"Are you okay?" she says. "Do you want me to call you an ambulance?" She stows the crossbow in her messenger bag and trots up.

She gets close enough to peer at his bite mark. "You don't look like you're bleeding out, but I'd still get that looked at and cleaned out and sewn up if I were you," she says.

"You were attacked," she says. "And now you are are injured and can I call you an ambulance or what?"

"Okay- yes, but- attacked by what, and why did he- why did it turn to dust? That's not nor- are you trying to get me to ignore- I'm not going to ignore that! Was that a, what, was that a death ray, you used on him?"

"I don't have a death ray," she says, producing her cellphone and starting to dial emergency services. "Bad sci-fi much?"

"You wouldn't believe me."

"Wouldn't believe- what do you think my competing explanation is, here? I don't have anything to work with! There is zero reason for a person to bite me and turn to dust in my universe! Can you give me- can you at least give me your best plausible lie?"

"Best plausible lie - sure. Hang on." She gives their intersection to the emergency dispatcher, then turns her attention back to him. "A guy came at you with a weird knife that might have had some kind of drugs on it, you lost plenty of blood and went shocky from the pain and trippy from the drug residue, you hallucinated, he's long gone and I wandered by and called you an ambulance."

"Maybe I'm not very cooperative and you asked me for a plausible lie and I gave you plausible without paying attention to the lie part," she suggests, flipping her phone closed. "Or maybe you were attacked by a vampire."

"That's what happens when they die. It makes vigilante rescuing much less legally complicated."

"The vampires don't want everybody and their cousin after them, and the people who know about the vampires would like the vampires to continue being motivated by secrecy. Is I think the dynamic, I don't know in detail."

"No, magic also exists. Also many species of demons, though vampires are by far the most common."

"Okay. You'll probably sleep better that way. Though, I recommend moving out of Sunnydale. This place is a vampire magnet."

"Mystical calling, believe it or not."

"My title is 'Slayer'. As in vampire slayer, though I'm also on tap to deal with non-vampire nasties."

"I bought the crossbow online, man. The job I inherited from a dead predecessor and I got the notification from a - something. Power That Is."

"I haven't been able to get any of it to work, I don't know what's wrong with me. I realize that kind of puts a hole in my story."

"You're good unless he fed you some of his blood," she says.

"The dust doesn't count. Some cops know, some are in really deep denial. Vampires are stronger and faster than humans to the point where I can't actually come up with a way for a cop to arrest one who didn't want to get arrested - if a squad car had pulled up you'd hope that the vampire didn't want to be inconvenienced by being shot at and having to kill the cops."

"The crossbow's regular," she says. "I don't really want to be here when the ambulance pulls up, dude, so - don't go out at night and get a crucifix."

"Avoid going out at night, vamps go up in flames in the sun. Separately," she shows off her necklace, "get a crucifix, vamps don't like them. It's wood, in the heart, that dusts them, but you're not strong enough to do it. And that's it from me tonight." She turns and jogs away.

And here is a familiar teenage girl, in the book section.

"Whoa, cool it," she snaps. "No need to threaten the building's structural integrity."

He attempts to locate a reason to be angry at her other than "associated with a stressful situation" or "kind of uppity". His search fails, and instead he stammers "You- magic! This- you said- I don't- you're trying to- I'm- magic!"

"I can't get any magic to work. They also sell," she gestures, "books here, the library doesn't have everything."

"Priced as marked and sometimes discounted Tuesdays, and about half of it is crap but you can tell most of the time based on publisher, publication date, and consistency with the rest of the - stuff. Are you holding up okay?"

"There's only one of me," she murmurs. "Usually what happens to people like you is you get eaten."

"Witches, relatively civilized demons. And some people who don't know they're buying real things - or actually aren't doing so; it sells plenty of, say, astrology. This particular shop I also vaguely suspect of not having paid rent for the last several years."

"Witch means human who does magic. It's not a safe profession. I don't have a safe profession anyway, so I tried, but I can't get it to work, and the people here and all the books I've read can't explain it. There's no reason to expect you couldn't be a witch, but you are reasonably likely if you try to wind up addicted to magic or summoning something you can't handle or turning your skin inside out or antagonizing another witch."

"Not a bit nice with physics, sorry."

"And what kind of not nice? Does it- does it steal its stuff? Beat it up in the playground after school? Bribe it, blackmail it for favors? Take a bazooka to it? How badly is the universe broken right now?!

"...I'm tempted to pick one of those metaphors just to watch you notice how inadequate a description it would be. Yes, random vamp snack, witches blackmail the laws of physics. They have pictures of universal gravitation in bed with magnetism's girlfriend."

"It's a pretty fucking big mystery, but I'm not an expert, since, see above, can't get it to work."

"...do you want help getting it to work? I would really love for it to stop being a mystery. Mysteries are bad."

"I would really like to be able to address the nasty bities of the world without shooting or punching them," she says. "So, sure, study magic, get back to me if you can diagnose my problem."

"And the best place to start would be... you mentioned there was a library? If there are books on magic I don't have to pay for on a UC-sun-D adjunct faculty wage, that would be ideal."

"The high school library has a better selection than the public library, but I don't know if you can hang around a high school library without looking like a total creeper."

"Did you get yourself a cross? Like on a necklace or something. It's not foolproof but it'll make you less appealing than the next snack."

"Beats me. Crosses and holy water both. It doesn't matter if you think the theology's worth squat, it just matters if it's genuine holy water and a cross made with - intent to make a cross as opposed to incidentally because you're nailing together an easel. I wouldn't count on that one, just get a plastic one from a dollar store or something."

"I don't know. It works if they're drawn, assembled, whatever - you could probably repel a vampire with a gingerbread cookie if you had the right cookie cutter."

"They don't have to see them. It's psychologically aversive over a short distance and burns on contact, though I don't think you can actually kill a vampire with a cross unless it is also made of wood and stabbed through their heart."

"They're stronger than you, they're not stronger than me."

"Oh, I wasn't counting that," she says. "I don't have anything to impressively bend in half, do you?"

"...Lift me off the ground with one hand?" he suggests.

"I don't know you that well, dude. Here -" She does a neat little backflip, and lands on one hand, then gradually transfers all her weight to one thumb. "I get super-strength, super-speed, a nice martial arts instincts package, and enough gymnastics to be accused of doping at the Olympics."

"I try not to do close combat. I mean, I could probably beat most vampires in close combat, but I have a crossbow, and they usually don't rise from the grave equipped with ranged weapons, so why pick a fair fight? And even if I could beat most vamps in close combat... well, there's most and then there's all. Adds up over long enough, I guess, and you wind up with dead predecessors."

"The traditional deal is, vampire feeds you some of their blood, then they drink enough of yours to kill you, then you stay dead for three days which is plenty of time to get six feet under, then you find that you are a vampire and claw your way to the surface and begin preying on drunk teenagers and homeless people and so on."

"So... they're all, like, unilaterally evil man-eating monsters, then. Not... people. How smart are they? Is there some reason we haven't given the cops wooden bullets and wiped them all out?"

"They wake up with complete memories of their lives but without what all the books refer to as a 'soul', which seems here to mean - ability to care if things are wrong, possibly impulse control, possibly other things, I haven't had any long conversations with vampires personally. They appear to be as smart as humans and can still care if things are dangerous, inconvenient, etcetera, and it might be that if you worked really hard on setting up a system designed to include them from the start you could get them to be tolerably decent citizens, but that's not the world we live in. I have no idea if wooden bullets work ballistically and the cops are generally not fast enough to hit a vampire in the heart anyway."

"How many of them are there, though? Are they a big problem? Organized at all? It seems like if this were common knowledge, removing them would be a comparatively cheap fix. Put bodies out in the sun for a while after they die, or- possibly stick stakes in all the corpses, or- we've already got coffins with crosses on them, even though you said you probably couldn't kill them that way. Why is it up to... your mystical vigilante thing?"

"I'm doing the stakes in corpses thing, actually, I have a key to the morgue. The mystical vigilante business is a stupid way to go about it, but nobody asked me before it got slapped on me."

"Are you sure," inquires the girl, "that you don't want vampires and the like to continue to be motivated by secrecy? I will concede that it's weird that they are, but... they are."

"They... that depends. I asked- how many of them are there? If an attack was launched against them with no subtlety at all, an announcement of open war- would that be a major disaster? How many more people would die than are being killed right now? Can society not "bite" the bullet- you see what- god, pretend I didn't just say that..."

"I don't know how many of them there are. Sunnydale used to be worse than most places, at least per capita, but I've been making a dent... They don't form political units that you can declare war on. And they currently fight each other quite a lot and only make new vampires under occasional apparently whimsical circumstances, which I think might be put on hold if they had humans to fight and recognized the double advantages of turning their attackers into new vampires. And the vampires are the least of our worries. They're common, here, compared to other demon types. They're also relatively easy to handle compared to other demon types. Vampires would be maybe handleable, if humanity suddenly demonstrated way more coordination power than it has ever historically done. Suddenly uninhibited demons of thousands of other types, not so much."

"Oh yeah." She makes a wave in the direction of the demonology section of the books. "They're harder to kill, they almost never have the sunlight problem or the crosses allergy or the entering human dwellings uninvited limitation, they often don't have even vaguely human psychology or speak English at all."

"Some of them have populations here but I think most of them are originally from demon dimensions."

"...Universe?" asks the Slayer. "Are you okay?"

"Well, technically you aren't any less safe than you were last week except insofar as you seem inclined to poke around scary things? I have a target painted on me, which is why I haven't given you my name, no offense. I don't know how many demon dimensions there are. Lots. Most of the demons in them don't bother with our dimension most of the time, though."

"Apocalyptically. I haven't had any apocalypses try to happen on my watch, but they're in my job description. Why way back when someone thought conscripting random teenage girls and giving them physical-combat-oriented superpowers to handle often magically-based apocalypses was a good plan, I do not know."

"I am pretty sure we've been extremely lucky. There may be other forces-for-non-apocalypse at work, goodness knows I don't have special powers that don't relate to punching things, it's pretty stupid."

"Do you wanna be, like, my support staff slash research assistant?" she calls. "Let me know if I need to go, uh, punch things?"

She gives him her cell number and takes his. "There. And yes, my support staff, I'm still Mystical Destiny Girl over here and you are a random dude who owes me his life, remember?"

"I'm supposed to get prophetic dreams but those don't work on me either, I had to get informed of the mystical destiny business by a - thing."

"I haven't been able to get it to show up again, although if you have novel suggestions besides 'wait for an apocalypse that it thinks I ought to hear about', I'd be happy to entertain them."

"Well, that's... does it typically do that? Do you think it's one of those anti-apocalypse forces, or something? Because if it does show up again, that's definitely something to ask it."

"The one time I saw it I thought I was dreaming for most of the interaction, unfortunately, so I wasn't very systematic about quizzing it. It's one of the Powers That Be and based on subsequent reading and what it did while it Was in my room, it's at least loosely white hat, if not particularly - effective about it."

"Uh, some books can in and of themselves be dangerous, but I don't think any of the ones that are in English have that problem so - be careful if you start learning obscure demon languages?"

"It's not Dewey, but they have their own section."