This leaves her plenty of time that afternoon to get herself worked up. Should she tell him? That resolves fairly quickly to 'yes'. He's her husband, he's dealt with all her parents' Watcher nonsense so far. But how to tell him, she can't not tell him, but she doesn't want him to think she's going back to being a Watcher. Slayers consult with plenty of people when they're active, right? Witches and priests and any of the other Watchers with expertise their own Watcher is lacking. She's not going to leave the girl hanging if she can help, but she's a nurse now. She has to be clear about that.
Should she tell her parents? That causes a lot more debate. Her parents don't know where the Slayer is, and it's upsetting them. And Emma does know where the Slayer is, and she has no desire to be a Watcher herself, so she really should tell them where the Slayer is, so they can arrange for someone to come and step in. But... Emma's kind of upset with her parents, right now. Watcher training is not more important than your daughter, than your daughter's expressly stated plans she made with her husband. And what if her parents insist that she has to be the Watcher, when she has no intention of doing so? She goes back and forth on that one for a while, and decides to get Phil's opinion. (He's her husband, they share, they come up with plans that work for both of them. Wouldn't it be nice if her parents could do the same?)
She briefly comes up with "should she tell the Watcher's Council separately from her parents", but dismisses that one even faster. Same problems as her parents, but her parents would also be upset she went over their heads. If she tells someone, it should be her parents, not the fussy old British men she's only met a handful of times.
And what happens if something happens to the Slayer in the meantime, that having a Watcher could have fixed? Is she responsible?
Emma is very stressed by the time Phil's home from work.
Phil is familiar with his wife's faces. The one she's wearing when he gets home is the one he has dubbed Kernel Panic Face. He scoops her up in a hug. "You," he informs her, setting her down and poking her nose, "look like you've been working yourself up all day. Spill, babe."
Emma's throat blocks up and she clings to Phil miserably. She doesn't know what to do, help, he's good at helping her decide things.
"Breathe, breathe," he soothes. "It'll be okay. This is not on you, this is the Slayer's job, okay? She'll get a Watcher and she'll save the world sixteen times before breakfast and you'll forget you were ever worried about it." When she's started breathing more like a normal person, he tilts her face up and out of his collarbone. "What'd she say when you asked her?"
But Emma gets distracted, unfortunately. She's got shifts the following day, and the day after, and then her coworker goes into labor early and Emma has to pick up her shifts, and then it's suddenly five days later and she's just slept through really the entire day on her first day off because she's so tired. Well, now she's bright and awake, at least, she just slept for- what, fifteen hours? Wow. She was tired, wasn't she.
She knows she has things to do- errands, call her father back, there's laundry to do and dinner to make and Slayers to talk to. But she has just worked twelve hour shifts for five straight days, and she is officially doing that all later.
She curls up in the living room with a book and watches the sunset. It's a nice way to spend a lazy evening.
"We're - she's in the backseat of our car in our driveway, I can't carry her, she was conscious most of the way home and then - I don't think anything bit her, I think maybe she touched something or breathed something...? She's not bleeding except from like little cuts - but she didn't tell me exactly -" She rattles off the address. "I tried a spell and it didn't work but I don't know if that's because I'm not very good or - what."
Emma grabs all the books she has on hand she thinks might be relevant- she didn't keep that many, she's not a Watcher, but not being a Watcher didn't mean demons stopped existing, she still has some- and heads for her car. She doesn't need to grab a first aid kit; she keeps one in the trunk.
After some questionably legal driving that only pretended to obey the speed limit, Emma's at the address provided. "Hello?" Drat, she didn't get the witch's name. "Little sister Swan?"
Bella is curled up on her side across the bench, hair in a ponytail, cross necklace on. There are some little scratches on her but no bites or claw marks. There's a messenger bag on the floor of the backseat, half-open, with a crossbow, a plastic bag full of water balloons, and a couple of stakes partly visible.
Emma pulls out her first aid kit and gets to examining. Firs things first- Bella might have been poisoned, so the gloves are going on. The larger of the scratches are dressed and bandaged, as long as she's here, but for the most part Bella's unscathed and she can focus on poison-searching. She snorts when she sees the water balloons, but otherwise mostly ignores the Slayer paraphernalia while she searches (except insofar as she has to maneuver around it). It's not like she's surprised Bella has a pile of stakes.
When she get to Bella's hands, she finds a slimy goo between her fingers and jerks backwards. "Okay, bad, bad bad bad. You-" she points at Soph- "no touching your sister. Just in case there's more of this."
She doesn't even remember the name of this particular demon, since they're not all that common, but they're common enough that there's a short note about them in one of her books. She pulls it out and finds the reference; the cure is complicated, but at least it exists.
"Okay, so, she's-" Emma rethinks her decision to explain any of this to a panicked younger(?) sister. 'Your sister will forever be a comatose vegetable without the cure' seems unnecessarily traumatizing. "-curable," she says instead. "It's a stupidly complicated cure, but it is a cure. I might need you to help brew it, though, I've never actually made it before."
Most of her work is nice and straightforward and the medicine already exists. There are, unfortunately, no stores in Sunnydale that stock demon antidotes, and brewing is not a heavily emphasized Watcher skill. At least she has a witch handy to help.
"Damn, that is a list, that- okay, yeah, I can make it, I don't have all of that but I have a lot of it. One of you come get me? Plus a shopping detour. Magic Box and the grocery store both. And possibly also the hardware store if the grocery store is its usual level of shit."
"Soph, here-" she digs out an extra set of gloves. "Don't move her if you can help it, but don't let her lie face down either, side or back are both fine. We've got some time, she's not going to decline quickly or anything." Emma gives it a couple of days give or take before she'd have to move Bella to a hospital, but the cure only takes about twelve hours to prepare, so that tidbit can wait until afterwards. "I'm going to get Alli, okay? Just- wait here. Call me if anything happens."
She extracts Alli's address from her and goes to play chauffeur.
They do not wind up needing to go to the hardware store, but they stop for ingredients at both the grocery store and the Magic Box. The Magic Box is in the process of closing for the night, but a combination of Alli's regular customer status and Emma's continued Responsible Adult (Alli giggles a little to see that Emma's put on her ER nurse badge, even) and they're allowed to make their purchases anyway. And then they head for the Swans' house.
Alli promptly starts lugging bags out of the car. "Okay, Soph, potion making class is no longer optional," she tells the other witch. "I have like forty five damn ingredients to get chopped and measured and combined. Help. And! Also! Want to tell me what the hell happened? Because I am familiar with your curfew, dude, it is past your curfew, and what the hell got to your sister that I'm making a potion that's complicated as shit to fix it."
Alli provides Soph with some spices and the desired quantities thereof. She then gets to work mashing up some weirdly shaped mushrooms from the Magic Box. "Okay, I get the... the... save the kid syndrome shit. I think. But you said she was waiting. Why was she waiting? Why the hell was it Bella in there, she has a cop dad with a gun and a witch for a little sister!"
She finishes grinding up some spices in the mortar Alli gave her and starts measuring piles into a mixing bowl, chanting carefully as she combines them. When she's done, she continues. "Except this was not vampires, these were Sonoral Demons, and they happen to be extremely venomous. How she killed enough of them to get the kid out at all is something of a miracle, to be honest. They're hard to kill if you don't know what they are, and that's if they don't poison you first."
Also, who is this lady and how do you know her and how does she know any of this, but since at this point Alli is expecting to be asking questions until Doomsday, she can wait.
"I did the rose quartz blessing on her. I hope it helped, but - I don't know, she still got poisoned. Alli I barely know more than you do all I know is a couple weeks after we moved in she suddenly wasn't clumsy anymore and then a little later this thing showed up in our bedroom and asked why she hadn't been getting dreams from it and it was all, 'you are the Slayer', and from there it's been - books and me trying to witch it up or figure out why she can't - might as well ask, is that because of being the Slayer, Emma, can Slayers not do spells? - and there's vampires but there's a lot fewer of them now because we have a key to the morgue and just stake everybody who comes through preemptively with little slivers of wood -"
At Soph's question, she blinks confusedly. "Um. A thing showed up in your bedroom? That's- I've never heard of that, what thing? Slayers as a rule don't become witches, but that's- that's because a lot of it's dark and it's horribly addictive, not because they can't, there are stories of Slayers who've cast spells."
Things are starting to be added to heat. Very carefully and with Emma occasionally contributing chanting, the potion is taking form. Mix, stir, add things, chant, repeat. Emma wasn't kidding about it being complicated.
After about five minutes, Alli dubs the potion ignorable enough that she can return to an actual conversation. "Your life," she informs Soph, "is both wickedly cool and insane as shit. Like, what the hell, man."
Emma is making herself an Understatement of the Century award when she gets home. Along with a very strong cocktail.
Alli shrugs, as much as is possible while stirring a potion. "Not your fault. It's just- it's shitty, right? Magic's too cool to stop using." She pulls a couple of vials out of her pocket, chugs one and rolls another in Soph's direction. "Have some Pick Me Up. As long as we're addicted anyway. What's one more feel good potion?"
She speaks the last chant over a bowl Alli offers her, and then looks at the recipe, which has been residing in front of Alli. "Now what?"
She dumps Emma's chanted-over bowl into the cauldron and turns the heat up. "Now- we boil it for half an hour, simmer it for three hours, and then we get to do that stir every hour thing we all think is deeply shitty. Thus. Pick Me Ups. We can stir in shifts, I guess, but no one here is about to get a hell of a lot of sleep." She offers one to Emma.
Emma isn't wild about the idea of taking untested potions from a teenager, but she feels like she's sort of gotten herself stuck with it by standing up for the thing in the first place, so she drinks it. And then regards the bottle with appreciation. "Not bad. Careful or I'll take it with me to the hospital for my ER shifts."
"Deal." She carefully turns up the heat on the potion until it's boiling, stirs it carefully twice in each direction, and then puts down the spoon. It's a metal spoon with a towel around the base- wooden spoons would not like this particular potion, the recipe was pretty clear about that. "Go en-coffee, Soph. We've got about twenty minutes until we have to pay attention to this thing again anyway. Someone set an alarm?"
"We have a cure, it's brewing, she'll be awake soon. Okay?"
"Hi - um - Bella got hurt but she's going to be fine I called that one nurse whose number she gave us and also my witch friend and I'm babysitting this potion and it'll be done in a few hours and she'll be fine. She's in the backseat of the car, we didn't want to move her."
From her nap on the couch, Emma hears the door close and stirs. She's briefly confused by her location, but sorts it out and sticks her head around the door. Soph said to let her talk, so she is carefully quiet in case Soph's not done, but she at least attempts to catch her eye in a sort of 'hi I am kind of backup' way.
"Physically she'll be fine," Emma confirms. "She had a few scratches but they weren't serious. I patched them up already, no stitches or anything. It's just- for her it'll feel like she slept a while and had a lot of nightmares? It's dangerous if it goes on too long, same as a coma, but she'll be awake well before she'd be in any danger."
"You can tell your sister you saved her when she wakes up," she suggests. It's not going to be every day Soph gets to save Bella, rather than vice versa; she might as well enjoy it.
Emma checks her watch. She's short sleep by an hour or so, but she's up anyway. She knew she was signing up for this with the middle shift anyway. "I'll just stay up, why not. Get some rest, I'll have Alli wake us up when-" she takes pity on Chief Swan and his potion-related uneasiness- "we're done here."
Emma drags herself awake, yawning and blinking. That was not enough sleep, she thinks tiredly. "Probably. If it's the right color, that's a good sign-" yawn, "-but let's test it on her hand first. She still has some of that goop between her fingers, it'll evaporate on contact if we did it right."
Alli is so excited, she made a potion and it worked and she helped save Bella and this is all so cool. But she attempts not to bounce too much, because Soph has been extremely stressed and that seems awfully mean for no reason. But still. Bella is awake, that is a good thing, she can be a little excited. "Bella? Bella, hey, are you okay?"
"You were supposed to have nightmares," Emma confirms. "But you're also supposed to have prophetic Slayer dreams, and Soph says you got to skip those too, so maybe this is related? But, um. Question for later. You should check in with your dad, he was pretty worried."
"So at any given time lots of old British people are stalking and training various possible Slayers, most of whom will never need it? Unless that's where more Watchers come from is ex-Slayers with lots of memorized demons and no enhanced stabbing skills?"
"Some of them join up. Some become demon hunters anyway. There aren't very many of either type. Most just- go about their daily lives. Not becoming the Slayer doesn't mean demons cease to exist, it's still useful sometimes. I've patched up quite a few demon bites myself since I got here."
"Well, I won't tell them if you don't want me to. But they're likely to find you eventually. It's worth having an approach planned out." Emma wonders if she can claim memory loss, should her parents ask her why she failed to notice or report a Slayer in her own town. "I'm curious, though. Support staff?"
"Demon-related information services. Medical attention that's less suspicious than non-you hospital nurses. Legal finagling if I kill something that leaves a humanlike-looking body or somebody pins a vampiric disappearance on me or I get spotted breaking in somewhere for legitimate supernatural purposes - Dad can help with this, but he's not a lawyer and every use of nepotism makes the other cops that much more suspicious. On-call rides to and from demonically infested places. Witching. Keeping me afloat in school if Slaying interferes with doing it the usual way. Hell, cash - it doesn't make sense for the one and only Slayer to have to save up her allowance for a crossbow. If there's lots of old British people in on this, any ten of them could work day jobs and tithe modest quantities so I didn't need to try to come up with some kind of career/Slaying balance once I move out of Dad's house. Since there's only one of me."
"Demon information, yes. On call rides generally also yes. Medical attention and witching they usually go with a find a helpful local approach. Legal and financial- might be out of their hands, unfortunately. They don't have a lot of power, particularly not outside of England, and no one's managed a successful tithe system yet. I think historically they've been treated as walking talking demon encyclopedias, for the most part."
"Well, walking demon encyclopedias could come in handy, but... I don't know, maybe I'm being paranoid, but - some of the ways an organization could maintain itself in a position of authority over non-volunteer superpowered teenage girls with short life expectancies who self-replace, over a long period of time, are not A+ best practices?"
"Paranoia is a healthy Slayer trait," Emma says wryly. "I'm sure there have been problems, no organization's perfect, but they're hardly bedtime stories my parents would be telling me, so I can't trot out specific examples or anything like that. I can say, as someone who has been a young girl around a number of Watchers- they seem to rely largely on British etiquette? We are your elders and are more knowledgeable about demons than you are, respect our age and learning, that sort of thing."
"I feel like if I got anywhere near this organization I'd want to either collect one non-objectionable Watcher and take them home with me to be my encyclopedia and never interact with the others, or spend a lot of time instituting social reforms. I wonder if I can contact them anonymously."
Emma collects Alli from where she'd fallen back asleep on the Swan's couch, drops her off, and returns home. Time to give her husband a more complete, less text-messaged report, and for the love of everything, get some more sleep.
Hello, this is the Slayer. I understand you're looking for me. Should I want you to find me?
Dear Anonymous Slayer,
We have been looking for you for months! We cannot send you your Watcher to supervise your training and improvement as a Slayer if we cannot locate you. Please get in contact with us as soon as possible so we can evaluate you and assign you a Watcher as efficiently as possible.
Sincerely,
The Watcher's Council
1) Who do you want to assign as my Watcher, and how is that decision made?
2) What sort of evaluation do you have in mind?
3) What is the content of your training curriculum?
- the Slayer
You may be assured that the Watcher's Council has many centuries of experience in assigning Watchers. Your evaluation can of course not be discussed until complete, lest the results be contaminated. Additionally, we cannot reveal the content of our training curriculum to an unverified, anonymous account with adequate proof of your identity.
Sincerely,
The Watcher's Council
Efforts are made to trace the emails. This also fails, somewhat spectacularly. The Watcher's Council has no one particularly knowledgeable on technology, and no good leads on how to locate such people; the Venn diagram of "competent with technology", "in the know enough to be told about Slayers and Watchers" and "locatable by the Council" turns out to be one technopagan up in Scotland who is utterly disinclined to work with the Watchers, and even less so when they explain their goal. He sides with the missing Slayer; the Watchers are welcome to find her themselves.
Finally, after a week, they are forced (extremely unwillingly) to admit that they are not infallible, and they may not be able to find this girl without her help. Another email is sent.
Dear Anonymous Slayer,
Surely you understand we cannot blithely reveal Council information to any anonymous account claiming to be the Slayer. What can you reasonably expect us to do that would make you willing to reveal yourself?
Sincerely,
The Watcher's Council
Is anyone else telling you they're the Slayer? I could certainly understand your reluctance to believe me if there's competing claims. I actually do not understand why the council feels the need to be particularly secretive about any of the questions I have asked, as the three of them together boil down to 'what do you do with non-volunteer teenage girls once you have found them'. A lack of transparency about what you do with non-volunteer teenage girls once you have found them worries me very much.
- the Slayer
The fact that the Slayer is missing and minimally active is not widely known, but becoming less so. That you are the first to claim Slayerhood does not make you the most reliable. That you find our methods 'worrisome' is suspicious by itself. Do you also regularly demand that your school provide you with your tests before you are given them?
Sincerely,
The Watcher's Council
Feel free to decide that I'm not the Slayer and that you don't want to Watch me; you aren't selling your usefulness nearly well enough to make me eager to prove myself. Public education in the developed world is subject to considerable regulation, parental and public scrutiny, reform activism, and oversight which I suspect you do not have, and the general scope of tests is known even when the questions are not.
- the Slayer
Eventually, a replacement is selected, largely by virtue of 'as different from Hughes as possible'. Soon, Bella has a response.
Dear Slayer,
I apologize for the attitude of your previous correspondent, though I do hope you understand his (poorly expressed) caution. Our goal is to help and support you in your goal; to be a source of knowledge and research and training. While I readily admit our initial replies leaves much to be desired, we are genuinely trying to help you. Please know that.
Sincerely,
Tamara Reed
Watcher's Council
P.S. The general scope of the tests is 'kill demons'. Hopefully I haven't ruined the surprise.
Thanks for replacing the previous Watcher.
I'm definitely interested in engaging help from various quarters, but by the time I found out Watchers existed, I was already underway on constructing my own support system and consider going on with that a viable option. Your plausible advantages of experience and knowledge are only good to me if they don't come with enough personality conflict and wastes of time to outweigh improved speed and accuracy at finding how to kill specific demons or interpret any given prophecy, and I am keenly aware that there are probably people who think that if they don't like the current Slayer they might want to hurry up and get ahold of the next one, so to speak. At present my identity is the only leverage I have as long as I don't want to take up assaulting living human beings, so I'm being cagey.
What do you say to consulting by e-mail for a while?
- the Slayer
Glad to help. You might consider adding resources to your list; the Watcher library is extensive, and Watchers often have supplemental personal libraries of their own. I understand your caution (and it's a healthy instinct for a Slayer I happen to applaud) but I promise my goal as a Watcher is to help you become a better Slayer. With that in mind, if e-mail makes you more comfortable, I'm happy to arrange a trial run.
Sincerely,
Tamara Reed
Watcher's Council
Good to know. I'll put this email account on my phone and stop emailing at only specific times of day; this will presumably make me easier to track down, but I think I'm going to extend you enough trust to allow that on the understanding that I don't want to work with you if you turn up or look into the details of my life before I ask you to.
One thing I haven't been able to find much about in the books I've turned up is the existence of people who can't do magic. I've been trying to supplement my Slayer-ability package and gotten no results. Any idea why that might be?
- the Slayer
I think I can manage that much. As it happens, I find travel tiresome and stressful and welcome the excuse to avoid it.
There's actually a few ways on record for humans to be unable to perform magic. By far the most common is a simple lack of magical power. But we've also been unable to locate you with magic. Have you encountered any other plausible magic-related abnormalities that could be relevant that you're willing to share?
Sincerely,
Tamara Reed
Watcher's Council
There are cases on record of humans born with innate mental defenses. There is no precedent of Slayers with such abilities, so I cannot speak to your prophetic dreams, but it's the closest match for the experiences you've mentioned. Does that seem plausible?
It prevents you from performing most known forms of magic, which you seem to already know, which has its pros and cons. It protects against mental effects and sendings; I might have called that an unambiguous good, but I'd be wary of warnings you might miss, if it's interfering with your prophecies. And it protects against magical scrying, which you probably already figured out from my original question, which is also a positive except possibly in cases of emergency.
Two that are unreliable enough as to be barely worth mentioning, and one that's more reliable but vague enough that it's considered 'possibly relevant' about every decade. I wouldn't schedule plans around them. But do let me know if you start seeing 'angles with fists of gold', I suppose. Or angels, to adjust for poor spelling.