“Undead monsters who steal milk and money, sometimes killing and dragging people back with them to their graves, sometimes turning them into more draugar. Traditionally grouped with ghosts, but modern scholars have compared them to vampires, what with the contagion element and the being corporeal. Traditional countermeasures include nailing a corpse to the inside of its coffin to immobilize it. Uh, if history isn’t your thing then we can try sticking to easily observable reality - there’s disagreement over whether vampires have reflections?”

"Oh, we totally don't! We show up on cameras and stuff though."

"That's something, then. In what sense are you dead? Heartbeat, breathing, do you eat anything besides blood, does your brain work, do you sleep - "

"No heartbeat, I don't have to breathe but I, like, can, witness how I'm talking out loud and stuff, I can't eat but I can drink it just doesn't do me any good unless it's blood, I dunno how to tell if my brain works? How do you tell if your brain works? And yeah, I sleep."

"I guess if we did an MRI I would not expect to see any visible brain activity without a heartbeat? But that's not really something you can be expected to know, MRI's are new and are like super hard to access. Does the blood have to be human blood or does any mammalian blood work?"

"We can absolutely live off animal blood if we want. I don't even know if it has to be mammals? I've never, like, tried chicken blood, but I haven't heard you're supposed to stay away from it or anything."

She nods. "And vampires don't typically do that because - ?"

"Oh, 'cause we're soulless murdering fiends," he says, helpfully. "Like, literally we don't have souls so we don't feel bad if we kill people. And it's more fun than buying a bunch of pig's blood."

"Good to know?" Gosh, that is super complicated. Also it's not possible to lose your actual soul, but he's probably using the word differently. So hush, brain, figure out what this model is supposed to be before you shoot holes in it. "Are you like, uh, incapable of feeling bad about anything?"

"Not exactly? We don't feel bad for like... moral reasons. I can still get upset, I just never feel guilty or whatever."

"Lots of people don't feel guilty for things, and they mostly do all right enough to not become serial killers. Isn't it like - inconvenient, living in a crypt and being a serial killer?"

"...not really? It's actually way more fun than what I was doing when I was alive? I'm not gonna miss eating people all that much, but that's really weird for a vampire, most people would hate to give up hunting as much as you'd hate to give up, I don't know, chocolate? I've never actually had chocolate, does it live up to the hype?"

"It's OK. I gave it up for Lent one year, but I decided it was too easy to really count as a fast."

"Something else, then. Sorry, all my human food knowledge is a century and a half out of date. Maybe candy isn't even the right analogy, it's more like... if somebody said 'oh, food is illegal now, you can only have soup. And you have to eat it by yourself, in a dark room, without using your hands.' Some people would be fine, but most people would be kind of upset, I think?"

"Yeah, that's a more sensible analogy. I think I would still prefer that to missing out on all the other good things about being a member of society? But I concede that probably not everyone does." Also aaaa, now she's thinking about how much vampires want to bite her. But probably she can just punch Zeke in the face if he personally becomes a problem. Being aware that punching people in the face is an available course of action is kind of a good feeling.

"Most of the good things about being a member of society are kind of hard to get when you catch fire in direct sunlight and can't tell anybody why! And like, we still have a society, it's just mostly not the same one."

"I bet someone could figure something out if they really wanted to. What's vampire society like, do you have a government, other kinds of leadership, assigned roles of any kind...."

"Haha no. There's, like, demon bars and kitten poker. And like - I guess there's some cultural stuff but it's surprisingly hard to summarize. But there's not, like, a secret vampire country."

"That does seem like it'd be excessively organized for a bunch of serial killers hanging out in graveyards," she sighs. 

"Are you making fun of me?"

"No," she says, sighing again. "You've been really great, for a member of a hostile demonic infestation that kills and eats humans because that's easier than subsisting off of soup forever? And possibly even been pretty great for just a regular person. But like, my parents died a week and a half ago, and now I have some kind of magical destiny thing where I'm supposed to take out a bunch of superpowered serial killers by myself, and the closest thing I have to backup is a self-professed soulless murdering fiend who doesn't seem to have, like, done any research on his condition in the last hundred and fifty years, and whose motivations I don't understand and who could totally try to kill me at any time? So I don't feel like you've caught me at my most charitable." Pause. "But I'm sorry anyway."

"...Wow," he says, with something not unlike sympathy. "You're kinda having a really shitty month, huh."

"It's been pretty bad," she says, with a determined sort of cheer. "But y'know. Time and tide, the widely-believed inevitability of death... I wish I had something actually profound to say here, but I think I'm out of those just now. It'd help if I knew what your angle was, given that you seem to be interested in helping."

"My angle is that if I successfully make friends with the Slayer I get to not worry she might show up and kill me at any moment. But, like, also you're surprisingly easy to make friends with? I honestly wasn't expecting to like you this much!"

"Aww, thanks! For what it's worth, you're the nicest soulless murdering fiend I've ever met? I'm working with a pretty small sample size right now, but I expect it to get larger over time, so we'll see how that holds up."

She unfolds a map of Sunnydale and turns to a blank page in one of her notebooks. "OK. Now that I've gotten some of the upsetness out of my system - anything you can tell me about which places in this town are vampire residences, hangouts, feeding grounds, etcetera, that'd all be super helpful. Can't make any plans or keep myself particularly safe until I know the general lay of the land."