AUTHOR: Hrunting(crc@crcdesign.net)
RATING: PG
DISCLAIMER: No infringement of copyright is intended. Joss Whedon/ME and Fox own Buffy, I'm just playing in the sandbox they've abandoned.
FEEDBACK: Please. Praise me, contradict me, correct me, flame me - whatever.
SUMMARY: With Sunnydale gone and an army of Slayers arisen, our intrepid heroes face new challenges and changing roles.
A circle of eight squat candles burned in front of Willow, reflecting off the scythe in her lap and casting highlights across her pale face. She sat cross-legged with her eyes closed, allowing the earth's power to flow through her and to connect her to the light emitted by the flames. The glow from the candles seemed to intensify as time passed, transforming the pitch black of the room around them into a dimly lit chamber of shifting shadows and light. Gradually, the light coalesced in the center of the circle about a foot above unperturbed flames.
The swirling mass of light seemed self-contained, somehow isolated from its environment, plunging the rest of the room again into darkness. The mass of light divided though, individual points separated one by one and floated into their appropriate positions before the red witch.
Willow grinned and opened her eyes knowing that things were proceeding smoothly thus far. The difficult part of the spell was nearly complete. Once the map was established, she need only learn what she could from it and then allow the power to return to the earth.
She reached out tentatively, bringing the tip of her index finger gently towards the nearest point of light. 'No matter how many times I do this,' she thought, 'I just keep expecting it to burn.' But the light, as always, offered no physical sensation of its own. The heat from the candle's flame dissipated normally. It was only light that she held on this plane for the spell to do its work.
While her slender finger and the point of light occupied the same apparent physical space, images and information flooded her mind. To one sensitive as she was, the scythe nearly rang with power reacting to the light she touched. 'There lays a Slayer,' it told her.
Willow could see the girl's plump, flushed face, the short auburn hair not much different from her own. The house she lived in with her widowed father was a 2-story Victorian not much more than a mile from the hotel. Sarah was the girl's name. She'd simply been eating some leftover Pad Thai for lunch when another spell had conferred upon her the mantle of Slayerhood. She'd felt the change, but had done nothing that made it obvious. Right now she was dozing on the couch, absently watching some movie on TV and thinking of... Colin Ferrell looking up from between her...
"Oh! Oops - sorry," said Willow aloud, embarrassedly drawing her hand back from Sarah's point of light. She committed the girl's location to memory and tried to clear her mind of what she'd just seen. There was nothing she could do to change the voyeuristic nature of her work, and the work must be done. Still, it was odd just how often she'd stumbled on such imaginings in the minds of her targets. It seemed an even worse violation of the girls to mention it to Buffy, but Willow was really starting to wonder if this was, at least to some extent, a slayer thing. "Sure," muttered Willow to herself, "I'll just ask: 'Hey, Buffy do you think you're hornier than other girls?'"
The door to Willow's hotel room opened at that and Buffy's head popped in. "What was that, Wil?" She asked, chipper and smiling brightly enough to almost outshine the flood of actual sunlight coming through the open door. "Did you call me?"
"Huh? Oh, I said... nothing. I was just... thinking aloud. About um... not you."
"Oh." She said, not thinking much about having misheard her friend. Buffy's eyes widened though when she noticed the ring of candles still lit on the floor. "Oh, God, I'm sorry. Did I disturb the spell?"
"No," said Willow, smiling. "No, it's okay. You'll have to come inside and close the door for me to see the lights, but everything's pretty stable once it's set up."
Buffy entered the room cradling several large brown paper grocery bags. Dawn followed her in, similarly laden, muttering something about not getting that super-slayer package-carrying strength.
With the room again sealed from the light outside, Willow's eyes quickly adjusted and she reached for the next pinpoint on her map.
Buffy cocked an eyebrow, deciding that this silent show wasn't going to qualify as entertainment for too long. She looked over at her sister, beautiful in simple blue jeans and silver on black Raiders t-shirt, gazing in rapt attention at Willow's progress. Such inspiration. "I think we need to do a little more shopping."
The younger Summers turned her wide-eyed admiration of Willow suddenly into wide-eyed exasperation and sputtered at her sister. "For what? We have enough food for weeks!"
"No, I was thinking of something a little more fun."
"Ooh, " cried Dawn, getting a little more into the idea now. "Can we go back to that arms antiquities dealer and play spot the fakes again?"
"Um, I was thinking something a little less 'Katana' a little more 'Prada'."
Someone's poking me. Right on a very sore shoulder. Come to think of it, that sore shoulder is attached to a very sore body and a very tired me.
Still with the poking.
Who the . . . "hell!" she finished the thought in a shout, striking out without looking, but connecting solidly with the torso of her tormentor.
"Damn girl, you're getting harder and more dangerous to wake up every morning - er afternoon."
Rona opened her eyes a slit to see the grinning Faith standing over her rubbing the lower ribs that had just been struck. "You're just lucky I don't sleep with a stake under my pillow."
"Huh, you're just lucky I wasn't a vamp. Their wake up calls aren't so gentle. Maybe we ought to add that to the curriculum: 'surprise attacks in your sleep 101.'"
"Will that be 7th period, right after 'partying all night with your teacher' or will you combine that with the junk food and cigarettes lunch break?"
"Hey, we managed to dust four vamps between dances *and* I got a solid lead on two nests in this burg. As for lunch, I picked some things up while you were still snoring this morning. Oranges, bananas and some absolutely massive shrimp that seems to be popular here."
Rona sat up on the bed, trying to think and focus her bleary eyes at the same time. An orange would taste just about prefect right now. "Snore? I don't snore!"
Ignoring the contradiction, Faith continued. "Once you're done with breakfast or lunch or whatever, we need to get a move on those nests while there's plenty of daylight left - Tina's already out scouting. Whenever we're done we gotta check in with Giles. He should know more about our base-camp plans by now."
The weight of these plans pulled Rona closer to the conscious world. She looked over at Adina - the new slayer they'd come to Guaymas to find - and asked, "How do you suppose she's taking it?"
"About as well as any of us did, I guess. At least she's not alone." Faith thought for a moment then said, "Not that that solves everything, but it can help."