Yeah. I can split my time between trying to get more people and trying to find out more about the council. Anything else we need to be working on? I assume the boat stuff is not super time sensitive compared to the other stuff.

I would rather leave before you get killed but I'm not picky beyond that.

Solid. 

She brings back a couple more vampires; neither knows as much as the first. She figures out where the council building is and makes an attempt at contact.

Well, she sends, when she trudges back to where Tyelcormo is. Got names and faces. They figured out that I was a girl with slayer training, though. They think I'm a never-activated potential.

That's a thing?

Yeah. Um, they have some way of locating girls who have the potential to become slayers, I don't know how exactly. Wishbone - my dog - says they find them when they're really small, sometimes so small they don't remember their parents, and they take them away and give them combat training and teach them about demons throughout their whole childhood. They're raised - mostly in isolation, no friends, no support structure outside the council. They don't find all the girls early, whatever method they have of finding slayers is a lot more reliable than their method of finding potentials, but - that's what happens to the ones they do find early. I didn't know what happened to the ones who never got called.

That's an awful thing to do to kids.

Yeah, I guess. Lotta awful things being done to kids these days. Uh, they said I could stay with them, but I told them I was staying with my watcher outside London. Not giving myself a ton of points for stealth there, but I don't think they're hugely suspicious.

They're not in communication with all the rest of the Watchers?

No, they can't be. Or, uh, I figured they couldn't be and I'm pretty sure I'm right. The world's too big. In the future they get better at it - or, uh, I assume they get better at it - but I think it's still too early for them to not lose track of people.

Huh. Okay. Then I guess I will get into the city and osanwë them while they're sleeping. I think there's only one specific point in the sleep cycle you got to hit for someone to remember it when they wake up but I don't know what it is or how to notice it in a sleeping human brain so I think I'll just do that all night.

Nod. Will you be OK doing that?

It will not be my favorite thing I've ever done but I have in fact spent a week taking cover behind a wall of enemy corpses and it didn't kill me so London will probably take at least that long.

She nods. I'll go with you? In case anything, uh, vampiric happens. Or anything happening to require saying words to people. But I can mostly leave you alone if that'll make things, uh, less annoying.

M'not annoyed by you.

- all right. Just saying. If you ever were.

You - try so hard to be not annoying I feel like I could punch you and you'd apologize for standing in the way of my fist. - I guess maybe I'd think that was itself a little annoying except I don't like games, and 'the thing you're doing, but try less hard at it' is a shitty game. M'not annoyed at you. Just not used to people.

OK.

Future you thinks I apologize too much, too. Just - I'm out here eating your food and not doing my own laundry and getting you to help me rescue random seers I don't actually know, and - you don't seem like you super need anything, besides a boat I guess, but if you ever did, for the record, I'd help, because - you should help people who're helping you. And it would suck if I assumed you were OK and then you weren't and something bad happened because of it.

You're gonna tell my familly about the future and the demons and so on once we get to them safely, that's - a lot more than laundry.

Oh. 

Yeah, I guess I am gonna do that.

They're nice. Or - 

- they're the right people to know this thing.

Your brother seemed OK. Of course he didn't seem as nice as you, and you're......... not the nicest person I have ever met, in this time period.

But I'll help you guys. You helped me, and - well it's not like I can really clean up Lurconis and everything like him by myself.

No, no, they'll be nice, they're nice to people when they get something out of it. - I'm not. He sounds faintly proud of that.

No, I guess not. You're all right, though. 

I'll just get some rest before tonight, then. See you in six hours or whenever.

He's still not really sure what an hour is but he nods.

Elsewhere, in London, a mostly-recovered vampire hears a rumor about a superhuman Chinese boy roaming the streets and beating up vampires. The vampire makes some connections. He'd previously been undecided on what to do about Angelus and Darla, after determining where they were in the city. Given a slayer on the loose, though, and given that Drusilla wouldn't be at full strength even if he turned her now, he figures it's about time he made some friends.

When the sun sets, he goes off to pay some old friends a visit.