"And... you do not in fact get more powerful upon exposure to more proportionately deadly challenges, is that right?"

"Yes. No one does that, on Earth, that I'm aware of."

"I'm not actually sure that's an illegal order under my paradigm - for one thing, it does not obviously involve orders, beyond 'show up to a training session', and 'show up to a training session' is a legal order..."

"Oh, they didn't openly present themselves as having conscripted me into a command structure per se. I think, hmm... my instinct is that in a healthily functioning system the Slayer's Watcher would refuse to use a training session as an avenue of sabotage against her, and that would be the sort of thing a Watcher would understand themselves to have a responsibility to refuse. But I suppose a potentially viable alternative would be to tell the Slayer that they're assuming the kind of authority over her where they consider themselves entitled to lie to her in order to put her in deadly situations without her knowledge or agreement. It seems to me that they're probably refraining from telling Slayers that because they think it would make Slayers less cooperative, and they're right that it would, and the correct solution to that dilemma is not to do the thing they're doing."

"You are functionally conscripted, though, if not by the Watchers per se? You did not volunteer to be the Slayer? - can you renounce it?"

"I didn't volunteer to be the Slayer, no, and there's no getting out of it except by dying."

"What manner of entity empowers Slayers?"

"Some kind of ancient spell. Not the deliberate action of any currently living being, as far as I know."

"Hm. I think I can understand the dysfunction you're pointing out in the arrangement but it might just be totally orthogonal to the concept of illegal orders except insofar as it's conceivable the entire Watcher organization should not be understood as a legitimate one."

"Yeah, I think the problem is more centrally the tension between presenting themselves in a support and advisory role with no overt assumption of authority and then acting like they have that authority anyway. But given that they're having a Slayer's Watcher present themselves to her in a support and advisory role with no overt assumption of authority, I think there probably is something to the idea that those Watchers should consider it their responsibility to refuse to use their Slayers' trust in them as an avenue of sabotage."

"I guess the way I'd implement that would be to have a Watcher who was meant to be entrusted with a Slayer swear an oath about this as part of assuming that responsibility?"

"If I ever end up in a position to reform the Watcher's Council I'll consider that. It seems like a reasonable place to start."

"What is the present relationship between your particular Watcher and the organization?"

"It's a bit awkward. He's no longer in their pay or under their command; he is the official point of contact between me and them, and on good terms with many individual Council members. They have a lot of institutional momentum behind the idea that the active Slayer's Watcher should be someone they can expect arbitrary obedience from. We try to be polite about it when they overstep, and they try to be polite about it when they're annoyed that we aren't listening to them."

"Is there a good emblematic example of a situation where they attempted to elicit some action from him or you and were rebuffed?"

"Hmm... they tipped us off about an especially powerful vampire, but phrased the tip as an instruction to make dealing with him our top priority, and our actual top priority at the time was investigating what the mayor was up to. Rupert told them we'd look into it and tried to be graceful about making it clear we wouldn't look into it immediately, and they tried to be graceful about telling him they thought investigating the mayor was a useless distraction, and in the end we were right that the mayor was worth investigating but we weren't fast enough to get to him before he invoked some dread ritual to make himself invincible for the several weeks leading up to his giant snake transformation. We dealt with the vampire just fine, though, when we got around to him."

"...after handling the giant snake transformation mayor situation?"

"We had enough downtime during mayor-related planning and preparation to take on a side mission. Waiting until after the giant snake transformation to handle the vampire would have been too slow."

"I see. Did they find the mayor transforming into a giant snake unlikely, or just not part of the core mission?"

"We didn't know beforehand exactly what he was planning, just that it seemed sketchy and plausibly supernatural, and they didn't think it sounded supernatural enough or threatening enough to be worth my time. Afterward with full information I get the impression they agree it was both, but they might still not agree that I had enough information to conclude that at the time or that I should have trusted my judgment over theirs even if I did."

"That would be a tricky sort of Law puzzle even if you had a completely regularized relationship of militarily normal trust with them."

"Yes."

"Is there any risk that they will attempt to conventionally assassinate you?"

"I don't think it's very likely. We're mostly managing to maintain good relations, and I don't think assassinating the Slayer is within the range of actions they feel are appropriate for them to take. If I somehow managed to colossally screw up as a Slayer without either getting myself killed or ending the world, that might change, but most ways to colossally screw up as a Slayer would kill, at minimum, me."

Blai nods. "Does this organization just exist entirely on its own recognizance? There's no backing country or church of any kind?"