Back Before Dawn
by Annakovsky
Part 9/12
See part 1 for disclaimer, rating, etc.
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Rijomar: 8:35 am, Wednesday, February 19, 2003
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Call me crazy, but being manhandled never really puts me in a good mood. Neither does realizing that I may have made a serious miscalculation in my plans. When that pathetic excuse for a vampire and the train wreck of a Slayer fastened those manacles on my wrists, I knew I was in big trouble. Big, big trouble. Normally I'd just teleport myself out of there, but I'm on probation and D'Hoffryn took away some of my privileges, goddamnit. I'm gonna be pissed if that ridiculous probation turns quite possibly my finest hour into the end of my career. I have the sinking feeling that I'm about to turn into some kind of cautionary tale passed around the break room back at the office, like that incompetent Anyanka. I never believed it when people would talk about how good she was at her job - if she'd been so great, she wouldn't have lost her power and gotten stuck in the body of a high schooler, now would she?
Well, apparently that can happen to the best of us. And just think of the horrors of being stuck in the body of an 8 year old permanently - all that Kool-Aid and peanut-butter and jelly, not to mention the fact that I always get motion-sickness on the swings. The kid thing was not a good plan, Rijomar. But after not making my quota for a few months (hence the probation) I was trying to think of new ways to swing this gig. Think outside the box and all that. And kids are wishing things all the time, so it wasn't going so bad until that little red-headed witch showed up. You would think the Slayer's best friend would know better than to make a wish to a stranger, but you would be wrong. Honestly, this is partly D'Hoffryn's fault - they really should have mug shots of the Slayer's little pals up on the office wall. This is two of us they've screwed over now? You'd think they were making those wishes on purpose – any way you look at it, those kids are bad news. And who has manacles conveniently attached to their basement wall, anyway? I mean, I heard this Slayer was into some freaky stuff, but honestly, the basement is a fairly public place. Think of the children!
Speaking of freaky stuff, what is up with her and that vampire? I heard she had the hots for the undead, but good Lord. They were giving each other moon eyes as they chained me up, hands brushing each other as they wrestled me down. Felt like I should take a really hot shower afterwards and scrub myself with industrial strength disinfectant soap.
Add that to their attempts at being "quippy" when they were clapping the handcuffs on me, and I think I might be sick. It's really an issue of respect, you know? No one appreciates the artistry of the vengeance demon's craft these days – and if they couldn't appreciate the artistry, they could at least acknowledge the sheer amount of hard work we put into our jobs. Do you know how much paperwork I've done in the last month alone? It could bury a small town.
The problem is that no one understands the process that goes into granting each wish. All they see is us doing the smoke and mirrors, bringing out our true faces and proclaiming "Done" in a deep voice. (I spent many hours in front of the mirror practicing my delivery on that one, by the way. It's details like that that separate the good from the great, you know?) What you don't see is what we do in between the wish and the granting. For instance, with this most recent wish, I immediately popped over to my office in the next dimension over. (Using inter-dimensional shifting is what enables us to provide our clients with apparent instantaneous granting of even the most complicated wish). Once I was in my office, I at once recorded the exact wording of the wish and began to run simulations. The general principle of vengeance demon wish-granting is a simple one. Granting any wish takes energy, and what fuels the granting is pain. So for each wish we grant, the pain we cause must equal the amount of energy it takes to grant the wish, and preferably exceed it. D'Hoffryn requires that we each rack up a minimum net gain of 5,000 Mursum units of pain each month. Your standard vengeance demon wishes are fairly straightforward this way - say someone wishes that their cheating ex-boyfriend would get boils. All this requires is a simple curse, taking about 45 Mursum units to perform, and it then produces about 125 Mursum units of pain in return, giving you a net gain of 80 units . These spells are our bread and butter and require very little behind the scenes work – good, steady, and straightforward wishes, those. But a wish like Red's is a doozy. Any kind of wish to change the past requires the yanking of a whole alternate, unrealized reality into the place of the reality that already exists. We're talking thousands, sometimes even millions of Mursum units, depending on how much time they want changed. Obviously, changing only a few years is much less costly than changing 20 or 30. But the beauty of these kinds of wishes is that they can also produce massive amounts of agony, often enough to make your quota for the whole year. You don't get wishes like that every day – this was my big break. So I ran simulations day and night. Willow's wish was vague enough to leave a lot of room for interpretation, which is sometimes a drag since it creates so much more work, but also really gives you a chance to shine creatively. Here, for example, there were many possibilities - Buffy could've had an older sister, a younger brother, heck, seven younger brothers. The problem with most of these scenarios was that they needed to have a lot of time changed, and many of them produced almost no pain at all. I was starting to get really frustrated when I came up with this brilliant, if a little out there, plan.
It came to me when I was looking at scenarios that involved one or the other of Buffy's parents having a child within the last two or three years, most of which had really minimal estimated-pain-caused (EPC) figures. Suddenly, a very bizarre alternate universe popped up. It turned out that if this one hell-god, Glory, was kicked out of her dimension and looking for the Key to get her back home, then this whole strange thing happened where monks turned the Key into a sister, so Buffy would protect it. The amount of Mursum units this development caused were off the chart! I'd never seen anything like it. Every year that went by caused a dramatic increase in pain, exponential in its growth.
Once you accepted this bizarre premise, the scenario really developed quite naturally. First of all, with a sister to protect and a hell-god to fight, Buffy was completely distracted from her quest to find the source of her powers, a quest that had left her both very mentally healthy and well-balanced, and also extremely powerful as a Slayer. Without the balance between light and darkness that she found on that quest, she progressively became more and more dark and alienated as the demonic side of her Slayer powers took precedence. Also, with all the stress of fighting this god, she didn't have time to process her mother's death and grieve it properly. Ultimately, she gave her own life to save her sister and the world, in a truly heroic, if despairing, gesture. But that wasn't the end, oh no. After she'd been dead several months, her friends raised her from the grave – and we all know that post-post-mortem depression can be killer. Excuse the pun. And then, in the midst of this depression, she started a destructive relationship with the soulless vampire Spike, who loved her but just furthered her descent into depression and darkness. And finally, Buffy's resurrection caused the balance of good and evil to be upset, resulting in the First Evil rising up to destroy the Slayer line. Oh yeah, this whole thing left Buffy in very bad shape indeed.
And that was only Buffy! Her friends had it just as bad, especially Red. When Glory hurt her little girlfriend, Red started her descent into dark magic, going after her to wreak vengeance. Then after Buffy died, resurrecting her took Red even further down that path, leading her to a bout with magic addiction that ended up in her killing spree and attempt to end the world. Seriously traumatized, that girl. Pain up the wazoo. Not to mention her pain at her friendship with Buffy dissolving as they both spiraled downward.
Her friend Xander wasn't as dramatically affected, but the battles with the First and Glory, and his pain at watching his friends suffer certainly all took their toll on him as well. Giles had it harder, as this scenario basically robs him of his wife and unborn child – since Olivia never came to visit him, she never decided to buy Joyce's gallery and they eventually broke up. He tried to move back to England, but with the upheaval over the First he ended up trying to straddle two continents and really belonging in neither. And even the vampire Spike was worse off – since Buffy got into a sexual relationship with him pre-soul, they never had a chance. Before, she'd refused to have anything to do with him romantically when he was unsoulled, and this finally frustrated him enough that he went off to get it without any attempted rape trauma. When they got together post-soul, they actually ended up kind of happy. Well, none of that in this scenario! Pain, pain, pain. It was marvelous!
And this is only talking about Buffy's friends, not even mentioning all the Sunnydale residents that Glory drove insane, the Potential Slayers that the First killed (and the ones that were taken from their families and had to go live with Buffy, which is not pleasant these days), the odious Warren (who was now dead at Willow's hand instead of in prison), Jonathan, killed by Andrew – and Andrew himself, who wasn't a murderer in the original timeline. Not to mention all the other victims whom Buffy wasn't in time to save – really, the list goes on and on. It was a miraculous wish – I think I would've been up for awards for this one, honestly. Sheer genius, if I do say so myself.
Then I had to answer the summons Willow made. Well, it's my job, right? Didn't have a choice about it. It's really a stupid clause – what, someone burns some herbs, says some Latin and we have to show up? Honestly, give us some discretion. But really, it would've been okay if I had resisted the gloating. The gloating will always do you in, kids, but believe me, it's hard to not to give into that temptation. And then the witch was all chasing me, and the Slayer was there – I tried to play dumb, doing the little kid act for the Slayer, and she totally would've bought it if it weren't for that stuffy English guy. Never did like the English – the food's terrible, and they're all so… well, stuffy. I probably shouldn't have lost my temper like that and shown my true face, but let's face it, the show was over and my last chance was violence. Stupid Slayer. How does the line from that cartoon go? Would've gotten away with it, too, if it weren't for those meddling kids? Yeah. Truer words were never spoken.
by Annakovsky
Part 9/12
See part 1 for disclaimer, rating, etc.
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*
*********************************************
Rijomar: 8:35 am, Wednesday, February 19, 2003
*********************************************
*
*
Call me crazy, but being manhandled never really puts me in a good mood. Neither does realizing that I may have made a serious miscalculation in my plans. When that pathetic excuse for a vampire and the train wreck of a Slayer fastened those manacles on my wrists, I knew I was in big trouble. Big, big trouble. Normally I'd just teleport myself out of there, but I'm on probation and D'Hoffryn took away some of my privileges, goddamnit. I'm gonna be pissed if that ridiculous probation turns quite possibly my finest hour into the end of my career. I have the sinking feeling that I'm about to turn into some kind of cautionary tale passed around the break room back at the office, like that incompetent Anyanka. I never believed it when people would talk about how good she was at her job - if she'd been so great, she wouldn't have lost her power and gotten stuck in the body of a high schooler, now would she?
Well, apparently that can happen to the best of us. And just think of the horrors of being stuck in the body of an 8 year old permanently - all that Kool-Aid and peanut-butter and jelly, not to mention the fact that I always get motion-sickness on the swings. The kid thing was not a good plan, Rijomar. But after not making my quota for a few months (hence the probation) I was trying to think of new ways to swing this gig. Think outside the box and all that. And kids are wishing things all the time, so it wasn't going so bad until that little red-headed witch showed up. You would think the Slayer's best friend would know better than to make a wish to a stranger, but you would be wrong. Honestly, this is partly D'Hoffryn's fault - they really should have mug shots of the Slayer's little pals up on the office wall. This is two of us they've screwed over now? You'd think they were making those wishes on purpose – any way you look at it, those kids are bad news. And who has manacles conveniently attached to their basement wall, anyway? I mean, I heard this Slayer was into some freaky stuff, but honestly, the basement is a fairly public place. Think of the children!
Speaking of freaky stuff, what is up with her and that vampire? I heard she had the hots for the undead, but good Lord. They were giving each other moon eyes as they chained me up, hands brushing each other as they wrestled me down. Felt like I should take a really hot shower afterwards and scrub myself with industrial strength disinfectant soap.
Add that to their attempts at being "quippy" when they were clapping the handcuffs on me, and I think I might be sick. It's really an issue of respect, you know? No one appreciates the artistry of the vengeance demon's craft these days – and if they couldn't appreciate the artistry, they could at least acknowledge the sheer amount of hard work we put into our jobs. Do you know how much paperwork I've done in the last month alone? It could bury a small town.
The problem is that no one understands the process that goes into granting each wish. All they see is us doing the smoke and mirrors, bringing out our true faces and proclaiming "Done" in a deep voice. (I spent many hours in front of the mirror practicing my delivery on that one, by the way. It's details like that that separate the good from the great, you know?) What you don't see is what we do in between the wish and the granting. For instance, with this most recent wish, I immediately popped over to my office in the next dimension over. (Using inter-dimensional shifting is what enables us to provide our clients with apparent instantaneous granting of even the most complicated wish). Once I was in my office, I at once recorded the exact wording of the wish and began to run simulations. The general principle of vengeance demon wish-granting is a simple one. Granting any wish takes energy, and what fuels the granting is pain. So for each wish we grant, the pain we cause must equal the amount of energy it takes to grant the wish, and preferably exceed it. D'Hoffryn requires that we each rack up a minimum net gain of 5,000 Mursum units of pain each month. Your standard vengeance demon wishes are fairly straightforward this way - say someone wishes that their cheating ex-boyfriend would get boils. All this requires is a simple curse, taking about 45 Mursum units to perform, and it then produces about 125 Mursum units of pain in return, giving you a net gain of 80 units . These spells are our bread and butter and require very little behind the scenes work – good, steady, and straightforward wishes, those. But a wish like Red's is a doozy. Any kind of wish to change the past requires the yanking of a whole alternate, unrealized reality into the place of the reality that already exists. We're talking thousands, sometimes even millions of Mursum units, depending on how much time they want changed. Obviously, changing only a few years is much less costly than changing 20 or 30. But the beauty of these kinds of wishes is that they can also produce massive amounts of agony, often enough to make your quota for the whole year. You don't get wishes like that every day – this was my big break. So I ran simulations day and night. Willow's wish was vague enough to leave a lot of room for interpretation, which is sometimes a drag since it creates so much more work, but also really gives you a chance to shine creatively. Here, for example, there were many possibilities - Buffy could've had an older sister, a younger brother, heck, seven younger brothers. The problem with most of these scenarios was that they needed to have a lot of time changed, and many of them produced almost no pain at all. I was starting to get really frustrated when I came up with this brilliant, if a little out there, plan.
It came to me when I was looking at scenarios that involved one or the other of Buffy's parents having a child within the last two or three years, most of which had really minimal estimated-pain-caused (EPC) figures. Suddenly, a very bizarre alternate universe popped up. It turned out that if this one hell-god, Glory, was kicked out of her dimension and looking for the Key to get her back home, then this whole strange thing happened where monks turned the Key into a sister, so Buffy would protect it. The amount of Mursum units this development caused were off the chart! I'd never seen anything like it. Every year that went by caused a dramatic increase in pain, exponential in its growth.
Once you accepted this bizarre premise, the scenario really developed quite naturally. First of all, with a sister to protect and a hell-god to fight, Buffy was completely distracted from her quest to find the source of her powers, a quest that had left her both very mentally healthy and well-balanced, and also extremely powerful as a Slayer. Without the balance between light and darkness that she found on that quest, she progressively became more and more dark and alienated as the demonic side of her Slayer powers took precedence. Also, with all the stress of fighting this god, she didn't have time to process her mother's death and grieve it properly. Ultimately, she gave her own life to save her sister and the world, in a truly heroic, if despairing, gesture. But that wasn't the end, oh no. After she'd been dead several months, her friends raised her from the grave – and we all know that post-post-mortem depression can be killer. Excuse the pun. And then, in the midst of this depression, she started a destructive relationship with the soulless vampire Spike, who loved her but just furthered her descent into depression and darkness. And finally, Buffy's resurrection caused the balance of good and evil to be upset, resulting in the First Evil rising up to destroy the Slayer line. Oh yeah, this whole thing left Buffy in very bad shape indeed.
And that was only Buffy! Her friends had it just as bad, especially Red. When Glory hurt her little girlfriend, Red started her descent into dark magic, going after her to wreak vengeance. Then after Buffy died, resurrecting her took Red even further down that path, leading her to a bout with magic addiction that ended up in her killing spree and attempt to end the world. Seriously traumatized, that girl. Pain up the wazoo. Not to mention her pain at her friendship with Buffy dissolving as they both spiraled downward.
Her friend Xander wasn't as dramatically affected, but the battles with the First and Glory, and his pain at watching his friends suffer certainly all took their toll on him as well. Giles had it harder, as this scenario basically robs him of his wife and unborn child – since Olivia never came to visit him, she never decided to buy Joyce's gallery and they eventually broke up. He tried to move back to England, but with the upheaval over the First he ended up trying to straddle two continents and really belonging in neither. And even the vampire Spike was worse off – since Buffy got into a sexual relationship with him pre-soul, they never had a chance. Before, she'd refused to have anything to do with him romantically when he was unsoulled, and this finally frustrated him enough that he went off to get it without any attempted rape trauma. When they got together post-soul, they actually ended up kind of happy. Well, none of that in this scenario! Pain, pain, pain. It was marvelous!
And this is only talking about Buffy's friends, not even mentioning all the Sunnydale residents that Glory drove insane, the Potential Slayers that the First killed (and the ones that were taken from their families and had to go live with Buffy, which is not pleasant these days), the odious Warren (who was now dead at Willow's hand instead of in prison), Jonathan, killed by Andrew – and Andrew himself, who wasn't a murderer in the original timeline. Not to mention all the other victims whom Buffy wasn't in time to save – really, the list goes on and on. It was a miraculous wish – I think I would've been up for awards for this one, honestly. Sheer genius, if I do say so myself.
Then I had to answer the summons Willow made. Well, it's my job, right? Didn't have a choice about it. It's really a stupid clause – what, someone burns some herbs, says some Latin and we have to show up? Honestly, give us some discretion. But really, it would've been okay if I had resisted the gloating. The gloating will always do you in, kids, but believe me, it's hard to not to give into that temptation. And then the witch was all chasing me, and the Slayer was there – I tried to play dumb, doing the little kid act for the Slayer, and she totally would've bought it if it weren't for that stuffy English guy. Never did like the English – the food's terrible, and they're all so… well, stuffy. I probably shouldn't have lost my temper like that and shown my true face, but let's face it, the show was over and my last chance was violence. Stupid Slayer. How does the line from that cartoon go? Would've gotten away with it, too, if it weren't for those meddling kids? Yeah. Truer words were never spoken.