"Oh, you mean the Master."

"Yeah, tell me about him. Friends? Allies? Evil schemes?"

"Oh, nothing terribly interesting. Murder, mayhem. Hell on Earth, if all goes well."

"Go on."

"Look, I don't know what the plan is if the Harvest fails. Give him time. But he'll find a way to free himself, and then - fun and games for everyone."

"Mmmhmm." He stands up. He stakes her.

"Was that really responsible?"

"I don't think this was anything - grand, or interesting, or big. Just a bunch of vampires, all dead now, but a day later than we shoulda done it. Will you come down and do the sewers with me this weekend?"

"Mmhmm. Stay here tonight, on the off-chance he has some allies you angered?"

"I hate your decor." But he stays.

She considers confessing, just so she can talk about how sad she is without any appreciable consequences, but she doesn't really actually think she's committed any mortal sins in this mess, so she skips it and just goes around sort of glumly for the next two days. She skips weekend training but promises she'll be back on the ball on Monday.

On Monday there is Dennis.

"Hi! What the fuck."

"You don't think you could let this one slide?"

"You made three dudes explode in front of like a hundred people, with a spotlight on you."

"Yes. And the explanation for this is - bye."

She runs off to class, which will allow her to avoid questions for, uh, the two hours that she has until gym class.

Where they're going to talk about how to escape kidnapping and what to do if something is stalking you in a dark alley!

These seem like important things to know! 

They should all pay attention to this probably.

"You realize you can't actually make me forget that you made three dudes explode by running away every time I ask about it. And how come nobody else remembers you making the three guys explode? Because I asked someone else about it and he said he thought you were a guest member of a local band."

"...I can definitely explain that but first I have to get through gym class."

"All right. You're not getting out of this, though."

After gym class she packs up her stuff.

Heyyy Alex, when the people on high declared from on high that vampires should not become common knowledge, how non-common did they want that knowledge to stay?

I'm not going to announce it to the class but if people are putting two and two together it's not the first time that's happened. It's okay to tell your friends.

OK then. Thanks.

She doesn't super have friends but this seems like a kind of irrelevant distinction. Dennis meets up with her at lunch.

"So the way it is, is - Sunnydale is situated on something that some people call a Hellmouth. It makes, uh, weird stuff come here, and happen in this area. Weird stuff like things that are, uh, colloquially known as vampires."

"So what are they actually?"

"Uh, I've just been calling them vampires. They drink blood and kill people and stuff. They're usually way more below the radar than they were the other night, the other night was weird."