"They want to build a government installation in Sunnydale and conduct experiments on demons. They have an idea to make them harmless, or something. Doesn't work yet, but maybe with more research. If they ever got it to work, we'd be done killing them."

"That would be really good." She smiles, because dancing about it would be weird.

"Yeah, it's a great solution for vampires - possibly the only one. Gonna be a bit awkward with demons but maybe they'll handle that reasonably, I don't really know."

"Yeah, a lot depends on the specific kind of demon. But it's better than a lot of possible alternatives."

"Yeah. Guy I know wants you to accept your summer camp invitation. He thinks it'll be a good chance to learn about the people doing this project, how they're thinking about demons and vampires, how annoying they're going to be to work with, how much we can trust them with - whether they'll look out for Zeke -"

She bites her lip.

She can't very well let Zeke outdo her on the heroic-defense-of-friends front. That would just be embarrassing. And it is, actually, important to know who they're dealing with.

"Yeah, OK. I can do that."

"I don't think it'll be dangerous or I'd keep you well clear of it. Just - lotsa being polite to people in uniform and figuring out how they work and what they want."

"I can be polite to people. Probably. As long as they don't have high expectations. What, uh, exactly do these people know about me right now, I assume they don't just invite random people to their... summer camp?"

"They know you're a new slayer who hasn't had your Watcher training. - word has gotten out, not through me, that there's a slayer in Sunnydale. I think it was all the slaying."

"Ahh. Yeah. I can see how that would happen. If magical dogs can find us then presumably at least a few other people have put two and two together."

"Yeah. Past time we talked about the Watcher's Council so you're prepared if they try to show up. Anyway, these people know you're a slayer."

"Yeah. Uh, Wishbone's told me some stuff, but I think his last contact with the Council was in the 1800s or so. It'd be good to know what they've been doing lately. Besides, uh, killing all of their slayers at eighteen."

"Technically not all of them. They do a 'coming of age' test where they drug the Slayer until she's weaker than a normal human, then lock her in with a vampire. To test her wits, or something. Our understanding is that they were finding the adult ones very hard to control, especially because they don't have that much to offer them - uh, training, but they're all unenhanced humans and there's really only so much an unenhanced human can teach you - access to a library, which is genuinely important, but which grates when it comes with a lot of conditions on who you fight and how and when..."

"Makes sense. The being drugged and locked up with a vampire sounds, uh, bad. ...these people are probably less likely to cause serious problems for us if we make friends with people like the summer camp people, aren't they. Conditional on the summer camp people being at least slightly less terrible."

"Seems like it, yeah. If you're affiliated with some humans who are doing.... legible human things... they might be less inclined to meddle than if your allies are all mysterious - I think the Watcher's Council also does not admit the existence of any categories other than 'demon' and 'human', or consider any of the former civilians."

"Figures. Be too simple if there were an uncomplicated good guy faction with only a couple shortcomings. All right. What do we know about what, uh, summer camp consists of?"

"The secret government agency that deals with supernatural stuff is called the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, in the Department of the Interior. It's based in Virginia. The director is one of us... our word for ourselves, the thing Michael and I are, is Quendi. It means 'user of words', because that was distinguishing, uh, way back when."

"Ahh." This is a more sensible and alien-sounding name than 'not-archangels', really. "So is the director, like, a sort of OK Quendi, or like a 'your mind is going to be being read a lot' Quendi?"

"We only do that to hostiles or in emergencies. I've been really pushing the line because Sunnydale has so many ways to randomly kill you but you don't need to worry about him reading your mind."

She adjusts down the odds of being mindread slightly.

"All right then. Anything else I need to be prepared for? Just, like, in general? List of items to pack?"

"I think there's...swimming? And hiking? And lectures on patriotism?"

"...It is at this point super unclear to me to what extent this is actually a summer camp."

"I think it will check all the summer camp boxes but, uh, some of the people involved are thinking of this in a 'superheroes are an asset to America' kind of way? Which is part of what - it'd be useful to know how many of those there are and whether they're reasonable about it -"

"Cool. I will, uh, pack with that in mind and take copious notes on our colleagues in the superhero business."

"All right. Take care. Page Matthew Carter if you get into any trouble that doesn't look like it can just be punched in the face."

- aw, man, Alex is gonna be out of range this whole time. Oh well. She got by for fifteen years without a person to page every time random terrible things happened, and she can probably do it again for however many weeks the camp is. Gotta be strong in the face of potential embarrassment.

"Will do. Oh, and can you take Wishbone, if it's gonna be a few weeks? Because he'll get super lonely if he doesn't have anybody to pay attention to him."

From his face this is a surprisingly complicated request but - 

"Yeah, yeah, of course."

"Cool. Thank you. - if it's not a problem? I just don't want him to be sad."

"Neither do I."

She nods. "I'll pack."

And she does. She packs normal, sensible essentials (clothes, toiletries, hair ties, notebooks, pens, wooden rods that don't look like stakes but can be snapped into them if needed, first aid kit with scissors, St. Benedict medal), morale-building materials (prayer cards, sci fi novels, game boy), and summer camp things (swimsuit, hiking boots, flashlight).

(She practices imagining that all of her thoughts are taking place behind a waterfall that plays the tune of 'Good King Wenceslas' on repeat. She assures Azalea that she will probably not be attacked by government assassins, and that if she is she can totally probably punch them in the face or something. She imagines being someone who is exactly the correct amount of competent.)

She decides that she's about as ready for superhero summer camp as she's going to be.

Superhero summer camp is held in the Appalachians. There are cabins and a cafeteria and a high ropes course and all of the counselors are clearly military but trying rather diligently to look like underpaid college students who got this job to get out of their parents' house. 

Her cabin contains a blind girl named Jasmine who uses a cane to get around objects but navigates people with no difficulty whatsoever, a tall girl named Callida who turns spiky when she sneezes, the invisible inhabitant of a bunk in the corner, who introduces herself as 'me', and a cheerful telekinetic named Rebecca who wears a floppy, wide-brimmed hat and warns the rest of them that sunburn will be terrible for their complexions. 

"Half-demon?" Callida asks Karen when they've all unpacked their possessions into the lockers at the foot of their bed.

"No, uh, I'm sort of a vampire slayer person. The spiky thing is cool, though."

"Wow," says Rebecca, "you're the Slayer? That's so cool, there's only one of those in the world, right? Did you know that once someone accused me of being a vampire? Me! - I'm not! I'll touch your cross if you want."

She offers one. "I mean, you can if you want, but I do sort of figure that we all got here during the day, so I'm not insanely worried about this." 

She is attempting to keep up musical waterfalls all the time now. But in a paranoid way, not in a worried way.

She pokes it. "Also one assumes that the government is competent enough to screen their summer camp for vampires, they're the government."

"How do we know that the government isn't mostly vampires?" Jasmine asks. "Because they're rich, you know, since they live forever, and if you wanted to eat people without getting in trouble you might try to be important..."

"I heard the Supreme Court justices are all vampires," Callida says. "I don't think it's true but I heard it. They just get to work early and leave late and no one asks any questions."

"Nonsense," Rebecca says firmly. "All politicians are sworn in on Bibles."

"Technically you don't have to use a Bible. Teddy Roosevelt didn't. But everybody's always asking how much longer the supreme court justices have to live, so I think they'd have about the hardest time of anyone being secretly vampires."

She's not at all sure how much she should bet on the government's competence. She's just not going to mention the mayor of Sunnydale.

Her cabinmates move on to debating which musicians and actors might be vampires. Callida sleeps with special fabrics because she rips through normal ones, apparently. Rebecca has an entire suitcase that's just skincare and makeup products. The invisible girl has a lot of boy band posters. "Can you see them?" she asks Jasmine.

"Uh, no."

"Oh. I thought you could see people, since you didn't need the cane -"

"I can see movement. Before it happens, actually. I can see people even if they're standing still because people can't really stand still. But not posters."

She's been here for three seconds and she already misses people. Mostly Wishbone. And Connor and Azalea. And Alex. And Zeke. And Dennis and Mercy. She doesn't even talk to all of these people every day, so it's kind of super illogical to miss all of them, but she does.

She determinedly writes down names and powers in one of her notebooks.

"So do you guys know when they're starting, uh - if there's a schedule I haven't seen it."

There's a schedule on the door, apparently. They have their choice of a climbing class and a survival class in the mornings and their choice of an obstacle course and a recognizing-demons class in the early afternoons and then free swimming and sports in the later afternoon.

She'll take survival and recognizing demons for now. She can probably survive swimming. (She hates swimming. Why does Zeke get to just get stabbed in the arm and hold up under torture and wow could she be any more self-involved.)

The survival classes take place just off the hiking trails up on the ridge; the soldier-counselors teach them how to start a fire and how to navigate at night and how to address an injury when far from medical care and how to react to various wild animals (some you hide from, some you yell at, some you fight). They're told that subsequent survival classes will also teach self-defense and self-defense against demons. The soldier-counselors are friendly; they come around to check out everyone's attempted fires and attempted injury dressings and declare "I'm a bear" or "I'm a moose" before charging. They might be a bit less friendly to Callida after she sneezes but it's not dramatic if so. 

Recognizing demons starts in the auditorium. "Most demons are animals," declares the leader, which technically has the unobjectionable meaning that there are lots of non-sapient demon species but is not the most promising of starts. They do have high-quality pictures of hundreds of species, though, and slime and excretions and footprints for the kids to look at. 

In the swimming pool kids play water polo and do flips off the diving board and hover in fascination around one boy who squirts ink out of his toes when he's frightened. Everyone wants Karen on their water polo team. 

It seems like one of the most important things to know about the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement is their stance on different kinds of demons and alien sapients. They're obviously not one hundred percent 'aliens bad, humans good', or they wouldn't be allowing Callida to take part in the summer camp, but there's a really large spectrum of opinions between 'kill or capture on sight' and Starfleet, and it's important to know where BSEE falls on it, both officially and unofficially. She takes copious notes and waits for opportunities to ask clarifying questions that aren't super suspicious.

She kind of hates water polo, because she kind of hates swimming, but she feels like she's doing a pretty good job of pretending this isn't the case.

After classes she approaches the invisible girl's bunk.

"Hi! Uh, you here right now?"

"Are you talking to me?" she asks even though there's no one else in the room.

"Yeah! Sorry. I just, uh, I feel like I forgot to say hi earlier. Neat posters."

"Everyone forgets to say hi - not even because of the invisibility, I mean, it was like that before."

"Gosh, I'm sorry. That sounds annoying."

"It was - I wasn't even sure when I went invisible, they asked later and I was like, dunno, probably sometime in February or March but it coulda been December really.... sorry, this is way too personal for summer camp. It's no biggie! How're you?"

"No, I mean - that sounds really hard, especially if you didn't have anyone to talk to or help you figure out what was going on. But, uh - I'm good so far, I think? I don't really know anyone yet, but, uh - working on that."

"Rebecca's friendly."

"Yeah. Everyone seems pretty friendly, I guess. Which is better than the alternative."

"The invisibility thing happens a lot, s'pposedly. Cause people just ignore people."

"...And that makes them invisible?"

Unhappy giggle. "I realize that doesn't actually make any sense."

"Lotsa things don't, it turns out. I know a kid who accidentally caused a bunch of people's dreams to become real because he was stuck in a coma. I'm more surprised that it keeps happening, I guess."

"There is a secret CIA invisible assassin program and as far as I can tell it's entirely high school students who got ignored until they were invisible. The lady who picked me up said that having parents who aren't home much was a risk factor. - I said no. I'm not a CIA assassin. I think if I were I'd go to the summer camp for the invisible CIA assassins. I said I didn't want to kill people - I don't even want to bother people -"

"...gosh. Same here, honestly, I think whatever process picks the slayer doesn't take into account whether someone wants to fight people or not. Uh - I'm Karen. If I forgot to say earlier."

"I was Margaret but I'm considering picking a new name. Since. What do you do, don't they make the Slayer kill vampires?"

"Yeah, I gotta stop 'em from murdering people. It's sad, though. Especially because some of them are only - you know that statistic about how sixty or ninety or whatever percentage of people will commit fraud or steal from their employers under the right circumstances? Vampires are like that with torture and murder. Keep the circumstances wrong for them and some of them are sort of chill, though. - like, they'll totally try to kill you if they can, don't go trying to make friends by yourself, but - I dunno. They're people, and I don't like having to kill people, even the ones that aren't very nice."

"People are never very nice."

"I dunno. Some of them surprise you. None of them are nice all the time, I think."

"Some of them surprise you with how nice they are, you're pretty and thin and have superpowers."

"I guess that's fair. I guess it's hard to tell how pretty someone is when they're invisible. At least the government seems to think that counts as having superpowers?"

"I think they just didn't know what to do with me when I said I didn't want to go to assassin school. They made it sound like all invisible kids want to go to assassin school."

"Huh. Sorta didn't expect peer pressure to be a huge factor when deciding whether to be a government assassin, but then I guess I didn't expect a lot of things about high school. But invisibility is totally a power, I bet it has all kinds of useful applications."

"My dad said he figured I'd run off to be a whore which is funny because that's one of the jobs it doesn't really help with, I think."

" - wow, that sucks. I was thinking more, like, if you were a police officer then you could tail criminals without them noticing you? Or, ooh, if you were a wildlife biologist then I bet some kinds of animals wouldn't notice you, so it'd be way easier to tag them and get info on what they were doing."

"Animals mostly have good hearing and smell."

"Yeah, it'd only work on specific kinds. ...maybe you could be a private investigator and people could pay you to get witness accounts of their abusive parents or boyfriends or whoever. - I'm just saying, I'm pretty sure invisibility is a known superpower. Martian Manhunter has it. Although I guess he can also fly. And it - it'd be a lot harder, if you didn't get any say in it and couldn't turn it off."

"No one cares about witness accounts of abusive parents or boyfriends anyway."

"I feel like someone somewhere must. But if not then I think people would need an invisible superhero helping them even more."

"What's the Martian Manhunter? That's a stupid name."

"Kinda is. He's one of the Justice League members. - I know it's dorky."

"Is that a real thing?"

She giggles. "No, no. Man, I wish. They're comic book people. Superman and Batman and people. I guess I don't have a ton of real-world superhero role models."

"Nah it's better they're not real, because, like, they'd ruin it."

"Yeah, maybe so. ...tell me what you want me to call you, whenever you figure it out. No rush, though."

"Everyone's just going to call me the invisible girl anyway."

"Well, they will if you don't give them anything else."

"You gave them a name and they all call you Slayer."

"Being the slayer is all right. And anyway, even if it's gotta be a superhero name, if you make your move first then maybe you can make it something cool. More Phantom Girl than Miss Martian, you know?"

"I'll think about it."

"'Kay. See you around. Or. Well. You know."

So that's one point of contact, which is better than zero. She'll try making more if she has the chance (for Alex and for Zeke, even though it's hard). Next obvious order of business is to get more information on the government's current stance on demons.

There are three teachers of the demon identification class. Chris is tall and blond and talks them through slides of different kinds of demons, dead and alive; Jason handles physical samples of the goos and excretions they're supposed to learn to analyze; Jennifer wears her hair in a very tight bun and distributes the textbooks and wrangles the projector every time it stops working. All three of them like Karen quite a lot, for some reason. 

"Hey, Slayer," Chris will say with a big grin every time she has a question, in or out of class.

This is disconcerting and suspicious. Very suspicious. Margaret-Slash-Phantom-Girl is probably right about some of it being - not that she's thin and pretty per se, but that she's cute and knows some things about demons and has some kind of general aura of likableness around her. It's suspicious beyond that, though. She takes notes and smiles a lot and tries not to let on that she finds all of this being liked business vaguely alarming.

(Being "Slayer" is maybe not as OK with her as she imagined it might be. Maybe once she gets used to it. And people stop smiling at her and looking at her all the time.)

Karen wants to know whether all of the demons they're analyzing are uniformly hostile. She's especially going to ask this any time she recognizes a demon and knows that the answer is "usually" or "sometimes" or "nah".

The answer is usually "we've never encountered a peaceful one" but sometimes it's "not always, but if they're stalking young girls around the city at night, you'll get yourself killed if you assume they have good intentions" and sometimes it's "they're killers, but they're sometimes quite friendly if they're not hungry".

They're never exactly wrong but some of these things are things you could also say about humans.

Suuuure.

It's not exactly Starfleet, but it's not obviously a serious problem. She needs to come home with more, though. She watches everybody's reactions to Callida and the other half-demons a lot, which is hopefully less suspicious and less noticeable than just constantly staring at Callida. 

Varies! Some of the camp counselors are as friendly around them as around the human kids; some keep their distance, or make a point of keeping an eye on them. She might get the sense that inviting half-demons to this summer camp was controversial. Callida seems quite cheerful about it. "The last place they wouldn't let me have anything made out of fabric. Said I'd shred it. Which, to be fair, I would, but -"

Mhmm. Good to get a sense of the range of reactions, anyway.

She's not entirely sure what else she's supposed to be doing here. She doesn't like it here - one week she could take, no problem, but she's going to be really miserable spending ten like this, without her room or her sister or her nephew or her friends or her ancient magical dog or anyone she knows better than Margaret-Slash-Phantom-Girl. At night she imagines turning her waterfall up really loud so that maybe people can't hear that her prayers consist largely of childish complaints.

If she can focus on investigating then maybe she'll be too busy to be miserable, though.

"Why're you here?" Phantom/Margaret asks her at the end of the first week. She's eating potato salad. It looks super weird.  "You could make them send you anywhere probably. Disneyland."

"I hear Disneyland has really long lines in the summer. But nah, I'm like - I wanna be able to do my job well, I guess."

"So you're here for, like, the classes? Man, that'd suck, going to summer camp just to do more school."

"Yeah, I guess. Plus I thought maybe I could make some friends who weren't in Sunnydale. When weird stuff happens it's often pretty localized, so it can be good to get sanity checks from people who're in other places." Or something. Alex definitely said something about that at some point.

"Do you need us to be anywhere in particular? Or just, not Sunnydale."

"Just not Sunnydale. Where're you usually?"

"Hadn't really figured it out. If you wanted someplace I could probably go there. - I stay in furniture stores overnight. Did you know that there are mattresses that cost twelve hundred dollars?"

"That's - I mean I guess it's probably not super unsafe, if nobody knows you're there, but it doesn't sound like much fun."

"Well, life's not much fun. And they are cozier than normal mattresses, the twelve hundred dollar ones."

She nods solemnly; it doesn't seem like a good time to get into an argument about whether she really has to stay in furniture stores or not, especially since she actually doesn't have housing plans lined up for random teenage superheroes. "It probably would help, having someone who could take care of themselves and go investigate things in different places. - here." She tears out a piece of paper, writes her home phone number on it, and pushes it vaguely in the direction of the potato salad. "It's my home phone, so I can't answer while I'm here, obviously, but - if you ever need to reach a slayer."

The piece of paper disappears. "You could send emails to a secret email and I could go to places to investigate things for you. If you wanted."

"Yeah. We probably could."

"No assassinations, though."

"Yeah, no. If someone really really needs to die I can make it happen myself."

"Do you worry that something bad'd happen to you if you stopped?"

"...bad things'd happen to other people if I stopped. Not just with the killing specifically, just - I guess when there are problems, then there has to be someone at some point who doesn't run away from them, you know? And... I think if I want anything done the way I want it, then I sort of have to be one of the people getting things done."

"Man, I see why they picked you for the superhero thing."

"...well. I try."

That weekend they do a high ropes course with a bunch of challenges that everyone has to work together to win at, and camp for the night by the side of a mountain lake, and return home for laser tag and s'mores and religious services for those who want them. 

Karen wants. Rope courses are cool, camping is cool, mountain lakes are cool, laser tag and s'mores are cool. Honestly everything about this place would be pretty OK if her brain weren't about 30% sure that she's constantly being watched by government people. And if her brain weren't spending 40% of its mental effort on screaming a lot. And if Wishbone were here. But there's really no logical reason for it to be any less fun than high school, so she mostly tries to breathe the awful out and give everything they try about twelve fair shots. Sometimes she forgets that everything is sort of terrible. Sometimes she feels like she's maybe even making some friends. Maybe.

The services take place in a pretty stone interdenominational chapel about a quarter of a mile from camp. Catholic services are in the evening so she's a little bit late to dinner, which is pizza and a side of leafy vegetables everyone is ignoring.

"Hey," a girl she knows from Survival, Jennifer, whispers over dessert. "Are you in?"

"Hmm?" she asks, because her mouth is actually momentarily full of pizza. Pizza is very important.

"We're going to sneak out tonight and see if we can make it down the road to the secret facility."

"What facility?" she asks, at the same whispery volume, 'cause if there are bugs then they can probably pick this up but she doesn't think she can get in trouble for asking. At least unless the high school students have already figured out something super secret, and really, you have to give the US government some credit.

"Some people wandered off that way during laser tag and there's this whole complex of buildings down in the valley, with the tops painted so they look like trees. There weren't 'keep out' signs or anything. We just want to go check it out. And you gotta do some ill-advised running around in the middle of the night in summer camp, right?"

She nods solemnly. "Kinda tired, though, actually. Lemme know how it goes?"

She nods eagerly. 

Four or five kids wander out about an hour later, giggling.

Hopefully they don't get in too much trouble. It'd be kind of a weird choice to toss all of your superpowered teenagers at anywhere where you've got other super  secret stuff; she has to assume that anyone involved in the project has ever met a teenager and considered this possibility.

A couple hours later the door to their cabin opens, then closes.

"Aaaah," says Rebecca, startling the rest of them awake. 

"What - is there anyone at the door -"

"Oh god."

"It's just me," says the invisible girl irritably. "I live here."

"Oh," Rebecca says. "Right. Sorry - I'm sorry."

"It's easy to forget."

"Well," Callida said, "did you see anything cool?"

"We got in! I got in, everyone else had to wait outside because they tried crawling in through the vents but the vents are tiny actually. But I just walked in! We didn't discover the evil conspiracy yet."

"Any clues?"

Invisible girl's bed bounces. "So there are six floors according to the elevator buttons, but I only checked out the first one, the guards didn't go down to the bottom five. The top floor is mostly an office, it had filing cabinets and computers and stuff. And it had surveillance cameras. There are some in the trees. They're watching the camp. I figured out where they all had to be, from the angles -" bounce bounce bounce bounce - "and there are ten."

"That's unconstitutional," says Rebecca indignantly. "And - and it's child pornography. Since we were in bikinis, at the pool."

"I don't think it's child pornography for adults to see teenagers in bikinis or the counselors would be in trouble," says Callida. "If it were in a private space that'd be different."

"Well, you could ask me, since I was there, unlike you, whether it was in a private space or not," says the invisible girl. 

"- that's what I was doing, I was asking."

"Were not."

"Well, was it?"

"Nope. Only outdoors."

(Only outdoor ones on the first floor, anyway. But of course they're watching the camp. Walmart watches people.)

"Where were they?" she asks, trying to sound only very slightly interested. Which she is. Because there are probably more cameras anyway.

Invisible girl points out ten locations that give pretty good coverage of the outdoor areas of the camp - "but it means it's possible to sneak out without any of the cameras seeing you if you hide in the bathroom of the cafeteria and then go out an upstairs window and then go straight back towards the trail. Or if you're me."

"Did you guys do that tonight though?"

"No."

"So they might've seen - well, not you, but seen everyone else."

"No one else did anything wrong. They went exploring and they found the building and they might've taken one grate off but they put it back. And now we know."

Cafeteria bathroom, upstairs window, straight back towards the trail. Honestly probably not a useful thing to know, because if they were worrying sorts of surveillance people then they'd probably have that area covered too, such that it's actually less suspicious to just pretend to get lost if you're going somewhere, but she repeats it over and over behind her waterfall anyway. She doesn't write it down.

"Neat," she says, approvingly. "Not really very much higher than Walmart on the sketchiness spectrum, though."

"Yeah." Bounce bounce. "But what's in the other five floors?"

"Maybe it's a seed bank," says Callida. "There are seed banks all over the country, to restart agriculture if there's a disaster or something."

"It might be entirely innocent. But we've got to at least check."

"I'm going to wait and see if the kids who went today get in trouble," says Rebecca.

"Makes sense," says Karen, and she shoots a smile in the general direction of Invisible girl's bed.

Bounce bounce. 

The next week the class options are 'history of the supernatural' or archery, and then more of 'identifying demons' or advanced rock climbing, and then free sports time. On Monday at dinner one of the counselors makes an announcement reminding students not to wander at night. "I know that it's fun to explore, but there's a lot of bad stuff out there, as you all know. Stick to the camp."

This is the only apparent consequence of the late-night excursion.

Cool, then. She'll take history of the supernatural, on the grounds that she already knows archery and if she wants to know it better she can practice with Alex, and then more identifying demons.

Identifying demons has advice on shapeshifters and possession and various demon species that sometimes pass as human. You can do something like a DNA test to identify many kinds of demon, apparently. They've been building an encyclopedia of blood and tissue and hair and glowing ooze samples from crime scenes around the country, now that they know what to look for. There are demons with regenerating powers, and they're studying the regenerating heart tissue of one particularly dangerous species for possible medical applications.

History of the supernatural includes a guest lecture from a cheerful anthropologist who explains that humans and demons in some societies may have lived and worked together, and a lot of deciphering references in old books. Dracula is a real thing, apparently. 

One of the lecturers takes Karen aside after the second day. "Hey! I have a question, do you have a minute?"

"Sure, what can I do for you?"

"So, uh, this class usually includes a day covering the slayers. Most of them - well, all of them died in the line of duty, and mostly very young. If you'd like to skip the lecture, or read the notes in advance so it isn't surprising or upsetting, either of those things would be completely reasonable. The world's a better place now, you have more support than slayers used to, and better weapons... I don't think you should be scared or anything, it just seemed like it could be an upsetting lecture."

"Oh! That's really considerate, but I'm fine, actually? I can look at the notes anyway, but I sort of know about the dying part."

"Okay! It's up to you but I have a copy of the notes here if you decide you do want to read them."

"Sure, I can look at them. Thanks."

The notes are scattered up through the 20th century and pretty good from then forward. Slayers often don't make it to their eighteenth birthday and those that do have a tendency to die on it. There's one who made it to 22 before being killed in a New York subway by the same vampire that killed a different slayer a century earlier.

This is not terribly new information, but she reads it with interest anyway. She likes history.

She writes home to Azalea and Alex and Wishbone, summing up the cool parts of summer camp and some of the neat things she's learned and some of the potential friends she is potentially making. She tries to go light on the complaints, and resists the urge to leave some kind of secret code in Alex's letter that works out to 'everything is terrible, can't wait for Deathtrap School to be in session again'. It's not that bad. Her brain is screaming a little less this week.

She is to all appearances moderately enthusiastic when it's time for the slayer lecture.

The Slayer lecture is exactly as promised! There's grainy surveillance video of the fight in the New York subway. They stop before the part where the Slayer dies, which means it's mostly just a really cool fight. A lot of the kids look fairly upset on Karen's behalf. 

"Isn't the test of the Slayer's abilities, uh, murder?"

"Yes," says the lecturer. "Prosecutions are complicated, though, and the last six incidents have not been in the United States."

"Do other countries have organizations like this one?"

"I wouldn't know."

She cheerfully takes notes on all of this. There's really nothing to be upset about. Maybe it's the whole already-having-died-twice thing.

Invisible girl picks a name. It's Trace. "I think it sounds cool."

"It's nice! Trace."

"I'm gonna go back to the facility during the daytime and see if I can get down to the lower floors."

"Makes sense. You don't think they'll catch you?"

"No one ever thinks about me. And they didn't last time."

"Yeah. Be careful, though, they have to remember that they have an invisible camper."

"I'll be careful."

Then she'll just have to wait to hear back. She feels a tiny bit guilty about wanting to know what exactly they're doing down there, especially since she hasn't been taking on any of the risk of finding out on her own, but such is life.

Her cabinmates do not seem to feel similarly guilty. They stay up playing Twenty Questions and this time when the door opens they don't freak out. 

"Hi!" says Trace. "I made it into the elevators, but the lower floors have locked doors. I don't think they're offices, though. The doors were reinforced."

"Could just be how they build military installations."

"I guess."

          "But the doors on the first floor weren't reinforced?" said Callida. 

"Nah, those ones seemed like normal doors."

          "There's got to be a way to get in."

"I might try to steal a keycard but I don't want to get in trouble."

Karen, too, doesn't really relish the thought of getting in trouble. She told Alex she would be polite. She's pretty sure that breaking into people's offices is traditionally considered impolite.

It takes about a week for letters to get to Sunnydale and for replies to get to the camp. Azalea's is half a page long, which is really pretty impressive for her. The other half of the page is taken up by Connor's drawing of her leading troops into battle against an army of what she supposes are vampires, judging from the fangs. Wishbone's letter is ten pages of typed text, because he's just like that as a person. She reads it all the day it arrives. Halfway through the third page, inserted apparently at random between unrelated anecdotes about how he's spending his summer, there's a note. 

I find it very interesting that the government claims to be using the regenerative properties of T'kelt demons in modern biomedical research. T'kelt regeneration is magical in nature, and stops working the moment the source demon dies. I suppose someone could separate a piece of the T'kelt demon's body while it lived, and perhaps make use of the separated parts, but it would require periodically harvesting tissue from a living captive, and ensuring that the captive remained alive. I've often found T'kelt demons very rude, myself, but if humans have been doing vivisections then I suppose I find that a bit more understandable.

She doesn't give any patently obvious outward sign that this bothers her. Maybe she fidgets more. Maybe she sleeps worse that night. She has a half-formed thought in her head that refuses to quite come together, and it bothers her, but it won't go away.

"D'you think the lecture materials from last week are still in the camp somewhere?" she asks Trace, the next day, idly picking at her macaroni and cheese.

"I think Melissa carries them around. Don't you take notes?"

"Yeah, there's just this thing I sort of half-remember and I'm not sure if I have it in my notes correctly? And - I dunno, it's bugging me."

"What?"

She bites her lip.

(They could be listening. They might not be on her side.)

"This thing about the regenerating demons that they're using in medical research or whatever? I just - I remembered something I think I might have heard about them that makes the thing not quite line up. And it's probably nothing, but it just - it smells weird."

"Ooooh," whispers Trace excitedly. "The thing they're hiding."

"It's probably nothing. But - yeah. Possibly."

"And you don't want to just ask Melissa because you don't want her to notice that anything's weird. I could check where she takes the notes and supplies after class."

" - yeah. That would be - kind of awesome, actually."

"Consider it done," she says with maybe entirely too much satisfaction in her voice.

Melissa, it transpires, takes the books and lecture notes and her computer to her car after the lecture, and then drives home with it after an afternoon meeting. "So you'd have about an hour, if you skipped swimming, to go look through the notes for whatever it was that bothered you," Trace reports solemnly.

"Computer's gotta be password protected," she notes. "Good work, though. Might be something in the paper notes."

"It turns out people just type their passwords sometimes and don't even check if there's someone looking over their shoulder."

She smiles, slowly and appreciatively. "You're very good at things, you know that? - there's also the matter of getting into the car, I guess."

"I don't have anything for that."

She nods. "I have an idea. I don't like my idea, but I have it. D'you think Rebecca's gonna run to the teachers if we ask her for help?"

"She hasn't said anything about me breaking into places."

"True. OK. There's a camera on the cars, so if I get caught, then - I guess I'm just really excessively into learning."

" - isn't that what you wanted Rebecca for? She can knock it around so it faces a different direction."

"Ohhh. That's smart. I'm dumb, I just wanted her to get into the car without resorting to obvious property damage."

"Oh, I guess she can unlock them from the inside. See, I didn't think of that one."

"We make excellent partners in crime," smiles Karen.

She finds Rebecca afterwards. "Hi. I could use your help with a thing, but it's kind of a sketchy thing so I understand if you don't want to."

"Oooh, what?"

"I'm trying to get some demon info out of Melissa's car. It'd be a lot easier if someone could point the camera away and unlock it from inside. It's technically illegal, but I'm not gonna steal anything, just look at it."

"That's intense. What do you want to look at, do you think she's in on the conspiracy?"

- she's honestly super unclear on why everyone thinks there's a conspiracy now. "I dunno. It was something she said during lecture. Just didn't quite match up with other stuff I know. I don't wanna tar her good name until I know more, but it's plausibly kind of a big deal. I won't know until I double-check."

"All right. I got you."

"OK. Tomorrow, then. We'll have to skip swimming."

She can't sleep that night. Breaking into people's cars is way more illegal than - actually, going off the trails and checking out the outside of a secret government facility isn't really illegal at all. Maybe messing with the vents is. It's not very illegal. What she's doing is, like, an actual crime. Not that she hasn't committed actual crimes before - investigations at Sunnydale High require nonzero ethically and legally hazy snooping around, plus there's the whole serial killer killer thing - but it's still the sort of thing that could get her in actual real trouble.

On the other hand, she has this image of an alien strapped to an operating table, doctors shuffling through her organs and determining through trial and error which ones she doesn't need, and she doesn't know anyone's language and doesn't know whether the scary foreign doctors are trying to kill her or not. And maybe that's not what happened. Maybe they asked. Maybe they paid her. Maybe they told her 'ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country', and maybe that was enough.

But maybe it wasn't.

She tries paging Alex. She knows it won't work. She tries anyway.

Alex is out of range. 

Can you pass on to Tyelcormo that Karen's trying to reach him? Has he been writing her?

I am going to bet no. I'll tell him. 

He says to not read her mind, she was stressed about that.

Yes, he mentioned and I haven't been. Her counselors like her, say she has some friends. The kids are running around trying to figure out if there are more government conspiracies beneath the big government conspiracy that they already know of. I think she's actually too paranoid to work very well within the initiative once it's in Sunnydale, so it might make the most sense to embed one of her friends in it and give them permission to share information with her. 

Are there conspiracies for the kids to find?

Well, there's the thing where we overthrow Central American governments for being too Communist.

That's not your department! 

The office building is just an office building, but it's an ugly, bizarre, complicated world out there. I don't know what Karen is paging Tyelco about but I don't want to assume it's nothing. 

Rebecca knocks the camera off course and unlocks Melissa's car and then runs off to play volleyball, which everyone else plays in swimsuits and which she plays in a full-length robe to protect her skin.

Cool cool cool.

It's probably nothing, it's probably nothing, she just has to see the notes and confirm that she misread and then she can go back to being normal levels of miserable and not excessively concerned about the government being overrun by anti-alien nazis.

She turns so the camera can't see her face if it happens to be moved back, then checks whether Melissa has any of last week's lecture notes in her car.

Yep! 

She didn't misread the notes, they're doing research with the regenerative heart tissue of T'Kelt demons.

Ugh.

(Man, losing a piece of your heart sounds even worse than losing a piece of your kidney. Maybe if it was only a few cells or something - )

She opens up the computer and logs in. Maybe she can find - she doesn't even know. More lecture notes? Something that looks like sources to be integrated into lecture notes? Anything labeled 'TOP SECRET, KAREN DON'T READ'?

There's a big encyclopedia of files on demons. Some kinds of demons are even more classified and want an additional password, but many are available. The notes include records of experiments. The experiments seem to usually leave the demons comotose or with brain damage, though there are three marked SUCCESS.

("They have an idea to make them harmless." She is so stupid. Of course to make someone really harmless you'd have to destroy their ability to do basic things - )

Any details on the successes? Any details on the failures?

Failures are usually coded either failure-death or failure-nonresponsive or failure-sys or failure-max or failure-min or failure-no-effect. Successes aren't noted further. 

Ugh. OK. OK. She has - maybe forty minutes, tops, if she wants to get out of this car without arousing suspicions. They could obviously catch her, she's left fingerprints or whatever all over everything; if she wants to have a shot at safety then she needs to keep them from looking. So forty minutes at the outside, and thirty to be safe. She isn't super sure what happens if she gets caught, but the dead and lobotomized demons are definitely causing her to update in favor of 'bad things, probably'.

She writes down the specific types of demons operated on and looks the species up in the encyclopedia. Sapient? Non? Typically violent? 

A mix. All the 'successes' were non-sapients, looks like. All species that are marked typically violent or situationally violent.

Humans, she figures, are probably most accurately considered situationally violent critters.

Callida's half Bracken demon, she does remember that. What's the encyclopedia got on Bracken demons?

Pictures, habitat range, powers (a great sense of direction and the ability to smell magic), treaties and relationships, situationally violent.

Lovely. Of course the available data doesn't necessarily mean that they're hurting things just for being in the 'situationally violent' category. It could only be, like, convicted criminals who have gone through some kind of parallel justice system that doesn't feature juries of their peers. That's - still horrifying, actually, but less of a loose cannon swinging around.

(She wonders whether Amy's mom got experimented on. Whether the zookeeper is in a box somewhere with half of his brain cut out.)

(She is committing a crime right now. Carjacking's a federal crime or something now, right, can't you technically get life for it? Maybe it's only carjacking if you move the car?)

She should be looking for something. She's gonna think of something later and be really mad that she didn't think of it when she was in the car. She can't think of what it is right now.

She checks for entries on vampires, vampire slayers, and Quendi.

Quendi aren't in there. Vampire slayers aren't in there. Vampires are typically violent. Forty experiments failed-no-effect and twelve failed-max.

Well, right as far as it goes. Lots of experiments on vampires, but if you're gonna cut into anyone then nearly-obligate-evil people with regenerative healing powers are about the least bad ones you could go with.

Anything easily findable about the facilities where these experiments were performed? She doesn't need or expect a location. Maybe who runs it? Maybe names of researchers involved? Maybe dates of specific experiments?

Nope.

Darn government, being at all more competent about things than random high schools tend to be.

She's got a more-than-halfway-formed thought that goes something like this: the government is capturing demons and experimenting on them, presumably without their informed consent, given the lobotomies and deaths. They may be limiting themselves to criminals, but lobotomies are pretty cruel and unusual, as punishments go. The government also has a summer camp for special people with special powers, including those of demonic-as-in-alien origin. It's not a fake summer camp, which means it's not straightforwardly a ruse to capture them all and steal their kidneys or brains or whatever, but it could very plausibly be a way of sorting them into people who are more useful to the government whole vs people who are more useful in pieces.

Annnd she has no trustworthy backup apart from Trace, and she can't safely contact her other friends, and she's pretty sure the US military is smarter and better equipped and has her and her band of B-movie superheroes outnumbered like a thousand to one, and she could probably escape but she probably couldn't escape with everyone else, and she clearly has enough power to have great responsibility here, but she's not sure she has enough to actually do anything.

She needs to get out of this car. She neatly packs up the papers the way she found them, logs out of the laptop and puts it back where she found it, steps out, locks the door behind her, and walks back the way she came without turning to see whether the camera has turned back. They won't have any trouble identifying her from her clothes anyway, if the camera has moved back, but might as well make them put some investigative effort in.

She goes back to the cabin and flops mournfully on her bed.

Callida brings her chicken wings and pineapple kabobs. "Missed you at dinner. Everything okay?"

"Yeah, I just got super tired. Maybe I'm coming down with something. Thanks for the food."

She's going to have to come up with something to tell Rebecca. If they're in danger then the rooms are almost definitely bugged, but everyone's going to say things the moment they walk in -

- they can't know that she looked at the computer files, not unless they're reading her mind, and if they're reading her mind then she can't win at anything anyway. They could be reading Trace, too, but Trace can't know that she looked at the computer - she can maybe still play it off as just looking at lecture notes, maybe claim she really was just confused - they'll know that she broke into the car but they maybe won't know that she suspects anything -

- if she does it'll be harder to mobilize people later, if she needs to convince people to leave the camp in a hurry -

- she hates this, it's scary and hard and very uncertain and she doesn't even have anyone else whose orders she can just follow -

She sits on her bed and very calmly takes a few bites of her chicken wings. 

She should probably find Rebecca, it's probably safest to try to head this off at the pass. "Actually I'm gonna go check on something. Back in a bit."

Rebecca is at the lake, apparently, where kids are shooting flare guns out over the water like they're fireworks.

Good, that's a lovely amount of background noise.

"Didn't find anything," she says, with an air of resigned disappointment. "Well, lecture notes, but it turns out I just wrote the thing down wrong. That was super cool, though, what you did. They can't all be real leads."

"Awww. I guess that's good, I like Melissa. Want a flare?"

"The counselors gave them to you?"

"Shawn said no and Jerry said 'dignity of risk, man' and I didn't even have to point out that it's not risky, I'm telekinetic."

"Yeah, what the heck." And so she cautiously experiments with flare guns.

Rebecca helps people get extra lift on their flare gun throws and they make pretty fireworks out on the lake and eventually retreat back to their cabins to sleep.

Everything is terrible. She goes to sleep without talking to Trace about it, because if she talks to Trace then she'll have to make decisions about whether to put her friend in danger or whether to lie to her friend or whether her friend is a necessary ally in - whatever it is that she's going to do about any of this, exactly.

If she wakes in the middle of the night and cries, she turns her face into the pillow and ignores it. Makes it harder to breathe, but nobody'll be able to see her, even if they do have night vision.

The next day Avi and Jake and Sarah are not at breakfast or in class.

Oh lovely.

She consults her notes for the relevant superpowers of Avi and Jake and Sarah, in case she had those written down somewhere.

Sarah is half Kwaini demon, Avi is half Frophla demon, and Jake lost his arm in a magical accident but can still grab and move stuff with it.

Well that's just super.

" - hey Trace? You seen Sarah and Avi around today?"

"Nah. Maybe they switched classes?"

"Maybe. - I dunno."

"You think something ate them?"

"I think - hm."

She gets out her notebook. Writes things down in ridiculously small letters that the best cameras maybe aren't good enough to pick up, if there are cameras.

This note needs to be thoroughly destroyed when we're done talking. There's something I want to talk to you about, but it could plausibly endanger you to know about it. And I don't mean expulsion, we're talking life and limb stuff, if that's not entirely too melodramatic.

She hands Trace her pen.

I think people are really just having fun, with the conspiracy stuff. You should just ignore them if it's making you actually really scared in real life. Not that I'm not happy to listen to whatever it is.

Yeah, I thought so, too. But now I think there's something there. 

Thing one - the government definitely has mind readers, so if I tell you the other stuff, then there's a chance that they'll find out what you know by reading your mind. I've been trying to keep them from doing it by, like, imagining that all of my thoughts are behind a waterfall that constantly plays music, but I don't actually know whether it's enough. It could be that the only way to meaningfully defend against it is to keep them from deciding to try.

Why do you think the government has mindreaders?

...promise not to tell anyone?

Well, yeah.

One of my friends is a mindreader. An OK one, one who doesn't read people unless it's OK with them or it's an emergency. They said there was one in government and at least one in range of the camp. They also said that the one in range of the camp wouldn't be reading people, and I mostly believed them, but I don't know how good their information is and I would really rather not bet lives on it.

Huh. Okay. Well, they can’t be paying very close attention - we’ve been doing lots of stuff that’s not allowed.

Either not paying attention or letting those things slide. Or taking it as information about us.

You're really good at this stuff.

I think I'm maybe just paranoid. Maybe not even paranoid in the right places.

If we are in danger - and we might not be, but if we are - then I think I have to tell you, because I don't think I can do what I'd have to do by myself. But since there are mindreaders in play, it's best not to tell anyone else anything that could get us caught. It might be worth it for you to try blocking them, but since I don't even know if that works, I think our first line of defense has to be having as few people in the know as possible until we have a plan.

That sounds pretty exhausting honestly, I don't think I'm going to do it.

It kind of is. I feel like we're probably screwed either way if they read us and aren't friendly, so that's pretty reasonable.

I bet they won't bother. No one wants to hear what a bunch of teenagers think.

Maybe.

She taps her pen irritably.

I'm worried about some stuff but I think I should probably talk about it later tonight.

Okay. 

Has anyone asked about the missing kids?

Nobody's said anything to me about it. Might be worth it to ask some of the counselors and see what they say.

The three of them snuck into town and into a bar and got drunk and have been expelled from camp.

This is totally plausible, but then she's been told that good liars try to tell plausible lies.

She makes it through the day. After dinner, she writes another note and passes it to Trace. 

So the thing is that the stuff I found in Melissa's computer included a lot of information about experiments that the government is running on demons. Lots of them are lobotomies, they leave the demons comatose or dead or with serious brain damage. At least one operation that involved cutting heart tissue from a living demon. A lot of cases on sapient demons. I don't know that it has anything to do with why the government decided to run a summer camp for superheroes, but I don't want to bet lives on it, especially with kids going missing. I'm going to head into town tonight and call for backup. You can decide whether you want to leave with me or stay here.

Wow. 

I'm with you.

Cool. 

She sort of thinks an at all competent evil summer camp would have the entire grounds covered, but it's possible they don't, so the cafeteria bathrooms are probably still their best bet. From there they can leave the camp and eventually circle around to the road, and from the road they can get back to the nearest small town. Towns mostly have payphones. She doesn't have a million quarters, but she thinks she has enough. 

She dials Dennis's number and asks his parents to put him on.

"Hey. Thought you were at summer camp."

"Oh, yeah, I am, but I think it might be an evil summer camp, so I snuck out, and conditional on it being an evil summer camp I think they might have my phone tapped? So I'm calling you instead of my sister, so that you can telepathically contact Alex."

" - so, uh, it sounds like you're keeping track of a lot of things right now, but I'm actually not telepathic."

"No, no, I know. He is. It'll work. Just - think the words 'paging Alex' at him, and then ask him, on a scale of one to ten, how sure he is that his Quendi friend in the government is not running an evil summer camp that exists to kidnap half-demons or figure out whether specific people are more useful as soldiers or as lobotomized lab rats, or whatever."

" - you know what, fine."

...paging Alex? Ugh, how would you even know if you were doing this right -

Cause I'll be like 'hey, what?'

Gah.

OK, uh, Karen wants to know how sure you are that your government Quendi friend isn't, quote, 'running an evil summer camp'? Sorting demon people into soldier types and lobotomized lab rat types? On a scale of one to ten. 

What's one and what's ten?

Man, I don't know.

"He wants to know what one and ten are."

"Um, I dunno, ten is 'I was actually my friend all along and am therefore as certain as one can be that their motivations are not that', and one is 'well, I know I told Karen that they were fine, but actually I met them once at a party a thousand years ago and they were giving off shifty vibes at the time, so come to think of it I actually know zero things.'"

Dennis attempts to think this at Alex.

Tell her ten. Does she want us to come out there?

She sighs when this is relayed. "No, not for a ten. Found some files about how the government is doing live dissections and lobotomies on sapient demons and stuff, which I'm pretty sure is unconstitutional or something on top of being really sketchy, but - "

"The government's doing what?"

" - but if he's really, really sure that the summer camp is safe and the kids who disappeared are gone for perfectly normal non-terrifying reasons, then - I guess I'll just head back before they notice I'm gone."

- ugh. Can you hear all that, relaying both halves of this conversation is actually really annoying.

I can hear her. Tell her - ugh - staying at a camp run by demon lobotomy people is horrifying, learning about them doesn't matter that much, she should come home. 

"He says staying at a camp run by demon lobotomy people is horrifying, learning about them doesn't matter that much, and you should come home."

"Did he say 'horrifying' or 'dangerous', because those are different things."

It's entirely safe, but it sounds awful! There's no good reason to do it! 

- I mean I feel like it actually kind of matters if the government is doing lobotomies on its citizens who happen to be other than strictly homo sapiens. 

"He says it's entirely safe, it just sounds awful and there's no good reason to do it."

" - OK, but see, the horrifying part is mostly the part where the demons get their organs stolen, and the part where people who are party to demon organ theft are currently in charge of a bunch of teenagers who also have some nifty demon organs, not so much the part where I have to play laser tag, and also yes, actually, if I have to work with the demon lobotomy people in the future then it actually kind of does matter how much I know about them?"

Tell her that while I am pretty sure everyone in that camp is safer there than anywhere in the world because in that sense I trust my friend ten, I am really pissed at him because I wanted her to be okay, not dealing with demon lobotomists and being scared for her friends, and the fact she is dealing with demon lobotomists makes me trust that he is trying to do right by her, uh, like, seven. At most. 

Dennis painstakingly relays this.

" - I mean I don't know that anyone here is personally a demon lobotomist. Just, when you learn that the government is capturing and hacking up demons, and has also collected a bunch of demons and other people likely to have interesting pieces and placed them in a summer camp thing, and some of the summer camp people have gone missing, there are certain possibilities that you have to phone home about and rule out."

Dennis, you are remarkably cool and if you want I will buy you an ice cream or something tomorrow. 

You're safe. Ten. I'd take it as a personal favor if you punched my friend in the face for putting you through hell summer camp when he all but promised not to but I bet you won't. Even though you should. It'd work really well. It's good for him.

Yeah at this point I feel like you kind of owe me. But thanks.

" - I think I have a personal policy against punching people in the face because I'm mad at them, and also even if I didn't, I haven't even seen your friend here, so it'd be kind of hard. Also I'm mostly upset about the lobotomies in the first place, but I don't really know if I should be, and in any case I feel like punching people is the wrong sort of response to that regardless."

I did know about that. We can talk about it sometime when we're not relaying through Dennis. Or you can ask my friend. He wants to meet you, he's just - 

- shy.

" - OK. Fine. If you think it's definitely not an evil summer camp. Thanks for the sanity check. And the caring."

Any time. Do feel free to run away and scavenge from dumpsters in the streets of Baltimore if that happens to beat staying. 

"I do know how to buy bus tickets. I'll keep it in mind, though."

She hangs up.

"OK. So. S'not an evil summer camp."

"Oh. That's good. - I mean, it's a kinda evil summer camp. Even if they didn't dissect our classmates for parts."

"I dunno. I think the government's probably doing evil stuff, but I feel like we kind of knew that? And it's like - I think probably the military can invade random places without it making NASA evil, or - something. So it could be that parts of the government are bad, but that the summer camp itself is mostly fine, in theory?"

"I guess. 

Kinda disappointing, though, isn't it? A superhero summer camp where nothing evil is happening?"

"I feel like it's gotta be bad practice to be disappointed about people being less shady than the most shady thing they could've been." She frowns. "They're still, like, profiting off of knowledge gained from the shady experiments, I guess that's kind of somewhere in the neighborhood of evil? It's like, evil's next door neighbor, or something?"

"I guess maybe that's close enough." They start walking back. "Are you gonna leave?"

"Nah. My friends thought I should, but I think just because they didn't want me to be sad about the demons that got hurt. And I think I'm gonna be sad anywhere, so might as well be sad at summer camp."

".... I guess it beats mattress stores. Mostly."

"I think I feel kinda better now that we don't have to stage a paramilitary uprising or anything. That would've sucked. - you know, I bet if you're like an investigator person then we could get you some kind of salary for it, and then you could stay in hotels and stuff? I guess there's the invisibility thing, but maybe if you wore enough clothes? Or like, wrapped yourself in bandages so people thought you were a burn victim or something. Maybe then you'd be able to check into hotels."

"The government suggested a personal assistant and had one on hand but - I don't like men."

"Ohh." So she actually can't just fling Alex at one hundred percent of her problems. "Did you ask them for one who wasn't a man?"

"No because I didn't want to tell them that."

"Fair. Well. I bet we could get you a salary, anyway. I do not have miraculous solutions to nearly as many problems as I wish I did, but I do have friends with money."

"That'd probably help. I could team up with some other girl who was homeless and she could do the interacting with society and stuff."

"Yeah! I bet that'd work. - thanks for helping with the investigating and stuff. I know it didn't turn out to be anything super dangerous to us personally, but I don't think we could've known that going in, really, and - I dunno. I was just cool of you."

"Anyone would've helped you out if you'd asked them."

"Maybe. I think most people wouldn't've been as good at it."

She doesn't say anything in response but she skips just a little.

She ducks her head and smiles.

(Maybe she is not completely hopeless at the making-friends-at-summer-camp thing.)

The next day they get a serious lecture about how, yes, they're able to get away with a lot here since it is a superhero summer camp after all, but really, if you sneak out and go into town and get drunk and get lost on the way back and Very Important people have to be called in to use magic to find you puking in the bushes, you will get sent home.

That's probably a vaguely sane policy to have.

She makes it through her classes and through afternoon sports without ever really approaching abject misery. She sort of has her waterfall stuck on now, out of habit, but she doesn't bother to make it play music, and this improves her mood a kind of substantial amount. She's able to go for as long as multiple hours at a time without irrationally worrying that all of the rooms are bugged and people are analyzing everything she does.

So now there's just that whole thing about how the government is maybe torturing tons of people.

She sneaks out at night, not because she can't sleep, but because she really doesn't even need eight hours anyway and staring at the ceiling is boring. She heads for the lake. She makes a little pile of rocks that are good for skipping, and then doesn't try to skip any of those, limiting herself to rocks that aren't shaped quite right to be skipped. This mostly results in rocks plopping disappointingly into the lake. She fails at skipping rocks for, like, an hour.

Paging Matt Carter. I guess. Actually maybe it's rude to do that at whatever hour this is.

That's very thoughtful of you but I just wouldn't hear you if I were sleeping. Everything all right?

I guess.

Tyelcormo said I should ask you about why the government lobotomizes demons.

Ah huh. We're not trying to. We're trying to figure out an implant for habitually violent species and for violent offenders in other species that'll let them go about their lives except that if they try to do serious harm to anyone they will fail. There's magic that is intent-triggered, that's the easy part, the hard part is something that immediately disables them without doing long-term damage. If it doesn't disable them instantaneously they can still murder people, they'll just have a headache afterwards, which isn't really the intent. The other hard part is that it has to be impossible to remove.

I guess that makes sense.

The alternative is killing them, so we're going to keep trying. We do kill them if they prefer that.

Ah.

She tries skipping one of her good rocks, and it plops right into the lake just like the others.

If you'd like, you can have your own clearance and read up on everything yourself.

I guess that'd be good. Probably won't help, but thanks.

It's pretty awful.

I guess.

You guess?

It's not like I'm in any position to take, like, a moral stand, or anything. I just kill people and then feel bad about it. 

I don't even super know what I thought the point of this conversation was going to be. It's not like it was going to go, 'hello, Mr. Carter, are you doing Nazi science things?' 'oh, yes, Karen, very astute, we thought that doing Nazi science things was a great idea.' 'oh, well you see Mr. Carter, you're probably like a million years old, and so I guess it makes sense that they didn't cover this when you were in sixth grade history, but actually the Nazis are the bad guys.' 'oh gosh, Karen, I had no idea, I'll inform the government right away that we should change our policy from doing Nazi things to helping blind orphans and teaching all of the vampires key kindergarten morality skills, like 'sharing is caring' and 'genocide is bad'.'

That's why Alex is always wanting to punch me in the face, see, he doesn't think I'm wrong and he doesn't think he could convince me if I was and he doesn't even think he has any grounds to have an opinion about it but if he got himself into a fistfight over it then, well, at least he did something about it. I don't think that works for people who aren't Alex, though if it does you're welcome to it.

Nah. He did ask me to punch you in the face, but I'm pretty sure it wouldn't help.

I guess it's just, like, if you're sixteen and your friends are getting eaten by demons and your independent resources are, like, wooden sticks and a dog and some superpowers that are mostly only good for punching things, then you have to try to do things right, but if you mess it all up then what did anybody really expect, it wasn't like you ever really had a shot at finding whatever one ideal answer was out there, no matter how hard you thought about it. And if you throw your lot in with the government, and the government has all of the resources and all of the cards and all of the brainpower to get things just right, and they decide to do super evil things, and nobody ever stops to think about whether you could do fewer evil things, then I think maybe you all end up at Nuremberg or something, and also a bunch of other people end up dead.

And I guess you still have to do your best? But I guess I was hoping people's real best would be less... terrible.

If stopping is less terrible, we'll do that.

She throws a rock into the lake without even trying to skip it. It makes a satisfying little plunk noise.

I guess.

Do you?

She thinks of a bunch of different things she could say to that and dumps them all out behind her waterfall, which may or may not even actually be doing anything.

Maybe she should just throw ALL of the rocks into the lake. Fly, rocks. Be free. Plunk plunk plunk plunk plunk.

Karen, do you think I'm talking to you because you're the Slayer?

I dunno.

Probably not exclusively, but you definitely wouldn't be talking to me if I weren't, so kind of, I guess.

I guess technically everyone in Sunnydale would be dead if you weren't the Slayer. 

Yeah. I guess.

But setting that aside, I'm talking to you to figure out which stuff you can fix, and most of the people who want to figure that out don't have any superpowers, and it doesn't change the conversation much. I want to know how you're thinking about this because I want to direct you at problems you can actually fix and resources you can actually use. I am talking to you because it matters a lot what you want to do about this.

Plunk.

Have you thought about what you want, aside from 'no war crimes trials'?

I guess I don't like it when people die?

What things that you did last year seemed like the right things to be doing?

...I guess, uh. Saving the city was probably better than not that. Tranquilizing the hyena kids was useful, I guess. I was probably at all helpful for keeping the murder rate down. I guess I helped Daryl and Chris? And - I didn't really have anything to do with the Tucker thing. Training has probably been good in the sense that, like, if I hadn't done it then I wouldn't've been the sort of person who could save the city?

Alex's account of last year was that you independently discovered what Slayers were and what vampires were, saved a dozen lives, befriended a vampire who is now a reliable information source and ally, joined the school newspaper to provide cover for investigation into mysterious happenings at the school, alerted him to eight different instances of such mysterious happenings at the school, six of which turns out to be supernatural in origin and requiring immediate action, made several close friends, passed all your classes, learned archery, hand-to-hand unarmed combat, hand-to-hand combat with a stake, hand-to-hand combat with a knife, and safe use of half a dozen other weapons, tracked and tranquilized five students possessed by a demon, won the assistance and loyalty of an immortal knight knowledgeable about demons, disarmed your zombie classmate and successfully deterred him from bringing a knife to school again, helped other students with supernatural and naturally-occurring problems, ran nightly patrols for six months, drove the murder rate down by a factor of seven, saved the city and took time off from lessons a total of twice.

I guess that all technically happened. Except that a lot of the murder rate was him.

He usually needs backup to handle a city, even one less complicated than Sunnydale. We would've had to assign a bunch more people.

Oh.

I'm kind of curious if you could walk me through one of those events from your perspective. It seems like a lot to stumble into entirely accidentally without any guiding principles.

I mean it wasn't an accident, but -

I mean, like - I started doing this stuff because a vampire attacked me, and it didn't work out for her because apparently I had superpowers, and then a different vampire approached me and told me about vampires and slayers, because apparently he thought he'd live longer if he made friends, and so I looked stuff up about it because who wouldn't, you know, and I put together some basic information, and I started going out at night looking to learn more, and I ran into vampires trying to kill people, and so I stopped them, because that's what you do, when you run into people in the middle of murdering other people, and after I did that for a while I figured I should talk to someone to see if I could do any better, and I ran into a priest who was also one of you guys, and he called in Tyelcormo, and once I had someone who knew what they were doing, it was simple enough to improve at what I was doing, and then he pointed out other stuff that it made sense for us to be doing, and -

- I don't know what you want me to say. 

I'm getting that sense, yes. 

Maybe it's not fair to ask a question without answering it yourself. I want to end all of the suffering in all of the universes. I want to send off teams of scientists and diplomats into newly safe and peaceful worlds, to send back messages and pictures and poetry and to make promises, to everyone, about the people of Earth. I want every person in every world to have a place somewhere that'll take them in and I want us to be that place, for most of them, as far as we can. I want all the children in your summer camp to be able to walk down the street the way they are, without anyone blinking. I want the radio to have better sound quality and play better songs. I want humans to have a bit more time before they need to grow up. I want to stop being threatened with the apocalypse once a month. I want to make schools prettier. I want to replace prisons with this elaborate system that shuttles people off to dimensions where they're around kinds of people they won't or can't hurt. I want to find a nice young man for my executive assistant to settle down with. I want Alex to stop telling people state secrets such as his name.

I think he only gives it to dogs. And only before it occurs to him that some dogs might be able to figure out how to type.

I wanna stop having to kill vampires. I want people to stop dying in high school, and I want to find some way to make it happen that doesn't consist of murdering a bunch of other people. I want my sister and my nephew to be safe and well and OK, and I guess when I'm feeling idealistic I kind of want everyone to be safe and well and OK, even the people who don't deserve it at all. I want - I think I want to finish high school, just to say I did, and I want my teachers to think that I'm a sort of OK student and not the literal laziest person they've ever met. I wanna be a better person who doesn't have to confess the same sins over and over again. I wanna be the sort of responsible person who does the dishes and the laundry without being asked, and who keeps my room clean and doesn't let it be a disaster all the time, and who's able to cook real dinners when my sister doesn't want to. Maybe I wanna be sainted, except I think if you go around trying to be sainted then it kind of messes with your odds because your heart's not really in the right place. I kinda want everyone to think I'm the best writer for the school paper even though I probably actually can't be. I want to be really good at being the Slayer, and be good at all of the things a Slayer should be good at and then maybe some extra ones, too, and I want Alex and Wishbone to be really impressed with me all the time, and I want Alex to stop feeling like he's a terrible person, and I want Wishbone to be able to turn back into a human someday if that's what he wants, and I want all of my other friends to finish high school and most of them to be able to go to college. Except Zeke. I guess I just want Zeke to keep being really chill and not killing people and maybe figure out a way of earning money legitimately so he doesn't end up stealing blood all the time. 

I wanna find a way to become immune to bullets, so people can't just learn who I am and hire a sniper to take me out during fifth period English. I wanna kill Lurconis the baby-eater, even though I guess that conflicts with wanting everyone to be safe and well and OK, because I kind of think he sucks. I wanna know whether I should prioritize literally everyone being safe and well and OK or killing Lurconis the baby-eater. I want to - I want to go to Yellowstone someday, I think, and take my sister and my nephew camping and go with them to see the geysers and the weird bubbly hot springs and the buffalo or whatever, and if I live long enough and feel like I've done enough things then maybe I want to go to Alaska sometime and see the aurora and the seals and the icebergs and - I don't even know, the caribou, or the moose, or whatever they even have there. And if I live for a really absurd amount of time then I wanna go to Mars, and maybe Titan and Triton and Io and Europa, and I want someone to found Starfleet, and to call it that, just because they can, and for us to have replicators so nobody's ever hungry or sick or so poor that they don't know how they're going to provide for their kids, or whatever, although I kind of hope we don't give up money altogether because I don't really think the Federation has a sensible way of allocating scarce resources like specific vineyards in rural France.

I wanna learn Old English well enough to read Beowulf the way it was originally written down, so I can have really legitimate Beowulf opinions. I wanna beat Zeke at every game the arcade has, even the really stupid ones that aren't actually any fun. If I ever get to heaven then I wanna read every book that's ever been written in chronological order of composition, which I guess will also involve learning every language that's ever existed, and then when I'm done I wanna go back and do it again and see if I appreciate any of them more with the benefit of all of the literary context in the entire universe. I wanna finish the Ender books before that. I wanna see how The X-Files ends. I think maybe I wanna learn to knit someday. I wanna, I dunno, be a responsible enough person that I can take care of a venus flytrap or something without killing it. I wanna go to prom, the year after next, even though I'll probably have to go by myself and I'll probably end up standing in a corner with one my friends all night talking about how nonsensical the entire concept of high school prom is. I wanna learn to make those really good grilled cheese sandwiches that have bacon and onions in them, except I guess I also sort of want to be vegetarian because I sort of want everyone to stop killing animals so that Alex doesn't have to be sad about it, except I also kind of want Wishbone to have all the bacon he wants, and I don't really know how to resolve all of this. I want people to stop killing babies. I wanna have a real useful job someday, and know that I'm, like, part of the rest of society, or something, and maybe if I'm really good at it I wanna have enough money that I can buy fruit smoothies and cinnamon rolls whenever I want, and I wanna eat the fruit smoothies and cinnamon rolls on like a covered patio outside some house in the midwest somewhere, in one of those little towns where after it rains everything smells like dirt, but in a really good and wholesome way?

I wanna learn how to drive, and I wanna buy some beat-up old pickup truck that still runs OK from some nice old man who thought he'd give it to his kids before he realized his kids were going to want cooler cars that would be better for taking people on dates, and I wanna fill it with weapons and toolboxes and dog food, I guess, and drive it from city to city putting out fires and documenting weird happenings and punching demons until I magically earn their respect and we become unshakeable friends who would never betray each other. And I wanna go home often enough that I can still run D&D campaigns for part of the year, because I wanna learn to be a dungeon master, and I want everyone to say that my campaigns are the coolest, even though I think they probably won't be. I wanna finish writing stories, even if they're not any good at all. I guess I wanna write a novel someday, just to do it. I guess maybe I wanna write some nonfiction books about weird stuff, too, because I feel like the state of weird stuff research and documentation is maybe not as good as it could be, is maybe even sad enough that I might ever possibly have anything to contribute to it. I wanna do whatever's the best use of a vaguely competent Slayer's time, even if it's in practice slightly less awesome-sounding than driving a pickup truck through random towns and hunting ghosts and doing supernatural detective work with the aid of an immortal dog.

And I wanna make it to thirty, but I don't really think I will, so I'll take twenty-two.

- and I don't think I can actually have very many of those things, really, so mostly I want - when I get to the end of my life and I have to account for everything I did with it, I want the account to make any sort of logical sense at all, and when I'm giving it I want to feel like - like maybe I didn't do everything right, because no one ever does, but like I was at least the sort of person who occasionally tried to reach towards things that were good and useful and helped other people. Like at least some of the time I was actually trying to run the race marked out for me as well as I could, even if it was hard and confusing and I couldn't always see where the path was.

I dunno. Something like that.

That name is not spectacularly safe to repeat. That's on him, not you, but you should be careful anyway. 

A thing about the Slayer is that everyone knows about the Slayer, and a lot of bad people are very afraid of the Slayer, and so it actually sounds pretty spectacularly useful to have a network of allies everywhere who can benefit in the work they do from the fact everyone knows that your allies will call in the Slayer if it's actually needed. 

I think you'd have an awful lot of very cool material for your D&D campaigns.

Possibly.

Anyway, I think it's a reasonable list of ambitions. Do you think you're making progress on them here?

I don't know if they're mostly the sorts of things that you ever actually make progress on.

They sound like the kinds of things that you make progress on. People pass classes and buy trucks and make friends in lots of different places and kill baby-eating demons and visit Yellowstone and write books and get better at doing the laundry.

I guess some people have in theory done some of those things at some points in human history.

The great heroes of legend have even done two or three of them in the same lifetime.

I think I don't think about it that much because a lot of things are things that I can't get very much closer to for a long time, and some of them don't make very much sense anyway. And also I have this sense that it'll get depressing.

It is possible that humans are different this way but I find it really helpful to have some things on my to-do list that are a thousand years out. It helps with - hmmm, one thing it helps with is that when you're tempted to ask yourself 'who am I to be doing this' you can answer 'the kind of person I'll need to be to do these important things eventually'.

I think maybe that only works if you think you're ever going to do anything really important.

- and it's not even like I don't do that, OK, I don't think I'm gonna go kill Lurconis next Thursday, but knowing that I wanna lets me at least imagine that doing hard stuff is maybe getting me ready to do harder things someday, if I ever actually get that far, which I probably won't, but - if I thought about life in terms of figuring out how to actually kill Lurconis, or whether I was getting any closer to it, I'd crash and burn and give up in two weeks, and then I wouldn't be anywhere. 

That's interesting. Because there wouldn't be enough days where it felt like you'd made enough progress?

Because I wouldn't be accomplishing anything. And because - you'd have to -

I don't know how to say it.

Alex does this thing for the other kids in gym class where if they run farther than they've ever run before, or if they run a whole lap faster than they've ever run one before, then they get a cookie. And that's not easy to do it on any given day, not if you haven't been gaming it the whole time, but it's manageable, it's a thing you can theoretically do. You don't have to be a person who can run a mile in six minutes, you don't even have to aim for it, you just have to be pushing yourself in that moment and trying to do better than you've done before. And if he just gave cookies to people who ran a mile in six minutes, or whatever, then almost nobody would ever get a cookie, even at the end of the year when they've had all year to train for it, because it'd be so far away and so difficult and there'd be nothing to sustain anybody on their way there, so they'd give up before they started.

And - the thing about Sunnydale is that, like, it's sort of a terrible place, but it's always got all of these little problems lying around to be solved, if you can find them? And so even if you can't do anything really transformational, there are lots of chances to stretch the limits of your abilities just a little. And - man, I feel like even telling you this is going to break it, but - if I only thought about really big things then I feel like I'd never get to any of them, and then I wouldn't be getting anything done at all.

I don't even know if any of that is right, just -

You don't have to defend it to me. We're not trying to make you change plans here. We're - I've got a bunch of people who are not quite as good as you at arresting demons but capable of doing it at all, and we're trying to figure out where they will do the most good, and it seems like it's important to have some of them in Sunnydale, but it also seems like you've done a tremendous amount of good in Sunnydale and need the space to keep doing that, both for the sake of the city and for the sake of letting you keep getting stronger. So the challenging thing - and I'm sorry about putting you through all of this, but we need to know you to get anywhere on any of it - is figuring out where people should be so that you have more leverage on the problems where more leverage is helpful without having people overlapping you enough that it makes your work harder.

I guess that makes sense.

I don't know if I really have plans. 

Can I suggest some? If they're small and attainable?

You can suggest them even if they're not, I just get to veto them if I think they'll wreck everything.

Kara Wilitzer, the climbing coach, wants an assignment in Sunnydale next year. I know the climbing class is a bit of a waste of your time - I know the whole camp is - but it'd be good to know if you get along with her. Zach Befton in cabin 8 hasn't made any friends and has been eating dinner in his cabin so it's not obvious he's not sitting with anyone, you could intercept him. Emmy Sandovol hasn't been going to Mass because no one else in her cabin does and she doesn't want to go alone.

She doesn't really feel like making friends is one of her core competency areas, but she said she'd be nice. And she really doesn't have anything better to do now that the summer camp isn't evil.

I can try. And I think tend to reserve the phrase 'waste of my time' for things that don't result in learning several government secrets and making at least one friend.

Oh good. In the future if you want to learn government secrets you can try less felonious channels, not that I'm upset. Alex doesn't tell you everything you're allowed to know because he associates telling people things with giving them homework and figures you'll ask if you're curious.

Oh. Huh.

I mostly only commit felonies when I think someone might be trying to murder a bunch of people, though.

That's good. I could get you out of trouble regardless but I'd be awfully concerned if I was routinely springing you for grand theft auto.

I mean I do tend to have 'someone is trying to murder a bunch of people' as a live hypothesis. But I will try to avoid actually stealing cars unless I really really have to.

You have my undying gratitude. - we're not any kind of dead, we're just immortal. In case you were wondering.

I just kinda figured you guys were aliens.

Is your age a state secret?

I was born about thirty five thousand years ago but was in the dimension we go to when we die for much of the interim. Alex is 480 years younger than me.

Huh.

OK.

Our species is actually native to Earth, but most of us have left. There's - somewhere nicer - and we can go anytime we want.

Ah.

Weren't you ever in the nicer place, then?

Born there, actually. My grandparents left Earth.

Why'd you come back?

Before God created the universe he created the Ainur, his servants, and he charged them with creating and shaping and protecting the Earth, and one of them rebelled against him - you've heard this story, though some of the details got a little distorted somewhere along the way. We called him Melkor. God had said that even Melkor's designs would resound to the greater glory of the whole thing, and so they weren't very afraid of him...and it made sense, at first. They'd craft valleys and he'd fill them in with mudslides, they'd build mountains and he'd chew through them with glaciers, and it all made the world closer to the original vision for it. But they - they were tired of conflict, they don't like it, they don't really understand it, and they left Earth for Valinor, the realm of the Valar, and they made it perfect and temperate and beautiful and a haven, in different places, for every animal that has ever lived here or ever will. 

When the Quendi awoke on Earth the other Ainur weren't there. Melkor was, and he captured and tortured us and bred his captives into a race of monstrous slaves and sent them back to prey on the survivors, and they invented weapons and stopped travelling alone and retreated towards the waters of the lake where we first awakened and they didn't understand what was happening. One of the Ainur, Oromë, the Vala of hunting, had returned to Earth to hunt, and he ran across a tribe of Quendi, and that was how the Ainur learned we'd arrived in the world. They went to war with Melkor. They imprisoned him. They invited us to come to Valinor with them. A few people agrees to go as scouts. They went. It was - so peaceful, and so beautiful, and free of war and violence and hunger and every affliction of the body. Some stayed. Some went. For three thousand years they flourished, in both worlds. And then the Ainur decided to release Melkor. 

They weren't - it sounds like a stupid mistake to a human but Melkor was the only evil in the universe, and we didn't know what evil was, and he said he was so very sorry and that he wanted only to walk free among the peoples of Valinor as our humble servant. They released him. He arranged through some elaborate machinations to ensure the King's eldest sons believed each other to be plotting to usurp him, murdered the King, triggered a civil war, and fled to Earth to scour it of all life.

People in Valinor were uncertain what to do about this. The factions were 'wait and see if we get more direct divine guidance', or 'something other than that'. Second faction left.

Ah.

She's sort of beginning to see why Alex might have the sense that telling her things would constitute homework. Also she probably should have brought her flashlight out here so that she could plausibly take any notes during this conversation.

So you were in the second faction, then?

Yes.

And how did that go for you?