Her curfew is sunset.

Her curfew is sunset past the time of year when that makes any kind of sense, and she didn't think Uncle Tag sucked that much - it really is kind of out of character for him to suck that much, despite all the everything -

Fuck it.  She climbs out her window.

So the first thing she notices is she's fucking sweltering.

It's California winter, of course, so it's not too cold, there's not snow on the ground or anything, but - she knows that, she's dressed accordingly.  And she feels like she could shuck all of it, be in shorts and a tee, and be more comfortable than this.  She's pretty sure it's in the mid thirties.

She ties her jacket around her waist and heads downtown.  She knows about the Bronze by now; and it's not so much that going out dancing in the middle of the night is in her top ten things to do, as it is something to do that's not being in a fucking house with a legal fucking guardian.

It's open.  They don't card at the door.  A local band called Dostoevsky's Arm is playing tonight.

It's slow and syrupy and sexy, which she likes, and loud, which she needs.  She dances.

(There's a man by the door who watches her as she comes in.  But he watches everyone as they come in.)

She dances, eventually sort-of with a boy.  She says the band sounds like Kidneythieves and he says he's never heard of them.  He asks if she wants to get out of here and she says there's literally nowhere else other than this room she wants to be tonight.  He kind of wanders off after that.

She's telling time by how tired she feels and so - this is the second thing she notices - she's shocked when she catches the clock's eye and realizes it's three in the morning.  She doesn't feel that many hours of dancing worth of tired.

She ducks out.

The third thing she notices when she climbs in her window, and it's that it's just about as effortless as opening the door.

She wakes up about two hours later, at five thirty in the morning, feeling bright and refreshed and focused, and this is the fourth thing she notices, and the one that convinces her that yeah something is definitely up.

"You doing okay?" Uncle Tag asks as she comes down to breakfast.

"Weirdly yeah," she says, and shakes herself.  "I mean, I couldn't sleep last night, so I was kinda expecting to feel like shit.  - bad."

"I don't care if you swear, Syl," he says.

Okay he doesn't buy into all of it, she has to admit, which she appreciates sometimes.  She starts in on breakfast.

Breakfast: tasty.  School: Kafkaesque.

Between periods, some muscleheaded alpha dog (derogatory) is picking on one of the weird kids, and she's fed up, basically, at this point, with how horseshit everything about this environment is, and she marches over to him and grabs him by the shoulder and swings him around to face her, and he says something smug and snide whose semantic content doesn't actually matter, and she says, "Lay off."

"Hey, I'm not gonna hit a pretty girl like you, but - "

She slaps him.  She doesn't feel like she slaps him that hard, but the sound is louder than a firecracker and he actually staggers a few steps in the direction of her hand.  He stares at her, as baffled as he is angry.

"Next time, hit me," she says.

She sets her jaw and stares him down and he slinks off.

Principal gives her some boilerplate about zero tolerance policies, and detention.  She stares him down until he dismisses her.

Detention: she glares silently into space.

There's a brief murmured exchange between Snyder and the librarian.

Snyder looms over her.  "I'm going to my office.  Don't try anything funny while I'm out."

He makes an irritated noise in the back of his throat and stalks off.

The librarian sits down opposite her.

"I apologize for him," he says in a beleaguered sort of voice.

"Mm."

"I think you behaved entirely reasonably today."

"Mm," she says again.  "Are you gonna do anything about it, though."

"I have given Snyder my opinion of you and of him and will certainly do so again in the future," he says.  "But I also want to - offer you a job."

" - what?"

"I'm going to ask you a number of questions that may seem confusing or alarming, and I'd like you to humor me for a few minutes."

"...all right."

"Have you noticed yourself developing any unnatural or inexplicable abilities?  Such as increased strength, speed, or reflexes, resistances to extreme temperatures or environmental conditions, a greatly reduced need for sleep or food, unnaturally quick healing, or seemingly prophetic dreams?"

"Some of those.  How'd you know?"

He sort of sighs, as if in anticipation of the absurdity of the thing he is about to say.

"Because of a prophecy."

She blinks.  It's the kind of slow, expressive blink you usually can't pull off unless you're a cartoon character.

"Well, yes," he says.

He clears his throat.  "I am part of a secret organization called the Watcher's Council.  It's our job to find and train magically-talented young women called Vampire Slayers.  There is one at any given time, and they tend to figure into prophecies of the end of the world."

"...Ahuh," she says.

"Can uh.  Can you gimmie anything like...... evidence?  Of this whole weird magic masquerade shit."

"I have video evidence of previous Slayers fighting vampires, including causing them to dissolve into dust when they die.  I have access to coroner's reports of people who were killed by exsanguination through barbecue-fork-shaped wounds, which I imagine you will find at least suggestive of the existence of vampires.  My colleague Watcher Quinn is authorized to perform minor magicks which could not easily be reproduced with sleight of hand.  Other than that - nothing which I imagine you would be willing to cooperate with without already trusting me."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, if you allowed Mr. Quinn and myself to train you and send you out on missions, you would encounter vampires in short order and find them easy to distinguish from ordinary humans."

She snorts.

"...Easy how."

"They catch fire in sunlight, turn to ash when they die, and - "

He produces from inside his jacket three photographs, one mugshot-style and two apparent candids, of people with oversized canines and inhumanly snarled faces, like someone turned their "frown" dials up two or three times as far as they were supposed to go.

" - do this when they're angry.  ...I also have these pictures, in the way of evidence."

She examines the pictures.

She sits back in her chair, lets out a breath.  "Barbecue forks are a thing in this town, huh."

"I can't guarantee there aren't any small time criminals also using them out of herd mentality, but - yes."

"...oh shit, and they catch fire in the sun - is that why Tag's so anal about the curfew being sunset - does he know about this, did he know about vampires and not fucking tell me - "

"It's more likely he knows about the Sunnydale crime statistics than about - anything supernatural.  Almost all random violence takes place after dark here, because almost all of it is committed by hungry vampires."

She sighs again.  Casts the photos back down onto the table.

"...Can I see those coroner's reports.  And the video, and the crime statistics if you've got them."

"Absolutely."  He takes the photos back.  "I'll be right back with them."

And he is, presently.  And those sure are some official-looking documents about people's blood getting sucked out through their necks.

And that sure is a videotape of a thirteen-year-old girl doing world class lifetime-of-training tier acrobatics.  And another video tape of her giggling and making a snow angel while dressed in a t-shirt and jogging shorts.  And another shaky-but-clear videotape of the same thirteen-year-old girl joint-locking an adult man and then shanking him through the chest.  And him dissolving into black smoke.

She exhales.

"She could hold her breath underwater for ten minutes," Giles says, a little distantly.  "I have that on tape too, if you like."

"I think I buy it," Sylvia says quietly.

"I'm glad."

"So, uh," she begins to ask, with an idea of what the answer's going to be, "if there's only one of us at a time.  What happened to her."

"She died," Giles says.  Baldly, bracingly.  "I'm - sorry to say that - many of you do not live very long."

"Small comfort though it is, you do tend to live longer if you work with us."

'Why's that."

"A prophecy is - vague, sparse in meaning, but very definite.  Unchanging.  Ordinarily causality moves in one direction, the past causing the future.  When a prophecy is made, a true prophecy, that flow reverses, future events causing the details of the prophecy to be what they are.  If that future could be averted, the prophecy could never have been made."

"Prophecies often say where the Slayer will be, when.  They may say some of what she does; they rarely say what happens to her.  They do not say why she is there.  If a Slayer works for the Watcher's Council, then she is there because we sent here there, and prepared her for whatever she must do.  She is there because she succeeded.  If a Slayer tries to run from her destiny, she is there because she failed."

She sighs again, a full proper sigh this time.  She runs her fingers through her hair.

"I am sorry, Sylvia.  It isn't a fate anyone deserves."

She snorts, a little, really just exhaling harder through her nose.  "I haven't had a lot of those."

"You wanna hear something fucked, though?"

"Ah.  Sure."

"If you can be, like.  Not a shit about it?  I really think I might prefer it to another year of public fucking schooling."

Very very extremely bad not good idea to be out after dark in Sunnydale, is her understanding.  But she's new in town and she got lost and she doesn't have a cell phone.

She's sticking to the more well-lit streets.

Is she sure, because apparently this street isn't so well lit that there's not a mugging going on right in the middle of it, in plain view, all of a sudden!

Okay yeah let's duck down an alley!

She should do something, she should - find someone with a phone to call the cops, she can't go over there and stop him she's just a kid but -

There is a man standing at the entrance of the alley, now, watching her.

She's going to walk quickly the other way.  (Is that the guy who was getting mugged?  It looked like him but he is not emanating the energy of a guy who just got mugged.)

Actually she's going to be lifted up off her feet by a man twice her size appearing behind her and looping his arms under hers.  He clamps a hand over her mouth, hard.

Well she can't scream but she can closed-mouth squeal as loud as she can, and try to kick his shins -

That doesn't do much.

He turns around.

The other stranger is approaching, swiftly but calmly, and producing something like a bike pump from the inside of his jacket.

She squeals and kicks and tries to bash her head backwards into her captor's nose.

"This will go easier for you if you don't struggle," the man says.

Her mouth is free, briefly, before the other man slips his fingers inside and pries it open and begins to force the hose of the bike pump into it.

"For you.  Not for us."

Something cold and metallic comes out of the bike pump.  She chokes, spits, swallows.

After a moment of this he pulls the hose out -

 - and he clamps down on her mouth again -

 - and he bites down on her carotid artery and drinks.

From the other side of his jacket he produces a long, thin knife, and drives it hard through two particular ribs, into her heart.

She goes limp.

He cleans his mouth and his knife with a silk handkerchief.  "Time?"

He slings the corpse over one shoulder and looks at his wristwatch.  "Two minutes and thirty-two seconds.  Plus about three hours and sixteen minutes from first sighting."

He dusts himself off.  "We're off our game, Mr. Gnash."

Sylvia borrows Giles's phone to call Uncle Tag and say she's heading to a friend's house after detention.

He takes her to his apartment.

"Sylvia Aster?" he says.  "John Quinn."  He sticks out a hand to shake.

Shake.  "I feel like I've seen you somewhere."

"I was at the Bronze the other night, keeping an eye out for Slayers.  I saw you there.  You were in a t-shirt in thirty degree weather, it was a hint," he says genially.

"I'll watch that now that I know what's up."

"I look forward to working with you."

"Can I get anyone anything to eat, or drink?  Tea?"

"Actually would it be all right if I just raided your fridge?"

"As you like."

Something snacky.  Hmm okay bag of grapes will do.  She sits down on the couch with the Watchers and pops a grape into her mouth.  "So I'm supposed to stop apocalypses."