" - oh. Well. All right, I'll - take this and return it when I'm done."

Either a good liar or, like, actually concerned with helping and not with isolating and murdering me.

If you want I can read his mind and check which.

I won't glare disapprovingly at you for it.

He brushes aside lots and lots of student thoughts and tries to find the new librarian. There's the new librarian.

The new librarian is hoping very much that he made a good impression on the slayer. This is such a complicated situation, a slayer who already has allies outside the council. It demands a certain degree of delicacy. She'll find the book useful, if she reads it; whatever allies she has can't be experts on the slayer in particular, no one is as good a resource there as the council is. No one has as complete a repository of mystical information in general, at least no one in this dimension or operating on an other-than-godlike amount of independent mystical power. So he will be useful, yes.

He should really finish investigating her allies as soon as possible. Hopefully they genuinely have her best interests at heart, but it's important to do his due diligence and check. Obviously they're not an immediate threat, if they've kept her alive and well for this long. Perhaps they're even exactly what they seem to be, or near enough to it. Few people, demon or human, are exactly what they seem, but sometimes they are what they seem in all of the places that matter.

He can probably afford to finish unpacking his extensive collection of occult books and then go find Alex tomorrow. 

He is so looking forward to this year.

"I think we have ourselves a non-evil Watcher. He really hopes you'll like the book. - mind, I'm sure he'll kill you when you turn eighteen like all of them. Most good people will murder people if everyone's expecting them to be responsible and do it."

She nods gravely. 

"Maybe it will help if you let him know that he would not get away with this. Or if I leave the area a week before. This might interfere with classes, but I hear that's also true of being dead."

"I'll do that and keep an eye out for whether it looks sufficiently persuasive. More melee training today?"

"Yes please."

Karen is getting very good at stabbing things at close range. "Maybe when Spike has chilled out a bit we can see if he wants to participate in your training."

"Nooo, then I'd have to talk to him."

"- I guess? Did you two hit it off badly in other than the murder way?"

"I mean it's generally kind of awkward interacting with people who've decided to murder you? Present company notwithstanding."

"That's fair. Maybe Angel'll fight you. I just want you to get some practice with styles other than mine."

"I can fight Angel. - If you somehow get Spike to agree to fight me I won't veto it, but I'll ask for cookies."

"Okay. They're still testing out whether the new chips they put in 'em all even work, so it'll be a while anyway."

"Yeah. - how's he gonna fight me if he has an anti-violence chip, do they have ways of shutting those off, or does sparring not count, or - ?"

"They can shut it off, apparently."

"Huh. Cool. - man, that just absolutely feels like the sort of thing where if you didn't do it then you'd end up regretting it, but it's also maybe gonna blow up somehow at some point. But I guess that's true of lots of things."

"The chips? Yeah, I think there's still a lot of disagreement over whether this is in fact better than killing them all. It's not actually impossible to murder someone chipped, either, though vampires mostly don't do things they find very unpleasant so there might not be reason to think the murder rate will be higher than it is for humans." Sigh. "I think this is good mostly because when you're fighting a war where your only goal is to kill all of the other guys it ends up being bad for you in various ways."

"I guess. Also lots of people are dead. - I don't even really know if it's better for vampires for them to be dead or not, I have no idea what happens to them when they die, or whether they're the sorts of beings that can even keep existing after they're not here anymore. But I don't know how I'd go about figuring it out, either. It doesn't seem like something past writers have ever been conflicted enough about to - consider, let alone come up with any way of getting more information. 

"I - guess sometimes you just gotta try to do your best for people."

"Someday we'll get all the afterlives sorted and everything'll be much simpler."

"Yeah," she says, even though she does not super believe that Alex is going to fix all of the afterlives, no matter how long he has to do it. "But even if you do, like - somewhere there's a non-vampire spirit that used to go with Zeke's body, and he probably doesn't wanna give it up, y'know?"

"That doesn't seem like a very big problem? We know a spell for making bodies, it'd obviously take some modifying from the thing we presently have but eventually they can each have one."

"I guess, if the bodies come with - memories and whatever else. 'Cause humans keep their memories in their brains, you know."