He wasn't behind this. He's still working for the mayor but there are still no leads on that and no indication Spike's crew was involved. 

Ah.

- so like, more specifically, Snyder says one of the kids who was supposed to host one of the international exchange students got really sick and had to pull out of the program but everything's already set for all of the kids to come and did I know that I am in possession of a house, and like this seems like a pretty ridiculous thing to be able to force students to do, even by Snyder standards, but I guess I'll probably say yes unless this is likely to be an evil plot of some kind.

Wow. Uh, I'll check.

This high school is super weird. I just want you to know that I'm pretty sure most high schools? Not this weird.

The concept of high school is pretty weird honestly. In a nice world you'd all spend most of your time exploring and sitting in on lectures that seem interesting and doing apprenticeships and building houses for your classmates who were ready to move out. And teaching little kids. 

That does sound a lot nicer. But in defense of high school, we only get until we're eighteen to either figure out how to support ourselves or figure out how to convince people that we're worth spending higher education dollars on. Also something something historical importance of compulsory education for maintaining a remotely free and equal and at all cohesive culturally diverse democratic system, rather than collapsing back into oppressive tyranny of the powerless and ignorant masses.

Yeah, you have a way harder problem. Sigh. I don't like the exchange student but I have no reason to think it's an evil plot.

Well he's got to stay somewhere. Thanks.

How long do Quendi get? To figure out - I guess I dunno whether anyone ever made you guys get jobs.

No one in Valinor needs to work but we legally come of age at five hundred and typically start to try to be adults by the time we're a thousand.

Well at least one person probably won't judge me too hard if I'm still making stupid decisions at twenty.

Honestly sometimes I think everything wrong with humans is that you are full-sized before you have enough experience to be good with each other. Most things humans do wouldn't be that horrifying if a Quendi toddler did them.

Sounds alarmingly plausible. Man, I was OK being human and mortal and everything until just now. I bet I could figure out how to be a responsible adult if I had five hundred years.

It makes a big difference. People - figure out what they actually want.

I dunno if I'd manage that. Maybe in a whole five hundred years. Man, that's like - five hundred years ago the Europeans had known about the Americas for five. The whole country isn't even that grown up. So - maybe in five hundred years even I could figure something like that out.

Anyway. I guess I don't really have to. One of the better parts of being a vampire slayer is that I get to stop trying to figure out what I'm going to be when I grow up.

Mmhmm. But - it's still good to have time to figure out how you want to be it.

Yeah. But I also get to not be murdered at eighteen, so that's cool. I'm like ahead of the curve and stuff.

- this conversation is getting more depressing the longer it stays on this topic, so, uh. You coming on the field trip next week?

Nope, I hate art museums and successfully finagled not being a chaperone. Sorry. 

You're gonna feel so bad about yourself when monsters jump out of the paintings and attack us.

No doubt.

They found a woman dead in the laundry room of an apartment complex out at Sunset and Mann. Barbecue forks, etcetera etcetera. Bureau's combing the area.

Dang it. I guess more extensive patrolling tonight, then. After we find her I wanna go back to unarmed hand-to-hand before we move on to hot wiring cars, but this comes first.

Lame how I don't have vampire senses. I would totally trade in the slayer dreams for a vampire radar. - or maybe I wouldn't, they were a lot more useful before I met you guys.

I think her precognition is making this vastly harder than it'd be otherwise.

Yeah.

- and that's the bell, I gotta go pretend to know Latin now. I'll see you after school.

They don't find Drusilla. She's really very good at hiding. Karen wonders whether she thought that this quality might save her, when Angelus was preying on everyone close to her. She kind of wants to give Spike some points in comparison, for going after girls who have some chance at fighting back. This is probably a dumb impulse.

On Monday the class takes a field trip to the Sunnydale Natural History Museum. They have lots of old pottery stuff. They have exhibits on dinosaurs, but no actual dinosaur skeletons, just trilobite fossils. She wants to be disappointed about that, but she also feels like if they did have dinosaurs then she would definitely have to fight a T-Rex at some point, and while this sounds incredibly badass, she has seen Jurassic Park, and she knows in her soul that it wouldn't turn out well in the end. 

They have an Incan mummy with worryingly little in the way of display glass. None, in fact. She could just reach out and touch this mummy. This is such a concerning disregard for the safety of valuable ancient historical artifacts.

When they return to the bus, no one counts off. Karen counts, in her head, out of habit, and notices that they're short one student.

Karen does not go home on the bus.

Heyyy, Alex, so I'm gonna cut sixth period to go wander around the natural history museum some more. We're missing a student but if it turns out he's just smoking pot somewhere then feel free to note this on, I dunno, a list of dumb teenage decisions that I have made.

I'll join you after school.

Cool.

Hey Alex? This is gonna sound really dumb, at least if you don't take into account the fact that there were fairies present at some point in our pasts and they cursed us to have interesting lives, but this mummy? This is a different mummy than the mummy that was here before. Also the burial seal plate thingy that was on the mummy before is, uh, broken.

Man, I hate this place.