Another quiet night. Jeez. There must be a convention in Sacramento or something.
(Ari makes a mental note to see if there's actually a convention in Sacramento that he could infect with Qik'thx Plague or something. That'd be convenient. Such things have been known to happen.)
Patrol, patrol, patrol.
"That's a pity then. You could pick up some martial arts katas or something? Get the blood flowing, without the potentially getting the blood flowing out of you."
"...I'm not sure how you're sure of that. I'm really not joking about the death thing, you understand. Teenagers aren't exempt."
She is a teenaged girl.
A teenaged girl with remarkably little concern for her bodily integrity.
"...You're fucking kidding me."
"I don't mean to be rude, it's just that I'm kind of doing a thing, keeping the vampires honest and all that, and I don't need them slain. So we're kind of at cross purposes here. Unless you've taken it on yourself to revolutionize the Vampire Slayer industry to not involve vampire slaying?"
"Well, you'll notice I haven't burned down the blood brothel. 'Is a vampire' is not that great an approximation of 'needs to be killed immediately', as far as I can tell. There's plenty of overlap, but it's very possible to be one thing and not the other."
"Thanks for that; the brothel's a major success story. You seem a lot more reasonable than I'd expect from a Slayer."
"More the support staff. The Council's a bit... zero-tolerance. Stab first, ask questions of next of kin before stabbing them, kind of thing. And a lot of the potential Slayers get secreted away to training facilities by them early on, so they end up as mini-Watchers themselves."
"Mentioning that you knew about the bite shop and hadn't set fire to it, really. The Watcherspawn don't really do subtle."
"I guess you probably have a Watcher anyway, though. Kind of mandatory, or so I'm told. What's that like?"
"Very likely! I've had run-ins with Watchers who made Torquemada look like Officer Friendly. And it's not like they're the rule, but they're less of an exception than I'd like."
After a moment, he thinks to ask "So, if you patrol and I patrol, should we set up some kind of system for more effective demon-thwarting? I'm used to covering the whole town, but I'm happy to pass off some of the work to someone whose actual job it is."