There was only about half as much equipment in the room as there had been a second ago, and it was all stacked against the walls. Clark and Cara were sprawled on the floor.
Slayer-sense told her there were no vampires anywhere nearby, that they were underground (which she already knew), that the Kent kids were alive (Good!), and that it was right around midnight.
Midnight? Uh, oh. Twenty-four hours would have been around nine. Shoot. Cara must have messed up Dawnie's aim.
As soon as the Big Space Battle had finished, Clark had limped back home -- Kents' couch to Luthor's basement, was that going to be too close? Had the Gobi Desert aliens started spreading plague yet? The BBC lady on TV yesterday -- er, tomorrow -- said, "early this morning." What time was it in China, anyway?
Too many questions. Buffy just had to get Superman up and away, and fast.
"Clark! Wake up!" Maybe it was magic in general that had a bad effect on him. No way would she ever believe that Dawn's doohickey was all 'science.' Nope, the Slayer knew magicks when she saw them. "Clark!" she yelled again, slapping him. Wow. Man of Steel.
At least all the yelling woke Cara. "Cara! Come help me wake up your brother!" The little girl obediently started poking Superman in the nose. "By the way," Buffy scolded, "what the heck were you thinking?"
"I wanted to come too!" Cara declared, "and not whine or make a fuss!"
Buffy sighed. She guessed that made sense, if you were a pre-schooler.
Cara climbed onto Superman's chest and bounced.
Clark woke up! "What? Where?"
"We're burnin' daylight! Come on!"
Flying with Clark was quite the experience. Buffy supposed she'd traveled that way from Metropolis to Smallville originally, but she thought it shouldn't count if you were unconscious. She was almost totally saved from having inappropriate fluttery feelings for HER SISTER'S BOYFRIEND by Cara's poingy and distracting presence.
Cara was having a grand old time sightseeing, but Buffy kept urging Clark to fly faster. She and Cara could both take it, after all, and the fate of the world was at stake.
When the big mountainy desert in the north-central part of China or Asia or whatever hove into view, Buffy figured it was almost 2 a.m. in Metropolis; the fighting would just be hitting its stride. Here, though, the sun was high overhead, and the cloudless sky was that blue that's so pale it's almost white. Everything but themselves was absolutely still -- no animals, no alive-looking plants, and not a breath of wind.
It all looked terribly familiar. She'd been here in her dreams.
Clark put himself into some sort of a search pattern, paying no attention to Cara and Buffy as they clung to him. Buffy admired the methodical way he worked, quickly and efficiently. She knew it was a trait that Giles would always have liked to see more of in her.
"There," Clark said eventually. He zoomed them all over to a spot on the desert, a place Buffy could barely see.
The ship there had clearly crashed, not put down under its own power like the one in Metropolis. Half a dozen Judgey-looking Demon Clone Warriors puttered about, mysteriously assembling something out of weird mechanical bits.
"We have to be careful to not set off the blood-rain thingie by accident," Buffy cautioned. "Cara, honey, you better keep well back. Stay out of the fighting."
"But --"
"Cara!"
Clark settled onto the sandy hard-baked clay and set the girls down.
Superman and the Slayer attacked.
Unfortunately, they had forgotten (in Cara's defense, she'd never known) that it had only been Dawn's and the Coven's spells which had allowed them to actually KILL these guys before. It was just luck that Buffy was still in the pummeling phase of her first fight when Clark ripped off an alien's head, and was driven back from a toxic cloud of green gas. It wasn't kryptonite; it didn't kill him, just made him cough a lot, but it gave the invaders plenty of time to stick the clone's head back on, and there he was as good as new.
"Dang!" Clark swore.
Buffy avoided the cloud neatly, and continued to kick and dodge her opponents. "We don't have the spells going on here that we did before!" she called. She circled and dodged, doing a pretty good job of leading the aliens away from their device.
"Well, at least they're the easy-to-see kind," Clark said, obviously trying to look on the bright side. Everybody who'd been in the fight in the city had told their stories in Smallville, and he'd heard about the frighteningly perfect alien camouflage.
"You have to go back to Metropolis!" Buffy yelled, kicking an alien to crash into and knock away two others. "Go get that ice-pick thingie from Fox Mulder!"
Superman squashed an alien up against the crashed ship and wrapped a section of hull around him. "Doesn't he need it there?" he asked, treating another manufactured soldier the same way.
"No!" Buffy kicked her next opponent to Clark, who caught him neatly and bound him up in hull-metal, too. "Dawn made all the weapons in Metropolis magic. He was using his gun! And hurry! If you're quick enough, maybe you can even save him! I've got the rest of these! Go!"
That was the winning argument. Clark took off. He went so fast that he made a sonic boom, like the supersonic jets they used to have at the Southern California air shows when Buffy was little.
Buffy might have been maybe just a tiny little bit optimistic when she'd said she could handle the rest of the aliens. The three that Clark had trapped were, of course, struggling to get free. Fortunately, they weren't quite Superman-strong. Unfortunately, the three that were still free gradually came to realize that Buffy wasn't the pushover they'd stubbornly expected. They quit attacking her head-on, willy-nilly, and they came up with a plan.
Cara's agitated bouncing drew their attention; they must have known that Earthlings were attached to their children, even if their research had failed to turn up vital Slayer- and superhero-related info.
To make matters worse, two of them double-teamed Buffy, making her fight them nonstop to keep them back from Cara. While they kept her busy and distracted, the other one dashed back to the wreckage and brought out some of those stupid heat-ray weapons. After that, they were all much more dangerous, although thankfully there wasn't much out here to set on fire.
Buffy hoped desperately, as she made a lucky shot and kicked one flat-headed interloper's ray-gun out of his hand, and dodged another one's blast, that Clark would hurry the heck up.
Then something went badly wrong. One of Clark's captives finally worked his way loose, roared and charged. Buffy was distracted for a moment, zigged when she should have zagged, and one of the armed aliens blasted Cara.
Mulder was only a little surprised when the barrel of his Glock started to glow green. He'd somehow fallen in with a very strange group of people, ever since he'd given up on saving the world. That fact was the only thing that gave him the slightest glimmer of hope.
Stonetree's old .38, looking tiny in his hand, had started glowing, too. Joe nodded at it meaningfully, as they snuck along the wall towards the Food Court loading dock. "Magic," he said.
"Ya think?" Mulder breathed.
Suddenly, a section of the inky nighttime park lurched at them. Mulder dodged and pirouetted away from the no-longer sheltering wall, ducked down behind a purely inadequate trash can, and shot back at it. Joe had just plain opened fire. The old man seemed to hold to the 'Anything worth shooting is worth shooting over and over again' philosophy, but Fox wasn't going to argue with him. The thing took a total of seven bullets and fell. Once it was down, they could see it, and Mulder dispatched it with his father's alien-killing tool.
He and Stonetree stood looking at it for a moment, breathing hard. Its blood was green and evil-looking, but it didn't smoke or burn, as he'd expected it to from past experience. "Must be the magic, huh?" he commented.
"Yup." Stonetree was taking a while to reload his revolver. "See this?" he pointed out, displaying the bullets. Each individual bullet point glowed green as well. "This is why we were able to take him down."
"I'll try to aim for the base of the skull next time I'm shooting one. Look, Joe, I don't think we can..."
"Go ahead. I'll catch up."
"Thanks." Mulder quickly made his way into the building. He could hear voices, so he headed that way. Oh, man. Was that the President? Take me to your freakin' leader. Fox hurried through the darkened hallways.
There was a doorway up ahead, with a light showing through it. He thought the voices had been coming from there, too, but there was only one voice now. There was just one guard at this door, and he was facing inwards. Mulder used his father's legacy again, sneaking up unnoticed and back-stabbing the alien without any fuss. He caught the body to avoid a noise, laid it down on the marble floor, and peered around the jamb.
President Bush lay immobile on the floor. Fox couldn't tell, from here, whether he was dead or alive. A dozen fat cats of the Consortium kneeled on the floor at another alien's feet. He was giving a speech; Fox identified the alien artifact that they must be using as a TV camera.
"Your children will be taken from you and sorted. The usable will be brought to central raising pens; the unusable will be destroyed."
Mulder stepped through the door. "You're not going to do this," he said, voice cracking. "You've done too much already."
The alien roared and surged up at him. Mulder immediately shot him, aiming for the base of the skull, and was thrilled to see that his magically-enhanced gun killed the alien without any trouble.
He didn't have time to savor his victory, though. Another alien came out of nowhere and tackled Mulder. The gun was knocked away, and Fox found himself fighting for his life, suspended by the neck with his feet a foot above the floor. He couldn't get a breath. The guy's grip was far too strong to break, and he was starting to twist.
Good-bye, Scully. I hope you and William will be okay.
Then Mulder found himself on the floor. His neck hurt, but he was alive.
Superman was there. The alien speaker was dead. Two more aliens charged in, firing heat-beam weapons. Joe Stonetree appeared at the doorway and shot them both dead. The room caught fire. Two of the aliens' servants started to scream. Superman took a deep breath, and blew the flames out. Moving almost too fast to see, Metropolis' superhero rounded up the well-dressed traitors and tied them up with the heavy curtains, slightly scorched, that had been decorating the office.
"Mr. Mulder, are you all right?"
Mulder caught his breath and nodded.
"May I please borrow the ice-pick weapon your father left you?"
Mulder gaped in surprise. "Uh. Sure," he said, fishing in his pocket.
"Thank you." Superman took it and flew away.
The little girl's screams were terrible to hear, as she was engulfed in flames. Buffy knew those weapons could flash-burn a man to blackened bone -- she'd seen it, in Metropolis -- but that was war. It hadn't torn at her heart like this did.
As had happened so often before, her rage gave her strength. The aliens didn't know what hit them, especially a couple of minutes later when an enraged, naked, bald, but otherwise completely unharmed toddler crashed into one of them like a runaway train.
Cara forced him into and through the mechanism the aliens had been trying to build. Parts flew everywhere. Fortunately, it didn't seem to activate.
"You burnt up my clothes!" Cara shrieked, embedding the hapless invader shoulder-deep in the hardpan. "And my hair!" she wailed, throwing another one up into what could possibly have been orbit, if Superman hadn't returned that very moment and caught him.
Buffy might have been wrong, but she thought the goon actually looked relieved to be stabbed in the back of the neck.
Cara flung herself down onto the ground, crying, kicking and howling. Superman dispatched all the remaining aliens in short order. Buffy gathered the furious little girl into her lap. "Here, baby," she said, shrugging out of her shirt. "Thank God Dawnie got me sports bras, huh?" she quipped to Clark, who was piling all the alien bodies together in the ruins of their plague-rain generator. "There you go," Buffy said. "It's just like a little dress. And the thing about hair? It grows back."
Clark collected the corpses, the weapons, the mysterious equipment, and the remains of the spacecraft, and wadded them all together into a big untidy ball. Buffy found the crunching noises this produced strangely satisfying.
Superman effortlessly picked up the ball and threw it far, far away. It was out of Buffy's sight almost immediately, but Clark gazed intently after it for almost ten minutes, during which time Cara subsided to sniffles in Buffy's lap. Finally, Clark looked down, and let out a deep breath.
"That's that," he said.
"What'd you do with it?" Buffy asked.
"Sent it into the sun."
"That's probably for the best. You really should go back and do that with the other one, too, just to be safe."
"Yeah." Clark crouched down beside them and spoke to Cara. "I'll be back as quick as I can."
"Hurry, okay?" Buffy told him. "I kinda think we should leave before the dimensions settle down and get too comfy like this."
"I'll hurry," Superman promised, and took off again.
"Or, wait!" Buffy called. Superman stopped in midair. "Take us with you and drop us off in Nebraska or something. That way you won't have to come all the way back to the Gobi Desert for us to all use the Recall Thingies together."
"Right." Buffy and Cara climbed aboard. Clark looked a little tired, close up, as he carried them back towards home. It had been a very long day.