Author: cross_and_bow | Sherlock is usually very puncutal. He's only one minute late, but that's still not quite as punctual as usual. Bella peers out the window, not yet allowing herself outright concern. |
Author: eversomuchfun | There he is!
It seems he's brought a friend. |
Author: cross_and_bow | "Who's that?" Bella says, sticking her head out the window. "And you're a minute late, your blood's gone cold." |
Author: dark_light | "Well," says Amariah, "that answers the mental opacity question very handily. Hi! I'm an alternate version of you from another dimension! I'm Isabella Amariah and you can call me Amariah for non-redundancy. Sherlock's been calling you Juliet, can I do the same?" |
Author: eversomuchfun | "This is going to be an interesting conversation," says Sherlock. |
Author: cross_and_bow | "What's going on?" |
Author: dark_light | "Sherlock can't hear me," says Amariah. "I've got a spell on that prevents anyone from noticing me. You're immune! Congratulations. Can we all go back to Sherlock's crypt so I can take the spell off? He doesn't need the blood anyway, my boyfriend let him bite him not half an hour ago." |
Author: cross_and_bow | "...Sherlock, she says you're not hungry and we should all go back to your crypt?" says Bella. |
Author: eversomuchfun | "Both very true." |
Author: cross_and_bow | "Okay then."
Bella dumps the blood and exits the house, messenger bag in tow. "I guess you can call me Juliet if Bella won't do." |
Author: dark_light | "It won't," says Amariah. "Too many of us to keep straight in the interdimensional hub, so we're all picking nicknames. Me, Shell Bell, Stella, Angela, and Golden hasn't picked a nickname officially but Stella's met her and that's her guess, and Sherlock supplied Juliet for you but you could go with something different." |
Author: cross_and_bow | "Okay, that's a lot. How exactly did you find Amariah, Sherlock?" |
Author: eversomuchfun | "Stepped out of my crypt, and instead of the usual graveyard I found a bar," he says. "Amariah spotted me and said hello." |
Author: dark_light | "Shell Bell is dating a girl version of him," says Amariah chattily. "I've met that one, her Tony, and another pair where they're both boys. This one doesn't have a Tony anymore, which is terribly sad - At any rate, I recognized him and said hi before I realized there was something the matter with his soul. Oh, by the way, my owl is my soul. Don't touch him. His name's Pathalan." |
Author: cross_and_bow | "You can tell by looking that there's something wrong with his soul? That is so unfair, I am supposed to have vampire detection powers," grumbles Juliet. |
Author: dark_light | "I'm a witch - I can't teach you, we're a species, not an academic specialty - and therefore magically sensitive. I can tell by looking that you don't have a Pathalan of your own. Which is still weird to me, but I'm getting used to it. And I could tell by looking that Sherlock's soul is not only internal but also weird." |
Author: cross_and_bow | "Internal souls," mutters Juliet. "It never occurred to me to store mine any other way. Seems like a liability." |
Author: eversomuchfun | "It rather does, doesn't it?" agrees Sherlock. |
Author: dark_light | "It can be," says Amariah. "But I'm much less dependent on notebooks or whatever for self-sorting than the others are - well, Shell Bell does audio recording and some of them have perfect recall now, but I mean barring that - because I can talk to Path, and he knows me inside and out." |
Author: cross_and_bow | "Okay, that does sound useful," acknowledges Juliet.
And presently they arrive at the crypt. |
Author: eversomuchfun | Sherlock leads them both inside and waits for Amariah to become noticeable again. |
Author: dark_light | The easiest way to break this particular spell is by screaming at the top of one's lungs! |
Author: cross_and_bow | "Ahhhh why would you do that?" asks Juliet, clapping her hands over her ears. She of course notices no difference. |
Author: eversomuchfun | "Because now I can hear her again," says Sherlock. "Thank you." |
Author: cross_and_bow | "Oh. Okay then." |
Author: dark_light | "Should've warned you," says Amariah apologetically. "So! I can do magic. I'm not as nigh-omnipotent as Stella or Shell Bell now that Stella has shared with her, but I can do some stuff. And I can catch you up on all of us Bells, in case you don't make it to Milliways yourself any time soon, too!" |
Author: cross_and_bow | "I approve of all of that!" replies Juliet. "What all can you do? I bet you have a list." |
Author: dark_light | "I do have a list!" says Amariah, producing her list. "Six of these are just basic blessings with no interactions and no side effects and I can do them all. Then these ones do interact and you can't have the whole set; I have a guess which you'll want but you know more about the situation than I do. And then there are some protective tattoos, which work very well and can go with anything else I know how to do just fine but they hurt to put on for a few seconds. I only know so many because my boyfriend is such a masochist." |
Author: eversomuchfun | (Sherlock grins.) |
Author: cross_and_bow | (Juliet catches that.) "I take it that's why he let you bite him?" she asks. |
Author: eversomuchfun | "You are correct! It was lovely." |
Author: cross_and_bow | "Good for you, hooray consensual biting," says Juliet. "...Wait, you said Shell Bell is...?" |
Author: dark_light | "Shell Bell's dating a girl alt of Sherlock, yeah, but I'm not dating a Sherlock at all - don't seem to have one, or at least haven't run into one outside Milliways. My boyfriend is a duplicate, though, there's three of him dating Bells and one who Stella dislikes so much that she put him on an asteroid," says Amariah. "We're calling the class of them 'Whistles'. They don't have name consistency like we do. Mine is Kas and his daemon's Petaal." |
Author: cross_and_bow | "Ah-huh." |
Author: dark_light | "I'll just get started on the runes for the universally compatible blessings, unless you object," says Amariah, reaching into the bag of "groceries" she brought from Milliways for the tea tree oil. |
Author: cross_and_bow | "No objections here. Er - assuming your magic doesn't have drastic brain-eating consequences or anything? I've been warned away from the local version." |
Author: dark_light | "I'm planning to sacrifice a couple of rats, a live rosemary sprout, and maybe a crow and a seagull depending on which incompatible spells you pick and whether you want the tattoos," says Amariah. "Other than that no harm will come to any living thing, least of all me." |
Author: eversomuchfun | "I have to wonder where you'll get the crow and the seagull," Sherlock muses. |
Author: dark_light | "I was thinking I'd go back out to the graveyard and summon them. If there's none in the nearest half-mile I can substitute pigeons," says Amariah. |
Author: eversomuchfun | "All right." |
Author: cross_and_bow | Juliet looks over the list. "I think I'm going to go with the set you picked out, with one swap. Tempting as this one about falls is. I'm not clumsy anymore," she says. "The opposite since I activated, really. I'll take the faster healing one instead. I already heal fast, but maybe it'll stack." |
Author: dark_light | "Ooh, nice. I'm not clumsy when I'm flying, but I still trip over things on the ground," says Amariah. "It took me ridiculous extra remedial lessons before I was declared not a clan embarrassment with a dagger, and they had to settle for that because there's no way I'm getting up to merely below average." Oil runes are forming as she pours them in a square on the floor of Sherlock's crypt. |
Author: eversomuchfun | "The differences and commonalities between you all are fascinating," says Sherlock. |
Author: dark_light | "Aren't they though? We also talk in our sleep," volunteers Amariah. "Most of us don't find that out for a while, though, someone has to actually be in the room while we're sleeping. And of course Golden doesn't sleep anymore, and Stella doesn't have to although she can if she wants." |
Author: cross_and_bow | "We talk in our sleep? What do we say?" |
Author: dark_light | "Nothing bad. Nothing even related to our dreams. Completely random words, mostly nouns," Amariah reassures her. |
Author: eversomuchfun |
Sherlock smiles. |
Author: dark_light | "Shell Bell's Sherlock thinks it's adorable," says Amariah, smirking and finishing the runes. "Okay, you stand here, Juliet." |
Author: cross_and_bow | Juliet stands there. |
Author: dark_light | Amariah conjures a handful of oregano with her cornucopia, and tosses it at her double, and mutters the spell. The runes and the oregano disappear. |
Author: eversomuchfun | "I also think it is adorable," Sherlock mentions. |
Author: dark_light | "Of course you do," says Amariah merrily, retrieving from her shopping bag a canister of salt and beginning another diagram. |
Author: cross_and_bow | "So - what kind of a spread are we looking at here, in... Bells?" |
Author: dark_light | "Well, there's me. There's Shell Bell, who's a human from a nasty little dystopia called Panem, but she ran into Stella and got Stella magic and so I imagine she's got the placed all fixed up by now. There's Stella, who has a Whistle called Alice, and she has the most overpowered magic ever, although it has this one eensy drawback - her magic system converts pain into wishes - so it's lucky she's got a Whistle, isn't it, because he's utterly thrilled to help her with that. Stella left notes in the guestbook about one who we're calling Golden who hasn't been by in person yet. Golden's a vampire - not the same kind as you have here, her kind sound like a much better deal all around I have to say - and she's married to a nonduplicate named Edward and they have a kid named Elspeth and she runs a secret vampire empire. I just met Angela today and she's an angel - I mean she literally has great big speckly wings coming out of her back - and she's kind of a personality outlier, kinda sheltered, I feel like she's editing herself farther upstream than the rest of us do. Which makes sense. She lives in a theocracy and she wants the local god to name her the next Archangel. And she grew up in a childhood of useful luxury, so that's as far as her ambition seems to go at the moment, can you imagine?" |
Author: cross_and_bow | "Useful luxury," repeats Juliet. "Yeah. I could see that being a developmental left turn. What does she get to do that's useful?" |
Author: dark_light | "Angels where she's from fly around and pray for weather, or sometimes medicine or seeds, by singing," says Amariah. "The place otherwise has nearly unlivable weather. And she is good at singing. I'm almost surprised she harbors ambitions that go as far up as Archangel, although I'm not sure if the living conditions for the non-angels are quite where she'd like them to be, so there's that." |
Author: eversomuchfun | "What's the significance of useful luxury?" asks Sherlock. |
Author: dark_light | "Okay, think about it," says Amariah. "We are both selfish and altruistic to the point of near-contradiction. Usually, this results in taking over the world. Golden was a revolutionary, I think Shell Bell's going that way too, Stella's going a sort of sideways route by colonizing Mars first, I've got a longer plan underway but it's definitely on the agenda, Juliet's still in the point in the Bell life-cycle where she's collecting resources and not moving forward on world takeover but I bet it sounds pretty good to her too." |
Author: cross_and_bow | "Not gonna deny it." |
Author: dark_light | "Being the benevolent dictator of the world is kind of the pinnacle of useful luxury, altruistic self-interest, power and service. Empress Bellas are comfortable, they are surrounded by people they like who acknowledge that they are in charge, they get to accomplish all kinds of valuable results for their worlds while also getting to wear elaborate crowns to boot. But we've all done this from a starting point of mediocrity. Most of us have divorced parents; Shell Bell's and mine are together, but Shell Bell grew up in oppressive poverty and my parents have this disastrous on-again off-again marriage. We attend public schools that are only adequate judged against other public schools. I've been half in witch culture, which is better - I get to learn magic and fly and stuff, which I'm good at - but there aren't any real affordances for doing things. Experiencing stuff, sure, I can always hop on my cloud pine and see the Taj Mahal or whatever, but doing stuff out in the world? Useful stuff? Fewer obvious routes, so of course I'm going to just claim the entire planet as my own, piecemeal, and declare the entire thing my responsibility. But Angela..." Amariah shakes her head. "Angela's parents are happily married. She never had to move or split herself between cultures or summer at one parents' house and spend the rest of the year at the others. She has friends, close friends, who she's known since she was born. She's high-status and she can fly and sing and all anyone wants from her is for her to fly and sing. Her god has more to say on the subject of how to live a good life than any of my goddesses do, so she's got an absorbing self-improvement project. She was born with everything she needed to ascend to the highest political office of her land and all she has to do is something she's good at, something she enjoys, something that visibly helps people who need it, under the direction of people she respects. I'm not surprised she wants to be Archangel, but I'm also not surprised she doesn't aspire beyond the standard-issue twenty-year term after the current Archangel is good and done with his." |
Author: eversomuchfun | "World conquest. Oh, what fun," says Sherlock. "Don't tell the Watchers; they'll have kittens." |
Author: cross_and_bow | "Mum's the word. I'm not even at that point in my life-cycle yet," snorts Juliet. |
Author: eversomuchfun | "That just makes you sound like some manner of insect," he says. "A monarch butterfly, perhaps." |
Author: cross_and_bow | Juliet cracks up. |
Author: dark_light | "There's no analogous period spent in the chrysalis," laughs Amariah. "It's a smooth transition from caterbella to bellafly." |
Author: eversomuchfun | ...Sherlock cracks up. |
Author: dark_light | Amariah, meanwhile, has finished her next diagram. She summons a rat; rats are not in short enough supply for this to take very long, and when it scurries up to her she seizes it, pulls her dagger, and speaks another poem before stabbing it through. |
Author: eversomuchfun | "If you two are going to be occupied with this for some time, I think I will go and fetch some tea," says Sherlock. "Please don't get eaten while I'm gone; I would be terribly disappointed." |
Author: dark_light | "You said fire works? I can do fire if anyone besides you barges in," Amariah says. |
Author: cross_and_bow | Juliet picks up her laser pointer out of her messenger bag, tosses and catches it, and says, "You go ahead." |
Author: eversomuchfun | He grins at both of them and exits the crypt. |
Author: dark_light | When he's back within word-discerning hearing range, one of them - Amariah, on sufficient analysis - is midsentence:
"- to tell you while he was here, because there is some chance you'll flip before you calm back down again, but me and Kas kinda slept with Sherlock. Yours, I mean, not one of the others floating around." |
Author: eversomuchfun | ...What timing.
He pauses in the doorway; if she does flip, he doesn't want to be an available target. |
Author: cross_and_bow | "I have no grounds for flipping. It's not like I'm dating him," says Juliet. |
Author: dark_light | "Oh, I know, but he liked you first, and I bet you like him even if you haven't decided to act on it so far, and while obviously we can do nonexclusivity just fine if we want to it doesn't come standard with being a Bell. So I wanted to make sure you had a minute to process first. Whistles don't come in monogamous; I don't know if Sherlocks do, but it's not default, at least." |
Author: eversomuchfun | He should probably either admit he's listening or go away.
He steps inside the crypt and closes the door. |
Author: dark_light | "He's back," says Path. |
Author: eversomuchfun | "Yes, with exquisite timing as always," he says, dropping into the hidden room to deposit his stolen tea. "Should I go away again?" |
Author: dark_light | Amariah and Juliet exchange a look.
"No, it's all right," says Amariah. "Unless Juliet's squeamish about you being in the room while I paint on the tattoos." |
Author: cross_and_bow | "Not especially," says Juliet. "They're just going on my shoulderblades, I don't even have to take my shirt all the way off as long as it's hiked up in back and held out of the way." |
Author: eversomuchfun | "In that case, I think I'll make some tea," says Sherlock. "Sorry, you can't have any, there's only the one mug." |
Author: dark_light | "Mug of oolong tea," Amariah says, amused, and one appears, floating before her and steaming gently. She takes it from the air, sips, sets it down, and returns to mixing her bayleaf ink for the first of several planned tattoos. |
Author: eversomuchfun | "Cheat," he accuses fondly. |
Author: dark_light | "Cheating is excellent," returns Amariah. "Juliet, lie down, shirt out of the way - idiotic nudity taboos, does it help that he's seen me naked already? no? all right then -" and when Juliet's shirt is out of the way she begins to paint. |
Author: cross_and_bow | "Whatever else you were going to say before he came back from his tea run I don't particularly care if you say it in front of him," says Juliet. |
Author: dark_light | "I was going to add that he comes highly recommended," says Amariah, painting the stem, "but otherwise I said everything I was going to." |
Author: eversomuchfun | "And I heard all of it from when you mentioned that we slept together," he says, "in case anyone was harbouring illusions on that front." |
Author: cross_and_bow | "Thank you," says Juliet. |
Author: dark_light | "All painted. Hold still while I recite the poem; it's not exactly going to tickle," says Amariah.
The bayleaf poem ensues. |
Author: cross_and_bow | Juliet hisses when the ink sinks in, but she does hold still. |
Author: eversomuchfun |
Sherlock watches over his kettle. |
Author: cross_and_bow | Juliet endures four more tattoos, lined up rather attractively from shoulderblade to shoulderblade and well under the neckline of all her shirts. Finally they're all done; she sits up. |
Author: eversomuchfun | "Congratulations on your increased likelihood of living past twenty," says Sherlock. |
Author: cross_and_bow | "Thanks." |
Author: dark_light | "I can put a few spells on your house, too, if you want them," says Amariah. "Probably a good idea to wait until Charlie's at work, though. Walking down the street in a weird outfit is one thing, drizzling substances on the carpet and killing pigeons is another." |
Author: eversomuchfun | "And he would be likely to find you confusing. Although at least he probably won't shoot you." |
Author: dark_light | "...Did he shoot you? Why, what were you doing?" |
Author: eversomuchfun | "He was outnumbered by a mob of demons. I killed most of them and scared off the rest." |
Author: dark_light | "Yes, I imagine he would find that alarming." |
Author: cross_and_bow | "I calmed him down after and there has been no further gunplay," says Juliet. |
Author: eversomuchfun | Sherlock snorts. |
Author: cross_and_bow | "You mentioned dagger training. Are you good enough to give me a run for my money so I can get in some practice against two people who don't actually want to kill me at the same time? I'm worried I'm going to fixate on combat patterns that only work for a single opponent and not for a single opponent and their friends and cousins and neighbors too." |
Author: dark_light | "I don't know about an actual run for your money, but I can brandish it threateningly at you if that would help somehow," says Amariah. |
Author: eversomuchfun | "Now that sounds like fun." |
Author: dark_light | "And since I'm not actually good with it, just capable of not cutting off my own fingers, I guess I won't have to worry about getting past you and hurting you, but are you going to be at risk of hurting me? If you're still learning, do you know how to pull your punches? I can do healing spells on myself if it comes to that, but only if I'm conscious and I have an intact trachea to recite verse and so on..." |
Author: cross_and_bow | "That is a risk," admits Juliet. "I don't really have to pull my punches with Sherlock; he's more durable than that. And I don't want to, like, embed a habit of punch-pulling. Sherlock, do you think it would be long-term disadvantageous to have a habit of engaging a primary opponent one at a time and only dodge the next person until the first one is down? Because if that's something reasonable to aim at, Amariah can weave around and be stabby and I can take you down while trying not to get stabbed?" |
Author: eversomuchfun | "It might do you good to have an option of pulling your punches, if you can separate that from the rest of the programming. It's not inconceivable that you may someday have to fight a human who is intent on harming you, yet prefer to leave them alive. As for the dodging... it is not the only good way to engage a group, but it is one such way." He quirks a smile. "Really, what you need is four of me. Perhaps I should advertise in the dimensional hub." |
Author: dark_light | Amariah raises her hand. "I'd like to point out that there are also nonhumans worth leaving alive." |
Author: cross_and_bow | "I can already sort of feed the programming goals, including don't hit that person too hard - I'm just not sure any of the progamming knows how strong I am or how much an unenhanced person can take. D'you think other yous would want to participate even if you could find several of them all at once? Especially if they're not vampires, especially if they come from worlds similar enough to have literally been scared of turning into you? Do worlds even cluster that close together?" Juliet asks, directing the last question at Amariah. |
Author: dark_light | "I'm not sure," says Amariah. "I mean... Golden and Stella have the same history up until they were seventeen, but they found completely different stuff when they moved to Forks, vampires versus wishcoins. Then there's me and Angela who weren't even human to start out. And Shell Bell's from Earth where Angela might not be, but even Shell Bell's from way in the future, and so are Shell Bell's Sherlock and Tony. The other Sherlock and Tony seem to have been from nearer by you. They had vampires, which seem at least more like the local kind than like Golden's or some other sort. That Tony described it as, what was it -"
"We were talking about souls," Path says, "and he said that on his world if you get turned into a vampire you become a people-eating asshole version of you." |
Author: eversomuchfun | "That does sound like our world," Sherlock agrees. |
Author: dark_light | "You don't appear to be an asshole," Amariah says. "Do you eat people? I'm not sure biting and leaving them alive and well like with Kas counts as eating them. More like tasting. Say, was he tasty?" |
Author: eversomuchfun | "Yes he was," Sherlock says cheerfully. "In the vast majority of cases, turning into a vampire does make someone much nastier than they previously were. I am, as ever, an outlier. And I did eat people for a while, but it's not a sufficient draw to be worth how much it will piss off Juliet, so I stopped." |
Author: dark_light | "Were you at least choosy about it? Golden's husband reportedly used to eat people, but he can read minds, so he only ate bad people." |
Author: cross_and_bow | "She married a guy who can read minds?" |
Author: dark_light | "Well, he can't read her, unless she tries really hard to let him," says Amariah. "Stella makes it sound like at this point he's her glorified radio." |
Author: eversomuchfun | "I only ate boring people," he offers. "That is probably not the kind of choosy you meant." |
Author: dark_light | "Nope, that is not what I had in mind. Oh well. Shell Bell's Sherlock killed twenty approximately innocent people on live national television. My Whistle killed some nasty individuals, even. Also, I assassinated Shell Bell's former president for her, he was bad news." Pause. "Actually, I think he was an alt of someone the other other Sherlock and Tony knew? I wasn't there, but I think they brought him to Milliways with them and then sent him home after Shell Bell screamed and drew her fire wand on him." |
Author: eversomuchfun | "...If that's who I'm thinking of, I've killed one of him too," Sherlock reports with excessive cheer. |
Author: dark_light | "Well, the President's name was Coriolanus Snow, but I don't think they matched and I don't remember the other one's name," says Amariah. "I might recognize it...?" |
Author: eversomuchfun | "Obadiah Stane." |
Author: dark_light | "Yeah, that was it. Shell Bell seemed to think that other Tony liked him but hers emphatically didn't and neither of the other Sherlocks did." |
Author: cross_and_bow | "Anyway, all this talk of who everyone has killed - I'm at twenty-one miscellaneous vampires and I don't have their names - isn't answering the question of whether otherworldly Sherlocks would be willing or able to be helpful even if accumulated in sufficient quantity," says Juliet. |
Author: eversomuchfun | "Any Sherlock from a world like ours would be delighted to train up a Vampire Slayer, especially one as brilliant as you. They might have some trouble fitting me into the picture, but perhaps not as much as they'd think." |
Author: dark_light | "Shell Bell's would probably help if Shell Bell asked her to," puts in Amariah. "They're adorable. You have no idea how adorable." |
Author: cross_and_bow | "We'll see who we can scare up after someone finds a door to send you home through, then," says Juliet. "...How long is that likely to take?" |
Author: dark_light | "Not sure," says Amariah. "I mean, Sherlock found the door once and I haven't found it myself before and neither have you, so he's the most likely to find it again but we don't have a good idea of frequency; we should have some way set up for him to be able to notify me when he does run into it. I can work something out with a saltwater charm if you don't have phones or mine turns out not to get service here. I'm happy to hang out for a while if I have to. I'm not getting meaningfully older, I have a project to work on that could easily take me a year, I'd miss Kas if it took a long time but he routinely fucks off for months on his own anyway, I'm willing to sleep in a hammock hanging from my cloud-pine in the sky, I have a cornucopia so I won't even be relying on you guys for food." |
Author: cross_and_bow | "If you wind up staying here for months I will be so tempted to loan you my clothes and ask you to attend school instead of me," says Juliet. |
Author: dark_light | "Eh, you probably don't really want to do that, I won't recognize your acquaintances or remember what you've been doing in class, and besides, I dropped completely out of my rather haphazard attendance at human school when I was fifteen," says Amariah. |
Author: eversomuchfun | "I do not, in fact, have a phone," says Sherlock. |
Author: dark_light | "Saltwater charms it is. You have a pulse, right?" |
Author: eversomuchfun | "No." |
Author: dark_light | "...Do you breathe?" |
Author: eversomuchfun | "Optionally." |
Author: dark_light | "Okay, then this is complicated but not impossible, I'll add a motion component and you can breathe in Morse code or something to alert me if you find a door. I can find you with a divination if I don't know where you are." |
Author: eversomuchfun | "...How would it have worked if I did have a pulse?" |
Author: dark_light | "I'd put the charm on your wrist or the inside of your elbow, and you'd press on the relevant vein just enough to slow it down, and my copy of the charm would inform me then. These are originally designed to notify people if the other party dies, but you can modify them for more purposeful communication," she says, and she tells her cornucopia to give her salt and a cup of water. |
Author: eversomuchfun | "I see. Fascinating." |
Author: dark_light | "Magic is great! What's the stuff around here like?" Amariah murmurs the thickening charm. She takes the liberty of touching Sherlock's chin so she can tilt his head back to paint over his airway, so the charm will be able to pick up on whether and when he breathes. "Also which way is north from here?" |
Author: cross_and_bow | "I'm not sure yet. Mr. Giles sort of agreed to teach me, but he seems to think it's terribly, desperately dangerous," says Juliet. "I haven't been able to get anything out of a book to work. North is that way, I think." She points. |
Author: eversomuchfun | "Mr. Giles may be exhibiting his crust, but to a certain extent he's right," says Sherlock. "It's fairly well accepted in some circles that merely being a habitual magic user makes you tend to attract supernatural hazards. Of course, in those same circles it's fairly well accepted that being the Slayer has the same effect at ten or a hundred times the magnitude, so if Mr. Giles were operating with all the facts he might have a different recommendation. And then again, I've never heard of a Slayer who was also a witch, so there may be some traditional or actual barrier in effect there." |
Author: dark_light | "What do the spells around here look like? If you've gotten as far as noting that things out of books don't work..." |
Author: cross_and_bow | "Oh, the ones I've found with stuff that seemed benign and didn't require locust wings prepared under the seventh moon of a prime-numbered lunar year or some crap like that all go like, 'Divine Hecate, behold my will, grant me this boon' and so on and so on." |
Author: dark_light | "...And," says Amariah, "can divine Hecate in fact behold your will? Or is it, say - opaque?" |
Author: cross_and_bow | "...good question," says Juliet. "But I heard you invoking all sorts of goddesses." |
Author: dark_light | "I've got mental opacity, but it comes from a birth blessing from a witch goddess," says Amariah. "I don't think they locked themselves out when they gave it to me. And my spells are more descriptive than 'behold my will', anyway." |
Author: eversomuchfun | "Well, that's hilarious," says Sherlock. |
Author: cross_and_bow | "It's annoying," exclaims Juliet. "Now I have to find a completely unrelated school of magic. I think they must exist - some of the nasty curses don't open with anything inviting deities to behold my will so obviously I didn't try those - but wow. Wow." |
Author: eversomuchfun | "It's hilariously annoying," he maintains. |
Author: cross_and_bow | "Okay, fine. So yours is a birth blessing - I wonder where mine comes from?" |
Author: dark_light | "Stella and Golden's worlds both just have people with innate powers crop up sometimes, so Stella's an 'ingot' and Golden's a - well, they call them 'witches' apparently, but it's not the same thing as me. Angela doesn't think she has it at all, and Shell Bell knows she didn't before she met Stella and got magic loot. I don't know about you." |
Author: eversomuchfun | "Do you know exactly which parts of the Slayer package you're missing?" he inquires. |
Author: cross_and_bow | "I have no supernatural senses, and a Power That Is had to visit me in person to wonder why I wasn't slaying anything yet and wanted to know why I hadn't gotten its dreams," reports Juliet. "If there's more, I don't know enough to know it's missing." |
Author: eversomuchfun | "You clearly do have all the physical upgrades, and the battle instincts. That part is interesting. Why that and not the senses, I wonder?" |
Author: dark_light | "Stella wrote that Golden's 'witchcraft' let her daughter communicate with her until her daughter tried to send useful information in a quantity that would have been incapacitating for a while," volunteers Amariah. "Stella was briefly worried that when her Whistle got a brain upgrade, her mindreading would stop working if she didn't boost herself to match because it would've been overwhelming. Are the senses or the dreams - unpleasant? Do they interfere with other stuff? I bet the battle instincts only come up when you're in a fight and then they'd be a strict improvement over whatever you started with." |
Author: cross_and_bow | "I don't know if they're unpleasant, I never had them," Juliet points out. "I imagine they could be. The Slayer package wasn't really designed for my well-being." |
Author: eversomuchfun | "The official Watcherly term for a Slayer's supernaturally acquired dreams is 'the nightmares'," says Sherlock. "So there's that." |
Author: cross_and_bow | "Oh. Yes, I do imagine I'd find that unpleasant." |
Author: dark_light | "And if the idea is for you to kill vampires and such I don't imagine supernaturally sensing them would be a gentle breezy sensation or patterns of dots on a magic heads-up display," comments Amariah. |
Author: eversomuchfun | Sherlock snorts. |
Author: cross_and_bow | "Okay, this is if nothing else a reasonable working hypothesis for why I can't cast spells I've tried and why half the Slayer properties didn't stick to me, but I still don't know where the original opacity came from," says Juliet. "Sherlock, do you know anything about - random magical powers people sometimes have? Is that a thing?" |
Author: eversomuchfun | He shrugs. "It's a vague rumour, at any rate. Doesn't seem to happen very frequently." |
Author: cross_and_bow | "But you've heard of it - what can other people do?" |
Author: eversomuchfun | "Visions of the future. Telekinesis." |
Author: cross_and_bow | "Those are cool," says Juliet. "On balance I think I'll stick with mine, though, I don't want nightmares or for magic to eat my brain or anything." |
Author: eversomuchfun | "Yes, magic eating your brain would be a tragic loss." |
Author: cross_and_bow | "I'd really object," says Juliet, nodding. "Maybe Mr. Giles will be able to help me find something that does work. He did pretty much agree to teach me in between all the dire warnings." |
Author: eversomuchfun | "Let us hope," agrees Sherlock. |
Author: cross_and_bow | "Anyway. Lemme put my new magic through its paces, huh?" says Juliet, rolling her shoulders and reaching behind herself to poke at the hidden tattoos. "Just Sherlock to start, and when I'm used to the boosts I can practice trying not to give Amariah an opening into which she might insert something sharp."
Training ensues. Amariah doesn't prove particularly useful as a stabby prop, but the blessings she cast are definitely helping. Juliet is less tired, less bruised, barely scratched, more alert, and surer on her feet than before, and it adds up to a definite edge above and beyond the revisions she's been making to her "autopilot".
Sherlock violently encounters the wall on more than one occasion. |
Author: dark_light | When Juliet's done for the night, Amariah gives Sherlock a hug, and then casts the quick verse-and-parsley notice-me-not spell so that she won't attract attention from bad guys, nosy neighbors, or Charlie. She walks home with Juliet and parks her cloud-pine, its hammock, and herself outside her alt's window. |
Author: cross_and_bow | The next day, Juliet takes Amariah to school with her. As long as Amariah doesn't do anything weirder than loitering and speaking in a normal tone of voice, she is completely unobtrusive.
Including to Mr. Giles when study hall rolls around and Juliet goes to return the books she's gotten through and talk magic. |
Author: pythbox | "That's more than I expected," he says as he reclaims them. "Considering the depth of your note-taking." |
Author: cross_and_bow | "I read pretty quickly," says Juliet. "You can look over my notes on them if you want proof they got read, or something." |
Author: pythbox | "I don't plan to be that kind of teacher," he says, with what might be a vestige of a smile. |
Author: cross_and_bow | "What kind of teacher do you plan to be?" she inquires. |
Author: dark_light | (Amariah, meanwhile, is reading through one of the books. Reading a book in a library is not unusual enough to break the spell, and she'll put it right back when Giles reaches for it.) |
Author: pythbox | "I have no idea," he admits. "Well, I have some idea. But 'not that kind' isn't much of an answer." |
Author: cross_and_bow | "It's not. Do you have an idea where we're going to start? Or are you stalling for time with the huge stack of demonological texts?" |
Author: pythbox | "The huge stack of demonological texts is full of crucial, valuable information," he says. "...And yes." |
Author: cross_and_bow | Juliet laughs.
"Hey, maybe you can answer a theory question for me," she says, when she's recovered. "You said I was lucky the only way I've had a spell fail is by not working at all. Does magic do a lot of uncontrolled stuff? Swirl around in random eddies breaking the laws of physics at random, stick to people who didn't especially solicit any, escape from poorly-worded spells and turn the local wildlife pink? Or is it all spells and sometimes exploding spells?" |
Author: pythbox | "It depends," he says. "Any spell that invokes a deity or demon—the difference isn't always perfectly clear—runs some risk of the named entity, ah, failing to cooperate. The results of that can be catastrophic, depending on whose attention you caught and how powerful and capricious they might be. Some spells, especially powerful ones, can backfire on the caster if done improperly. And magical artifacts of various kinds can have unpredictable effects. In general, no, magic doesn't do anything unless someone somewhere was trying to use it." |
Author: cross_and_bow | "A lot of the spells I saw invoked deities-or-demons - they're basically the same, really? - but that just pushes the question of how the magic works back one step farther. Do the deities-or-demons do their own magic when no one's bothering them to do someone else's? And what's this about artifacts, let's hear about artifacts," says Juliet. |
Author: pythbox | "Some do; some don't. If you want to know about them, or about artifacts, I can give you more books." |
Author: cross_and_bow | "I would like that," says Juliet decisively. |
Author: pythbox | He smiles tentatively and retreats behind the counter to haul out another armful from his personal collection. |
Author: cross_and_bow | "Did you expect me to need those?" Juliet asks. "For that matter, why did you bring your personal demonology collection, yesterday?" |
Author: pythbox | "I always bring my personal demonology collection," he says. |
Author: cross_and_bow | "To school with you?" Bella asks. "In case a demon attacks you and this is a problem that can best be solved by available reference books?" |
Author: pythbox | "You never know when you might need a cross-reference," he says with dignity. |
Author: cross_and_bow | "Maybe you can read these beautifully illuminated page numbers more easily than I can," she says. "Say, how did you get all these books? Where do demonology books even come from?" |
Author: pythbox | "Private collections," he says. "And, apparently, the Sunnydale High school library." |
Author: cross_and_bow | "Whose private collections? Are you obtaining books from people who are..." She attempts his accent. "Evil in some way?" |
Author: pythbox | He gives her a disapproving look over his glasses. |
Author: cross_and_bow | |
Author: pythbox | "Perhaps I should have gone with my first explanation," he says. "Sometimes, when two demonology texts love each other very much..." |
Author: cross_and_bow | Juliet cracks up. "You know, at this point, that explanation for at least a handful of them wouldn't floor me? But seriously, who's collecting these things, who's writing them?" |
Author: pythbox | "Demonologists write them," he says. "And collect them. And occasionally give them up to other collectors, or researchers, or I don't know who else. If it's any consolation, I can't tell you where I found most of the mundane books on my shelves, either." |
Author: cross_and_bow | "How do people wind up being demonologists? Is that the sort of field you can fall into? Perhaps literally - is there a secret demonology department down in a cellar at UC Sunnydale and if you trip in the right place they offer you a scholarship?" |
Author: pythbox | "I can't think of a demonology book off the top of my head that was published in the last four centuries," he says. "So if there is such a department, I'm not who you want to ask about it." |
Author: cross_and_bow | "That explains the archaic language. Lucky I'm up on my Shakespeare and so on," says Juliet. |
Author: pythbox | "Yes, that is lucky," he agrees. "I have relatively recent translations for most of the older and more obscure texts, but if you want to make a serious study of demonology—or magic, for that matter—I recommend learning Latin." |
Author: cross_and_bow | "Is there a Latin class here that I should switch into from Spanish or am I looking at self-study if I go that route?" |
Author: pythbox | "There is a Latin class! I even have the forms," he says. "Would you like some forms? I'm very proud of my forms." |
Author: cross_and_bow | "I would be perfectly happy to switch to Latin from Spanish as long as there's a low-level section available and I won't be flailing in bewilderment," snorts Juliet. |
Author: pythbox | "Fear not," he says, and he produces a form. |
Author: cross_and_bow | Juliet accepts the form. She fills it out. "Do I give this back to you or do I have to turn it in to the registrar or something?" |
Author: pythbox | "The latter," he says. "As a mere librarian I am not empowered to ferry your documents through the bureaucracy." |
Author: cross_and_bow | "Okay. It's near the cafeteria, I'll just do that come lunchtime." She checks the time on her phone. "Aaaand time for Bio, in which they have yet to explain how that one demon with the pink-and-gold scales managed to store seven gallons of venom in its torso without compromising the function of its internal organs despite all my many complaints about this oversight to the school board. See you after hours!"
She - with Amariah following after and giggling - departs the library. |
Author: pythbox | "Magic," he calls after her, laughing. |
Author: cross_and_bow | "Of course!" she calls over her shoulder, grinning.
After school she returns, with a slip in her pocket signifying her transfer to Latin, which she attended for the first time not ten minutes ago. "Latin," she announces, "gets entirely too fancy with its nouns." And she plunks the next book in her lineup onto the table and starts reading-and-notetaking. |
Author: pythbox | "A common complaint," says Mr. Giles. |
Author: cross_and_bow | "Oh well, I was no great shakes at Spanish, and I bet I know someone who'll help me out if I get stuck on Latin," Juliet says, winking. |
Author: dark_light | Amariah decides to take advantage of her unnoticeability and peer behind the desk, where Giles keeps his personal stash of books. She doesn't walk around behind the counter, but she can lean on it and dangle her hand over, with Path clinging to it, and he can read the titles. |
Author: pythbox | Very few of them actually have titles on the spines.
"But don't speak Latin around my books until you know what you're doing," he cautions. "Some of them are excitable." |
Author: cross_and_bow | "Is it possible to accidentally do spells that way, really?" asks Juliet. "Can you accidentally do spells in other languages?" |
Author: dark_light | "I can accidentally do spells in any language if I speak it in verse and it's clear enough that it's aimed at an effect," comments Amariah, pulling Path back up and putting him on her shoulder again. "I wasn't allowed to read Shakespeare aloud in school." |
Author: pythbox | "It's closer to accidentally activating an artifact than accidentally doing a spell," he says. "A book of magic, or a book about magic, will tend to get... suggestible... with age. And Latin for some reason seems to be particularly, er, suggestive. So combining the two can have unpredictable effects." |
Author: dark_light | "Ask him if it's only speaking or if writing Latin has the same problem," says Amariah. |
Author: cross_and_bow | "Does writing Latin have the same problem? In my own notebooks, or in the - I promise it's not going to happen - event that someone wrote Latin margin notes in one of these?" |
Author: pythbox | He frowns thoughtfully.
"Your own notebooks should be fine," he says. "I'm less sure about the margin notes, but that should be a moot point." |
Author: cross_and_bow | "It is, I wouldn't write in old books," promises Juliet. "Should be fine even if I'm telling the Latin teacher I'm a fantasy nerd and doing all my homework exercises about magic to cement specialized vocabulary?" |
Author: dark_light | "I wish I could get my spells to work in writing. Not just automatically, but if I could write them in special ink, maybe, it'd be easier than reciting whole poems. Oh well," says Amariah. |
Author: cross_and_bow | Amariah gets a brief glance and a smile, though Juliet doesn't otherwise acknowledge her presence. |
Author: pythbox | "As long as you don't mix the Latin and the old books, yes." |
Author: cross_and_bow | "Are the books self-aware or anything? Because that would be weird." |
Author: dark_light | "And you'd have to be even more careful with them," comments Amariah. |
Author: cross_and_bow | "And, not that I'm not being careful with your books, but there's 'valuable possession' and there's 'maybe a person' on the scale of whether I can put it in my backpack or not," says Juliet. |
Author: dark_light | "Well, I sometimes sit in my Isabella's bag, if she's flying quickly and I can't keep up or hold on to her as usual," Path says. (He's just as covered as Amariah by the notice-me-not spell.) "Backpacks aren't so bad." |
Author: pythbox | "The books are not self-aware," he assures her. |
Author: cross_and_bow | "How can you be sure?" Juliet asks. |
Author: dark_light | "I can try to whip up a spell to check for it if he doesn't have a good answer, although I don't think I'd better cast it while there's someone in the room, it might break my notice-me-not," Amariah says. |
Author: cross_and_bow | Juliet attempts to disguise her nod as a roll of her neck. |
Author: pythbox | "I have never heard of a book becoming self-aware. I have heard of possessed books, but even those did not have actual awareness except as lent to them by their demonic residents. And none of my books are possessed." |
Author: cross_and_bow | "Do you check for possession on the first Wednesday of each month?" Juliet snickers. |
Author: dark_light | "Just because he hasn't heard of it happening any other way... I'm going to go ahead and whip up at least a verse-and-herb for it when we go back to your house," Amariah says. "Don't nod again, he'll notice you're acting funny." |
Author: pythbox | He removes his glasses, cleans them, and puts them back on. |
Author: dark_light | "You weren't kidding about him having nervous habits," snorts Amariah. She sits down and goes back to looking through Juliet's books. |
Author: cross_and_bow | Juliet doesn't answer aloud, just goes back to her own reading and notetaking. |
Author: pythbox | "Would you mind answering a question for me?" |
Author: cross_and_bow | "What is it?" Juliet asks, twisting around in her chair. |
Author: pythbox | He gestures to Amariah.
"Who or what followed you here, and are you on friendly terms with him, her, or it?" |
Author: dark_light | "You can see me?" demands Amariah. Not loud enough to break the spell; someone else might walk in. |
Author: cross_and_bow | Juliet holds very still and waits for Mr. Giles to answer Amariah's question. |
Author: pythbox | "I have no idea what you just said," he says in Amariah's direction. |
Author: cross_and_bow | "...But you can tell that she's there and that she said something," Juliet says slowly. |
Author: dark_light | "I'm sure I cast the spell right. I'm sure," exclaims Amariah. "I was following you around all day, no one saw me -" |
Author: pythbox | "Yes," he says. "Should I not be able to? Who is it? It seems to me that if you know someone who can summon invisibility that well, you have no business applying to a, a dusty old librarian for lessons in magic." |
Author: cross_and_bow | "Is there somewhere less - accessible - we can go so she can take the spell off and we can explain?" Juliet says. "Your office maybe?" |
Author: pythbox | "I don't have one," he says. |
Author: cross_and_bow | "Do people ever come in here after hours besides me...? I guess I'd know better than you would, I've been here longer. Okay. Amariah, do you know any kind of spell to - you know what, nevermind, this is Sunnydale and everyone here has their certificate in advanced rationalization. But please don't break your notice-me-not by screaming this time. Do something else." |
Author: dark_light | Amariah shrugs and walks up to Giles and pokes him in the chest, hard enough that he can't shrug it off as irrelevant.
"Hi," she says sheepishly. |
Author: pythbox | He blinks at her.
"...Hello." |
Author: dark_light | "Don't touch the owl," Amariah adds. (This has become its own word, all strung together, she's been in Milliways warning people away from her daemon enough now.) "Um, so, I'm an alternate of the Bella you know from another dimension. I can't teach her magic because my kind only works for my species, but I came here to help her out by casting a few blessings on her, and now I'm hanging around until I can get back home." |
Author: pythbox | "It's... good to meet you," he says cautiously. "How do you two... know each other?" |
Author: cross_and_bow | "Amariah, I hope it goes without saying that this should not turn into a story about who exactly you picked up at a bar," says Juliet dryly.
(This is code for don't tell him about Sherlock.) |
Author: dark_light | "Okay, I'll spare your librarian's sensibilities and omit the fine details," snorts Amariah. (This is code for okay, I won't.) "But in the non-fine-details department - the interdimesional hub collects alts of lots of people. I've met three others of us and heard about a couple more beyond that. This isn't even the first one I've visited at home." |
Author: pythbox | "My sensibilities are very grateful," says Mr. Giles. "I've never heard of this interdimensional hub, but I'm well aware I don't know everything." |
Author: dark_light | "If you ever open a door and it appears to lead to a bar, instead of whatever you were expecting," says Amariah, "that's probably Milliways. Right now, no time is passing in my home world at all. When me or Juliet finds a door back in, I'll just visit the room our template shares to make some notes in the guestbook and let myself out, and my boyfriend'll be waiting for me at home like no time has passed." |
Author: pythbox | "That sounds convenient," he remarks. |
Author: dark_light | "It is! So that's what I'm here and why I was following - well, we can just call her Bella, since there's only two of us and I don't even go by that when I'm home. She can see through my notice-me-not just fine. How did you do it, though?" |
Author: pythbox | "I have no idea," he admits. |
Author: cross_and_bow | "Do you have some kind of anti-mind-affecting-magic artifact or something?" asks Juliet. |
Author: pythbox | "...No..." he says slowly. |
Author: cross_and_bow | "Nobody else saw her, or at least reacted to her, and she's been following me around all day," Juliet says. "There must be something up with you." |
Author: dark_light | "Yeah, we know why Bella can see me. Shell Bell or Stella or Golden would've been able to, too," says Amariah. "But you're unexplained. If there's a hole in the spell I should work out something heavier-duty or just find someplace to hide out instead of accompanying her." |
Author: pythbox |
He takes off his glasses.
He cleans them.
He puts them back on. |
Author: dark_light | "That's not very informative," remarks Amariah.
"I wonder if it's me," says Path. "Am I too weird in a world without daemons? By just enough to weaken the spell for someone who's on the lookout for oddities?" |
Author: pythbox | "That might be true," says Mr. Giles. |
Author: dark_light | "Well, I could go sit up on a bookshelf and she could recast, and you could see if my Isabella is less noticeable that way," Path suggests. |
Author: pythbox | "Does it not make a difference whether or not I expect her to be there?" |
Author: dark_light | "I'll recast, leave the room, and come back without Path and you say when you think I've done that," decides Amariah. "If you can tell, then it's not him. Dried parsley," she says. She takes the parsley handful from the air, tosses it, and mutters her non-English spell. Then she lets herself out, Path finds someplace out of the way to sit for a few moments, and, after a minute's wait, Amariah walks back in alone. |
Author: cross_and_bow | Juliet studiously refrains from reacting to any of this after the spell is cast. |
Author: pythbox | "Hello again," he says without missing a beat, as soon as she walks in. |
Author: dark_light | "Rats, that's not it then," says Amariah. She holds the door open and Path flies to her arm and she pokes Giles again to break the spell so he'll be able to converse with her unimpeded. "Do you have any ongoing magical - properties?" she asks. "Do you care if I invent a verse-and-herb to check for it if you don't know? My kind of magic is perfectly safe unless I don't want it to be." |
Author: pythbox | "...I won't ask you not to," he says, looking slightly uncomfortable. |
Author: cross_and_bow | "She cast like a dozen things on my yesterday evening," says Juliet. "They all worked exactly like she said they would." |
Author: dark_light | "Sugar. Celery seed," says Amariah, and the named ingredients appear and she composes a poem in her head. Finally she says:
"Show me how this one is shown
What is hidden, dark, unknown."
And she tosses the herbs at Giles and squints. |
Author: pythbox | Something glows through his sleeve. |
Author: dark_light | "Can I have a closer look at your left arm before this wears off?" Amariah asks. |
Author: pythbox | He takes off his glasses and rubs the bridge of his nose. "I would rather you didn't." |
Author: cross_and_bow | "Why, what is it?" asks Juliet. |
Author: pythbox | "One of the hazards of working magic," he says. "Particularly, of working magic while young and stupid." |
Author: cross_and_bow | "It... seems to have given you a superpower, so what are the dire and ooky drawbacks?" |
Author: pythbox | He gets out his cloth and starts cleaning his glasses again.
"It killed a friend of mine," he says shortly. "When I was not much older than you. We got involved with forces we didn't understand, or didn't care to, and he paid the price." |
Author: cross_and_bow | "I'm sorry," says Juliet. |
Author: dark_light | "Damn, I wish I could teach my witchcraft," murmurs Amariah, picking up Path from her shoulder and petting his feathers. "Much better deal - what were you doing, then, if you'll talk about it?" |
Author: pythbox | "Summoning a demon to get high." He puts his glasses back on. "And I am now done talking about it." |
Author: cross_and_bow | "I'm really sorry about your friend," says Juliet. |
Author: dark_light | "How in the world does summoning a - right, done talking about it, right," says Amariah. "Well, now we know why you can see me through the notice-me-not and it's not going to be common, I imagine. I hope." |
Author: pythbox | "There are perhaps four other people alive who share this distinction," he says with a gesture indicating the upper part of his left arm, "and last I saw any of them was in London." |
Author: cross_and_bow | "Sunnydale is in California," Juliet supplies to Amariah before Amariah can ask. |
Author: dark_light | "So not near London, then. Okay. Existing precautions adequate." |
Author: pythbox | "Glad that's settled," mutters Giles. |
Author: cross_and_bow | "...I promise never to do any magic that's primarily motivated by recreational psychological side effects," volunteers Juliet tentatively. |
Author: pythbox | "Thank you," he says, looking away. |
Author: cross_and_bow | Right. Done talking about it. Books and notetaking and setting a timer on her phone to get home before curfew. |
Author: dark_light | Amariah works alongside her. They take such similar notes, there's no reason not to divide the work. |
Author: pythbox | Giles watches them with a certain amount of curiosity. Dimensional alternates is new. |
Author: dark_light | "...Do you want to quiz me about my home dimension, or something?" Amariah offers. "I mean, I can also take notes, but she's got to read them to know the contents anyway, it doesn't save as much time as it looks like." |
Author: pythbox | "...You've mentioned that your magic isn't teachable," he says. "How did you come by it?" |
Author: dark_light | "I'm a witch. It's a species where I come from. Sort of, I mean - witches are all women, if we're going to make more witches we pretty much have to find mortals to cooperate, so my dad is just a human. Our sons are mortal, our daughters are witches. I've been doing simple nursery-rhyme level spells since I could talk, although I didn't start learning systematically until I could fly." She has her cloud-pine with her; there's enough scary stuff in this town that she wants to be able to put Juliet on it as a passenger and zoom out of wherever she's at at two hundred miles an hour without having to retrieve it from somewhere. She gestures with the branch. "When I was not quite six." |
Author: pythbox | "I see," he says. "That's... fascinating on several levels. Does 'mortals' imply what I think it does?" |
Author: dark_light | "Well, in my case, it does, but our alt Angela kept saying 'mortals' too and she just means people without wings and boasts no special lifespan herself, so good on you for asking. Witches live until we - well, there's not an exact understanding of how it happens, but it looks like barring death by violence we live until we're too bored or too lonely." |
Author: pythbox | "Not a bad deal," he muses. |
Author: dark_light | "Well, it means that we tend to last until we've gone through about four husbands, which takes a few centuries but not literally forever. I'm just planning to find a way to make my boyfriend immortal instead." |
Author: pythbox | "Good luck," he ventures. |
Author: dark_light | "Oh, I'll be able to do it. We have these devices -" she gestures to indicate the size. "That dispense objective truth in complete - sentences, so to speak, although it has to talk through symbols, they're really not very well designed, and the device says I can. I just have a research project to complete first." |
Author: pythbox | "...Now that sounds useful." |
Author: dark_light | "It is! Unfortunately, I've tried it outside my universe and the functionality's not portable. When questioned back home they say they run on 'dust' that isn't anywhere else." She shrugs. "Still very glad I have them. Well, I have one, my boyfriend has the other. He's an intuitive reader and he's much better at communicating with them than I am, so he wanted his own. There's only six in the world but two were lost; I found the first with a spell and he asked it where the other was." |
Author: pythbox | "Remarkable," murmurs Giles. |
Author: dark_light | Amariah grins at him. |
Author: pythbox | He smiles back. |
Author: dark_light | "Do you want any conveniently consequence-free spells on you or your house or whatever, as long as I'm loitering in this world and you're helping my counterpart here?" Amariah inquires. "The whole set I gave Bella includes four protective tattoos, which take a while, but if you wanted to skip those it'd only take a couple hours to go through all of them. I have tea tree oil and stuff left." |
Author: pythbox | "That... would be very generous of you," he says, surprised. "Yes." |
Author: dark_light | "I don't mind. I have time to kill, and Bells without their own magic can use all the help they can get. I mean, maybe she'll meet Stella or Shell Bell her first time through Milliways and whatever I do will be redundant, but maybe she won't. Here, I've got a list I wrote for Bella." Path pulls the paper out of her bag for her, and transfers it to her hand; she unfolds it and hands it to Giles. |
Author: pythbox |
"That's very thorough," he says. |
Author: dark_light | "Enh, it's a bunch of spells, but they only add up to so much," demurs Amariah. "Even Golden, let alone Stella or Shell Bell, would be more help than me. If Bella wanted to undergo a species change. - Golden's world has a different kind of vampire than this one. A dramatically superior and less inherently problematic kind of vampire, sounds like." |
Author: pythbox | "That's not saying much," he mutters absently. |
Author: dark_light | "Golden's kind of vampire - I haven't met Golden in person, I've read Stella's notes about her in the guestbook in our shared room in Milliways, but according to the notes - Golden's kind of vampire is immortal, has no inconvenient allergies, can go weeks without eating, don't sleep, are almost physically indestructible short of fire and even then Golden's survived being pulverized to bits and then set on fire twice, and they are way, way faster and stronger than the vampires you have here. And they have perfect recall, and enhanced senses, and they think fast enough to process all this stuff plus the super-speed, and on top of all of that they are super pretty. The only drawbacks are that they mate for life and that's really serious business, female vampires can't get pregnant, and they feel pretty thirsty a lot of the time - but Milliways sells synthetic blood that they like just fine and Golden has her R&D department reverse-engineering it. And Golden managed to have a kid anyway, egg-harvesting before she turned." |
Author: pythbox |
"I can't decide whether I am envious or terrified," he says with dry calm. |
Author: dark_light | "I'd rather have Stella's magic, really. It's kind of fucked up, but it's easy to hack that," says Amariah. "Besides, I don't know if Golden-vampires would be able to turn a non-human like me in the usual way and I don't think I'd wanna be a test subject." |
Author: pythbox | "Stella's magic being...?" |
Author: dark_light | "Wishes. She can make nearly arbitrary wishes, and they come true," says Amariah. "The fucked up part is where wishes come from, but she's got a copy of my boyfriend for her own, and that template is all over it. I'll spare your librarian sensibilities the details of what they are all over." |
Author: pythbox | "Thank you very much," he says dryly. |
Author: cross_and_bow | Juliet snickers. |
Author: dark_light | "We are a fascinating bunch," asserts Amariah. |
Author: pythbox | "I'm beginning to see that," Giles agrees. |
Author: dark_light | "Bella's always home at sundown, and I'm trying to stick with her, because my phone is from 2013 in another world and does not get service here and I want to know if she finds a door to Milliways," says Amariah. "Should I run and get the ingredients for spells to be added to your person, or would you rather set up a time to do that some other place than the school library?" |
Author: pythbox | "...The latter is probably the wiser course," he says. |
Author: dark_light | "Okay. I'll bring the stuff tomorrow; do you have to stay here until a certain time or can we go to your house after school or something? Bella's place won't do, there's always the risk that her dad will be home earlier than expected." |
Author: pythbox | "No one ever visits my house unexpectedly," he says wryly. "And I can leave as soon as school lets out." |
Author: cross_and_bow | "So you've just been sticking around for my charming company?" asks Juliet impishly. |
Author: pythbox | "Not when you put it like that," he says. |
Author: dark_light | Amariah laughs. |
Author: cross_and_bow | "Oh, sorry. You've been -" cough, fake English accent - "making yourself available for a student with an interest in extracurriculuars in which you have some expertise you are willing to share?" She cleans a pair of imaginary glasses and grins. |
Author: pythbox |
He laughs. |
Author: cross_and_bow | Juliet hums to herself and writes a half-word of further notes before her phone goes off. "Time to head home," she says, putting her pen down and packing up. "See you tomorrow, Mr. Giles!" |
Author: dark_light | Amariah parks her cloud-pine in mid-air, sits on it, and follows Juliet. |
Author: pythbox | Mr. Giles watches them leave, shaking his head slowly. |
Author: dark_light | Whoops! Amariah almost forgot to renew her notice-me-not again. She pauses to redo that before leaving the library, and then catches up. |
Author: cross_and_bow | Juliet is home at exactly the right time to put Sherlock's blood for the night in the microwave. Meanwhile, Amariah hovers fifteen feet off the ground, in case any nasties come out in the falling dark. |
Author: eversomuchfun | There he is, right on time.
"And what did we learn at school today, dear Juliet?" |
Author: cross_and_bow | "Mr. Giles, when he was young and stupid, used to indulge in demon-summoning for recreational psychological effects, and this left him with something on his arm that let him see partway through Amariah's notice-me-not and also a dead friend," reports Juliet, handing over the blood and bending her head to breathe through the fabric of her t-shirt sleeve. "So we had to explain her, but at least he didn't curse first and ask questions later. He wanted to know who or what he, she, or it was and whether we were on good terms." |
Author: eversomuchfun | "Well, that's more life than I expected out of him," says Sherlock.
Slurp! |
Author: cross_and_bow | "What, a history of recreational demon-summoning? I suppose it's lively except insofar as it wound up being anti-lively," says Juliet. "I promised him never to use magic primarily for recreational psychological effects. I half-suspect I couldn't even obtain same, actually, but even if I could it'd be a trivial promise, I am apparently less reckless than Mr. Giles was at my age." |
Author: dark_light | "And tomorrow after school we're going to his house and I'm going to load him up with some of the same protections Juliet got. Oh, and we managed to explain my presence without reference to you, Sherlock - he's not supposed to know about you, I take it?" |
Author: eversomuchfun | "I am a vampire. He is part of an organization dedicated to exterminating us. It would probably be unwise to mention me around him." |
Author: cross_and_bow | "I'm not sure if that will be long-term viable," says Juliet, hefting her messenger bag and starting down the sidewalk. "Is there some set of criteria he could meet such that it'd be okay to reveal you, or are we just going with he-can-never-know! until that falls apart or I stop interacting with him for some reason? Or I could introduce you to him and react to any suspicion by rolling my eyes and suggesting offering you a glass of water with a drop of blood in it. Hide you in plain sight, like." |
Author: eversomuchfun | "Let's say that he can know about me only after he knows you're the Slayer, and only if he seems sufficiently reasonable under those circumstances to deal with the revelation without throwing a fit." |
Author: cross_and_bow | "Okay. I'm hanging on to the Slayer stuff until I learn about his - well, not his day job, librarian is his day job, but until he tells me about his side project, so to speak." |
Author: dark_light | "He was very reasonable about me," says Amariah optimistically. "Took the explanation pretty much at face value, let me cast a divination on him to see why he could see me, wasn't hostile or anything. Even though I'm pretty far-out. Am I less far-out than a non-asshole vampire?" |
Author: eversomuchfun | "Much less." |
Author: cross_and_bow | "To be more exact, he has fewer prejudices about extradimensional witch alts than he does about local vampires," says Juliet. "I think that he could tell that you were there, and that was enough for him to tell that I could tell you were there, but he didn't know what you were, just that I was not alarmed - and there are more nasty things than benign things to explain any given weirdness, but benign explanations aren't as unheard of as nice vampires." |
Author: eversomuchfun | "As the lady says," Sherlock agrees. |
Author: dark_light | "I wonder what it would look like if someone with a daemon was turned into the local vampire sort," muses Amariah. "Not enough to try it, not near enough, but I wonder." |
Author: eversomuchfun | "Yes, I advise you to continue wondering," says Sherlock. |
Author: dark_light | "Believe me, even apart from my basic interest in preserving my personality, I'm especially sensitive to the possibility that it'd hurt Path," says Amariah soberly. |
Author: cross_and_bow | Juliet's heard this story - Amariah's been following her around all day, inaudible to everyone around them, she has all the highlights by now. She nods. |
Author: eversomuchfun | "I expect that it would," he says softly. |
Author: cross_and_bow | There's the crypt! Combat practice time. Juliet ramps up to two-minute sequences, bolstered by all her new blessings, but sometimes they don't last that long due to repeated enactments of Sherlock, Meet Wall, or sometimes Sherlock, Meet Floor With The Slayer Sitting On You Bending Your Arms In Ways They Are Not Supposed To Bend. |
Author: dark_light | Amariah has nothing to contribute tonight; she works on movement-based spells, dancing around experimentally in another section of the crypt. |
Author: eversomuchfun | It is all great fun. |
Author: dark_light | The next day, Amariah brings her "groceries" to school with Juliet, and after school they go to Mr. Giles's house - the modification Amariah invented to the notice-me-not applies to him as well as to Sherlock. She casts blessings and a slightly different combination of less compatible charms and, after he accepts with great trepidation, a line of protective tattoos on his previously unmarked arm. |
Author: pythbox | It helps that he's seen her cast quite a lot by then. Her magic and the magic of this world are fundamentally unalike. |
Author: dark_light | "You're all set," says Amariah. "Don't be reckless with these. They'd help if you got hit by a car or something, but you shouldn't go lie on the railroad tracks." |
Author: cross_and_bow | "I shouldn't? Gosh, thanks for warning me," says Juliet. |
Author: pythbox | "Thank you," says Giles. "And I have no intention of putting myself in harm's way just because it's now slightly less likely to run me over." |
Author: dark_light | "- Something just occurred to me," says Amariah. "On my world, you'd want those tattoos visible, because people are less likely to attack someone a witch has decided to protect, and because a lot of people, even humans, are magically sensitive enough to tell they're there even if they're not in a visible location. But here, those advantages don't really exist. I can hide them, if you want. Though I personally think the bayleaf one and the sun-shaped one are both very decorative." |
Author: pythbox | "...I'm not sure." |
Author: cross_and_bow | "Can you hide mine? I wasn't really getting them for cosmetic reasons. ...I don't have to take my shirt off, do I?" |
Author: dark_light | "Nah, although the -" She addresses her cornucopia. "White vinegar and honey!" - she speaks normally again - "will need to soak through your shirt if you're going to leave it on. They'll disappear after, though, so you don't have to worry about laundry and Mr. Giles should not complain if you lie down on his carpet." |
Author: cross_and_bow | Juliet lies down on his carpet. "Does this part hurt too?" |
Author: dark_light | "Nope," says Amariah, pouring the vinegar and then the honey across Juliet's shoulders. "Hide my marks / conceal them all / make unseen / all my workings," she intones. The liquids vanish. |
Author: pythbox | "...Could you hide everything after the bayleaf?" asks Mr. Giles. |
Author: dark_light | "If I edit the verse. You like the bayleaf?" |
Author: pythbox | "I do," he says, twisting his arm forward to look at it. |
Author: dark_light | "Sure." She has honey and vinegar left. She pours over all the tattoos apart from the bayleaf, and contemplates adjustments, and finally says, "Hide four marks / conceal these four / make unseen / non-leaf workings." |
Author: pythbox | And there they go.
"Your form of magic really is a lot more convenient than ours," he remarks. |
Author: dark_light | "No kidding. I'd share if I could, but not even my boyfriend's daemon, who can turn into a witch well enough to fly a cloud-pine and feel celestial light, can get out so much as a pure verse spell," says Amariah apologetically. |
Author: pythbox | "Unfortunate," he says, rolling his sleeve down again. |
Author: dark_light | "Sorry," says Amariah. "Oh, it's almost sundown. We should head back to Bella's." |
Author: cross_and_bow | "Off we go," agrees Juliet, picking up her messenger bag and following her witch counterpart out the door. |
Author: pythbox | What an interesting pair. |
Author: cross_and_bow | Juliet has Sherlock's blood ready for him on time. |
Author: eversomuchfun | And Sherlock is on time to receive it. |
Author: dark_light | "Hey, do you want blessings and stuff too?" Amariah asks him when he shows up. (She hangs back. She doesn't like the smell of blood either, although her distaste is about on the level of Juliet's after Slayer activation; she's had to get used to it for sacrifice components.) |
Author: eversomuchfun | "Interesting thought," he says. "Sure, why not."
Slurp! |
Author: cross_and_bow | "If I were you I'd be worried about a bad interaction with the goddesses from some of the spells," says Juliet. "I mean, I know it's only crosses and not also crescent moons and Stars of David and yin-yangs, but still." |
Author: eversomuchfun | "Oh, I know," he says. "But it probably won't kill me. Odds are slim it'll even hurt." |
Author: cross_and_bow | "The tattoos hurt," says Juliet. |
Author: eversomuchfun | "Seperately, I mean," he says with a wave of his hand. |
Author: dark_light | "Well, this is going to wipe me out of the ingredients that I can't conjure, but I think I have enough of everything to do one more person, anyway," says Amariah. "I don't think it's worth even trying to ask Charlie, is it? I mean, mine's used to witch stuff, but I'm imagining mine if I brought home - I don't know, aliens?" |
Author: cross_and_bow | "Yeah, I think not informing him of you or offering to paint him with bayleaf ink is the best bet," says Juliet. |
Author: eversomuchfun | Sherlock laughs. |
Author: dark_light | At the crypt, Amariah gets to work while Juliet shadowboxes and practices tumbling around artfully on the floor without hurting herself. |
Author: eversomuchfun | If the tattoos do hurt, Sherlock doesn't complain of it. |
Author: dark_light | "Do you want these showing or hidden?" |
Author: eversomuchfun | "Oh, showing, I think." |
Author: dark_light | "All right then," says Amariah. "Have you got a trash can or something for the empty bottles?" |
Author: cross_and_bow | Juliet may or may not be peering through the open archway at shirtless Sherlock, between rolls and flips and shadowboxed throws. |
Author: eversomuchfun | "Or something," he says. "Pile them up by the tea; I'll get rid of them when I get rid of the box."
Then he calls over his shoulder to Juliet, "If you'd like a closer look, I won't begrudge." |
Author: dark_light | Amariah giggles as she stashes the refuse where Sherlock specified. |
Author: cross_and_bow | Juliet is sufficiently surprised at being caught that her autopilot glitches and she scrapes her knuckles against a rough patch of stone landing from a midair twirl, and in spite of all her protections she splits her lip open against the edge of one of those stone coffin things. (Without them she'd have chipped a tooth too, and her hand would be much more open to the air.)
She sits on the floor, and then she smirks and holds up her injured hand.
"If you want dessert," she says, "I won't begrudge." |
Author: eversomuchfun | Laughing, he sits on the floor in front of her, picks up her hand, and kisses her knuckles with extravagant courtesy.
Extravagant courtesy, and then tongue. |
Author: cross_and_bow | Juliet laughs softly. |
Author: eversomuchfun | After a little while, he lets go of her hand and leans forward and kisses her on the mouth in much the same way. |
Author: cross_and_bow | "Mmm -"
Juliet didn't really expect that.
But she really should've. And she likes it anyway. And, ignoring the complaint from her split lip, she kisses him right back. |
Author: dark_light | Amariah grins and decides to leave them be. She sneaks out of the crypt and flies back to Juliet's by herself.
She wants peroxide for her next experiment in moving magic, and her cornucopia won't make that. Charlie's not home yet. She finds the spare key to the backdoor wedged in the mailbox (predictable, Charlie) and opens the back door to swipe some.
But there is Milliways instead.
Well, she can't reach them. Path can fly the key back to where it goes while she keeps the door open. She conjures up a little honey and writes going home! by the door, and she steps through. |
Author: eversomuchfun | "We have been left alone," Sherlock observes eventually. |
Author: cross_and_bow | "Noticed," grins Juliet. But why is he using his mouth for something other than kissing? That seems like a poor choice right now. She places one hand on each side of his head and redirects his attention. |
Author: eversomuchfun | He is more than happy to follow her lead. |
Author: cross_and_bow | Her lead goes in that direction for a while, and then she says, "Well, this will never do, it's nearly my bedtime and I still haven't flung you into even one wall." |
Author: eversomuchfun | "Tragic," he agrees, grinning blissfully. "Shall we correct that?" |
Author: cross_and_bow | "Yeah, do let's," she says, disentangling, turning, and somersaulting in such a way as to land on her feet. She grins at him and holds up her fists. "Surprise me." |
Author: eversomuchfun | He attacks with blurring speed. |
Author: cross_and_bow | His Bella can well and truly match it, and she's blessed and edited and in a fantastic mood. She blocks and dodges and collects what would be a nasty bruise on her shoulder sans bayleaf and she kicks and -
Sherlock does not encounter a wall. He encounters the floor, face up, pinned in what is (if one thinks about it hard enough) really a very compromising position.
And he receives another kiss. |
Author: eversomuchfun |
He melts. |
Author: cross_and_bow | "Interesting," Juliet murmurs against his mouth, drawing back just enough to speak, and then she kisses him again. |
Author: eversomuchfun | Point of interest: Sherlock does not, in fact, need to breathe. It is a luxury he can do without, if he has reason. |
Author: cross_and_bow | Juliet has to breathe. But she's got a nose for that. |
Author: eversomuchfun | And a delightful nose it is. |
Author: cross_and_bow | It really is getting late. Bella eventually peels herself off of Sherlock. (In the process of so peeling a hand may just skim over the surface of a certain shirtless chest.) "I'd better get home," she says. "Or I won't be rested for my all-important English class." |
Author: eversomuchfun | "Perish the thought. Shall I walk you home?" |
Author: cross_and_bow | "I think so, yes. But you probably don't want to try to kiss me goodnight on the porch. That could be hazardous to your health in more ways than one." She stands up and offers him her hand. |
Author: eversomuchfun | He takes her hand and hauls himself to his feet, laughing, then wanders off to retrieve his shirt and coat.
"The one way being your porch lights, and the other being your father's excellent aim?" |
Author: cross_and_bow | "Aren't you clever?" she laughs, offering him her hand again once he's clothed and strolling out of the crypt. |
Author: eversomuchfun | Ooh, holding hands. Holding hands is delightful.
"The occasional bullet is a small price to pay, really." |
Author: cross_and_bow | "The occasional bullet is not the price of admission. Although I do appreciate the circumstances under which you took that first." |
Author: eversomuchfun | "All in a night's work," he says. "You would be upset if your father were mauled by demons; therefore so would I." |
Author: cross_and_bow | "You're sweet," Bella accuses. |
Author: eversomuchfun | "Never," he says indignantly, and then winks. |
Author: cross_and_bow | "I would know," she says loftily, "I tasted you. I declare you sweet." |
Author: eversomuchfun | He laughs.
"In that case, who am I to argue?" |
Author: cross_and_bow | "No one whatever," she says. "In fact, I think you might be fictional." |
Author: eversomuchfun | "Ouch," he deadpans, and then laughs again. |
Author: cross_and_bow | She grins at him. She likes him. She probably would've kissed him herself within a day or two.
There's her house.
"I don't know if Charlie's looking out the window, but - lemme find out some way to explain you to him before risking it, okay?" she says ruefully, letting go of Sherlock's hand. "It might take me a while to come up with something sufficiently likely to leave your next favorite coat intact." |
Author: eversomuchfun | "As you like," he says, smiling. |
Author: cross_and_bow | "G'night, Sherlock," she says, and she backs away a few steps before turning and heading into her house. |
Author: eversomuchfun | "Night, love."
Off he goes. |
Author: cross_and_bow | ...That is an interesting thing for him to have called her.
She wonders if it's a Britishism, calling people "love" regardless of emotional content. (Giles doesn't do it, though.) (It could be regional, or just Sherlock, and still not mean -) (Or it could go right ahead and mean that, and would this be so bad? It wouldn't. He was unproblematic about liking her. He'll be unproblematic about loving her. All right then, so it doesn't matter beyond its being sweet. For now.)
She doesn't find Amariah, does find - and clean up - the note left in honey, and goes to bed.
She shows up at study hall the next day with only the progress made on her borrowed books that Mr. Giles saw her make at his house while Amariah did spellcasting. |
Author: pythbox | Mr. Giles makes no comment on this, just greets her with a friendly hello. |
Author: cross_and_bow | "Amariah went home," she tells him, picking up where she left off, and switching to Latin catch-up when she finishes the book she's partway through. "Found a door last night when I wasn't in shouting distance and went through." |
Author: pythbox | "I see," he says. "Well, that explains why she's not here." |
Author: cross_and_bow | "Yup. I hope I run into her again someday but there aren't any guarantees. I don't blame her for taking the first door home, though, she's got her own stuff going on and it was very kind of her to visit." |
Author: pythbox | "Yes it was," he agrees. |
Author: cross_and_bow | "When I'm done reading through your instruments of stalling for time - are you starting to form any ideas on how to go about teaching me other stuff?" |
Author: pythbox | "Starting to, yes," he says. |
Author: cross_and_bow | "Can I have inklings?" |
Author: pythbox | "Finish your stalling homework," he says with a slight smile. |
Author: cross_and_bow | She sticks out her tongue, and goes back to alternating between Latin and demonology until the bell rings to send her to her next designated location.
She returns after school and gets out her stalling homework again. |
Author: pythbox | "Hello again," says Mr. Giles. |
Author: cross_and_bow | "Hi! Hey, is it just a coincidence that the kind of person to have his own personal demonology collection wound up at the Sunnydale high school library? Or are you here for some Sunnydale-related reason?" she asks, while writing a chapter heading in her notebook. |
Author: pythbox | "...I suppose you could say I am," he muses. |
Author: cross_and_bow | "Do tell." |
Author: pythbox | He takes off his glasses.
He starts cleaning them.
"What do you know about the Vampire Slayer?" |
Author: cross_and_bow | "The name makes it sound like a weapon," she says. |
Author: pythbox | "In a sense," he sighs, "you're right. The Slayer is a girl, usually about your age, who is gifted with the necessary abilities to, well, slay vampires. Or demons. Or, generally, get between this world and anyone who wants to destroy it." |
Author: cross_and_bow | "...Why is the Slayer a girl usually about my age? Why is the Slayer not six people of assorted genders and ages, or maybe a few hundred of them, so they can specialize and cooperate and be in several places at once?" |
Author: pythbox | "Much as I would love to answer that question, the only people who can have been dead for thousands of years," he says. "And the rest of us are stuck with the world as it is." |
Author: cross_and_bow | "That sounds irritating. So you're here for something Slayer-related, I take it? Teach her to throw fireballs or whatever so she doesn't get her uniquely powerful teenage self killed by a lucky shot?" |
Author: pythbox | "No," he says, continuing to clean his glasses. "Not quite. I'm here because the Slayer is missing." |
Author: cross_and_bow | "What, she ran away from wherever Slayers live?" |
Author: pythbox | "When one Slayer dies, the next is called," he says. "She can be anyone of the right gender and age. Sometimes it takes a few weeks or months to track her down and explain her destiny. But it's always been possible to find her. This time... as far as anyone scrying for the Council can tell, there is no Slayer." |
Author: cross_and_bow | "There's a Council? They... fundraise so she can slay stuff full-time, run interference between her and law enforcement, man a hotline so someone's always available to look up obscure demons for her? That sounds neat," says Juliet.
(Someone who does not know what she does about the Slayer and the Council would make these guesses and would think it sounded nice. She's looking forward to seeing if Giles contradicts her.) |
Author: pythbox | "...More or less," he says. "But right now that's a little beside the point. The rumour that the line of Slayers has ended is already going around. If she doesn't show herself soon—to the demons, more importantly than to us—I'm afraid they'll just keep getting bolder." |
Author: cross_and_bow | "I'm not clear on how one person has any significant deterrent effect on the worldwide demon population, however good she is at throwing fireballs," says Bella. "I mean, if she's here where you're looking for her, then how does that matter to a family of demons in Beijing?" |
Author: pythbox | "She has symbolic value," he says. "The mere knowledge that there is a Slayer somewhere, even if she's not an immediate threat, has a quelling effect on demonic activity. There are records of previous times when the line of succession was cast into doubt, and none of them make good bedtime reading." |
Author: cross_and_bow | "Fair enough. So you said more or less - what else do you Councily types do?" |
Author: pythbox | "Watchers," he supplies. "It's the Watchers' Council. Before you ask, no, I don't know why. And our job is to train and prepare the Slayer for hers. We do the research; we study the demons; we help her develop her technique; we keep her informed of everything she needs to know. Assuming, of course, that we can find her in the first place." |
Author: cross_and_bow | "What happens if you get a Slayer who's a pacifist or a sociopath or throws in with the demons or just doesn't want anything to do with you because she's a ballerina and needs to devote all her energy to her Art?" |
Author: pythbox | "I have never seen records of a Slayer joining the other side," he says carefully. "As for the rest... one of those previous times I mentioned involved a Slayer running away from the Watcher who found her. She kept ahead of us for several years. No one knows what happened to her exactly, but we know when the next Slayer was called." |
Author: cross_and_bow | "She had to run," says Bella. "The Watcher didn't just let her go because she was involuntarily involved and didn't want anything to do with him. Is that right?" |
Author: pythbox | He frowns at her over his glasses.
"I don't know what you mean." |
Author: cross_and_bow | "Some Watcher found some Slayer and she ran away. She kept ahead of you - the Council - that's what you said, isn't it? It sounds like you guys chased that poor girl until she died." |
Author: pythbox | "Given that their other option was to let one badly handled conversation deprive the world of its strongest defense against evil," he says sharply, "I'm not sure they made the wrong choice." |
Author: cross_and_bow | "You said it was more important that the missing Slayer reveal herself to the demons than to the Council," says Bella. "She was known to exist, wasn't she? With a whole council full of people with access to all kinds of information and magic I'm stunned they tried to ask anything more of her than that she spend the rest of her life with a target painted on her jugular vein. I'm stunned they used all those resources to hunt down one terrified, fleeing girl instead of trying to learn more about neutral demons or subsidize the development of sunshiney lightbulbs with motion-detectors for use over patios or just coming up with large-scale spells that, sure, maybe they'd eat a few people, but they'd be informed volunteers and they could save way more. I bet something toothy murdered that Slayer when she was twenty-something and then all your colleagues were very relieved because she was in the way and then she wasn't anymore. I can't imagine why anyone would bolt at the first sign of attention from the Stalkers Council, can you?" |
Author: pythbox | "Two different powerful demons claimed to have found and killed her, but as far as later research could tell, they were both lying. For those few years, there effectively was no Slayer. All the resources that weren't put into finding her were put into dealing, inadequately, with the chaos caused by her absence." |
Author: cross_and_bow | "Have you considered lying? Tell the Council 'found Slayer, but she's shy and wishes to remain otherwise anonymous', let them publicize the misinformation, produce occasional reports. You don't need to be the Slayer to cut the vampire population. I got hold of a key to the morgue and I've been surreptitiously pounding slivers of wood into every cadaver that passes through police hands practically since I moved here." |
Author: pythbox |
He blinks at her, lost for words. |
Author: cross_and_bow | "What?" |
Author: pythbox | "I don't know how you think this works," he says. "Pre-staking the corpses is, is brilliant, but I can't imagine any way that lying to the Council would help. It's not the Council that needs to know there's a Slayer on the job, it's the demons." |
Author: cross_and_bow | "How do the demons usually find out, if the Council isn't issuing a press release or anything? Lie to whoever tells the demons. I mean, she's super-powerful, more efficient as a source of demon control apparently than anything else the Council could be doing with its time, I'm assuming bitey things don't usually tangle with her and live to tell the tale until one manages to actually kill her? Fights to someone's death all, yes?" |
Author: pythbox | "You have a strangely idealized view of all this for someone who lives in Sunnydale," he says. "Demons frequently run away from her, and she can't possibly hunt down and kill every single one. Leaving aside the times when she loses a fight but escapes with her life." |
Author: cross_and_bow | "I've only lived here a couple months," says Bella. (But except for Sherlock, who is special, she's never confirmed a vampire's vampirehood without dusting it. Although she supposes some demons did run from Sherlock. If Sherlock were a girl like Shell Bell's version, would rumors be circulating even now about a Slayer in town?) "...Am I just completely off base on the fireballs thing?" |
Author: pythbox | "...Yes?" he says. "What fireballs?" |
Author: cross_and_bow | "I mentioned fireballs twice when I was guessing what exactly Watchers are supposed to teach the Slayer to do?" |
Author: pythbox | "Oh. Sorry, I didn't catch that. No, no fireballs." |
Author: cross_and_bow | "What powers does she get, then? Telekinesis? Care Bear Stare?" |
Author: pythbox | "A supernatural aptitude for physical combat." |
Author: cross_and_bow | "The entire demon world is terrified of someone who is good at punching things," says Bella flatly, deadpan skeptical. "That is ridiculous. Vampires are good at punching things, eighty percent of demons are good at punching things, is she even appreciably better than them or does she just have an unusual affordance to get training on how to punch things?" |
Author: pythbox | "An untrained Slayer with a stake in her hand can kill most vampires as easily as you would wipe your nose." |
Author: cross_and_bow | "So if her existence and approximate location are public knowledge from all those demons who flee from her approach chattering into the grapevine, wouldn't she just scatter the bitey critters, not drive them into outright hiding? She can't teleport, she can't do one thing in Munich and another in Sao Paulo at the same time. Why can they coordinate well enough to spread the word but not well enough to do whatever they want with sardinelike safety in numbers?" |
Author: pythbox | "I don't know," he says. "Perhaps you'd like to find a local demon and ask." |
Author: cross_and_bow | "Am I irritating you?" |
Author: pythbox | He takes off his glasses and cleans them. "Being questioned about the Slayer as though I am personally responsible for every aspect of the situation from the actions of unknown people or gods thousands of years ago to the behaviour of demons across the planet does start to wear, yes." |
Author: cross_and_bow | "Sorry," she sighs. "How'd you wind up throwing in with the Watchers, anyway?" |
Author: pythbox | "They were the opposite of my first crowd in every possible way." |
Author: cross_and_bow | "That's a why, not a how." |
Author: pythbox | "The how isn't very interesting. Family connections," he says. "I knew they were there, so that's where I went." |
Author: cross_and_bow | "Fair enough." She lets silence save pen-scratching reign for a few minutes to let some of his annoyance drop, then says:
"How're you going about looking for the Slayer? I mean, I guess a high school's a good vantage point, but I can account for an awful lot of your time." |
Author: pythbox | "To be perfectly honest with you," he says, "I'm hoping she shows up and makes herself obvious somehow, because I am out of other options. I'm a Watcher, not a spy. I'm good at, at cataloguing books and deciphering illuminated manuscripts. I'm not good at questioning teenage girls to see if they've developed superpowers recently." |
Author: cross_and_bow | "What'll you do if she starts killing demons in public and then shouting her full name and address?" |
