"...hell of a story," a familiar voice is saying as its owner comes up the path toward her cottage in the early hours after midnight. "If I didn't know better I'd think you were pulling my leg."

"Who, me? Perish the thought," says the stranger Zeke is talking to.

Well, isn't that interesting.

This website will keep, she's left herself enough time before the deadline. She can put it on pause for a little while. Besides, she wants to know who this stranger is, and why Zeke's introducing him to her.

She closes her laptop, finishes off the contents of her mug, and leaves it in the sink to go answer the door.

The stranger is short, dressed in an unfamiliar grey-and-white uniform, and wearing a pair of holstered weapons that look extremely sci-fi. Modern sci-fi, too, none of that eighties stuff. The uniform has a little of the same look.

"Hello!" he says, favouring her with a wonderfully charming smile. "My name is Miles. Zeke says you might be able to help me retrieve my soul."

"Hello," she replies, with a slight smile of her own. "Pleasure to meet you, I'm Yvette. Retrieve your soul. That's a new one. Hmm. Come in, both of you, it sounds like an interesting problem."

"Yes, I gather it's not a common request."

In they go.

"He appeared out of nowhere lying in the middle of an alley with both his arms broken," Zeke explains, "and he's cute, so I turned him, and then he really wanted his soul back for some reason, so of course I thought of you."

"I'm flattered! I'll see what I have, but off the top of my head, there's not a lot on the subject. Though I remember a curse being involved..." She hums thoughtfully, and traipses off to her library.

With a careless wave of a hand as she leaves, she adds, "Blood's in the fridge if you want it."

"Thanks! We swung by the butcher before we came here, though. I brought some extra, I can put it away for you."

"Thank you, darling! I do appreciate it."

She finds two promising books and returns to the living room with them.

"Now," she says, sitting at the couch, "how quickly do you want it back, and how well do you want it stuck on?"

"Soon and very, the latter being more important than the former."

"Huh. Well, okay." She sets a book on the coffee table and begins flipping through its peer. "Why do you want it back? Mine only ever gave me trouble."

"It turned out I was keeping all my best skills in it," he says. "But not the ambitious nature that drove me to accomplish incredible things with them. It's... an awkward situation to be in."

"Huh," she repeats. "I can sort of see how that would work. Interpersonal skills and the like?"

(Flip flip, flip flip, through the book.)

"That general kind of thing, yeah."

"Sorry about the loss." Her sincerity is somewhat impacted by how she's not looking up from the book.

"So that's one available option," she muses mostly to herself, putting the still open book down. She gets the other one and starts flipping through it, too. "I was right about the curse. It's just not particularly good at sticking and can be undone by -" she moves to glance at the text, "quote, 'A moment of perfect happiness.' Which is super vague, and sounds like a shoddy job of cursemaking to me, really. And then a shoddy job of documentation." She sniffs with disdain, and returns to the second book. "I could probably fix it up to something less shoddy, but I'll need you - or Zeke, I guess, if he wants to - to foot the bill for the material cost."

Miles glances at Zeke.

Zeke shrugs. "Sure, whatever."

"Ever the sweetheart," says Yvette, amused and slightly fond.

She continues reading, then:

"And now a second one that somehow manages to have even worse documentation. Round of applause. What's here looks more reliable than the shoddy curse, but that could be the lack of records. Basically, it would involve going on a field trip to Africa and do some quest... thing. It's not very specific. I think I'll have to break into Sunnydale's library to really give you an answer for what's involved with this one, it's got a better selection than I do."

"You feel like going to Africa?" he asks Miles.

"If I have to." A pause. "I haven't been on this planet that long, where's Africa?"

"Other side of the world. You'd have to catch a plane."

"Inconvenient but not insurmountable."

"Yep. No guarantees for its reliability until I go visit the library, though, so don't book any plane tickets. Do you have a preference for whether you'd rather take a while to get your soul back on once, properly, and that's it, or if you'd rather have a number of potential false starts to get you your soul back quickly with some chance of playing soul-pong with bad sticking methods?"

"I wouldn't mind some fussing around with it first as long as I know that when it's on for good it really definitely is."