See first chapter for disclaimers.

AUTHOR'S NOTE: Thanks to Storyseeker for beta-reading this. As usual, if you have any comments or preferences, please don't be shy. RandR.

PREVIOUSLY: Overlord

Play Acting

The girl was fast. Superhumanly fast. That and the bizarre costume she wore suggested she'd decided to be a superhero and had the power to back it up. She was blurring around the big metal-skinned bruiser with the mohawk and tossing out the cleanest smack talk either of them had ever heard.

"Guess this is a G-rated world," Faith said, smirking from behind the low wall of the car park where they had taken cover. Xander nodded absently as he considered Faith's words. The city they had arrived in seemed like a perfectly mundane mid-west American city at first. A newspaper they had found indicated that they were in Kansas City, as mundane a place as Xander could imagine. Then things had started to get weird.

A black teenage girl with Flash-like speed, bizarre fashion sense, and teeth so blindingly white they probably half-blinded her enemies when she smiled, was fighting a punk rocker type with metal skin and hair that looked like a wire brush. It sounded like the kind of thing you'd find in a kid's cartoon show. The damage the two were doing to the surrounding buildings, however, was quite real. The metal guy wasn't just incredibly strong, either. They saw him gesture with one hand and cause the hood of a wrecked car to tear itself off and fly to him so he could use it as a shield when the girl started throwing things at him. He had some kind of power over metal, and the young speedster, 14 at most, was dodging flying car parts as she zigzagged back and forth across the road. Thus, they were hiding as they watched the confrontation.

They weren't the only ones watching, though. There were a number of people watching, albeit from a safe distance. Some of them were actually cheering for the girl as if it was a sporting event of some sort. A few were even cheering for the villain.

"This is a kind of nuts we haven't seen before," Xander muttered, looking around at the crowd. "Do they think this is some kind of performance art or something?"

"Maybe it is." Faith shrugged, reasoning that it would hardly be the strangest thing they had encountered. "We don't really know what's going on. Let's keep watching. If the color blind munchkin gets in over her head, we step in."

"Color blind?" Xander asked, not looking away from the fight.

"Her outfit looks like a rainbow threw up."

Xander shrugged, acknowledging the point. Clearly, stealth was never going to be the girl's strong suit. They continued to watch in silence as the crowd cheered. He spared a moment to consider their options. Faith's slayer strength wouldn't be of much use against the metal guy, but there were ways of dealing with strong opponents that didn't involve brute force. Even as they watched, the two worked out a plan.

The villain seemed to be enjoying himself. The kid was fast, but she wasn't doing much damage, and her metallic opponent was making that plain. He was openly laughing at her efforts, but at the same time he didn't seem to be in a hurry to end the fight in a permanent fashion.

Maybe it was some kind of performance, Xander allowed. One that destroyed cars and damaged buildings to either side of the wide street they were fighting in. That seemed a little unlikely to him. There were broken windows and cracked walls on the buildings, indicating structural damage. Three cars had been smashed, and Xander somehow doubted that the owners were among the cheering crowd.

It suddenly seemed less likely to be a show when the metal guy actually managed to connect and sent the speedster skidding down the road uncontrollably. She came to rest against a wall of one of the damaged buildings and didn't get up.

"Okay. Time to get involved." Xander dashed off to do his part as Faith readied her weapon of choice. No way was she going to break a perfectly good blade against metal guy's skin, but there were other options.

Metal guy was moving toward the downed speedster. He looked surprised. Or maybe he was just disappointed that the fun was already over. It didn't matter. Faith had no intention of letting him reach her. The slayer ran at her top speed, as quietly as she could, till she was well within range. Then she gave a short sharp whistle.

Metal guy turned at the sound and Faith pulled the trigger. They had collected something at almost every one of their stops. A lot had been used up or discarded along the way. Magical items that worked in one world didn't always work in others, but the technology they had picked up functioned anywhere, and a few things had been held in reserve.

The small gun-like device she had acquired in one of the futuristic worlds they had visited was meant to serve the same purpose as a flare gun, but it didn't fire metal shells with chemicals that reacted producing the light. It fired a burst of energy that remained cohesive somehow until it reached a certain altitude. Or until it hit a solid object, such as metal man's face.

"AAAuuggh!" He staggered back, screaming as he was temporarily blinded. Faith tucked the gun away as she ran to the downed hero and scooped her up in a bridal carry.

"W-wha-?" The girl had been dazed by her fall but she was recovering quickly. "Who are you?"

"Faith. Don't worry. My partner will handle your playmate. I need to get you clear."

"Hey!" The metal guy yelled after them. "Come back here!" He started after them and Faith shifted her grip on the girl.

"Close your eyes," she whispered to the girl. Turning back, she fired another burst from the flare gun. This time, their enemy used the hood of the car he'd destroyed earlier to block the burst of energy. Faith fired again, aiming at the ground in front of him.

"AAA! Again?!"

The girl Faith carried snickered. "Nice shot, but you can put me down. I'm a hero. Being rescued doesn't really suit me."

"When he tagged you, you skidded heroically across 30 feet of asphalt. You okay to run?"

"Not my finest moment," she admitted, "but I do everything fast, including heal. Besides, you can't outrun him."

"Don't have to." Faith grinned, setting the girl down. The roar of an engine drowned out what ever she might have said next. A cry of alarm caused the speedster to spin in place. Out of the car park came a four-door pickup truck, the heaviest Xander could find, moving at near its top speed. The metal-skinned villain heard it and turned, but he didn't have time to react before it slammed into him, sending him flying through the air and into the wall of a bank. The truck braked hard and managed to come to a stop, pinning the super-villain to the wall of the building.

Xander slid across the truck's bench seat and bailed out of the passenger-side door, knowing that the truck wouldn't hold the man long. He quickly caught up to Faith and the colorful speedster. "Time to go," he said as he passed them. The metal man was already straining to get free.

"That way," the speedster pointed. "I need to get you to safety." She directed them into the car park and toward the upper level.

"You do know you can't beat him the way you've been fighting, right?" Faith asked. "He's strong and nearly invulnerable. You can't hit him hard enough to make a difference, at least with your fists."

"I appreciate you trying to help," she said as she guided them through the carpark and out to a currently empty street, "but this really wasn't necessary. I can handle him."

"Didn't seem to be making much of an impact," Xander noted.

"Don't have to." She hesitated a moment. "Little known fact about cape fights? No one actually gets hurt. Cold Steel is actually a good friend. Hitting me was an accident. He just got carried away."

"And the property damage?" Xander asked, not sure he believed what he was hearing. "Did the owners of those cars and buildings agree to have them wrecked?"

"They'll be fixed by tomorrow," the speedster assured them. "No one's actually breaking the law."

"You were right, Xan." Faith shook her head incredulously. "This is a kind of nuts we haven't seen before. We've met a few 'capes' who would love to move to a world where the villains aren't villains."

"World?" the speedster asked, sounding perplexed.

"We travel between dimensions." Xander explained. "Everywhere we go, we find trouble of one sort or another. This isn't the first world we've encountered with superheroes and supervillains. Except there, the villains actually commit crimes and try to kill the heroes that show up to stop them." He thought for a moment. "And not all the heroes there were actually heroes."

Faith nodded, making a face at the memory. "A few worlds back, we arrived just in time to stop a 'hero' who liked to torture people when she was out of costume from doing something really disgusting to a teenage girl." The speedster's eyes got wide at the implication. "While we were there, we met this teenage villain that never wanted to be a villain. Some psycho callin' himself Coil put a gun to her head and told her to work for him or else. We dropped her off on the next world we visited."

The speedster shuddered at the thought. "Well nothing like that happens here. The Hall wouldn't stand for it."

"Well, that's good." Xander nodded. "On the downside, we still don't know why we're here."