To the rush of an infinite wind, Peleps Kolohi stepped through the gateway. There was a flash of silver light, and the blackened-yet-living vegetation was no more. In its place was a narrow street between tall brick buildings, half-filled at various points with big metal containers of refuse. The buildings were dingy where Luthe had shone, regular and blocky where most towns she had known followed the organic flows of geomancy (if not always well). Yet in material, and in the various objects that cluttered the space (brilliantly-white paper! black refuse bags of a slick substance she had never seen! a boxy, enclosed carriage with a mechanical engine exposed!) it was clearly worlds in advance of every other city she had ever laid eyes on, save only Luthe.

She had stepped into another world. She had stepped into another Age. This might not be the greatest wonder she had seen...but it was up there.

There was Renjin, staring about him in wonder that was surely no greater than her own. And there was Fred, the Dreamer of Reason, whom Kolohi suddenly felt she understood far better. "You're home," Kolohi said. "It's good to see this with you."

"It is good," Fred said. She looked around, seeing the city with new and old eyes at once. "But I'm not home." She smiled at Kolohi, a pleased smile, an excited smile, but she did not kiss the ground or race into a familiar building. "I've been here before."

"Is this Tek-sas?" Renjin asked. "You said you were from a small town, but I'm having trouble judging."

Fred shook her head. "This is Los Anjalis, or Ellay for short."

Renjin scratched his head. "The city is called 'the spirit messengers'?"

Fred blinked, then burst into laughter. "Actually, yes! Ciudad de Los Angeles-the City of Angels! I'm not remembering why right now."

"I will be on the lookout for these angels," Renjin said. "One never knows."

"Remember we're not staying long this time," Fred said. "I want to make sure there's no apocalypse going on, so you have a little time to see the sights, but then we have to go for now."

"We're safe using our powers here?" Kolohi asked. "The Dragonblooded don't rule, correct?"

Fred began to twitch in many different places, most of all her fingers and lips. "Kolohi, mortals rule here. Also there are demons and sorcerors who could notice you."

Was Fred really afraid of them still? True, a city of mortals improperly handled might be trouble, but she and Renjin knew what they were doing. As for mere demons or mortal sorcerors-was she joking? "No Exalted, though?"

"Just Faith," Fred said. "I don't know anything much about her."

"Buffy's successor?" Renjin shrugged. "Even if she's a Solar, it's three on one."

"Excuse me," an unfamiliar voice said. Kolohi looked up to see a woman in strange fur-lined clothing pointing a metal rod at them. "Did you people just make a mystical disturbance in my neighborhood? Because I don't approve of that."

"Mortal?" Kolohi murmured to Fred.

"She must be," Fred said uncertainly.

Kolohi grunted, rolled her eyes, and burst free of her human form, growing bulky and armored. All she had to do waa scare the woman.

"Nice try," the woman said, and erupted into a towering mass of fur and fangs. It wasn't a war form, but it was still a huge bear.

Maybe Kolohi'd made an error of judgement? She heard Fred gulp; she really hadn't known.

This could be a problem.

Chapter 46-Disputed Territory

The idea of turning into a grizzly in public, in broad daylight, still left Kate Lockley's insides quivering. This wasn't how supernatural stuff was handled. Only now there was a mutant humanoid turtle standing in front of her. Just maybe she could be mistaken for someone filming a movie?

"Hey!" the slightly-built girl in the jumpsuit shouted, and took hold of the turtle by the arm. "Kolohi, wait. She must be a Lunar too. Can we try and figure out what she wants? She's just defending-"

"Let her defend, then!" The turtle charged.

Maybe it'd have been better to open fire. She was committed to meeting strength with strength now. Well, she wasn't exactly weak. Kate dropped to all fours and barreled forward, sending the turtle flying up and over her back, then swung around as fast as she could to clamp her mouth on the being's-Kolohi's?-leg. She bore down with all the strength in her jaw, tasting the creature's blood, but its hide was extraordinarily tough.

The turtle brought a huge fist down on Kate's back, cracking ribs, but she lunged forward, slamming the monster into a wall, shaking her head for all she was worth, trying to tear something loose. The monster ripped itself free, bleeding profusely but hardly seeming injured. "That your best?" it snarled.

That was a foolish question to ask. Not only could Kate not answer in this form, she honestly had no idea what her best was. If this thing was like her, and thought her effort was lousy, then she must be capable of more.

There was a state of mind snipers were said to enter, a kind of cold absolute focus on killing their targets. Kate felt that mindset roll over her now. This time when her jaws closed on the creature's leg, she felt bone crunch. This time when she worried it, the monster toppled.

And then it laughed at her, a laugh that spoke of genuine enjoyment, and Kate wrapped her paws around the turtle-thing and squeezed. The shell held, but Kate felt its pinned arms break.

She bit at its head, but the creature reared up suddenly to stand on the leg she was certain she'd broken moments ago and returned the bite, crushing Kate's left paw. Kate had the disturbing feeling that Kolohi could have severed it and had chosen not to.

It was healing. She needed more power to kill it. Sometimes gun trumped bear; sometimes bear trumped gun. It was too bad she couldn't have b-

Kate felt her hips shift and her thumbs twist. Elements of her costume reappeared, including her holster, with her gun back inside. It fit clumsily against her altered hands, but she could draw and she would be able to fire. "I could tell you to stand down," she growled, "but I'm not in the mood." Ignoring the pain in her other hand, she held Kolohi immobile with her left arm and pressed the revolver to the creature's temple.

"Stop!" the skinny girl shouted, but Kate was in no mood to stop now. She began to squeeze the trigger, but a squid tentacle wrapped around her arm and wrenched it away from the turtle-thing's head. The gun still went off, but the bullet spanged off its shell. The girl had vanished and in her place was a squid-thing straight out of Lovecraft. "Kolohi, that's enough. You've made your point." The squid tried to wrench Kate's gun away, so she fused it into her hand. "Damn it! We didn't come here to fight!" It tangled her further, dragging her away from the turtle-woman.

"Speak for yourself," Kate growled. "You're working for Lilah Morgan, aren't you?"

"What?" The squid-thing began to make a rasping heave. Only after several seconds could Kate identify it as laughter. "Angel Investigations rescued me from Pylea. I don't know a whole lot about Lilah, but I know she's not one of the good guys."

The murderous urge slowly subsided. "Then I have bad news for you."

"Did you seriously do that superhero thing where another hero shows up," Robin asked, "and you fight just because?" Amy snickered.

"We fought because we're Lunars," Kolohi said, "and I was testing whether she was strong enough to defend her territory."

Kate frowned and nodded slowly. "I don't know why that sounds familiar, but it does. You know, I nearly shot you."

"Not as much of a deterrent as you might think," Fred pointed out. "Renjin, why'd you stay out of it?"

"The lady's an obvious Full Moon," he said with a shrug. "I figured I'd leave it between her and the Jade Wave."

"Actually my caste hasn't settled yet," Kate said. "We're not sure if it will. Things have changed."

"If it hasn't settled in a year or so," Fred said, "send for me and someone will come to help fix it."

"You're not staying?" Robin wondered. "I thought you wanted to get home."

"I did," Fred said. "Then I got there. Things have changed. I'm Queen of Luthe, to start with. Anyway, I also have to help deal with Buffy. By the time I figured out how to get back, she'd lost it. She's helping the Yozis-the Old Ones-escape. We have to keep her from destroying the world."

"We've got the same problem with Lilah Morgan at this end," Amy said. "Only there's some other game going on that we don't completely understand."

"She's the one doling out the Exaltations on our side," Kate explained. "We don't know why she doesn't just keep them locked up, because she's having trouble keeping Exalts on her side."

"Why's it so important she win this...election thing?" Kolohi asked. "Why not just attack?"

"She is attacking," Amy said. "She's doing it Fiend-style...um, corrupt Eclipse style," she added, seeing that Renjin and Kolohi looked baffled. "She's using the rules to break the system. If she becomes President she'll be ruler of the most powerful country on Earth, with enough military force it'll probably take the full Exalted host to beat her."

"Maybe not that much," Fred said, "but you guys have barely scratched the surface of what an Exalt can do. You should see what Buffy's capable of by now, and there are elders who can do things she can't imagine yet."

"I can grant wishes," Amy said. "Sam can make a gun shoot fire. Harmony's suddenly a genius."

"All that's just the beginning," Renjin said. "But if you're really working with Five Days' Darkness, he's told you that."

"He did," Kate said. "At least he said we'd keep getting more powerful. He was a little vague about the scope."

"The Exalted were created for the ultimate war," Renjin said. "We keep gaining power the longer we live, and not just in the supernatural sense. I'm sure you were a good peace officer, Kate-a protector of the helpless. That'd fit you being Lunar. But you have the potential to live for thousands of years, and you'll be a lot more than police by the time you reach a hundred."

"Like what?" Kate barked out a laugh. "Queen of California?"

"Don't rule it out," Fred said seriously. "The kind of power Exalted develop if they live long enough is hard not to use. Some end up as master architects or inventors, but that's just another kind of political power. Remember Oppenheimer? 'I am become Death, destroyer of worlds.' Now imagine that he lived thousands of years and kept inventing the whole time."

"Buffy didn't have that kind of influence," Amy argued.

"But she did," Fred explained. "The Slayer held off demonkind for thousands of years. No individual Slayer lived long enough to get really powerful on her own, but they still had an immense impactagainst change. Without them, Earth would either be long-dead or part of a demon empire. The Slayer line bought humanity time to build new civilizations."

"Now there are a handful of you," Kolohi said. "Even if you try to do nothing but solve supernatural crises, you'll put every mortal investigator and demon hunter out of business, and they're pretty extraordinary themselves, as mortals go. They'll go into other fields-politics, research, the military, whatever."

"And don't think it'll stop with you, either," Renjin said. "Dragon-blooded breed. Even if there aren't any men out there, it'll take a good long while before the blood dilutes to nothing. Odds are that someone will release more of the Exaltations, too, even if Lilah decides to stop."

"So Earth is doomed to become a collection of god-empires ruled by petty tyrants?" Kate scowled. "Not going to let that happen."

"I've been told there was a utopia for a few thousand years under the Solars," Fred said. "It went bad eventually, but we can do better this time."

"Also," Renjin pointed out, "don't forget you're part of the problem now."

"So," Fred asked, "what's it like?"

"Incredible," Harmony said. "Incredibly good most of the time. Only sometimes it's incredibly scary. Like, I read Flowers for Algernon for the first time a couple of days before you got here, and I sorta had I think it was an anxiety attack."

Fred nodded. "I can imagine. If it helps, I'm getting smarter too, and as a Lunar I fluctuate a lot more. I can be brilliant at one thing for a little while and then I crash."

Harmony shuddered. "That's got to be totally awful on the downswing."

"Just remember, you're not going to suffer the Algernon-Gordon effect, and you have peers you can interact with. Charlie didn't, and that was a big part of his problems." Fred leaned over to examine Harm's code. "It's nice and clean. I'm impressed. What's it for?"

"I'm serious about going public. I made this to trawl the web for demons and other supernatural stuff so I can collect it in one place." Harmony opened another window. "See this video? It's, like, completely unedited footage of a Fyarl demon, but it keeps getting misidentified as a hoax. I can debunk the real fakers too, so no one thinks I'm just gullible."

"That could be useful," Fred acknowledged. "Have you been able to tie anything to Lilah?"

"Not yet, and we've only got a couple of months. I mean, what if it's too late for this kind of thing?" A third window popped open. "There's Droodzilla leaving the penthouse. I could make a scandal with that, maybe."

"I'm sure you could." Harm definitely didn't realize her own strength socially just yet; she didn't use many psychological terms, but she intuitively understood people on a level that Five Days' Darkness said most new Twilights would have drooled over. "It might not be a good idea, though."

"Wrong kind of backlash." Harmony nodded and clicked the window closed. "Last resort if she looks like she's about to free the Yozis? No, probly too late at that point."

"Are you sure you can convince anyone of this? People in our world usually only believe what they're ready for." Sunnydale syndrome was an extreme example, but there were plenty of other oblivious people in the world.

"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence," Harm said a little smugly, and opened another window. This one began with Kolohi and Kate's fight in the alley. "Betcha didn't notice me." The images were clearly taken with a little handheld camera, but they definitely didn't look edited. "We're taking lots of selfie footage. It'll get our foot in the door, even with some of the news still calling us a hoax." Another window seemed to be an interview with Lorne.

"They talk about October surprises for a reason," Fred acknowledged. "This'll be the mother of them."

"These things are everywhere?" Kolohi squeezed a vampire's head in each giant fist till they burst. "There's nothing like this at home."

Faith leapt into the air and high-kicked another pair of them in the face. The golden ring on her forehead had begun to shine, but Five Days' Darkness was right-without trying to hide it, she had a lot more energy to burn. "They're like rats," she said, "only bigger. There aren't as many as it seems like, though. High turnover, and they like to hang out together in big cities and hellmouths."

"So they said you invented a martial art?" Kolohi slammed the heads off the ones Faith had kicked as they stumbled backwards.

"Dude, that wasn't me! I still haven't remembered any of that stuff." She owed Five two services, and maybe more for his help here, or at least he said she did, but she still hadn't remembered anything about Shadow's Grace except a few bits and pieces of stabbing people.

"Of course it was you," Kolohi said, sounding confused. "It'll come back to you in time."

Faith shrugged. "If I remember I remember. That was a long time ago. I've got bigger worries these days, like Kate's water bill."

"I don't know why you don't just take what you want," Kolohi said. "You're a Prince of the Earth. The world belongs to you-especially to you, since you're a Solar."

Faith did the only thing she could do. She busted a gut laughing. "I did that for a year. Even my Watcher said it was fine, as long as I didn't attract too much attention. I ended up working for the guy trying to turn into an Old One. I've been on the wagon for less than a year now, you know."

Kolohi scratched her massive head. "I don't understand this world, Faith. But I promise, it's better because you're here to fight for it."

Faith offered a high five that Kolohi took a few seconds to understand and return. "We're five by five, then. C'mon, let's patrol a while longer."

"Good with me," Kolohi rumbled. "I hope I get to work with you again."

"You don't seem as powerful as the others," Amy said to Renjin, floating their plates over.

"You're looking at the wrong things," Renjin said. "Hey, is this a taco? Fred made these in Luthe!" He took a bite. "Not bad. Anyway, you could use more of the kind of social power I use. When I tell people what to do, they do it. You could ruin Lilah's whole strategy that way."

"Sounds like cheating," Amy said. "How do I learn it? Better than letting Lilah Morgan run the planet."

"I don't know," Renjin said. "You're not a Lunar, or any kind of Exalt I'm familiar with really. But you have some kind of powers in that direction you can learn. All Exalted do. Ask Five Days' Darkness about it."

"I'm on it," Amy agreed. "Maybe you should hang around and help us."

"I might," Renjin said. "It won't do much good to stop Lilah here if the Yozis get free at home."

"True." Amy focused on her telekinesis. It felt as if she could use it on a deep enough level to do things like make fire, but she hadn't succeeded yet. She floated her drink up to her mouth as if it were in a straw. Some people said you shouldn't use magic that way, but she was practicing, not just screwing around. That was different, right? "What kinds of things can you do?"

"Well, let's say I go out and make a speech. I can make people afraid of something-say, an invasion-or make them want things, like foreign food. That might not sound like much, but it's not a hit-and-miss thing. I can go out on the street right now and scare people about a foreign invasion, and I don't even know who your neighbors are."

"So it works every time?" Amy frowned. That sounded like mind control, and she drew...well, a dotted line there, anyway. If it stopped Lilah...

"Eh...maybe nine out of ten, instead of three out of ten. It's not just completely perfect." Renjin blushed a little, embarrassed that it wasn't. Not that he could tell people what to think and make them think it.

Well...maybe she shouldn't be either.

"It's weird working with Dragon-Blooded," Fred explained. "It's got to be even weirder for Renjin and Kolohi. Not that I'm complaining," she added as Sam incinerated a vampire with one bullet.

"It's weird being told that I'm not quite human any more," Sam countered, "but being around Lunars helps."

"That's fair," Fred agreed. "Maybe it'll help Buffy too. Hang on." She raised her hands and began to chant.

Sam shrugged and continued plugging the vampires with gunfire. There were a lot of them, but it was one hit, one kill, and they weren't adapting very well. "You seem like a sciencey type. Is that magic?"

Fred's aura flared silver over shadow, and a line of barbed razor wire accreted out of thin air and hurled itself, spinning, at the necks of the largest group of vampires. "Yup. But sufficiently-analyzed magic is indistinguishable from technology."

Sam smiled grimly. "Can I do it too?"

"Takes practice, but I think so. Battle sorcery's a high art in Creation. No reason it can't be here too...other than the usual problems with bottles and genies." Fred sprouted a pair of insectile legs and scurried up a wall to catch an escaping vampire.

"From what you people and Five Days' Darkness say, that shit's already hit the fan...to completely mix up the metaphor there."

Fred let out a heavy sigh as she dropped back to the ground. "Probably. Exaltations were meant to make humans able to fight Primordials. Nukes do more guaranteed damage, but we're each more powerful now than an ICBM, in our own ways. Of course, there is a bottle, if we want to try using it."

Sam scowled. "Just so you know, I'm taking that under advisement."

"Verbal passcode required."

"Not dead," Warren intoned, "nor not of the living." This mystical stuff was all a crock. It was a matter of science and being in the proper mindset, nothing more. Ignorant people talked about demons when it was obvious this was just the resolution of the Fermi paradox: the aliens had always been here.

Of course, having his skin back would've been nice.

"Very interesting," Weeping Raiton Cast Aside said, examining the computer screens. "What does it say?"

Warren shrugged. What did it matter what some other-dimensional primitive thought? He read off the text. A little joke on his part. "SKYNET operating system online and ready for distribution. How may I be of assistance, Mr. Mears?"

"Sky...net?" Weeping Raiton peered at him as if his face would reveal the secret. But the Master must have been more savvy than he looked. He began to giggle.

By the time his laughter died down, an hour later, Warren was really, really annoyed.