Disclaimer: I do not own Buffy: The Vampire Slayer or any characters belonging to Marvel. I make no profit off of any of this.
A/N: I was originally going to use this interlude to split Part 1 and Part 2 of the next installment in Follow, Follow but I realized that made zero sense chronologically so I might as well release it now. Consider this my (one-eyed, decidedly non-romantic) Valentine's gift to you!
This story follows Through the Door which you really need to read first or this will be utter gibberish. (Check my profile!)
INTERLUDE : Angry Eye Patch Man
"This is completely unacceptable."
The building's head of security flinched back slightly from the irate man dressed in combat blacks. "Sir, we – "
"Do you have any concept of how serious this situation is?"
"Sir, we were monitoring the lab but we can't control what Dr. Rosenberg – "
"Stop," the man said sharply, holding up a hand for silence. He swept his gaze around the room, taking in the mess strewn haphazardly across the abandoned work stations.
He turned back to his subordinate and fixed her with a heavy, one-eyed glare. "There are no excuses for an oversight of this magnitude."
The woman swallowed, and stayed silent.
"Honestly, who orders only one extra eggroll?!"
"Sir?"
Xander waved a crumpled take-out receipt at her. "Pitiful. Willow has always been a terrible take-out orderer, but I expect better from the Buffster."
"Xander?" A lab tech stuck his head around the open door. "Mr. Giles is on the phone for you."
Xander sighed. "Thanks, John. I'll be out in a minute." He scrubbed a hand roughly over his face before a lightbulb sparked. "Hey, wait, come back here for a second!"
John stepped fully into the room, bemused.
"You must have a pretty good idea of what Willow's been working on recently, right? Being her assistant and all?" Xander confirmed.
John shrugged. "Yeah, I guess. The big stuff. She's always got a lot of Bunsen burners going at once, if you know what I mean."
Xander rolled his good eye. Scientists, he mouthed to Verity, the promising young slayer who had recently been promoted to head of security for the New York City HQ. She frowned back, obviously too upset at having lost track of two senior Council members in one night to find any humor in the situation. Xander made a mental note to work on that.
"O-kay," he said, clapping his hands together. "This is what we're gonna do, kiddos. Johnny-boy, you're going to analyze all of…this." He gestured to the glowing wall of monitors in front of them.
"What am I looking for?" John asked as he slid into Willow's abandoned seat.
"Anything weird." Xander paused, reflecting. "Weirder than normal," he clarified.
He turned back to Verity.
"Put out a city-wide alert. I want patrols on the street around the clock. Usual drill: rough up the local scumbags, listen for rumblings in the nastier demon circles – check out that creepy book club that meets in Astoria on Tuesdays, I know they are up to something – and I want to know exactly where Buffy has been in the last – "
"New Mexico," John interrupted, tapping frantically on one of the keyboards. His face was awash with the glow from the half-dozen computer screens, bleaching his skin an even paler blue than usual.
"What?"
"These are the energy readings from New Mexico that Willow was obsessing over yesterday," John explained, clicking through a couple of graphs. They looked like audio waves with the odd Venn diagram thrown in.
Xander frowned. "Mystical energy readings?" he guessed. His cellphone vibrated in his pocket and he held up an apologetic just-one-moment finger to John. Glancing at the caller ID, he tapped his earpiece and accepted the call. "Hey, G-Man."
"Don't call me that," Giles said automatically, and then cut to the chase. "What have you found?"
"No respect for the subtle art of ordering Chinese take-out," Xander promptly replied. "Other than that…whaddya you hear about the weather in New Mexico this time of year?"
On the other end of the line, Giles drew in a sharp breath. "I told her not to do anything rash."
"Told who? Told Willow? Was she wearing her Resolve Face?"
"I couldn't see her face. We spoke on the phone."
"It's not just a visual expression, it's a tone of voice," Xander explained impatiently. "Geez, man, stop acting like a total noob!"
"Xander," Giles said warningly.
"What's in New Mexico?" Xander pressed.
"Nothing. Or so I thought. Willow believed differently."
"Well, it looks like she was right," Xander snapped, his good humor finally running out. "Because I've got security footage of my girls teleporting out of here last night – presumably to Nothing, New Mexico – and nobody's been able to make contact with them since. And I don't think it's the crappy cell service in the desert."
Giles was quiet on the other end of the line.
Xander clenched his jaw. "I'm sending in a team," he decided. "Call the Coven. Find out if there's anyone in the Four Corners area who can get a better reading on the ground. I wanna know what kind of trouble we're heading into."
It was a sign of how incredibly pissed off Xander was feeling that he started ordering Giles around without bothering to phrase it as a request; but these days, he was generally past caring if he stepped on Giles' toes to get the answers he needed. In point of fact, he didn't have to clear anything by the older Watcher in the first place. As head of the WSC's tactical division, Xander was unequivocally in charge of dispatching resources in emergency situations.
"Fine," Giles relented. "I will call you as soon as I hear anything."
"I'll check in later," Xander said shortly, and tapped his earpiece to disconnect. "Verity, change of plans. Contact L.A. – tell them to suit up."
"There was a small unit dispatched to Roswell last week," Verity informed him, checking her tablet. "There were reports of widespread memory loss in the town, hallucinations, and strange sigils appearing in various public offices."
"Status?"
"The memory loss and hallucinations were caused by the spores of a non-indigenous species of fungus that was being traded on the demon market. Trade has since been shut down. The sigils were an act of vandalism perpetrated by local teenagers, and unconnected," Verity read from the report.
"Alien fungi. In Roswell. Seriously?" Xander shook his head. "Never mind. Tell them to head for – " he rattled off the latitude and longitude Willow's graphs indicated " – ASAP. I'll be on the first portal out. I want to head this one up personally."
"There's something else here…" John mused, still focused on the data in front of him. "Let me just…" He typed furiously, tongue between his teeth. "Ah. There it is." He sat back, glancing up at his companions with satisfaction.
A beat.
"Is that a Quarterback Sneak?" Xander asked, squinting at the colorful squiggles on the screen.
Verity gaped at him. "You watch football?"
"Is that a jab at my masculinity or my taste in sports? Don't answer that. John, translate."
"This is the original event," John explained, pointing. "It occurred at approximately 11:45 EST. This second surge of energy – " he pointed again " – registered approximately 27 hours later."
"So…six hours, give or take, after Dr. Rosenberg and the Commander left the building," Verity calculated.
Xander guffawed loudly. They both looked at him. "I'm sorry, I just love knowing you actually call her that to her face," he said, wiping a tear from the corner of his eye.
"Dr. Rosenberg has multiple P.H.D.s," Verity said matter-of-factly. "What else would I call her?"
"No, I meant – you know what? Not important."
"She's yanking your chain," John told Xander dryly. "Level Seven's got a contest going to see how many honorifics they can get away with calling Buffy before she completely loses it. One of the new girls called her 'Mrs.' last week by accident and it's been a downward spiral from there."
"You've been holding out on me!" Xander accused Verity, looking at her in an entirely new light.
"Don't act so innocent," Verity scoffed, nudging John's chair with what probably constituted 'gentle' for a Slayer, but resulted in him ramming his legs into the corner of the desk. "You called her 'My Liege' when she was here on Wednesday."
"In Latin," John defended, rubbing his injured shin.
"Bad Latin. Terrible, actually. She thought you were sneezing."
"Um, guys?" Xander pointed at one of the monitors. "I think we're being spammed."
A new window had popped up on the central screen. It depicted what looked like seismic activity of some kind. They all watched as a thin line scribbled across the black screen like an angry heart monitor. It sped up; jumping higher and higher until one surge nearly broke through the top of the graph, and then, just as quickly, receded to a negligible blip.
The pop-up window flashed twice before shrinking down to a thumbnail that flew up to a small cluster of similar icons in the upper left-hand corner of the screen. The rest of the active screens whirred and shuddered like the old split-flap arrivals boards you still found in some train stations and airports, changing to accommodate the new data as Willow's fancy algorithms worked their magic.
(Possibly actual magic. Xander was so not technology guy and Willow had been going all mojo-fusion recently.)
"So…not spam?" he guessed.
"A third flare," Verity surmised.
"Almost directly on top of the first two," John confirmed, checking the data. He pulled up a satellite map of the region and zoomed in, but all they could see was empty desert. The nearest splotch of civilization was miles away. He clicked open another tab in the internet browser and found the local weather forecast.
"Clear skies," he noted with a frown.
"Is that important?"
"It kind of blows the whole lightning storm theory out of the water," John pointed out.
"So what does that mean?" asked Verity.
Xander's mouth was set in a hard line. "It means," he said in a dangerous voice, "that I'm beginning to get seriously miffed."
So, anyone still with me...?!