Properties of the VMC K_s band light curves for the counterparts to our targets (red solid line) and of the light curves for the counterparts to the reference sample (black dotted line). Top panel: histograms of the slopes of the linear fits for objects with 15 or more epochs; only reliable slopes are considered in the comparison. The black dashed line is the same as the black dotted, but scaled to match the level of the first bin. Middle panel: histograms of the number of available K_s epochs. Bottom panel: K_s band apparent luminosity functions averaged over epochs.