The small group of humans were in serious trouble. They'd gone to the park expecting to dust a couple of vampires, and they'd ended up stumbling on an orgy/feast. If the sights weren't enough to kill them, the ravenous and aroused vampires were.
As the group fought for its life, several other vamps continued their party. One had a still-human girl, probably about thirteen years old, pinned against the ground. Her shirt was ripped, and he was biting her right above her breast. As he straddled her, he slowly moved his teeth downward, lacerating her skin.
Another vamp had just turned another girl. They were still in the same pose as they had been before - the struggle. It was no longer a struggle for her life. Now it was a struggle for pleasure.
Another was draining a young man. He was terrified, and screamed as the vamp twisted. He called out for his mother. The vampire sunk its fangs in deeper.
The group of young teenage fighters were losing ground. There were only five of them, and they were besieged by no less than eight vampires, all in a frenzy.
The five were no match for the vampires. Quite suddenly, through the apparently even hand to hand combat, one of the five lost the upper hand. Before anyone knew what was happening, he'd been grabbed and was being drained, quickly and painfully.
"Mike!" one of the remaining fighters shouted. He glanced at the rest of his friends. They wouldn't survive this if they kept it up. Then he glanced at the several people still being tortured by the hungry vampires. Some were still human - some weren't dead yet.
Agonizingly, the young man decided that he could do nothing more for them.
"Fall back!" he shouted. Immediately, his friends broke their fights and ran. He lingered for a moment, to throw a bottle of holy water at one of the feasting vampires. Then he was gone.
As he fled into the night, Jonathan Banks felt sick to his stomach.
Willow had decided that Cleveland was not to her liking. She'd always been a small town girl - born and raised. Occasional excitement she could handle. This was just too noisy for her - the traffic going by her hotel woke her early every morning.
She glanced at Kennedy lying beside her. The young Slayer was still asleep. It was nearing eight in the morning. Willow chuckled inaudibly, and her humor translated into magic that changed the color of the ceiling from drab grey to a swirling multicolor.
Willow smiled at her new ceiling. She'd done that so many times now that Kennedy teased her about it, telling her that the color of their ceiling reflected Willow's mood. Now Kennedy rolled over and smiled, looking at the ceiling. "Happy this morning, honey?" she asked, sweetly.
Willow punched her. "Your not nearly as cute as you think you are."
"No, I'm cuter," Kennedy replied, smiling.
"Bite me," Willow said.
"Ooh, with pleasure," Kennedy said, grinning maliciously.
Willow blushed slightly. She wasn't used to having such a 'forward' partner. "Wasn't last night enough?" she asked.
Kennedy shrugged. "Slayer endurance...I could keep going for a week."
Willow nodded. "That happened to Buffy once," she said. Kennedy stared. "Well, not a week, exactly, but it was a long time. Like four hours, without a break."
Kennedy's jaw was hanging open. "She was put under a spell by some rowdy spirits," Willow explained.
Kennedy still stared, but managed to form a joke. "Hook me up with those spirits."
Willow shook her head and climbed out of bed. "You wouldn't have liked them so much," she said. "They were all teenagers who were tormented by the head of their group home. They were using Buffy and Riley as a battery to channel themselves into our plane."
Kennedy climbed out of bed too. "Still doesn't sound that bad. I mean besides the whole tormented teenagers bit, but we deal with stuff like that all the time."
Willow shook her head again as she dressed. "They were going to keep Buffy and Riley going - you know, until they died."
Kennedy started to dress as well. "So...death by sex? In case you've never read about other Slayers, that's not such a bad way to go."
Seeing that she wasn't going to win this one, Willow finished getting dressed in silence. They left the room together and went down to the hotel's kitchen for breakfast.
They ate briefly and left the building.
Willow and Kennedy had come to Cleveland on the business of the newly reinstated Watcher's Council, which was being run by Giles from England. They were searching for newly risen Slayers - there were so many of them! Giles had told Willow that Cleveland and its surrounding area would be a difficult assignment - Cleveland was situated on top of another Hellmouth, after all. Willow had lived on a Hellmouth her entire life - so she'd accepted. Some part of her brain had thought that Cleveland would be a lot like Sunnydale, what with the Hellmouth connection.
She'd been drastically wrong.
Oh, she was acquainted with the concept of the 'big city' - she'd been to LA several times, after all - but she wasn't acquainted with 'city living'.
A week in Cleveland and she still wasn't used to it. She wasn't having much luck with her search, either. A locater spell had revealed that there were five new Slayers here in the city, but so far she hadn't been able to pin down one of them.
She and Kennedy were, today, bound for the Jefferson Krieger Junior High School, where Willow was planning on applying for a job. It was two sided - the Watcher's job didn't pay shit, and she wanted to be able to observe the junior high with the largest student population in Cleveland.
Willow was confident about the job - Jefferson Krieger had been advertising for a new tech teacher, and Willow still knew how to work a computer.
She glanced at Kennedy. The young woman was still searching for a good place to get into Cleveland's world of teenagers - she was only 18, after all.
"Thinking deep thoughts?" Kennedy asked. They turned a corner in the direction of the school.
"Not really," Willow said. She sighed, then decided to ask. "Kennedy, how are things going with your assignment?"
Kennedy frowned slightly. "Not too good, not too bad," she admitted. "I'm not really getting anywhere. I don't know...I'm not used to making a concerted effort to get into the popular circles."
"Why is that?" Willow asked.
Kennedy shrugged. "I never really needed popularity," she said. "I had a couple of friends...mostly I was a loner."
Willow's face crinkled. There was something there...something... "Aha!" she said. Kennedy jumped.
"You're looking for Slayers, Kennedy, girls like you," she said. "They're probably pretty confused about the whole thing by now. They'll be loners...not popularity contest winners."
They rounded a corner and came into sight of Jefferson Krieger. It was fairly enormous - bigger than Willow had expected.
"Wow," she said. "That's big...on a big sort of big scale, you know? Big."
Kennedy smiled now. "Chill out, Willow. You'll be fine. You've done teaching before."
Willow's anxiety faded, mostly because of the reassuring look on Kennedy's face. She nodded.
"Okay," she said. "I helped save the world from unspeakable evil...I can get a job."
Kennedy grinned. "I'll see you at four back the apartment," she said. She grew serious. "If anything comes up, I'll leave a message there."
Willow nodded at her, and, making sure that no one was looking, quickly kissed Kennedy on the cheek. They parted.
Kennedy wasn't entirely sure of where she was headed to; after a week, she'd uncovered only one teen hangout in fairly large city. The place was surprisingly clean; the kids seemed to make a concerted effort to keep it safe and drug free. It puzzled Kennedy; when she'd been younger, her friends had all tried their hardest to keep the local teen center infested with drugs.
The Cleveland Teen Center was a small, squat building set back from the road about fifty feet. It was made of brick, some of which was covered in ivy, and it had old, grimy windows that were barred. The outside of the building looked terrible.
Kennedy entered and, not for the first time, was astounded by just how clean the place was on the inside. For the second time, she entered to find kids cleaning. She paused. Silence met her ears.
This was unusual. Kennedy had been going to the Center now for four days, and not once had the place been empty. Even in the mornings, the place always had a noisy population in, listening to music and playing pool. Now there was nothing.
Kennedy crossed the threshold quickly and entered the main room. It was packed fairly tightly with kids, but they weren't at all happy. Some were talking, and there was a low buzzing that was undetectable from outside the room. Everyone looked up upon Kennedy's entrance, but they went back to whatever they were doing when they saw who she was.
They were waiting for someone. That much was obvious. So, too, was the fact that they were all in formal wear.
Kennedy attempted to blend, but her ratty jeans and tight black tank top were a bit out of place in the mess of collared shirts and dresses. She waited for a while; nothing happened. The conversations were too low for her to hear; and she didn't know what exactly to ask if she tried to engage anyone in conversation.
Finally, when the oppressive vibe in the room got to be too much for Kennedy to take, she approached a girl leaning against a wall.
"What's up?" Kennedy asked, in the same low tone everyone else was using.
Before the girl could answer, the door opened and a boy entered. Kennedy had never seen the boy before, but it was obvious that he was the person whom the crow had been waiting for. They all stood at once. All the noise died away instantly.
The boy looked around the room in bitter appraisal. "It's time," he said. "Lets go."
The crowd slowly, solemnly filed past him. Caught up and unwilling to stay anyway, Kennedy passed him by. His gaze turned on her briefly, and she was chilled to the bone. There was fire in his eyes.
Kennedy had to quickly remind herself that there was no way that this kid could ever take her. She was a Slayer, after all; he was just a kid, fifteen if she didn't miss her guess. But that anger seemed indomitable.
The crowd walked down to the road and turned automatically, almost without thinking, to the left. They'd done this before. Kennedy followed at a distance, the back of the fiery eyed boy taking up most of her attention. She had never seen him around, and yet, all the Teen Center regulars seemed to know and respect him. Granted, she hadn't been around all that long, but still...
The group turned another corner on autopilot. Kennedy was still wondering to herself where they were going when they turned in towards a cemetery.
Oh, no, she thought. Someone died.
Death was an enormous part of Kennedy's life these days. That came as no surprise, seeing as death pretty much came in the job description. But it was still unnerving. Kennedy firmly believed that it never got to be okay.
Now she was really uncomfortable. She was underdressed for something like this. The kids were the only ones present at the burial; and as Kennedy looked around, she realized that all the dates on the tombstones were those that signified people who had died as teenagers.
She considered drifting away, since she didn't want to seem disrespectful by showing up looking like a slob. But then she got a look at the body.
There were two tiny wounds, painstakingly patched up, on his neck. They were hidden quite well, but Kennedy had seen what the aftermath of a vampire attack looked like many times; her eye was trained for this sort of thing.
All at once, her entire attention went into the situation. The man was young; sixteen, perhaps. As Kennedy quickly examined him, she realized that he'd put up a fight. He was bruised in several locations, and there were tiny scratches that none but a Slayer would have been able to detect.
The minister was beginning. "Michael Damon was a truly extraordinary young man..."
Several of the girls began crying. Kennedy, subconsciously deciding to stay, gazed around at the girls. Could one of them perhaps be a Slayer?
The minister went on. He'd delivered similar orations before; there was a practiced ease to the speech. It didn't lack pain; but it flowed in the same way the kids all had on the trip down.
When it was over, the minister closed his book and turned to the body on in the coffin. He quietly said a personal prayer, then turned, shook the fiery eyed boy's hand, and departed.
The kids stayed while the undertaker closed the coffin and lowered it into the ground. Fiery Eyes gazed around and, his mouth quivering with sadness, said, "Lets get back to the Center. Anyone who needs to stay longer, feel free to."
Kennedy immediately slipped away. She wanted to be the first one back at the Center. She had a feeling that something was going to be said there, and she wanted to be in a position to catch every word.
Willow walked through the door to the school and was greeted by the same old dilapidation that had infected the old Sunnydale High. It made her reminisce for a moment; despite the horrific death the old school had inflicted on several of her friends, she still missed it sometimes. Instinctive, she supposed. Some of her best times had come there, as well as some of her nightmarish times.
She had chosen a sharp dress for the occasion, hoping to look intelligent and impressive. She carried with her the advertisement in the Cleveland Gazette.
She headed straight for the main office. It was fairly easy to find; the school was well marked. The secretary at the main desk didn't seem too happy to see her, but she didn't seem to happy to be breathing, either.
"Hello. You are....?" The secretary asked.
"I'm Willow Rosenberg," Willow said. "I applied for the Technology Education teaching position, and I'm here for my interview."
The secretary looked down at her schedule. "Okay. You can go right in, Ms. Rosenberg."
She indicated a door at the opposite side of the office. Willow thanked the secretary, who seemed to have already forgotten her existence, and turned to the door. Amusingly enough, her nerves had disappeared.
Willow pushed open the door and entered. The principal looked up as she entered. "Hello, Ms. Rosenberg," he said. "Its nice to see you here so promptly."
Willow shrugged, grinning at the complement. "Well, I try," she said. The principal grinned.
"That's good," he said. "Determination is something you definitely have to have in the education field. Though you already know that," he added. "You've taught before."
Willow nodded. "I did some substituting in high school. That was for a computer course too, actually."
The principal raised an eyebrow. "By in high school, what exactly do you mean?"
Willow wondered whether or not this would help her. "I was a student when I did my substituting."
Now both of the principals eyebrows were up. "That is quite extraordinary."
Willow blushed. "Thank you. So, do you want to get on with the interviewing?"
Now the principal grinned slightly sheepishly. "Actually, I didn't ask you here for an interview."
Willow was instantly worried. These things were never good. "What did you invite me here for?"
"To tell you that you got the job," he said. "No one else has applied for the position, and its been open for months and months. You were the first person to apply for the job, and your credentials all checked out immediately. Mr. Wood was certainly more than happy to provide us with the file on you. But he never mentioned that you'd been a student...incredible. There is just one thing that I wanted to know before welcoming you onboard.
"Why Cleveland?" he finished.
Willow had an answer prepared. "There's need," she said simply. "I like to help when I can, and these kids need a teacher. I figured that I could do some good here."
The principal nodded. "I like you already, Ms. Rosenberg. Welcome to the staff of JK High."
First chapter done! Yayness! That's not a word, right? Oh, well. I can't keep track of the number of words that Joss Whedon has created, so I think I'm safe with a single, pointless exclamation. What did y'all think? Leave me a review, if you don't mind. That way, I'll know what you think, and I can keep writing. No reviews...no rest of the story. Got it? Good. Peace.
As the group fought for its life, several other vamps continued their party. One had a still-human girl, probably about thirteen years old, pinned against the ground. Her shirt was ripped, and he was biting her right above her breast. As he straddled her, he slowly moved his teeth downward, lacerating her skin.
Another vamp had just turned another girl. They were still in the same pose as they had been before - the struggle. It was no longer a struggle for her life. Now it was a struggle for pleasure.
Another was draining a young man. He was terrified, and screamed as the vamp twisted. He called out for his mother. The vampire sunk its fangs in deeper.
The group of young teenage fighters were losing ground. There were only five of them, and they were besieged by no less than eight vampires, all in a frenzy.
The five were no match for the vampires. Quite suddenly, through the apparently even hand to hand combat, one of the five lost the upper hand. Before anyone knew what was happening, he'd been grabbed and was being drained, quickly and painfully.
"Mike!" one of the remaining fighters shouted. He glanced at the rest of his friends. They wouldn't survive this if they kept it up. Then he glanced at the several people still being tortured by the hungry vampires. Some were still human - some weren't dead yet.
Agonizingly, the young man decided that he could do nothing more for them.
"Fall back!" he shouted. Immediately, his friends broke their fights and ran. He lingered for a moment, to throw a bottle of holy water at one of the feasting vampires. Then he was gone.
As he fled into the night, Jonathan Banks felt sick to his stomach.
Willow had decided that Cleveland was not to her liking. She'd always been a small town girl - born and raised. Occasional excitement she could handle. This was just too noisy for her - the traffic going by her hotel woke her early every morning.
She glanced at Kennedy lying beside her. The young Slayer was still asleep. It was nearing eight in the morning. Willow chuckled inaudibly, and her humor translated into magic that changed the color of the ceiling from drab grey to a swirling multicolor.
Willow smiled at her new ceiling. She'd done that so many times now that Kennedy teased her about it, telling her that the color of their ceiling reflected Willow's mood. Now Kennedy rolled over and smiled, looking at the ceiling. "Happy this morning, honey?" she asked, sweetly.
Willow punched her. "Your not nearly as cute as you think you are."
"No, I'm cuter," Kennedy replied, smiling.
"Bite me," Willow said.
"Ooh, with pleasure," Kennedy said, grinning maliciously.
Willow blushed slightly. She wasn't used to having such a 'forward' partner. "Wasn't last night enough?" she asked.
Kennedy shrugged. "Slayer endurance...I could keep going for a week."
Willow nodded. "That happened to Buffy once," she said. Kennedy stared. "Well, not a week, exactly, but it was a long time. Like four hours, without a break."
Kennedy's jaw was hanging open. "She was put under a spell by some rowdy spirits," Willow explained.
Kennedy still stared, but managed to form a joke. "Hook me up with those spirits."
Willow shook her head and climbed out of bed. "You wouldn't have liked them so much," she said. "They were all teenagers who were tormented by the head of their group home. They were using Buffy and Riley as a battery to channel themselves into our plane."
Kennedy climbed out of bed too. "Still doesn't sound that bad. I mean besides the whole tormented teenagers bit, but we deal with stuff like that all the time."
Willow shook her head again as she dressed. "They were going to keep Buffy and Riley going - you know, until they died."
Kennedy started to dress as well. "So...death by sex? In case you've never read about other Slayers, that's not such a bad way to go."
Seeing that she wasn't going to win this one, Willow finished getting dressed in silence. They left the room together and went down to the hotel's kitchen for breakfast.
They ate briefly and left the building.
Willow and Kennedy had come to Cleveland on the business of the newly reinstated Watcher's Council, which was being run by Giles from England. They were searching for newly risen Slayers - there were so many of them! Giles had told Willow that Cleveland and its surrounding area would be a difficult assignment - Cleveland was situated on top of another Hellmouth, after all. Willow had lived on a Hellmouth her entire life - so she'd accepted. Some part of her brain had thought that Cleveland would be a lot like Sunnydale, what with the Hellmouth connection.
She'd been drastically wrong.
Oh, she was acquainted with the concept of the 'big city' - she'd been to LA several times, after all - but she wasn't acquainted with 'city living'.
A week in Cleveland and she still wasn't used to it. She wasn't having much luck with her search, either. A locater spell had revealed that there were five new Slayers here in the city, but so far she hadn't been able to pin down one of them.
She and Kennedy were, today, bound for the Jefferson Krieger Junior High School, where Willow was planning on applying for a job. It was two sided - the Watcher's job didn't pay shit, and she wanted to be able to observe the junior high with the largest student population in Cleveland.
Willow was confident about the job - Jefferson Krieger had been advertising for a new tech teacher, and Willow still knew how to work a computer.
She glanced at Kennedy. The young woman was still searching for a good place to get into Cleveland's world of teenagers - she was only 18, after all.
"Thinking deep thoughts?" Kennedy asked. They turned a corner in the direction of the school.
"Not really," Willow said. She sighed, then decided to ask. "Kennedy, how are things going with your assignment?"
Kennedy frowned slightly. "Not too good, not too bad," she admitted. "I'm not really getting anywhere. I don't know...I'm not used to making a concerted effort to get into the popular circles."
"Why is that?" Willow asked.
Kennedy shrugged. "I never really needed popularity," she said. "I had a couple of friends...mostly I was a loner."
Willow's face crinkled. There was something there...something... "Aha!" she said. Kennedy jumped.
"You're looking for Slayers, Kennedy, girls like you," she said. "They're probably pretty confused about the whole thing by now. They'll be loners...not popularity contest winners."
They rounded a corner and came into sight of Jefferson Krieger. It was fairly enormous - bigger than Willow had expected.
"Wow," she said. "That's big...on a big sort of big scale, you know? Big."
Kennedy smiled now. "Chill out, Willow. You'll be fine. You've done teaching before."
Willow's anxiety faded, mostly because of the reassuring look on Kennedy's face. She nodded.
"Okay," she said. "I helped save the world from unspeakable evil...I can get a job."
Kennedy grinned. "I'll see you at four back the apartment," she said. She grew serious. "If anything comes up, I'll leave a message there."
Willow nodded at her, and, making sure that no one was looking, quickly kissed Kennedy on the cheek. They parted.
Kennedy wasn't entirely sure of where she was headed to; after a week, she'd uncovered only one teen hangout in fairly large city. The place was surprisingly clean; the kids seemed to make a concerted effort to keep it safe and drug free. It puzzled Kennedy; when she'd been younger, her friends had all tried their hardest to keep the local teen center infested with drugs.
The Cleveland Teen Center was a small, squat building set back from the road about fifty feet. It was made of brick, some of which was covered in ivy, and it had old, grimy windows that were barred. The outside of the building looked terrible.
Kennedy entered and, not for the first time, was astounded by just how clean the place was on the inside. For the second time, she entered to find kids cleaning. She paused. Silence met her ears.
This was unusual. Kennedy had been going to the Center now for four days, and not once had the place been empty. Even in the mornings, the place always had a noisy population in, listening to music and playing pool. Now there was nothing.
Kennedy crossed the threshold quickly and entered the main room. It was packed fairly tightly with kids, but they weren't at all happy. Some were talking, and there was a low buzzing that was undetectable from outside the room. Everyone looked up upon Kennedy's entrance, but they went back to whatever they were doing when they saw who she was.
They were waiting for someone. That much was obvious. So, too, was the fact that they were all in formal wear.
Kennedy attempted to blend, but her ratty jeans and tight black tank top were a bit out of place in the mess of collared shirts and dresses. She waited for a while; nothing happened. The conversations were too low for her to hear; and she didn't know what exactly to ask if she tried to engage anyone in conversation.
Finally, when the oppressive vibe in the room got to be too much for Kennedy to take, she approached a girl leaning against a wall.
"What's up?" Kennedy asked, in the same low tone everyone else was using.
Before the girl could answer, the door opened and a boy entered. Kennedy had never seen the boy before, but it was obvious that he was the person whom the crow had been waiting for. They all stood at once. All the noise died away instantly.
The boy looked around the room in bitter appraisal. "It's time," he said. "Lets go."
The crowd slowly, solemnly filed past him. Caught up and unwilling to stay anyway, Kennedy passed him by. His gaze turned on her briefly, and she was chilled to the bone. There was fire in his eyes.
Kennedy had to quickly remind herself that there was no way that this kid could ever take her. She was a Slayer, after all; he was just a kid, fifteen if she didn't miss her guess. But that anger seemed indomitable.
The crowd walked down to the road and turned automatically, almost without thinking, to the left. They'd done this before. Kennedy followed at a distance, the back of the fiery eyed boy taking up most of her attention. She had never seen him around, and yet, all the Teen Center regulars seemed to know and respect him. Granted, she hadn't been around all that long, but still...
The group turned another corner on autopilot. Kennedy was still wondering to herself where they were going when they turned in towards a cemetery.
Oh, no, she thought. Someone died.
Death was an enormous part of Kennedy's life these days. That came as no surprise, seeing as death pretty much came in the job description. But it was still unnerving. Kennedy firmly believed that it never got to be okay.
Now she was really uncomfortable. She was underdressed for something like this. The kids were the only ones present at the burial; and as Kennedy looked around, she realized that all the dates on the tombstones were those that signified people who had died as teenagers.
She considered drifting away, since she didn't want to seem disrespectful by showing up looking like a slob. But then she got a look at the body.
There were two tiny wounds, painstakingly patched up, on his neck. They were hidden quite well, but Kennedy had seen what the aftermath of a vampire attack looked like many times; her eye was trained for this sort of thing.
All at once, her entire attention went into the situation. The man was young; sixteen, perhaps. As Kennedy quickly examined him, she realized that he'd put up a fight. He was bruised in several locations, and there were tiny scratches that none but a Slayer would have been able to detect.
The minister was beginning. "Michael Damon was a truly extraordinary young man..."
Several of the girls began crying. Kennedy, subconsciously deciding to stay, gazed around at the girls. Could one of them perhaps be a Slayer?
The minister went on. He'd delivered similar orations before; there was a practiced ease to the speech. It didn't lack pain; but it flowed in the same way the kids all had on the trip down.
When it was over, the minister closed his book and turned to the body on in the coffin. He quietly said a personal prayer, then turned, shook the fiery eyed boy's hand, and departed.
The kids stayed while the undertaker closed the coffin and lowered it into the ground. Fiery Eyes gazed around and, his mouth quivering with sadness, said, "Lets get back to the Center. Anyone who needs to stay longer, feel free to."
Kennedy immediately slipped away. She wanted to be the first one back at the Center. She had a feeling that something was going to be said there, and she wanted to be in a position to catch every word.
Willow walked through the door to the school and was greeted by the same old dilapidation that had infected the old Sunnydale High. It made her reminisce for a moment; despite the horrific death the old school had inflicted on several of her friends, she still missed it sometimes. Instinctive, she supposed. Some of her best times had come there, as well as some of her nightmarish times.
She had chosen a sharp dress for the occasion, hoping to look intelligent and impressive. She carried with her the advertisement in the Cleveland Gazette.
She headed straight for the main office. It was fairly easy to find; the school was well marked. The secretary at the main desk didn't seem too happy to see her, but she didn't seem to happy to be breathing, either.
"Hello. You are....?" The secretary asked.
"I'm Willow Rosenberg," Willow said. "I applied for the Technology Education teaching position, and I'm here for my interview."
The secretary looked down at her schedule. "Okay. You can go right in, Ms. Rosenberg."
She indicated a door at the opposite side of the office. Willow thanked the secretary, who seemed to have already forgotten her existence, and turned to the door. Amusingly enough, her nerves had disappeared.
Willow pushed open the door and entered. The principal looked up as she entered. "Hello, Ms. Rosenberg," he said. "Its nice to see you here so promptly."
Willow shrugged, grinning at the complement. "Well, I try," she said. The principal grinned.
"That's good," he said. "Determination is something you definitely have to have in the education field. Though you already know that," he added. "You've taught before."
Willow nodded. "I did some substituting in high school. That was for a computer course too, actually."
The principal raised an eyebrow. "By in high school, what exactly do you mean?"
Willow wondered whether or not this would help her. "I was a student when I did my substituting."
Now both of the principals eyebrows were up. "That is quite extraordinary."
Willow blushed. "Thank you. So, do you want to get on with the interviewing?"
Now the principal grinned slightly sheepishly. "Actually, I didn't ask you here for an interview."
Willow was instantly worried. These things were never good. "What did you invite me here for?"
"To tell you that you got the job," he said. "No one else has applied for the position, and its been open for months and months. You were the first person to apply for the job, and your credentials all checked out immediately. Mr. Wood was certainly more than happy to provide us with the file on you. But he never mentioned that you'd been a student...incredible. There is just one thing that I wanted to know before welcoming you onboard.
"Why Cleveland?" he finished.
Willow had an answer prepared. "There's need," she said simply. "I like to help when I can, and these kids need a teacher. I figured that I could do some good here."
The principal nodded. "I like you already, Ms. Rosenberg. Welcome to the staff of JK High."
First chapter done! Yayness! That's not a word, right? Oh, well. I can't keep track of the number of words that Joss Whedon has created, so I think I'm safe with a single, pointless exclamation. What did y'all think? Leave me a review, if you don't mind. That way, I'll know what you think, and I can keep writing. No reviews...no rest of the story. Got it? Good. Peace.
