Chapter 3

Just the facts, Ma'am.

It wasn't until the next Tuesday that all of her paperwork came through allowing her to go back to school. Hell, if it wasn't for the fact that in order to be part of the defense of the town she needed access to the location of the Hellmouth she might not have bothered.

Well, that and the fact that Jenny demanded she go to school.

Getting the tea set in and out of the kiln became problematic simply because the teacher demanded to see the finished pieces and it took Alex turning the woman down multiple times to keep them out of the county arts and crafts fair. A second Dedicated Wright is being built back at the house, the same design though with a red safety hat this time. Alex is holding off until they are both live before she gets too crazy about producing stuff.

Alex finds herself somewhat lost as she wanders through the halls to go talk to Principal Snyder. Not literally, of course. She knows her way around the high school well. But mentally, trying to figure out her place in the institution given her new circumstances is a confusing and an unholy annoyance. Besides, as irritating, creepy, and evil as that little wretch Snyder was when dealing with a male, Alex is not particularly excited to deal with the man as a short, slender, and stacked young woman. Even simply wearing blue jeans and a t-shirt she is getting looks from the jocks, and Cordelia and the Cordettes were already starting the rumor mill going against her to defend their supremacy.

After asking at the office and being directed to a bench, she has to wait nearly fifteen minutes for the little toad man to open his door and wave her over.

"Alexis Harrison. I took a look at your transcripts. Fair grades, nothing outstanding. I noted that you haven't been involved in any of the sports, clubs, or other sorts of sanctioned extra curricular activities. I was wondering if you could come up with any reason at all that I should allow you to infect this learning environment with your anti-social and lazy ways?" His eyes pan quickly over her form as she stands there. Not as obvious as most of the male students she passes in the halls, but ten times is icky.

Alex makes it a point to look confused. "Because it's the law that I have to go to school and you have to take me? I'm not sure why you are acting like this is voluntary for either of us."

"Miss Harrison. May I call you Alexis?"

"No. I don't think so."

Snyder's weasel eyes start to fill with the hate he is so known for. "Look here, I don't run this place to let it get taken over by trouble makers. Just keep yourself out of detention and we'll get along fine. You can go down to the library to get your books."

Alex walks down to the library on autopilot, essentially. Wondering how long she will need to spend in the shower tonight to wash the eyes of Snyder off her chest.

Entering the library reveals the whole gang plus a random Cordelia. You know, for kicks. The group all looks up when she walks in, and Jenny and Giles both give her a nod, while Giles also looks over at the counter which has her text books sitting on it. Willow stands up with a smirk and walks over to give Alex a hug. Confused, Alex wraps her arms around her friend. Willow uses the opportunity to whisper to her.

"Cordelia is trying to grill us all on Xander's whereabouts. Nobody has said anything to her yet, we were all kind of waiting to find out what you wanted."

Alex nods. "Okay Wills. I think I can let her know. She'll figure it out anyway. She's a lot of things, but she was never stupid."

Willow gives Alex a confused look as she digs through her backpack for that damned bra that Cordy had supplied for Halloween. Alex then walks up to Cordelia, hands her the bra as her eyes widen almost comically.

"Thanks for the loan. I can honestly say that without your help I would not be who I am today."

She then slides past a gaping Cordelia and puts her new texts into her pack. By the time she is turned back around, Cordelia's mouth has closed and confusion and amusement are waging a border war on her features.

"What happened, Xander?"

Looking up at her old adversary, Alex corrects her. "Please, call me Alex. Short for Alexis. As for what happened, well, remember on Halloween when everybody was all wonky with their costumes? Well, I got my brain back but everything else apparently got co-opted by my costume. So, new improved me I guess." The sarcasm dripping off her tongue is easy to hear as well as the despair that taints everything when this topic comes up.

Cordelia looks a little defensive. "Hey, there was no way I could know that Halloween was going to go so crazy. I almost got eaten by JoJo the dog faced boy, I know Halloween pain. Believe you me."

Alex looks up at her. "Look, Cordy, I know there wasn't any way for you to know. I don't blame you for this." She takes a moment to motion to herself. "But thinking about it just hurts and despite all the snark we have spit at each other, I know you are plenty smart enough to figure out who I am. That's why I told you. But please, could we just not... Not get into it? If you want to go after my grades, or my clothes, or my hair, fine. The fact that I am poor, sure. But don't go after what I am or what I was. I have to deal with that enough already, I don't need the most popular girl in school dragging what passes for my life now through the muck."

Cordelia finds herself nodding. If she suddenly sprouted a penis, she wouldn't want the the class to know, that's for sure. "That's fair, I suppose. Going after this would be low hanging fruit anyway. I aspire to greater things than to kick a foe when... she's down. Do me a couple favors though?"

Alex looks at her curiously. "What's that?"

"Don't look at me in the locker room, and if you get a good opportunity to verbally destroy Harmony, I would love to see the shrew deal with a 'new girl' that has Xander's knack for inciting rage."

A quick smirk later, and Alex nods.

A few days later and everyone is once again in Alex's room to see the last bits of the animation of the new Homunculus. Her cherry red hard hat being the only difference that most can see between the two, though Alex can tell them apart easily. Naming them 'Thing One' and 'Thing Two' she is a little shocked when they both fly over to her and adorn her cheeks with a chaste but loving kiss each. Her cheeks reddening as she turns around to face her friends, she sees smiles all around as she sits on the bed.

"I think I must be doing something wrong. They have all the skills, and they do what I ask of them without complaint. But I don't remember them having this much personality before." She then looks at Buffy. "I can't put together any kind of metal gear or weapons without a forge, but it wouldn't take much to get you squared away with some good clothes and leather armor that were geared toward keeping you alive. Any preferences before I put them to work? I picked up the supplies for it last weekend."

Buffy looks a little shocked herself as the two Wrights fly over with cloth tapes and start taking her measurements, nudging arms and legs into the positions they need without so much as an attempt at explanation. "Well, you would be the expert, Alex. I mean, you do what you need to do I guess. Just, not black, okay? Make it happy colors. My life has enough darkness in it already. Also, fashionable if you can. I want to be looking good while I slay."

"That's fair. I'll put them to work on some stuff today, and we'll get the items themselves done and fitted to your satisfaction before we start the enchanting process. Making the leathers and shirt and whatever won't take all that long, not with both of them here and all the measurements already taken. Dying the leather before they stitch it all together will likely take as long as all the other steps of the process combined. Now, since it might make a difference on the overall look of the suit, are you willing to swap out for a pair of fashionable hand crafted boots instead of your normal shoes?"

Willow smiles. "Striding and Springing?"

Alex nods. "Yeah. There are a lot of other cool options, but for overall utility vs cost, a thirty three percent increase in speed along with a massive bonus to jumping ability seemed like the way to go. I was also thinking about trying to put together a slightly modified 'Belt of hidden pouches' for her."

Willow looks confused while Giles, Jenny, and Buffy are all looking Gobsmacked.

"Why modified?" Willow can't help but ask.

Alex shrugs. "Because the standard is thirty pockets each of which can hold five pounds but nothing can be longer than six inches in any dimension. Vampire killing stakes are longer than that. Going to have to try to work on the tolerances for the item to meet customer needs. Probably see if I can double the size of the dimensional pockets and cut it down to fifteen instead of thirty. More useful for her anyway."

Willow grins. "Why not just make her a Handy Haversack? I mean, a backpack that always has whatever you want from it on top would be almost as good most of the time, and better in a pinch, wouldn't it?"

Alex shakes her head. "It would if I thought I had a chance in hell of getting her to lug around a backpack while she is slaying."

Buffy finally breaks in at this point. "Yeah, that's not gonna happen peeps, sorry."

There is some good natured chuckling at this while they all head out of Alex's room now that Buffy's measurements have been jotted down by Thing Two and they are both looking at the crew with a little annoyance, feet tapping in that "You are in our way" kind of manner.

When they all get out into the living room, Jenny checks her email and then calls out to Alex. "Hey, we got a bite on the website!"

Alex rushes over to take a look. "Cool, who is it?"

Jenny glances through the email. "The Frog brothers, Edgar and Alan over in Santa Carla. You'd like these guys, Buffy. They've been keeping a lid on the Sunnydale echo fault for ten years, and they started at your age."

Giles startles at this. "The council disproved the existence of an echo fault for Sunnydale years ago."

Jenny snorts. "Yeah, I would imagine that they did. That's because these lunatics have been waging a two man war against the garbage that floats through their area and doing a good enough job to keep things from building up enough to draw the council's attention. My family has done business with them before. They are six kinds of crazy, but they're good people and they know what they're doing."

Buffy looks to Giles. "What the heck is a gecko faulty?"

Giles removes his glasses and holds the bridge of his nose. "Echo Fault, Buffy. It is a small offshoot of a primary Hellmouth, much like a volcano may have multiple vents before erupting. If what Jenny is saying is true, then these Frog brothers are quite remarkable. While not nearly as dangerous as an actual Hellmouth, these echos are not to be trifled with, the things they attract are quite deadly. I would be quite curious as to how they do it."

Jenny is reading the particulars of the email as she responds. "They only attack during the day, they have multiple well defended lairs in town to fall back to, and they cheat like mad bastards. My favorite story that the family brought back about them involved paint pellets full of holy water and a flame thrower."

Alex grins. These are his kinda people. "What do they need?"

Jenny looks a little sad when she responds. "Well, they have a bit of a list of 'wants' but the one thing they say that they desperately need is a way to produce holy water. It seems that the priest that was supplying them until recently ran afoul of some kind of trouble down by the waterfront."

"Hmmm. Interesting." Alex thinks for a minute, getting some scratch paper. "Well, the good news is that I know I can do it. The bad news is that I can't quote a price right now because I am pretty sure that the rules for holy water have changed on me and I will need to experiment. At least I hope they have, because if the cost is the same here then it is gonna be out of everybody's price range."

Giles raises his eyebrows. "You can create holy water?"

Alex shakes her head. "Yes and no. I mean, I can, but the traditional material component where these abilities were perfected was five pounds of powdered silver per pint of holy water. But then, that was on a world that had like fifty or sixty active gods that were all vying for power and control, it isn't surprising that they wanted their due for the blessing. Here, I can see it being a hell of a lot cheaper as the faith that produces it is a lot stronger and here, gods don't need money. Theoretically. Tell them that I can have an answer in a couple of days."

Jenny types it all in with a smile on her face, pleased that her idea is bearing fruit.

Willow takes this opportunity during a gap in the conversation to bring up something that she was hoping to avoid, but since everybody is here now... "So, Buffy, umm... Angel asked me to look into your buddy Ford a little bit, and I think you should know that he isn't registered for school like he says he is. He isn't on any of the rolls, and I can't find any record of his father having been transferred here like he says he was either and I only did it because Angel asked me to and please don't look at me like that it isn't my fault!"

This is new to Alex, she has been heading directly home after school to keep an eye on various projects and so has been a bit out of the gossip loop of late.

Buffy looks less than pleased. "So why do you feel like you need to spy on my friends?"

Alex can't help piping up at this point. Raising a single finger, she disagrees. "If it pleases the court, it was actually Angel that felt your friends needed to be spied upon, Willow was just doing your dead boyfriend a favor. Since she is pretty much the only one of us that would, you might wanna cut her some slack."

Buffy looks hurt and highly confused as well as offended. "You still don't like Angel? Why not? You aren't a boy anymore anyway."

Alex rolls her eyes. "Yeah. I'll admit that there might have been some teensy amount of jealousy involved, Buff. But primarily I didn't, and don't, like Angel because he is an undead pedophile that has more than two hundred years of history, a hundred and fifty of which involved killing anything that looked at him funny. Or, you know, looked at him at all. Or thought about looking. Or..."

Buffy cuts in, growling. "He isn't like that anymore. He has a soul now."

Looking up from his notes and sketches, Alex responds. "Yup. Some idiot gypsies stole an innocent soul from heaven and jammed it into a vampire so that they could both be miserable for eternity. That's great as long as you absolutely hate souls. If the guy actually had any balls he'd off himself in his guilt and the soul could go back where it came from. But that is just my opinion, Buffy. I am not passing judgment on you or your relationship as long as I never have to hear about it. All I am trying to make clear is that the person you are about to come unglued on is the only person you know that doesn't, on some level, want to see you crying into a dustpan full of boyfriend. So be nice."

"Xander would have never said that." Buffy says, disbelieving.

Alex nods. "That's true. He never would have said that he wasn't passing judgment. The rest of it was pretty much just waiting for a good opportunity. I don't think you quite understand how gross I find it that you are lusting after an animated corpse. Now can we please talk about something else while we are still friends? Because poor taste in boyfriends and my current unfortunate gender situation aside, I am still interested in being your friend. Just, a less mumbles in the dark to herself one and a more tells you what she thinks you need to hear one."

Her face still ashen, Buffy nods, though she then immediately mumbles an excuse and leaves to start her patrol early.

Willow is glaring at Alex, though it is undercut somewhat by the hand she has placed on Alex's arm as a silent thank you for standing up for her. Giles is sitting on the couch with his glasses I his hand, his fingers on the bridge of his nose, and alternates between grinning at the floor and scowling at Alex.

Jenny just looks shocked. Shocked, dismayed, and more than a little scared. Alex files that for later. Scared seems a bit much as a response to this.

"Jenny, do you mind if we go to the jewelers? I need to buy about a pound of silver. Probably run a bit over two hundred dollars, so I should have it no problem. But I need it to test with."

She nods, and the two leave after saying goodbyes to Giles and Willow, who are also leaving.

Author's Note:

I'm updating this once here for every two chapters I post on TtH. Just FYI :P

Edgar and Alan Frog are from the movie "The Lost Boys." Which I do not own, but instead Warner Bros. does.