A demon appears in the frat house. "...hi there. What, uh, what can I do for you?" He glances around, tail swishing, takes in the pizza boxes and the bedding and the... vintage TV.

"Shit," says Zach.

"Shit," says Tyler. 

They stare at each other in bewildered panic for a second and then Zach gets up and puts a sock on the door and closes it. 

     "- uh -" says Tyler.

"Landlord said we were out if any more funny shit happened," Zach says, "so let's not have the whole town over to look at it, right?

     "You can't evict people for funny shit happening. What're you going to do, go to court and say, your honor, they summoned a demon -"

"Are you a demon?" asks Zach.

"Yes? What does it say in the circle, dude? - okay, this is in Latin, but still, wings, tail, appears in circles?"

"....that's fair," says Zach, blinking rapidly. "I thought the book was a joke. Demons don't exist."

"Lemme guess, that TV is not more than a few years old?"

They both turn to look at the TV. "Uh, yeah," Tyler says. "Are demons picky about TV?"

"No, apparently demons are from the future. Demon singular is from the future, rather. It's very exciting."

They both continue to seem just a little bit weirdly nonplussed about discovering that demons exist and that this demon is from the future. 

"I"m sorry for summoning you from the future," Zach says uncertainly. "Please don't board all the doors and fling snakes at everyone, our lease is a bit precarious."

"I don't really see why I'd find that entertaining, honestly."

"Oh good."

"What do you find entertaining?" says Tyler.

"Uh. Eradicating malaria? Eh, I guess that's not so much recreational. Terraforming Mars! I want to terraform Mars."

They blink at each other. 

"I guess that doesn't affect the lease," says Zach.

"I'd be really surprised if it did. However, the circle currently doesn't allow me to do either of those things."

They both look at the Latin. "We should maybe get someone in here who has any idea what the fuck they're doing," says Tyler.

"Who's that going to be?" says Zach. 

"....dunno. Ryan? Seems like a guy who has any idea what the fuck he's doing. And he was the one who didn't buy the explanation about gangs on PCP with barbecue forks -"

     "Oh, yeah. You know, in hindsight that was pretty fishy."

"Drugs'll fuck you up. Do you want to go get him?"

      "You should. I'm the one who summoned the demon." 

"Does that matter?"

      "The book said so."

"Gangs on PCP with barbecue forks?"

"This town is weird, man," says Zach.

         "I have a friend at UC Davis and he said they hadn't had a single murder that he knew of."

"Isn't UC Davis smaller, though?"

         "Nah, it's twice the size."

"...what does Ryan think is the real explanation for, uh, the murders?"

"I don't know."

"I mean," says Tyler, "the obvious theory here is....demons, yes? It turns out there are secretly demons, and also that there's a government coverup of some kind, probably the government coverup is of the demons?"

"I don't think there's any good reason for a demon serial killer to make anything look like it was the responsibility of gangs on PCP. With barbecue forks. It's just... really specific to even be a binding loophole."

"I'm just saying that, like, it's weird for there to be secret demons and a government coverup of something else," Tyler says.

"The boarding up the house and filling it with snakes, does that one sound to you like a demon?" asks Zach.

"It sounds like something a demon could do if they had very specific tastes in horror movies?"

"How about the walls starting to scream and beg us to break them down? And then oozing blood?"

"That was a separate incident," says Tyler helpfully.

"The screaming would require speakers somewhere, oozing blood's straightforward. You are getting a really unlucky crop of demons, huh, are people summoning off the horror reenactment enthusiast mailing list's membership roll?"

"Where'd you get the book from again?" asked Zach.

       "From Alex. He said his girlfriend gave it to him."

"Betsy?" 

        "Nah, they broke up ages ago."

"Who's he seeing now?"

         "I don't know."

"I'm really unclear on what demons can do."

"Make stuff," says Cam.

"What stuff, though?"

"Not antimatter. Or people, we can't do anything smart."

"The snakes seemed pretty smart," said Tyler. "Some of them took weeks to find."

"Then maybe it wasn't a demon."

" - I'll go look for Ryan." He vanishes.

Zach shuffles his feet. "Anything, huh? Why do demons, uh, bother to bother frat houses, if you have everything you could want anyway?"

"I can't tell the difference between a summon in a frat house and any other summon. But most of us do stay home rather than take summonses at all, if that's what you mean."

"That makes more sense. But you do this because you want to ...terraform Mars and eradicate malaria?"

"Yeah! Well, in the future malaria's handled, but Mars isn't, people are still living in arcologies, it's super frustrating!"

"It just doesn't seem like a very demonic ambition!"

Several men burst into the room arguing. "You idiot!" the unfamiliar one yells at Tyler.

       "We didn't know it'd work!"

"You didn't know it wouldn't work!"

      "I thought I did know it wouldn't work, actually, because demons don't fucking exist!"

"This is the fourth time this year!"

     "The blood, the snakes, the gangs on PCP -"

"No, those were vampires. Moron. The third time everyone had a week of dreams about a howling void whispering our names and woke up freezing cold, remember?"

     "I thought the heat was broken."

"That's not Ryan," Zach tells the demon helpfully.

     "Ryan was out," says Tyler. 

"Hello, not-Ryan," says Cam. "Does it help if I assert that I'm a friendly demon who isn't going to kill anybody or - anything? Vampires, really? We don't have vampires where I'm from."

"I'm Daniel," says not-Ryan. "A friendly demon, that's a change of pace. I have no idea if they have vampires where you're from but they have them most places, here. Sunnydale has extra for some reason."

"Okay, let me revise my statement about being from the future, I'm gonna update that to alternate - universe, timeline, something."

"They don't have vampires in Redwood City," says Tyler.

     "They do, they just prey on homeless people," says Daniel.

"We don't have homeless people in Redwood City," says Tyler.

     "That's because the vampires ate them."

"Goodness," says Cam.

Zach has his head in his hands. "Can you go away? You can go wherever as long as you don't fuck up the frat house or murder anyone or anything."

      "Nah, we gotta tell the government about him."

               "Ryan's out, though."

      "Well, where'd he go?"

"I can't walk out of the circle till you either negotiate a task with me or snap the binding. I literally have to hang out here in the boundaries of this here circle you drew on the floor. And the clues are adding up to 'none of you took Summoning 101 and know how to negotiate a task correctly' so it'll be a lot simpler if you just snap the binding, simple mental action."

"Don't do that," says Daniel. "That sounds like a bad thing to do."

"Your task is... to go away!" Zach says triumphantly. 

(It is becoming increasingly obvious that all these people may be a bit drunk.)

"That doesn't count," says Cam. "I am actually qualified to teach Summoning 101 but it's a four credit course, you know, though I could condense it into a half semester if I cut all the cultural stuff."

"What happens if we try to carry you out of the circle and outside?" asks Zach. "We could drop you off downtown or something. I have -" he fishes in his pocket - "money for beer - I guess you don't need that -"

"Why don't you just tell us what to say so that you can go off but you can't do anything that gets us in trouble?" says Tyler. 

       "You're already in trouble," says Daniel. 

"I saw you at the Bronze with a girl who definitely wasn't Melanie."

       " - right, because we broke up. You think you're really clever?"

Zach snaps Cam's binding. It's unclear from the expression on his face whether this was deliberate.

"Yeah, you know what, carrying me out of the circle actually works fine," Cam says. "You don't even have to get me all the way downtown."

"Oh, okay," They carry him out of the circle, a bit awkwardly, still arguing.

"Thanks!" he says. "I don't wanna turn heads walking down the street, can I duck into your shower to cut off my wings and tail without making a huge mess, before I go? It's okay if the answer's no, I can just do a snazzy leather coat, but if anybody looks twice..."

"Use the one on the second floor, it's full of blood anyway."

"- why's that?"

"The drain's stopped up," Tyler says patiently, "and the walls bled that one time."

"Okay," says Cam blandly, and he goes up to the second floor bathroom, puts plastic bags on his legs, steps into the tub, removes offending appendages, and leaves them and the plastic bags there when he steps out again, now with added T-shirt.

He passes some bedrooms and a common area with a battered couch where a boy and a girl are making out. No one bothers him. 

Uh-huh.

He goes downstairs, sticks a small tracking device in Zach for future reference, waves to everybody politely, departs from the frat house, and makes himself a motorcycle, which he proceeds to ride around looking for a public library.

Sunnydale, California has one of those. It's closed because it's late at night.

Cam notes its location for future reference and looks for a pawn shop.

Several of those. Some of them are open despite the hour; they are named things like "CA$H QUICK NO QUE$TIONS" and "CA$H 4 GOLD".

Cam would like to pawn (he peeps in the window for ideas of the range) this violin and this string of pearls, here, and these articles of gold jewelry, there.

Cam can have a couple hundred dollars in cash from wary proprietors who have bars between him and them.

Cool. That will probably come in handy sooner or later.

Cam wanders around, puttering slowly on his motorcycle, assessing the place.

It seems like a deeply unpleasant sort of place. It goes on forever, one or two stories tall. There are a lot of vacant lots. Most of the streets don't have sidewalks. None of them have pedestrian crossings. He passes at least six different cemeteries and like twenty churches. A billboard advertises cigarettes. A strip club has a neon sign. 

He doesn't see any vampires. 

Apparently that's what most people see when they go looking for vampires, so. He'd still really rather like to figure out the vertebrate vampire situation before he does anything complicating with the invertebrate vampires. He can't think of a way for vampires to interact with the eradication of the malarial mosquito, but then he knows about two thirds of a thing about vampires from very unreliable drunk sources.

Putter putter putter. Eventually he pauses to sit on a bench and consume a chicken sandwich.

That gets someone to walk up to him. Girl, maybe his age, not very dressed. "That looks tasty," she says.

"Want some?"

"I think so." And her face transforms. It gets bumpier and - fangier - and she lunges forwards faster than anyone should be able to move and bites his neck.

How suggestive.

Cam waits to see if she will react in some way to how unbiteable he is.

She is startled by it. She tries again a couple times, then pulls back, snarling, and punches him in the face instead.

"Is punching also nutritious?" he asks mildly, when his sandwich goes flying and he has sat back up from being knocked against the back of the bench. "It doesn't seem like it would be."

Snarl! 

- and she turns to run off.

Her legs are tied together now. "Was it something I said?"

She violently attempts to free herself.

It's just rope, but there isn't a knot in it and it's very snug, which might make it hard. Cam gets up and wanders over to her. "Look, are you really hungry?" he asks.

With some apparent effort she un-snarls her face. "What are you?"

"I'm a -" Hm. "-n apsel. You, I'm assuming, are a vampire, have I got that right?"

"What do you want with me?"

"You're really gonna have to start answering questions at some point here or I'll still be standing over you at sunrise without any reliable information on whether you are about to die of that in some way."

"Yes, I'll die of that. Yes, I'm hungry."

"Cool. Short of 'on the hoof' in what variety and form do you prefer your blood?"

" - human? Human temperature? Where're you getting it-"

"You don't specifically prefer college-aged white males who have recently eaten sandwiches or anything like that, just human at ninety eight point six?"

"Race doesn't affect the flavor. Some people will tell you it does, but they're lying. Now, vegan girl, that'll affect the flavor. - I don't really care."

Cam hands her a thermos. It contains non-vegan-girl A-negative blood and just in case there is weird nonmetabolic stuff going on it doesn't have any nuclei in it making it belong to anybody in particular. "Here you go. Let me know if you want a refill, I don't know if you usually go for Red Cross amounts or slasher film."

She drinks the thermos. "This is fine for now. So you're recruiting?"

"Is that typical?"

"Something big and bad is lounging around, doesn't kill me, offers presents - yeah, that's usually what's up."

"Huh. I don't know what has you thinking I'm bad."

"Well, you didn't kill me."

"Am I supposed to?"

"No! But good guys kill vampires, right, it's like what they do. Because we're evil."

"Are you? Why's that?"

" - I don't know, man. It's like, I woke up, clawed my way out of my grave, and I was like, woah, hey, guess I'm evil! I'll eat people and rob liquor stores!"

"Was that as disorienting as it sounds?"

"Pretty fucking weird. You're like, hey, is this the afterlife, nah wait I recognize that gas station - guess I'm glad they didn't cremate me, haha -"

"So you have continuity of experience with your human self and you like being - undead, is that the term?"

The vampire looks a little uncertain she caught all those words. "Yep, it's great."

"Do you have a preferred shaded area in which we can continue this discussion, by the by?"

"There're tunnels under the graveyards. It's how everyone gets around."

"Exciting. Are we liable to be interrupted?"

"Nah. The good guys have killed almost everyone, you gotta be real careful these days. The tunnels are so empty you can sing karaoke all day and no one tells you to keep it down."

"Who are the good guys?"

"Haven't met them or I'd be dead, wouldn't I? There's supposed to be a vampire slayer."

"Just one?"

"Yup. Guess she keeps busy."

"Well, how shall we get into these tunnels of yours so I don't have to clockwatch while we chat?"

"Thataway." She points at the graveyard.

The rope around her ankles snaps. "Lead the way."

She seems to contemplate running away and decide to not do that. The graveyard has an elaborate crypt and the crypt has a staircase in the back and then there are tunnels. They're dark.

Cam makes his computer since he's going to do that sooner or later anyway and turns on its light to see by.

The vampire sits down and pouts. "You still haven't told me what you're after."

"I don't know much about vampires and stuff, and I'd like to. Also you need to cut it out with the biting people."

Laugh. "Sure."

"I'm so heartened by the interest in rehabilitation. The face thing, do you do that every time?"

"I dunno. Probably."

"I'd think it would be hard to miss."

"It doesn't really feel like much of anything. Sometimes new vampires don't know they're doing it. - we don't have reflections."

"Huh, fun fact." He opens a computer file and starts taking notes. "Just you or your clothes and stuff too?"

"It looks in the mirror like there's nothing there."

"Interesting! And sunlight kills you - garlic, crosses, running water, compulsive counting, wood to the heart, decapitation, holy water, consecrated ground, vulnerable to iron or steel, unable to enter homes without invitation, sleep in coffins, require soil from your burial site, any of that?"

"Garlic is kind of annoying because it smells terrible and I guess it makes people a bit less tasty, crosses sucks, water's fine, never heard anything about counting, I don't want to tell you how to kill vampires if you don't already know..."

"You want me to find out by testing it?"

"Won't you anyway? I could be lying."

"I was thinking I'd rig you to, say, detonate, if remotely triggered should I suspect you did anything untoward, and hope that would at least stop you from hurting people while I caught up, but I don't have to kill you if you don't do anything untoward."

"Most things that'd kill a human will kill us except we don't bleed and we don't age."

"Cool. I might wanna test some drug reactions, that okay with you? I went to medical school."

"What do I get out of agreeing to that, exactly?"

"I don't have to leave you here restrained while I go look for more test subjects?"

"I hope you run into something nastier than you are."

"I'm indestructible. Look, I just wanna try a thing that'd knock a human out temporarily. Won't do worse than a mild headache unless you have a non-sunlight weakness that humans don't have."

Her eyes narrow. "Fine."

Dose!

Either knocked out or pretending very convincingly.

Cam's computer makes a loud startling noise!

No twitch but maybe it's easier to not twitch if you don't need to breathe or have a heartbeat or whatever.

He waits for fifteen minutes and if she's not up by then he tries the antidote.

She doesn't react to that either.

That begins to be slightly concerning.

Itching powder on her foot?

After a minute she shifts slightly to rub it against a rock.

"Hello there. I can't use this result, unfortunately."

She opens her eyes to glare at him. "Don't you have anything better to do than harass people?"

"I'd like to be in sub-Sarahan Africa eradicating malaria. Unfortunately, my information about the state of the world isn't up to the level I prefer to have when I'm making large ecological changes."

"That sounds like a fine thing to do. Not very evil, I guess. You could replace it with having mosquitos bring their blood to the shrine of a hellgod or something?"

"I'm not trying to be evil!"

"Well, I'm just making suggestions," she pouts.

Sigh. "Hellgods are a going concern?"

"I've heard about them. I haven't met any. I guess they could just be demons putting on airs."

"Tell me about those," he says.

"They're from hell dimensions and they don't come here much but when they do they try to suck us into a hell dimension or whatever?"

"And vampires are a different thing, not directly related?"

"I haven't exactly read a book about it. Pretty sure I'm not from a hell dimension. I guess I'm in favor of hell dimensions, you know, 'cause they sound pretty evil."

"Were you evil in life?"

"Nah, I was boring as fuck."

"Is that the taxonomy here, nobody's both good and interesting?"

The vampire looks kind of lost and kind of impatient. "Being the Slayer's probably pretty interesting."

"Mkay. I'm gonna rig up an experimental good behavior enforcement system for you before I let you go. I expect to continue to be available to provide ethically sourced blood. Is animal blood nutritious for you, out of curiosity?"

"Never tried it."

He hands her a cup.

She sniffs it and makes a face. "Gonna go with no."

"Okay, how about this -" New cup. Shelf stabilized human blood.

She makes less of a face. "What's this?"

"O-neg."

"Human, though?"

"Yeah, just shelf stable, or it would be if it were sealed up. I don't want to be making a lot of trips to feed you and anybody else I catch so I might want to just leave a stash of this around and replenish it every now and then."

"It'll do."

"Taste it and make sure?"

She tastes it. "Yeah, it'll do."

"Cool." He starts designing a vampire-good-behavior system on his computer. "I never got your name."

"I'm still tryna pick one, actually."

"Do you have a working title?"

"I was gonna pick between Tate and Talon and Shadow. What do you think?"

"Ooh, I like Talon."

"There we go, then!"

"Nice to meetcha, Talon, I'm Cam. I'm gonna put at least one tracking device in you and a blood-detecting diagnostic object in your mouth which will inform me when you are snacking and I'm currently undecided whether unauthorized snacking should just kill you or if I want the responsibility of hunting you down to avoid the risk of equipment failure, what do you think?"

"I think putting explody things in people is more evil."

"Does that mean you're in favor?"

"Yeah!"

"Gosh, I guess that settles it!" Design design design. "Okay. Diagnostic thingy leaves your mouth, that'll signal the explody thing and notify me - any trackers leave your person, so will that - diagnostic thingy detects a blood response and you aren't in the depository I will make and stock for you, that'll signal the explody thing too - debugging in progress - do you have a phone, I could buy a phone in case there is any problem with this and you need software updates?"

"I don't have a phone."

"Okay, well, fun fact, if you write something and then stick 'letter to Cam' on it, I'll see it next time I check my mail by magic. It's very cool. Do you go in for any evil besides eating people?" He makes some stuff and puts a blood sample in it; the stuff goes beep. "Hmmm, I don't want this to trigger if you just bite your tongue..."

"I rob liquor stores. Sometimes I hang peoples' cats from trees with shoelaces."

"Why liquor stores in particular?"

"They're really satisfying to smash up! And I drink a lot."

"You can still get drunk?"

"It's a bit more work, but yeah."

"Welp. I don't think I'm going to impose the death penalty for robbery or animal abuse. Also harder to detect than the presence of blood in your mouth. Good news, vampire blood is different in a detectable way!" He works on his program some more.

" - so it's cool if I go rob a liquor store now? Want anything?"

"I don't drink, thanks. I have to install all this shit, hold still." Little detonator full of wood shrapnel by the heart. Tracker here and there and there and there. Diagnostic thingy in mouth - "Is that comfy enough if you yawn?"

She yawns. "Fine I guess."

"Software propagating, and... congratulations, you're rigged to blow, but not intensely enough to suicide-bomb anyone, now show me where to put a place you can safely eat shelf blood?"

She rolls her eyes and finds a nook in the sewers. "If anyone else takes up here I'll fight them for it."

"I am hoping to be able to send multiple vampires here if I catch any more," he remarks. "Can you cope with that?"

"Depends what they're like I guess."

"I guess I can make several depositories." The nook acquires a nice layer of tile and shelves of sealed blood by the pint. "I'm adding some more features I'm not going to tell you about in detail to prevent dragging live prey down here to chew on from working. You can come here, you can grab a pint, you can eat it while you're here, wait till you've swallowed it all to leave."

"Really seems like there's gonna be better things to do with your time, man, but okay."

"It's possible I should have just killed you but I've never killed anyone before and want to make really sure I have a good reason before I ever do."

"You're really bad at this evil thing."

"Oh good," he says. "Have a nice unlife, Talon." He heads back the way they came, up out of the tunnel.

No one else is stalking the streets this fine night. Or out for more innocent reasons, either.

He hangs out by the library trying to patch into their wifi with a series of backwards-compatibility gadgets only to discover that, in fact, they do not have wifi. He sighs and waits for it to open.

It opens at 8. Once the sun goes up there are dogwalkers and commuters and Sunnydale seems more like a normal city. 

It's a nice library. Sunnydale doesn't seem to have any homeless people so it's all students and parents and businesspeople.

And it does have wired Internet, though it's abombinably slow. He gets online and starts looking for stuff about vampires and demons.

The usual mix of nonsense that you'd expect when searching on the internet for vampires and demons. Maybe some of it isn't nonsense but it's not obviously not nonsense. There's probably more of it than there would have been in a 1998 internet search in his world.

Disappointing. There's probably loads of old security holes he can use if he wants to look them up but he doesn't even know who to hack. Anybody vehemently denying the existence of demons and/or vampires? Any coverage of the incidents mentioned at the frat?

The events merit a mention on the police blotter, where they've been rendered as vandalism. Sunnydale has a truly impressive obituaries page. No one seems super invested in denying the existence of demons or vampires except in the 'calling people stupid on the internet is fun' way.

Okay, this is annoying. Does the library have any books that look handy?

It has a decent selection of books on mythology and vampires and demons and stuff.

He skims it all. It is disappointing.

He asks a librarian if this is all they have on vampires.

The librarian makes a face. "Some are checked out?" She reads off some names.

Cam dutifully writes down these titles. "That's it?" he asks.

"That's it."

"Thank you."

He motorcycles away and makes the books and skims those too in case they're any better.

One of them is at least more detailed than you might expect from making shit up. It claims that vampires are demons inhabiting the corpses of previously alive people, that their faces transform, that they're universally evil because they're demons, that holy water and stakes and sunlight and decapitation all work to stop them, that they need an invitation into residences and can't enter churches, that Dracula is real and one of them, and that humans can train in combat well enough to take them on, though it isn't advised. 

Complete works of this author?

Also wrote some attempted translations of the Bible and a long commentary on Aquinas and a narrative account of the effort to hunt down a Shoggoth demon terrorizing his hometown and a diary which is mostly accounts of sex he had with his wife but does feature twelve different references to vampires and forty to demons, some metaphorical and some apparently literal.

Does he have any citations?

Lots for the Aquinas thing.

Heck.

Is this the only library in town?

The high school has one, as do the various colleges.

...how hard is it to get into these libraries as a nonstudent?

One college wants key cards, the others don't bother. The high school wants you to sign in at the front desk.

Sure. His name is Cam and his arrival time is 10:47 a.m. In he goes.

The Sunnydale High School library turns out to be the one with a lot of books about vampires for whatever reason. They are old and bound in all kinds of interesting materials and have fascinating Latin titles. After a couple minutes someone asks him what he's doing here, though.

"Browsing. You don't have interlibrary loan set up with SPL, do you?"

"Not for those books, no. This library is for students."

"Sorry, I didn't see a sign. Do I need to clear out?"

"You do." She looks like she expects saying this might go badly.

"Sure, sorry to have intruded."

He goes out. Motorcycles to a nice park and sits down with a smoothie. Before he conjures up electronic format of that whole stack he checks his mail in case Talon has anything to say.

Nope!

Cool. He reads a lot, computer hidden in what appears to casual inspection to be a large hardback book without a title on it lest a title inspire conversationalists. Then he reconsiders and puts the title of one of the more interesting-looking demon-related books on the front.

Sunnydale is almost as quiet in the daytime as it is at night, at least until school gets out. 

Books agree on: vampires are evil demons. sunlight, holy water, stakes through the heart, and beheading all work; it's obvious if something works because the vampire will dust.  can't enter houses. faster and stronger than humans. existing vampires make new ones. no reflections. shifty fangy faces.

Books disagree on: whether crosses do anything, whether garlic does anything, whether fire does anything, what exactly is required for an existing vampire to make a new one, who can give a vampire permission to enter a house, how quickly vampires heal from injuries, whether vampires remember anything from the lives of the human whose corpse they inhabit.

Demons seem to come in astounding variety with astoundingly varied abilities.

This is fascinating and Cam will read about demons all day long, less occasional trips to the nearest trash can to discard cups and wrappers as he noms things. He checks his mail again come sundown.

Talon still doesn't want to say hi, apparently. 

Some demons are believed to be native to this dimension and many are from other dimensions. A lot of dimensions are called hell-dimensions; it's not clear what makes them hellish. Most demons are mindless beasts but some are believed to be intelligent. Many demons have magical powers ranging from telepathy to inducing hallucinations to teleporting to possessing people to inspiring terror and paranoia to excreting magical poisons to 'a good sense of direction' to both halves regenerating when cut in half. Some kinds of demon hybridize. There are several ways people can become demons - impressing a demon enough, doing an ascension ritual, being cursed. All demons are evil, of course, but some are very subtle about it.

Gosh. Rituals and curses. Anything on that sort of thing to be had?

Several of these are books about magic. There are all kinds. Some involve using magic ingredients to do reactions in a way that sounds like normal chemistry except that the ingredients are things like 'the horn of a Karrak demon' or 'the hand of a mummy' and the results things like 'makes people fall in love with you' and 'turns you invisible' and 'burns away your enemy starting with their little toe'. Some kinds involve prayers or negotiations with extradimensional deities. Some kinds use your inherent magical abilities, which people have varying amounts of. 

Do any of the potion-y things have exclusively nonmagical ingredients? (Where he's from mummies are nonmagical but he's not betting on that here. Can he make just a little bit of a Karrak demon horn?)

He can make some Karrak demon horn but it transpires that no potion-y thing have entirely ingredients he can make. 

Well, he supposes that might explain why none of these potions were invented back where things are as he's accustomed. What's the fastest way to determine if he has innate magical ability of the relevant sort?

He can check if he can levitate a sheet of paper; it might take a couple of days.

He will try this intermittently while continuing to read and sometimes check his mail. Sunset finds him still on this bench.

"You shouldn't be out," someone tells him, hurrying home with groceries, but they do not follow up on this. 

Some drunk college students or maybe teenagers meander down the sidewalk a couple hours after sundown on their way to a bar. 

Bars are less interesting than books. He is however becoming increasingly convinced that none of this is relevant to mosquitoes. He searches the corpus for various spellings and languages of "mosquito" and "malaria" (and other mosquito-borne illnesses) just to make sure.

Seems pretty irrelevant to mosquitos.

Cool, time to make a little shuttle and go put down some sterile male mosquitoes.

It's morning again by the time he's back and he resumes reading about demons and stuff. His shuttle is hidden under some shrubbery in the desert.

There's an angry letter from Talon.

Asshole. Now I can't eat at all.

...okay, where are her many tracking devices?

Like fifteen miles north of here.

Cam motorcycles on up.

He can get about fourteen miles, then the road is closed off. The sign says Bureau For Environmental Enforcement - Do Not Enter

He's gonna enter anyhow!

He gets maybe 200 feet before someone shouts 'freeze' through a loudspeaker.

Cam pauses and looks around.

"This is a secure area," the loudspeaker complains. "Put your hands on your head."

Yeah okay he will go along with this for the time being. Hands, head.

"Lie down on the ground."

Cam sits, but stops short of lying down. "I misplaced a vampire, she says she can't eat, and my tracking device says she's in there."

"Lie down on the ground." And some off-speaker chatter.

"Are you looking into my misplaced vampire?" Cam asks, flopping.

Some soldiers come out of the trees. One of them scans him with some sort of scanner thing. Another one handcuffs him. Then they haul him to his feet. "We've got your vampire," says the first one. 

"Yeah, can you let me within like fifteen feet of her so I can reprogram her catch-and-release doodads? I don't want her to get wood shrapnel to the heart for accepting food. I'm generously assuming here that you have an in with the Red Cross or your own folks get voluntold to donate, if you're shoving live MKULTRA castoffs at her we have a difference of opinion but I can also just replace that as a blood solution."

"You are what, exactly?"

"Let's say I'm an apsel."

"Native to Earth or elsewhere?"

"- it's complicated. It's complicated in, like, three different ways."

"Happen to know if any governments of your species are in diplomatic contact with the American government -"

"That's also complicated but I'm going to lean pretty much toward no."

"Why did you rig a vampire to detonate?"

"I suspected otherwise she'd eat people. She isn't going to explode hard enough to harm bystanders. Maybe a splinter if she has a really weak ribcage?"

"Is there anything here that could be unexpectedly injurious to you or set off her explosive device - allergies to music, machinery, electricity, other species of demon -"

"Nope. Well, I haven't met very many kinds of demon, but provisionally nope. I can set off her explosive device at will in range but I'm not gonna, I would have killed her in the first place if I'd wanted to do that and you let her write me a note so this probably isn't a maximally dystopian secret government vampire project."

"We're doing our best. And they're allowed to kill themselves if they want to. So're you. Is there anyone who will be seriously inconvenienced if you're detained here for a few days?"

"Anybody who needs a cure for cancer a few days earlier than this will allow me to get around to it, similar demographics. Also me, I'm someone. Do you have, like, a good reason why I should let you detain me here for a few days?"

"You're going around rigging people with explosives and wandering into secure areas, that's enough reason for people to want a bit more information before they let you go back to doing that. You have a cure for cancer?"

"Only some kinds. If you have cancer let me know. I didn't ask if you had a good reason to attempt to detain me, I asked if I had a good reason to let you."

"Because you don't know what kind of magic went into protecting this place. You need to be physically present with someone to cure them of cancer? What kinds?"

"I have to be physically present if you want me to go in with syringes my own self but I was just gonna, like, go to the NIH at some point. The classes of cancers I have cures for have names but I do not believe them to be part of your medical jargon even if you are, improbably, a doctor, it would just sound like I was rattling off random proper nouns. The whole unknown magic issue seems like maybe I shouldn't let you take me into the building, I don't think you probably have any heavy duty magic out here where a confused monolingual Spanish speaker could accidentally make a wrong turn. You could bring my vampire someplace to let me reprogram her shit? Or I could probably set up enough repeaters to do it from here."

"We can bring the NIH here. Look, there's not a lot of folks out there trying to figure out how to safely release vampires into the wild, we're on the same side here."

"I seem to be wearing handcuffs."

"If I walked into your house with unknown powers what would I be wearing?"

"Now that would be a trick," says Cam. "But I don't think I'd escalate to open hostility right away, that just seems like it can't help if they're stronger than you and isn't necessary if they aren't, in a straightforward sort of interaction. I rode up on a motorcycle and announced my business, this isn't exactly high intrigue."

Sigh. "I can call and ask."

"'Preciate it!"

He spends a surprisingly long time on his walkie-talkie. Nothing he says is intelligible.

Elsewhere he wakes up to a phone call. 

"What?"

         "Can you drive out here?"

"So here's the deal," he says when he finally gets off the phone. "I promise that no one's trying to drown you in bureaucracy, it's just with all the mind-control that's going around it's useful to have procedures less flexible than they'd otherwise be. If we want, we can show you back to the border and wave you off, not a hostile, no intrusion intended, and you can go deal with anything that's so important that keeping you here for a couple days would inevitably end in violence, and come back if that ever changes."

His associate looks surprised.

"Option two, you're a demon we found, we bring you in, you fix your vampire, this goes just like it'd go if you hadn't threatened us, in the morning you're talking to whoever's the diplomat on staff about your species and what we should know about you and then we can have the cancer folks here if you want.

Option three is I guess you have your shot at busting out and they take notes so they know more about what they're dealing with and my parents have a big fight at my funeral about whose fault it is that they ever let me join the army. I guess I'm biased but it doesn't really seem like it has a lot going for it."

"To be perfectly clear, I wasn't trying to imply I'd harm a hair on anybody's head in the process of leaving. I guess the building might suffer and I don't know how much collateral damage your wards do, but I was envisioning a zero-casualty departure."

"The building is, uh, full of dangerous demons."

"...I wasn't planning to stage a massive jailbreak unless you've got some really dumb architectural decisions going on in there. If you had decided to put me in the middle of a lot of concentric circles of cells with more above and below I suppose I might have had a call to make about that?"

"Dude, I don't know what your powers are, that's kind of half the problem. This isn't a good place to mess around, generally speaking. If you want to head out you can head right out."

"I mean, I'm tempted to try working with you, delivery NIH is a heck of a selling point. But I notice I'm still wearing handcuffs. Can I still come in if I take 'em off?"

Sigh. "Yeah, okay."

His body language quite clearly conveys that he expects this to get him killed but he uncuffs Cam.

"Thanks!"

And Cam accompanies them into the building.

It's mostly underground. Spacious, well-lit, bizarrely tasteful for a underground secret government prison. Talon is shackled to the wall in a cell behind steel bars. Glaring at him. She's in the only cell he can see, so it's anyone's bet how characteristic it is, but it has a rug, a couch that folds into a bed, and a television. She is apparently watching Star Trek.

"Hey there. Sorry about this whole thing, I can reprogram your things now. Thanks for writing me about it instead of testing the system, by the way." He pulls his computer off his belt loop and lights it up and makes the necessary adjustments. "I'm just going to turn it off for the time being since you seem pretty sewn up in here and I don't know if these fellows would appreciate me adding electronics to your cell to designate it a safe eating location. Hungry now?"

She rolls her eyes. "They're feeding us pig's blood. Like we're animals."

"And here you told me that it wasn't nutritious! I feel lied to, Talon!" he says, appearing a Capri Sun style bag of B-positive in her lap nice and warm. "Enjoy."

She blows him a kiss and then drinks it. 

In range.

         Great. What the fuck is he?

I guess I'll know when he thinks about it. 

"Can we get you anything?" the soldier asks Cam.

"You got Internet in here?" They don't have Wikipedia yet, poor souls.

"No."

"That's awful. A place to sit and read will do, then, while you rummage through your interrogators to find one who'll talk to me. I can also provide palatable ethically sourced shelf stable human-flavored blood for your various captives, if you want to accommodate their gourmet sensibilities?" They could just be messing with everybody about the taste differing substantially but maybe they're not.

" - I'll pass that on but I think it's complicated, there's some evidence they're significantly more aggressive on human blood? Opinions vary on whether it's 'human blood is addictive' or 'they're healthier on their natural diet' but - yeah, I don't know. I'll pass it along. What's your supplier?"

"I just make it? Were you not watching?" He gestures at Talon's Capri Sangue.

"There's a lot more, uh, dimensional pocket nonsense than -" he wrinkles his forehead. 

"Huh. Well, not me, that's brand new over there," he shrugs.

" - wow."

It's in the name, guys! That's what 'apsel' means! It is in no way any of your faults that you don't know that! "Where to?" he prompts.

"Uh, downstairs." The elevator accepts a voice code, a thumbprint and a password. 

Downstairs is even more elaborate. High ceilings, nice artwork, well-tended live plants. 

Swanky. What, did this use to be a hotel? Is there a 'make my digs classy' spell? "If you don't spend your entire budget they take it away, huh?" Cam remarks, tapping a fern frond as he passes it.

"Some species really care. Dunno which ones, it isn't vampires. The ones it's important to impress, I guess. Maybe yours."

"I mean, it's nice but I wasn't going to complain if you'd gone with something more Art Deco."

"Can I get you anything to - I guess I probably can't get you anything to drink."

"You could get me a mug, and then I wouldn't have to DIY all the dishes and let them pile up," suggests Cam. That would probably create a hilarious inventory accounting headache.

He does that. There's a little kitchenette. The dishes are piling up in the sink a bit. 

"People whose job involves more diplomacy are on their way. Sorry for the wait. They don't live here."

"That's okay. I'm not going to expire of boredom." Or anything. He takes the mug and fills it with mocha. Mmmmm. He makes very good mocha. "You got any book recommendations?"

"- not really. Sorry."

Would you please ask -

- oh. Right. Sorry. 

"What sort of information do you need to make a book, does it have to actually exist?"

"It does have to exist. I mean, it doesn't have to be a book, I could bookify some other existing material, but I don't - reach into Platonic bookspace and grab something new, no."

"But you can't need to be thinking of all the words in it or it wouldn't be very useful -"

"Thank you for your assessment of my brainpower! But no, you're right, I just need to refer to it. Usually title and author'll do. No cute search terms like seventh book ever to be edited by a widowed redhead."

"Can you translate things?"

"No but I can do format conversion."

"If it did exist but doesn't anymore, like the Library of Alexandria -"

"Yeah, do you have room for one of those? A lot of the interest is in the nature of the physical storage." Also, like, fucking floppy disks and their computers are not gonna be up to modern Unicode standard so even electronic format they could use would be hefty.

" - uh, I don't know. Probably not in here, there's all kinds of screening for what gets in here. You know, it'll turn out there was a magic book in the Library of Alexandria and then we'll have a horde of time-travelling collector demons after us for it, that kind of stuff."

Har har, time traveler demons. "That does sound worth being careful about. If the book itself is magic as opposed to containing information about magic I can't get it but I suppose the time traveler demons might think it would be in with the rest anyway if you didn't have very good lines of communication."

"Honestly we're not talking to a hundredth of what's out there." Possibly shouldn't have said that. It's kind of obvious though. "You can't make magic things?"

"It seems I cannot, yep." He didn't try every magical-sounding thing because what if something worked and it was bad, but he can't make a wosscalled horn, so.

"Are vampires magic things?"

"I have not tried to make one but I bet so. I'd probably just get a corpse, maybe one with a funky face that stayed that way like it didn't listen to its mom." Or a basement dweller but like, those die if you don't let their hearts beat.

He nods. The elevator chimes. A serious middle-aged man in uniform comes out; the soldiers salute him. "This is Lieutenant Colonel Scott Sender, U.S. Army," the one who's been talking to Cam says. 

"Welcome to Sunnydale," says Sender. "Appreciate you coming to us. That girl was quite upset." He waves the soldiers off. "What should I call you?"

"I'm Cam!" says Cam. He regrets that he cannot wag his tail in a friendly manner. A terrible pity. "It's nice to meet you, Scott." He is not saying Lieutenant Colonel over and over. What a pointlessly long name for a rank.

He maybe twitches the tiniest bit at that but only the tiniest bit. "I'm sure you must have a lot of questions for us."

"When do I get to tell NIH people - CDC or whatever is fine too, I don't really care, bring a bunch of different ones - how to cure various kinds of cancer etcetera? I would like to know how long I have to develop my lesson plan."

"They can fly over in the morning. They'll probably be here tomorrow night." Is he for real?

He's not eagerly contemplating his eagerness to betray you. 

"Cool, cool. Also, anybody gonna take terrible offense if next week I go terraform Mars? Are there demons on Mars or anything to worry about?" Mars is gonna have GRASS and WATER and TREES and CLOUDS and SHRUBBERY and FLOWERS and a MAGNETIC FIELD and BUGS and REALLY DUMB BIRDS SITTING ON NESTS OF EGGS SOME OF THE CHICKS OF WHICH MIGHT SURVIVE HAVING A REALLY DUMB PARENT BIRD. FUCK YEAH.

"We haven't actually been to Mars, so I'm afraid we're the wrong people to answer that for you. No one known to us has claimed they live there."

"Cool, I'll do due diligence but it's nice to expect a clear shot at it!"

"What's the plan once Mars is habitable?"

"Not sure yet. I might put off Mars, since it doesn't seem urgent and plausibly there are more things on Earth that would benefit from my attention sooner, I just really really wanna terraform Mars." Stupid gagcircling summoners who won't let him terraform!!!! MARS!!! can't stop him now. Mars is gonna have TOPSOIL. With WORMS in it.

"I heard the question of what dimension you're from is very complicated."

"It is! So complicated!" Like, yes, he's from Earth, but you're gonna get all the wrong ideas if he just says that. (Mars is gonna have SNOW and an OCEAN and FISH who won't even have the dumb fish parent problem.)

"We worked the other day with a group of people who'd fled here after the dimension they'd been living in, which wasn't their dimension of origin, expelled them at the request of a group of their political enemies back in their dimension of origin; they came here because the time dilation between this dimension and the one they started in was so intense that they didn't think anyone'd follow them here. Am I on the right track or does it get even more complicated?"

"I'd say differently rather than more." Heck, is he time dilated? No, if he were time dilated - well, if he were time dilated in the bad direction - he'd have more mail. - he'd still get mail from home, yeah, yes, he's been able to get reference materials and stuff from home, not even just his own computer he's personally interacted with. He'd probably get mail from home. Renée'll write any day, not time to panic.

"Should we be rolling out welcoming mats for any displaced apsels?"

"I don't think so. I guess you might get more tourism at some point." This place is a MESS but nobody had gotten to malaria yet so it could still probably use a proper summoning rollout, only, it's a huge mess, so. Why hasn't it been more generally discovered? Do local demon types just usually hijack circles, perhaps before they're properly valid? Angels? Fairies? So complicated. Gotta figure all that out before doing a Revelation.

He grimaces just a little. "Great."

"What, we're lovely." Well, they'll be lovely if they don't use fricking gagged circles and they can get theater fans and skiiers on the regular instead of rapist assholes.

"Everybody's lovely, it's just -" he clears his throat -" I don't know how much Earth history you're familiar with, where should I start?"

"Assume that once long ago I attended a small number of high school classes in the United States but was mostly thinking about other things during them." Heheheheheheh.

He mostly takes this in stride. "When this country was founded we thought all its residents were human, and we weren't even great at making sure its laws extended to all of them. We've gotten better since then. It was a shock to learn there are hundreds of other species of people who have at least some members here, and that some of them like vampires are universally gleeful mass murderers and many of the others have terrifying superpowers. There are a lot of challenges involved in protecting our people when so many of the threats to them aren't ones we understand well. Tourism's great. Also you will frequently catch me making pained faces about it."

That's a nice speech. Cam's touched. "Sounds like an exciting job."

That's the right angle.

"I used to say I can sleep when I'm dead, but apparently we can't even count on that. Are there apsel governmental organizations that we should be reaching out to?"

"No, apsels are anarchists. I don't think you'd have a lot to say to a neighborhood association." That's a hilarious mental image though.

Anarchist absurdly powerful matter-generating demons, great. "Then we'll probably want to draft things everyone can read."

"Most of them are never going to come here, but sure, you could come up with some sort of general audiences announcement if you really want all the apsels to know what you're about." Angels and fairies aren't anarchists but Cam doesn't know as much about them, one thing at a time.

"Do I want that?"

"There are advantages and disadvantages. They will not appear uninvited but I have to admit we are hell on your infosec, if you have infosec."

"That has crossed my mind. Who invited you?"

"I'd rather not say." But if he ever needs him for anything he's still got the tracking device in his tailbone.

"I try not to stereotype more than is warranted but if they had fangs or looked like lawyers they probably did not mean well."

"Actually, neither!" Well, maybe he was a law student? Can't judge somebody's major by how on the ball they seem drunk.

"When did you get here?"

"Recently." ...what day of the week is it?

"Dug up some of Sunnydale's mysteries pretty fast. Admittedly the more conspicuous ones."

"Making things is very handy. Also my vampire tried to bite me. It didn't work."

"Yep, she mentioned that. Were you able to answer all your questions about vampires with your info-sec unfriendly powers already, or do you have questions we can answer?"

"I've skimmed -" He rattles off titles. "Plus I talked to Talon but I can't trust what she says too far, you know?"

He nods seriously. "There are vampires who haven't actually done anything gravely evil because it turned out to be inconvenient or a bad idea, but..."

Long pause while he contemplates phrasing. "There aren't any I'd trust."

"It does seem to be something of an occupational hazard. I've only met the one socially. Why are they like that?"

"'Why's not really my department. A persistent feature of the more-informed folk explanations is that they don't have a soul, and there's reputedly one vampire who got his soul back and was then struck with remorse, so there's that. They all score very poorly on tests of affective empathy. Many of them express an active desire to do evil things, usually with reasons like 'because I'm a monster' or 'it'll be fun'.  Poor impulse control and somewhat impaired cognitive empathy. too."