Just me and you. Can I interest you in a beverage? First one's free.

"Hello, randomly appearing napkin," she says, bemused. "Alright, what kind of beverages do you have?"

I'm the bar. You may call me Bar. And I have everything.

"Hello, Bar. Is there any particular reason I got you instead of the bar I was trying to get into? And when you say everything, do you mean everything one would expect a bar to have, or every form of liquid that exists?"

I cannot distribute things, even liquids, that are magical, living, particularly hazardous, or in overlarge quantities. The door's behaviors are not under my control nor subject to any obvious pattern, but the mechanics of the door are such that when you exit and let it close the original destination of the door you opened will reassert itself in the place of Milliways, and while you are here with it closed, time in your world will not pass.

"In my world? I'm in a completely different world?"

Milliways qualifies as its own world under some but not all definitions. Certainly you are no longer in your original world.

"Wow. And no time is going to pass before I get home, hm. Too bad my Klaudia's not in shouting distance, she'd love to see it, I bet. Ooh, how specific can these drink orders get?"

Arbitrarily in theory; in practice limited by your ability to communicate your preferences using a common reference frame.

"If I say, some of my wife's blood before she was turned, can you do that?"

Not knowing your wife or having her or some of her blood here to look at, alas, I cannot.

"What about some of my blood from before I was turned? I've never tasted that."

A wineglass appears with the requested blood. Enjoy.

"Thank you." sip "Mm, nice. Not as good as Klaudia's, but still, very nice."

The door opens.

"Oh, hello. Come on, sit down. It doesn't look like there's a bartender, but the bar--itself? Herself? Himself? The bar is sentient, and communicates by napkin!" Gloria waves her handful of napkins."

"That was my reaction, when I came in! I mean, it was slightly less odd because I was trying to get into a bar anyway, but still."

"I was trying to get out of a nest of demons that I've finally cleared out, and this should have led to the back of the dollar store they were hiding out behind."

"Not the term I'd use, but when some lizard critters are sacrificing progressively larger numbers of progressively larger vertebrates to their dark pantheon - especially when they have gotten as far as 'sixteen assorted dogs' and aren't slowing down - they are being monsters and I take it upon myself to hunt them."

"Huh. I don't think I'd heard of any creepy lizard cults, which is probably a good thing. Kudos for fixing the problem before it got too public." She toasts her with her glass and takes another sip.

"Nice dress." The bar offers Bella a drink. "Um, cherry milkshake." She receives a cherry milkshake. Slurp.

"Thanks. I run a club, and I was headed in to work when this place decided to happen instead."

"Where at? I'm pretty sure you don't operate the Bronze, and I don't think my town has any other clubs. Weird space-warping bar."

"It's called the Monster Mash. Horribly cheesy, I know, my wife never gets tired of reminding me."

"So the question is do you have that song playing all the time, or do you just constantly get requests for it?"

Gloria laughs. "We play all kinds of kitschy Halloween-type music. There was actually a period of about a month a little while ago where the DJ literally was not allowed to play that one because everyone else on staff was sick of it."

Giggle.

"Yeah, the tyrrany of compulsory education, that's my weekdays."

"Poor dear. I'm just as glad to be done with that, really, but I didn't mind high school so much. I had a lot of good friends, and reasonably competent teachers."

"Eh, mine is okay as schools go, and we have Latin, but I'm in a new school this year so I don't really know any of my classmates well and frankly that's easier anyway."

"Ooh, Latin, nice. I had to go with French. I mean, I could have taken Spanish, but does this look like the kind of dress someone who values practicality over aesthetics wears?" she plucks at the lace on her bodice. "Easier, huh? So you're an introvert, or just very dedicated to schooling?"

"I was doing Spanish before, I switched - and definitely an introvert, yeah, but I also need a lot of spare time for finding and punching lizard demons and the like."

"Do you have a lot of lizards that need punching?" she asked incredulously. "And I can't really recommend punching as the solution to you violent problems, especially when your opponent is likely to have teeth and claws."

"It's usually not lizards! I'd say it's usually vampires but they've gotten to be kind of thin on the ground in my town. I'd rather be slinging magic around but I can't get any spells to work, so I have to use what I've got."

"I...cannot recommend randomly murdering vampires, either."

"I usually manage to get them before they turn. I have a key to the morgue, I put little splinters of wood in their hearts, everything's dandy."

"You've got a reproductive vampire running around your town draining people? Honey, being a ghoul's no fun, but it's reversible. Death isn't. Do you--where do you live, I can get you the number of a nearby vampire council, they can fix the problem."

"There...are...thirteen kinds of vampire. Only the most powerful five kinds can make new vampires. If one of them just drains someone, without giving them any blood in return, they go corpselike and when they wake up they're a ghoul. Making ghouls is super illegal inasmuch as vampires have separate laws, which basically means that if someone catches you doing it they rip your head off. Literally. If you have a choice between killing a ghoul and letting it kill someone else, by all means put the poor thing out of its misery, but if you know someone is going to become a ghoul you can send for a higher-level vampire, they feed it, it gets promoted to something with higher reasoning faculties."

"That sounds very civilized but I'm afraid we're talking past each other, see, I'm talking about actual vampires and you seem to be talking about your favorite video game."

"I am a vampire," she says, holding up her glass, which still has blood in it. "I think I know how we work."

"That is, apparently, a way we are different. Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of assholes who take suddenly having superpowers and a reputation for being monsters as an excuse to live down to the legend, but they're a minority and I'm not one of them." She rubs her neck. "The jerk who turned me was, but I came out of it fine."

"Good for you."

"So if your kind of vampire are ninety nine point nine percent sociopaths, why are you dating one?"

"He's a point one percenter. Actually, not even all the sociopaths are completely uncivilized, there's some who have a kind of sex-work-like business model, I have no quarrel with those even as I cannot vouch for their emotional complexity."

"Well, that's...better than several of the alternatives, I suppose. I can't imagine going for it myself, though."

"They make a living on it, it seems consensual, boyfriend says they don't have skeletons in the closet, I leave them be."

"Yeah. I can't imagine they have the problems literal sex workers face."

"They may or may not have that as a sideline, but I'm not sure they work as vectors for infections and positive they don't work as vectors for babies, so."

"I meant more along the lines of not being assaulted or abused or virtually enslaved. Problems specific to sex workers and not, also, people who have lots of casual sex that is not a transaction. To be honest, the STD and pregnancy thing hadn't even occurred to me. My kind of vampire don't work as vectors for those either."

The stake goes back into her messenger bag. "I mean, their immunity to that is largely predicated on their willingness to use violence, since if they don't there's no material advantage in the situation to being a vampire except maybe lesser emotional vulnerability? But I imagine the customers think twice, anyway."

"Using violence in self defense to prevent someone else from using violence on you is something most people are willing to do. I'm not sure how vampirism is different from having a tazer in that regard, aside from being more effective."

"They're vampires - my kind - so I bet it's pretty available to them on an emotional level, but some people with souls freeze up in violent confrontations."

"Vampires don't have souls where you're from? Well, I guess that would explain the sociopathy, if not the point one percent."

"Oh, my boyfriend just turned out to be using his soul for a smaller set of things than most people," she shrugs. "Like, he's different, but still personable. He may technically be a sociopath, I'm using the word very much unadvisedly and have not looked it up as a psychiatric condition or anything, but he's nice and he doesn't eat people because it would bother me."

"I guess someone who was already a high-functioning sociopath would probably be better at sociopathy than someone who had lived their life with more empathy," Gloria said. "I suppose technically we haven't proved that souls exist in my universe, but I've seen some things that would be hard to explain without."

"I'm not actually sure how it is supposedly known that soul loss in particular is part of the vampire-becoming process, but it's a convenient shorthand if nothing else and I don't have a strong reason to doubt it in the context of vampires and such existing to begin with."

"...What?"

"I mean, even if your kind of vampire happen to all be saints, which isn't the case, it could interact really badly with my kind, or with some sort of demon, or with brain-melting magical powers, or something like that. I'd be tempted to take it for myself but I'm already upgraded and don't want to fiddle with that lest that interact horribly - a lot of things in my world are just sort of disposed to be horrible - and I can't make avoiding death by old age a particularly high priority until I'm sure I can do better than all my predecessors at not dying of violence."

"Predecessors at what?"

"You called me a monster hunter, my title is technically 'slayer'. Bella the Vampire Slayer, at your service, although I slay other things and do not invariably slay vampires, as discussed. There's only one of me at a time."

"So you're upgraded in order to fight anything that isn't human, but mostly vampires, and there's only one of you at a time. If your vampires were anything like me and mine, I would express the hope that that meant no one else was hunting us, but as it is I can only assume that your world was the work of a particularly malevolent Creator."

"If there's anyone doing the job, they're doing it badly. There are some, you know, things, but nothing that seems definitely responsible for the whole shebang."

"So why are you wearing...oh, lovely, your world's vampires are allergic to crosses?"

"Yeah. And holy water. You're not? I forgot I was wearing it or I would have asked if it was bothering you. My boyfriend's trained away the reaction to an impressive degree but I still take it off when we spar."

Gloria fished under her collar for a moment, before pulling out a cross necklace of her own. "No. And I go to church on Sundays, too. I wear this under the dress when I have a high enough neckline for the chain not to look out of place, because a vampire 'costume' with a cross would look odd. But the fangs haven't impeded my Christianity at all."

"Good for your Christianity. I've painted crosses all over my town to make it difficult for more vampires to move in to replace the ones I nab."

"Clever. Of course then you have a problem with those vampires continuing to exist outside of super-powered stabbing range, but no system's perfect."

"I travel a bit on weekends. And it's actually particularly important that fewer nasty-biteys congregate where I live, because it has a Hellmouth and boy does shit ever happen there. I'm not sure of the exact mechanism, but shit is very intent on happening around Hellmouths. I would like the shit that is trying to happen to be poorly staffed."

"I suppose since you have a calling and a boyfriend and whatnot you're probably not interested, but is there anyone within earshot of your door who might be interested in moving to a universe less intent on trying to kill them?"

"I'm in a low-rent shopping center on a slow Tuesday and since I killed the lizard demons it's all humans, most of whom probably don't know there's anything more magical than fraudster Tarot readers out there."

"Being abruptly educated still seems like a better deal than living in the Elemental Plane of Murder."

"Do you want to move to my universe? It seems worth asking."

"Who, me? If I don't die in my world there might not be any more Slayers. The system is dodgy as all fuck but I don't know how to set up a replacement with volunteers and funding and combat options that don't involve violent impacts, so this is what we got. The world would be substantially more lethal if little monsters were not told about the Slayer in the closet as a scary bedtime story. Also I have parents and a boyfriend who cannot reasonably get to this door either."

"I didn't think so, but better safe than sorry." She sighs. "I wish there was something I could do to help."

"Well, you offered to export blood, which is a bad idea for any number of reasons, but maybe you have other exports which aren't so... contagious and potentially interactive?"

"Blood is something I have in my body. I was coming in to work, I don't have that much on me...I could probably hold the door open until one of my employees gets here and have them fetch something for me. I do have a witch on staff, but her actual job description has less to do with mixing potions and more to do with mixing cocktails. Might be a good idea to see if she has any brilliant ideas, though."

"Sure. According to Bar's explanation you could send her on arbitrary errands as long as you're willing to hold the door."

"My dad's a cop," volunteers Bella.

"That seems like it might be a more dangerous job than usual in a particularly murdery small town."

"It is. Lot of turnover. But he's been okay so far. And now he knows when to call me."

"That's good. I hope he keeps being okay."

"Me too."

"Do you have any ideas for anything that might be useful aside from magic? I'm not intimately familiar with Chris's whole repertoire, and of course there's the theoretical possibility she might not agree to help, or be taking a sick day and not come in or something. I do probably have more available funds than you do."

"Inconveniently, the organization intended to support and supplement Slayers doesn't take the expedient step of having a dozen of them work ordinary jobs and tithe to pay Slayers. I'm living entirely off my parents. That said, I am not strictly funds-limited - boyfriend ought to have inherited a lot of money, which has not managed to legally fall into his possession but he can steal it without moral qualm if it's crunch time. I might be tech-limited if you guys have different stuff?"

"You have an organization designed to support you and you still have to worry about high scool Latin class?" Gloria asks incredulously. "If I, or more realistically my wife, were designing a support system for the only person in the world who keeps a population of malevolent supernatural beings under control, it would involve, one, shock troopers to take some of the workload off your shoulders, and two, a jet of some kind to get you wherever nasty things were nastying their nastiest. Equipping you with state-of-the-art whatever it is you use ought to go without saying. Are these people being incompetent on purpose?"

"You know, sometimes I'm not sure? The one who's directly responsible for interacting with me is okay by and large. The rest of them I suspect of deeply stupid and unethical Slayer-related behavior, of which 'not paying me' is perhaps more forgivable than some. Latin is actually job-relevant, though. Interpreting prophecies and so on."

"Do I want to know what kind of stupid and unethical Slayer-related behavior? I suppose it doesn't really matter, does it, there's not much I can do about it from here. It's 2026 in my world, what about yours?"

"2005. So that's promising, depending on what's within errand reach of your door. But, well, consider that, one, Watchers view Slayers principally as tools for keeping demons and vampires under control, and two, Slayers are non-volunteer randomly selected teenage girls whose title passes only when one dies."

"You think they're encouraging a high turnover rate?"

"I don't think they have incentives to kill off the average Slayer - training does make a difference in effectiveness - but if one doesn't want the job on account of the job not caring if it's wanted or not? Easily."

"I see. The one you've got with you, you described him as decent, I'm guessing he'd side with you over them if it came down to it?"

"Probably. And I mean, I don't object to saving the world as an occupation, I just object to my limited institutional backup and my stupid, stupid power set. I have to punch things. It's really dumb."

"That is really dumb. I do hope you haven't decided to give in to the idiocy by not acquiring suitable weapons. What I actually meant, though, about your friend, is that it might be worth asking him not to overtly disobey them if they told him to do something nasty to you. Claim you worked it out or avoided it somehow. Having an inside man in a creepy sinister organisation sounds rather useful, don't you think? I imagine if he's with them in the first place he probably wouldn't spy on them for you before they've proven themselves overtly terrible, but."

"I have a crossbow, I have stakes, I'm considering various bladed options - my powerset comes with competence at physical combat generally, but it's still dumb. And that's probably worth bringing up with Giles, yeah."

"Yes...I'm trying to remember what things have been invented in the past twenty-one years, and I'm not coming up with much that's both useful and portable. Smaller electronic devices, sleeker cars, they've started replacing asphalt roads with solar hexes...Klaudia will probably have a better idea, she likes mechanical things."

"My vampires don't like ultraviolet, I have porch lights that take advantage of that and a UV laser pointer but the laser pointers were invented by someone now dead and the noble work has not been taken up so I can't distribute them like party favors... if you have good automatic translation that knows ancient languages that could help with the prophecies in Sumerian and what have you with less laborious work from my Watcher..."

"I have no idea whether we have decent automatic translation that knows ancient languages. I know someone who knows ancient Egyptian circa 1800 B.C.E, if that helps. We use ultraviolet light in the club--that's what blacklights are. I don't know about laser pointers, but it wouldn't surprise me."

"I don't have anything on me in ancient Egyptian to translate, I was hoping for a futuristic widget."

Bella peers to see who's speaking.

"I'm Bella. What's your name?"

"Gloria. Gloria Scott. What an embarrassing oversight."

"No big deal."

"What's the magical artifact?" wonders Bella. "Is it cool?"

"It...is keeping the aforementioned cocktail waitress alive. We prefer not to tell people too much about it, because that results in people kidnapping her and trying to kill her. No offense to you, of course, but talking about it overmuch is not a habit I want to be in," Gloria explains.

"All right. Not gonna kill your cocktail waitress."

"Nice."

"We've been friends forever, she's used to it. The shenanigans I dragged her into growing up were less physically improbable, but not, from her point of view, less dramatic."

"I wish there were anyone near my door to send on errands. My boyfriend would be ideal but I could make do with my Watcher or my dad."

"Do you not have a phone on you?"

"Lizard demon flung it against a wall, battery popped out and fell into a pool of dog blood, I can't be sure the phone itself is busted but I don't want to try putting the battery into it."

"Ew. Well, I'm very fast, if you hold the door and gave me directions I could maybe run to someone and ferry messages and/or borrow a phone."

"My boyfriend'll be asleep, my dad'll be at work, and I don't actually have Giles's home address - I'm not saying it's impossible but there's nothing we obviously need from my world, so may as well hold off until then."

"It might not be useless to send my wife to talk to your dad, come to think of it, but you're right about not obviously needing things. I'm assuming Giles is your resident member of the suspicious society?"

"Yeah."

"If I can't find any good translation doohickeys--and I do think I'm coming up blank on that one--it might be worth trying to see if he has anything in Ancient Egyptian that Hepzibah could translate."

"Maybe. I don't remember seeing a lot of hieroglyphs around but maybe it's a thing."

"Mhm. Not the most useful resource, but one does what one can with what one has."

"Yeah."

"Amityvillesworld? Anyway, hi, pleased to meet you."

"The Amityville Horror is, predictably enough, a horror movie. Good to meet you to. Thank you for not trying to kill my wife."

"You're welcome."

"If they're allergic to garlic it's not very. Pretty sure they can cross running water."

"We get sunburns more easily than humans, have circadian rhythms that want us to be nocturnal, and dislike garlic but aren't allergic to it. A stake to the heart or cutting our heads off will kill us, but then that would kill a human too. I've heard rumors of vampires being harmed by holy symbols of religions they objected to for some reason, but nothing substantiated," Klaudia notes. "...Hm. Do your kind of vampire have a heartbeat?"

"No."

"You've got a mummy cocktail waitress?"

"Yes."

"That's sort of cute."

"Okay? I'm not sure how it's any more cute in particular than the witch mixologist or the bar staffed almost entirely with supernatural beings being called 'Monster Mash' in the first place."

"No, I just mean, if I heard about a mummy at home it would probably be followed by 'and it is spreading around a curse that is causing everyone in town to hallucinate their worst nightmares and/or bleed from the eyes and/or burn all their toast, and then I'd have to kill it? And yours is a cocktail waitress."

Snort.

"Potentially lethal shenanigans are so much less fun. Hi, I'm Bella."

"Hi, Bella. I'm Hepzibah. I assume that you're involved with the shenanigans somehow."

"Yep. In my universe I am what is called a vampire slayer, which occupation is needed because where I'm from vampires are almost invariably terrible serial killers. Also there are other, non-vampire things that fall under my job description. And my power set is stupid, so any little bit of extradimensional help could be a big deal if it's the right swag."

Bella pulls hers out and displays it. "I have some, but occasionally I manage to rescue a snack and I'd like to be more helpful than 'get jewelry with crosses on it and don't go out after dark or invite people into your house'."

"Thanks."

"In my case instead of not looking like a back hallway it doesn't look like a dollar store."

"Maybe you can get the bar here to mix drinks and save yourself the need for a bartender per se."

Hello. Can I get you a drink?

"Can you really...what Gloria said?"

Certainly.

"Huh. Alright then, I'll try that."

A glass appears.

You're welcome, of course.

That's correct. Further glasses of the same will be $8 in your currency.

"My dad is a regular dude. There aren't as far as I know irregular dudes on the police force."

"Unfortunate, but not really surprising considering how many mean names my wife has been calling your universe. The riot gear remark still applies, although it might be a little conspicuous for regular use."

"A little, yeah."

"Any more specific advice I could give would have to do with the details of individual species, which would probably actually be worse than useless considering how different our vampires are from yours."

"And there's thousands of kinds of demons."

"Demons?"

"Yeah. Of which vampires are the most common kind, depending on who you ask - some people think they are technically not demons, it's a thing. And then there are lots of things that are definitely demons. Some are just, you know, people with bizarre non-earthly cultures, but most of them are pretty actively malevolent."

"No, there are also some non-demon supernatural beings. I'm not sure 'demon' is actually a natural category, but basically it gets used to refer to creatures from other planes which are not humans, divinities of some kind - I'm even less sure how those are defined - part-humans, ex-humans, or, like, plants, and even then it seems like people say 'demon plant' to refer to plants native to demon dimensions, i.e. any dimension other than the one where most humans live."

"I assume you have, like, churros and sunsets and Shakespeare in your world and won't be impressed that we have those things?"

"My universe is absolutely terrible and if it weren't so inconveniently inhabited by innocent people I would cheerfully abandon it. I understand the impulse completely."

"I kind of feel like I should name it. I'm going to name it Sunshine. To be ironic and prevent you from referring to it with Amityville references."

"Irony. Sunshine is cheerful, pleasant, and sets my kinda vampires on fire."

"Sure, I won't engrave it in any rocks."

Attempting to go through the door currently appropriated by the door to the bar from the other side will not work.

"But could she come through the door from that side and then turn around and come in from this side or would that not work either?"

Approaching the door from the far side will, typically, result in finding the door to be stuck.

"The place could use the help."

"Well, what kinds of help does it need? Is the problem political, ecological, social or something else?"

"Our vampires are evil and our demons are numerous and also evil."

"Sumerian is an example. They're in a lot of languages."

"My Watcher has... some knowledge of some of the languages, so if I could copy him that would be nontrivial."

"I have no clue what a Watcher is. How hard would it be to get him? I have spells that can help with transportation, if that's relevant."

"I mean, I'd have to hold the door, but if you can teleport him..."

"I can teleport to him, and then teleport back with him."

"I imagine he'll splutter about it but sure."

Bella opens it.

"What did you say this fellow's name was?" Chris asks, stepping through the door. She makes a face. "And where is he right now? Ick, this really is not a nice place, is it."

"It's really not. Sorry about the mess. His name is Rupert Giles and he should be at home."

"Hello. My name is Dorothy Christina Archer, but I go by Chris. I'm a witch from a different universe which is currently connected to yours via a magic bar that my boss and also someone named Bella found. Apparently you know languages that it would be helpful for me to copy into her brain?"

"Magic. Do you need technical details?"

"I would very much like a clear idea of what my part in this process is meant to be."

"I teleport you to the magic bar, you consent to having the contents of your head accessed for this one specific purpose, I copy it into my head, I copy it into her head. My boss explains how our universes are different and yours sucks, probably."

"Have you any assurance that she genuinely sent you?"

"Well, if I move then we have a door problem..." Bella reaches into her bag and produces a notebook and a pen and writes Weird, huh? I can't claim to have longstanding personal contact with these folks or anything and if she tries to eat your face I withdraw my vouch but I did send her. -Bella She folds this up and hands it over.

"I didn't overdo the being-characteristically-myself? You did not see in that note a caricature of my genuine personality clearly indicating duress or forgery?"

"No, it seemed perfectly normal."

"Good, 'cause I wrote it."