Slayer Gothic 2
Chapter 14
Streets. Sunnydale.
Right now I was moving faster than most track stars could sprint, but this wasn't me in a hurry. When I was in a hurry, I really moved. Plus I had really good endurance, this was my second lap of Sunnydale tonight, and although I was taking deep breathes, I had no cramps in my muscles or pain in my luges. The streets were dark, the streetlights often far apart, but I could see clearly enough.
This wasn't normal even more. I seemed to be more powerful than ever, but I had no idea why. Halloween had come and gone without anyone turning into anything, as Ethan Rayne was dead, and if someone had cast a spell in an attempt to harm me then they'd done a piss poor job of it.
Cutting through a yard, I then easily leaped over a chain link fence and found myself back on the street. Next I deliberately ran at a car and before I hit it I jumped. When I landed past the rear bumper, I started running again.
My body was overflowing with energy tonight, and there was nothing to vent it on. I'd have to keep running, and then hope one of my girls was up for a good shagging.
"If I really wear myself out maybe I can sleep for more than a few hours" I mused.
However rather than start running I climbed up the side of a building, and once I was on the roof I started to look for something to go kill. I didn't see anything demony, but I could hear things and my eyes spotted other things.
A few cars were driving around. There was an aeroplane passing high overhead. Also I saw a group of bats over by patch of woods that were beyond the fields here at the edge of town.
Next I heard the sound of men running, and a muffled shout, which all came from further into town, the part that passed for a retail high street in Sunnydale.
Since I knew where the noise was coming from I decided to go get a closer look. This involved jumping down two stories, without even spraining an ankle, and then running really fast.
When going at full speed, like I was now meant I really had to watch where I was going, because it was certain that no one was going to see me coming in time to get out of the way. With that in mind I ran down a quiet side street, then cut through a car park in order to reduce the chances of bumping into any one.
At this time of night, only a handful of cars occupied the space, along with a few shopping carts. Which made sense as I was now in front of a supermarket. It had one of big billboards that displayed the stores name, and I climbed it.
From here I could see the men who were running about. The guy in the lead was dressed all in black, with a ski-mask over his face. Really he might as well have had the word "Crook" stamped on his forehead.
Behind him came three Sunnydale police, they were chasing after the first man, and actually gaining on him. I was surprised to see the cops out here actually do their job so I sat down to watch the chase.
The fugitive had a small sack hanging from his belt, probably holding something that did not belong to him. On the other side of his belt hung some sort of weapon, and when he looked behind him and saw that mere yards separating him from his pursuers he hurriedly pulled the weapon free.
Even at this distance I could see that was a knife made for killing rather than for a kitchen, and I smiled as the live entertainment became more thrilling man.
Alas it would all be over soon as anyone who drew a knife when being chased by three cops with guns was going to get shot.
I watched as the man raised the blade over his head, which prompted the cops to shout out commands to drop the weapon. The man ignored the shouts, and the bullets that followed, which missed and shattered the window of car in the lot I was sitting above. Which caused a car alarm to go off.
Yet even with the alarm and guns going off I didn't fail to see that the crook's knife flared green. The man brought the weapon down in an abrupt, cutting motion, and the green light hung in the air for a moment, then faded.
During that brief moment the thief had dove forward through the cut he had made, and then vanished. He had also reappeared at the same instant, tumbling out of a vertical green line which had materialised about a twenty meters away, in front of a drug store.
Now the crook was hidden from the cops by the bulk of a car, he was crouched low and by the looks of things he was trying to regain his breath. His knife still had a faint glow, but it wasn't bright enough to give his position away.
After jumping off the sign I began to move quietly down the street towards the edge of the lot. I kept one eye on the knife man and the other on the Sunnydale cops. I saw that they had spread out slightly, moving around with their guns ready, and their flashlights out. One of them circled a shopping cart warily, as if his quarry could somehow be hiding behind or inside it.
Meanwhile knife Man peeked through the windows of a parked car, he was watching the cops as well. I knew, as he did, that he couldn't leave cover without being spotted, as he was ninja like me, and if they kept coming towards him, he would be discovered soon.
I didn't wish for this as I wanted that knife, it was a powerful weapon, and could be invaluable to Fred's portal research.
However I wasn't too worried about him leaving as if he could have he would have already. I guessed he couldn't repeat his earlier trick, but when the man's body language suddenly shifted I figured he was up to something.
I could have just shot the crook myself, but I didn't want to be seen by the police as the one form of observation my wards didn't project me from was being seen with the naked eye. The last thing I wanted was to be noticed by the cops while they were chasing a crook, and for a description of me to get past around the police station as the less attention on me I had, the better.
Those concerns were forgotten for a moment when the knife man made a stabbing gesture with his weapon, which flared green again. Further down the street a cop screamed and dropped his flashlight. The police officers turned to aid their buddy, and when that happened the crook made a run for it.
I went after him, but my stealth failed me for once as the bad guy realised he was being chased. I saw him cut horizontally at head height with the glowing knife, and smartly I ducked down just in case he had been aiming for my neck.
That was the only chance he got to attack me as when I got up he was so shocked by his failure that I had enough to time to take his knife from him.
When he turned to keep running I grabbed the guy and slammed his head hard enough into the ground that it was possible that I killed him, but upon checking I found that he still had a pluse. Which was good because while I was fine using lethal force to remove threats to humanity, it was best that this guy went to jail for his crimes. That way the cops wouldn't looked too closley into what had happened here.
Next opened the sack the man had been carrying. Inside was jewelry, and quite a bit of it. The guy must have trigged a silent alarm and spent too long in a store giving the cops a chance to find him.
Obviously the knife had a limited range, or he'd never have been around to get shot at by the cops. As for not using the knife multiple times, I figured it needed to be recharged in some way.
I didn't think on that for long as I heard someone running this way so I left the body, and took only the knife. I left the swag behind as I could get better stuff in Mareth.
Beside getting the magical weapon to my home was what mattered right now.
(Line Break)
Home. Sunnydale
"You seem fine to me" Fred said as she examined me "I'm not a doctor, but you're not running a temperature, you don't look sick. I'll have to check my saliva samples to be sure there's not a bug in your system".
It seemed odd that a disease could make me feel more powerful, but this was a world were the lines between the mystical and the physical could blur. As such it best not rule things out.
"Maybe you're just getting stronger and faster because your reaching your peak" Fred then wondered "You still have some time to grow".
Maybe my increased power was just a result of me maturing in the physical sense. However I was still feeling cautious as it wasn't just my muscles that were working better, it was my reflexes too.
"Everything we've got on Slayers only covers girls" Marcie said from behind a pile of books "there is some stuff about them growing stronger over time, due to training, but nothing this as sudden as this".
Fred shined a light in my eyes before saying anything else.
"I don't think its drug related either" she said "So I'm going to with you having a growth spurt, its not unheard for boys even as old as you grow a little taller and to see an increase in their upper body strength. Plus you do exercise and eat well, so I wouldn't get all freaked out by any of this".
Fred then looked worried.
"Although I am feeling more like a cradle robber right now" she was now saying "Sometimes I forget how young you are".
It wasn't my fault I'd been de-aged. No one wanted to be a teenager it was horrible, but I figured it was partly a good thing as adapting to the increase in strength and agility was bound to be easier in a body that was used to changing.
"If I'm old enough to be out fighting monsters and saving the world I'm old enough to having sex with you" I said to Fred "Besides I'm more mature than my age suggests".
Her concern over the matter passed as she started to busy herself with the microscope she kept at home. We had a proper lab at the CDR building but it was now late at night and as a rule we shut down the lab at night so that it could be locked up tight. Still we had basement and that was good for storing all the things that didn't really belong in other rooms, like medical supplies and science equipment.
"Maybe guy Slayers just work differently" Tara said, her face hidden by a book "boys take a little longer to finish growing, and now you've reached your peak. Don't forget you're turning seventeen really soon".
It did seem like this was one last growth spurt. My body had leaped in growth and since being a Slayer enhanced a human's natural abilities, it did make sense. That I hadn't been a Slayer natural so it made sense it might take some time for me to fully access my powers.
"I have news on the portal front too" Fred said as she studied the spit sample she had taken "My work's not complete, I don't think it ever will be, but I have come up with a way to quickly open portals using a device. I pretty much ripped off a TV show you know Sliders, and made a machine that will let you punch open a portal".
That sounded awesome.
"Now it still needs a hot spot to make it work" she then told us "and I still haven't figured out a way to make a portal to somewhere else on Earth, but we can enter another reality and portal back to anywhere in this world we'd like. And I'm working on a way to store psychic energy into a kind of battery so that in an emergency we can open one portal".
This was truly awesome indeed.
"The battery will need to be Clear Quartz" Tara told me "and the cheap stuff won't do. There will be a lot energy going into the crystals so they need to be flawless".
Fred then took over.
"The Hell-mouth is full of the psychic just we need" she explained "and the quartz will hold that energy and let us amplify it using the device I built. The gudience system I came up with means that once we know where we want to go we type in the numbers and then the device transmits the right mathematical symbols at the hot spot. This makes a portal. How long it lasts depends on how much energy there is, but I also built something that can detect the energy we required. Sunnydale is all a hot spot, so we can pretty much open all the portals we want as long as we don't do it too near the school and you know don't try to move an army".
Sounded as if the mystical arts and science had worked well together when creating this new way of making portals.
"So I won't be sending an army of cyborg ninjas through portals anytime soon" I reasoned.
Fred smiled at me, and it was the smile she used when I was being silly in her view.
"Why bother with an army of anything" she then said "If we set up a decent lab in other dimension and get our hands on some WMDs we could nuke anyone we wanted. Heck from the lab at the factory I could send nuclear bombs to Mareth or Pleya and take out whole cities... not that I would".
Marcie and Tara looked concerned. Faith, who had been cleaning her nails this entire time, didn't seem to share that worry.
"Where would you even get a nuke from?" the potential Slayer asked.
Fred turned back to the microscope before answering.
"I could build one" she said "the tricky part would be getting my hands on enough processed uranium".
Actually it wouldn't be that hard.
"If we could find a version of Earth were all the people have been eaten by zombies, or something like that, we could take their nuclear weapons" I figured "but that would be overkill. Its not like we need to take out entire countries".
Since now both Fred and I were getting strange looks I decided to change the subject.
"Shouldn't it have taken you longer to figure so much out" I asked the clever young woman "I mean you've got a prototype sliding device all ready to go, and you only started working on it like a month ago".
It should have take months if not years.
"Most of the theroy work I did while we were on the road" Fred told me "Once I had good understanding of the physics behind portals coming up with a way of applying that understanding should have about taken two years I figure, but you got all that material which really speed things up. Whoever else has been working on this they were really close to perfecting a system for portal travel, but I don't think they had a witch helping them. I did, which made a difference".
Having access to magic and technology, as well as people know how to use both, had really sped things up.
"Did the Sigal Stone help at all?" I asked.
Since it was magical object used in creating a long lasting gateway through dimensions it should have been useful in her work.
"Well I did manage, with Amy's help, to open a portal to that Deadlands place you told us about using that stone" Fred informed me "So now we can visited Mareth, Pylea or the Deadlands when ever we want".
Not ideal as I had been hoping to find a reality with more advanced tech that this one so we could profit from it by back engineering some computers and selling off slight advancements to what was available here.
"The good news is that because I now have three sets of base cooridates to work with I can start refining my searches for realities we can visit without dying when we get there" Fred was now saying "What helped was finding out the Deadlands are a plane of existence much further away from our own the Lorne's world or Mareth. You I know that I was sending Ted, that robot got me, off to random dimensions and the worlds he went to had air that would kill in seconds, or were too hot, too cold, and so on. Now I had a much better idea of where to look".
Well that was good news.
"So I'm guessing you'll need more supplies and equipment" I said to the science girl "how much will this cost to get us all Slider Devices".
That was a good a name as any for them.
"Not that much" she answered "Just be glad I'm not building a particle detector using super fluid helium".
I didn't get why that would be funny, and neither did anyone other than Fred.
"Anyway yeah I will need a few cheques signed" she finally said "and I'm sure that once we get back to Mareth we can find someone who knows more about portals created with formulas. Maybe those mages people talked about. You know the ones that came from another world. If they have information then I need it".
I'd add to the list of things I intended to do once we got back to that world.
"Oh and I'll take that knife you found into the lab tomorrow" Fred told me "A few days and some help from Tara and Amy should be enough to figure out if it I'll be useful to use".
That sounded fine by me.
"I'll hand it over to the Watchers if you don't figure it out" I replied "If nothing else it will keep them too busy to bother us".
Which was a good thing because we didn't want them interfering with our real work. Although I would talk to them about this becoming more powerful deal, just in case they knew something about Slayers that the TV show had never gone into.
Author Note
Something like the Sliding Device could work with the portals they have in BTVS as in the Angel ep Supersymmetry Fred gets a text message which opens a portal near to her. So the formula used to open portals can be transmitted.
Since the Fred in my story is okay with portals, having used them safely, so her figuring out how to make a kind of Sliding Device isn't that strange. She's worked out the maths and has a lab with a decent budget.
Now that Fred has some more data to work with she'll soon be finding more worlds for the group to visit. Should be fun.