protecting safe?"

She pauses.

" - I think so. Some them had to be taken to the hospital, but I think I got to them all in time. They're - not permanently safe, but they're alive and stuff."

"It is very unusual for a human to be able to repeatedly fight vampires."

" - yeah. Yeah, I know. It's, um, there's some magical thing - I dunno if using magic is a sin, but it just sort of happened? It wasn't on purpose. Apparently there's something where one girl at any given time is something the vampires call a slayer. Superhuman speed, strength, etcetera, enhanced healing, prophetic dreams. And she's supposed to use her powers to fight vampires. I guess. I think I kinda missed the orientation. So to speak."

"It's often hard to tell how God means us to use our gifts, but those sound like gifts you have because you needed them to protect people. There is some debate over how we are to interpret the scriptural prohibitions on magic, but the understanding my conscience guides me to is that you should never consort with, or pray to, beings other than God. Everything else is - working within the universe to do good, just like using its less mystical physical laws."

"...OK. That makes sense, I guess. Um. ...I've been trying to figure out whether there's something better to do than to just try to catch vampires in the act of killing someone and then kill them back before it's too late. 'Cause it seems like a pretty non-ideal system."

"It's good of you to be thinking about that. I - think perhaps it would be good for you to ask me for help outside the confessional. Would you be willing to do that?"

".....yeah, OK. If you're not gonna tell the FBI so they can lock me in a padded cell and do weird experiments to see if they can duplicate slayerness."

"I promise that we won't go to the U.S. government with information about you until the U.S. government can be relied upon to handle this gracefully. - I know someone working on that, it's not as impossible as it sounds. I mostly want to introduce you to someone who can watch your back and to some people who are trying to research alternatives to stabbing."

"OK. That sounds really good. Thank you, Father. - oh, I have to finish the thing, sorry."

She counts off on her fingers and starts talking abnormally fast, because then this part will be over sooner. "I haven't been praying or reading the Bible as often as I should. I skipped mass once without a good reason. I didn't do the laundry when it was my turn and my sister had to do it even though she was really tired after work and I think it made her sad. I wrote a story and I got to a part about sex and I think I should've skipped over it and I deleted it later but I shouldn't have written it in the first place probably. Also I skipped doing algebra homework three times to fight vampires, and I don't know whether fighting vampires is a good enough excuse that it isn't still a sin to not do my homework, especially since I think the vampires thing might be motivated reasoning since I kind of didn't want to do it anyway. - that's all I think."

“Did you apologize to your sister? Can you do the laundry when it’s her turn?”

"Not yet. I can do it when I get home. And yeah, I can take one of her turns."

“You can’t drive God away, you know. Even if you run away for a very long time he’ll be right there the next time you really look. But the people you love - you can end up with a lot of distance to close, if you’re careless. I want that to be your priority this week, all right? That and the vampires. 

I don’t know if you ought to do your math homework. I do think you ought to sit down and imagine what the life that lets you do the most good for the next year looks like, and then do your math homework if you think it’s part of the best you can do, instead of letting the pressures of the moment settle it.

Why do you think you don’t pray enough? Do you start when you’re in a hurry? Do you run out of things to say?”

"No, I think - I think I sort of got out of the habit after my parents died? I kind of stopped talking to a lot of people after my parents died. Not my sister, but - other people. And - with God, there just keep being more and more things that I should ask about, and some of them are confusing no matter how much I ask about them? And - I guess sometimes I just feel like I'm bad at praying, like I don't know how to focus on it right and I definitely don't know how to hear what God's telling me to do all the time, and I know that it's still important to do it even if it doesn't always feel like it's doing anything, but it's... demoralizing. And so it's hard to just keep deciding to do it anyway, even though I know it's important. And I'm tired."

“When my father died I stopped talking to God. Eventually I found that I could sing to him, though. 

I think I would like you to try this week to pray when you feel safe and strong and happy. Get yourself your favorite food, watch a movie with your sister, come here to church to watch the sunset and escort the parishioners home safely - and then tell God that you are glad for the world and working to protect and love the people in it, and that you understand him a bit better when you do that. And someday you will understand him well enough for the hard questions.”

"OK. I think I can do that. Thank you, Father."

“For your penance, I want you to apologize to your sister and do the laundry for her. Say your act of contrition.”

"My God, I am sorry for my sins with all my heart. In choosing to do wrong and failing to do good, I have sinned against You, whom I should love above all things. I firmly intend, with Your help, to do penance, to sin no more, and to avoid whatever leads me to sin. Our Savior Jesus Christ suffered and died for us. In His name, my God, have mercy."

She sounds a lot more cheerful now.

“God, the Father of mercies, through the death and resurrection of his Son has reconciled the world to himself and sent the Holy Spirit among us for the forgiveness of sins; through the ministry of the Church may God give you pardon and peace, and I absolve you from your sins in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”

"Amen. Thanks again."

When she's all done, she waits in one of the pews and thanks God that there is at least one probably vaguely responsible adult in the world who doesn't think she's crazy. She scribbles some Latin vocabulary in a notebook and waits for the scheduled confession time to end. She looks up about twice a minute to make sure she doesn't miss the priest - even if he didn't mean to talk about the vampires right away, she does actually have to be able to recognize him to talk about the thing later.

Eventually he departs the confession booth. He’s tall, really tall, with long glossy carefully-braided black hair and a very striking face. He looks perhaps 25, which is odd because the short biography in the brochures at the front door says that he graduated from seminary in 1973. Maybe it’s a typo.

He smiles at her.

OR, her brain helpfully offers, MAYBE he is IMMORTAL.

It would probably be super logistically complicated for a vampire to become a priest. 

She had better not take her chances.

"Hi Father! I have to ask you a question, do you have a minute now or should I come back? - also can we maybe talk outside. Where there is sunlight."

He’s wearing a silver crucifix; he raises his eyebrows just slightly and reaches up to touch it. “Yes, absolutely.”

"Sorry," she says, when they're outside. "Slayers are supposed to die young but I don't want to make it easy for anyone. Um, so - I found out about vampires when one of them attacked me a few months ago, but she lost, which was very confusing for both of us, and then a different vampire told me that I was something called a slayer, and - since then I've been trying to learn more about vampires, and about all the other weird stuff that happens around here, but I'm sort of completely unqualified to handle all that alone, and I thought if I got help it might take me longer to. Y'know. Die."

“You were right to get help. There’s an organization that’s supposed to train and orient slayers, I wonder what went wrong. I haven’t heard particularly inspiring things about them anyway, though, letting them know they missed one wouldn’t be my highest priority unless you’d like me to do that. There are other resources it’ll be easier to get you without the Watcher’s Council considering itself responsible for you. Is your living situation safe right now? Does everyone know not to invite people in?”

"I think so. I told them not to. My sister doesn't necessarily believe in vampires, per se, but she's not sure they're not real, and she's not the sort of person who ignores easy chances to do things for other people's peace of mind just because she might think they're kind of dumb. And I told my nephew."

"Okay. I think I want to arrange you a bodyguard and some books and some case studies from cities less complicated than Sunnydale so that you can be safe and get some training while you figure out what you think you ought to be doing. Does that work?"

"Gosh. Yeah, that'd be amazing."

"All right. You can come by for the books any time you'd like; I don't know where the bodyguard is right now but I expect he can be here within a week or so. Would you like a hug?"

"I think so." Hug. "Thanks so much."

“There’s one other thing. If you find yourself in trouble, you can do - ” this “and I will hear you if we’re in the same city, and can try to help.”

Woah.

" - you're not a normal human person, are you."

"I'm not. - I am validly a priest, though, there was no reason to think I shouldn't be but nonetheless I checked whether water I blessed was lethal to vampires before I did any sacraments people relied on."

"...cool. Well, I'll see you, Father - what's your name again?"

“Michael.”

"Like the archangel." He looks sort of like what you might think an archangel would look like, maybe. "I'm Karen. I'll see you, Father Michael."

She does not, for once in her life, report back to Azalea, nor does she report her findings to Zeke. Her allies are all... very different from each other, and it seems like letting them be made aware that they are all allied with her is the sort of thing that could potentially lead to problems. She does apologize and do the laundry. She's back at the church for Sunday night Mass a few days later, and she hangs around the sanctuary afterwards and waits until it looks like she won't be interrupting anything by asking about the books.

“Of course!” He hands her a big stack; they are freshly-bound with covers that say things like “an introduction to folklore in the Ottoman Empire” and “excerpted oral tradition in Mesopotamia, 10th century B.C.”. “Vampires,” he says matter-of-factly, pointing to the books one by one, “other demons, institutional actors, case studies from Saskatchewan, Ontario and Cleveland in ascending complexity. Ignore the titles. How are you doing?”

"Much better now!" she says, packing the books into her backpack - best to keep her hands free if she's walking across town at night. "My sister likes me, I have a new church that comes with excellent new reading material, and nobody at my school has mysteriously died this week. So really about as good as it gets."

"I'm so glad. Your bodyguard will be in town tomorrow, is there a good place for you to meet him?"

"I am kind of unclear on the extent to which we are planning to let my sister know that I have a bodyguard, so... here, or I guess school if you want it to be somewhere I'd be going anyway? Also I have no idea what having a bodyguard entails if you are not the president."

"I trust you to figure out what it makes sense to tell your sister, though if it will help for her to hear it from an adult I am happy to drop by and explain. I want you to have a bodyguard to alert you to threats before they are in range of your hearing, help train you to protect yourself and others, and intervene in fights that look particularly dangerous. Other potential uses might include looking after your loved ones if they're doing something dangerous you can't accompany them on, or if anyone tries to get to you by targeting them, or persuading the Watcher's Council that you're looked-after and do not require a Watcher, assuming you don't want one. - the books will be informative about that."

"OK. I will not get through all the books tonight, but I'll make a good start. Should I come here tomorrow after school or do you think Sunnydale High is OK? I can't, uh, drive, so going places takes a little bit of time. But I can make it if here's better."

"He can meet you there. Maybe you can mention that you have a distant cousin in town planning to pick you up for ice cream. - he is in fact very likely to be a distant cousin."

"I will consider mentioning this," says Karen, because she doesn't want to say that this sounds exactly like the sort of thing that a bad-at-lying fifteen-year-old would come up with if she were trying to hide something bad. Maybe this is the point. People will probably not assume that she's hiding vampires.

"Anything else?"

"I don't think so. Take care."

"Thanks! You too."

She wastes no time when she gets home. "AZALEA.”

“You know, Karen, I truly and genuinely appreciate that I was not tasked with raising one of those teenagers who only communicates with her adults in monosyllables.”

“ - that’s sincere, right?”

“Completely. What can I do for you.”

“So I told the priest at St. Mary’s about vampires, and it turns out he already knows about them, and also knows about slayers, and also knows about the sort of training that slayers are supposed to get, except for whatever reason the group that’s supposed to train them hasn’t caught up with me yet, and also Father Michael says that’s a good thing so we're not going to let them know right away, but he does think that I should have a - he kept calling him a bodyguard? Someone to make sure that I don't get myself killed fighting vampires while I'm still figuring out how to do that. And I thought that if that was going to be the situation then I should probably let you know."

"...I appreciate how many syllables that was."

"Are you really worried or just a little worried?"

"I'm... you understand that you're fifteen years old, right? That's old enough to do a lot of things. I do not know that it is or should be old enough to go to war."

“I’m not going to war! I’m just, you know, doing - training-wheels superheroics, instead of starting with a motorcycle and probably wiping out and killing myself.”

“…you’re going to try to save people from vampires no matter what I say, aren’t you.”

“Yes.”

“I suppose that under those conditions it makes sense for you to have some kind of backup.”

“Yes.”

“I want to meet this person. And Father Michael. And anyone else who thinks it’s a good idea for you to go around - doing these things.”

“Does that include Zeke? Because I haven’t asked him directly but he seems to condone it and I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to meet Zeke right now.”

“Zeke is your vampire friend.”

“Yeah, the one who told me all the stuff.”

“….meet the damn bodyguard. Invite him and the priest guy over to dinner sometime. Give me some advance warning so I can make something in the way of an actual dinner.”

“…OK. Thanks. Are you mad?”

"No. You’re fifteen, it’s your job to be reckless and idealistic. Or nihilistic, whichever. But I’m twenty-four, and it’s my job to turn in my cool card if that’s what it takes to keep weirdos from hurting you.”

“That seems kind of backwards.”

“I know, right? Who decided to let me be the older sister? Dinner’s refried beans and leftover mashed potatoes.”

So she eats dinner, and she stays up until two AM reading her books, and then she wakes up at six AM and does half of her homework in a panic and tells herself that maybe she can finish the rest during lunch. (She does not finish the rest during lunch.) One of the kids who's noticed her being shifty asks where she's going after school, and, having failed to think of a more plausible cover story than the one she was given, she reports that a distant cousin is coming to pick her up for ice cream.

The kid predictably finds this doubtful.

After school, she and the kid can be found on a nearby bench conversing really, really slowly in broken Latin, waiting for whoever it is to find them.

He looks like - well, whatever sort of being Father Michael is, he is obviously the same sort, though they don’t otherwise look all that much alike. He glances around, sees them, and lopes over very gracefully. “Karen?”

"Hi! Yeah that's me."

Wow, he's not even a tiny bit plausibly Korean. Technically she has family members who aren't Korean but she does feel like this would have been less suspicious if there were anything resembling a family resemblance whatsoever.

"Your cousin," says the kid next to her. "Your last common ancestor was who, Noah?"

"A very distant one," she says, solemnly shutting her Latin textbook.

“So technically what happened was that my grandfather remarried after my grandmother died and had four more children, and Karen’s on that side. We don’t get on with our half-cousins and that’s what everyone but Michael calls them, half-cousins, but he’s all serious these days so I guess he decided it was Christlier to drop the “half-”. Who’re you?”

"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.

Cool, they can work on that too! And on stances more combat-oriented than karate lessons for nine-year-olds, generally.

This sounds like a very good use of time. Her form improves considerably.

This seems pretty important so they can go until she's getting tired or her sister is expecting her home.

Azalea honestly doesn't expect her home at any specific time, but eventually they will hit the hour when Karen feels like she's in danger of missing dinner if she doesn't head home soon.

"Oh! Also. Azalea wanted me to invite you and your brother over for dinner later in the week, presumably to discuss the slayer thing, is there a day that would be good for that?"

"Whatever works for you, I don't have a real job here yet and doubt I will by the end of the week. - Michael's got his singing things on Wednesdays and Saturdays and Sundays, I think."

"OK! Thursday then, Thursday's good. Thanks so much. - what's your name, again?"

"Good question." He pulls his driver's license out of his pocket and examines it studiously. "Alex," he announces. 

" - you know, Gabriel would be funnier, but OK. I'll see you tomorrow?"

"The guy who makes our identities banned elaborate in-jokes after the incident in the 1980s. Tomorrow sounds great."

"That's probably fair of him. I'll see you."

She heads home and tells Azalea that Real Dinner should happen Thursday. She reads her books. She considers whether she should tell Azalea more and whether she should tell Alex more and whether she should tell -

- she actually has no idea what Zeke would do if she announced that that she's getting serious training in vampire-killing now, and that she has a new trainer-person whose attitude towards not-currently-violent vampires is not really something she feels comfortable gambling on. Probably not try to kill anyone directly, if only because it sounds dangerous. Probably he'll just leave town and make her somewhat sad about that. But he could tell someone else. He could buy a gun. She likewise has no idea what Alex would do if she told him that she's friends with a vampire; probably ask her if she's sure that he's not committing any murders, and given that she actually technically isn't, quite possibly kill him.

She can maybe just not mention either to the other, but this seems unlikely to work very well long-term unless she just never talks to Zeke again, and even then Zeke might worry that she's dead and come check on her.

Why is protecting people not really simple, like just always running into burning buildings to save trapped toddlers?

Possibly she should get some advice. Who does she know who cannot go killing people after being asked for advice on the subject, even if they think that someone really needs to be killed?

She checks her parish bulletin and confirms that St. Mary's very conveniently has 7:30 AM confessions on Tuesdays, and that she can probably make it from there to school by 8:00 AM if she runs the whole way. St. Mary's probably also has other priests who ever do things, but it's worth a shot. Or, like, maybe it's not, maybe confessing that you're scared that your decisions are going to get your confessor's brother killed is a terrible thing to do to someone, but she's going to do it anyway, because maybe she is terrible when she's afraid that she's going to get her friends killed.

She's at the church at 7:10, mostly because she can't very well invite Father Michael to dinner while she's confessing, and can't very well wait until 8:00 and be late for school, so she has to catch him on the way in. If he happens to be the priest on duty today at all.

He is, and is in fact there already, sitting in the first row and singing. This was already fairly obvious when he led Mass but he has a truly astonishing singing voice.

Wow.

She'll just. Sit in the back row and listen and try to catch him when he has to stop and move to the confessional, rather than having to make any decisions about whether and when she should interrupt him while he's doing that.

At 7:29 he goes on over. 

And she is there, having rehearsed what she's going to say continuously for the past fifteen minutes.

"Hi! Sorry to interrupt you, I just wanted to say that my sister wants to talk to you and your brother about stuff and do you think you could come over for dinner to this address this Thursday at seven?" She has a slip of paper with her address on it.

"Oh! Yes, absolutely." He takes the paper and puts it in his pocket and opens the door to the booth.

Cool cool cool. 

There is one person in line; she waits for them to finish and then enters herself.

"Bless me Father for I have sinned. Maybe? Probably at some point. It has been six days since my last confession. I have a problem."

" - all right. Welcome, what's going on?"

"So the reason I didn't end up dying when I was first - activated? - is that after I got jumped by the first vampire a different vampire came by and explained vampires and slayers to me and told me what research to do and how to kill vampires and how to protect myself from them, and I totally thought that he was trying to get me to lower my guard so that he could kill me later, and I guess I don't know one hundred percent that he wasn't doing that, because it's hard to know something like that, but in terms of his actual actions he's just been super helpful and without him I'd probably be dead and we're sort of friends now, and he's not a good person or anything but he's not, like, killing anybody, I don't think, although technically I haven't had the resources to one hundred percent confirm this? And I talked to Alex about how I want to find a way to stop vampires without killing them, and he seemed like he didn't think that was a totally stupid idea, so I don't know that if I told him about Zeke he'd want to kill Zeke, but I also don't know that he wouldn't, and then Zeke would be dead, because Alex is way more terrifying than Zeke. But also I usually talk to Zeke about how I'm doing and I think if I don't get back to him soon then he'll wonder if I'm dead or something, and I'm not super good at lying to people so I think if we get to talking again then I will probably end up mentioning Alex, and probably Zeke would just leave town then, where I guess he would maybe just start killing people again so actually maybe that's a terrible outcome, but if he doesn't then I don't want Zeke to like panic and buy a gun and try to shoot your brother before your brother can decide to shoot him? And I'm really really really sorry about giving you all of this information in a context that means that you can't act on it and have to just hope that I make responsible decisions, because I know that if I were in that situation that would be super horrible to experience, but also I don't want anyone to die, and I thought that to make that happen I should probably ask someone for advice who is not fifteen and who cannot unilaterally decide to kill people based on the information received in the process of giving advice."

She takes a breath and sighs heavily.

"Also I lied to my history teacher about forgetting to do my homework."

"Having a list in advance of safe explanations that aren't lies is a good way to avoid lying when you have a secret to keep. It's hard to do in the moment. If you get a planner, and don't use it, then you can always say 'I didn't write it down in my planner'....

Of the things you described, I am by far the most concerned that Alex will kill your friend while going around killing vampires that are wandering the streets at night, as I take it he doesn't currently know that there's a reason to do that selectively. If you tell him how to identify your friend I am confident he won't kill him. Given that, I think it might not be a good idea to tell your friend. It sounds like it might disrupt him out of an equilibrium where he isn't murdering people. - why do you think he isn't murdering people?"

"Because he said he wouldn't kill anybody if I didn't kill him, and it sounded fake, so I shadowed him for a few nights a few months ago, and he doesn't really hunt or anything? He breaks into the butcher shop after hours and steals, like, cow blood. Obviously he could have a way of knowing when I'm watching him, or could kill people only sometimes and happen to only kill them during nights where I haven't been watching him, and I should really check on him more thoroughly now that I can, but he was - sort of helping me help other people not die?"

Nod. "I think Alex might follow him longer but that seems like a reasonable amount of checking, for the resources you had."

"That makes sense. I'll... tell Alex, then. Thanks."

"Of course. Ah, say your act of contrition -"

She says her memorized act of contrition and resolves to do better. 

" - oh, do I have to do a penance thing? For the lying?"

"Say three Hail Marys."

"OK. I can do that. Thank you, Father."

Annnd then when he's said the absolution she really does need to run to school as fast as she can. She can say Hail Marys while running. Mary is a sensible person who probably wants her to get to school on time. And then she prays to God, for the rest of the way, because she's remembered that that's a thing she should be doing.

She's late. She's not very late. She's on time when she leaves the school and looks around for Alex.

Sitting on a bench weaving a basket out of weeds. It's a cool-looking basket despite being made out of dandelions.

"Hi! Ready to go. Also I remembered that I didn't give you my address, and I know you might have it anyway, but it seems best not to assume that people know where your house is unless it would be inconvenient for you if they did, as a rule. - nice basket."

"Thanks. I have been following you closely enough to get an address but I think it's considered less weird if you tell it to me."

"That's what I figured." She gives him a slip of paper with her address on it. "Also we need to talk about a thing but where there are - not people."

"Yeah, people, they're terrible. Same place as last time?"

"Sounds good!"

Off they drive. 

"So I have this friend," she says, eventually. "I guess he's a friend. It's slightly unclear. I think he's a friend. He's a vampire. An anomalously nice one, but, like, by vampire standards. He is probably some significant part of why I am not dead yet. Or at least a significant reason why the victims of the attacks I stopped aren't."

"Cool. What's he look like?"

"White, dirty blond hair I guess, this much taller than me - he's sort of generic-looking? I can point his crypt out on a map. ...you're gonna not kill him, right? At least unless he's still killing other people?"

"Keeping your friends alive is my entire job. Well. It's like seventy percent of my job."

"Oh. OK. Thanks, then."

She is in better spirits for today's practice.

Oh good! Then they can get better at archery and hand-to-hand fighting and have a try at hearing people coming from a distance - "do Slayers have better senses?"

She can get better at hearing people coming with practice, but she doesn't seem to have significantly better senses than a normal human. Can't have all the powers.

So it goes. "Though that means we should probably get you bulletproof clothes."

"Yeah. I am... not super clear on how we prevent me from being taken out by snipers once the vampires in town generally know what I look like. It seems like a thing that they might be interested in causing to happen."

"I mean, I can hang around and stop them, but it seems like an extra layer of precautions will be good. - I do have vastly better than human senses."

"That's cool. I don't super know where to get bulletproof clothes but I guess you probably do?"

"Bulletproof clothes, bulletproof limos, antiaircraft missiles, sonic grenades, you name it."

"Ah. I... think I don't need any of those other things, but I'll remember if I ever do."

"Hey, better safe than sorry, imagine if someday you really need an antiaircraft missile and you haven't got one."

"Maybe if we end up fighting dragons at some point."

Wednesday is more of the same - school, practice, dinner, books, a few hours of sleep, panicked homework-doing the next morning.

On Thursday, gym is cancelled because the teacher is missing. Karen really, really needs to get her math homework done before class this time, so she ducks into the basement during lunch on the theory that it'll be quieter down there and she might be able to focus.

There are trails of slime in the basement that disappear behind ancient filing cabinets. Also the smell of rotting meat.

She does not get her homework done.

Alex is waiting for her after school. Today he is knitting an elaborate soft hat.

"I think the gym teacher was....... eaten by something."

"Shit." He stands up, ties off the hat, and puts it in his backpack. "What'd you see -"

"Um - so the gym teacher was missing today and I happened to notice for unrelated reasons that the basement looked like, uh, like a really big slug had gone through it, and it smelled like something was rotting down there? And then I checked the gym teacher's office during passing period to see if anything was weird about it, and I think someone cleaned up part of whatever was there but they, uh, didn't get all of the slime."

"All right. I'm gonna tell someone to look up kinds of critter that might be, in case it has any weird vulnerabilities or abilities we should know about, and then I think we should go after it today when we can easily follow it. Is that okay with you?"

She nods seriously.

"You okay?"

"Uh-huh. I didn't look through the basement for it. I, uh, only have a wooden stake right now."

"I got stuff in the car but I haven't taught you how to use it yet. I guess a knife isn't wielded all that differently from a wooden stake."

"This is true. Probably. I am not an expert. I can probably figure out stabbing things with a knife, though."

"The important question is whether you're safer with a knife than without one. I think ...you probably are? But a baseball bat might be even safer. Yeah, let's do that." He walks briskly towards his car.  

Cool. Baseball bats seem nice and uncomplicated.

"Do you want to see the basement, or..."

"Yeah but I'd like to go in armed even if we're going to wait for identification before we follow it. In case it's back."

She nods and accepts a baseball bat.

He takes a crowbar and a gun and something that might be a grenade and hands them both earplugs and in they go.

The basement is creepy and quiet and continues to smell of rotting meat. There are greenish slime trails on the floor and on the ceiling.

He looks at them intently. "Okay. I asked Michael to call a friend of ours with a big database, see if they can identify it. I'll let you know when they have something."

"You asked - oh, the telepathy. Cool."

"It doesn't work on vampires, actually, which sucks, it'd make it pretty much impossible for them to sneak up on us. But it's useful for this kinda thing. Not something you can learn, sorry."

"I figured it was a... you thing." At some point she should really write up a list of all of the abilities of - archangels? Not-archangels, so that she doesn't get confused. Maybe write up a list of all of the abilities of everything she runs into, in case that ever comes in handy.

"Yeah."

A person with a sufficiently comprehensive database of demons could probably narrow it down to a few different things that climb on walls and eat people and leave slime trails that may or may not be about that color. Of the likely candidates, the Atrashi demon spits acid and the Kulaxa has a really ridiculous number of claws. Neither is thought to be intelligent.

He conveys this. "All right. Let's follow the slime."

"Cool."

There are slime trails leading in and out of the vents, and also slime trails leading to and from the boiler, and - ah. That would be the gym teacher. He's looking pretty cut up and melted at this point.

"...ah."

"You wanna stay here or go up?"

"Nah, I wanna find it. It's the third murder this year, I'll live. - unless I don't, I guess. How do we get to it if it's in the vents?"

"Good question. I'd say we could gas it out but there are probably still people in the school....hmmm."

"I guess we could wait until the school empties. Or - if it's been hanging out by the boiler then it probably needs water? Or warmth?"

"Ah huh. If we send something cold through the vents maybe it'll come to us."

"Radio-controlled car and... ice, I guess? Although you'd need a camera on it to have any idea which way it should be going. Or a map of the vent system, maybe, but I have no idea where we get one of those. Sort of wildly spitballing here."

"You're thinking about the right stuff, though. Do you know where the air intake for the ventilation system is?"

"Nah. One of the janitors might, I guess? Someone has to upkeep the system, I'd think..."

"Yeah. Let's go ask them."

The janitor they find needs to check his binder - Sunnydale janitors change so frequently that apparently Principal Flutie has taken to giving them all binders of everything they could possibly be expected to know, rather than wait for them to actually learn all of it. He then tells them where the air intake is, and doesn't even bother to ask them what they need to know for.

That's convenient. "There's liquid nitrogen in the car. I think the easiest thing is to make the whole school very chilly for a little bit, and wait for our slime thing to come for the boiler."

"That makes sense. You have a lot of things in your car."

"Oh, the antiaircraft missiles aren't in the car, I have to call in for those." He stacks several identical indistiguishable black boxes and pulls out some metal canisters. "Here we go."

"Solid. I don't know how to handle those safely so I'm going to let you do that and then wait by the boiler, I think."

"Sounds good." He opens the canisters outside the air intake valves; they start to steam immediately. 

The school is pretty cold by the time the Karen makes it to the boiler. The demon, it turns out, does not like cold. After a couple minutes of waiting, there's a gurgling noise, and then the vent cover is punched clean off the wall, and then the demon with lots of claws is headed right for Karen.

Between Karen and the claws and the baseball bat, the baseball bat is the weakest link; it splinters.

She takes - really almost no time to process this, actually, before skewering the thing's center on the pointy piece of wood she now has in her hand. The demon shrieks.

He has arrived at the door by then but hangs back watching.

She takes her stake out and stabs it again, on the theory that this will probably do more damage than leaving it in.

The demon explodes. Its innards are horrifically messy, but apparently not immediately caustic, because Karen is covered in them and mostly seems grossed out.

"I.... think it's dead."

"Yes, I think so. Well done."

"Thank you. Uh. Do we do anything about the dead part-of-a-body, or...?"

"Taking a shower might be more urgent, but yeah, we should probably not leave this for the janitors. I'll mop it up."

"Yeah. I'll go... do that. Thanks."

She heads for the locker rooms.

She runs into someone on the way.

"...I'm gonna let you slide this one time, Teller."

"That's big of you."

She showers. She changes into her gym clothes, because these are the only clean clothes she has right now. It occurs to her that they are probably in danger of being late for dinner, so she stuffs her slimed clothes into a plastic bag and grabs her backpack and runs out to the car.

If he disposed of the demon he somehow did it without sliming himself at all. He's packing things back into the spacious trunk of the car. "Hey! Are we late for dinner?"

She glances at her watch (which has been carefully washed free of slime, at least on the outside). "We will be, a little, by the time we drive over there. It's not a huge deal."

"Okey dokey." He gets in the car. "You did great."

"Thanks," she sighs, without much enthusiasm. "I guess we need a new gym teacher now."

"Your school has a lotta vacancies."

"Yes. I think they're about half deaths and about half people who decided to get going while the going was good. Have you seen the death numbers for Sunnydale High students and teachers? They're even more appalling than the numbers for the rest of the town."

"Is there more stuff lurking around the school, do you know?"

"Probably. I feel like there's gotta be. Nobody keeps official records on just the school, but I told the school paper that I maybe wanted to join and asked them if I could look through old copies for examples of good writing. They've been running an obituary section for the past seven years, and if you compare the deaths there with the information on the murders in the Sunnydale Herald - aside from just the sheer number, a lot of them have been killed in really weird ways, things that don't sound like vampire attacks."

She frowns. "I wonder if the Hellmouth's near the school. If Hellmouths are even things that have locations that are that specific."

"I think they do, yeah. Man, why do kids keep going to a school with an obituary section of the paper?"

"It's very mysterious. I am sort of confused about how nobody seems to have... noticed. Or, like, there are people who have noticed, but how nobody says anything. I think the police are doing coverups, but you'd think at some point that would just.... stop working?"

"You'd think, yeah."

Another sigh. "Is there an answer, is it magic or something?"

"I haven't looked into a Hellmouth in particular before, but if you compare witness reports when a nonhuman-looking demon charges through a crowded plaza to witness reports when a human wearing a rubber mask charges through a crowded plaza, people are much better at identifying the attributes of the mask and much less likely to say the masked person was a normal-looking guy. So there's something at play."

"Huh. So I guess it's probably some combination of magical influence and not wanting to be the one to say that the Emperor has no clothes. But there's clearly some level of evidence that you can give people to make them realize that something weird is going on."

"Yeah. And the government does know, though I don't know what precisely they're doing or which many people I mean when I say 'the government'. 

If it were up to me I'd tell everyone. Let them protect themselves."

"Yeah. Though I guess if everyone knew it could escalate to just - open warfare, if not just mass panic. Which I guess could be better than the status quo, if it changed things enough. But the word from on high is 'not right now'?"

"The problem with specializing in stabbing is that other people do all the international policy stuff. And yeah, they say not now."

"Makes sense. I would probably not be any good at international policy stuff. I will keep this in mind when deciding what to write for the school paper."

"I'd be awful at it but on the other hand when I leave it to other people they always make decisions I disagree with." He pulls up in front of her house.

She knocks on the door; the door opens.

"Hi! Sorry we're late, there was a - thing. At the school."

"A thing?"

"The gym teacher got eaten."

She heads inside and runs upstairs to change her clothes, rather than staying to answer questions about that.

Azalea lets her pass. She raises her eyebrows at Alex and pointedly neglects to invite him in.

He comes in anyway. "You must be Karen's sister! I'm Alex."

"Azalea. What's this about the gym teacher?"

"Eaten by a Kulaxa demon."

"Mhmm. What is that."

"Clawed, slimy, not thought to be sentient, dead now."

"I see," says Azalea, although she really thinks she probably doesn't. "Dining room's in there. Your brother was on time."

"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."

"I bet you'd be good at it. The last guy was really bad at it. ...no offense to him."

"I really dislike having authority. But - hmm, maybe there's a way to make it work."

"Up to you. I am no longer personally suffering now that I have been magically imbued with the power not to be one of the kids who gets mercilessly pelted with dodgeballs from eight different directions."

"Your school sounds at least moderately concerning in almost every way that I can think of."

"Yeah. I might have asked for a transfer but I sort of don't want to go anywhere else now."

"What'd'you think, should I be a high school gym teacher?"

"Probably. You could teach self-defense."

"Yeah, that's what I was thinking. Maybe the ones who aren't idiots could learn archery."

"Even you weren't safe with a bow when you were fifteen."

For some unclear reason Alex seems to find this comment utterly exasperating, but he doesn't respond.

"...so, are you planning to train with Alex every day from now on?"

"I don't know. Probably almost every day, at least until I get better at things? Maybe not all at the same time, at some point I have to go back to actually stopping vampires. And the school paper meetings are on Mondays and Thursdays, if I end up doing that. And I still have to read more, I'm almost done with the first load of books but it sounds like there are a ton more things that it would pay to know about. And I should probably ever do any of my homework. Or have any friends." She frowns. "But yeah, like, probably. Maybe some days Alex'll have stuff to do, though."

"I've been keeping an eye out in the evenings, I don't think vampires have been emboldened by your absence. I'll let you know if that changes."

"There's lots it'd be good to know but I wouldn't say there's much it's worth disrupting your sleep and school to read a little faster."

She looks pained by this. "...but school is hard."

"Well, maybe you should drop out."

The two of them are probably having a telepathy conversation of some kind judging by the glaring but all he says is, "what's hard about it?"

"It's just, uh, hard to make homework happen, I guess." Lots of staring at it and not doing it and thinking about how you should really be doing it and then not doing it, lots of panicking at the last minute and internally screaming about not getting things done. "I guess maybe if I budgeted my time better, or something." To accommodate all of the screaming time.

"Can you take classes that involve more in-class assessments and less homework?"

This would probably require paying slightly more attention during class and writing notes instead of stories. "Maybe. I think homework is sort of a fact of life when you're in high school? And I don't think Sunnydale High is super customizable even as high schools go, what with the teacher mortality rate."

"Hmm. Perhaps this isn't the time, but maybe we can think later about how to make school a little easier for you."

"Orrr you could drop out."

"I think that's illegal at fifteen. And, hey, then I would have no excuse to be on school grounds and stop slime monsters."

"That's true."

"I will just have to bravely suffer through remedial English."

"You're taking remedial English?"

"Well I didn't read the books in regular English. I'm doing OK in Latin!"

"We could get someone to do your homework for you -"

"That's not -"

"I'm pretty sure God doesn't care."

"- Karen, most kinds of support or assistance you could possibly think of are available, but I think that this is a normal teenage problem and that it will be healthier for you in the long run to try to solve it with strategies that don't involve systemic deception."

"I agree! Honestly, I'll be fine. - but I'm still going to read the books."

"Okay."

"They've been fascinating so far, by the way. Very good rundown of things, way more comprehensive than what I had. I'm not all done with the case studies yet but they've been really excellent so far. I think I want to go over them one more time and take more notes before I return them, though."

"That sounds good. I'd say you could keep them but we worry about theft."

She nods. "Sometime next week, probably."

"Sounds great."

The following Monday the students of Sunnydale High School have a new gym teacher. 

Rumor among the students who have him early in the morning is that he's really hot.

Dennis is in the same gym class as Karen. Latin and gym are actually the only two classes they share; Dennis is honors track for everything.

"You realize the fact that your not-cousin is suddenly the gym teacher now gives you about a thousand more weirdness points, right?"

"I can't decide what he does, man. It's a free country."

She waves at the new teacher.

He waves at her. 

"Hello, everyone! I'm Alex. This class has two rules: don't be stupid, and don't interfere with other people getting something out of this class. If you want to sit on the bleachers and talk to your friends, I'll give you an A. This stuff - the stuff you're going to learn here - is important, but at some point you gotta figure out how to do important things without people dangling test scores in front of you. 

Your last gym teacher died. I heard from my first class this morning that that happens a lot."

There are murmurs of mixed confusion and agreement. One of the kids in front asks what they're going to learn here.

"Self-defense. Also basketball, because it's in the state-mandated curriculum. But mostly self-defense. The stuff out there is mostly stronger than you guys, which means that it takes different tactics than you'd learn in tae-kwon-do class. But nothing out there is impossible to fight. The curriculum says I gotta tell you that physical education is important because people who exercise live longer. I think they meant that you won't get heart disease when you're sixty. But also, you won't get ...stabbed in the neck by an angry gang with barbecue forks... next Tuesday."

There are, again, murmurs of mixed confusion and agreement.

"What are we starting with?"

"We're gonna start by learning how to fall, because then you won't get hurt when you learn literally everything else. But first, we're all going to run towards the end of the football field and back, because being in decent shape will help you run away from bad stuff and because you'll sit still better if you're tired out. Here are the rules about running towards the end of the football field.

First, I said 'towards'. You don't have to make it all the way there. If you start feeling like 'wow, this sucks', check how far you got, stroll on back. Tomorrow maybe it'll be a little farther. Or maybe it won't, people always have off days, but next week it'll be quite a bit farther. Second rule, if you make it farther than you've ever made it before, you get a chocolate chip cookie at the end of class, because you're pushing your body and you need energy to keep doing that. Today's the first time, so everyone's going to make it farther than you've ever made it before. Okay, go."

A lot of the kids start walking back after not very long, but no one takes him up on sitting at the back of the bleachers and talking with their friends. Karen makes it to the end of the field first and makes it back fourth, of the ones who ran the whole way, because somewhere on the way back she remembered that she is supposed to have a secret identity or something.

"Awesome. So, some people, a little running around helps you sit still and pay attention. Other people pay better attention if they don't hafta sit still. If you're going to learn fastest if you're sitting, come sit in the front. If you're gonna learn fastest if you're pacing, or standing on your head, or trying to balance a ball on your finger, go to the back so you don't distract anyone else. Can I get a volunteer to punch me so I can show you all a couple different ways to fall over?"

Mercy raises her hand.

(Karen goes to the back and stands.)

He points at Mercy. "Awesome, come up here. What's your name?"

"Mercy."

"Great. I would like you to punch me or shove me. It doesn't really matter how hard, because you can't hurt me and because I will act like I was hit really hard even if you barely tap me so we can entertain the crowd here."

She smiles and nods seriously, then punches him as hard as she can.

He takes a very dramatically satisfying tumble and rolls and stands up and talks about some principles for falling safely. "Again, Mercy?"

She does! Mercy enjoys hitting people as hard as she can. She doesn't seem to mind at all if this specific person is in fact entirely unharmed by it.

What a wonderful person! He will take a bunch of entertaining falls and intersperse a safety lecture that is in significant part about falling but also manages to cover a lot of points that are important for safe sparring generally, either because he's deliberately trying to get that lecture across in a interesting format or because he just keeps thinking of related concepts when he's explaining something. 

Eventually he invites the kids to give it a try.

The kids pair off and practice falling. Karen considers asking if Mercy wants to practice and then thinks better of it and decides to pair off with a random girl who is scared of someone punching her too hard. (Karen does not punch her too hard.)

Mercy doesn't punch kids as hard as she can. That would be unfair to the other kids. She does pick the most formidable-looking boy in the class and practice with him.

Dennis spends a little time trying the falling thing and a lot of time watching the teacher for additional signs that he is some kind of horrifying demonic entity. He doesn't exactly know that this is what he's looking for.

Everyone else seems to like Alex; he'll be a very popular teacher by the end of the day.

He seems to be having the time of his life. He corrects kids who are doing dangerous stuff and lets them self-correct if they're just doing counterproductive stuff, unless they look frustrated.  At the end of class he gives everyone cookies. 

Possible signs he's some kind of demonic entity:

- he doesn't exactly move like a human; particularly when he's not paying attention, he's a little too fluid and fast

- he has long braided blond hair that doesn't go with the rest of his presentation at all

- he seems to really like being a gym teacher????

If the cookies are drugged with something that will turn all the students into rats for him to eat, the effects are not immediate.

Medium suspicious. Dennis puts his cookie in a plastic baggie to be consumed later, when enough time has elapsed that he's decided it's not an evil cookie. Or until he gets hungry.

Karen is more excited than usual when she stops by after the journalism club meeting. "You seem like you're very good at this job."

"I don't actually know if it'll be enough. Could make things worse, if they take more chances since they're all sure of themselves. But I guess an hour of their day doesn't suck, that's something. ...I didn't do well with school."

"I can tell. I mean, I couldn't tell for sure that you ever went to school, but you seem like if you did ever go to school then it didn't agree with you very well."

"It was better than something like Sunnydale High would've been, but it was pretty bad for me until someone noticed I'd be much happier out hunting all the time." He drives them off to their usual practicing grounds.

"I don't think people around here can mostly get by just hunting all the time. But I'm glad you found something you were good at."

There was a point at which she would have wondered what she was good at, if anything, but she feels like she maybe doesn't need to figure that out anymore. She has a job; she's going to do her best with it. She works very hard on slayer training for someone who seems to have a very hard time putting any effort into school things at all.

He doesn't really think that not putting in the effort is her problem with school. 

But anyway, school doesn't matter and this does, so it's a good thing she's a hard worker and a quick study.

She is those things! She mostly does not ask to cover new material on her own, but is nearly always excited when Alex decides that it's time for that. And she always does her best, which is consistently really good for someone with no previous training.

The gym classes go well too! The kids are mostly not as quick studies as Karen but he diligently does a lot of research into the best options for surviving something stronger, faster and tougher than you and teaches the kids that, and bakes a lot of cookies, none of which turn anyone into a rat. On Tuesdays they instead do basketball but after sternly telling them all that the curriculum says they're doing basketball, he works on stances and hand-to-hand fighting with anyone who wants.

Karen's books detail the operations of an organization of unclear size and scope which Michael works for, and which has been clearing small towns of vampires by attacking the main nests in force, leaving blood brothels and blood bank operations alone, instituting new procedures at the coroner's office, and then making it widely known that any vampire who kills a human will die the same day. This takes a lot of legwork to enforce but vampires do learn from examples. The book includes comparisons of the number of deaths caused by doing it this way (usually some vampires test the rule) to the expected casualties of an operation more singlemindedly focused on killing all the vampires. Which one is better kind of depends on how bad you think it is to kill a not-currently-murderous vampire. 

The case study for Cleveland is instead vastly more complicated, because Cleveland apparently was simultaneously near a hellmouth, ground zero of a turf war between two species of demons with a many-thousand-year history of racial hatred, the core port of entry for a dozen smuggling gangs, and home to some very old vampires and some dangerously powerful magicians. 

The books describe every species known to Michael and Alex except, apparently, the species Michael and Alex are. In the background of one picture of a crowd of demons there's another being like the two of them, though.

Karen studiously takes notes on all of this and commits as much of the information to memory as possible. (She has also been taking notes on whatever kind of thing Michael and Alex are, and on every Weird Thing that appears at the school, because she might be probably-going-to-die but it seems like Weird Things are a field where additional notes could someday leave future people more prepared to spend more time not-dying.) 

Whenever she runs out of books, she returns them to Father Michael and asks if he has anything else for her. She continues doing research online, and spends most of her allowance ordering more books from the internet, whenever she runs into one that looks like it might have additional useful information about Weird Stuff. She develops a habit of watching this one cryptid-hunting show on Saturdays, just in case any of the things they're hunting are examples of legitimate Weird Stuff. Also cryptids are fun. She writes up a bunch of perfectly respectable articles for the school paper.

She kind of doesn't push on when they should start properly hunting vampires, because she kind of doesn't know what their game plan there should be, but she does feel like this is maybe a failing on her part and she should maybe be figuring this out faster.

He wanders the streets of Sunnydale at night killing things if they're vampires and aren't Karen's friend Zeke. He's not opposed to bringing Karen along for this but there hasn't yet been an occasion that seems like it'd teach her something useful, and she's not quick enough on her feet yet that he'd be comfortable sending her off outside his hearing.  

And it seems like this is good enough.

Until two kids don't make it to school one day.

"Missing since yesterday," he tells her after class is over. He has pictures. "Do you know either of them?"

"This one's Willow Rosenberg. I don't remember the other one's name, but he's friends with her. She's honors track for everything. Sort of shy and nervous about everything, but super smart. You think something got them?"

"It seems pretty likely." He makes an unhappy sound under his breath, a little bit of a growl. "I didn't hear anything but I can't pick out everyone in the city at the same time."

"It's sort of a lot of people. Any idea where to look? If it was vampires we could check the cemeteries, see if anyone is hiding bodies out... anywhere, but I guess we have no idea whether it was a vampire attack in the first place."

"We really don't. Do you know any friends of theirs who we can ask where they were seen last?"

"Cordelia Chase picks on her sometimes? I think maybe she's friends with Xander? I don't really remember ever seeing her talking to anyone else. She's probably in a lot of Dennis's classes, I guess."

Sigh. "All right. Thanks."

"Sorry. I'm not acquaintances with every single person in the school yet."

"I'm not mad at you, I'm not disappointed in you, I don't think there's something that you reasonably could have identified as a good decision in advance that'd have changed anything. I -" he shakes his head like a horse shaking off a fly. "Do you want to go ask their friends, or do you want me to?"

"I can do it. Back in a bit."

Dennis doesn't know anything, but gives her an additional weirdness point for asking. Cordelia hasn't seen Willow, but did see Jesse at the Bronze and wants her to know that he's a tremendously uncool loser with delusions of having a shot in hell with her. Xander was going to meet Willow at the Bronze last night, and he thought she just thought better of it, but given that she was absent today he's concluded that she's probably really sick or something.

"So probably they were both at the Bronze last night," she concludes, after reporting all of this to Alex.

"What's the Bronze?"

"Oh! It's a club. Sort of the club, for high school students, since they card at the bar and not at the door. It's always crowded in the evenings so I think the vampires like it. - I'd have mentioned it before, sorry, I just assumed you knew about it - do you want to see my map of Sunnydale later - "

"Sounds good. Want to head over there and ask the staff if they left with anyone?"

"Yeah, OK. It'll be crowded, though, it's Friday night."

"Huh, so it is. Well, maybe that'll make us less memorable."

So they go to the Bronze. The staff doesn't seem to remember Willow or Jesse - some of them weren't even working last night - and also doesn't want to tell random people who other random people left with. 

At some point after sunset, the person at the door is pushed inside and the door is locked shut. Karen is asking another staff person and won't immediately notice the six vampires at the door.

Not wanting to tell them isn't much of a barrier, he'll read minds for something like this. Not remembering is a much bigger one. 

He notices the door closing and finds his way through the crowd towards Karen.

"Hi! I don't think anyone remembers."

The vampires make their way to the front of the Bronze; a few of them grab people, though they don't immediately try to kill anyone.

Might want to take one alive if we can, to get a location out of. Why don't you take down the ones who aren't holding people, less messy if you miss.

OK. Cool cool cool. She looks around to identify the vampires.

Someone kills the lights and puts a spotlight on the stage, where a vampire in game face is looking down at everyone.

"Ladies and gentlemen," says the vampire. "There is no cause for alarm."

Karen decides to make her way to the stage, actually.

They should probably work on tactical communication. That can wait, though. He scans around to make sure he knows where all the vampires are.

In her defense, the vampire on the stage isn't holding anyone. When she's near the stage, there's one vampire to her left offstage, one to her right onstage with a person, and then the one with the spotlight. Plus there's the one at the lights; she knows there are more but she doesn't know where they all are.

"Actually," says the vampire with the spotlight on him, "There is cause for alarm, it just won't do any good. Bring me the first."

She looks up and sees that the first is - oh hi Dennis.

Yeah this is not happening.

She moves. She pulls out her stake, stabs the vampire to her left, vaults onstage and stabs the one in the spotlight mid-evil-mologue, pulls the one off of Dennis and stabs her, then looks around for other vampires who need to be immediately stabbed and realizes that she can't see them because the rest of the room is dark and there is a spotlight on her. 

The whole maneuver takes about three seconds. She gives herself an A minus for murder, a C for preparedness, and an F minus for secret identity-ing.

Sorry sorry sorry, she thinks, in case Alex can hear that.

The ones at the doors hesitate and then try to open the doors when the one in the spotlight is killed. He stabs one, stabs two, clubs number three over the head hard enough to kill a human, turns around to see Karen blinking in the spotlight, turns back to club number three again.

Karen cannot actually see this. She should... probably go for whoever is controlling that spotlight? She jumps offstage and climbs the stairs. The one at the lights notices this and runs, but not fast enough; she remembers that they were supposed to take one of them alive and attempts to beat the one at the lights into a coma. She doesn't super know how to beat people into comas so she mostly just kicks the vampire in the head as hard as she can until she stops moving.

He surveys the room, satisfies himself that no one else in it is a vampire, notes that they now have two alive vampires, stakes the one he's holding, and heads over to Karen.

"Hi! Sorry about the - sorry. I got a vampire?"

People below them are mostly panicking and attempting to leave the building as quickly as possible.

"Let's get it out of here so we can get directions to wherever it's headed. I think one of the missing kids was among the vampires here tonight but not the other, does that match what you saw -"

"I don't think I got a good look at... any of them." She slings her vampire over her shoulder.

"We can get out onto the roof." He does that. "I saw -" face, face, face, face, face, face, face.

" - OK, that looks right. So the one in the spotlight had a symbol on his face? Or maybe it's just a weird-looking scar?"

He sends it again. Probably not just a weird-looking scar.

"...OK. They were... weirdly open about what they were doing, for vampires."

"Yeah. I guess vampires planning to kill everyone in there might be that reckless, but they shouldn't've been so sure. Pretty careless not to check for you, if they knew there was a slayer in town."

"Maybe they didn't? I haven't been doing that much looking for vampires since you showed up, and the ones I staked earlier were all alone."

"Well, if they haven't noticed let's keep it that way." What kind of condition is the one Karen's carrying in?

Her skull is looking just a liiittle bit smashed. She'll recover, of course, but it may actually take her a while to regain consciousness.

(It hasn't, actually, but Darla has decided that anyone who can curb-stomp the Order of Aurelius that quickly is probably fairly dangerous, and as a magically reanimated dead body she's actually very good at playing dead.)

"There's vampire-safe handcuffs in my car," he tells Karen, "let's head that way. We can leave her with Michael and then - I guess our best guess is the cemeteries?"

"I think we should ask Zeke if he's heard anything. Or, well, I should ask Zeke. Otherwise yeah."

"Sounds good." He gets vampire-safe handcuffs out of his car. "You go ask Zeke, I drop this on Michael until it wakes up?"

She nods seriously, hands over her captive, and heads for Zeke's crypt. 

He cuffs the vampire to the metal frame of the car and drives to Michael's. 

Michael has a cottage that looks humble on the outside and is fairly ridiculous on the inside, with an amphitheater and a room entirely consumed by a personal computer and an indoor swimming pool with a waterfall and four underground floors full of artwork. There's a live-in human servant with instructions to never let anyone in including at gunpoint, because Elves don't relevantly count as residents. There is one underground floor (the second of the four) where the servant doesn't live and which can be accessed via tunnel; Macalaurë protects himself by the simple expedient of not sleeping there and checking whether there are people there every time he goes in. It's their general strategy when they're operating in a city where they may have made some enemies.

Tyelcormo sleeps in the woods. It hasn't failed him yet.

He drags the prisoner into the unprotected underground floor.