sunnydale welcomes you

Bella has been here before, but only during summers. When she arrives in February, something is different.

People don't go out late. It's like they're constrained by the sun, not the hour. In summertime Charlie always insisted that she be home and indoors by sunset. She's always abided by the rule - she was younger then, he seemed so very serious about it, and sunset was a reasonable curfew when it was July.

Now she is here and it's winter and sunset is before dinnertime and the rule is still home and inside by sunset.

She asks. He shows her some statistics about suspicious deaths. She shuts up and she is always home before the sun touches the horizon.

School is mediocre. (Well. It's a high school.) The library is quite good, and there she lurks.

A couple of weeks after she moves to Sunnydale, she goes for one solid week without tripping. Or getting a papercut. Or dropping anything. Or displaying any symptoms of clumsiness at all.

This is weird.

She tests it. She dances. She looks up how to do a cartwheel, and does six, flawlessly, not even dizzy. She gets more and more bold as every trick she tries works - she can do a backflip, a whole sequence of them if she likes, and it just works.

She's pretty sure that even if whatever was wrong with her had spontaneously healed herself she would not have also gained that ability.

When she's been unclumsy for somewhere between a week and two (she's not sure exactly when it started - a few days without accident were never unheard of) she is treated to a visitor. This person is apparently genderless, ageless, not entirely corporeal, and not pleased to be there.

"Haven't you been getting our dreams?" it asks her.

"...What."

"Slayers are meant to learn of who they are through visions, but you've done nothing to show that you've understood a one of them. If you had a Watcher to explain these things to you, it would be a forgivable ignorance, but they've somehow overlooked you, so just how long do you intend to neglect the signs we've sent?"

"I don't know what you're talking about, hallucinatory person. I haven't had any dreams with you in them. Except this one."

It frowns at her. "You are not asleep. We typically commune through dreams, but your brain does not appear to work."

"My brain works great and I fully approve of it vetoing input from creepy dudes," Bella says. She pats herself on the head. "Good brain, you get a biscuit."

It becomes frownier. "Perhaps I should get to the point," it says.

"Perhaps," agrees Bella.

"You have been called to be the Slayer, she who is granted powers above and beyond those of ordinary humans to hold back the forces of darkness." At her blank look, it goes on: "Vampires. Demons. Dark witches."

Vampires. Well, that makes more sense than barbecue forks being the locally popular weapons for PCP-addled gang members.

"So that's why I'm not a klutz anymore."

"You have been chosen for the gift of supernatural strength, speed, and grace, by we, the Powers That Be," intones the apparition, "with which to combat these wicked powers. Slayers also may develop a sixth sense to detect vampires as they move among humans, although whether that will function with your uncooperative mind is unknown to us."

There is a pause.

"Sweet," says Bella. It sounds like she's a special snowflake, but it also sounds like she's screwing up whatever mechanisms are used to find her brand of special snowflakes, except for this person's, and this person doesn't sound like he wishes her dead. So having the powers strictly dominates not having them. "That's neat," she reiterates.

"The purpose of the enhancement is not to improve your quality of life," snaps the Power That Is.

"Oh, sure. If I find evil things, I will Slay them. Slaying evil things sounds good to me, because, you know, evil, bad stuff. If I'm good enough at it to think it's a reasonable tradeoff I might even start looking for evil things. Sweet," repeats Bella.

The Power That Is appears to decide that this is the best it's going to get. It disappears.

Bella sits around and waits to wake up, and when that doesn't work, she tries going to sleep. That does cause her to wake up, some eight hours later, remembering the encounter with perfect undreamlike clarity.

"Sweet," she tells her empty room.

She wonders if the Sunnydale library has anything on vampires. The suspicious death stats make it a reasonable bet.

enjoy its extensive library catalog

Bella settles into a new routine.

After school, she hits the library. They have a rather impressive collection of suspiciously elderly and internally consistent books on vampires, their lacking of souls, and how to kill them. It also explains where they come from.

Bella realizes that tangling with any of these creatures will put her life at risk. She orders a repeating crossbow online from an obscure custom weapons manufacturer, and a make-your-own-bolts kit, wiping out her savings in so doing - but that's not the best approach, she thinks, that shouldn't be her first line of defense.

Her first line of defense, besides wearing a pretty golden crucifix that Renée left behind when she moved out of the Sunnydale house and acquiring enough holy water to rinse her hair in it after every shower (it's more effective wet, but leaves a trace dried if it's not washed away by something else first), is this: She walks into her dad's bedroom on her hands, does a roll and a flip and takes a bow, and says, "Dad, I need a key to the morgue."

Barbecue fork deaths usually pass through police hands, and just as usually they never find anything. If she goes once a day, finds the autopsied bodies, and drives even just a sliver of wood through their hearts, they'll puff into dust before they can claw their way out of their graves later. She doesn't think this will eliminate the vampire population of Sunnydale, but it will certainly curb it without the least bit of danger to anyone.

Charlie stares at her. He says, "Why's that, Bells?"

"Barbecue forks," she says, "have a way of multiplying. I have a way of sterilizing them."

He stares at her a bit more. "Let's see that flip again," he says slowly.

She flips, obligingly. Twice.

Three days later she has a key to the morgue. She doesn't ask him how he got it. He doesn't ask her why she can do gymnastics now. He tells her when the place is usually deserted and she tells him thanks.

She gets a package of firewood, splits it into splinters that are pointy at one end and too wide to pierce her hand on the other, and diligently renders everyone - no point in skipping the non-barbecue-forks; for all she knows there are lesser-advertised ways to become a vampire, or less popular blood vessels that work just as well as the classic neck ones - unable to rise with the third night of their demise.

Nighttime deaths drop. After two weeks it's enough for Charlie to notice on his statistics.

He takes her out for ice cream and says he hopes she's not up to anything dangerous.

She's not, then. She says,

"Not yet."

The next day, her crossbow arrives, custom-made and shiny and the right size to hide in a messenger bag. She goes to a little woodsy spot, twenty minutes' drive away, and shoots at knots on trees and confirms that she's got herself decent aim. She makes herself a great big stack of ammunition, which she keeps discreetly in her closet but not actually hidden. Charlie is not a snoop, and it's not so much a secret from him as it is a vaguely impolite topic.

She starts patrolling after dark, and Charlie furrows his brow and frets but doesn't remind her pointedly about her curfew.

The first vampire she finds is being ludicrously obvious about it, walking around with his fangs out. She gets him from ten feet away -

And she drew her bow at six yards.

She needs to get faster. She has none of that sensory mojo the Power That Was In Her Bedroom advertised.

She reads. She practices drawing and shooting and loading a new packet of homemade bolts, and she makes stakes and holy water balloons and learns to throw them, and she watches people on the Internet do aikido and shadowboxes them the second time through each video. She replaces the porch lights with sunlamp bulbs; she's not sure if that will work but it can't hurt. She escorts fools who are out late to their homes, when they cross paths with her. (Her excuse? Her dad is the chief of police, and even gangs on PCP know it and will steer clear of her.)

She leaves crosses around. By "around" is meant "hiding". Under sidewalk pavers, where they come up enough for her to jam one underneath. Scratched into the underside of the pokey bits of fire hydrants with a screwdriver. Cut unobtrusively into paper snowflakes and hung from the tree in the elementary schoolyard with a hundred others. Drizzled in white paint on white lines or black paint on sections of asphalt filler in the crosswalks. From what she has read, only direct contact with a contiguous object that is a cross with burn a vampire, and her little traps won't do them any injury at all - but as deliberately made crosses and not accidental line intersections made without intent or for other purposes, they will nevertheless cause a subconscious aversion. She memorizes where they are and she watches who walks right over or past them - and whose path wobbles, whose step falters, who looks suddenly like they are in a bad mood. The latter sort she follows. About half of those are coincidence - they wind up walking unimpeded into private residences or having no reaction to the next cross they pass - and half of them she catches trying to eat somebody. And shoots and dusts.

She's laying down hidden crosses in a neighborhood she hasn't covered yet at just past eight p.m. when she spots a person about her age, maybe a little older with that posture. And since she hasn't covered this neighborhood yet he isn't wandering over any of her little traps.

Well, as far as she knows, most people in town are human; the odds are in his favor. "I don't recommend being out at night hereabouts," she calls. "I don't count, my dad is chief of police and everybody knows it, but you probably wanna go home."