"He seemed like it, but."

"I'm pretty sure the guy who tried to use you as a murder weapon had a soul. Souls seem increasingly like a statistical thing."

Snort.

"Pleased to meet you, insofar as I am pleased about anything."

"Are you not? Pleased about things."

"One hundred percent of the people I have ever been close to are dead. 'Pleased' seems a ways out of reach just now."

"Okay, point. Still, suicide by Slayer a week out seems like jumping the gun. ...The laser pointer."

"I don't actively want to kill myself, I just can't be bothered to give the vaguest approximation of a fuck whether I live or die."

"Ah."

"Whereas I'd be somewhat annoyed if you died. I'm not much in the habit of liking people, but I like you."

"Because I made a cheesy joke about fries?"

"I think it was around 'me and my key to the morgue' that I became more than idly charmed."

"I mean, the Slayer power set - much though I miss it right now - is really badly designed. It makes much more sense to sneak up on incipient vampires when they aren't twitching."

"Eh, cut the originators some slack, I'm sure the situation was very different several thousand years ago when they cooked it up. I'd be more inclined to question their choice of specifically and only teenage girls as potential recipients."

"Yes, I object to that too. I like saving the world as an occupation, but nobody actually checked on that first."

"Well, if the chain depended on consent it would only take one generation of unusually recalcitrant potential Slayers to fuck everyone over. But if I had to design the thing, assuming a context where the need for a superpowered champion to beat up demons was desperate and immediate, I still wouldn't limit it to girls and I would not if at all possible limit it to one at a time. Limiting it to teenagers is a little more defensible on practical grounds, slip the superpowers in with all the adolescent biological upheavals so the recipient has a better chance to adapt, take maximum advantage of all that youthful energy, but if they could've had the whole package guided a little more sensibly on its way from host to host they wouldn't have needed to rely on that kind of approximation to boost the chance of landing an effective Slayer."

"I think my wording when I was complaining about this to my Watcher was something like 'fifty adult volunteers'."

"I'm sure it comes down to some combination of 'operative constraints on the magic' and 'they were idiots'."

"Yes. Some unknown combination that as far as I know no one has tried to reverse-engineer. I think that series of complaints also objected to the fact that I don't get a budget."

"That part is the fault of the modern Watcher's Council, who are certainly idiots."

"Any ten of them with a day job and a tithe the typical Mormon manages to cough up could free me up for full-time Slaying. As it is I'm stuck living with my dad until I find some kind of income stream that accepts 'sorry, I have to go punch things' as an excused absence."

"And I suppose you can't just take up theft."

"Be an awkward transition period between cohabiting with the cop and fencing enough art and jewelry to make rent elsewhere."