"Like five a.m., maybe."

"And when is sunrise?"

"It'll be in about an hour and a half but if you're very friendly maybe you can crash in my crypt."

"Emily here isn't very friendly but Celine and I can probably be sufficiently so to make up for it, if you'd let her stay as well.  Quickly."  Alley!  Waving goodbye to Emily!

In the alley, Celine pulls aside the shoulder of her dress and arranges her hair away from one side of her neck.

...the local is presently somewhat confused about what exactly they're expecting to happen in this alley. Does nice-biting even work on non-humans? ...okay well it's a neck and it's right there, presumably she knows what she's doing. Nomf.

Celine doesn't complain.

Ellis snuggles up next to her and pets the local's back.

(Emily goes off to look at more cars.  They all have different letters and numbers on metal rectangles on them??  She doesn't know what's up with that.  Also some houses have boxes on posts out front; she starts opening those when she finds them to see if she can determine what they're about.  So far they've all been empty, except sometimes for spiders.)

There's folded up paper rectangles in this one! And a shiny cardstock restaurant advertisement!

What does Celine taste like.

Definitely different than a human, and... worse?  Yeah, probably that's worse and not just strange and new.  But not bad, overall.

Huh. Well, a snack's a snack. She doesn't taste, like, toxic. Are they also going to have sex, that's kind of what this vampire was expecting.

Well, once the biting's done, Celine starts out with kissing, with both of them getting ambiguously handsy, but once she shoves her husband to his knees and starts at the local's pants it probably becomes pretty clear.

By comparing enough boxed paper, Emily can find out... not much.  She has guesses; it's clear that these are associated with individual houses, which means that they're probably for either giving or receiving the papers, but it's hard to say which.

Then she sees a street sign, and goes back and checks it against some of the text she remembers, and yep, that's a match.  She'll have to ask Ellis whether mortals had a system like this, before.  It's pretty impressive, if it mostly works, which it might not.

All the pieces she finds have 'Sunnydale, CA' on them, somewhere, and it wasn't hard to find some with what she thinks must be different towns.  But can she find anything that's obviously from somewhere farther away than that?  A different state or territory?  A different country?

Most of the mailboxes are still empty but some of the scant pieces available have destination or return addresses in other towns, even in other states.

That makes sense, because why else would they be writing the state on here.  (Though notably, yeah, they aren't writing the country.)

What else can she figure out.  Why is the ground (again, impressively flat for the outdoors) different colors and at slightly different heights.  The side sections are kind of human-width, ish, and the painted lines are about the width of the big wheeled things?  But that's taking up so much space, for just those.  There's got to be something more to it.

She climbs to the top of one of the streetlight poles and checks for solar panels.

None! Also it makes an annoying whining noise.

Huh.

Back down.

It wouldn't do to get too far from the adults, but she can do a quick scouting trip to see if there's anything more than the cemetery and these same sorts of houses.  She travels five blocks very quickly, with plans to orient, turn left, and repeat that three times.  Unless she sees something interesting.

There's a truck trundling down the street.

Oh, it's kind of loud; that makes sense.  She's going to follow it.  Just for a bit.  Non-obviously, zipping from shadow to shadow.

It doesn't notice her. It turns a corner. The driver is sipping coffee and listening to Radiohead.

On the one hand she's good at directions and on the other hand she doesn't think the adults are going to take that long.  She'll follow it another few blocks; she really wants to hear more of that music.

The song concludes, the truck continues, the next song on the mix is Pink Floyd.

...It'll be harder to navigate this new... planet?  World?  And listen to more of its music, if she loses track of the two other people who have the same context as she does and can talk for her and stuff.  She heads back to, well, down the street from the alley they disappeared into.  She doesn't really want to overhear anything if they're still going.

The local vampire isn't going to get tired any time soon but they do have a dawn to avoid. They have earned their crash space. Her crypt's thisaway.