Disclaimer: I don't own Buffy, Angel, or any associated characters; I just own this plot, Heure, and Brindil. I don't own Duana; he's a creation of Jaclyn Blackrose.
Feedback: Naturally
Pinkyblue-ice: You wanted more, and more you shall have
IWRY-ALWAYS: Strictly speaking, it's not all the big bads; just those who had the most muscle and have a certain emotional impact on the group
Minorcadence: Yeah, I'd gathered, but it's always nice to hear that my work's appreciated
Julyhearts: Indeed; that was the whole point of the tension between them
charli92: Glad to hear it, and hear it is
WhiteWolf 3: But the question is, my dear Wolf, will even that be enough…?
wackycavegirl: More or less; there's Dracula and the other original demons I've created, but otherwise you've seen everyone the Scoobies are up against
A Buffy from the Past
"Ugh…" Willow muttered, as she dazedly blinked her eyes open. "Did someone get the number of that truck?"
"Willow?" a voice said from off to one side. "Are you OK?"
"Uh… Fred?" Willow asked, looking over in the direction of the voice to see the brunette physicist. "What are you doing here?"
"Well, everyone else is occupied with working out what kind of apocalypse we'll be dealing with- well, Wesley's trying to find somewhere that our opponents could be working from, but the rest of us are doing research- so I was sent down here because, well, a physicist isn't really much use in tackling that kind of issue, and we needed someone to see when you got up-" Fred began, before Willow stopped her with a raised hand.
"Wait wait wait; we've got an apocalypse?" she asked, looking at Fred in confusion. "What did I miss?"
"Well… a lot, really," Fred said, looking at Willow with a slightly nervous expression. "You see, that demon that knocked you and Angel out…?"
Angel, Spike, Faith, Kennedy, and the two Buffies looked up in surprise as a faint 'WHAT!' suddenly sounded from somewhere further down the corridor; it wasn't loud enough to attract the attention of the others, but with their supernaturally-enhanced hearing, it was easy enough to pick out.
"Fred told her, then?" Faith asked, looking over at Spike and Angel inquiringly.
Spike shrugged. "Probably," he said casually, barely looking up from the book he was now browsing through. "That's the thing about Fred; honest, whatever else you can say about her."
"Can we focus on this, please?" Giles asked, looking over at the vampire. "We need to figure out what kind of ritual the Partners are going to perform that would actually aid someone else involved if we're going to get anywhere in this investigation, and so far there's nothing that wouldn't automatically kill the person at the heart of the ritual once it was completed."
"Maybe he made a mistake?" Dawn asked hopefully.
"If he was able to convince Angelus to work for him, this guy has a convincing argument," Angel said, looking over at Dawn as he spoke. "He never went into anything if he wasn't at least ninety per cent certain he'd get out of it better off than he'd been when he went into it."
"Only ninety?" Gunn said, looking at Angel in surprise. "I would have thought he'd be more of a perfectionist."
Angel shrugged. "He always acknowledged a risk of something happening," he said dismissively. "He knew nobody could plan for everything, but he could get close enough to make most unexpected twists work to his advantage."
"Most, but not all of them, right, Peaches?" Spike said, looking over at him with a small smile. "Like when he was trying to awaken Alc-"
He stopped, a glare from PastBuffy reminding him that, regardless of what the present model thought of him, she wouldn't hesitate to stake him if he brought up Angel going to Hell again.
"Anyway," Xander said, trying to defuse the sudden awkwardness that had arisen between the vampire and the temporally-relocated Slayer, "getting back to business… couldn't the guy have not told Dead-boy 2 everything, just enough to keep him interested?"
Angel shook his head. "It wouldn't have worked," he said, as he continued to browse through the book in front of him. "He may have been prepared to serve the Beast's master without knowing everything, but that was only because the 'Master' was holding my soul as a bargaining chip; Angelus wasn't exactly keen on getting stuck in my psyche again."
"But…" Faith began, before Giles looked up from the book he was currently browsing, a look of horror on his face.
"Oh no…" he said, looking at the others in horror.
"What?" Gunn asked, looking at Giles inquiringly. "What's the problem?"
"I found the ritual that our foe must be planning," Giles said, as he looked up at the others. "An extremely dangerous one; it's know as the Ritual of Transference."
"Eh?" Xander said, looking at Giles in confusion. "Are you sure you got the right one; it sounds more like something to do with teleportation."
"No, when it says 'transference', it refers to body energy and power, as well as a certain degree of mass, although no more than 25 grams of it," Giles explained, as he studied the information in front of him. "It seems as though the person casting the ritual uses it to form a link between themselves and the Senior Partners, and then the ritual takes a certain amount of the subject's mass to form a new body for the Partners. For the first few minutes after the ritual's completion, the Partners possess all the weaknesses of the being whose mass they have absorbed, essentially being little more than the subjects' 'clones', if you will, but then their own powers assert themselves and they assume their own bodies and powers."
"And, lemme guess, they're practically unstoppable in their own form?" Faith asked, raising an eyebrow as she looked over at Giles.
"Correct," Giles said, nodding at Faith in approval. Then he sighed. "And, of course, they gain a fourth, reserve Partner in the form of whatever being was used to provide the mass for the ritual."
Angel, Spike and Gunn looked over at Giles in horror at that statement.
"Wait a minute; a fourth Partner!" Angel asked, hoping that Giles was mistaken. "But… but that…"
"Wouldn't be good, to put it mildly, right?" PastBuffy asked, looking over at Angel. "I'll take it these 'Partners' are pretty dangerous?"
"They've been trying to organise an apocalypse since concepts such as Good and Evil actually existed," Angel replied, looking back over at Buffy. "I think that makes them a problem."
"We don't know much about them, but what we do know, we haven't liked the sound of," Gunn added, as he slammed his book shut and looked around at the others. "Essentially, they're major players on the side of Evil, and they've been an important force just about everywhere; we even ran into evidence of them in another dimension once. If they're coming to this dimension, and getting another member…"
"We're screwed?" Dawn asked politely.
"That's a radical understatement of the situation we'd have if that ever happened, but essentially yes," Gunn replied.
"Oh, trust me, you've got more than enough problems to be going with at the moment," a voice suddenly said from the door.
The group spun around…
And, standing there, as bold as brass, a long bony claw extended from his left arm while a grenade launcher was attached to his right, with an expression on his face that might be a grin but could just as easily have been a sneer, was Adam, looking around at them all with a gleam in his eyes.
As the Slayers and the two vampires took up a combat stance in front of the others, only one thought crossed Buffy's mind as she stared at the cyborg, last seen lying at her feet as she held his power pack in her hand.
Round one.