It’s been eight days since Mrs. Mears disappeared. There are too many missing-person cases here for the police to stay on top of. They say that after the first forty-eight hours, we should just assume that she got bit. Warren has already filed the paperwork to put the house in his name. He keeps saying, “She knew the risk of staying here.” But I don’t know if she did. I don’t know if any of us realized how different things would be living on an open hellmouth. Sunnydale was always a weird place to live. Things happened that we couldn’t explain. Like the time that the SHS swim team all grew gills and flippers and Principal Snyder said it was a side effect of black market steroids. Or the number of people who went missing every year. And those hyena people. But knowing for sure that there are monsters out there, waiting to kill all of us. . .it’s worse. It’s so much worse.

Horrified, the Slayer skips to the middle of the journal.

Warren says that we’re sitting ducks without some powers. Andrew sees this as an excuse to go get himself some fangs, obviously, and Warren is looking into rumors of a transformation spell that turns a human into a super demon or something. I think staying human could be something we use to our advantage. We should use what we know from comics and rule this town! Or, at least, be equals with the vampires and demons and magic users. The best supervillains are just really smart humans. Lex Luthor. Doctor Octopus. Ozymandias.

I keep trying to convince Warren that if he’d stop obsessing over building the perfect robot girl, we could come up with some killer tech. He says that if I want to play with phasers, I should make one myself. Since the schools all closed when they couldn’t find anyone brave enough to teach in Demondale, I guess I have time to learn some advanced mechanical engineering.

The Slayer shuts the journal, unsettled. In searching for proof that these boys had some nefarious purpose, all she’s done is found exactly what happens around an unprotected hellmouth. If this reality had a Slayer to defend it from the nasties and the baddies, then helpless people like Jonathan wouldn’t have to spend their lives trapped in a town that literally wants to kill them.