Can you pass on to Tyelcormo that Karen's trying to reach him? Has he been writing her?

I am going to bet no. I'll tell him. 

He says to not read her mind, she was stressed about that.

Yes, he mentioned and I haven't been. Her counselors like her, say she has some friends. The kids are running around trying to figure out if there are more government conspiracies beneath the big government conspiracy that they already know of. I think she's actually too paranoid to work very well within the initiative once it's in Sunnydale, so it might make the most sense to embed one of her friends in it and give them permission to share information with her. 

Are there conspiracies for the kids to find?

Well, there's the thing where we overthrow Central American governments for being too Communist.

That's not your department! 

The office building is just an office building, but it's an ugly, bizarre, complicated world out there. I don't know what Karen is paging Tyelco about but I don't want to assume it's nothing. 

Rebecca knocks the camera off course and unlocks Melissa's car and then runs off to play volleyball, which everyone else plays in swimsuits and which she plays in a full-length robe to protect her skin.

Cool cool cool.

It's probably nothing, it's probably nothing, she just has to see the notes and confirm that she misread and then she can go back to being normal levels of miserable and not excessively concerned about the government being overrun by anti-alien nazis.

She turns so the camera can't see her face if it happens to be moved back, then checks whether Melissa has any of last week's lecture notes in her car.

Yep! 

She didn't misread the notes, they're doing research with the regenerative heart tissue of T'Kelt demons.

Ugh.

(Man, losing a piece of your heart sounds even worse than losing a piece of your kidney. Maybe if it was only a few cells or something - )

She opens up the computer and logs in. Maybe she can find - she doesn't even know. More lecture notes? Something that looks like sources to be integrated into lecture notes? Anything labeled 'TOP SECRET, KAREN DON'T READ'?

There's a big encyclopedia of files on demons. Some kinds of demons are even more classified and want an additional password, but many are available. The notes include records of experiments. The experiments seem to usually leave the demons comotose or with brain damage, though there are three marked SUCCESS.

("They have an idea to make them harmless." She is so stupid. Of course to make someone really harmless you'd have to destroy their ability to do basic things - )

Any details on the successes? Any details on the failures?

Failures are usually coded either failure-death or failure-nonresponsive or failure-sys or failure-max or failure-min or failure-no-effect. Successes aren't noted further. 

Ugh. OK. OK. She has - maybe forty minutes, tops, if she wants to get out of this car without arousing suspicions. They could obviously catch her, she's left fingerprints or whatever all over everything; if she wants to have a shot at safety then she needs to keep them from looking. So forty minutes at the outside, and thirty to be safe. She isn't super sure what happens if she gets caught, but the dead and lobotomized demons are definitely causing her to update in favor of 'bad things, probably'.

She writes down the specific types of demons operated on and looks the species up in the encyclopedia. Sapient? Non? Typically violent? 

A mix. All the 'successes' were non-sapients, looks like. All species that are marked typically violent or situationally violent.

Humans, she figures, are probably most accurately considered situationally violent critters.

Callida's half Bracken demon, she does remember that. What's the encyclopedia got on Bracken demons?

Pictures, habitat range, powers (a great sense of direction and the ability to smell magic), treaties and relationships, situationally violent.

Lovely. Of course the available data doesn't necessarily mean that they're hurting things just for being in the 'situationally violent' category. It could only be, like, convicted criminals who have gone through some kind of parallel justice system that doesn't feature juries of their peers. That's - still horrifying, actually, but less of a loose cannon swinging around.

(She wonders whether Amy's mom got experimented on. Whether the zookeeper is in a box somewhere with half of his brain cut out.)

(She is committing a crime right now. Carjacking's a federal crime or something now, right, can't you technically get life for it? Maybe it's only carjacking if you move the car?)

She should be looking for something. She's gonna think of something later and be really mad that she didn't think of it when she was in the car. She can't think of what it is right now.

She checks for entries on vampires, vampire slayers, and Quendi.

Quendi aren't in there. Vampire slayers aren't in there. Vampires are typically violent. Forty experiments failed-no-effect and twelve failed-max.

Well, right as far as it goes. Lots of experiments on vampires, but if you're gonna cut into anyone then nearly-obligate-evil people with regenerative healing powers are about the least bad ones you could go with.

Anything easily findable about the facilities where these experiments were performed? She doesn't need or expect a location. Maybe who runs it? Maybe names of researchers involved? Maybe dates of specific experiments?

Nope.

Darn government, being at all more competent about things than random high schools tend to be.

She's got a more-than-halfway-formed thought that goes something like this: the government is capturing demons and experimenting on them, presumably without their informed consent, given the lobotomies and deaths. They may be limiting themselves to criminals, but lobotomies are pretty cruel and unusual, as punishments go. The government also has a summer camp for special people with special powers, including those of demonic-as-in-alien origin. It's not a fake summer camp, which means it's not straightforwardly a ruse to capture them all and steal their kidneys or brains or whatever, but it could very plausibly be a way of sorting them into people who are more useful to the government whole vs people who are more useful in pieces.

Annnd she has no trustworthy backup apart from Trace, and she can't safely contact her other friends, and she's pretty sure the US military is smarter and better equipped and has her and her band of B-movie superheroes outnumbered like a thousand to one, and she could probably escape but she probably couldn't escape with everyone else, and she clearly has enough power to have great responsibility here, but she's not sure she has enough to actually do anything.

She needs to get out of this car. She neatly packs up the papers the way she found them, logs out of the laptop and puts it back where she found it, steps out, locks the door behind her, and walks back the way she came without turning to see whether the camera has turned back. They won't have any trouble identifying her from her clothes anyway, if the camera has moved back, but might as well make them put some investigative effort in.

She goes back to the cabin and flops mournfully on her bed.

Callida brings her chicken wings and pineapple kabobs. "Missed you at dinner. Everything okay?"

"Yeah, I just got super tired. Maybe I'm coming down with something. Thanks for the food."

She's going to have to come up with something to tell Rebecca. If they're in danger then the rooms are almost definitely bugged, but everyone's going to say things the moment they walk in -

- they can't know that she looked at the computer files, not unless they're reading her mind, and if they're reading her mind then she can't win at anything anyway. They could be reading Trace, too, but Trace can't know that she looked at the computer - she can maybe still play it off as just looking at lecture notes, maybe claim she really was just confused - they'll know that she broke into the car but they maybe won't know that she suspects anything -

- if she does it'll be harder to mobilize people later, if she needs to convince people to leave the camp in a hurry -

- she hates this, it's scary and hard and very uncertain and she doesn't even have anyone else whose orders she can just follow -

She sits on her bed and very calmly takes a few bites of her chicken wings. 

She should probably find Rebecca, it's probably safest to try to head this off at the pass. "Actually I'm gonna go check on something. Back in a bit."