Title: What could it be?

Author: Nopporn Wongrassamee aka the Evil Author

EMail Address: EvilAuthor@aol.com

Archive: Anywhere and everywhere. Just tell me if you do.

Spoilers: Anything goes.

Summary: A man in the know reflects on the world at large.

Disclaimer: I only own this story. Everything else belongs to their

respective owners

Somewhere, 1135pm

In a darkened, windowless office, a nameless man was catching up on

his paperwork. His office was dark and windowless because it foiled

certain eavesdropping technologies. He was nameless because he had

long since stopped telling anyone what it was. And he was doing

paperwork because even shadowy world conspiracies needed to keep

track of what was really going on.

There was a truism that the only constants in the universe were

death and taxes. The man didn't believe it. Being a shadow government

type allowed him to avoid paying the latter; he didn't officially

exist. And he had been avoiding the former by avoiding any long-lived

loonies with swords for the past eighty or ninety years.

But paperwork was impossible to get away from.

Most of these were reports on the activities of aliens or alien

related projects. A man in his position simply had to know what

Earth's otherworldly visitors were up to.

There was George Fox's alien for instance. Although masquerading as

photojournalist Paul Forrester, the alien was relatively harmless

whatever Fox believed. What little technology Forrester displayed

seemed to be far more advanced than anything anybody else had. While

it was tempting to try to capture such technology, other aliens had

higher priority.

Then there were the so called Asgard. The face they presented to

Stargate Command pictured them as benevolent guardians. But given the

abductions and experiments they did in secret, the conspiracy had a

darker picture of them. Either the Asgard were being twofaced or were

factionalized to the point of "left hand doesn't know what the right

hand is doing". In the man's experience, it was probably the latter.

On the plus side, some gains have been made. Project Backstep was

derived from alien technology. The Mothren were gone. The Tenctonese

were integrating with human society nicely; some of them even were

even useful in researching other aliens' technology.

The man picked up a report on his favorite pair of FBI agents. Now

these two seemed to run into more types of aliens than anyone else.

Despite their uninvited poking into Consortium business, they did

perform a valuable service: bait.

Looking at the vast array of alien incursions, the man wondered what

made Earth so attractive. Was there something here that they all

considered valuable? Something worth fighting over?

Taking a long drag on his cigarette, the man indulged himself and

speculated. What would such a thing be?

Sunnydale CA, 1202am

"My God," Giles whispered, "it's grown."

As he, his Slayers, and slayerettes watched, the first demon rose

from the opened Hellmouth.