"Statistical Anomaly" by A Gentleman of Leisure.
Disclaimer: See Part 1.
Part 10: Interview With A Vampire Slayer - 3
"So, Mr. Giles. How come you know so much about these demons and vampires and things?" Mulder asked.
"Oh, well you must realise that under the circumstances I've obviously had to do a considerable amount of research on the subject. I have a certain number of reference books... upstairs in the restricted section", Giles said vaguely.
Mulder looked at the upper floor of the library with interest. This was just the sort of thing he loved - new information on the weird and wonderful. After all, one never knew what stray or unusual fact might one day illuminate some baffling detail of an X-File.
"I'd like to see, if I may".
Giles looked at him thoughtfully for a moment, considering the request, and then nodded, perhaps a trifle reluctantly.
"Giles!" Willow said urgently, and she tugged at his sleeve, but he ignored her.
The two men got up and left the others, and climbed the short curving flight of stairs to the upper level, leaving her gazing anxiously after them.
Giles led Mulder through to the back of the stacks where the collection of Watchers books was kept - his own specialist library for reference and research purposes, normally only accessible to himself and the other Slayerettes.
"Why do you keep them in cages - are they very valuable? Do you have trouble with the kids at this school trying to steal them?"
"Possibly I might, if they knew about them, but, you know, I think I'm almost more afraid that the books themselves might get loose!" Giles said enigmatically.
-----
"So, Miss Rosenberg, Willow. What are you studying at the moment?" said Scully, more to pass the time than for any other reason.
"Um... You know - the usual stuff - like Reeling and Writhing and Fainting in Coils", Willow said nervously.
"Uh... Oh, as in 'Alice In Wonderland' - right. And Mr. Harris?"
"Ambition, Distraction, Uglification and Derision?" Xander volunteered.
"I see", Scully said slowly, now a little puzzled. "How about you, Miss Summers?"
"Er... the history of Robin Hood?" said Buffy.
Scully looked at her for a moment. Then she smiled.
"Oh yes, the archery. Twang... please Sheriff, can we have our arrow back?"
Buffy smiled too, and nodded.
"Right. That sort of thing".
"Agent Scully", Willow said slowly. "I was just... um... wondering..."
-----
"And then there's this other type that only eats..."
"Mr. Giles, I'm sorry to interrupt. All this is absolutely fascinating, but what about the things, sorry demons, that attacked us? What can you tell me about them? Are you able to identify them?"
"I think so. If you could just grab these last few books, we'll go back downstairs rejoin the others, shall we?"
Giles dumped an unexpectedly large pile of heavy leather bound volumes into Mulder's unsuspecting arms, and taking a few of the smaller ones himself, he led the way back downstairs again.
"Nice book collection", Scully commented dryly as they deposited their cargo in an untidy heap on the table in front of her. "Antiques? Rummage sale? Goodwill store?"
"Giles", Willow said anxiously, trying to keep her voice down as much as possible. "Are you sure it's such a good idea to be showing them all this stuff?"
"It's all right, Willow", Giles reassured her, equally quietly. "I've thought about it carefully, and I've decided that it's important they comprehend the situation here properly. After all, in the end it's their people that we've got to track down and deal with, and I think they really ought to understand just a little bit about the state of things here in Sunnydale".
"So what happened to not telling them too much, then?"
"Don't worry, Willow. I'm sure it'll be fine", Giles said, and he polished his glasses for perhaps the twentieth time that morning. "Don't make a fuss, there's a good girl".
"I'm not fussing", she muttered to herself, and slumped back in her seat, still looking rather worried and unhappy. "Nobody except me seems to care that all this was supposed to be kept secret". Then she added, equally quietly, "And for that matter, why does everybody always think of me as a goody good girl? I can be b-bad too, I'm sure I can. I just need the right opportunity".
-----
"Look, isn't that rather like our three little piggies? Oh no, sorry. They've got tails".
"Don't mention pigs to me!" Xander exclaimed, remembering the episode from the previous year, which had resulted in the school's mascot suffering the fate of all pigs, but without the benefit of a frying pan.
"Euwww! I can't look a bacon sandwich in the face, even now!" Cordelia said.
"That's because you're supposed to be on a diet", Xander pointed out, "at least, that's what you keep telling us".
Cordy scowled, and stuck her tongue out at him.
"Neither can I", said Willow.
"Why not?" Xander asked.
"Kosher, much?" Buffy reminded him.
"Stop it, all of you", Giles said firmly.
"Yes, do stop. Please, please stop", said Mulder unexpectedly, and groaned melodramatically.
"Why, what's wrong Agent Mulder? Aren't you feeling well?"
"He missed breakfast this morning for an extra ten minutes in bed", Scully told them. She was grinning broadly, and trying not to laugh, though not very hard.
"Bed?" said Mulder. "Bed? I was sleeping on the couch, which may I point out was six inches too short. You were the one in bed".
Everyone suddenly tried not to look at all interested in the FBI's domestic arrangements when out on assignment.
"The demon head stank us out of Mulder's motel room", Scully explained. "I tried to do an autopsy before the whole thing disintegrated, but it was decaying visibly as we worked. I don't know how to describe the smell - it was like something from your worst nightmares, plus half a dozen rancid skunks. In the end it was utterly unbearable, and we had to retreat", she finished.
"Was there anything left of it this morning?" Buffy asked. "I've often wondered whether there's ever anything for the trash collectors, or the police, to clear up the next day".
Scully pulled a face.
"There was nothing left of the head when I looked, except a lump of shiny goo at the bottom of the bucket. I'd dowsed it in formaldehyde, but without proper refrigeration I don't actually think I've much hope of getting anything useable back to the labs at Quantico".
"I think I may have found the ones we're looking for", Giles announced suddenly. During the last few minutes he'd been leafing through a smallish red book which had its title in silver lettering riveted to the front cover. Now he was looking at an old woodcut depicting a group of monsters which each had a number of long thick projections sticking out of the tops of their heads.
"That's them", Buffy said.
"Definitely. Look at those crests. Does it say what they're called?" asked Willow.
To their surprise Giles "ummed" and "ahh'd" for a bit. Then he sort of laughed, and said "Oh dear". He looked mildly disconcerted.
"What is it, Giles? Don't they have a name?" Willow asked again.
"Well yes, they do. They're Sumerian demons I think, or at least they're mentioned in some Sumerian myths. They were in texts written in cuneiform on clay tablets excavated by Sir Max Mallowan near Babylon, some time in the nineteen thirties. The tablets themselves are now in the British Museum.
"Pretty ordinary stuff really", he continued, "but apparently they, the demons that is, originally came from somewhere else - I mean another hell dimension. I'm not sure exactly how to pronounce their real name..." He paused, looking perhaps a little embarrassed. "...But I can tell you roughly what it translates as".
They all looked at him expectantly. He shrugged.
"It just means 'knob-head'".
Buffy looked up sharply. There had been a peculiar tone in his voice, and to her surprise she realised that her Watcher, the ever-serious Mr. Rupert Giles, was smirking!
There was a short interval of silence, broken after a moment by a quiet gurgle from Mulder. Someone else sniggered.
"Huh! Men!" said Cordelia.
"Well, really!" said Buffy in agreement, unconsciously sounding just like Shirley Temple.
"I'm speechless", Willow announced, contradicting herself by doing so.
Scully looked at her partner and slowly shook her head.
"Mulder", she said, "you have a dirty mind. What am I going to do with you?"
-----
"Hey! Hello-o! Slayer here!" said Buffy after a moment. "If everyone's done with the locker room humour, guys? I think we're losing sight of the purpose of us all being here, namely two renegade FBI agents who've been vamped. I just thought I ought to point this out", she added.
"The reason, not the purpose", Giles corrected her, absent-mindedly straightening his glasses.
"OK, OK, Mr Grammar man, but you must admit she's right", Xander said. "Why are we here?"
'Ah, the Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything, to which the Answer is not actually 42', Mulder thought to himself.
"Our mission, should we care to accept it, is to find and finish off these two new members of the Fang Gang", Buffy said. "But we aren't going to do it by sitting here on our butts making smutty jokes, even if it does mean I get to miss double chemistry!"
"Just a moment, please", Scully said quietly. "If possible we'd like to try to talk to them before we take any sort of irretrievable action. For one thing we ought to attempt to find out what happened to them in the first place".
"Well, du-uh!" said Cordelia. "Isn't that obvious? Even I can tell you that! One of them was bitten by a local vamp that attacked him when he arrived, and then the other was recruited by the first".
"Short and simple. That's quite probably exactly what happened. Very good, Cordelia", Giles said. "After all, the second agent would simply go up to the first one when they met..."
"'...Et Robert est ton oncle'", said Willow. "After all, he wouldn't have known anything had happened to his friend until it was much too late".
"So how do we go about finding them?" said Mulder. "I'm assuming they will have already heard about last night's encounter, and made themselves scarce".
"Yes, they'll have moved house, so to speak", Giles said. "Finding them may be somewhat of a problem".
"Not necessarily - Angel can probably help us".
"You know how I feel about relying on Angel, Buffy. I'm fully aware you believe you can trust him implicitly, but we must still keep in mind the fact that he is one of them".
"Who is Angel?" Mulder asked.
"Ah! Who is Dead Boy? Good question", Xander answered. "If only we knew for sure".
"Angel's a vampire, but he's a good guy. He helps us - well sometimes. He drove you back to your motel the other night after you encountered Tweedledum and Tweedledee", Buffy explained.
'Aha, the heavy', thought Mulder, making a mental note to enlighten Scully later, when they were alone again.
"He's a vampire?" Scully sounded confused. "There are good vampires? I thought..."
"It seems there are exceptions to every rule", Giles said stiffly. "Even the one that says the undead are all evil bloodsuckers and must be staked at the earliest opportunity. At least, he's not shown us otherwise so far".
It was obvious from the way he spoke that he would rather wash his mouth out with soap than freely admit the matter. Also that in fact he trusted Angel about as far as he could throw him.
"So if you have a spy in the enemy's camp, so to speak, how do you contact him? Or is a vampire 'it'?" Scully asked.
"Him", Buffy said firmly. "Angel is 'him'. And we can trust him absolutely. He's not really a spy - to the others he's just another vampire. They all seem to be aware he knows us, but they leave him alone for some reason".
"Maybe we could go visit him now", Willow suggested eagerly. "Buffy knows where he lives".
"He sleeps during the daytime", Buffy said to Mulder and Scully by way of explanation, "but he won't want us all turning up unannounced. Anyway, someone else might see us".
Willow and Xander looked a little disappointed; they would both quite like to know a little more about Angel themselves. An expedition to visit him during the day would be a great way of getting out of some more classes, something Xander was always particularly happy to do, though Willow somewhat less so, of course. Also it would admirably piss off Principal Snyder, which would be a definite bonus in anybody's book.
"How about I go visit him after school this afternoon? I can fix up for him to meet us all later this evening, after sunset. OK?"
"He drove me back?" Mulder said doubtfully, harking back to something Buffy had said a moment or two earlier.
"You banged your head on a gravestone when he dragged you out of your 'friend's' clutches".
"That explains how you came by the headache you had yesterday morning when I rang you up", Scully said. "You suspected something of the sort, didn't you? And there was me thinking you'd really been out on the town!"
"Hm. And daytime would certainly be best for reconnoitring a potential battlefield, wouldn't it?" Mulder pointed out. "No other vampires around to bump into. I think we ought to do that first".
Everyone else immediately nodded in agreement, except Giles - those who could already see where this might lead, somewhat more enthusiastically than the others.
"So?" said Mulder. "Shall we? What will your Principal say?"
"I say 'Yes', to the first question, and 'Who cares?' to the second", Xander said with obvious eagerness.
"Hear, hear".
Giles hesitated, still looking uncertain. However, at length he shrugged reluctantly and agreed, so they all got up and began to troop out of the library. Unfortunately, just as they got to the doorway they ran straight into Principal Snyder himself, apparently snooping on his three current most problematic pupils. Cordelia of course had never caused him any trouble, though, as an eternal pessimist, or perhaps optimist, he always considered there to be a first time for everything. He was quite looking forward to that.
"And where do you think you're all going? Recess is over, Miss Summers".
Once again Buffy's mouth opened and words came out without her engaging her brain.
"We've all been deputised by the FBI to look for the missing agents, and they want us to go and take part in the search right away", she said.
At the back of the group, Mulder nodded slightly in confirmation.
Snyder glared at her mutely, and if looks could have killed, Buffy would have been crispy overdone toast before you could say 'vampire', or 'discipline', or even 'detention'.
Then, very rashly, as she walked past him, she extremely quietly, under her breath, made an anatomically impossible suggestion for him to try, to pass the time till they came back. The little man immediately went deep purple in the face. Veins stood out like a map of the tributaries of the Mississippi. He looked as if he was about to burst into flames, and said loudly "I heard that, Miss Summers!"
But before he could get another word out, Scully, who was directly behind Buffy, stopped and looked him right in the eye.
"No you didn't!" she said firmly. Snyder's mouth fell open in astonishment, and he abruptly went as white as a sheet.
Last in line, Mulder hung back until his partner was out of the library door, then leaned over, grinned wickedly, and added "...but whatever it was, maybe you should try it anyway!" as the others moved off out of earshot down the school hallway.
END OF PART 10. TO BE CONTINUED...