Clearly. 

- do you receive all thoughts, or only those specifically transmitted to you, or - ?

Either I can't read people when they're not trying or I don't 'cause that's rude. Sharable details are that you can reach me at about a mile's range by yelling my name or otherwise trying to get my attention and that the Slayers have learned to fight when all their sensory input is from a different vantage point 'cause that comes up sometimes and that I can't get anything off vampires. 

I see. It does seem like something that would have a wide range of practical applications.

Takes a lot of work to keep the murder rate down in this place. 

I imagine it would.

I'll loop you in when that makes any sense. Oh - Angel, the vampire with a soul, is here staying with Faith and helping when we need extra people, and there's a sentient mummy Karen rescued living in my house, I have an associate in this town presently though he leaves in a week, and we hand over vampires to the American government which has a secret experimental program trying to contain them, I guess those are things it makes any sense to loop you in on.

Well. I hope that I make your situation less rather than more complex.

Giles is really going to have a lot of questions about most of those things later, but they seem like things that could take a while to explain, and he does have a second job now.

Karen fills Giles in on things that she doesn't think it's particularly harmful for him to know about. She reads the entire slayer handbook within a week, although she doesn't entirely understand all of it because parts of it are in pretty archaic English. Giles gives her more books when she's done. She decides that he's pretty OK.

A little more time passes. Halloween comes around.

Paging Alex. Yellow alert, Snyder says I have to escort kids around the city on Halloween, in costume. Honestly that sounds like fun and like if we're gonna have Halloween at all then everybody should have armed possibly-slayer escorts, but at this point I just call it a yellow alert whenever Snyder tells me to do anything, so - this is your alert.

Consider me alerted. Everyone, or you in particular?

Me and Dennis and Mercy and some other people he specifically doesn't like.

I thought this country banned slavery.

If you check the thirteenth amendment, it says 'except as punishment for a crime'. I assume my crimes are many and numerous.

You don't have to have been, uh, convicted of the crime? That's sure a loophole.

The actual serious legal answer here is that Snyder likes to threaten me with detention and sometimes expulsion, which are things that he's allowed to hand out as long as he has any kind of justification at all, not things he has to go through the courts for. I could totally just be like 'no, not gonna', but then Snyder would find some way to get me kicked out of school, which would make it way harder to do my actual job, and - if I'm gonna pick this fight I'm not gonna do it over having to dress up like a superhero and follow kids around getting candy? That's just honestly a pretty fine use of a night.

I know, it just - pisses me off when people tell kids to do things just because they can.

Yeah. But I'll get a costume and take Connor and some other kids around town and it'll probably be kinda fun, so.

Okay.

I do appreciate how you don't tell me to do stuff just because you can.

It's so if I ever do you'll know I have been murdered and replaced by an imposter.

Good plan.

She buys a costume at some discount costume shop, one of those seasonal ones that's only open around Halloween. She is delighted to find that they have a Green Lantern costume. She makes herself a little cardboard candy bucket in the shape of the green lantern itself. Connor goes as a snake. Mercy goes as a knight, because of course she does, and Dennis goes as Will Smith's character from Men In Black, because of course he does. They meet at the school and then split up to lead their charges around town.

And then, at 5:47 PM, some grade-A certified Sunnydale bullshit occurs. 

Heyyy Alex, we have a - situation.

Where are you -

The... sky.

She's floating several hundred feet above the ground, surveying the city. It's hard to see anything from up here, in the dark, so she tries switching to infra red, and yep, that's a power she has, too. Now she can see that all of her kids - and, in fact, most of the other kids - have transformed into monsters or animals or movie characters. Nothing super cataclysmic has happened yet, but one group of monster kids is tearing off down the street attacking not-monster kids, and a different group is attacking an old lady handing out chocolate bars.

All right, so, people seem to be turning into their costumes, that's not alarming at all. I guess I'm a green lantern now. Gonna figure out why and what the implications of this are just as soon as I have prevented children-turned-monsters from tearing apart nice old ladies. I'm gonna need a holding cell. Or several, if they turn on each other.

I am very tired of this city. 

Uh, congratulations.

I'd be more concerned, but it's only, like, the second most ridiculous thing that's ever happened here. Lucky I didn't pick a different color, I guess. 

...I guess I don't know whether these powers are gonna crap out randomly, maybe I should be flying closer to the ground.

Please do that. Or over some water, if you really want to see what the world looks like from space. I'll ask Wishbone - and the Watcher, I guess - if they have any guesses.