Fic: Souls, Slayers... and a Scythe???
Author: mkcrl120
Disclaimer: All the characters mentioned in this story belong to Joss Whedon or Mutant Enemy or some other people. I own nothing and wrote this just to get it out of my system.
Summary: Set two weeks after the events in Explaining Africa 3
Authors Notes: I have no clue about Africa. Which is probably always a good place to start writing a story. So if details I've used for place names, and tribal names and whatever are wrong then just (correctly) assume I have no idea what I'm doing.
Rating: 15 by English standards (mainly for language)
========================
Chapter 2b:
Roger was still reading Giles' journals, when Amy walked in requesting he check the email.
'Third time this hour. Chill girl. Shote will send the info when he has it.' Roger reluctantly handed the laptop over.
Amy smiled, as she logged into their shared email account, she asked him. "Thought you hated these things?"
Roger admitted. "I've been catching up on his adventures. That is not a normal school. How the hell did he not realise it 'til he was fifteen?"
"So enjoying yourself then?"
"Stories are vaguer than I'd like but I'm starting to see where Xander comes from."
Amy looked shocked, "Vaguer than you'd like? These are the collected journals of Rupert Giles prior to his dismissal from the council."
"I've read most of them. They're quite short. Like this one referring to the Angel character. It says here he lost his soul, and returned to the Angelus character. Now that might explain why Xander's so worried about the Spike scenario but it doesn't mention anything about how he lost his soul or why Angelus is soo scary that they had to highlight him in blue. I've noticed they do that for a few vampires and some other specific demons. The Master, blue. Spike, blue. Drusilla, blue."
Amy paused. "Sorry... it's just... show me how you use this thing."
Roger took the laptop back. He opened a random entry.
Amy watched over his shoulder.
-----------
Watcher chronicle: #25523455-187723
Watcher: Rupert Giles
Slayer: Buffy Summers
From the Journals of Rupert Giles:
Kendra arrived in town last night. Briefly facing off against Buffy, a fight in which neither of them were seriously hurt, she informed us as to her identity. During the discussion as we came to the conclusion what had caused Kendra to be activated, we discovered that in her haste, Kendra had had a run in with Angel.
They promptly left to discover what had happened to Angel since Kendra's departure.
------------
"And?" Amy prompted.
"I'm not stupid you know." Roger countered. "You then use the page-down button to read the rest. Simple."
"And you've read all of them?"
"Well it doesn't take long."
"Okay... Right, see this bit here, where both the watcher chronicle number and the 'From the Journals of' bit are highlighted in blue and underlined."
"Yes."
"That's a hyperlink."
"Okay."
"Do you even know what a hyperlink is?"
"Let's assume I don't."
"well instead of hitting page down if you move the cursor over the blue writing then notice it changes."
"Can you stop talking to me like I'm a child?"
"Sorry, couldn't help myself." She teased. "Click that and the following happens."
Roger watched as a new document started up.
------
Watcher chronicle: #25523455-187723
Watcher: Rupert Giles
Slayer: Buffy Summers
Buffy greeted me first thing this morning with a strange new girl in tow. Not sure as to the reason for their visit, I portrayed the librarian role that I was assigned to do in such situations.
Buffy told me to relax. She then informed me that Kendra already knew about slayers. Obviously, I reminded her that although I had allowed some leniency regarding some of the others who were aware of her identity; that she should not be taking that as a general invite into the group.
Buffy seemed quick to correct me that she didn't tell Kendra anything. Uncertain as to who to blame for this slip as none of the other students had had the decency to accompany Buffy when she came to inform me, I was deep in thought of appropriate reprimands when I misheard what she told me. She repeated it. I hadn't misheard.
Kendra was a vampire slayer.
Buffy even offered to fight her one-on-one to prove they weren't lying. A few more subtle tests regarding strength were appropriate. Her accuracy with weapons was equal to Buffy's.
I managed to contact Kendra's watcher, a Mr S. Zabuto, and establish the reason for Kendra's appearance in Sunnydale. He informed me that they'd realised the warning concerned the hellmouth, and as such dispatched Kendra immediately. Mr Zabuto informed me that he'd been raising Kendra as one of the many identified potentials when she'd come to him believing she'd been called. He hadn't been aware that this hellmouth was currently guarded, or in fact that Buffy was still alive. After reporting the activation of his potential as per procedure, they'd simply been assigned to a local hot spot, and been working from there for the previous few months.
Shortly afterward Willow arrived, and between us we all managed to decipher the reason behind Kendra's calling.
------
'It's massive.' Roger thought, as he stared at the scroll bar at the right hand side.
"Watcher's are requested to send both a detailed report and summary sheet of all incidents they find worthy of mention."
'So, I've got to read it all?'
Amy returned to the previous page. "Now see these names at the top, which are also highlighted?" Roger nodded, "These provide a link to the following. Here you can find out just about everything you'd require; for Giles you'd be given various reports throughout the years on both academic achievement, pysche profiles, assignments given, etc. For Buffy, similar again; when called, when died, where assigned, known achievements. And for both a complete list of all chronicle entries they appear in. In the case of Kendra, she would have any of Giles's chronicle entries she would have appeared in, even though she wasn't assigned to him."
"Enough."
"Okay, well all major people who've done something worthy of notice have similar links. See Angel/Angelus comes up a few times. Basically it links to all killings we've known Angelus was involved in. It also, after discovery of the curse by Rupert Giles, links to Angel and informs of what he's done. Notice its a bit blank for Angel. The watchers, on the whole, weren't too impressed with the idea of a vampire with a soul. Demons get categorised into species. Some are known to be friendly or at least human tolerant, others not so. Having anomalies within a species is not favoured upon."
He gave her a blank look.
"You don't actually have to be online to read Giles' chronicles because I downloaded both versions of each chronicle for you to the desktop. I just figured you could read the summaries and then look into the full version of any that interested you. You will, however, need to be online in order to get access to a lot of the links not directly related to the Giles/Buffy chronicles, consisting of Xander's further adventures."
"Okay." 'My head is starting to hurt.' "So... Xander had chronicles just about himself? Can I just read those instead?"
"Sorry, I mustn't have explained that properly. Xander is neither a watcher nor a slayer, as such the only chronicles he would be mentioned in belong to either Rupert Giles or those of Wesley Wyndham-Price. I have not included either Mr Wyndham-Price's chronicles, or the chronicles that were provided once Giles returned to active service as a field watcher. To get to those you would also have to be online, which isn't a problem at the moment as we are awaiting an email from..." Amy became distracted, Roger looked over her shoulder. Even he recognised the flashing email sign in the bottom right corner.
'Thank god. She might leave me alone now.'
Amy opened the email and began to read.
=====
Xander got out of the shower. Walking back to his room, he turned to see Amy staring at him.
"She got an email." He heard from the kitchen. Roger came back into the living room and handed them all a coke.
"Shote?" Xander asked.
"Giles." was Amy's response.
"Giles?" Xander thought back to why Giles would be contacting them.
"He's come up with a way to start afresh."
"Afresh?"
"You asked about..."
"Oh yeah." Xander remembered. "What did he come up with?"
"It turns out that they no longer need the box."
"What box?" both Roger and Xander asked at the same time.
"I was hoping you could tell me."
'Eh?' "Did Giles say any more?"
"Yes, erm, it's the box that Buffy used for her vision quest. Well, not the normal vision quest they go on, but the one that Robin W..."
"Ahhh, Robin's mom's box." Xander winced. 'Really should have worded that better.'
"Erm," Roger began. "For those of us not in the know, you know the ones that only figured out what a slayer is and how to properly read a watcher's report earlier today. What exactly is this box, and how is it supposed to help us?"
"Good question," Xander thought, "for which I have no idea."
"It's hand crafted. Giles thought it might be possible to see if anyone recognises any of the symbols on it."
"Possible, and the best we've got in a bad situation really. Anything else?"
"Giles mentions that he's having problems with a lot of the earliest watcher chronicles."
"What sort of problems?"
"The assignments of slayers can sometimes miss many years, a couple of times only one or two were found in a century."
"Okay.... What does that mean?"
"The speech, you know the speech, right?"
Xander tried to think of a specific one. "Care to narrow it down a little." he said with a confused look on his face.
"The 'one girl in all the world' speech."
"Yeah, you both told it me this morning."
"Well, that speech, in that, it specifically mentions there only being one girl in each generation."
"I didn't mention it to them, but what if what Roger was mentioning this morning was true?"
"Which bit?"
"About it being a family thing."
Xander just looked confused, "You've lost me." Roger's nodding indicated she'd lost him too.
"What if it was originally just a family thing? But eventually there were no more members of that family."
"Wouldn't it die off?"
"Not if what Roger said had been true, eldest girl and all that. What if, in one generation, the girl died before she could have children, and what if she'd had no sisters."
"What are you suggesting?"
"That the line had always been continuing via all the other siblings of each slayer. And that when it reached a dead point it simply had to find others who shared the genes. If you went back along the line and checked out the descendants of each other branch of the family tree, you'd get a fairly diverse amount of people who could be potentials."
"It's worth considering. Reply to Giles, tell him the theory. Get Roger and Steven in on it too. Tell them to help. We can't use them much until we get something back from Shote anyway."
=====
A few hours later.
Amy had re-read Giles email.
Xander returned from the kitchen with the night's food. "Anything?" he asked, handing it out to both Amy and Roger as they sat on sofas.
"Another from Giles."
"And?" he said returning with his own meal.
"He commented that they hadn't thought of that. But the theory doesn't seem to match other chronicles."
"In what way?" Roger asked, through a mouthful of food.
Amy had organised herself so that the food was on her lap, and the laptop was on the arm of the sofa. "A lot of chronicles, written prior to the missing century, showed girls that were called being discovered within a few months of one another."
"Maybe it happened before that."
"What's the earliest chronicle dated as?" Roger asked.
"That's where it gets weirder."
"It gets weirder?" Xander asked, 'Of course it gets weirder, you've been doing this for how many years now.'
"Some of them have been carbon-dated to prove they weren't fakes."
"And?"
"They seem to have been written as early as the eighth century BC."
"And that's weird how?"
"Reports don't get constant 'til about the third century AD."
"So we have a gap spanning over a millenia with only a few entries, but no one worries about that. But the fact that we have a century with the same is quite worrying?"
Roger looked lost, "Are you sure it isn't the watchers that are weird?"
"With you there."
Xander laughed as Amy glared at both of them.
"Giles had different teams trying to cover an overall history of the watchers council. It was supposed to help with us covering an overall idea of the slayer line."
"So?"
"There are council entries for the sixth to seventh century AD, which is when we seemed to have no slayers."
"And?"
"They don't mention the lack of slayers at all. It's like they either expected it or they weren't worried."
"WHAT???"
"Giles is getting people to look into it in detail. He figures the earlier ones may have been destroyed due to age. But the fact that is that these other chronicles survived that same era, whereas all slayer documentation is lost."
"This is just getting weirder."
"That's what Giles said."
=====
End chapter 2b:
========================
Author: mkcrl120
Disclaimer: All the characters mentioned in this story belong to Joss Whedon or Mutant Enemy or some other people. I own nothing and wrote this just to get it out of my system.
Summary: Set two weeks after the events in Explaining Africa 3
Authors Notes: I have no clue about Africa. Which is probably always a good place to start writing a story. So if details I've used for place names, and tribal names and whatever are wrong then just (correctly) assume I have no idea what I'm doing.
Rating: 15 by English standards (mainly for language)
========================
Chapter 2b:
Roger was still reading Giles' journals, when Amy walked in requesting he check the email.
'Third time this hour. Chill girl. Shote will send the info when he has it.' Roger reluctantly handed the laptop over.
Amy smiled, as she logged into their shared email account, she asked him. "Thought you hated these things?"
Roger admitted. "I've been catching up on his adventures. That is not a normal school. How the hell did he not realise it 'til he was fifteen?"
"So enjoying yourself then?"
"Stories are vaguer than I'd like but I'm starting to see where Xander comes from."
Amy looked shocked, "Vaguer than you'd like? These are the collected journals of Rupert Giles prior to his dismissal from the council."
"I've read most of them. They're quite short. Like this one referring to the Angel character. It says here he lost his soul, and returned to the Angelus character. Now that might explain why Xander's so worried about the Spike scenario but it doesn't mention anything about how he lost his soul or why Angelus is soo scary that they had to highlight him in blue. I've noticed they do that for a few vampires and some other specific demons. The Master, blue. Spike, blue. Drusilla, blue."
Amy paused. "Sorry... it's just... show me how you use this thing."
Roger took the laptop back. He opened a random entry.
Amy watched over his shoulder.
-----------
Watcher chronicle: #25523455-187723
Watcher: Rupert Giles
Slayer: Buffy Summers
From the Journals of Rupert Giles:
Kendra arrived in town last night. Briefly facing off against Buffy, a fight in which neither of them were seriously hurt, she informed us as to her identity. During the discussion as we came to the conclusion what had caused Kendra to be activated, we discovered that in her haste, Kendra had had a run in with Angel.
They promptly left to discover what had happened to Angel since Kendra's departure.
------------
"And?" Amy prompted.
"I'm not stupid you know." Roger countered. "You then use the page-down button to read the rest. Simple."
"And you've read all of them?"
"Well it doesn't take long."
"Okay... Right, see this bit here, where both the watcher chronicle number and the 'From the Journals of' bit are highlighted in blue and underlined."
"Yes."
"That's a hyperlink."
"Okay."
"Do you even know what a hyperlink is?"
"Let's assume I don't."
"well instead of hitting page down if you move the cursor over the blue writing then notice it changes."
"Can you stop talking to me like I'm a child?"
"Sorry, couldn't help myself." She teased. "Click that and the following happens."
Roger watched as a new document started up.
------
Watcher chronicle: #25523455-187723
Watcher: Rupert Giles
Slayer: Buffy Summers
Buffy greeted me first thing this morning with a strange new girl in tow. Not sure as to the reason for their visit, I portrayed the librarian role that I was assigned to do in such situations.
Buffy told me to relax. She then informed me that Kendra already knew about slayers. Obviously, I reminded her that although I had allowed some leniency regarding some of the others who were aware of her identity; that she should not be taking that as a general invite into the group.
Buffy seemed quick to correct me that she didn't tell Kendra anything. Uncertain as to who to blame for this slip as none of the other students had had the decency to accompany Buffy when she came to inform me, I was deep in thought of appropriate reprimands when I misheard what she told me. She repeated it. I hadn't misheard.
Kendra was a vampire slayer.
Buffy even offered to fight her one-on-one to prove they weren't lying. A few more subtle tests regarding strength were appropriate. Her accuracy with weapons was equal to Buffy's.
I managed to contact Kendra's watcher, a Mr S. Zabuto, and establish the reason for Kendra's appearance in Sunnydale. He informed me that they'd realised the warning concerned the hellmouth, and as such dispatched Kendra immediately. Mr Zabuto informed me that he'd been raising Kendra as one of the many identified potentials when she'd come to him believing she'd been called. He hadn't been aware that this hellmouth was currently guarded, or in fact that Buffy was still alive. After reporting the activation of his potential as per procedure, they'd simply been assigned to a local hot spot, and been working from there for the previous few months.
Shortly afterward Willow arrived, and between us we all managed to decipher the reason behind Kendra's calling.
------
'It's massive.' Roger thought, as he stared at the scroll bar at the right hand side.
"Watcher's are requested to send both a detailed report and summary sheet of all incidents they find worthy of mention."
'So, I've got to read it all?'
Amy returned to the previous page. "Now see these names at the top, which are also highlighted?" Roger nodded, "These provide a link to the following. Here you can find out just about everything you'd require; for Giles you'd be given various reports throughout the years on both academic achievement, pysche profiles, assignments given, etc. For Buffy, similar again; when called, when died, where assigned, known achievements. And for both a complete list of all chronicle entries they appear in. In the case of Kendra, she would have any of Giles's chronicle entries she would have appeared in, even though she wasn't assigned to him."
"Enough."
"Okay, well all major people who've done something worthy of notice have similar links. See Angel/Angelus comes up a few times. Basically it links to all killings we've known Angelus was involved in. It also, after discovery of the curse by Rupert Giles, links to Angel and informs of what he's done. Notice its a bit blank for Angel. The watchers, on the whole, weren't too impressed with the idea of a vampire with a soul. Demons get categorised into species. Some are known to be friendly or at least human tolerant, others not so. Having anomalies within a species is not favoured upon."
He gave her a blank look.
"You don't actually have to be online to read Giles' chronicles because I downloaded both versions of each chronicle for you to the desktop. I just figured you could read the summaries and then look into the full version of any that interested you. You will, however, need to be online in order to get access to a lot of the links not directly related to the Giles/Buffy chronicles, consisting of Xander's further adventures."
"Okay." 'My head is starting to hurt.' "So... Xander had chronicles just about himself? Can I just read those instead?"
"Sorry, I mustn't have explained that properly. Xander is neither a watcher nor a slayer, as such the only chronicles he would be mentioned in belong to either Rupert Giles or those of Wesley Wyndham-Price. I have not included either Mr Wyndham-Price's chronicles, or the chronicles that were provided once Giles returned to active service as a field watcher. To get to those you would also have to be online, which isn't a problem at the moment as we are awaiting an email from..." Amy became distracted, Roger looked over her shoulder. Even he recognised the flashing email sign in the bottom right corner.
'Thank god. She might leave me alone now.'
Amy opened the email and began to read.
=====
Xander got out of the shower. Walking back to his room, he turned to see Amy staring at him.
"She got an email." He heard from the kitchen. Roger came back into the living room and handed them all a coke.
"Shote?" Xander asked.
"Giles." was Amy's response.
"Giles?" Xander thought back to why Giles would be contacting them.
"He's come up with a way to start afresh."
"Afresh?"
"You asked about..."
"Oh yeah." Xander remembered. "What did he come up with?"
"It turns out that they no longer need the box."
"What box?" both Roger and Xander asked at the same time.
"I was hoping you could tell me."
'Eh?' "Did Giles say any more?"
"Yes, erm, it's the box that Buffy used for her vision quest. Well, not the normal vision quest they go on, but the one that Robin W..."
"Ahhh, Robin's mom's box." Xander winced. 'Really should have worded that better.'
"Erm," Roger began. "For those of us not in the know, you know the ones that only figured out what a slayer is and how to properly read a watcher's report earlier today. What exactly is this box, and how is it supposed to help us?"
"Good question," Xander thought, "for which I have no idea."
"It's hand crafted. Giles thought it might be possible to see if anyone recognises any of the symbols on it."
"Possible, and the best we've got in a bad situation really. Anything else?"
"Giles mentions that he's having problems with a lot of the earliest watcher chronicles."
"What sort of problems?"
"The assignments of slayers can sometimes miss many years, a couple of times only one or two were found in a century."
"Okay.... What does that mean?"
"The speech, you know the speech, right?"
Xander tried to think of a specific one. "Care to narrow it down a little." he said with a confused look on his face.
"The 'one girl in all the world' speech."
"Yeah, you both told it me this morning."
"Well, that speech, in that, it specifically mentions there only being one girl in each generation."
"I didn't mention it to them, but what if what Roger was mentioning this morning was true?"
"Which bit?"
"About it being a family thing."
Xander just looked confused, "You've lost me." Roger's nodding indicated she'd lost him too.
"What if it was originally just a family thing? But eventually there were no more members of that family."
"Wouldn't it die off?"
"Not if what Roger said had been true, eldest girl and all that. What if, in one generation, the girl died before she could have children, and what if she'd had no sisters."
"What are you suggesting?"
"That the line had always been continuing via all the other siblings of each slayer. And that when it reached a dead point it simply had to find others who shared the genes. If you went back along the line and checked out the descendants of each other branch of the family tree, you'd get a fairly diverse amount of people who could be potentials."
"It's worth considering. Reply to Giles, tell him the theory. Get Roger and Steven in on it too. Tell them to help. We can't use them much until we get something back from Shote anyway."
=====
A few hours later.
Amy had re-read Giles email.
Xander returned from the kitchen with the night's food. "Anything?" he asked, handing it out to both Amy and Roger as they sat on sofas.
"Another from Giles."
"And?" he said returning with his own meal.
"He commented that they hadn't thought of that. But the theory doesn't seem to match other chronicles."
"In what way?" Roger asked, through a mouthful of food.
Amy had organised herself so that the food was on her lap, and the laptop was on the arm of the sofa. "A lot of chronicles, written prior to the missing century, showed girls that were called being discovered within a few months of one another."
"Maybe it happened before that."
"What's the earliest chronicle dated as?" Roger asked.
"That's where it gets weirder."
"It gets weirder?" Xander asked, 'Of course it gets weirder, you've been doing this for how many years now.'
"Some of them have been carbon-dated to prove they weren't fakes."
"And?"
"They seem to have been written as early as the eighth century BC."
"And that's weird how?"
"Reports don't get constant 'til about the third century AD."
"So we have a gap spanning over a millenia with only a few entries, but no one worries about that. But the fact that we have a century with the same is quite worrying?"
Roger looked lost, "Are you sure it isn't the watchers that are weird?"
"With you there."
Xander laughed as Amy glared at both of them.
"Giles had different teams trying to cover an overall history of the watchers council. It was supposed to help with us covering an overall idea of the slayer line."
"So?"
"There are council entries for the sixth to seventh century AD, which is when we seemed to have no slayers."
"And?"
"They don't mention the lack of slayers at all. It's like they either expected it or they weren't worried."
"WHAT???"
"Giles is getting people to look into it in detail. He figures the earlier ones may have been destroyed due to age. But the fact that is that these other chronicles survived that same era, whereas all slayer documentation is lost."
"This is just getting weirder."
"That's what Giles said."
=====
End chapter 2b:
========================