Disclaimer: I don't own the challenge; that belongs to Lee. Buffy and Angel and respective characters belong to Joss Whedon, and Ocean's Eleven belongs to Warner Bros.
Feedback: Please do.
Challenge: Basically, redo the basic plot of Ocean's Eleven with Buffy and Angel characters. Angel should take the place of Danny Ocean, and Connor as Linus Caldwell. The other characters are up to you.
Other Requirements:
Keep the running gag of the Rusty character always eating/drinking something.
All characters should be at the jobs they were in the movie (Frank a dealer in a casino, Basher in the middle of another heist, Rusty teaching movie stars how to play poker, Danny/Angel in jail, Livingston working freelance for the FBI, etc.)
Angel's Eleven
The next day, Spike sat in his hotel room in the Bellagio, studying the various explosives he'd managed to acquire for this mission. He'd known from the beginning that he'd gone over-the-top- after all, they only needed a few small plastic explosives- but he still preferred to be prepared for any eventuality. Currently he was working at 'carving' one of the lumps of explosive into an emerald-shape, another two already prepared for the purpose and a fourth one awaiting similar treatment. He knew they wouldn't stand up to close scrutiny, but under a cursory glance they should look authentic enough to get by even Abrams' well-trained eyes…
There was a sudden knock at the door.
"House cleaning," a voice said at the other side of the door.
"Just jumping into the shower, can you come back later?" Spike called back, only giving the maid a third of his attention; the remaining two-thirds were split between the faux emerald in his hand and the TV, where a reporter was broadcasting live from a scene that Spike had come to know all too well.
"We're here at the historic Paradiso Hotel and Casino, once the prize resort of Las Vegas, now seconds away from demolition..." the reporter spoke. The moment had come for Nabbit's casino to be demolished, but, even though this event was the main reason the crew had even managed to get this far in their plans (After all Nabbit never would have funded them unless he wanted revenge againsts Abrams), Spike was the only member of the Eleven immediately available to watch the full event as it was televised. Nabbit had gone down to the casino himself, accompanied by Angel and Connor in case things turned nasty, but the rest of the Eleven were already occupied with constructing the duplicate vault; they still had a few kinks to iron out.
Just down the street from the Parker Abrams Trinity of casinos, a crowd had already gathered to witness the destruction of the Paradiso casino first-hand.
Parker Abrams, of course, was one of them, his fingers already hovering over the plunger that would trigger the dynamtie that would send the casino to kingdom come, and his face in the spotlight. Buffy was another, wearing a pair of sunglasses and standing 'near' to her man- near, in this instance, being the steps up to the stage; Parker hadn't wanted her close enough to the centre to draw attention away from him. Angel and Connor stood in the crowd, some distance apart as they watched Nabbit walk onto the stage.
"... and here's David Nabbit," the reporter said, turning to indicate the billionaire in question, "former owner of the Paradiso, come to bid farewell to his fabled resort and wish Parker Abrams all the best with his future plans for the property..."
Parker warmly shook Nabbit's hand, although both of them knew that he was only doing it for the TV cameras and newspaper reporters.
"Good to see you," Parker said to Nabbit loudly, so that the cameras could all hear it.
"Go and get stuffed, why don't you?" Nabbit retorted in a quieter voice; he didn't want to cause a scene in public, especially since Parker would be getting an even worse blow to his reputation in a few days…
As Parker turned back to the plunger that would set off the dynamite, turning a Paradiso into the biggest pile of rubble in the city, Angel and Buffy briefly locked eyes, Angel giving Buffy a little grin before she turned away. Connor stared critically at his father, wondering who the woman was to attract so much attention from him, but shoved it to the back of his mind; he'd come here to watch the historic event before him, not keep an eye on his father.
As the cameras flashed in his direction, Parker smiled and waved at the cheering audience, before he took the plunger in his hands and pushed it down.
As the Paradiso crumbled just outside Spike's window, even as Spike focused his attention on the TV rather than the real thing behind him, the lights and TV in his room flickered and went out.
After sitting in the dark for a fewmoments, just in case this was all a mere fluke and the power supply was perfectly intact, Spike sighed.
"Shit," he muttered, as he scrambled for the door, sticking a "Do Not Disturb" sign on it as he ran for the street.
If this was caused by what he thought it was, they were about to have a very serious problem…
In the warehouse where the Eleven had concealed their faux vault, the remaining ten members of the team (Spike still absent without leaving any hint as to where he was going) sat around the vault as Wesley explained the plan to them one more time; with the plan only a couple of days from completion, it had been decided to give everyone the day off prior to the night of the heist, so he wanted to go over the groundwork now rather than later.
"Call is at five-thirty," Wesley said, as he looked around the room once again; it may have been Angel's plan, but Wesley was the better at capturing attention when public speaking was required. "Makeup and costume. Giles's package arrives at seven-fifteen, and Connor grabs our codes. All goes well there and we're a go. Seven-thirty Faith and Gwen deliver Oz and we're committed; from that point, we have thirty minutes to blow the power or he suffocates.
"Once the electricity goes, all entry points to the vault and its elevator will automatically lock down for two minutes. That's when we make our move..."
A few minutes later, the false vault was deserted. As the door opened, two guards wheeled in a cash cart, leaving it in the vault's centre before they marched out again, closing the thick metal door behind them. As the vault locked, the green lasers on the floor of the floor, programmed to trigger an alarm if the link was broken, activated, even as Oz opened the false top of the cart revealing his neatly-'folded' form.
Inhaling deeply, Oz then slowly unspooled himself from the cash cart, hauling himself outwards until he crouched on top of it, studying his surroundings with the grace and elan of a cat.
From outside the vault, in the monitoring room that had been developed to allow the crew to monitor the training programs, Wesley's voice suddenly appeared over the speakers in the vault.
"OK," Wesley said as he looked at Oz, trying not to be aware of Willow's sudden nervousness as she looked at the first boy she'd ever loved as he studied his surroundings. "They've put you in the middle of the room, far from everything. You have to get from here to the door without touching the floor. What do you do?"
"Five says he shorts it," Gunn commented casually.
"Ten says he doesn't," Connor retorted as he looked back at Gunn; he'd grown to have a lot of faith in the acrobat's abilities.
From a dead squat, Oz leapt from the cash cart to the set of shelves five yards away, hands first, and grabbed it safely without his legs even coming close to touching the floor. As Gunn tossed Conner the tenner he owed the young pickpocket, Oz began to inch his way along the shelves, to a position where he could jump to the door…
Then a door slammed behind the crew and Spike entered the room, his normally immaculately-clean clothes covered from head to toe in sewage.
"We're in deep shit," he said, as the others turned to look at him.
After a few moments, Gunn broke the silence.
"Really?" he asked, looking Spike up and down critically. "No offence, but it looks like you're the only one who's been there."
"The damn demo crew didn't use a coaxial lynch to back the mainline!" Spike yelled in frustration as he sat in front of the other members of the Eleven, each one subtly trying not to smell his now extremely foul body odour; Gwen had volunteered to hose him off, but he wanted to tell them what had happened first. "Onioned the mainframe couplet!"
"You understand any of this?" Nabbit whispered over to Willow, grateful that they were both at the back of the group.
"I'll explain later," Willow promised the billionaire, Spike continuing to talk as though nothing had happened.
"Blew the backup grid one by one!" he yelled, looking at the group as though this was somehow all their fault. "Like dominoes!"
"Spike," Angel said, trying not to show that he, like the others, had no real idea what his old 'colleague' was going on about. "What happened?"
"Those bloody demolition bastards," Spike said, as he glared at Angel. "They did exactly what I planned to do, only they did it by accident! Now they know their weakness, and they're fixing it!"
"So...?" Angel asked, waving one hand in a prompting gesture.
"So," Spike said, as he looked back at Angel, "unless we decide to do this job in Reno, we're screwed.
Angel groaned.
Great, he thought to himself. Just what we need… And things had been going so well up until now too.
"We could-" Wesley began.
"By tomorrow?" Angel interrupted. Wesley just stopped and shook his head; evidently his idea wouldn't work under those kind of time constraints.
For a few moments, the various members of the Eleven just stood there, each trying to come up with a solution to this new problem, when Spike clicked his fingers, inspiration apparently striking him as all eyes turned back to him.
"We could use a pinch," the former heroin adict said, a wide grin on his face.
Instantly Angel was looking harshly at Spike, a focused expression in his eyes.
"What," Angel asked, glaring at Spike critically,"is a pinch?"
"A pinch is the equivalent of a cardiac arrest for any broad-band electrical circuitry," Spike said casually.
Angel's eyes widened slightly at that; he'd always thought that the long-winded scientific explanations were Willow's thing rather than Spike's.
"Or better yet," Spike said, noticing the confusion of around half the people in the room (Willow, Giles, Wesley and Oz the only obvious exceptions), "A pinch is a bomb... but without the bomb. See, every time a nuclear weapon detonates, it unleashes an electromagnetic pulse that shuts down any power source within its vicinity."
"What, you mean… you drop a nuke, everything near enough to it gets turned off?" Faith asked, looking at Spike inquiringly.
"Yep," the convict said, smiling in approval at the thief before turning back to the others. "'Course, that tends not to matter in most cases because the nuclear weapon destroys everything you might need power for anyway. Now a pinch creates a similar electromagnetic pulse, but without the headache of mass destruction and death. So instead of Hiroshima, you get the Seventeenth Century."
"For how long?" Gwen asked, smiling slightly; electronics had always been a passion of hers, for reasons she'd never quite been able to figure out, and this concept in particular struck her as rather intriguing.
"About twenty, maybe thirty seconds," Spike said casually. "Should be enough time to do what needs to be done."
"Could a pinch take out the power of an entire city?" Angel put in, deciding they might as well get back on track. "Like, I don't know…"
"Las Vegas?" Spike asked, smiling. "Yeah, I think so…"
Then he sighed in exasperation. "Problem is, there's only one pinch in the world big enough to handle it; it might notknock out the wholecity, but it should take out all power on the strip long enough for us to get the job done."
"Where is it?" Wesley put in.
Spike swallowed nervously as he looked at the others.
"Pasadena."
"Ah," Gwen said, rolling her eyes in annoyance as she looked over at her sister.
That might make things difficult…
Meanwhile, in Parker's office, just as he was going over the evening's take, there was a sudden beep on his speaker.
"Yes?" he asked, tapping the button impatiently.
"Sir, you have a visitor," his secretary said on the other end of the line. "Her name is Lilah Morgan-"
"Send her in," Parker said, smiling slightly as he hung up. He had lost touch with her after their L.A. office had been destroyed, but, back when he'd needed assistance in getting his casino business off the ground, Lilah had been his contact with Wolfram & Hart, and they'd had an… interesting relationship, to say the least (Never sexual, of course, but the promise of it was always there).
"Ah, Miss Morgan," he said, smiling as the door opened and the remarkably sexy brunette walked into the room, grinning at him. "How's things?"
"Oh, about what you'd expect," Lilah said dismissively as she sat down opposite Parker. "Although I do have an interesting bit of information about a possible threat to your casino that you may be interested in…"