"Yeah." Sigh. "Can you show me where your friends are? I think - probably I should go home and tell my sister that I have to stay out tonight, so she doesn't worry, and then I can come back and help try to kill them when they show up. There are an awful lot of vampires around here, though, I'm not very sure whether we can get it to the point where it's safe to sleep outside a house just by picking them off as they come at us."

"There are lots vampires?" 

Sigh. "God give us strength. I show you where we live."

And she will take Karen down to the parking lot in which the trailers are parked and the tents pitched. People recognize her and wave; she chatters to them in Spanish, telling them that she didn't get any holy water but she thinks God has other plans. Do they all have their holy symbols? They do! Good! 

These poor people. They know the right things to do and it isn't going to help.

"I'll try to be back as soon as I can. - I didn't get your name, I think. I'm Karen."

"Iomedae. God go with you."

"And also with you," she replies, almost automatically, even if it's not quite the familiar form of the phrase in English.

She jogs back to her house to scarf down dinner and explain the situation to her sister.

"...you want to spend all night camping out with a bunch of illegal immigrants who you don't know at all, and who you think are going to be attacked by vampires."

"Yeah."

"You do see how this is extremely worrying."

"She said that I had been sent by God, after the priest refused to give her holy water. And she's - probably right? They're going to die, if I don't help them. I'm just telling you beforehand so you know that I'm not dead, and don't start worrying about that unless I don't come back in the morning. I'm not leaving them to die so that I can do homework. - I'll probably bring my homework with me, though."

She's such an infuriatingly good kid.

"All right. Just - be careful, Karen. Not everyone out there is a good person, even the ones who are in danger."

"But the human kinds of bad people are, as a rule, way less capable of taking a hit than vampires are. - I'll be careful."

She's back around an hour and a half later, with three stakes and backpack full of textbooks. 

They've had dinner. She offers Karen some, of course. She has tortillas and rice and beans for both meals every day. She has told everyone to bring the trailers closer and positioned herself such that it'd be hard for Evil to get near anyone without getting into what she thinks is her Evil-detecting range, though it's not as if she's had Evils patiently test its exact limits with her. She has her sword out and is jumpy.

Karen's eaten, but of course she thanks them. She pushes down any thoughts about trying to get them more food than this. Karen has a job, but it's not the kind of job you get paid for, because that would require anyone to know about it. She doesn't personally have a lot of money, or anything. 

She can't decide how nervous she is, or how nervous she wants to look. She's won the fights she's picked so far, but she generally has some element of surprise going for her, and she's not sure how much the huddling together gives anything away. She thinks that vampires will probably go for them even when they're huddled together like this, but it's hard to say. She supposes it's also a win if they don't. The point is for no one to die, not for Karen to have to kill things. But if she doesn't fight the vampires here, they're probably eating people somewhere else, and also it's occurring to her that she doesn't have any way of gracefully extricating herself from guarding these people at any future point, which is awkward if she doesn't want to spend every night here indefinitely.

Probably the workers will move on, eventually. There are vampires in other places, too, presumably, but - it can't be as bad as it is here, there wouldn't be any people left in the world.

Concentrating on Detect Evil all the time turns out to be exhausting but she can sleep when she's in Heaven. She turns and turns and turns and prays and -

- ha -

- it's satisfying even though she is probably going to die now. She points Karen in the right direction and draws the sword.

Karen is off like a shot. Their visitor is fang-faced, no subtlety; there's no point in it, for running up and dragging off people who know you're coming. She starts off by punching him, trying to get the vampire away from his target and away from everyone else. He's going to hit her back, but she can take a couple hits while she works on staking him. She's pretty sure the important thing is just not to let him pin her.

How is she that fast. How is she punching the vampire. Powerful things can be hurt only by smiting them or by magic weapons!! 

She will, herself, smite it, and try to stab it while definitely not stabbing Karen.

Wow, okay, sword. She was honestly kind of expecting Iomedae to hang back once she saw that Karen was kinda sorta capable of handling this, but now that she thinks of it that doesn't really sound like someone who shows up at the local Catholic Church with a sword and a dozen gatorade bottles that she wants to fill with holy water, does it.

The problem with stabbing vampires with swords is that it's not actually that much more effective than punching them, apparently, which isn't actually a thing that Karen was sure of before because Karen does not personally use a sword. She knows that you can behead them, but if you mean to stab them, it's got to be wood, and it's got to be through the heart. If you mean to disable them - Karen has never actually disabled a vampire and honestly has no idea what it would take.

This vampire, she is going to try to stake, now, if she can manage to do it while Iomedae is swinging her sword around.

She can! The sword is mostly only distracting the vampire but it's at least that!

(Iomedae's religious knowledge is not quite sufficient to know this is weird though she is thinking that she kind of hoped her first smite would be more spectacular.)

She rams her stake through the vampire's heart, and it disappears into a puff of dust.

"Well. One down," says Karen, more like she just finished an annoying algebra problem than like she just slew a vampire.

Iomedae doesn't know enough to know if vampires are supposed to do that!

"Thank you! God is good!" Everyone else is watching them a little wonderingly and Iomedae turns around to say more to them in rapid Spanish. Then back to Karen. "I need learn that so you not here always. How you learn?"

Oh that's so reasonable. And awkward. Oh.

"I, uh, sort of didn't? It's, um - I hear that - supposedly, at any given time, there's exactly one teenage girl somewhere in the world, who gets - you know, strength, speed, toughness, and is supposed to use her powers to fight vampires. And I guess right now that's me. I can tell you the stuff that I know about vampires, if there's anything you don't already know, but - I don't know how to make you hit like a truck."

“God do that.” And a pause as she tried to figure out how to say more - “Strength is from God, but learn to fight also, so God strength go farther.”

" - yeah. I guess that would probably also be smart." Karen's formal combat training pretty much consists of attending some karate classes when she was nine. It's - kind of embarrassing that it hasn't occurred to her to sign up for more. But then she'd have to hide her powers or explain her powers, and those both sound terrible, so -

"Priest should teach us. Priest no teach us, we find old person fought vampires when young. And you teach me. And we teach everyone."

"That sounds... possible." It's possible that she means exactly the opposite of that. "I, uh, haven't actually met anyone else who believes in vampires, though? So I'm not sure if we'll be able to find an old person who's fought vampires."