Slayer Magic
Chapter Seven

by Jared Ornstead
aka Skysaber
aka Perfect Lionheart

OoOoO

All of their friends cheered for Willow and Xander's new engagement. It was the way angels were, as happy for the success of others as they were for their own.

Besides, there was no worry Xander wouldn't meet his obligations to them. That was part of their nature too, after all. If he was needed for something, and it was even partially his responsibility, he would see to it.

That's just the way he was now.

OoOoO

Leaves parted on the green canopy above the Sunnydale Zoo to admit the presence of Xander and other descending angels. Stepping around the side of a closed concessions booth, the grinning youth came into view of the great cats exhibit.

Four brightly glowing cards emerged from a dragon leather wallet specifically crafted to limit the light (as they hadn't captured ALL of the dragons, having slain two. And they'd played enough role playing games among them to know how useful dragon parts were, so had kept the bodies of the two ones they'd slain).

The cards were gone almost as soon as they'd been retrieved out of the wallet, helping to keep this little 'outside of business hours' visit concealable. Although Harmony smirked at the effort, as the newly empowered Savannah Lions simply muscled up to the bars of their cage, bent them apart with their noses, and bounded free.

The same with the Grizzly Bears, and an antelope enclosure got devastated by their occupants being empowered as Stampeding Wildebeests. The reptile house actually burst apart at the seems as a couple of pythons and anacondas swiftly enlarged into Sea Serpents each as large as a decent sized commuter train.

Concrete, buildings and inconvenient walls simply parted and splintered as those massive creatures slithered off into the ocean. Then the whole thing got repeated again as a couple of other snakes, slipping out of the cracks of the now-ruined reptile house, scattered yellow bricks aside as they became Crawl Wurms, land dwelling cousins of the sea serpent, and slithered out through town, smashing apart vampire housing and scattering the stunned and terrified assassins of both the Watcher's Council and other parties as they went.

~No,~ Harmony giggled into her sleeve. ~Nobody is going to miss this visit.~

Last stop of their little zoo trip was when Xander skipped up the artfully curved walkway up to the rare bird exhibit, lions and bears and wildebeests stamping over around and through the lush greenery of the zoo's landscaping as they followed behind him, angels making a light accompaniment as they giggled, flitting along overhead.

The rare bird exhibit swiftly got empowered as Birds of Paradise, colorful swarms of them in bright plumage counting as one-one green creatures with flying - and the real reason everyone wanted them was the bird of paradise swarms could each be tapped for one mana of any color, just like his mox diamonds.

After that, they left the ravaged park behind, burst pipes fountaining jets of water into the air, fences torn apart, and buildings shattered, all having been crushed by the passage of giant crawl wurms and sea serpents, muscled apart by super powered lions and bears, and just generally trampled under feet by wildebeests while gorgeous birds and angels flitted about overhead.

It was the sort of scene that called out for some elephants and rhinos, really. Add that, and it could almost be mistaken for a scene out of the movie Jumanji.

Luckily, like so much else in town, the Sunnydale Zoo was personal property of the major. So since he was one of the opposition parties, any damage they did to his things was fine. War could pretty much be assumed when the other player sent attacks to kill you, after all.

After the zoo, the angels left those animals behind, banking through low hanging clouds to make a quick stop at one of the farms outside of town. There they stopped in long enough to play for four roosters (the farmer was already up feeding his animals at this hour), which they then quickly transformed into Cockatrices, which could petrify with a touch.

Then they rejoined the animals and quickly teleported this menagerie home.

OoOoO

Blue creatures had a preponderance of merfolk. Now, understandable, but very few girls wanted to commit to a life beneath the waves, when in doing so they would be losing out on access to malls and, most particularly, shopping for shoes.

There just aren't all that many great restaurants underwater, to say nothing about television or the electronics they'd have to give up. So, no volunteers to make like a tuna with the lower half of her. Perfectly understandable.

Instead, they took it from the opposite direction. Rather than transforming a woman into part fish, they transformed something already swimming into a part-girl. And this was done rather handily when, flying back to their island home, they came across a fishing trawler that had just caught a large number of tuna - along with a few dolphins in the mix.

One sea captain slapped in the face with wads of cash later, and they had a whole cargo of tons of tuna now squirming back into the water as merfolk.

The crew of that fishing ship, having watched this, then promptly got drunk. Very drunk.

OoOoO

"Wow! When you said palace, I never imagined this!" Cordelia said on completing their tour. They were all a little on the edge of sensory overload.

"I know what you mean!" Verity agreed, still struck with wonder.

All modern building styles, for a variety of reasons, tend to emphasize straight lines. There are a number of advantages to doing things that way. For one thing building materials are easier to ship, or mass produce in the first place. There are a number of standardized parts and features like elevators and wheelchair ramps that are helped out greatly by everything being all straight and level, to say nothing of how it simplifies construction, making things much easier on the contractors having everything at right angles.

But it did have a tendency in a number of cases of leading to a depressing sameness, where it led to a rigid, mass-produced and corporate feeling.

Elves apparently had a differing view on building design that did not emphasize efficiency of construction or straight lines. If anything, they were the reverse! There were walls that looked like cascading sea foam, and not just because they were painted that way. Half the palace looked like it was outdoors, even while indoors, and it would be extremely difficult to say just how many stories tall each one was, because this whole concept of straight lines, level floors, and strictly defined stories seemed to have been entirely optional to the elves.

There were corridors that had brooks meandering down them, cascading into waterfalls off of balconies. In the great assembly halls, or other rooms where columns or pillars were called for, those got mostly sculpted as individual trees, with their own character to bark, roots and branches. And Charity was among not a few who'd whistled in appreciation, coming into her first leaf-lined hall.

Hope summed it up when she described those elfhame palaces as "Everything you want when you go to a park, or camping, but the real experience never provides."

Nor were those palaces just the outdoors brought indoors. There was a ridiculous quantity of gold and jewels incorporated into the design, emphasizing a little detail here, forming a mosaic there, or just generally involved in 'take your breath away' extravaganzas where you walk into a hall or ballroom and positively everything glitters in a thousand reflected lights.

If modern building styles were plain vanilla, then each of these palaces were thirty-one different flavors, each one of them a refreshing change from the last.

"We're going to live here," Willow declared firmly, on reaching the royal chambers and finding it just the right combination of soft and fluffy pillows scattered about, the necessary furniture for living, and the air of both a library and well-manicured garden.

"Which here?" Xander smiled indulgently, enjoying the awe of his betrothed. "You've said that about the last three palaces as well."

Willow's face scrunched up in concentration as she decided. "Well, there are four of them. How about we call them the Winter, Summer, Spring and Fall Palaces, and divide up the year living three months in each one?"

"That's fine," Xander gave her a hug, choosing not to mention that the spells they'd played this round had created an entirely new island chain, and they were only a couple hundred miles south of Hawaii, so he expected their seasons would not be so drastic as, say, Great Britain, where there were actually good reasons to move south for the winter.

His plains and other land had somehow come along for the ride when he'd first played the tropical island cards, and now they had a main island about the size of New Zealand. And wasn't THAT a big surprise!

"What now?" Charity asked as they left off further exploration of those extensive palaces for later.

Amy checked her notebook. "Well, we are running short on mana, so now would be a good time to play a Serra's Sanctum. Unfortunately, we can only have one."

"Why?" Harmony asked, genuinely puzzled as she collected the card from Xander.

Amy sighed. "Because, unlike most of our cards, that one is officially a Legend, and you can only have one of each type of legend out at one time."

"Oh." Harmony thought about it for a moment, then made her copies and took out her magic label maker and simply affixed a blank strip of tape over the word 'legend', wiping it off of one card.

Seeing that made Amy's hair stand up straight.

"Can you do that?" Sophie probed, dubious.

Harmony shrugged casually. "Well, the worst that can happen is that we can no longer use that card. No big loss. We have four of them, and in that case could only use one, anyway."

She gave a sexy bounce, twirling to a seat in mid-air. "Next worst thing that could happen is that it simply does nothing. We'll find that out when we play a second one. What happens when you play two of the same legends?"

"They both go to the discard pile," Sophie told her, while Amy was still working over her fits, muttering something along the lines of 'can't do that'.

"Ok," Harmony bounced. "So, in that case, we play two and lose both. But we still have one to play, and one to hold in reserve. I don't see anything wrong with that, and believe it's worth the gamble. What have we got to lose?"

Sophie carefully considered that. "Not much, really. Certainly nothing in comparison to what we could gain if this does work out right," she concluded after some deliberation.

Harmony handed over the altered card to Xander, who played it. One rush of near hurricane force wind later, and they had a section of quasi-divine city floating peacefully overhead on its own separate bit of gravity-defying island.

"So the card still worked, and the worst case didn't happen," Harmony observed boldly, then cocked her head curiously to the rest of them, displaying a positively impish grin. "Care to try for another one?"

The experiment got repeated, to no bad results. Soon they had two of the legendary floating city fragments drifting casually overhead in slow orbits of their island properties down below. On analysis, Xander decided there was no conflict between them at all, and the new flying properties were just as permanent and stable as the rest of their magically created belongings. Shortly after he'd decided that, they had four of the flying island cities.

"Well, that worked out fine," Harmony declared, hands posed proudly on her cute hips.

Amy even swallowed her consternation to congratulate her on a fine idea.

OoOoO

"Now that we've got the mana problem solved, what next?" Sophie bubbled.

"Well, it is all white..." Amy's objections cut off as she saw Harmony entering the room, cans of blue and green paint rattling as she shook them. "Nevermind."

Cordelia had just finished reading a second copy of the Book of Exalted Deeds, refreshing the abilities being goo, however briefly, had once stripped away, and as it turned to dust and vanished away on a nonexistent breeze, handed the glasses off to Willow, who'd been waiting with her own copy of the printed book.

Suddenly, there came a crash from downstairs. They'd returned to their original Library of Alexandria to converse, so downstairs was where their guests were. So used to attacks the angels were down there in moments fully prepared to fight to the death.

Instead, what they found was Larry the obnoxious football player embedded in the buffet table, having splattered food everywhere with his impact. Poor Bianca, who'd cooked all that food, was wringing her hands nearby in distress. A large part of what was odd about this was that none of them had ever invited Larry.

The question of how he'd gotten there, at least so far as bathing in their food, was explained when they noticed two things. One, Larry was drunk...

And two, Buffy Summers was standing over him, the tiny girl trying to loom menacingly over him. The looming wasn't working so well due to the difference in size, but the menace was present for all to see. Girl had super strength and wasn't afraid to use it to make a point.

Subtle, thy name is NOT Buffy. Even on a Hellmouth, with Sunnydale Denial Syndrome working fully in her favor, ordinary sheeple had worked out that you do NOT mess with miss Summers.

Casual displays like tossing around football players might have had something to do with it.

"What are you doing here?" Cordelia inquired mildly of Larry as she walked up casually.

The drunk footballer sat up in the scrambled eggs, wiping syrup from his face. "My buddies and I were out drinking when we saw all the cool chicks driving here, and figured we'd crash the party."

Cody nodded. A simple explanation, and probably a true one. She noted his four equally drunk buddies, stunned by the violence so not, at the moment, acting disruptive. Then she turned to Buffy and repeated her mild question. "What are you doing here?"

"But out, Cordelia, this is my fight," came the angry reply.

"This is my home. You will answer my questions," Cordy told her bluntly.

In the background, Willow winced. It was classic Buffy to order other people around, but in certain cases it was an error, if not a sin, to just automatically assert your authority. Especially in cases, like now, when she had none.

Joyce quickly interceded on behalf of her daughter, coming up behind to grasp her by the shoulders and answer in her stead, "I'm sorry. I was with Dawn, chaperoning her at a junior version of the swim team sleepover, when we got told the party was relocating here. On the way I found Buffy wandering the streets, and couldn't simply leave her out there!"

Cordelia nodded. A fair and rational explanation, and she accepted it as such. No sane mother wanted her teenage daughter out walking the streets until dawn. If one knew about the supernatural, the very thought of her being out there in that danger would be horrifying; and if one didn't, they might believe streetwalking was how their daughter earned spending cash, which was arguably worse.

A big step up from dating the undead, though.

Cordy did not even smirk as the presence of Buffy's mother forced Buffy to back down. If not for her, however, she could so easily see the frustrated Slayer going from giving out orders, to threats of physical force.

The problem with Buffy was the world did not exist to orbit her. Her own, personal angst did not drive the universe. And if there was a place it did, Cordy did not want to live there. "Well," she said mildly, "This is a library, not a hotel. However we do have some rooms with the odd couch or two. I'll take Larry and his friends to one to sleep it off. Would you like one too?"

"I just want to go home," Buffy said rather petulantly, averting her eyes and folding her arms.

Cordelia, who was completely unruffled by this childish display. Instead, she was helping Larry off the table and to his feet. However, to the football player's drunken logic this was a perfect opportunity to steal a kiss, and made a drunken lunge to do so, which she dodged adroitly and without any seeming effort, slipping under his arm and around behind him.

Seeing the most popular girl in school was no longer in his sights, Larry saw Buffy before him and decided that she could do in a pinch, only to get decked for his trouble.

Larry fell to the floor, knocked out cold.

Buffy was now glaring at Cordelia. "Who are you? Cordelia never knew how to fight."

A circle of descending angels suddenly surrounded Buffy, swords out, and laid on her neck in a perfect ring of sharp steel encircling her jugular. All of them were wings out, and halos on.

And every one of them was a face she knew from school.

"Please," Willow pled to Buffy, "Don't force us to hurt you."

Cordelia nonchalantly pointed east. "Well, if you still want to go home, it is about a thousand miles that way. I do hope you can swim. If you start now, it should only take you about a month to get back there. Unfortunately, we have no boats to offer you. But perhaps you can use a tree branch as a flotation device."

"What's going on?" Joyce asked desperately, clutching Dawn to her bosom and staring left and right at these people who held her eldest at sword point, all deadly serious.

"I can answer that," Xander descended from on high, his own wings making an arch behind him, white garments softly glowing as he landed behind the ring of angels that held Buffy captive.

"YOU!" The Slayer accused, her eyes narrowing at him. "So I guess that medical excuse was a lie all along. What possessed you this time?"

The young man simply ignored her, turning to Joyce he apologized, "I am sorry about this incident. But your daughter is a magically empowered human with special abilities called a Vampire Slayer, and she works for a Watcher's Council, that has ordered my death."

Xander looked at Buffy directly, then spread his arms. "I am the sorcerer your organization has hunted this past month. You have been ordered to kill me. Will you do it?"

Seeing that not even Willow's sword wavered so much as a perceptible fraction of an inch, and a tentative shove trying to poke one away showed there was at least as much super-strength on the other end of those swords as she had, Buffy surrendered, raising her hands.

Cordelia smugly ordered, "Take her away, and strip her."

The looks on both Joyce and Buffy's faces were horrified.

Cordelia calmly explained to the mother, "This is a library, not a prison. We don't have any holding cells or cages or anything like that. We do have locks, but none that she couldn't simply smash through. So our only option is for her not to want to escape. Since I doubt she wants to go streaking in front of everybody, we'll put her in a closet, and she'll pass out her clothes, and consider that good enough."

She looked at Joyce directly. "For a potential assassin, this method of incarceration is the most mild we have, considering our limited resources and her own supernatural strength."

Cordelia, smiling, then met Buffy's eyes. "I think we should put you in the closet of the room where Larry and the drunks will be sleeping. Unless you want to give them an eyeful, you 'll stay inside. As you are stronger than all of them, there is no doubt in your ability to hold that door shut, should they try to enter. Consider them guard dogs."

Willow and Amy assumed the duty, the latter getting the Slayer in an arm lock from behind before they simply marched her away. Minor struggles proved to Buffy that her captors were at least as strong as she was, and in Amy's case stronger.

Both returned in moments, and while Amy was giving to Buffy's mother the bag holding all of her daughter's clothes, every stitch down her to shoes and socks, with underwear on top, Willow instead approached Xander and presented him with a slip torn from the magic pad of receipts.

"What's this?" He read it and cocked an eyebrow at her.

She explained. "The problem we have with Buffy is that, effectively, she is an enemy creature. Well, also that she has what the Watcher archives refer to as the Heart of Demon giving her all her powers. But you didn't draw a Disenchant to get rid of that, so this is the best we can do."

"What is it?" Harmony peeked over from his side to see.

Xander raised the slip of magic paper. "A receipt, that in exchange for not putting her in the closet of a room full of drunken jocks, Buffy agrees not to try and escape for the next twenty four hours. Or, failing that, she agrees to belong to me, body and soul."

"While she is an enemy creature, we can't trust her. But she is a friend, and this," Willow explained excitedly, pointing to the slip of paper, "Should put her back on our side."

"She'll try to break out in the next fifteen minutes, tops," Amy estimated.

"Where did you put her?" Xander asked.

"Closet of your room." Willow bounced in joy. "We had to take all of your clothes and things out, so she wouldn't just put them on. She's in there right now with a stool and a bucket and a jug of water, just like in the prison movies."

"It's ominous," Amy agreed.

"How will we know when she tries to escape?" Charity asked.

Willow held up a cell phone. "I've wired the door with an alarm, and the room for video so I can see if she's just peeking or actually trying to slip out. We'll know."

She then treated everyone to a brilliant smile. "She breaks out, she becomes *our* Slayer! And I'm sure you can trust your own creatures. Maybe, once she is ours, we can even use paint to deal with her black part!"

An experiment during the past month had revealed that magic paint didn't have any effect worth noting on things that Xander didn't have magical control of. His style of magic being closely tied to colors probably had something to do with that. But, like so much else, it didn't come with an instruction manual, so they had to guess.

Still, what Willow offered was as good a plan as any that had been presented for dealing with the Slayer. Xander gave her a smile and a nod, accepting it.

Joyce had been forced to seek a seat on a nearby sofa, holding her pounding heart. It could not have been easy to find that your daughter was effectively a professional killer, and one of her own best friends was the current target!

Hope and Charity sat with the mother on either side and began to soothe and comfort her.

Verity and her friends were working the crowds, doing much the same with them.

OoOoO

Amy had overestimated Buffy's patience by about five minutes. It was ten minutes, almost to the dot, when the Slayer tried to escape.

When poking her head out revealed no guards, she darted across the room to where Xander's clothes had been laid after being removed from the closet. Seizing hold on a pair of jeans, she bent to slip them on, when...

"Wow, Buffy. If you really wanted into my pants, all you had to do was ask. Previous to my engagement, of course."

The Slayer whirled around, clutching the pants to best cover her as yet unclad body, and discovered she was in a room filled with angels, who'd snuck in to surround her far stealthier than she ever could.

Xander's face was amused, being oddly chivalrous as he looked nowhere but her eyes as he held forth the receipt. "You were told to leave that closet or try to clothe yourself would be treated as an escape attempt, and here you are doing both. I call your debt due."

The pants in Buffy's hands turned half white, half black.

Xander turned his back on her. Touching Willow on the shoulder, he said, "I leave you to handle this," and left, the ivory door swinging noiselessly closed behind him.

Willow took hold of a can of white paint and began shaking it.

Xander was a little surprised that Harmony had followed him out. Instead of asking her, however, she took him by the arm and led him off to an adjoining room. "Come on," she told him, whipping open the street vendor's coat to reveal a projector, which she quickly paid for, then set up on a table. "When we turned to goo we reset, losing everything significant to our game statistics but the qualities the cards gave us. We still have the powers of several cards combined, but we lost the advantages we got from reading those level up books, and have to do them over again."

"So why the projector?" He cocked his head as she placed it on a table and began to fiddle with the settings.

Bend over the ancient piece of furniture while fine tuning a piece of modern technology, her somewhat distracted answer floated back, "Because if we are to get everyone up to speed they all have to do this, but we all need the reading glasses to get it done, and since we are expecting a hundred and fifty angels just out of the tokens from that one enchantment card, there is simply no time to get everybody ten minutes alone with those glasses. Not if we are going to attack someone today."

She finished what she was doing and stood, pulling the enchanted glasses from a pocket as she spoke to the brown haired youth. "The most important quality an angel gets out of reading this Book of Exalted Deeds is not tapping to attack, if she didn't already have it. Your angel tokens don't already have it. They can fly, but not this. Our experience from last round says we need them for blockers. So, since they cannot both block and attack without that power, we need them all to read this book."

Xander cocked his head at her curiously. "Our only enemy we know of it the Sunnydale Mayor, and I think a few dozen angels should be fine for taking on that job."

She gave him an indulgent huff. "My advice? Don't go with what *should* work. We've been surviving attacks for weeks that should have killed us. Go all out. Throw everything you can at him without compromising your defenses. We only know of one target to hit, so it's not like there is a reason to split our attack forces, or not use what we have."

He considered that and nodded, conceding that she had a real point with it.

She turned away from him to bend over the table once more, using a slight bit of magic to affix the reading glasses over the projector lens, so the beam was cast out through them. Then she put a copy of the Book of Exalted Deeds in his hands, took one for herself, and finally one inside the projector.

Then, her copy of the book still held firmly in her lap, she took a seat, guided him to one with a glance, then looked up at the ivory wall where the image of the book was displayed by the projector, and reached over to the device to open the cover of the copy projected.

"If I am right, then reading the copy on the screen will go quickly, because we are technically doing it through those enchanted reading glasses, and the books in our laps we are holding because the cost to gaining the advantages comes in the form of the book disintegrating. So we each have our own copy to disintegrate, as well as the one to read. Let's see if this works, ok?"

Deciding he could spare ten minutes, as it would take them at least that long to tame Buffy to whatever scheme Willow had cooked up, Xander settled in to read.

A small army of several dozen angel tokens settled in behind them, each with their own copies, as one of their number had been tasked with printing extra of those books since they'd first been created that morning, in anticipation of the hundred and fifty of them expected to be in place by tonight.

OoOoO

Buffy Summers had begun feeling a whole lot better about herself since they had painted the black half of those jeans white, and no, she could not explain that at all. Ten minutes ago, she would have thought dressing in all white to be a fashion disaster to be avoided at all costs, yet they somehow pulled it off, and now she felt drawn that way herself.

"Okay, black taint taken care of!" Willow declared triumphantly, setting down her paint can with every evidence of extreme satisfaction.

The rest of Xander's clothes had already been returned to his closet by the other angels.

Amy was sizing Buffy up, considering her, yet her comment was directed to Willow, "We've never combined a creature of our type of magic with one of another style before, and I don't feel comfortable leaving her The Slayer in any case, for fear the Watchers have some hooks in her we don't know of to keep or restore control."

Cordelia nodded from where she was in the air above the Slayer, sword drawn, in guard position in case anything funny should happen. "But Xander didn't draw a Disenchant. How do you plan to remove her Slayer-ness?"

Hope and Charity, along with Verity and some others, were still downstairs comforting Buffy's mother and otherwise keeping tabs on the crowd.

Willow treated them all to an impish grin before going to the boxes of things recovered from the costume shop, and after a moment of searching her hands emerged with a princess dress.

"It's very simple," the redhead explained. "We know of only one thing that has removed her Slayer powers before, and fortunately, we just happen to have a copy."

OoOoO

Author's Notes:

So Buffy rejoins the gang.

And no, I really couldn't think of anything less complicated or benign to bring her into the group. What with their ability to detect magic, and her working for an enemy organization, those were pretty tough obstacles to overcome in a way they could rely on.

This is a group who deal with absolutes, so certainty is very important to them. And due to Buffy's laid back attitude of "sure, whatever" it would not have been enough for her to just say "sure, I'll join you," when she could just as easily change her mind the next moment.

And we know the enemy would have done things like kidnap her mom to force her to switch sides again. So, knowing what was at stake, not only their own lives but the fate of this and hundreds of other worlds, Xander and his side could not accept her into theirs knowing that.

So we got something they could feel certain of.

Also, I must confess, it has been truly pointed out to me that Library of Leng is an artifact that costs one, not a land. However, this is already a very fussy story, so I don't want to go back and recalculate everything (and you'd be surprised at how much math is involved in keeping this story straight). So, while I acknowledge the fault, we will go forward as though they got hold of a misprinted card, and treat it as a land, not an artifact.

It shouldn't make that much difference in the story, but there would be a lot more back-end work to fix it than it is really worth.