When the flash clears, the vampire is visibly singed, with wisps of smoke curling up from under his (undamaged) clothes. He has his snarly vampire face on and is clutching his eyes and howling. Eliza pulls a stake out of her pocket and steps in to efficiently apply it.

"That seems like a good option to have for vampire crowd control," she comments once she's back out of the cloud of dust. "I have thankfully not had to do vampire crowd control very often but I definitely think the experience would be improved by one or two of those."

"Did I already say how far away I can center it - it's a long range one, I could have the middle of the burst as far away as - that house with the round windows there, from here."

She judges the distance and nods. "Yeah, definitely useful."

"I'll consider it a standard prep, then."

"I'd rather avoid using it around civilians but if I remember right it won't actually hurt them unless they're evil which most people aren't, so in a pinch it could work for mixed crowd control when there's vampires hiding among civilians and the situation is urgent."

"It will usually kill a civilian if they do happen to be evil. Most people aren't, but some people are and that is not sufficient grounds to kill them."

"Yes. But if they are at that moment being threatened by vampires it might still be overall a good idea to risk it. Not often a good idea, but the first time I did significant vampire crowd control it was a mixed crowd and several of the civilians did die before I could get on top of the situation."

"It would I think be close to perfectly safe in a crowd of children. Those are almost always formally neutral."

"On the other hand, considerably more awkward to explain if one of them turned out to be possessed or something."

"...how would you normally explain collateral damage like that?"

"I guess by 'awkward to explain' I mean more precisely something like—if a flash of light goes off in the middle of a crowd of children and nobody dies this is vaguely alarming but not very alarming, people will come up with their own explanations and probably conclude that they don't need to worry about it. If a flash of light goes off in the middle of a crowd of children and one of them does die, that's very alarming, people will be alarmed, they'll still come up with their own explanations but the explanation might be 'someone threw a bomb into a crowd of children' and that's the sort of thing that causes a big stir and a lot of people trying to figure out how to prevent it from happening again, which will be unhelpful because they don't understand what actually happened."

"I suppose whether it killed the child would depend on the mechanics of the possession."

"I don't know what mechanics to expect exactly, I just have the impression that in a crowd of children in Sunnydale it is awkwardly plausible that one of them might have something going on that could make them susceptible to a spell that only damages evil beings, without the child necessarily even being evil exactly. Probably most of the time it would be fine, but, it's the sort of thing where if it happened I would look back and say 'that's a possibility I should've been tracking'."

"Right. So, risky crowd control. - does this also apply to things that damage only specifically undead, do you have an undead children situation?"

"Thankfully, most vampires aren't interested in turning children most of the time. I've met a child vampire, but only one. And no other undead children I know of."

"And you don't have, say, zombie or ghoul outbreaks that are less discriminating?"

"Hmm, I'm not confident our version of zombies is much like your version of zombies given the disparity between vampires, and I'm not actually sure what I should be picturing when you say ghouls... the one zombie outbreak I've seen was the result of a cursed mask that reanimated anyone who died within its radius of effect, which wouldn't result in the kind of surprise vulnerability I'm worried about here."

"I would not be astonished by an artifact doing that on Golarion but it is not the standard way to get zombies, no, the standard way is either someone raising them with spells or particularly improper burials."

"Improper burial resulting in undead is pretty rare around here. I wouldn't be surprised to hear it had happened, but I wouldn't expect it as a default."

"It doesn't usually happen on Golarion either, which is not helpful toward a project of getting people who have surreptitious bodies they wish to dispose of to be more careful about harm reduction."

"Oof, yeah, I see what you mean."

"Reportedly a lot of the work of being a village cleric is tracking down people who are exposing babies in the woods instead of doing something more responsible with them, though I imagine the actual occurrence can't be as frequent as the amount of curriculum devoted to it would imply."

"I wonder if Earth used to have problems with undead babies back when exposing babies in the woods was a normal thing to do? Rupert might know, we can ask him tomorrow if we remember." They are continuing to walk past graveyards. There is so much graveyard in this town.

"That would more often be ghosts rather than corporeal undead."

"Huh. I think I normally expect ghosts when someone died in a particularly upsetting way, not so much based on what happened to their body afterward, but I wouldn't call myself an expert in ghost formation so I could be off base. And I guess death by exposure also counts as pretty upsetting, at least for the baby."