"Maybe it's the self-constructed personality. Maybe anyone would've felt the same in my situation and my situation was just rare enough not to have made an impression on the public consciousness. Maybe I'm just a fluke. Does it matter?"

"It could. Although not very much if it's any of your guesses."

"Under what circumstances would it, then?"

"Well, here you are, having a polite conversation with the Slayer, whom you have just handed a deadly weapon. If there were any scaled-up way to displace conventional vampires with you-vampires that would be nice, given that conventional vampires sometimes torture people to death too."

"I wouldn't get my hopes up if I were you."

"They weren't very up, especially since you seem to want me to kill you and I worry that if this were a widespread incentive I would have a lot of problems."

"In what sense?"

"If there were only like thirty of them they could just form a line. If there were a whole lot they might have to compete for my attention, and I'm pretty sure they wouldn't pick ways I'd like to be prioritized for staking."

"Yes, that does sound like it would get awkward rather precipitously."

"Exactly. And somehow I doubt that the relevant traits can be mixed a la carte."

"Will it help if I say that I would not at all be inclined to participate in that competition?"

"I mean, not in the hypothetical where I'm considering releasing your personality virus into the air, but maybe. What are you going to do if I don't kill you here today?"

"Who the fuck knows."

"You haven't even been a vampire very long - I don't remember when I saw the news story but it wasn't that long ago..."

"Yeah. And I can tell what losing my soul did to me, and it really doesn't seem to be as drastic as advertised. Maybe my personality just happens to be naturally resilient to the loss of its moral compass."

"Or maybe it's a weird interaction with cloning, or somebody cast a spell on you... no good way to tell."

"A spell to do what? If I'd kept my soul, I still would've killed Obadiah but I wouldn't have bothered with the elaborate torments first."

"I don't know, I'm not exactly an expert on magic, I can't get any of it to work on my own and haven't found a teacher to troubleshoot."

"You wanna know how they got me?"

"Fake magic teacher?" he guesses.

"Yep. I'm not even sure if they had the ruse planned ahead of time, I just showed up and instead of my Watcher there was this other guy and I asked if my Watcher got me a magic teacher for my birthday."

"And he ran with it. Proving, I suppose, that not all Watchers are hopelessly stupid. And now here we are."

"Here we are. I don't know how much my Watcher knew."

"Couldn't tell you. Wouldn't surprise me to hear that he was in on it, but maybe you have an unusually ethical Watcher."