Sometimes I shouldn't use words

It's hard to imagine how. Let's see.

"Bernard, what's this, then?"

"That's the appropriation for the Council of Watchers of Britain."

"Council of Watchers? What's that? Some sort of quango? What is it they watch, anyway?"

"I'm not sure, sir."

"Probably a bunch of Oxford academics and philosophers, trying to save the world from something that doesn't exist. Environmentalists and all that. What does Sir Humphrey have to say about it?"

I can't force it beyond that, but I'll put it on the back burner.

And a lot of it is knowledge of how things work.

MY major objection to "Slayer School" fics is the decentralization angle. As dlgood says, in a world where a Slayer is necessary, a Slayer is insufficient. So, now we have thousands of Slayers, presumably placed by whatever places with some foreknowledge (the same way Buffy was at Hemery HS when the vampires attacked Hemery, not Eagle Rock) so if this Slayer is called in a boring suburb of Oslo, or Papua New Guinea, or Tokyo, perhaps that's where the trouble will be and pulling the Slayer out of there to spar with other Slayers is a bad idea. However, really, while the tools of Slaying, the weapons with which we do battle, are decentralized, the knowledge is really even more centralized, from a minor bureaucracy with agents in most countries to Giles, Willow and Xander. The occult knowledge they need is now even more hidden. Considering the minimal way the Council uses itself as a weapon, preferring to use the Slayer, it's hard to separate the knowledge base from the people who maintain it. Caleb, of course, separated both from this plane of existence instead.