All right. You wanna do that today or wait until you're all better?

Kind of want to do it now, but it's probably smarter to wait a day. Not like I could immediately do much with the information.

Okay. 

She flops back onto the grass.

I guess I should think about whether to go to the Watcher's Council at some point. They're supposed to be based in London, we could probably find them if we wanted to.

Who's that?

The people who usually train and deploy slayers. We decided not to go to them - us in the future, I mean - because they have this habit of murdering them when they turn eighteen. For obvious reasons I am sort of hesitant to go to them, but I am a slayer, and they do know a lot about mystical things, and it's possibly the fastest way to figure out what resources there are in this time period. Or it might get me killed.

Wait a sec, you're not eighteen? What point in the human life is eighteen?

Approximately the beginning of adulthood, or considered to be so in my century. I'm sixteen. Given the time period I don't think most other people'll care. It's not like they have child labor laws anyway.

Wow.

I am trying my best here.

I'm not mad at you, kid. I'm kind of unimpressed that in the future I got you - tangled up in all of this - but I assume someone had a reason to tell me to do that.

Oh, you didn't. Slayers just get magically activated as teenagers. I - sort of got lost in the shuffle and nobody came by to train me, but I figured out the slayer thing on my own anyway, and - I told your brother about the fact that I was fighting vampires to save people, and he said I should have someone to keep stuff from killing me and to teach me how to do the superheroics, like, at all safely, and you showed up like a week later, and - I'd be doing this stuff either way, but it's better like this, with someone else to keep me from - I think I'd be dead a couple times over if not for you. So it's better. For me, anyway. Plus, even if I hadn't gotten myself killed in action without you, the council found out about me about a month ago, and - I sort of prefer the combat instructor who isn't planning to kill me in two years.

How'd you run into my brother?

He's a Catholic priest. I, being Catholic, occasionally interact with priests. 'Specially when I have to talk about really weird monster stuff with someone who can't turn around and send me to a mental institution for it.

Kiddo, you need to give more context when you say things. What's a Catholic, what's a priest, what's a mental institution...

Sorry, right. Uh, Catholicism is a religion, the largest branch of Christianity - the, um, the religion that goes with those buildings that have steeples with crosses at the top. - oh, that's another thing about vampires, they get burned by crosses if they come into contact with them. Priests are religious - Catholic religious workers, I guess, they give sermons and conduct services and baptize babies and marry people and, relevantly, hear confessions, which is this thing where you say everything really bad you've done and ask for forgiveness, and the priest absolves you and gives you advice and stuff on how to be better. They're not allowed to tell anyone about anything they hear in confession, so it's - safer, than some things, when you really need to ask for advice and really need to not be punished for doing that.

Mental institutions are places where people end up if they have mental problems that mean that they can't take care of themselves or are a danger to themselves or others. They're - not the worst place ever, but they're not good places, I hear nobody takes you seriously in them or gives you stuff you want, and if you're involuntarily committed then you're not allowed to leave. I think in this time period they're probably a lot worse than they are in mine, I know they used to chain people up and beat them and lock them in unsanitary cells and stuff. Strong preference not to end up in one.

Great. Okay. That's not what Macalaurë is doing right now. I don't know when he starts.

Well. - oh, wait, I do know that, he graduated from seminary in 1975. Uh, you learned about vampires in the seventies, too, maybe those were related.

Probably. Vampires sound more interesting than most of the other problems we knew humans had.

That's - a word for them, yeah. - what exactly are you guys doing at this point? Other than hanging out in the mountains. Unless that's just the only thing you guys have been doing.

Pretty much just that. Can't live around humans.

How come?

Their cities are too ugly and loud and smell terrible and there's something in the air from all the coal they're burning - gets into your lungs - I assume it does that to you all, too, but maybe you die of something else before it kills you.

No, no, people died of that too. And of lots of other things. Maybe I won't end up getting murdered by vampires at all. You seem like you do OK in my time period, but I guess in my time period we have, uh, sanitation and stuff.

Oh, if humans eventually get better and are possible to live around that'd explain why we end up actually doing things.