He nods.  "Yes, one of us should've thought of that."  He frowns pensively at the board, again, and rubs his chin.  "It also occurs to me that, from your description of the fight with Vanessa, punching vampires in the solar plexus doesn't seem to work nearly as well as it does on humans.  And looking back on the timeline of events... there are a few opportunities that I think Vanessa missed, which I wouldn't want to rely on the next master vampire missing as well.  She could've had her assassin or another daywalker ally stake out your house as soon as she knew where you lived - the ragdoll demon was clearly capable of avoiding your notice.  And we're fortunate that she didn't make any moves against you while you were staking out the Line and Sinker."

"Yeah, definitely. I'm - not as familiar as I probably need to be with vampire anatomy, and Vanessa was - messing up a lot, too."

He nods.  "Instinct and habit is as important as intellectual knowledge of vampire anatomy - I think we should also practice not going for the solar plexus and similar sensitive areas in sparring as well.  As for our strategic errors..."

He spends a moment turning over this next sentence in his mind.

"You can be careful not to be visibly near-peak human ability when you're out of costume, to avoid making it obvious that Nausicaa Uzun is the Slayer.  But it's also important to think about what... general strategic errors we were making, that, had we not made them, would have reliably allowed us to foresee mistakes like that.  Does that make sense?"

"I think so?"

“Do you have any thoughts in that direction?”

Kaylee pipes up, for the first time in a while.  “Well - you talked about how you kept the parkour within what was possible for humans, but - even if something really athletic is possible for humans, if someone who knows about Slayers sees a teenage girl doing it, and she matches the description of the Slayer they already heard about - that’s going to be suggestive, you know?  So I think the - way to have thought of that in advance - is to think, if I’m a vampire, could this make me suspicious?  Not just whether it’s absolute proof.  If that makes sense.”

"...I guess so, yeah. That's a good point, Kaylee, and - something I should be better at."

"I recall you saying something similar, Kaylee, when we were trying to predict Vanessa's next moves," Giles says.  "In general I think we should all be quicker to think of - trying to see our actions through our enemies' eyes."

"Yeah. I should talk to any vampires we - get any kind of cooperating with us, too, so I'm not assuming they're human-like psychologically."

(She already knows how careful to be around vampires who seem to be cooperative, Rupert, reiterating it will not help anything.)  He nods.

"Well," he says, "all things considered, I think we've done good work today."

"Yeah. Feel mentally wrung out, but."

Grin.  "I'll let you rest."

"Thanks, G-man. Though - we gotta figure out what to do with the vampires we've got captive, too. Maybe contact Galbraith, actually, he'll want to know Vanessa's down..."

"Those shall be our first priorities when we return to the breach."

"Yeah."

She rests, as much as she's willing to allow herself (it isn't much), then calls Galbraith.

He picks up.

There's a hesitation, then:

"Is she dead?"

"Yes. Dust."

" - did you tell her?"

"Tried. It was kind of - chaos, though. Sorry."

"It's fine.  What happened to the rest of her people?"

"Dusted a few, trapped a few others in the cells they'd been using for humans - I'm actually unsure what to do with the trapped ones, now."

“I doubt I’m gonna be able to get them onboard with our whatever-this-is,” he says.  “You might have to dust them too.”

" - I really need to figure out how to present myself though, and they might be good tests for - me being the one doing the talking."

Even if having to dust them if they don't come around would be really horrible.

“You’re the boss,” he says.  “I think those cells in Sterling-Blanc are rated for vampires even though we only ever used them for humans.  You could keep ‘em around at least for a bit if you want, if you had a source of blood to feed ‘em.”