"Does anyone else feel like going out and partying? I've got wicked H&Hes after that fight and most of the bars are still open." Faith was jaunting into her room to change into street clothes, already rushing into her next high. Willow wasn't sure what was normal for the group, but she felt like she could use some quiet time after her night of grand larceny, near death, and second degree murder.
Dawn had different ideas though, immediately perking up from fiddling with the lock on her gauntlet. "Oooh! I'll go. Just give me half an hour to shower and stuff."
"It's already way, way, way past your bedtime Dawn Patrol." Xander was carefully taking the Cretin costume off, watching not to tear the ruined sleeve any worse. "Warren, you still had some of this material left over right?" Willow looked in regret at the ruins of her own flowing silky costume, torn in multiple places and barely holding together. She supposed it was lucky that someone on her team sidelined in this sort of thing.
Warren in fact, was too busy checking over some damage on April to enter the conversation yet, and Dawn refused to let her chance for late night partying go. "It's a weekend! And even if it wasn't, it's not like I go to school anyways. We could have the tutors shift into a later schedule or something."
"Dawn, you're twelve. Even if you manage to sneak into one of Faith's dives, you'll just get chucked out again the second you show your face."
"Maybe I'm a late bloomer?" Dawn tested. "Hmmm. Warren, what could I trade you for makeup to look nine years older?"
Just as it seemed Warren might be about to answer, Faith sauntered out of her room again, wearing a red leather outfit that didn't conceal much more than Slayer's did. "I suppose I'm on my own again?"
"Xander won't let me go. And it's so totally unfair that you don't even have to shower," Dawn whined.
"I could swim through shit and come out smelling like roses." Faith then addressed the whole group, "Alright everyone, we'll meet up sometime after noon tomorrow to shoot the shit and talk the walk. And Sabrina, that was a mucho awesome rookie performance, keep it up." Faith gave Willow a tap on the butt, making her jump up in surprise, and before Willow could gather her senses she was gone, up a tunnel to one of the Lair's attached and inconspicuous above ground flat.
Willow was stunned for another moment, then said "Does she always do that? It's not that I'm … not, but I'm not, I think, and that was certainly a thing that she did, before she left."
"She has a tendency to be affectionate after life and death situations. If it makes you feel any better, I'll be happy to redeem all your Faith-related physical contact in the future." Xander offered.
Dawn shoved him immediately, finally divested of her sizable (but apparently not very heavy) equipment. "Eww, Xander, don't be gross." She paused, then started peeling at her cheek a bit. "Don't forget to take these fake face-altery thing off too Willow, I forgot I had mine on and went to sleep in it last time."
"You could at least call my invention by its proper name, squirt. It's a coherent cosmetic mask." Warren had finished his spot checks on April, and was now removing the blonde wig over her natural (unnatural?) brown hair and her coherent cosmetics as well.
"These are really good Warren. They come on and off so easily too." The coherent cosmetics were thin patches they could wear on their faces to change up their natural look enough to seem like a slightly different person. Combined with a domino mask, both Warren and Dawn agreed it would foil computer based facial recognition by slightly altering features around their ears and on their foreheads. Willow was just happy that it helped her compete with Faith in the sexy costume department.
With her natural copper hair shook out of her longer black wig and her real face on display, Willow sort of wished she looked like Dark Witch normally instead. Warren's Tinker focus seemed kind of creepy at times, but you couldn't really argue with the synthetic beauty he produced.
"I'm going to get myself and April cleaned up in my lab. After that I should be busy for the rest of the night touching up the damage from those fucking blood whips and optimizing her machine learning data from the fight. I'll talk to you all at the meeting tomorrow." And now was one of those times. Warren's many upgrades to the Lair included sound dampening in the walls, but considering the amount of time he spent alone with April, even Willow had a pretty good idea what, or perhaps who, he'd be doing tonight.
Warren left to his private workshop and room with a still cheery April in tow, and Willow was left with Xander and his little sister in the fairly luxurious common room. "So, my costume is sort of halfway to falling off and I'm still covered with blood. I should probably go shower, then, umm, TV?" Willow said awkwardly.
"I call the Lair shower, it gets the best water pressure." Dawn scooted off, and Xander shrugged his shoulders and led Willow up through the passage Faith had taken up, leading into the basement proper of the somewhat dilapidated flat the Lair was built under.
Faith, Xander, and Warren nominally rented the flat, and though it was a little dingy adding it to the Lair made the whole seem pretty spacious. There were three bedrooms up here, though only one bathroom; Warren practically lived in his lab, ceding the three aboveground rooms to the other Scoobies. Willow got the sense she could've moved in, but in fact she was still living at her parents' house like a normal high schooler. Said parents currently touring Europe made late night escapades like this easier for the near future though.
They approached the bathroom, and Xander theatrically opened the door for her. "You can go first, I'll wait. Don't worry, there's no way you'll take longer than Dawn." Xander sat on the floor to avoid dirtying the furniture and flipped on the TV.
The flat with convenient underground base of course was no accident; it had been made available to the Scoobies by Faith's mysterious employer. Willow was pretty leery of not even knowing the name of the person giving her 'suggestions', but she couldn't deny he seemed to be providing a lot for the team. He'd somehow managed to get Xander custody of Dawn, and even gotten her pulled out of school and into an elaborate tutoring program after her trigger.
After showering the filthy evidence of all her numerous felonies away, Willow dressed in her street clothes and waved Xander through. She took a cursory look around the flat she hadn't seen much of yet, but there wasn't really much to see, and she went back down to the Lair.
Moving between floors really emphasized the contrast between the old flat that looked like a bunch of poor twenty-somethings were living in it and the shiny Lair that had been refurbished by Warren and stuffed full of ill-gotten gains. Still feeling a little overwhelmed, she plunked herself down on the couch and sort of sank into the cushions.
Just as she was about to nod off, Dawn returned from her shower, somehow even more chipper and excited than before. She vaulted the back of the couch and crash-landed next to Willow before saying, "Girl talk time!"
"Oh. Ok. I'm not really sure what to talk about though, since I haven't really had many close female friends lately. And by lately, I mean pretty much since ever. I mean, before joining, since both you and Faith seem friendly. Faith was ah, really friendly earlier in fact," Willow trailed off toward the end, unsure how deep she should dig her hole.
"Yeah! Faith is totally bi and proud and cool and stuff. Some guys from E88 hassled her about it out of costume last month and she totally managed to beat them all up without revealing anything!" Dawn hadn't changed to a sitting position yet, but was waving her hands around and miming punches regardless.
"Oh, that's good. Great even. I'm totally non-judgmental and accepting Willow," Willow said.
"Hmm, so you aren't into her then?" Dawn got a mischievous look in her eye. "What about my brother, do you have a thing for him? I remember you totally used to hang out all the time when I was little."
Willow blushed, and tried to figure out what to say, and was eventually saved by Xander wandering down the stairs. "Hey girls! So what are your opinions: Charlie Brown marathon or Muppet Treasure Island?"
"Umm, that sounds fun, but maybe we should try to figure out who was trying to kill us first? I mean, the extra two people?" Willow asked.
"That won't take long with my awesome set-up!" Dawn bragged, strolling over to the computer. She started typing in a flurry and a Parahumans Online window opened onto her monitor, and then also on the big TV at the front of the room. Dawn opened the cape wiki and went to the search feature.
Willow shuddered a bit, determined not to freak about her near death experience. "The woman that stabbed me called herself Miss Edith, does that bring up anything? It was like she was one step ahead of everything I did, without April diving in I would've been a goner."
Noticing her discomfort, Xander sat down next to her and put an arm around her shoulder. "But thanks to the magic of Weird Science and, ah, black magic, you're perfectly alright with nary a wound." During the trip home, there had been plenty of time for Willow to patch herself up completely, along with the rest of the Scoobies. She was a little apprehensive to feel Cure Wounds fade away with Faith's departure, but she supposed nobody was likely to get hurt in the safety of the Lair.
It seemed like he was about to shuffle over to the other side of the couch, but Willow impulsively grabbed the arm and leaned into his neck. "I needed you too. It was really smart of you to use doubles of yourself to snap me back to my senses."
Xander seemed uncomfortable at the praise, and replied, "I've used them to coordinate in combat like that before. It can be trickier to get them to say things than just move around though, so I usually don't when I need to push a lot of them out quickly."
Willow nodded, secretly excited that Xander probably felt her affirmative instead of seeing it. "Are big things like the cars like that too? You used them as a distraction at the start, but once we were in the fight you were just spinning out the doubles."
Xander explained, "Copying a person and having it do a thing is the easiest. When I do cars or walls or other stuff it always ends up a little crummy around the edges, even when there are examples around. I still can't really get headlights right, for example."
Dawn had started humming in the background, and finally chose this moment to cut in, "So, Miss Edith is a thing. A vague thing; apparently she's some kind of combat thinker, short term precog. Also supposedly crazy as a barrel of monkeys." A picture of Miss Edith showed up on the TV with her entry; even though the picture was taken from rather far away Miss Edith appeared to be waving at the camera and smiling. She was carrying a shopping bag and had what looked like a tiny pair of shoes hanging around her neck by the laces.
Willow agreed, "I can vote a yes on the crazy. I think maybe she was predicting blood movements somehow? Her spell let me see all the blood around. Like, see through other things to see the blood, I mean. It was kind of gross. Also, April managed to surprise her, and hey: no blood there!"
"And Willow takes 'Creepy Thinkers' for 800," said Xander good naturedly.
Dawn continued, she's been travelling with this Spike guy lately; take a look at this! The mysterious blood whip cape appeared on the screen, complete with leather jacket. He was using two of the whips to swing between low buildings and was attacking a flying hero with the other pair. "Nothing much we didn't already know; has blood whips, will travel."
A map of North America took up the screen, and a dozen red circles were superimposed over major cities. "They move around a lot, twenty different sightings in two years. The last time they were settled down for long anywhere was in LA."
She double clicked LA on the map and an article opened on 'The Unholy Order of Saint Vigeous.' Xander interjected, "Well, isn't that a pretentious name."
"They seem like they were a pretty pretentious group." Dawn continued her infodump, "The other members were 'The Master', Darla, and get this, Twilight!" Dawn turned around to stick out her tongue at Xander. "See! I told you I'm not the only supervillain to think Twilight is cool!"
"Dawn, I think he got his name before the publication date," Xander replied.
She did some more clicking, and then got a disappointed look on her face. "Oh. Well at least he kept it."
Willow decided to get the conversation back on track before Dawn asked her any searching questions about fictional sparkly vampires in front of Xander. "So this means Spike and Miss Edith will probably leave town just as quick as they came in right? They don't seem to have a reason to stay, and without them the Merchants will be all feeble and unable to exact horrific revenge."
Dawn nodded confidently. "Definitely. I bet we won't be seeing them again."