Crisis Points
by Alixtii
"I cannot believe that you, of all people, are trying to Scully me. There is something supernatural at work here. Get your books! Look stuff up!"
—Buffy, in "The Pack"
London, England—November 2002
"They took our files, wiped out our records. We've lost contact with operations in Munich, Switzerland and Rome. We've got casualty confirmations coming in from as far away as Melbourne."
"Sir," Lydia summarized her colleague's report, "we are crippled."
"It's all right, Lydia. We are still masters of our fate, still captains of our souls."
"Yes, sir," Lydia answered, but she didn't feel her mentor's confidence. She was worried.
Travers cleared his throat. "Ladies and gentlemen, our fears have been confirmed. The First Evil has declared all-out war on this institution. Their first volleys proved most effective. I, for one, think it's time we struck back. Give me confirmations on all remaining operatives. Visuals and tacticals. Highest alert. Get them here as soon as possible. Begin preparations for mobilization. Once we're accounted for, I want to be ready to move."
"Sir?" someone asked, voicing the confusion that Lydia felt.
"We'll be paying a visit to the Hellmouth," he explained. "My friends, these are the times that define us. Proverbs 24:6. Oh, by wise council, you shall make your war."
And then it happened. Fire, was everywhere, obscuring Lydia's sight completely. There was nothing but conflagration, ripping through the world. There was nothing Lydia could turn to escape the flames, nowhere she could go. She tried to cry out, but her shout was silent compared to the din of the explosion.
Only then did it occur to her to wonder at the fact that she was not already dead.
London, England—December 2003
Reginald sat in the library, scanning the obscure texts for references of the vampire Drusilla when Lydia came up behind him and covered his eyes. "Guess who," she whispered as she brought her lips to the back of his neck and began to nuzzle.
Reginald started so greatly he practically jumped out of his seat. "Lydia, please," he said. "Not here. What if Wyndam-Pryce walks by? What if someone sees and notices, tells someone who tells someone..."
"Reginald, relax," said Lydia. "Look around you—everyone's just like you were, with their noses buried so deep in their books they wouldn't know if the sky turned colours. Nobody's going to notice. We're safe."
Reginald did seem to relax somewhat, his body regaining a more natural posture, but didn't seem completely satisfied either. "My nose should be buried as well. I need to finish the bloody thing."
Lydia sat down on his desk. "Calm down. Your thesis is going to turn out fine. I promise."
"Well, there's still another two-thirds of the dissertation committee I'm going to have to impress with thing, and I have twenty pages left to write. And research."
"Shouldn't you be done your research by now?"
"Yes," agreed Reginald. "But I keep on being distracted by my lover who drags me off to have wild sex. It's a wonder I get any work done at all."
"Well, where exactly are you?" Lydia asked, picking up one of the books sitting on the desk. Aurelius and His Children by Diana Wescar. She looked at the others in the stack. Angelus' Women, by Deborah Giles. The Prophecies of Aurelius, translated by Archibald Pryce. The Queens of the Night by Martha Landau. Aspects of the Demon Psyche by J.S. Zeitchmier. Mind and Mysticism: An Inquiry into Demon Psychology and Neurology by John Walsh. She picked up the last book and began to read it to herself, opening at a random page.
One must remember that the vampire is a peculiar creature, a paradox, even. It is a corpse, dead and cold. Its heart does not beat; its blood does not circulate through its veins (although admittedly they bleed much more copiously than the average corpse); it does not breathe in the normal sense of the word. Still, it is in some sense a biological creature. It must rely on its physical form to procure the blood it requires for sustenance. It can engage in sexual intercourse, although admittedly it cannot procreate. Its vocal chords operate in some way that is still a mystery, and they have been seen to smoke cigarettes, cigars, pipes, marijuana joints, etc. While they have a greater tolerance to alcohol than the average human, they can become intoxicated. In fact, they are succeptible to the short-term effects of a large range of pharmaceuticals, including nicotine, LSD, and several analgesics. Snap a vampire's spinal cord, and it will become temporally paralyzed, although it is capable of regenerating the damage.
So it is with the vampiric brain. The relation between the brain of the host body and the demon which inhabits in it is unclear. Certainly the brain cannot be used in the manner normal for humans, for without circulation that would be impossible. Still, the brain is clearly necessary for vampire cognition. Damage to the cerebellum can result in severe retardation, although in most cases it too is capable of regeneration over time, resulting in a restoration of the vampire's full original faculties, assuming it does not mindlessly wander into the sun during the period of retardation. Similarly, prolonged starvation (from blood) can result in impairment of higher brain functions which can be catastrophic.
Furthermore, it has already been documented (Wyndam 1869; Jones 1928) that some psychological disorders suffered by an individual in life will in many case continue to afflict the vampire he or she becomes after being turned. Disorders with which this is known to be the case include, but are not limited to: paranoia, schizophrenia, severe phobias, panic disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorder, communication skills disorders, and some learning disabilities. Other disorders, such as clinical depression, do not seem to transfer. Of course, there are also some disorders, such as psycopathy, antisocial disorders, and oppositional defiant disorder, which represent the vampiric norm rather than a deviation. Why such symptoms persist—whether it is merely an aspect of the human personality which goes on to inform the formation of the human-demon hybrid (the vampiric personality), or whether the biological causes of the original conditional continue to afflict the vampire—remains a mystery.
It would follow, however, that manipulation of the vampiric brain should result in a resulting alteration of the vampire's behavior in a manner somewhat analogous to the practices of human psychology. Electrical stimulation of portions of the vampire's brain, for example, could result in....
Lydia looked up from the text. "Do we still have Quentin Travers' notes on Zackary Kralik?" she asked.
"What?" asked Reg, looking up from his work. "Oh, yes. I had them checked out when the explosion happened. The similarities are mostly superficial, though. Kralik was, according to Travers' notes, a sufferer of intermittent explosive disorder, paraphilia, conduct disorder, and possibly OCD in life. All of those symptoms represent the normal characteristics of the typical vampire, with the possible exception of the obsessive- compulsive disorder. Drusilla, on the other hand, is a schizophrenic, showing symptoms of delusions, visual and auditory hallucinations, verbal incoherence, and dementia. Of course, there is no way of knowing how much of that is an affect of her Sight; after all, she quite literally sees things no one else does on a regular basis, and I'd have to imagine it'd be difficult to put into words what she sees. But there's no record of any other precognitive vampire being quite so...eccentric. In any case, there is no reason to assume her amorality or her taste for sadomasochism—her most pronounced characteristic, next to insanity—stem from anything other than her own demonic nature and her learning at Angelus' knee—quite literally in some aspects, we can assume.
"We can't even be sure that she went crazy before Angelus turned her. That's just the least hypothesis, since there's no indication that great stress or trauma can awaken the necessary genetic factors in vampires the way it can in humans. Besides, it'd be easier for Angelus to drive her mad—if he was the one responsible—when she was a human. But we can't be sure. We haven't been able to definitively identify who she had been in life, though, so its impossible to know for sure what happened. Although after reviewing this research, I'd bet my last shilling she was Roman Catholic, which suggests she wasprobably involved in the Sisters of Mercy Massacre in 1860—we have eyewitness accounts of Angelus and Darla in London around that time—although whether she was involved as the predator or the prey I couldn't tell you. We don't get a definitive sighting of Drusilla until the early 1870s although there are plenty of sightings before that which are speculated to be her. I even have one source which suggests that Darla rather than Angelus turned her and that she is older than Angelus, although there's no way that could possibly be right. It doesn't fit her MO—she's without a doubt a Victorian."
"Maybe you should put a call into Wolfram or Hart. I'm sure either Angel or Spike knows what happened, although I don't know how thrilled they be to share." Lydia shut the Walsh text in her lap. "You seem to have this pretty well down," she said, returning the book to the pile. "You sure you don't want to go find that wild lover you were talking about?"
Reginald shook his head. "She is a wicked girl and she tries to corrupt me."
Somewhere in Romania...
"We don't have much time," Drusilla says, behind the mask of the Amanda-child. She found the mask deep within the buried desires of the Key, and now that she has stirred them the Key is full of a passion it has not known before. Drusilla likes this mask; it is pretty, after all. She envies the vampire who had had the pleasure of breaking the girl in two.
"What are we to do?" asks Dawn, not understanding. Drusilla must constantly renew the thrall, the girl's quick mind constantly trying to sort through the confusion, her curiosity searching for the answers that Drusilla must keep obscured or else the illusion will be broken.
"A spell," answers Amanda. "I need you to read this."
Dawn takes the piece of paper that Amanda hands her. Quod perditum est, invenietur. "It's Latin," she says. "It means…" She looks at Amanda and suddenly finds her grasp of the language faltering. What does it mean again? She cannot remember the vocabulary.
"Please," insists Amanda.
Dawn shrugs. "Quod perditum est, invenietur."
Amanda smiles, then closes her eyes. "Not dead... nor of the living," she recites. "Spirits of the interregnum, I call. Return to the body what distinguishes man from the beast."
A third voice breaks in on Dawn's consciousness, an older female voice marked by a thick Eastern European accent. "Nici mort, nici de-al finite," it goes. "Te invoc, spirit al trecerii. Reda trupului ce separa omul de animal."
"So it shall be," says Amanda.
"Asa sa fie," echoes the voice.
"Restore me."
"Utrespur aceastui."
Somewhere in Nevada…
"Did you feel that, Beth?" Ethan asked the boy.
Although he was blind, Beth Daniels cocked his head up as if he were looking at Ethan. "I felt it," he answered simply, then returned to the chalk drawing he was working on.
Beth Daniels was, as near as Ethan could tell, sixteen or seventeen years old. What the boy had done to land himself in the detention center was a mystery to everyone, although Ethan secretly thought that the kid had probably used black magic to kill his parents in revenge for their naming him Beth. A boy named Sue, indeed…
"What are you drawing?" asked Ethan. The boy was incredibly sensitive to the currents of chaos and order, good and evil which ran through the world, and often he was Ethan's only way of telling what was going on in the world outside.
"This is the past," he said, pointing to a picture of a giant ferris wheel—the wheel of life, Ethan realized. "This is the present." This picture was half-finished, and Beth worked on it with meticulous detail. There was a picture of a woman, slender with raven black hair, reaching out to a man that Beth had sketched only in rough outline. The lovers.
Ethan knew the meaning of the tarot, knew what a change from the wheel to the lovers meant: out of the constant flux of life, some type of crisis point had been reached. Some trial was at hand. "And what of the future?"
Beth held his hand over the drawing, and suddenly the chalk image began to change, the colours shifting and rearranging themselves into a new pattern, one instantly recognizable to Ethan: the robed figure of Death. Change. Transformation. Even drawn in chalk upon the pavement, the image was intimidating.
"Whose fortune is this, Beth?" Ethan asked, almost afraid to find out the answer. Ask not for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
The boy made some strokes on the pavement with his chalk, etched out the rough outline of a woman, slender in figure. He picked up a piece of chalk which was charcoal black and began to draw what would be her raven tresses. It was the figure from before, Ethan recognized, the lover. In her hands, Beth drew a large five-pointed star. The Queen of Pentacles, then. In the sky above the two figures, the Queen and Death, Beth draws more stars and, at the center of the blue sky, an archangel blowing his trumpet. Judgment day.
Ethan smiled to himself, making a brief gesture with his left hand invoking the good will of Janus. If Beth's prophecy were to be trusted—and he had never known the boy's drawings to lead him wrong before—things were just about to get interesting, and there would be plenty of chaos to go around.
London, England
"How was your flight?" asked Lydia.
The contractor shrugged. It seemed to Reg that she was just a bit….unconvential. Particularly in her dress. But someone with a reputation like hers could get away with dressing however she wanted, he supposed. "I'm not fond of crossing oceans," she admitted. "Water gives me the heebie-jeebies. You know?"
Lydia nodded. "You understand what we need from you, Miss Raiden?"
"I go in, snag the Thesulac, and boogey off with it. And then give it to you. Trust me, I'm a professional."
Being a professional thief didn't exactly engender trust, Reginald mused. But he remained silent, let Lydia take care of the negotiations.
"Your usual rate of commission will be satisfactory, I assume?" Lydia asked.
The contractor nodded. "And with the Orbs of Thesula currently having a street value of a sweet 13 mill…."
"….that brings your commission to approximately a million pounds."
"2 million dollars," she corrected, "and some pocket change to boot."
Lydia sighed. "It will practically drain our coffers, but very well. We need the orb."
The contractor smiled. "I thought you Watcher people were rolling in the cash."
Lydia looked at the contractor. "Many things," she said, "have changed in the last two years."
A/N: Some of the titles and authors used in this chapter have been taken from the bibliography of the version of Lydia's thesis found on the 'net. keeps eating my links, probably afraid its porn. Try using Google.) While that thesis is not consistent with this story (in this story, I blame Lydia for getting Spike's age wrong; in that thesis, she corrects the mistake), I have to admit that it was at least one of many influences in writing this. Giving credit where credit is due, here.
And expect more references to John Walsh in future chapters.
I do not own Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Although if you thought I did, I do happen to own a bridge in Brooklyn that I can sell you. Or would you prefer a sandbox in Florida? A galley full of Spanish prisoners?
Please review. Thank you, please come again. And review then, too.
Alixtii.