"No, don't!" someone shouted, just as Giles was about to smash the statue. He hesitated.
A teenage boy wearing stained sweatpants and a T-shirt with NASA's logo scrambled into the back of the shop with Giles and Ethan.
"Young man, I understand that this item may be valuable, but it is causing..."
"Yes, yes, I heard you! But we have to keep the curse going -"
The boy pulled something out of his pocket, slightly gingerly. It looked like a gun, but didn't seem to have a hole at the end of the barrel for bullets. It was made of shining metal, and had several buttons on the side.
"My little brother's a Trekkie like me, and he was dressed as Kirk. He's currently running around hitting on every woman he can find, which is rather amusing because he still normally thinks girls have cooties. But that's not the point - this is."
The teenager pointed the gun at Ethan and pulled the trigger. A crackling, humming noise filled the back room, and a visible beam of light or lightning or something came out and struck Ethan. Ethan collapsed flat, unconscious.
"If the curse breaks," the boy asserted, "this is a plastic toy again. I understand that people may die and get hurt here in town, but if we can get this thing to a lab, and hold the curse, they can reverse engineer it. There's obviously the military use, but imagine how many fewer people would get hurt or killed if everyone had stun guns for law enforcement and self defense. And the energy storage! This power pack holds far more electrical charge than a comparable modern battery. With this, we could switch to all electric vehicles...not even need petroleum any more!"
Giles hesitated. "I see what you're saying, but there are reasons we have to break it. This...well, there's a person who..."
"No, please! Look, we'll take this to the government. They can send in the Army, catch the children alive, catch everyone alive and keep them separated and contained until we've made sense of the phaser!"
"If this curse follows the ordinary rules, as soon as the sun rises, it will break. That's not enough time -"
"There are aircraft that can outrun the sun! The government can load the statue on an SR-71 Blackbird, say, and keep flying west. We can keep that statue in perpetual darkness that way...actually, it's October 31, it might already be dark all day at the North Pole!"
It all made sense, what he was saying. Maybe. But what the boy didn't know, couldn't know, was that Buffy was under the curse, and as such, completely useless until it was broken. And if she was useless, vampires would roam free, the Hellmouth might even be opened...
"I'm sorry, but I have to," Giles said, starting to raise the statue -
The boy aimed and fired. Giles staggered back a step, then fell, the back of his head narrowly missing the wall. As it was, he hit the ground fairly hard. The boy quickly checked on him and confirmed that Giles was breathing. After a moment's hesitation, he ran to the shop door, shut and locked it, and then began looking for something to load the phaser and statue into.
USAF Lieutenant Kyle Rogers, as usual these days, was cold. He was sitting in a tent at the North Pole, which was an activity which tended to make one cold; the three propane heaters going full blast in the tent didn't seem to be helping. And to top it off, he still didn't know what this was about. He had been given a sealed steel box, strict orders to handle it carefully but not open it, and a route to take that was a sort of spiral leading across Canada and Alaska and then to the North Pole. When he asked when he could expect to get out of here over the radio, he was told someone would come and relieve him and his copilot in about a week, and not to make any more nonessential transmissions.
This sucked.
The air smelled sweet and clean as Buffy made her way through downtown Los Angeles. Giles had turned up something in the news that sounded like a gang of vampires was operating there, and she had decided this needed investigating. The traffic was still terrible, of course, but it wasn't noisy like when she was a teenager. The cars made barely audible humming sounds as they accelerated, only to skid to a stop behind the next car as it halted again.
She glanced up at the sky, which was clear, a deep, brilliant blue. That more than made up for the diminished glory of the sunsets, she mused briefly, before snapping her mind back to the task at hand.
It was Halloween. She'd decided to wait a few days for this day, when the vampires would be weak and easy to handle. As she strode down one block after another, scanning for the right street, she let her mind wander back to past Halloweens. Obviously, the most memorable one was her junior year of high school, when she and half the kids in town had been put under a curse. For two freaking weeks, she had thought she was a high-born lady, and would have been about as dangerous to a vampire as a rabbit. Then she'd suddenly woken up in some Army camp, with no idea where she was or what had happened. No one seemed to be willing to explain anything; the parents involved had been told their kids had become infected with MRSA and had had to be quarantined, and the whole thing was hushed up. Giles had told her this wasn't quite what happened, but to her annoyance, had refused to elaborate. She'd had quite a job clearing the streets after that, although it was a bit easier because the Army had picked up some of the vampires, assuming they were "ordinary" victims.
Her job had been hard when she was a kid, she thought. Some of the vamps had had guns, which tended to be rather dangerous to someone with only a crossbow, even a Slayer. Now, all you could buy were stunners, which took so long to affect her that they wouldn't do vampires any good. There had been a lot of anger and even threats of violence from the NRA and such, but private firearms had been banned in President Gore's first term. There were no legitimate uses for firearms that couldn't be done with stunners. Of course, vampires still turned up with guns for a few years after that, but by '04 or so black-market ammo was so expensive that the vamps couldn't afford it any more. Willow said this had saved thousands of lives every year.
Buffy shook herself and tried to focus. She was here and now, and had a job to do.