That's why Alex is always wanting to punch me in the face, see, he doesn't think I'm wrong and he doesn't think he could convince me if I was and he doesn't even think he has any grounds to have an opinion about it but if he got himself into a fistfight over it then, well, at least he did something about it. I don't think that works for people who aren't Alex, though if it does you're welcome to it.

Nah. He did ask me to punch you in the face, but I'm pretty sure it wouldn't help.

I guess it's just, like, if you're sixteen and your friends are getting eaten by demons and your independent resources are, like, wooden sticks and a dog and some superpowers that are mostly only good for punching things, then you have to try to do things right, but if you mess it all up then what did anybody really expect, it wasn't like you ever really had a shot at finding whatever one ideal answer was out there, no matter how hard you thought about it. And if you throw your lot in with the government, and the government has all of the resources and all of the cards and all of the brainpower to get things just right, and they decide to do super evil things, and nobody ever stops to think about whether you could do fewer evil things, then I think maybe you all end up at Nuremberg or something, and also a bunch of other people end up dead.

And I guess you still have to do your best? But I guess I was hoping people's real best would be less... terrible.

If stopping is less terrible, we'll do that.

She throws a rock into the lake without even trying to skip it. It makes a satisfying little plunk noise.

I guess.

Do you?

She thinks of a bunch of different things she could say to that and dumps them all out behind her waterfall, which may or may not even actually be doing anything.

Maybe she should just throw ALL of the rocks into the lake. Fly, rocks. Be free. Plunk plunk plunk plunk plunk.

Karen, do you think I'm talking to you because you're the Slayer?

I dunno.

Probably not exclusively, but you definitely wouldn't be talking to me if I weren't, so kind of, I guess.

I guess technically everyone in Sunnydale would be dead if you weren't the Slayer. 

Yeah. I guess.

But setting that aside, I'm talking to you to figure out which stuff you can fix, and most of the people who want to figure that out don't have any superpowers, and it doesn't change the conversation much. I want to know how you're thinking about this because I want to direct you at problems you can actually fix and resources you can actually use. I am talking to you because it matters a lot what you want to do about this.

Plunk.

Have you thought about what you want, aside from 'no war crimes trials'?

I guess I don't like it when people die?

What things that you did last year seemed like the right things to be doing?

...I guess, uh. Saving the city was probably better than not that. Tranquilizing the hyena kids was useful, I guess. I was probably at all helpful for keeping the murder rate down. I guess I helped Daryl and Chris? And - I didn't really have anything to do with the Tucker thing. Training has probably been good in the sense that, like, if I hadn't done it then I wouldn't've been the sort of person who could save the city?

Alex's account of last year was that you independently discovered what Slayers were and what vampires were, saved a dozen lives, befriended a vampire who is now a reliable information source and ally, joined the school newspaper to provide cover for investigation into mysterious happenings at the school, alerted him to eight different instances of such mysterious happenings at the school, six of which turns out to be supernatural in origin and requiring immediate action, made several close friends, passed all your classes, learned archery, hand-to-hand unarmed combat, hand-to-hand combat with a stake, hand-to-hand combat with a knife, and safe use of half a dozen other weapons, tracked and tranquilized five students possessed by a demon, won the assistance and loyalty of an immortal knight knowledgeable about demons, disarmed your zombie classmate and successfully deterred him from bringing a knife to school again, helped other students with supernatural and naturally-occurring problems, ran nightly patrols for six months, drove the murder rate down by a factor of seven, saved the city and took time off from lessons a total of twice.

I guess that all technically happened. Except that a lot of the murder rate was him.

He usually needs backup to handle a city, even one less complicated than Sunnydale. We would've had to assign a bunch more people.

Oh.

I'm kind of curious if you could walk me through one of those events from your perspective. It seems like a lot to stumble into entirely accidentally without any guiding principles.

I mean it wasn't an accident, but -

I mean, like - I started doing this stuff because a vampire attacked me, and it didn't work out for her because apparently I had superpowers, and then a different vampire approached me and told me about vampires and slayers, because apparently he thought he'd live longer if he made friends, and so I looked stuff up about it because who wouldn't, you know, and I put together some basic information, and I started going out at night looking to learn more, and I ran into vampires trying to kill people, and so I stopped them, because that's what you do, when you run into people in the middle of murdering other people, and after I did that for a while I figured I should talk to someone to see if I could do any better, and I ran into a priest who was also one of you guys, and he called in Tyelcormo, and once I had someone who knew what they were doing, it was simple enough to improve at what I was doing, and then he pointed out other stuff that it made sense for us to be doing, and -

- I don't know what you want me to say. 

I'm getting that sense, yes. 

Maybe it's not fair to ask a question without answering it yourself. I want to end all of the suffering in all of the universes. I want to send off teams of scientists and diplomats into newly safe and peaceful worlds, to send back messages and pictures and poetry and to make promises, to everyone, about the people of Earth. I want every person in every world to have a place somewhere that'll take them in and I want us to be that place, for most of them, as far as we can. I want all the children in your summer camp to be able to walk down the street the way they are, without anyone blinking. I want the radio to have better sound quality and play better songs. I want humans to have a bit more time before they need to grow up. I want to stop being threatened with the apocalypse once a month. I want to make schools prettier. I want to replace prisons with this elaborate system that shuttles people off to dimensions where they're around kinds of people they won't or can't hurt. I want to find a nice young man for my executive assistant to settle down with. I want Alex to stop telling people state secrets such as his name.

I think he only gives it to dogs. And only before it occurs to him that some dogs might be able to figure out how to type.

I wanna stop having to kill vampires. I want people to stop dying in high school, and I want to find some way to make it happen that doesn't consist of murdering a bunch of other people. I want my sister and my nephew to be safe and well and OK, and I guess when I'm feeling idealistic I kind of want everyone to be safe and well and OK, even the people who don't deserve it at all. I want - I think I want to finish high school, just to say I did, and I want my teachers to think that I'm a sort of OK student and not the literal laziest person they've ever met. I wanna be a better person who doesn't have to confess the same sins over and over again. I wanna be the sort of responsible person who does the dishes and the laundry without being asked, and who keeps my room clean and doesn't let it be a disaster all the time, and who's able to cook real dinners when my sister doesn't want to. Maybe I wanna be sainted, except I think if you go around trying to be sainted then it kind of messes with your odds because your heart's not really in the right place. I kinda want everyone to think I'm the best writer for the school paper even though I probably actually can't be. I want to be really good at being the Slayer, and be good at all of the things a Slayer should be good at and then maybe some extra ones, too, and I want Alex and Wishbone to be really impressed with me all the time, and I want Alex to stop feeling like he's a terrible person, and I want Wishbone to be able to turn back into a human someday if that's what he wants, and I want all of my other friends to finish high school and most of them to be able to go to college. Except Zeke. I guess I just want Zeke to keep being really chill and not killing people and maybe figure out a way of earning money legitimately so he doesn't end up stealing blood all the time. 

I wanna find a way to become immune to bullets, so people can't just learn who I am and hire a sniper to take me out during fifth period English. I wanna kill Lurconis the baby-eater, even though I guess that conflicts with wanting everyone to be safe and well and OK, because I kind of think he sucks. I wanna know whether I should prioritize literally everyone being safe and well and OK or killing Lurconis the baby-eater. I want to - I want to go to Yellowstone someday, I think, and take my sister and my nephew camping and go with them to see the geysers and the weird bubbly hot springs and the buffalo or whatever, and if I live long enough and feel like I've done enough things then maybe I want to go to Alaska sometime and see the aurora and the seals and the icebergs and - I don't even know, the caribou, or the moose, or whatever they even have there. And if I live for a really absurd amount of time then I wanna go to Mars, and maybe Titan and Triton and Io and Europa, and I want someone to found Starfleet, and to call it that, just because they can, and for us to have replicators so nobody's ever hungry or sick or so poor that they don't know how they're going to provide for their kids, or whatever, although I kind of hope we don't give up money altogether because I don't really think the Federation has a sensible way of allocating scarce resources like specific vineyards in rural France.

I wanna learn Old English well enough to read Beowulf the way it was originally written down, so I can have really legitimate Beowulf opinions. I wanna beat Zeke at every game the arcade has, even the really stupid ones that aren't actually any fun. If I ever get to heaven then I wanna read every book that's ever been written in chronological order of composition, which I guess will also involve learning every language that's ever existed, and then when I'm done I wanna go back and do it again and see if I appreciate any of them more with the benefit of all of the literary context in the entire universe. I wanna finish the Ender books before that. I wanna see how The X-Files ends. I think maybe I wanna learn to knit someday. I wanna, I dunno, be a responsible enough person that I can take care of a venus flytrap or something without killing it. I wanna go to prom, the year after next, even though I'll probably have to go by myself and I'll probably end up standing in a corner with one my friends all night talking about how nonsensical the entire concept of high school prom is. I wanna learn to make those really good grilled cheese sandwiches that have bacon and onions in them, except I guess I also sort of want to be vegetarian because I sort of want everyone to stop killing animals so that Alex doesn't have to be sad about it, except I also kind of want Wishbone to have all the bacon he wants, and I don't really know how to resolve all of this. I want people to stop killing babies. I wanna have a real useful job someday, and know that I'm, like, part of the rest of society, or something, and maybe if I'm really good at it I wanna have enough money that I can buy fruit smoothies and cinnamon rolls whenever I want, and I wanna eat the fruit smoothies and cinnamon rolls on like a covered patio outside some house in the midwest somewhere, in one of those little towns where after it rains everything smells like dirt, but in a really good and wholesome way?

I wanna learn how to drive, and I wanna buy some beat-up old pickup truck that still runs OK from some nice old man who thought he'd give it to his kids before he realized his kids were going to want cooler cars that would be better for taking people on dates, and I wanna fill it with weapons and toolboxes and dog food, I guess, and drive it from city to city putting out fires and documenting weird happenings and punching demons until I magically earn their respect and we become unshakeable friends who would never betray each other. And I wanna go home often enough that I can still run D&D campaigns for part of the year, because I wanna learn to be a dungeon master, and I want everyone to say that my campaigns are the coolest, even though I think they probably won't be. I wanna finish writing stories, even if they're not any good at all. I guess I wanna write a novel someday, just to do it. I guess maybe I wanna write some nonfiction books about weird stuff, too, because I feel like the state of weird stuff research and documentation is maybe not as good as it could be, is maybe even sad enough that I might ever possibly have anything to contribute to it. I wanna do whatever's the best use of a vaguely competent Slayer's time, even if it's in practice slightly less awesome-sounding than driving a pickup truck through random towns and hunting ghosts and doing supernatural detective work with the aid of an immortal dog.

And I wanna make it to thirty, but I don't really think I will, so I'll take twenty-two.

- and I don't think I can actually have very many of those things, really, so mostly I want - when I get to the end of my life and I have to account for everything I did with it, I want the account to make any sort of logical sense at all, and when I'm giving it I want to feel like - like maybe I didn't do everything right, because no one ever does, but like I was at least the sort of person who occasionally tried to reach towards things that were good and useful and helped other people. Like at least some of the time I was actually trying to run the race marked out for me as well as I could, even if it was hard and confusing and I couldn't always see where the path was.

I dunno. Something like that.

That name is not spectacularly safe to repeat. That's on him, not you, but you should be careful anyway. 

A thing about the Slayer is that everyone knows about the Slayer, and a lot of bad people are very afraid of the Slayer, and so it actually sounds pretty spectacularly useful to have a network of allies everywhere who can benefit in the work they do from the fact everyone knows that your allies will call in the Slayer if it's actually needed. 

I think you'd have an awful lot of very cool material for your D&D campaigns.