He squints at her a bit bemusedly.  "Oh. No. It's, uh, the noise, and the smell, and the - people - cafeterias all smell the same no matter what food they're serving, don't they?"

She considers various cafeterias that she's eaten in over the course of her life. "...yeah. Well, not the one at home, the one at home kind of on and off smells like slime monsters went through it, which is I think kind of a different thing, but in general, yeah."

"Slime monsters?"

"Yeah, you know. I mean, there are different varieties of slimy things that have different official names, but I feel like my high school cafeteria just attracts an inordinate number of things that leave slime around? Not even all supernatural things, either, one time a bunch of slugs migrated into the kitchen for some reason, and then all of the trays smelled kind of like slugs for a while."

He giggles, weakly. "If that happened at my school my father would call the board of supervisors and yell about child abuse until they promised him I wouldn't have to eat with the other kids anymore. - I'm sorry, I'm not, like, I'm not trying to be all 'you know what my father will do', I never tell him anything, I promise, just, when I was eight they thought I had a dairy allergy and that's what he did so I can't even think what he'd do if there were slugs. Or slime monsters."

"No, yeah, that's not even unreasonable. Sunnydale High is a very special place. And by that I mostly mean that they should shut the place down because it is built on fundamentally unholy ground that causes problems for all who set foot there."

"Why'd they, uh, do that?"

"I kind of assume they didn't know at the time? Although I haven't nailed all the history down yet, and if you told me that Sunnydale High existed specifically because some very evil entities thought it would be funny to throw a bunch of high schoolers into the most dangerous possible environment within suburban America then I wouldn't really be very surprised."

Nodnodnod. Smile. Awkward foot-shuffling. "Uh, sorry, I forgot, what'd you need from me?"

Oh no.

Why did the not-aliens ever think she was qualified for this.

She probably has to say a thing here.

" - oh, yeah, you caught me. I don't need a thing. I just wanted to see how you were doing."

"Uh. Fine, aside from the allergy. The not-allergy. I - are you sure you aren't mixing me up with someone more interesting?"

"I kinda think everyone is interesting?" 

Augh.

"Um, they could be and that'd still be - it would still be pretty weird objectively speaking that you would want to talk with me. ...anyway I'm okay. I don't like summer camp but I don't really see how anyone likes summer camp and I don't dislike this summer camp more than last year's summer camp or the year before that's summer camp and nothing awful happened either of those years. Summer camp is the kind of thing that feels like the worst thing in the world, but doesn't actually kill you, you know? Sometimes I tell myself it's practice at doing things that feel like the worst thing in the world over and over and over again - I'm sorry, you have real problems -"

" - that is the most relatable thing I've ever heard in my entire life."

"I, uh, I don't think it's my original opinion or anything, probably someone else has said it before and I just read it."

"I mean, I don't even mean that it's necessarily super profound or anything, just - I think I'm bad at summer camps? I've never been to one that was ten whole weeks before, the last one I went to was two, but at the end of it I still wanted to go home more than anything else in the world? And I figured, you know, I'm older now, and I've seen dead bodies and learned how to do my own laundry, so probably summer camp will be fine? And - it's not literally the worst thing in the world, there are a couple things that're worse, but it's still pretty terrible, even though there's actually absolutely nothing wrong with it and it's supposed to be - fun."

"No it's not! It's supposed to get kids out of the way for ten weeks so their parents don't have to deal with them while school's out, except school isn't all day and all night so it has to be less superficially terrible than school so people don't riot."

"Oh." She frowns. "I mean I think this one is to give the US government information on budding superheroes and keep the budding superheroes from doing anything really stupid that'll get them killed before they can vote, but you could be right about the general case."

"- right, I guess there's that for this one.

But, uh, for parents to not feel bad about themselves for sending their kids to summer camp they have to sorta believe, or at least have enough grounds that they feel like a reasonable adult judging them would think they believed, that the camp was nice, so it has to contain nice things. But, if it was really about making kids happy, there'd be summer camps where you play video games the entire time. And there's not one of them. I looked this year. I don't even like video games that much but it seemed like the other kids would be distracted a lot."

"...I think that's probably because you can play video games at home, so the kids who want to play video games all summer don't have to go to summer camp to do it? And you can't, like, do proper wilderness survival training without a wilderness."

" - I guess. You could still have, you know, lots more games and way better computers but I guess at least your market would be smaller. There could be LARP camps. There aren't LARP camps. .... I still don't think there're millions of kids who want wilderness survival training, I think there're millions of parents who want to send their kids to wilderness survival training."

"This is possible. ...I'm, uh, I'm not here because my parents couldn't stand me, I'm here because my friend thought it'd be a good idea to meet people who were in the know about weird stuff but who didn't live in Sunnydale, in case there are local effects such that we'd benefit from having friends who were in other places. Also then I thought the summer camp might be evil and he thought I should come home, except he only thought that because I sounded like I wasn't having a good time, and I was like, no, if it's important for me to be here then it's still important for me to be here if I don't happen to like it all the time, and now I sort of regret it and sort of want to go home, but I also feel like I have to stick it out now for reasons of honor. Or something. And it really would be better to have friends who weren't in Sunnydale."

"Why does it matter where your friends are? And isn't it a lot more useful to have friends where you live?"

"Well, normally, but Sunnydale has this problem where it's a hub of crazy and evil for weird mystical reasons. As a result, there are sometimes mystical phenomena that affect everyone who you can easily reach, but which don't affect people who are far away, so faraway people are really good for, like, reality checks and things, or for getting data on whether you're even always able to contact people outside the area. Also some of the evil things are migratory or have friends in other places, and so it's good for the good guys to be connected, too, so that we have more resources and can work together better, instead of just being a bunch of scattered individual people who can't do very much on our own."

"Oh. Huh. ....well I don't have any useful superpowers or I'd offer to help, I'm sorry."