White Knight!

by Joshua The Evil Guy

A Buffy the Vampire SlayerStatic Shock! Crossover Xander manages to get a bit further than Oxford on his summer “trip of discovery”, and is in Dakota City just in time to help a young black kid get home after the ‘Big Bang’.

6. Part 5: Light of Day

Part 5: "The Light of Day"

Willow Rosenberg was content. Two of her best friends were super heroes, saving the world practically every week, or at least saving the city in Xander's case. Her boyfriend was the bass guitarist in a popular band and loved her very much, school was going great, and she was meeting lots of interesting and nice people. Not to mention, since she lived on the Hellmouth and knew what it was, the fact that the world was still spinning with humanity alive and well on it was more than enough cause for celebration.

It was a couple of weeks after the meta-hunters had tried to kidnap Xander, or rather the White Knight, and the young hero was doing better than ever. And, in light of the whole 'cell phone crisis', as she was personally calling it, the genius hacker witch turned her attention towards an untraceable communication system, for when the hero might need her help or advice, as he had that night.

Considering Xander's powers of light, she thought it funny to make a solar-powered microwave transceiver. Using microwaves instead of radio waves made the signal more difficult to track and was much more reliable than radio waves, which could be jammed or blocked if outside of signal range. Microwaves were a lot more powerful and reliable than that. In addition, since Microwaves were part of the upper spectrum of light, White Knight could easily manipulate them if somebody actually was capable of tracing the signal.

She called the small little black walkie talkie device a "Light Wave", partly for the solar powered aspect, partly for the Microwave aspect. And when she showed them to Xander, who she assured could be made compact enough to go in his pocket with his armor, he absolutely loved them and spent at least an hour praising her genius and calling her 'Professor'.

He, of course, got to keep one, while she had the only other one. And to keep people from getting suspicious about all the microwave bursts that would be going back and forth between Los Angeles and Sunnydale, she managed, through nearly pure genius effort, to adjust the devices so that instead of sending 'loud' signal bursts of mega-microwaves, which is how the military used the application, the devices would search each other out through a sort of mini-microwave radar and then set up a very low-level steady stream of two way microwaves, practically indistinguishable from the rest of the microwave radiation that was in the LA skyline.

They had spent the past week testing them out, as well as some further testing of Xander's powers, specifically the newest ones he had discovered where he could concentrate spectrums of light to create beams of energy, which they still weren't entirely sure about beyond the Infra-Blasts which set things on fire.

At the moment though, Willow was just hanging out behind the Bronze, Oz and the Dingoes having just finished for the night and were packing away their gear in anticipation for their 'LA Tour' as Devon was calling it. Devon was the Lead Singer and other guitarist of the group. The band had just gone back inside to get the last of the equipment, leaving Willow out here alone by Oz's van, when an immaculately dressed blonde bimbo-type walked up to her.

"Willow?" a too-familiar voice spoke from the bimbo-type.

Willow blinked, not entirely certain she could trust her ears at that moment, and then she took a slightly closer look at the bimbo-type and nearly screamed out loud. Instead she squealed like an excited girl you sometimes see on TV and said excitedly, "Harmony? Oh my gosh, what are you doing here?"

Thankfully though the once bitter High School enemies just managed to keep from hugging each other in their excitement.

"Well, actually it's kind of a long story. I had been planning on a trip to Europe, but, you know, Graduation. Big snake, huh?" the blonde trailed off.

Memories flooding of the mentioned event through Willow's mind. "Yeah," she agreed with Harmony, despite the shock of that concept, she knew how that event had changed many lives. And it was a big snake.

"So . . . uh, what's up?" Willow finally asked after an uncomfortable silence.

"Oh, not much," Harmony hastily replied. "Going through some big changes recently."

"Oh yeah, me too," Willow responded, relieved at having something to talk about. "All about the change here. Like you wouldn't believe."

"You'd be surprised," Harmony smiled at the redhead. For Harmony it was actually normal for her, but on any other human being it would be a cruel and evil smirk. Then her face distorted in to the visage of a vampire game face.

  

The White Knight, the Angelic hero of the City of Lost Angels, was gliding silently through the night air over Sunnydale, on patrol. Normally he would be over in LA, but recent events taken into account had caused him to err on the side of caution and stick to what he knew he could handle. Demons and vampires he could handle without problem, especially with his powers.

He swept down a little closer to the ground, absently noting he was close to the Bronze. For a brief moment he considered taking a small break and seeing if the Dingoes were still playing. All thoughts of Bronzing vanished when a familiar scream pierced the night.

Reacting instantly, White Knight shot down towards the source and saw a strange and very Hellmouthy sight.

Willow talking to Harmony, who just happened to be a vampire from what he could tell.

Without thought, the superhero landed directly between the vampire and her would-be victim, even as the former stereotypical blonde Cordette was lunging in. In typical Harmony fashion though, after she rebounded off the armored hero, she guffawed, making it a rather comical expression with her game face on, and then whined in that grating voice of hers, "Who the hell are you? And what the heck do you think you're doing protecting that freak Rosenberg?"

Reminding himself to keep his voice deep and masked, White Knight replied with a question, "Who is the vampire here? And in case you're too blonde to figure it out, take a look at the outfit. I'm a superhero. Protecting people is what I do."

"Yeah right, like that geek is actually a person," the vampire snorted, rolling her yellow eyes.

White Knight's glowing eyes narrowed and flashed red for a moment before returning to shining white. Raising his arm, he began to generate and gather a pulse of harmless, normal sunlight. Against anyone or anything else it would be like flashing a strobe light on them. Against a vampire, it was lethal. "I am so going to enjoy this," he admitted as the pulse began to shine around his raised fist.

An unbidden instinct raised the hairs on the back of Harmony's neck, letting her realize that maybe she had gone a little bit far and now was the time to err on the side of caution. Or in her case, run like the wind. Backing away with a superior scowl on her face, she snorted and retorted just before she ran off, "Well, I'm going to tell my boyfriend that you were mean to me, and then he's going to kill you and the Rosenberg freak!"

White Knight considered for a moment, watching as the vampiress ran off and finally decided it just wasn't worth it. So instead he turned back to his friend, smiling beneath the mask/helmet.

"My hero," Willow teased him in the "damsel voice" that made him chuckle. He just couldn't imagine Willow as the type of woman who would rather scream and run around like a chicken with its head cut off while waiting to be rescued.

At that moment Oz walked back out of the Bronze, carrying the last of the equipment from inside. At seeing his girlfriend standing next to a figure that had been on TV several times over the past few weeks, and had briefly been suspected to be either a real angel or a demon in disguise, his reaction was to be complimented. "Hey. Something going on?" he asked as he carried the equipment the rest of the way to the van.

Keeping his voice disguised, White Knight nodded at the musician and replied, "Just a small bit of vampire trouble. Nothing to worry about really. Have a nice night, and please be more careful Miss."

"Willow," the redhead added quickly, and gave the armored figure a look. Xander quickly caught on.

Nodding again, he repeated, "Miss Willow. It's been a pleasure. And be sure to let out that healthy scream of yours if there's anymore trouble. I try to stick close to the Hellmouth, so I'm sure I'll be close by. Have a good evening folks!" he said one final time before reforming his wings and taking off into the air, quickly disappearing among the stars.

The werewolf and witch stared up at the sky for a few moments longer before Oz finally commented, "So that was the White Knight."

"Yep," Willow nodded, grinning widely.

"Nice guy. Friendly."

"He was, wasn't he?"

A minute of silence as they just stood there looking at the star scape. Oz turned to Willow and asked with a tone of concern, "Vampire?"

  

"So, this is my dorm room," Buffy told the young man beside her. Feeling nervous and doing so making the Slayer short circuit in her behavior, reached out and knocked on it. "Wood. Good thing to make doors out of."

"Yeah, I've heard that," the young man smiled, so obviously flirting with her. Which was a good thing since she was flirting right back.

"So, uh, anyway," he started to say, but was interrupted when Willow and Oz came around the corner and were right behind Buffy in a second.

"Uh, hey guys, is there a problem, oh and you remember Parker," she introduced a little belatedly.

"Yeah hi, Buffy we kind of have a situation that we need to talk about, very urgently even," Willow let out in a rush.

"Huh?" Buffy, in typical blonde fashion blurted.

"Yeah, remember that research project we've been working on for the past few weeks, the one about Knights with, you know, the white banners?" Willow put the emphasis where not even Buffy could have missed it. A moment later her eyes went a little wide, but not overwhelmingly so, and therefore she wasn't yet suitably impressed enough to get rid of potential boyfriend just to talk about the White Knight.

"Uh huh," the Slayer urged her friend to continue.

"Well, there's been a development. I found something that is . . ." Willow stretched for the words to use.

"Willow personally encountered this new piece of research," Oz filled in for her, earning a big glowing smile from his girlfriend.

Buffy blinked, stunned for a minute. Oz couldn't possibly be saying what she was thinking he was saying, was he?

Fortunately, Buffy was saved from coming up with a response to that as another of her friends came from the other direction.

"Hey Buff, Will, Oz-man," Xander, coming up behind Parker, greeted. Stopping beside the dark-haired youth, who was a couple inches shorter than him, Xander looked him up and down while Parker did the same to him. "I don't know who you are," Xander commented in the same jovial tone, and then turned his attention back to the blonde, redhead, and . . . other.

"Hi, I'm Parker," the college student held out his hand.

"Hi, friends call me Xander," the townie just nodded his head, ignoring the hand. Looking embarrassed, Parker just sheepishly took his hand back.

"Xander, what are you doing here?" Buffy asked, surprised.

Xander grinned at Parker and said, "See," then turned back to answer Buffy's question. "Well it's kind of this thing, but I think I get to be a bit of a celebrity for a while here. I got to meet the White Knight."

"No way!" Parker shouted at him.

Willow frowned at her friend, wondering what he was up to.

"Way," Xander mocked in an obviously fake 'surfer' voice. "I was sort of on my way to Giles' place when these . . ." he paused, looking Parker over for a second and finally continued, ". . . gang members on PCP came out of like nowhere and I thought I was in a lot of trouble when this blinding light stopped the . . . gang members on PCP and then he showed up and like totally dusted them just like that!"

Willow glared at her friend, nearly growling out loud as he inadvertently stole her thunder.

"Wow, really?" Buffy was majorly impressed. Enough that she forgot Parker was even there anymore.

"Really!" Xander continued enthusiastically, then turned part of his attention to Parker, which automatically reminded the Slayer her potential paramour was still in the hall with her.

"Oh, uh, Parker, well, I'll uh, see you later then?" she tried not to sound like she was getting rid of him, but she really wanted to hear more about the White Knight that wasn't from the media.

"Uh . . ." Parker stuttered, unsure what was going on as the blonde began to physically turn him around and push him down the hall. Finally he got the hint and started walking away, but by the time he thought to call after her, at the least hoping for a goodbye kiss, he saw that she had already dragged all her 'friends' into her room and slammed the door shut.

Once they were alone and it was just the gang, Xander dropped the goofy, 'I just met my idol' act and turned deadly serious, as did everyone else in the room.

"All right Xander, what exactly happened?" Buffy asked, her voice firm, but listening.

"Well, actually pretty much what I said in front of Mr. Handsome out there," he answered. "I was headed over to Giles place when these vamps jumped out of nowhere, which they tend to do quite often I've noticed. I first did the smart thing and tried to get away from them by running like a scaredy cat, which for the record I am not. And I think I proved by then doing the stupid thing and taunting them when they somehow got me cornered in an alley somewhere."

"Then what happened?" Buffy interrupted, obviously on the edge of her seat.

Xander just shrugged for a moment before answering, "And then there was this blinding flash of light, and once I could see well enough again, I saw the vamps exploding in flames and then one by one they dusted. Only having limited experience in using sunlight to dust vampires, I can't say for certain, but I'm pretty sure it was almost certainly the same thing."

"But you said you met the White Knight Xander," Willow argued, a look of hefty annoyance on her face, "Seeing vampires dust from a flash of light like it was daylight does not count as meeting him."

Again, Xander shrugged, but this time there was definitely a glint of humor in his eyes as he said, "Well, no, that is very true, it's not. But when he dropped down from above, white glowing wings and all, and asked if I was all right, that does count as having met."

"Why were you going to Giles' place?" Oz asked out of the blue.

Buffy and Willow turned and gave the musician a glare, while Xander stared incredulously at the werewolf, but finally answered, "Money's kind of tight of late. So the G-man and I came to a sort of an arrangement. For 100 bucks I help him sort through and organize all the books we saved from the Library last year and help him clean up his apartment. It pays for my dinner for the next week, and there aren't any tax deductions plus don't have to fill out countless paperwork and other stuff. And actually . . . instead of going on to his place after meeting and greeting our new superhero in town, I came straight here, so I better scoot."

He started making his way to the door, and then suddenly skidded and turned on his heels.

"Oh yeah, almost forgot. I told the White Knight I knew about vampires and demons and the Hellmouth, and then told him about us and he told me how to get in contact with him for the next apocalypse in case we needed his help. That's all I really wanted to tell you guys. See ya! Thanks for reminding me about Giles Oz!" he called as he walked out and closed the door behind him.

Now the two girls were glaring dangerously at Oz, which told him exactly how he'd been played by Xander Harris. "Huh," he muttered sheepishly to the two furies before him, "Who knew?"

  

Outside, on the way to Giles', Xander was humming to himself.

"That was more fun than it had a right to be," he congratulated himself.

Focusing more on his good mood and trying to work out which would be the fastest way to get to Giles', he never noticed the brunette coed, who was equally distracted, until they bumped into each other just outside the doors to the dorm.

"Oh I am so sorry!" they both cried as they grabbed onto one another to keep the other from falling. They stood there a moment as they finally noticed who it was exactly they had bumped into.

'Whoa,' Xander thought to himself as he took the cute brunette in, 'Quite a grip she's got there, and she is majorly cute. I think I'm falling in love all over again. At least this time I managed to keep myself off the ground.' Reminding himself about the first time he saw Buffy Summers.

She was about 5'6" with shoulder-length brown hair, done up in a wavy ponytail. She was petite and wore a pair of heavy round glasses over her bright blue eyes. She was dressed more as somebody from the midwest, over-sized flannel shirt with simple t-shirt beneath it and durable blue jeans, which Xander had seen more of lately since visiting Buffy and Willow on campus, all these students from other parts of the country, and the other thing that he noticed immediately about her, was that she was quite possibly the most beautiful girl he'd ever seen before.

"Uh, I'm sorry, it was totally my fault," Xander immediately apologized, "I wasn't watching where I was going."

"No, it was my fault, really," she argued back, her voice cultured, but with that unmistakable southern drawl to it.

Smiling at the humor of the whole situation, Xander just held out his hand and offered, "How about we call it even and say we're both sorry? Hi, my name's Xander, Xander Harris."

Smiling herself, and briefly making Xander wonder if his powers weren't acting up again from the way the whole night suddenly seemed to light up, she took his hand and gently shook it, introducing herself, "Hi. Kara Kent. I'm a, uh, a student here."

"Well, what a coincidence," Xander heard his mouth saying without his say-so, "I'm not. But I know a couple people in this dorm that are."

She laughed. She had a beautiful laugh he found.

"Well, maybe you can help me anyway," she said, "I'm not from around here and I need to get to a place in town called the Espresso Pump. You wouldn't happen to know where it is, would you?"

"As a matter of fact, I do. It's where I pick up donuts practically every day. See what you do is . . ." Xander was suddenly distracted by something, though he couldn't say exactly what it was. "You know what, it might be better if I just showed you."

Kara smiled again and nodded her head, "I'd appreciate that. I can never follow directions very easily anyway."

"Well what a coincidence," he remarked as they started walking, "I can't give them very well either."

She laughed at him, enjoying his company greatly. And she really didn't know where this Espresso Pump was, and she didn't really want to test how much people were willing to ignore her if she ran around as fast as she could looking for it. The Flash might be able to get away with things like that, but Kara couldn't afford to.

They walked along and soon found themselves off the campus and on the streets of Sunnydale.

"So," Kara finally said, "who do you know in the dorms?"

"Uh, Buffy Summers and Willow Rosenberg, in room 215," he answered somewhat hesitantly.

Kara frowned, knowing the names, but unable to attach faces along with them. "You live in town?"

Smiling pitifully at himself, Xander nodded. "Yep. Whole life. And doomed to being a townie while friends go off to college and take the world by storm."

Offering some comfort, Kara gently patted him on the back, "Aw, it can't be that bad. First thing I celebrated once I graduated was no more homework. Until my Aunt and Uncle thought I should go to college. You know, to pick up some real life experience. And as great as Smallville is, I think I prefer California. For one thing at least there are nice people here."

Xander wasn't sure if the heat he felt around his face was his powers or him blushing, but he quickly tried to change the subject either way.

"So, Smallville, huh? Where is that exactly? Like I said, pretty much my whole life in this one-Starbucks burg, so I don't get to do much traveling . . ." 'Except for that little detour to Detroit City . . .' he added silently to himself.

"Oh, it's almost smack dab in the middle of nowhere. Smallville, Kansas," she added when she saw he wasn't getting her joke. "It's a nice quiet place. Too quiet for my tastes actually. I visited my cousin whenever I could."

Xander noticed she suddenly got real quiet, kind of like he did when he managed to catch his mouth before he would've said something monumentally stupid. It was a rare thing, him actually being able to catch himself. Like now for instance, "Where does your cousin live?"

Kara's mouth twitched slightly before she answered smoothly, "Metropolis."

Xander nodded. He decided not to push anymore, given his recent life changes, he decided for once to follow his instincts when they told him to back off.

"So you're going to school here? I know you probably get asked this by just about everybody, but what's your Major?" he asked.

"I'm undeclared at the moment," Kara answered, obviously relieved in the change of subject. "But it was the furthest that I could get away and the cheapest that my Aunt and Uncle could afford at the same time. I had thought of going to school in Metropolis, but my cousin practically forbid it. I don't think he wanted to deal with my, what did he call it, oh, 'precocious nature' any more than he has to."

"Who's your cousin?" Xander asked out of the blue.

"Clark Kent," Kara responded without thought, and then her eyes went wide like she had just let some big secret slip, but Xander didn't comment on it.

For about three seconds.

"The Clark Kent of Lois & Clark, the Daily Planet's super reporter team that gets practically every single exclusive with Superman that there is?" he made it sound like he was describing a rock on the ground.

"Uh, yeah," Kara, blushing, ducked her head as she answered.

"So who are you meeting at the Espresso Pump?" he changed the subject again.

Kara turned and looked at him, stunned.

"Wait, you aren't going to gush over the fact that I have a cousin that knows Superman, that I might even know Superman myself?"

"Nope," Xander shrugged, "Why? Should I?"

"Well, everyone else that I've let slip about it has," she grumbled uncomfortably.

"Sorry to disappoint," Xander grinned, and then pointed out, "You never answered the question I did ask though?"

Kara regarded him with a teasing grin, "And what makes you think I'm meeting somebody there?"

"Well, it is a rather popular place to meet people, especially in couples," Xander easily hid the distracting pang in his chest at the thought that the lovely brunette would be going to meet someone else, especially as a couple. "And the only other reason for a college student to go there, to study, is moot since you aren't carrying any books with you, and let me tell you now, the coffee really isn't that good."

"Well maybe I'm going for the donuts instead," she teased him again.

"Ah, yet another couple activity, since a girl with your figure isn't really into scarfing donuts as a midnight snack. At least in my experience." After a moment, Xander realized that what he said might be very easily misinterpreted, so he stuttered to correct himself. "Uh, that is, what I meant to say is, what I mean, I mean . . ."

Kara laughed at the boy's obvious discomfort, and shocked herself even more as she continued to flirt with him. "So you're saying you like my figure?" she asked innocently.

"Well yeah, who wouldn't!" he blurted, and then slapped his hand over his mouth, and corrected, "That's not what I meant."

"Oh, then what did you mean?"

Xander's thought processes tumbled over one another until he came to a final single undeniable conclusion. "You're teasing me aren't you?" he asked, deadpan.

Kara only laughed.

"Yeah, well you're just lucky we're already here Miss teases-a-lot," Xander gestured at the open porch coffee shop.

"Oh!" Kara jumped a little, surprised at how quickly they had arrived, and just as much at her regret that it hadn't lasted a bit longer. "Well, thank you for showing me the way. I hope to see you again Xander Harris." She held out her hand.

He took it with a firm shake, "Oh, you can count on it Miss Kara Kent. Expect me to be dressed in full Superman regalia and no-holds barred retaliation for your teasing upon my person."

Kara couldn't help herself as she almost doubled over with laughter. When she could control herself, she nodded and told him, "I look forward to it. Thanks again." Then she quickly walked towards the Espresso Pump. Xander watched her go for only a moment before he turned back towards the direction of Giles' place, his good mood now twice as much.

  

Kara looked over her shoulder to make sure that Xander wasn't watching and was indeed walking away, before going around to the side of the coffee shop and then down a dark and narrow alley behind the store.

"Took you long enough," a voice spoke from the shadows.

Stifling a yelp, Kara jumped and faced the darkest parts of the shadows. "Have I ever told you how /annoying/ it is when you do that?"

"Yes," the voice spoke as it detached from the shadows and the shape of a man became more defined. A pair of cold, almost inhuman white eyes stared out at her.

Scowling at the man-shadow, Kara just crossed her arms and pouted. "I got your message, I'm here, now what do you want?"

"What have you found out?"

"Not much. And hey! I've only been here for two weeks. You are so lucky that I was actually considering this school when you came at me with this mission Batman," Kara snapped at him.

The figure stepped out of the shadow enough for Kara to clearly see the costumed vigilante and Dark Knight of Gotham City, and she didn't need X-ray vision to see the scowl on his face either. "And you're lucky that Kara Kent was eligible for a Wayne Scholarship. Those are hard to come by if I recall correctly."

"Bite me Bats," Kara stuck her tongue out at him. Then she sighed and leaned against the brick wall at her back. "Unfortunately the only people that know anything about this White Knight guy, know even less than we do. I've been asking around as discreetly as I can, but most of the people I know are going to be regular college students, and they'll only know what they see on TV. Almost literally in some cases."

"What about that boy you were just talking to?" If Kara didn't know any better, she'd swear there was an 'Adult-teasing-tone' in Batman's voice. In either case, she chose to ignore his tone and answer his question.

"His name is Xander Harris and according to him, he's lived here all his life. I'm still new to town and we kind of bumped into each other so he helped me find this place. Why? He seemed harmless enough," she commented.

"Harmless maybe," Batman growled as he slipped back into the shadows, "But my instinct tells me he may know more about what we're looking for than he lets on. Follow him, get to know him," he paused and Kara would have sworn under any oath that he was giving her a superior smirk, "not that I'd have to order you to. Or that I could."

Growling herself, Kara just leaped up from her position and quickly started back to the dorms, not giving Bats the satisfaction of a response. However, she had to admit to herself, getting to know Xander Harris might not be such a /mission/ after all. With a giggle and a big grin on her face, Kara raced back to her single suite dorm room.

  

The next evening found the Slayerettes as scattered as they'd ever been. Buffy, thanks to her new "friend" Parker, was at a Frat party, which he had invited her to, while Willow was adoringly gazing at Oz while he played at the Bronze, and Xander was about a mile over the L.A. skyline looking for trouble.

So of course, it didn't take him very long before finding some.

Only a block from downtown, a loud alarm piercing the night caused him to do a couple of fancy loops in his haste to control his flight. A quick bending of the light to his eyes revealed several armed robbers breaking into several of the stores down below, a jewelry store only one of them and the one with the very loud alarm. The disturbing thing, in his mind though was how there was absolutely no one else around.

"Well," he called out loudly as he landed/hovered over the street, his light-wings fully extended, "I have to admit it's a bit better than the mugging trap, but it somehow lacks originality. Please tell me you guys aren't more terrorists out to capture me for some meta-human camp, because I'm starting to get very annoyed by people who do that."

The armed robbers had stopped the moment the White Knight had appeared, and at first after his speech just stood there dumbly looking at each other. The one of them turned to the rest and asked, "Uh, is that who I think it is?"

"AHHHKK! LA was supposed to be superhero free for crying out loud!" another one cried out.

"You haven't been watching enough news lately, have you?" White Knight sarcastically remarked.

"GET HIM!" the biggest one that the young hero could see shouted, right before they all raised their rifles and opened fire. A combination of bullets, hollow-point armor piercing rounds, and laser fire raced right towards the black and white armored figure.

In a single instant, faster than the blink of a human eye, White Knight's wings wrapped around his body and became a 'light' armored-egg, which absorbed (and melted in the case of the bullets and armor piercing rounds or just plain absorbed in in the case of the lasers) all of the attacks.

"They really don't watch enough news," White Knight commented to himself. He then tweaked his powers so that he could have a 360° view of the battlefield he'd found himself on.

Half a minute later, just as the armed robbers were beginning to realize their weapons were having absolutely no effect, the street lamps, in fact all of the lights on the street began to flicker slightly, right before streamers of light began to fly from those sources to several points on the street. Moments later, there were numerous bright flashes of white light at all of those points and the armed robbers now faced a small army of solholo SWAT team enforcers. Pure white of course.

The robbers all took a moment to pause and gage the situation they had suddenly found themselves in. Several of them gulped in appreciation of the size of the solholo SWAT enforcers, as well as the night sticks each of them carried with powerful and comfortable ease. One by one, the solholos came to life and chose the nearest target.

One of the criminals summarized the entire gang's reaction with a single expression.

"Aw sh—"

"You said it," White Knight, playing puppeteer behind his armored-egg, quickly ended things and tied up the armed robbers. A quick "look" around the neighborhood showed that this was actually a low-rent neighborhood in the "bad" part of town, which explained why no one was about. If he recalled correctly, he had actually cleaned out the neighborhood of the gangs plaguing this area the last time he had stopped a gang/police shooting war.

With the robbers tied up, hanging from the lamp posts and telephone poles, White Knight turned and began to walk down the street to a nearby pay phone.

Just as he was passing an open alley however, he heard a shuffling on the pavement, and turned to look behind him just in time to see some ganger-dressed punk running right at him. It was moving too slow to be a vamp, but better to be safe than sorry, White Knight thought to himself.

Using reflexes honed over the years of dodging and hunting vampires and other more powerful demons, he quickly side-stepped the ganger's blind charge, and then let out a burst of pure sunlight causing the ganger to cry out in pain and trip onto the ground. However he did not spontaneously combust.

"Well, you're obviously not a vamp," White Knight muttered as he stopped shining the light in the boy's eyes. Now that he had a good look at him, the kid was barely 18-years-old. But he had definitely been on the streets for a long time.

Screaming wordlessly, the ganger got up and charged the young hero again, this time though, White Knight leaned into his attack and let out a punch at the boy's chest, trained into his muscles by staking vamps as quickly as possible, even as they blind-rushed him.

The boy collapsed, the wind knocked out of him, and had he known, he would have just been glad that the White Knight didn't have a stake in his hand when he made that hit.

On his hands and knees on the ground, the boy finally gasped out, "What the hell kinda demon are you?!"

White Knight wasn't sure whether to be insulted, angry, or highly amused.

"I'm not a demon. What is it with people and not watching the news lately? OK, I haven't been around for very long, and I'll admit I'm no Superman, or even Batman, but in this city it's gotten so that I can hardly go one block without somebody or everybody knowing about me." When the boy looked up at him, incredulous disbelief written into his features, he introduced himself, "I'm the White Knight. A good guy. Promise."

Now the boy's eyes opened in wide disbelief.

Then he, slowly and unsteadily, got to his feet and finally replied with, "Oh."

White Knight stared at him, showing his own disbelief for a moment, before finally just shrugging it off. "What was that all about anyway?"

"Uh . . . long story," the boy, or rather young man, now that he wasn't on the ground or scared witless it showed better, answered. "Let's just say ever since I got to LA it's practically been nothing but demons and vampires left and right for me. Knew I should have just driven right back to Philadelphia after that weird Private Eye saved me that first night from some vamps."

"Private Eye?" White Knight repeated, curious. He'd heard a rumor, but he wasn't going to jump to any assumptions.

"Yeah, some pretty boy with too much gel calling himself Angel," the young man answered.

White Knight could have spit. He wanted to scream, rant, rave and throw some things around. Instead he just sighed and rolled his eyes beneath his mask.

"Yeah, I know who you're talking about. Hey, what's your name, I can give you a lift to your hotel or motel or wherever, since you're out of town. Oh, I just have to call the cops first."

"Cops? What do you need the cops for?" the young man asked, suddenly nervous.

"Oh, those . . ." he trailed off as they turned and saw several of the robbers loose on the street and helping the others get loose as well. White Knight growled and cursed under his breath. "I really, really should have learned better knots in the Boy Scouts. Hang on for a minute, this won't take long." With that he marched with purpose towards the robbers. If life were a cartoon, you would see White Knight pushing up his sleeves and steam coming out of his ears and the buildings shaking with each step he took.

  

Meanwhile, over in Sunnydale, Buffy and Parker were enjoying themselves at the Frat party. Of course Buffy hardly knew anybody, and had to rely on Parker and her almost long-forgotten hobnobbing skills from when she lived in LA, but fun was had and she couldn't argue with that.

"Some party, huh?" Parker asked as they maneuvered through the noisy crowd. "Kinda like what they had in Rome."

"Better," Buffy replied with a giddy smile. When he looked at her with a curious glance she added without skipping a beat, "No old Romans." They both kind of laughed at that.

"Hey, you wanna dance?" Parker pointed towards the main hall where a lot of people were already making with the dance moves.

Keeping her face neutral, Buffy replied with sarcastic deadpan, "No, let's have a meaningful talk instead." He looked rather shocked at her for several seconds until she could no longer contain her grin and soon he was matching her tooth for tooth.

Then, the fun came to a screeching halt as the couple walked almost right into another couple, both bleach blonds, holding a pale and sickly looking college student between them. The two couples stopped before they could actually bump into one another and then it was like everything stopped, only without anyone else stopping, as Buffy, Spike, and Harmony recognized each other.

"Spike," Buffy sneered, the master vampire's name dripping like ice-cold venom from her mouth. Then she took in the other blond and barely managed to contain a laugh, the amusement of the situation clearly defined upon her face. "And Harmony."

Harmony, knowing Buffy was the Slayer, and now thanks to her boyfriend Spike knowing exactly what that meant, gulped in appreciation of the situation and returned the greeting. "Buffy. Hi! What a cute outfit. Last year."

Parker, sensing that there was something more going on than what he was aware of, just kept glancing back and forth between his date and the other couple.

"Well, this is interesting?" Spike spoke up, "It's uh, sort of a double-date."

"Looks like your friend started the party a little early, huh?" Parker commented on the college student being held between the two vampires.

"Say," Spike suddenly glared at the young man beside the Slayer, "let's have a look at the new boy."

"Hi, I'm Parker," he quickly extracted his hand from around Buffy's shoulders to offer a hand to the vampire, not that he knew exactly what he was doing.

Spike, still holding the anonymous college student up, just looked at the offered hand and the glared at the boy until the hand was finally retracted.

"I like him," Spike announced, looking at Parker now like he was a rack of lamb on the spit. "He's got, uhm . . . what's the word? Vulnerability."

"And you with Harmony," Buffy observed, a perverse little grin of her own on her face. "Heh. What you lose a bet?"

"Hey!" the blond vampiress exclaimed.

"Ah, actually, how we met, it's uh a funny story really, y'see . . ." Spike started to muddle his way through the explanation before doing quite the unexpected and quickly threw the body he and Harmony were carrying at the Slayer and her new beau and then jumping over a nearby couch before running at top speed for the exit.

"Stay here!" Buffy shouted to Parker before making to follow Spike as quickly as she could.

Harmony, seeing she was getting left behind, quickly made to follow Spike's example, though rather than leaping over the couch she more tried to slide over it and thus was more following the Slayer than Spike.

Unfortunately, Buffy didn't catch Spike before he made it to the exit, but her instincts, as well as past experience with the master vampire, told her that he was still in the immediate vicinity and she slowed her pace, more hunting now than chasing. Weeding through the crowd, she turned towards the large bushes that were directly around the Frat House, big enough and dark enough at night to hide just about anything. Including a master vampire.

Taking out her stake, she began to stalk forward, keeping her senses fully open and tensing her muscles in preparation for the fight to come. Just as she rounded the corner on the largest bush, ready to strike out, Spike struck first, with a punch to the face. She retaliated and quickly dragged him out of his hiding place. Seeing each at a standoff, for the moment, they backed up a single pace and sneered at each other, now preparing their wits for a barrage of quips and insults.

"What's the matter Spike? Dru dump you again?" the Slayer teased before letting loose with a cross-punch which caused the vampire to reel in pain.

"Maybe I dumped her!" Spike angrily retorted before launching his own combo, pulling the Slayer across in a throw so that they ended up switching places.

Harmony, now behind Spike, answered Buffy's question as though it were a new piece of gossip, and everyone knows what kind of gossip-hog Harmony Kendall is. "She left him for a Fungus demon. That's all he talks about most days." She sounded annoyed by this latest tidbit of fact.

"HARM!!" Spike roared, turning on his paramour. "We are going." Then he turned and gave an evil glare at the Slayer before adding, "It isn't time yet."

"Yeah" Harmony added, before continuing, "but as soon as we have the Gem of Amara, you are going to be so so--"

Spike looked incredulously at his childe before grabbing her roughly, cutting off her speech and growling loudly before dragging her away. "GRRRR!!!"

"Oww!" Harmony squealed as she was dragged away.

Staring in fascination and morbid curiosity, Buffy just watched the two vampires storm off into the night, and quickly made a couple of fast decisions, the first of which was to get in touch with Giles on that little tidbit of valuable information Harmony had just let slip.

Quickly finding a payphone she dialed up Giles' home number and only had to wait a couple of quick rings before it answered. Giving Giles the quick rundown, which was mostly Spike was back in town, Harmony was now a vampire and apparently Spike's girlfriend, and that they were looking for something called the Gem of Amara, she then listened as he calmly and in his watchery way explained that the Gem didn't actually exist, to which she pointed out in her slayery way, that Spike was still in town looking for it and that nevertheless meant trouble, whether the gem was real or not.

After that, and with only slightly guilty thoughts on making Giles think that she'd encountered Spike and Harmony on patrol instead of at a party, she hung up and then quickly made her way back to the party, and to Parker.

  

"Was all that really necessary?"

White Knight turned to the young man from Philadelphia, standing off at the sidelines, before finally answering.

"Probably not, but then again I did try just tying them up and they kept getting loose, so enforced unconsciousness seemed just as good. And look, none of them are trying to get away now!" the superhero jokingly commented.

"Yeah, but doing the Mighty Mouse Kung-Fu Toss thing?"

Keeping from laughing, but only barely, White Knight only shrugged before causing all the solholos on the street to vanish back into harmless light once more, including the Mighty Mouse one.

"It seemed like a good idea at the time. Now, you still want that ride to your motel or wherever?" he offered.

"Uh, sure I guess, uh . . . Mr. Knight?"

"White Knight will suffice for now," Xander quickly waved off the other title. "Say, what's your name kid? I'm sure you don't want me calling you the kid from Philadelphia all night?"

"Oh, uh, it's Shawn. Shawn Hunter. By the way, you aren't going to like, carry me in your arms, are you?" the young man asked, sounding uncertain.

White Knight concentrated for only a few moments before smirking beneath his helmet and replying, "Nah, I figured you look old enough to be able to drive yourself. I'm just providing escort and transportation." He gestured to right behind the young man.

Shawn turned, and then stared in awe, his eyes going wide and his jaw dropping in shock. There, gleaming white and silver, was a motorcycle with large bird-like wings attached to it.

"Are-are . . . are you serious?" Shawn hoarsely replied.

"Don't worry, it's safe. I've driven it myself. Not to mention, I'd definitely make sure you wouldn't fall, so no need to worry about that sort of thing. OK? Ready to go?"

In response, Shawn just launched himself at the solholo bike and leapt on with a wide grin on his face. "I'll take that as a yes," White Knight smirked again, but then just reformed his own wings and with subtle mental control, started the bike and both quickly took to the air.

"WHOOO HOOOO!!" Shawn screamed at the sudden take-off.

Xander grinned beneath his mask and angled to fly right along side the young man from Phillie.

"So, where you stayin' at? Can't just joy ride all night, despite the tempting prospects involved," he pointed out.

"Oh, right. The Motel 6, uh . . ." Shawn looked around and then pointed in an easterly direction, "uh, that way, I think."

"That way it is," White Knight made the course correction and soon they were flying due East.

After several minutes spent in silence, White Knight decided to open up a little conversation. At least to pass the time. "So . . . you mentioned Angel?"

"Uh, yeah," Shawn was obviously just a bit uncomfortable talking with a real superhero, but he was handling it OK so far. "It was real weird too. I had just arrived in town and was asking questions about my father, uh, he was kind of a wanderer, going from place to place. He . . . he, uh, he died recently, and I . . . well I've been trying to get to know him, by going to the places he's been and meet the people he met when he was . . ."

"Wandering?" the hero input.

"Yeah," Shawn nodded, smiling, glad to not hear any kind of pity in the hero's voice.

"I know how that is," Xander bared the tiniest bit of his soul, "Trying to find out who you are, confused by everything that's supposed to be familiar and you're just trying to make sense of it all and how you fit in what's supposed to be your normal life."

"Yeah," Shawn was surprised, because that was exactly the way he felt. "That happened to you?"

"A little less than a year ago, yep," White Knight remembered the nightmare of keeping up with while trying to stop a bunch of zombies from inadvertently ending the world. "Wanna know a secret?"

"Uh, sure!"

"Now I don't know your exact situation, but I can make some guesses based on what happened with me. You got any good friends back home?"

"Uh . . . yeah. A few really great friends. My best friend, Cory Mathews . . . he, uh, didn't want me to go on this trip. Said I didn't need to." Hunter explained.

"Well, that's just cause he was trying to protect you, and probably from his point of view, your place in life was pretty obvious. I had some of that happening to me too."

"You? But you're a superhero!"

"Wasn't always," White Knight pointed out. He bent the light around his eyes to take a "closer" look at the ground below, and quickly found a Motel 6 that just so happened to have a motor home and truck in the parking lot with Philadelphia plates. The only car in the entire lot as a matter of fact.

"Way I see it, it always goes two ways with your friends trying to protect you. Either they push you away, "for your own good" or they try and smother you, which sounds like what your friends were trying to do. Now here's the secret. Whatever you do, don't listen to them. You have to have confidence in yourself. After that, everything else is cake."

"Wait, wait, wait a minute here. You're saying, all I have to do is have confidence in myself? That's it? I've had that since I could talk! That's the big secret?" Shawn, needless to say, was a might disappointed.

"Your dad died recently, right?"

"Uh, yeah," Shawn returned with a huff of annoyance.

"And you've probably graduated High School, started college and all that?"

"Yeah," Shawn sounded less annoyed and more curious now.

"And I'm guessing, since you've said your dad was pretty much a wanderer, that you never had the lifestyles of the Rich and Fabulous, am I right?"

"Not wrong," he grumbled.

"Any one of those things by itself is enough to knock the confidence of even the coolest person on the planet down a few notches. Plus, taking once again from my own situation, that you never really saw yourself with much of a career growing up, I'm willing to bet that in regards to your own future you never really believed you could actually accomplish anything. And that's what I'm talking about. You don't have to know what you're going to be or what you're going to do. You just have to believe in yourself, your own abilities, and tell whatever fear that's rattling up in your skull to take a flying leap off the nearest cliff. After that, well like I said, everything else tends to fall in place."

Shawn was quiet the rest of the trip to his motel.

"So, what were you saying about Angel?" White Knight asked as he dropped the young man off and dissolved the solholo bike, as well as his own wings, for the moment.

"Oh, right. Well, I hadn't even been in town like an hour even, and then he comes up to me out of nowhere, then tackles this chick I was talking to . . . who just happened to be a vampire, and then he dusted her right in front of me. He sat me down and kind of tried to explain what was going on. He went into vampires, demons, and the fact that the world is almost more regularly in danger of ending than what we hear about in the news. He, uh, he also tried to talk me into letting him protect me from something, though he didn't exactly go into what it was. That was three days ago, and every time I've gone out since, it's like left and right are vampires and demons."

"Yeah, funny thing about LA, it attracts the strangest folks," White Knight mused.

Internally, however, he was musing more over paying a visit to one souled-vamp private eye. "Well, my advice Shawn, go home. Go home to those really great friends of yours, and your best friend Cory. You don't have to live your father's life Shawn, and there is nothing in this world that says you have to end up the way he did. You're your own man, and you are living your own life. Remember that."

With but a thought the wings reformed and carried him into the night sky. Before going too high though, he turned and shouted back one last bit of advice to the out-of-towner. "I really think you should go home Shawn. Because as much as you might think you don't need your friends, they probably need you more."

  

After dropping Shawn off at his motel, and incidentally dusting the few vamps that had been hanging around the motel, probably hoping to pick off some out-of-towners, White Knight made his way back towards the city, downtown specifically.

Surprisingly, it didn't take him long to find the exact thing he'd been looking for. There was a popular club, Xander didn't know the name of it, but he could see from where he was that at the moment it was surrounded by police. About a block from there, he found the only vampire in the world that still had his human soul.

Smirking to himself as he did so, the young hero created a few holographic-only illusions that soon had the vampire trapped at the end of a dead-end alley. Not wanting to risk his old nemesis going underground, aka the sewers, the White Knight chose that moment to make his entrance.

Angel was confused. He'd gone home this way hundreds of times already, almost, and here he was, lost. If Cordelia learned about this, he knew he'd never hear the end of it. Why was it again that he had to save her life? Oh, right, redemption.

The next thing he knew, he was at the end of an alley that he shouldn't have been and when he turned around to leave, a brilliant, and yet painful light lit up the area. Covering himself the best he could with his coat, the souled vampire tried to make his way to the sewer entrance at the end of the alley. Before he could move so much as a foot however, the light suddenly vanished, and a commanding voice came from above him.

"Stop right there Angelus. Or much rather, Liam, wasn't it? When you were still mortal?"

Curious, and highly suspicious, Angel came out from behind his cover and looked up. He stared, then was forced to do a double-take just to confirm what he was seeing. A glowing figure, equally made up of the black of night and glowing white, was hovering several feet above the pavement. That in itself would have made Angel stare, but it was the glowing white angel wings that really got his attention. Finally, something in the news, and Cordelia briefly obsessing over it, came to his mind.

"You're the White Knight," he observed, finally understanding.

"Not as dumb as the rest of your kind, are you? Though my reason for cornering you leads me to believe otherwise," the angelic hero replied.

"What are you . . . Wait, you lead me here? What for? I thought you were one of the good guys?" Angel asked.

"Rumor has it that so are you, though I'm inclined to disagree, for my own reasons," the White Knight finally touched the ground and just like that his wings disappeared in a flash of light that had Angel flinching in pain.

"What do you want?" Angel finally growled.

"You met a young man not too long ago, not sure if you'd remember the name, but it was Shawn Hunter. Ring any bells for you?"

It did but Angel's expression gave nothing away, "Might, might not, what's it to you?"

"I ran into him earlier this evening. He tried to attack me, thinking I was a demon," White Knight casually answered, stepping closer to the vampire. He grinned beneath his glowing white helmet when the vampire instinctively recoiled once the effects of his solholo armor started to affect him.

"If you hurt that boy . . . !" Angel snarled and almost tried to attack the White Knight himself, but some instinct kept him where he was.

"Shawn's fine," White Knight allayed the vampire's fears. "I just dropped him off at his motel and dusted all the vampires around the area just to be certain. What I want to talk to you about," he took another step forward, Angel took a couple steps back, "is your encounter with the boy. Just because an innocent boy from Philly may get attacked by a vamp his first night in town, is no reason to explain to him the finer points of the world you live in. You don't need to tell him how to spot a vamp in a crowd," another step forward, another step back, "you don't need to tell him about demons and how close the whole world comes to ending on a weekly, if not nightly basis. The nightly news and Hero Watch does that well enough."

White Knight's next step put the vampire with his back against the wall and feeling very uncomfortable being less than a foot from solidified and purified sunlight.

"The boy doesn't even need to see you. Next time you get a vision of somebody about to get attacked, take out the threat without them even knowing about it. It's better for everybody all around vampire. I work publicly because the light does not and will not hide in the shadows. You, however, I've heard are rather an expert at working out of shadows. If you want to do good, for whatever reasons, fine, more power to you. But don't try to become a superhero vampire. If you want to do good for goods sake, then just be a man trying to do good, and don't stand by and let evil happen. You want redemption for what the demon did? Then stop being a damned soul, and just start being a good man."

The two stared each other in the eyes for several long minutes, until finally, with a muffled snort, the White Knight turned, in a flash of light his wings were back, and then just like that he took off into the air, leaving a very confused, and curious souled vampire behind.

Rumors had it that the White Knight really was an angel sent from Heaven, and after his encounter, and especially the way his demonic side had reacted to the mere presence of the superhero, Angel was inclined to believe that this truly was the truth. Which meant that the White Knight had either been sent by the Powers That Be, to see him this night and give him this message, or the only force that could be considered over the Powers That Be did.

Believing all this to be true, Angel shook his head in quiet disbelief. "Damn. That's all it took? Stop being a damned soul looking for redemption and just start being a good man? They couldn't have told me that a hundred years ago?" Angel asked to the heavens as he made his way home, his entire outlook on the rest of his eternity entirely different from what it had been even a few minutes earlier.

  

In the morning, things had changed. Buffy had awoken in Parker's dorm room, naked, and when Parker finally showed up, (that's two for two that she wakes up alone), he's treating the entire situation like it happens every day.

Xander had woken up alone as well, but he'd spent the night out hunting for demons and criminals to stop. Strangely though, his mind was still on that girl he'd escorted to the Coffee shop before he'd gone out on patrol. Kara.

Oz and Willow had woken up together, having spent the night together, and thus Buffy and Willow's dorm room had been empty the entire night, but the redheaded witch didn't know that. Meanwhile she was more distracted by her 'job' at S.T.A.R. Labs than over her concerns that Buffy had been lonely the night before. Besides, she consoled herself, Buffy had gone to that party with Parker that the Slayer had told her about, so maybe the blond superhero had just crashed after getting back from the party.

However, no matter where they'd all woken up that morning, they still found themselves in Giles' apartment that afternoon to discuss Buffy's encounter with Spike and Harmony.

"So, any clues about what Spike doesn't want me to know?" Buffy asked, helping herself to the donuts available.

"Other than the ones Harmony so helpfully blurted out?" Xander teased back, bringing a smile to everyone's face at how completely bizarre, idiotic, and downright stupid Harmony being a vampire was.

"It doesn't make any sense though," Giles admitted, walking down the stairs, book in hand. "The Gem of Amara is a myth. Like the Holy Grail, or, or, or Atlantis. It simply doesn't exist. There are records of vampires looking for it for centuries, but . . . quite obviously no one has, has ever found it. It simply doesn't exist."

"Just cause none of them have found it yet?" Xander asked.

"Not simply that, but because of the amount of effort that has been put into looking for it. Finally, after conducting their own, century-spanning, search for it, the Watcher's Council declared it to be simply a vampire myth, an impossible dream," Giles answered.

"So Spike suddenly thinks it's in Sunnydale somewhere?" Buffy brought the track back around to her.

"What is this . . . Jen of Harem anyway?" Xander asked.

"Gem of Amara," Giles corrected, then began to read from the book in his hands again. "Supposedly, it's rumored to hold some great power that will make any vampire that wields it completely invincible."

"And we're going to take the word of the Watcher's Council, that gave up on this thing before England even discovered America, that it /doesn't/ exist?" Xander pointed out the logical flaws.

"Or that just because it doesn't exist, even though Spike is looking for it here in Sunnydale, that he won't find it," Willow picked up the train of thought.

Buffy and Giles looked at each other, the Slayer shrugging, the former Watcher blushing slightly, and then both heaved a heavy sigh. "I'll contact my sources, check for any and all references to the gem," Giles said as he walked to the phone.

"I'll go hit Willy, I mean hit up Willy for some information," Buffy said, and then glanced at her watch, "After class. C'mon Wills, Walsh awaits."

"And I'll . . ." Xander trailed off for a second, but before Giles could put the words in his mouth, he quickly got up, finishing with, "get more donuts. See you guys!" He was out the door before Buffy and Willow had even gotten halfway there.

"No, that's all right, I'll handle it myself," Giles said to the empty room. "Really, it's no trouble at all. Bloody American Teenagers!"

  

Kara was beginning to get a bit worried. And strangely enough, not about her mission in Sunnydale. No, it wasn't even about the fact that she'd barely gotten any sleep because Supergirl was needed late last night all the way on the East Coast in Metropolis. Apparently 'Granny' from Apocalypse had tried another invasion attempt, though this one a little more subtle than outright attack, or even working through Intergang. Unfortunately Clark was busy with the Justice League elsewhere so it was up to her and the other Heroes that took Metropolis as their home and protectorate, but they'd managed. Even though she was faster than a speeding bullet herself, it still took her the better part of an hour commuting all the way from Sunnydale to Metropolis and back, not to mention how exhausted she was after the whole fight in the first place.

No, sleep deprivation she was also used to, even having to force herself to stay awake in classes that should have been paid for as sleep aids instead of college courses, she wasn't worried about /that/. She'd make it up later anyway.

What she was worried about was the fact that despite all the things she /should/ have been worried about were the last things on her mind and instead all she was thinking and worrying about was the next time she'd meet Xander Harris.

It had her not only worried, but confused too. Or maybe confused first and worried second, because it was a known fact, superheroes that get involved with civilians usually, almost guaranteed, get those same civilians into life-threatening danger at some point.

Besides, since when did /Supergirl/ need a boyfriend?

Since she had been taken to Prom by her cousin, she answered herself. And he didn't even go as Superman!

Letting out a sigh of frustration, she gathered up her books as the professor had just dismissed class and was walking out when out of nowhere she bumped into the very subject of her distracted thoughts.

"Whoa! Sorry there!" Xander blurted as he and Kara collided, all her books being spilled over the floor.

For just a second after they'd steadied themselves, they stopped and stared at one another, stunned silent.

"Kara," Xander whispered, not consciously aware he'd said anything.

"Xander," she whispered back, gulping in appreciation of how handsome his dark eyes looked on his face. "I am so so sorry," she finally snapped out of it, bending down to pick up her books. "I should have been watching where I was going. I don't know why I'm so out of it today."

Realizing he was just standing there like an idiot, he quickly bent down himself to start helping the young woman pick up her things. Of course she'd already gotten most of it, and the last thing left they both reached for at the same time, their hands brushing, forcing them to make eye contact once more.

"No it was totally my fault," he finally admitted.

Kara couldn't help giggling at the naturally goofy face she found staring hopefully at hers, so she just stood back up and coughed lightly to cover the giggles, and said, "How about we just start over and say, 'Hi, nice to see you again', and go from there."

"Deal," Xander replied with a grateful smile.

A beat later, he beamed, "Hi! Nice to see you again, fancy meeting you here, hey, by any chance have seen anything suspicious involving a bleached-blond Billy Idol wannabe with a cockney English accent running around with a blond bimbo that could drop your IQ points by ten degrees just by having a two-minute conversation with her, have you?"

"Hi, nice to see you too," Kara replied with a straight face, though internally she was wondering what Xander had to do with that vampire couple she'd seen drive into town about a day after she arrived, "And no, sorry, can't say that I have. Why? Friends of yours?"

"God no!" the expression on his face almost sent the girl into giggles again, "But I suppose it's good all the same . . . that you haven't seen them I mean," he continued, now looking more troubled than pleased to see her. "Oh, and if you do happen to see them . . . Run. Run as fast as you can in the opposite direction. I've got to go now, it was nice, uh, bumping into you again Kara. Chances are, knowing my luck, it'll happen again soon. See you around!"

Kara frowned in confusion for a moment, then happened to glance at her watch. She glanced back up at Xander's retreating back, then back down to her watch. With a sigh, she quickly raced at almost-super speed to her next class. She didn't have enough evidence to warrant following Xander, and one conversation and a hunch from a man that dressed as a bat was not, in her book, reason enough to ditch even one of her classes.

She might be undercover, but she still had to go to school!

  

Xander was running around trying to find out if anyone had seen or heard any kind of clue about where Spike and Harmony might be or might have been. Although truthfully, he didn't expect Spike to be seen topside again until he had what he came to Sunnydale for. It was his near-long-forgotten soldier instincts telling him so, but still, and on this even the soldier instincts agreed, it was better to cover all the options.

So he, and all the others, were racing all over town trying to find clues as to where Spike was at the moment. Buffy didn't have much luck with Willy other than just getting final confirmation that Spike had been recruiting and hadn't been seen so much as once around town after Buffy met him and Harmony at the Frat party.

Willow had offered to do a scrying spell, but both Buffy and Giles shot it down, for different reasons, but if Xander knew his Prof, she was probably doing it even now. He just hoped she knew what she was doing. Stealing from S.T.A.R. Labs to help him in his superhero efforts, and hacking government computers was one thing, magic was a whole other ballpark that Xander often worried over his friend about.

Unfortunately, it seemed that no matter what they tried, Spike was keeping himself and his minions underground. Probably both literally and figuratively, Xander thought as he got shoved off by yet another student. Finally he'd had enough and went back to Giles' to report in that he'd found absolutely nothing out, and found that Giles had found some text alluding to that the gem had been rumored to be in the "valley of the sun", so they knew Spike had a real chance of actually finding this gem somehow.

After that rather informative waste of time, Xander decided to vent his frustration and 'powered up' and went to LA to stop some petty robberies for a while. It was fun, as he got to use new and imaginative solholos to take them out, and he got some more practice avoiding News and Police helicopters.

Unfortunately it was two whole days before they even got word of where Spike might be. Doubly unfortunate that they got their lead when Spike attacked Buffy . . . in broad daylight.

  

Buffy slowly got up from the ground where Spike had knocked her down when he'd almost literally popped in out of nowhere. She'd finally found Parker, although she was the last person to think that when she did, it would be seeing him flirt with some other girl. After the devastating blow to her ego, Spike took that opportune moment to effectively hit her when she was down.

Unknown to either Buffy or Spike, however, Xander was walking over to meet with Buffy at some pre-arranged location, when he entered the quad and saw the confrontation beginning. Running back to an alley between buildings he'd noticed before, he powered up and put his armor on, hoping he wouldn't be too late.

While Xander was running off to come to her rescue however, Buffy was dealing with Spike on her own.

"Birds singing, squirrels making lots of rotten little squirrels. Sun beaming down in a nice, non-fatal way," Spike was almost preening in front of her as he gloated, "It's very exciting, I can't wait to see if I freckle."

Buffy grabbed her stake and jumped up. She landed a punch, but then he punched back and she hit the ground. He went to jump on her, but she managed to kick him back off of her. He staggered back, but jumped forward again, right into her stake.

"Oh, do it again. It tickles. You know, in a good way," he taunted her, as she stepped back in shock, watching as the new hole she'd just given him healed up right before her eyes.

"The gem of amara," he gloated, holding up his hand with the ring on the pinky finger, which he then used to casually backhand her, knocking her down again. "Official sponsor of my killing you."

With that, he vamped out and lunged in for the kill . . . if not for Superman swooping in to save the day! An albino, softly-glowing Superman in an all-white costume that gave off no shadows, but it still looked like Superman. The solholo superhero got between Spike and Buffy and launched the vampire away with a right cross. Duty, for the moment, done, the solid hologram faded into nothing, leaving Buffy wondering if Spike had hit her too hard or if she was going crazy. A moment later, she had her answer.

"Sorry for the interruption," a deep voice spoke seriously right above and behind her, "but it appeared that you needed some help. Are you all right?"

For half a second, the Slayer almost blurted out for Xander to stop talking so weird, but thankfully she turned around before embarrassing herself like that. Standing, almost lazily right behind her, in full, living 3D color was none other than the White Knight.

"Who the bloody hell are you, ya ponce?" Spike raged, still vamped out, as he got back to his feet.

"Vampire, huh?" the White Knight turned to give Spike a casual regard, before turning his helmeted face upwards to look at the sun, and then back down at Spike. He gave a heavy sigh and straightened himself, and Buffy's breath was nearly taken away when she saw and felt the hero's calm and confident presence.

"I'd been worried that I might get lazy with the simple way I've been able to dispatch your kind," the White Knight told Spike, stepping beside and across from Buffy, creating a kind of weird triangle, "It's almost refreshing to meet a challenge that doesn't use guns or high-tech gadgetry."

"So glad I could provide," Spike sarcastically shot back, "Still doesn't tell me who ya are!"

"They call me the White Knight," the superhero introduced himself, then, more for show, he reformed the angel-wings on his back in a blinding flash of light, and spread them wide.

"Bloody hell," Spike cursed, then he grinned wickedly, "Never had me a taste of /real/ angel blood."

"Stakes don't work either," Buffy told the superhero as she got ready for Spike's attack.

Smirking beneath his mask, Xander couldn't help teasing Buffy just a bit, and maybe a little out of spite for a few things from back in high school, as he turned and said to her, keeping up the 'serious White Knight' voice, "Miss, perhaps you should step back, I think I can handle one lone vampire, and I don't want you to get hurt."

"WHAT?!!" the blonde screeched loudly, making even Spike wince in pain.

Rather than reply or continue the argument, White Knight formed a solholo sword in one hand and took off, flying at full speed, which was damn fast, for Spike, swiping twice before flying past and having to loop around for another pass. Both strikes hit, which surprised Spike most of all as the bloody superhero moved faster than he'd expected. And they hurt like hell.

What really surprised, both Spike and White Knight, was that the wounds healed slowly. Slower than any wound he'd had yet, Spike realized with shock. The White Knight shocked they healed at all as it was /concentrated/ sunlight that he had struck with. Stakes, pieces of dead wood, were one thing, but solholos?

That left decapitation and holy water, and personally White Knight worried that even if they got Spike to somehow drink or drown in an ocean of the stuff it still wouldn't work. Never something easy to do, even when you did have a sword.

While the White Knight was turning to come back, Buffy had used the distraction to try another bout with Spike, leading in with a flying kick, knocking the vampire back, and then coming back with a roundhouse combo, both of which Spike managed to block. After a few more blows traded, Spike landed another backhand that knocked Buffy down some nearby steps, stunning her for several moments. Several moments that the White Knight used to run Spike down again, this time aiming to spear him through the heart with the solholo blade. Unfortunately, Spike saw it coming and managed to dodge to the side just in time.

White Knight dropped from the air just as suddenly and blocked Spike's retaliatory strike against his shoulder, and in an uncharacteristic display of violence, shot out with a rapid full-bodied punch to Spike's face, that actually knocked the vampire for a loop or two.

Taking the distraction, and knowing how quickly most vampires recovered, White Knight, as fast as thought, reformed the wings around him in the full-bodied armor, sort of a mini-scale of the Juggernaut armor, and just in time too as Spike had been throwing a left hook right at his head, and if it hadn't been for the armor he might have gotten his head knocked clear off.

"Owww!" Spike screamed stepping back holding his broken and quickly-healing hand, shaking it once it was healed. "Bloody hell!"

Using his light-bending vision, White Knight, "out of the corner of his eye", noticed Buffy getting back up and ready to charge back in. He stopped her by shouting angrily back at her, "Miss! I really think you should leave now! I can't afford the distraction of trying to protect you, and you could get seriously hurt!"

Spike guffawed in the hero's face and squawked, "The Slayer getting told by a ponce in glowing white armor to take a hike? Oh this is rich! And you'd better believe she's going to get hurt Mr. Knight, I'm gonna hurt her until she's dead."

White Knight paused, actually turning to look at Buffy before looking back at Spike. "She's the Slayer?" he asked.

"Yeah, what of it?" Spike was confused.

"Oh, well in that case," he turned and bowed even with his waist, "I apologize miss, and I would greatly appreciate any assistance you could offer."

"Assistance?!" Buffy screeched again, and then streaked forward, screaming with rage.

Before she even got halfway up the steps though, White Knight transformed his full armor into the Juggernaut armor and let loose a giant haymaker, throwing Spike painfully against the wall of the building behind him. Rather high up on the wall. After falling to the ground from about a story up, the vampire got up and shook his head, glaring hatefully at the Slayer and the White Knight standing together.

"We are going to have words after we're through," Buffy swore to the White Knight, who reverted back to his normal costume.

"Well, if I'd known you were the Slayer . . ." he tried to excuse, but Spike had gotten back up and was attacking again.

"He's got the gem of amara, it's what is making him invulnerable," Buffy quickly informed the White Knight as they both ducked and weaved around Spike's wild and angry attacks. "It's the ring on his finger."

"Oh is that all," he sarcastically retorted, making Buffy look strangely at him, before he shot forward, this time riding a disc of light, charging and then slamming into Spike feet, and disc, first.

Again, the vampire was slammed against the wall, giving White Knight enough time to go back to Buffy and ask, "Have you tried decapitation yet?"

"Well it's not like I have a . . ." she stopped when she noticed the same solholo blade the hero had used earlier, hovering quietly before her, ". . . a sword? Is that . . . ?"

"For you," White Knight nodded, "although it'll disappear after this battle is through. Do not worry, it is as sturdy as any sword you've ever used before, and will handle the same, I promise you."

"Cool," the Slayer's eyes lit up with appreciation before looking back over to Spike with a predatory grin.

The vampire, hyped up on his own invulnerability, sneered at the weapon and taunted, "Oh, so that Parker bloke ain't the only one hittin' up the Slayer then, eh? How much does it take to pry apart those legs of yours anyway?"

For a second, Xander was stunned and looked over at Buffy in disbelief, then he quickly got over it and looked back at Spike, his eyes now a burning (literally) red. In response to his emotions, which thankfully mirrored Buffy's own at the moment, the only active solholo that was not his armor-costume reacted and erupted into infra-red flames.

Spike was unprepared for the brutality of the Slayer's assault, trying to avoid the sword, that hurt just to get near it, he began to realize the limitations of this ring of his. Just cause he wouldn't die from something like fire or sunlight or a stake through the heart, didn't mean they still didn't hurt like hell when they injured him, and as he learned when Buffy actually managed to slice out a chunk of his arm, thankfully without severing the whole limb, the ring just healed him fast, he didn't regenerate any faster, and for things like an arm, finger, leg, or even a head, those he didn't regenerate at all. Especially the head.

"Bugger," he cursed as the Slayer managed to set his coat on fire, which he quickly put out. Unfortunate for Spike, he'd forgotten all about the White Knight and was surprised when the superhero in Juggernaut armor blindsided him and held him down just long enough for some little crab-like construction made of pure light took the gem off of his hand.

Self-preservation forced Spike to flee and gave him the raw strength to force off the hulk made of light and the Slayer and he quickly disappeared down the manhole that he'd entered from.

Surprisingly, it got quiet in the court yard once the vampire had disappeared as the two heroes, and friends though Buffy didn't know that, stood there and stared at each other.

"Uh . . . thanks for the loan," Buffy offered the sword back to the White Knight, but was surprised when it dissolved away in her grip.

"If ever we fight together again, I'll be sure to . . . loan it to you once more," White Knight bowed once more, ever the courteous and chivalrous knight.

"Hey, y'know, since we're, uh, y'know, like on the same side," Buffy stuttered, "maybe we can, uh . . . y'know, hang out some time? Fight some evil together, maybe?" She winced at how lame that sounded.

White Knight tilted his head to the side, either confused or interested she couldn't tell, though secretly Xander was doing his best just to not laugh. The crab-like solholo crawled up and deposited the ring into the superhero's waiting hand, which he then offered to Buffy.

"I feel I can trust this with you, since you are the Slayer," he said as she took it from him. "And as warriors of light, I am sure that we will one day meet again. Probably sooner than you think."

With that, he nodded at her, and then looked to the sky as the wings reformed on his back and carried him into the heavens, where he then disappeared in a blinding flash of light. Buffy was still looking up into the sky with a quirky grin on her face when Xander came up behind her.

"Buff?" he called, grabbing her gently by the shoulder, "Buffy? You OK?"

"Huh?" she startled, "Oh! Xander! You won't believe it! You just missed it! The White Knight totally just helped me take out Spike, and," she held up the ring, "I've got the gem of amara. He was amazing! He did this thing where he . . ."

"Uh, Buff," Xander interrupted her, and then gestured around and she noticed that a bunch of students were filling into the court yard.

She nodded, "Right, uh, let's go back to Giles, that way I only have to tell the story once."

"Good idea," he quickly agreed, trying to hide his blush at the way she'd been gushing about him. Not that she knew it was him of course.

"So," he asked slowly, "you and Parker?"

  

/Giles' Apartment/

"You met him face to face?" Willow exclaimed, gushing with excitement, not all of it faked, nor need it be since she was petrified that Buffy had figured out that Xander was the White Knight.

"Yeah, it was so cool!" Buffy gushed.

"Isn't he?" Xander agreed, drawing a warning glare from the redhead.

"Well, he was a bit arrogant and presumptuous," Buffy continued, missing the byplay between her two friends. "I mean, he didn't even know I was the Slayer! Like I'd be fighting Spike if I wasn't!"

At that, Xander raised an eyebrow, but let it slide for the moment.

"And yeah, the fight went a lot better than it could've if he hadn't been there, and we did make a pretty good team. I mean, he swooped in and kept Spike off of me every time, uh, every time that I was regrouping and gathering my energy for the next round in beating Spike. Plus he let me borrow this really cool flaming sword, which he promised I could use again the next time that he teamed up with me."

"Sounds amazing Buffy," Xander agreed with the blonde slayer. "So did he tell you how to get in touch with him, y'know, like he told me?"

That brought Buffy up short, while Willow slapped him, again, across the back of the head.

Thankfully, before things could get any more heated, Giles walked back in with the ring/Gem of Amara and an open book in his other hand. "Completely unbelievable," he was saying, as he had been saying since Buffy and Xander had first shown him the ring. "It exists, it truly exists," was another repeated statement.

"Yeah, about that," Xander said as a way of getting Willow off his case, "What are we gonna do with it? I mean I think I can find a sledgehammer somewhere if Buffy wants to relive her Master-bone-smashing days and see if brand new ring-smashing can compare."

"We're swinging through LA on a tour of gigs Devon set up," Oz suddenly said out of the blue. "I'll drop it off while the others are setting up some night."

"Huh?" Xander blurted, looking back and forth between the werewolf and the Slayer.

"She's giving it to Angel doofus," Willow nearly slapped him upside the head again.

"Whu...?!" now he was just gaping like a fish at the girl he secretly called "Prof."

Accepting the ring from Giles, Buffy fingered it for a moment before handing it over to Oz with a nod.

"Now hold on a minute!" Xander yelled out loud.

"Xander," Giles snapped, silencing the young meta-human. "Normally, I might be inclined to agree with your prejudice in such matters, but not now. And not over this. If anyone can be trusted with this, unfortunately I have to agree, Angel is the one, the only one."

"And smashing it to pieces is not a better idea because why?" he exclaimed where before he might have remained silent. It was the whole reason he, as the White Knight, had let Buffy keep it in the first place, because it might look suspicious of a new superhero taking something like that, and he believed that Giles would know of the best way to get rid of a mystical object. He should've just taken it and vaporized it with a combination of ultra-violet and microwave radiation, aka Purple and Red mixed together.

"It's going to Angel Xander, and that's final," Buffy pronounced, then nodded at Oz and got up and left.

"This is such a bad idea," the secret superhero announced.

  

/Los Angeles, CA/

/Two days later/

"This was /such/ a bad idea," White Knight muttered as he soared over LA on the solholo "angel wings" as he used his light-bending telescopic vision to scour the city below for, ironically, Angel.

It had taken Oz and the rest of the Dingoes an afternoon to get to LA and Oz had put the ring in Angel's hands by that evening. A day later, Angel was missing, and Oz, Cordelia, and Doyle were hunting the sewers for Spike and Angel, and Buffy back in Sunnydale was panicking her panties off. Xander had heard about the situation from Willow and almost immediately had taken off for LA to start searching from a birds-eye view.

Thankfully, today was his day off from work as he'd been at his patrolling the city for hours now.

It had also forced him to improve his cloaking abilities to an unheard of degree just to keep the helicopters off him, not to mention the cops, reporters, and potential super villains from harassing him as he tried to look for the souled vampire and the potential threat he carried he with him.

Of course he was keeping in mind that it was /vampires/ that he was tracking down. Just because Spike was obsessed with that ring and had a personal hatred for Angel that just didn't quit, did not automatically make him suicidally stupid. Unfortunately.

So that lead him to trying a different way of using his light-bending powers, rather than just increase his vision range or allow him to see far away things up close, he'd begun trying to work with other frequencies of light, meaning infra-red heat vision, and x-ray vision. The last he really got a kick out of... until he realized the concentration level required was monumental and he almost dropped to the streets below from losing both his cloak and his wings.

As it was, he still had no clue about where to even start looking for Angel or Spike.

Rather than let that get him down, he just concentrated harder and pretty soon got used to what needed to be done to use his powers in this way. It was far from perfected but at least he could see through the buildings now. And... WHOA!!

White Knight staggered in mid-air. Good thing nobody saw him, cause he was invisible, otherwise it might have been embarrassing. But being embarrassed was nothing compared to getting hit with a TON of x-ray radiation out of the middle of nowhere. Wait a sec... there aren't any x-ray machines two miles above the city, and the amount of radiation wasn't so much massive as it was concentrated into a tight beam.

"What heck was that?" White Knight asked himself, only to get the answer a single second later.

A few feet in front of him, mid-air, where before there had been nothing, was suddenly occupied by a cute blonde in a white baby-T-shirt and a blue spandex mini-skirt, red boots, and a short red cape. She also had a red and yellow symbol printed on the T-shirt. A very, very/very/ familiar symbol.

"Oh crap," he hissed.

"All right Mister White Knight," Supergirl said to the air, not-quite looking right at him, "Come out and show yourself. I've been looking for you for a while now and I'm getting pretty tired of the runaround."

Floating silently around her to see if she could actually see him or if she had tracked him via the sound of his voice, he watched her stay stationary, though her eyes were dancing all over the place. Finally when he was behind and a good distance away from her he asked aloud, "Not that I'm not flattered, but what would the Maiden of Steel want with me?"

She turned her head instantly and began x-raying the spot where she heard his voice coming from. White Knight, however, had already moved out of the way. He believed he could bend those x-rays off in another direction, but not easily and he didn't want to experiment with it here and now.

"Where are you?" Supergirl demanded.

"First, why don't you tell me why you're looking for me?"

"We have some questions for you," she answered, looking all around her, but still not seeing him.

"Who's we? Your cousin and yourself?"

"The Justice League," the teen superheroine replied.

"I wasn't aware one had to 'check in' with the convening authorities to wear a costume and help people."

"It is when you dress up and claim to be an honest-to-God angel! Pardon the expression," she exclaimed.

"I've never made any claims about who, or what I am to anyone, just that I want to help," White Knight explained, constantly moving around the girl. "And again, unless you have evidence that I have wrongly hurt someone, innocent or otherwise, the Justice League has nothing to do with me or my business."

"So you're not an angel?" Supergirl stated more than asked.

"No more than you or your cousin is, but neither am I descended from the heavens," White Knight joked with her, "Now if you will excuse me, I have somebody to find, or a lot more people could be killed. Or worse."

That statement seemed to stun the teen superheroine, as she immediately yelled out, "Wait, what?! What do you mean a lot of people could be killed or worse?!"

"There's a potentially dangerous artifact in circulation and if I don't get to it before the bad guys do, they're gonna start killing a bunch of innocent people in broad daylight and I'd rather not have to follow a bloody trail of bodies to them just to stop them from killing more. Now if you wouldn't mind, like I said, I'm kinda busy here!" With that, White Knight flew off, continuing his search of the city and ignoring the flying girl that was following him. More or less.

"What kind of dangerous artifact?" Supergirl demanded, flying slowly in the direction she thought the White Knight had gone in.

"What do you know about vampires?" the voice carried on the wind, but allowed her to correct her course some.

"Only what you read in books and see in the movies," she giggled.

"Imagine one that's more invincible than Dracula, can walk in sunlight, won't dust when staked or set of fire, and the only way to be absolutely sure to kill him permanently /might/ be to cut his head off."

"You're kidding?" her voice carried her shock.

"I wish. And why are you still following me?"

"I still have questions, and you're still talking so I'm following the sound of your voice."

They were flying over the beach front by this point, and it just so happened to be that precise moment when Xander caught "sight" of the very thing he'd been looking for.

"Shit," he cursed.

"What? Well, you are still talking, and since you aren't letting me see you, it's the only way I /can/ follow you, so..." Supergirl misinterpreted his expletive.

"Not that," he snapped, "Found what I was looking for."

With that, he dropped his invisibility and dove almost straight down, startling the Kryptonian heroine with the fact that he had been less than a foot in front of her, but also the fact that he had glowing white wing that were allowing him to fly in the first place. A moment to use her own telescopic and X-ray vision to see what the new hero was homing in on, Supergirl took a dive of her own, right on the White Knight's tail.

Moments later, White Knight dives in under the pier on the waterfront, Supergirl a second behind him, only for them to come up in the middle of the fight between three vampires and the human, werewolf and half-demon sideline members. Unfortunately, one of those vampires was Angel, so White Knight knew he couldn't end this the "easy way" however much he wanted to.

Cordelia screamed in exclamation when she saw the White Knight and Supergirl flying just inside the shade of the docks. She knew, from the moment she'd watched him on the news, that Xander was the White Knight, but she likewise knew that not everybody knew that, maybe not even Oz, who was standing there beside her watching Angel, Spike, and the crazy child-abusing torture-expert vampire go at it for possession of a ring. And despite what many think of her, Cordelia Chase is not stupid, so she knew the best thing to do at the moment was to keep her mouth shut, but likewise motioned for her former boyfriend to do something.

White Knight was at a loss for what to do. If he created a solholo, Angel had as much chance of turning to ash as the other two did, provided nobody was wearing the ring at the moment, and then only the wearer would survive. If only there was a way to guarantee Angel to be wearing... it... Wait a second...

White Knight slowly turned to look at the flying blonde superhero behind him. She stared in a bit of morbid fascination, like people who can't stop staring at a car wreck, only this was three vampires fighting over a piece of jewelry. When she finally noticed his stare, she frowned and asked, "What?"

"Can you get that ring away from them?" he asked, almost desperate.

"What? Why?"

"That ring is the dangerous artifact, those three men are vampires, one of them is my ally, my powers are to control light, and sunlight /kills/ vampires. The ring will make my ally immune to my powers, temporarily. We need the ring in our hands so I can dust the other two," White Knight explained as quickly as he could.

"Good enough for me," Supergirl replied and moved at super speed into the vampires midst, quickly located and liberated the ring. She was out of the rough and tumble before any of them even realized what happened. Spike, of course, was the first to realize it. He took one look at Supergirl, then at the bleater that had helped the Slayer the last time, and he didn't waste any time running back for the sewer access as fast as a vampire could ever possibly move. He was long gone by the time Angel had the ring on and White Knight lit up a second sun under the docks and burned the other vampire to ash.

After some brief excuses and explanations, White Knight gave a meaningful look towards Cordelia and then both he and Supergirl took off into the daylight sky, while Angel walked, overwhelmed and amazed, into the sunlight itself for the first time in over two hundred years.

Not wanting to hang around with an "invincible" Deadboy, White Knight decided to just leave. Unfortunately, Supergirl wasn't as easy to get away from as the entire LA helicopter force.

"What do you want from me?" he finally stopped and hovered about three thousand feet over Los Angeles. He turned to face the, admittedly very cute, flying blonde Kryptonian.

"Some answers to my questions would be nice!" she shouted right back.

"Your questions I'll be more than glad to answer," he replied hotly, "It's the Justice League, the Police, the Reporters, the Government, and their questions that I have a problem with!"

"Who are you?" she demanded to know.

"People call me the White Knight. I'm not inclined to disagree with them," he answered.

"That's not what I meant," she fumed.

"So who are you then?" he turned it around on her.

Flustered, she answered, "Uh, I'm Supergirl..."

"That's not what I meant," he repeated.

Scowling at him, she demanded to know, "OK, forget who, lets start with what. What are you first of all? Human? Alien? Hero? Bad guy?" she hesitated then added, "Angel?"

He just hovered there for a moment, staring at her with blank, glowing white eyes. Finally, he answered, "Human. I only recently came into my powers. And I don't know /what/ I am. What I do know is that all I want to do with my abilities, all of my abilities, is help. It's all I've ever wanted to do."

"Why?"

"Why not?" he immediately countered.

Flustered at that, she frowned and asked one last question.

"Where can we reach you?"

He just shrugged at that, and she couldn't help feeling that he was smiling at her for some reason. Then, in a blinding flash of light, he vanished entirely.

End Part 5