"Well, as long as he's not planning on being a serial killer," says Azalea, making a plain turkey sandwich for him. "I have a strict 'no current serial killers inside the house' rule."

"I've never killed anyone and if I got attacked I would try to pick something reversible to do to the person who attacked me. Why are people confused about whether eating meat is ethical?"

"Well... sometimes people disagree about what the right thing to do is. They've all got mostly the same ideas, underneath it all, but the details are fuzzy, and sometimes the details turn out to be important, you know? But don't worry about that stuff until you've got down, like, 'murder is bad' and 'sharing is caring', all right? Here, eat this."

"Thank you!" Hey, it's much better than the cookie! "I've never had food this nice."

"That's horrifying. Karen, put turkey and ham on the - oh, you are. Good."

Karen is scribbling down things to add to their grocery list. "So I think it'll be hard to do very much in the way of getting you home before Christmas, but we can ask Wishbone about where to look, and - maybe you just wanna take a couple days off anyway? We can get more foods for you to try, and we have a Nintendo 64, I bet you don't have a Nintendo 64 at home. Tomorrow I gotta break up a vampire Christmas party down in LA before it starts, and then I gotta go to the Christmas vigil mass, but you can just hang out here probably? Unless that sounds super boring."

"Staying here sounds good. I hope the vampires don't hurt you, I really like you."

"I hope so too! I'll have backup and stuff. Also we're gonna have a party over here in three days, so some more people and some food, is that gonna bother you? You can stay in the basement if you need to - I realize this is like a gazillion things - "

"I like people! And I appreciate the basement! I should probably look at it and see if it's habitable but you seem pretty human so it should be."

"Oh, yeah, let's check, it's this way - "

The basement isn't really decorated - it's got one room that's almost entirely full of storage boxes, and the other has a washing machine and a dryer and a card table.

"So - we do the laundry there about once a week, but we can do it only when you're not using the room, if you're OK with that. If not then maybe we can go through the boxes and get you set up in that other room. It doesn't have its own bathroom but you can use the ones upstairs, I think? And we can set up a cot with some blankets over there or somewhere."

"Can I have a little box to put stuff in, if just putting it in the room isn't going to hide it? If I can have that then the laundry room is fine."

"Sure, yeah." She is silently sort of delighted that these specific alien needs are both alien and very easy to address. She comes back from the other room a minute later with a decent-sized cardboard moving box. "Like this?"

"Thank you! That'll work! So how do you do your laundry in here, is that what those boxes are for?"

"Those big white ones over there! It's - I can show you, I have to do it anyway."

She leaves and is back in less than a minute with a hamper full of clothes. "So this one washes - you put the clothes in like this, just darks or whites or colored ones at one time, and you put in some detergent - there's a mark on the cap that shows you how much - and you set the temperature and size with these dials, and then you shut the top. And now it'll spin them around for a while with the water and the soap until they're clean, and then we put them in the dryer to be blasted with hot air to dry. They make noises, so we'll make sure not to run them when you're sleeping. Make sense?"

"That sounds convenient! It's impressive that you can set the temperature, at home we don't know how to do all the things you do with your magic."

"Oh, this isn't magic! Our magic is way less reliable than this, most of the time, the translation amulet is really special. This is engineering. I don't know exactly how it works, but I bet we could look it up if we wanted the answer enough. At least if the library weren't closed tomorrow."

"If the library is open while I'm here, will your translation work on writing?"

"I dunno." She pulls her notebook out of her pocket again; the letters are completely unrecognizable. "Can you read that?"

"No. Well, even if I can't read about your technology, maybe I can get a job and buy some to take home."

"OK! If you want anything specific read I can read it out loud to you, though. I mean, not anything-anything, I guess I have some stuff to do, too, but in general."

"Thank you! You're really, really... I guess it's just ethics but it's really nice of you. I don't suppose you happen to want another hug?"

"Hugs are good!" She hugs him. "And - hmm. I don't want to make it sound like everyone here is good all the time, or that they always make the world better, even when they know how to do that. No one does good things all the time. Nobody here, anyway. Being nice to people who are nice back at me, that's super easy. But some things are hard, still. Like - it would be easier, I guess, to skip out on stopping the Christmas party in LA, and just have my own nice Christmas party at home. But I won't do that, because it'd be wrong to let people die when I know I can stop it. And then some things are way harder than that, like - studying for math class, or trying to figure out what to do with vampires you've captured and can't figure out how to rehabilitate? And those things it's - we don't manage to do it perfectly. We're not really strong enough. It's really hard, sometimes, to keep trying to do only good things all the time. It's so hard that nobody manages it. But - I think the trying gets us a long way, sometimes."

"...At home when we can't rehabilitate criminals we enslave them or kill them, is that evil or just not possible with vampires?"

She sighs and pulls herself up to sit on the dryer. "So people disagree on this one. Most people think there are situations where the best thing you can do is to kill someone, like if they're trying to murder a bunch of other people and you're not strong enough to stop them other ways. Some people think that there are things you can do that are so bad that it becomes OK to kill you because you did them. I think - I guess I think that everyone is just really really important, you know? Even criminals. Even vampires. So - sometimes I have to kill vampires. Sometimes it's the only way to stop them from hurting and killing lots of other people. But if I can stop them without resorting to that, then I want to do it, because - because they're mostly awful people, but they're people. Twisted, broken, often really terrible people. But people. And I think that people are worth saving, even when they suck."

She stifles the urge to end with 'and that's what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown'.

"That sounds really hard. ...Actually, it sounds like something a government should take care of, why is this your job?"