Slayer Magic
Chapter Eight
by Jared Ornstead
aka Skysaber
aka Perfect Lionheart
OoOoO
"My Lord," Willow twinkled merrily, entering the room at the head of an entourage of angels, plus Buffy in a dress. "May I present to you the Lady Elizabeth Anne Summers?"
The Lady Summers dropped into a perfect curtsy.
Xander rose, the Book of Exalted Deeds had already disintegrated to dust in his hands (he would have to thank Harmony, as she'd had a brilliant idea on this, and though it had also caused the projector, and the book on it to short out, they could always buy new projectors and print more books), but he was very much reassured to be a five-five creature again.
He was also a trifle surprised to see they'd gotten her into that dress. He'd overheard some of the discussions in the next room, where Buffy had refused to wear the corset, and half of the petticoats. She'd also taken objection to certain other parts of the attire.
In the end they wound up recovering the original princess costume out of the Summer's attic in Sunnydale, where the torn garment had been placed after it got returned to her mother by the hospital staff when she'd been admitted, and threatened to stuff her into THAT instead, at which point the Slayer's objections had crumbled, having been objecting to the new dress mostly out of bad memories of the first.
Faced with the actuality of the first, she'd scrambled into the second.
Of course, they'd added to it, as the primary problem the last time was the lady she had ended up as was a little too old fashioned. So they'd made a stop by a regular costume shop and picked up a bit of tawdy plastic jewelry meant for four year old girls, and that was based on a set worn by the Princess Diana.
Now that tawdy plastic jewelry was very real, and it was quite a modern princess who was curtsying before him.
"Rise, Lady Elizabeth," Xander instructed, raising a card. "As Slayer you were protector of mankind. Now you shall continue those duties in another form. More vampires, monsters and creatures of darkness die attacking me nightly than you used to kill in a month. You shall see to it that continues for a good, long time, as my Veteran Bodyguard!"
He charged the card (handed it off to be copied) then brought it down.
OoOoO
As a young girl in Boston was working out on the set of exercise equipment in the gym her current guardian had set up in the basement, performing a little, late night practice before going to bed, the little, leather ball she'd been smacking around on that boxing thingy suddenly exploded from her latest hit.
"What happened?" Faith stared at the destroyed leather ball leaking sawdust.
"Oh, I think you know," her gentle guardian prompted. "Congratulations, Slayer."
"You mean all that stuff you were telling me about slayers and vampires was REAL?" the young girl protested.
By way of answer, the gentle woman simply gestured to the barbell set Faith had been grunting and straining against earlier. The girl went to it a little dubiously. A minute later, when the set she could barely lift a few minutes ago was being tossed around and juggled in one hand, the girl was convinced.
Leaving her young charge dealing with her suddenly inherited Slayer powers, the Watcher quietly excused herself to make some calls.
They would be quickly assigned to Sunnydale.
OoOoO
"What happened?"
"I don't KNOW! We've never combined our kind of magic with someone enchanted by any other before, and that includes magic costumes!"
The rest of Buffy's princess costume, along with the former one, had risen on their own, along with the outfit of clothes Buffy had been wearing when she got there, and stood as silent sentinels by either side of her crackling with magic, little bolts of what appeared to be blue lightning arcing between her and them continually.
Buffy still had not risen from where she now lay on the floor. Her dress was now far more practical, although clearly still fancy it was suited to more modern balls, and concealing the ample weaponry she now carried, including a shoulder holstered pistol.
But she wasn't moving, except to breathe.
Harmony whispered in Xander's ear, and he looked. Yes, it looked like there *were* little, electrical, after-images of it looked like a ghostly Buffy inhabiting the other three costumes.
"What can it hurt to try?" Harmony asked, over the crackle. "You know when you tried it on those mannequins that first day all it did was not let you."
Silently agreeing that was the case, Xander shrugged and brought up the second Veteran Bodyguard card, directing it toward the set of floating corset and petticoats that Buffy had refused to wear out of her current costume, and that was, between lightning bolts, inhabited by an after-image of her.
The card activated and a second flesh and blood Buffy crumpled to the floor where the floating corset and petticoats had once been, dressed in a modest costume similar to the first. The lightning storm also seemed to die out by about a third.
Xander met Harmony's eyes.
Two more cards came down, each time creating a new Buffy out of a formerly empty set of clothes, and finally the lightning storm ceased.
The moment it stopped, all four Buffies began to stir.
OoOoO
"Huh! What?" Giles startled awake in his bed, brought aware by a gentle hand on his shoulder. A glance to the side at the glowing numerals of his clock revealed it was early in the morning, far too early to be awake as he'd only gone to sleep a few, short hours ago.
"I just thought you'd like to know," a voice whispered out of the darkness, a voice Giles recognized as belonging to one of the more sympathetic of his fellow Watchers. "A new Slayer has been called."
"Something happened to the rookie?" What was that Jamaican Slayer's name again?
"No." the figure shook its head in the darkness. "Apparently miss Summers was lost on patrol last night."
Giles did not return to sleep that night, spending a lonely day with a bottle of whiskey.
OoOoO
"Well," said Willow, forcing some brightness over her confusion. "They all insist they are Lady Elizabeth. So, I hereby dub thee Lady Elizabeth de Summers, Lady Elizabeth de Winter, Lady Elizabeth de Spring, and Lady Elizabeth de Autumn." She pointed to the four Buffy-copies in turn.
Each curtsied as she received her title.
"And I suppose we can give you duties over the four palaces, during peacetime, assuming we ever get a peacetime," she half-grumbled that last part under her breath, then looked up to Xander, "Assuming that pleases my lord?"
"It does," Xander confirmed, nodding gravely, looking over his four bodyguards. At least one aspect of this was turning out alright. Better than anticipated, really. A Veteran Bodyguard was naturally a two-five creature, not amazing on dishing out damage, but able to absorb terrific punishment without harm. Since a Slayer was only a two-two creature before getting plus one-plus one tokens from killing strong vampires, this was obviously pretty good.
Only Buffy didn't lose any of her tokens when she'd permanently stopped being a Slayer, and become a Veteran Bodyguard. So now she was a four-seven creature, before you counted the enchanted castles, which made her a four-fifteen, almost ridiculous, really - A single human who could take on three mature dragons before it would kill her.
Except, the job of a Veteran Bodyguard was to take any damage from unblocked creatures that would normally hit him, so she'd almost certainly use every bit of that toughness and still need more.
Fortunately, thanks to his enchantments, any one of his creatures could be regenerated. So even if a demon stuffed a nuke down his shorts, and she took that damage for him, she'd still be alright.
So it was good, and what she was now left what she'd been as The Slayer in the dust.
Harmony cocked her head at Xander, then asked, "Is a Veteran Bodyguard a knight?"
"No. Unfortunately, it counts as a simple human." Willow answered for him.
Harmony turned upon the gowned blondes and commanded, "Elizabeth Summers, kneel!"
Understanding dawning, the four stunned former Slayers did so.
"I hereby knight thee, Dame Elizabeth de Summers." Harmony announced, tapping the first Buffy on both shoulders with her sword.
There came a flash of light as her status changed.
"Rise, and greet thy Lord Alexander."
As Elizabeth rose to her feet and flung herself into a hug on Xander, Amy's cat whispered to those nearby, "It makes sense. The only requirement to being a soldier is to be drafted to serve as one, and the only difference between being a soldier and a knight is having been elevated to the right social position. And unless the king declares otherwise, knights have always been able to create other knights."
"That was very nice of Harmony," Willow glowed with joy for her friends. As she watched, Harmony had moved on to knight the next Buffy in line, then the next, and so on.
OoOoO
Spellcasting after that came hot and fast.
The enchantment Privileged Position meant everything he had but Player Xander himself couldn't be targeted by his enemies, thus replacing the special ability of his lost Indomitable Angels with something even better. Land Tax got played, which gave him three more land a turn so long as any enemy controlled more territory than him. Concordant Crossroads and Circle of Protection: Green all got laid down without much trouble.
About the only problem they had was the Circle of Protection: Green, which could protect against green sources of damage in exchange for mana, they were hoping to use magic paint on to make the four circles each protect against a different color, most particularly Black - only it didn't work that way.
It was a classical magic circle drawn in runes, and the runes didn't much care what color they were, they were letters of a forgotten alphabet that still only said the same thing, and what those said defined how that circle worked.
So green was all it could protect him from, and so far, to their knowledge, they had no green opponents. But with that one circle in there, that indicated circles for the other colors were probably in that deck somewhere.
Still, despite that disappointment, things went along pretty smoothly.
They already had one Spellbook in play from earlier that round, and Harmony had proved they could make as many copies as they wanted on her machine, so they literally had no reason to play any more of, so could afford to keep three back to pad his hand.
Moss Diamond gave green mana, and was one of those things meant to replace the mox jewels, only it wasn't nearly as good any way you measured it. He played it mostly so his girls would have a fist-sized diamond to be all sparkly and look pretty for them.
Living Artifact allowed him to regain any life he lost, a rate of one point per turn, or in other words almost certainly too slow to do him any good. But it was an enchantment, so playing it got him some extra angel tokens. He enchanted the moss diamonds for the heck of it.
Sophie snorted when she got a look at his next card. "Acorn Catapults are kind of like the Prodigal Sorcerer, in that it can tap to do a point of damage to anyone, anywhere. The only problem is, they have a drawback, in that whoever you shoot, the player in control of the target shot gets a one-one squirrel token on his side to serve him. So you could just be adding recruits to an enemy player's army."
Xander grinned and played all four catapults, then immediately used them to shoot his own walls - the ones that got tougher every time they got damaged, and that gave him life while doing so. So he got extra life, tougher walls, and four extra squirrels doing it.
Then they got back to creatures.
"There are Jolly Green Giants in that deck?" Charity asked, staring up in wonder as four of their male guests transformed into... well, yes, they did bear a resemblance to a certain character that was used to sell canned vegetables.
Amy snorted in laughter. "Uhm, no." She blushed, trying to ignore the resemblance. "They are called Gaea's Liege, and mostly they have one power and one toughness for every forest you control. It's different on the attack, then he has power and toughness equal to the forests the defending player controls. But either way, he can be insanely tough."
"So, how many of those have we got?" Charity asked innocently.
"Well, first round, for mana, we drew a forest and two plains, not counting the island we had to discard to pay for mox diamond. Then we got another forest this round, and that tropical island also counts. So, three lands that count as forests, then four copies of each, so on defense, he is a twelve-twelve right now, but in later rounds should only get tougher." Amy instructed.
Willow's smirk was almost feral, as that was HER man these giants would be defending! "Better still, he has the special ability of 'tap to turn target land into a forest', so he can get real big, real quick." she explained.
"Who are going to be the Deranged Hermits?" Cordelia asked, with some distaste. That was an emotion they all shared, as there was no part of that title they liked.
"I was thinking Larry and his drunk buddies, actually," Xander confessed with a grin.
A grin they all soon shared.
"Totally! Far Out!" Larry awoke wearing a tie-die shirt, bell-bottomed pants, and a kerchief over hair that was almost as long as he was tall. "Squirrels, man!" he declared with ludicrous intensity. "It's all about the squirrels, dude!"
"Yeah! We totally dig it!" three of his four drunken buddies, now similarly attired, exclaimed.
"Ok, Deranged Hermits now taken care of," Xander exclaimed as they left the room with the drunks, that was now rapidly filling with squirrels running in from outdoors. "What next?"
Sophie was reading off a list in her hands. "Well, we've got a Throne of Empires left to play. After that things get a little more complicated."
SMASH!
They all looked over to where Harmony had just reduced to rubble the porcelain throne Xander had been using as his official seat ever since Halloween. "What?" she challenged. "We all know what Xander was going to use to enchant for any card named 'throne'. But we only had one of it, and now he needs four. So, one of those repair spells we have been studying can restore any nonmagical object, so long as there is at least half of it left. So help me shift this rubble a bit. If we can put it into two equal halves, we can restore each into two separate thrones. Then do it again and we'll have four!"
Soon it was so.
"What's he going to do with four places to sit?" Amy whispered aside to Willow.
"Put one of them in each of his four palaces, I suppose," was her answer. "By the way, I've been meaning to ask, what does a Throne of Empires do, anyway? I don't know that card."
"Pay it mana and tap it to create a one-one white soldier token." Amy replied. "It gets better if you have the matching crown and scepter, but it works as-is."
"More defenders is a good thing," Willow agreed. "And I find I am not minding having the tokens around. The tiniest creature can block the mightiest, if you don't mind it dying. And with tokens we don't mind!"
"It works," Amy nodded, looking back to where Xander activated his new thrones ability to put four companies of a hundred troops each into play, that all together only added up to four one-one creatures. Counted as individuals, the soldiers were nonentities. "So long as the enemy you are blocking doesn't have Trample," she muttered under her breath.
"Now on to the complicated stuff," Sophie mourned.
"What's complicated about these?" Amy pointed out four cards.
By way of answer, Sophie just subtly pointed out Harmony with her thumb.
"Oh!" Yes. That was a sufficient answer.
Harmony had been busy setting up an easel, like artists used to hold up canvases to paint on, only what she had hung on hers looked like an oversize dream catcher. "Ok!" the former cheerleader declared brightly, turning to face them all. "We've all been studying the books we copied from the Watcher Archives. But I've also looked into the spellbook left behind by Amy's mom, and her witchcraft had an interesting way to stop a curse from hitting you, by making it get stuck on a proxy instead."
She put a hand on the rim of her oversize dream catcher. "This is that setup. The only real drawbacks are you have to put the whole thing together before a curse is cast on you, and you've got to have something to take that curse for you."
She held up a For Dummies book whose pages had been blanked out by white paint. Placing that at the heart of her dream catcher array, she then stood before Xander and presented herself for a spell. "Okay! Now hit me with one of those creature enchantments!"
OoOoO
The noonday sun glinted down on a cloud of white robes and feathers, and waves sparkled beneath their advance, as an assault force of nearly two hundred angels swept down on the green coast where Sunnydale lay before them.
In the midst of this cloud, in the most protected position, Xander's face was wet with tears of fierce joy, and his chest burned with the emotions within him, as around him his friends and followers, and even family accompanied him on one of the most important days of his life. He had never been more proud to be part of the good guys than on this day. Just being a part of this great force of good creatures was the single best experience of his life.
By his side, Willow winked at him, her tears of joy matching his.
The assault on the Mayor was on.
Harmony's crazy idea had borne fruit... again! Her plan for deflecting curses into an object, deflecting one of his enchantment spells off of her instead of a curse, then using a blanked-out For Dummies book for the object to receive that curse, had, crazily enough, combined the instructional magic of the For Dummies book with his creature enchantment and given them a For Dummies book that provided the benefit of that enchantment to whatever creature read the book.
She'd then immediately proceeded to make hundreds of copies, of course.
So, thanks to her insane brilliance, and willingness to play funky tricks with his cards, the products of Archery Training, Jabari's Banner, Hermetic Study and Nature's Blessing (all four types) had been encoded into their own For Dummies books, to be used by every creature who could read. That cut out creatures like his walls and the squirrels, but included everyone in his current assault force.
That quite literally gave every one of his angels an extra half-dozen special abilities, and now the very least of them were six-six creatures.
Some few were even better than that.
Xander was almost ashamed to be launching an assault force this size against anyone, as it represented so much overkill it got downright silly! However, he took glory in the moment of just being a part of something so grand and glorious as nearly two hundred angels all united on the same mission.
Then the waves below parted and the first of the undead ghost ships rose to the defense.
OoOoO
"It's easy to forget, sometimes, that this guy lived through both World Wars!" Xander yelled aside to Willow, shouting to be heard over the roar of explosions going on all around them.
She was about to reply, but it got lost as she was forced to dodge the flaming wreckage of a Sopwith Camel as it went tumbling past her out of the sky, a grinning skeleton sat at the biplane's controls still wearing the classic flight helmet and jacket, scarf tucked jauntily into the collar as it went crashing to what was probably not its first doom.
The sky surrounding them was black with smoke from the anti-aircraft artillery pounding away at them. On the waves below rode a significant portion of the United States Navy from both world wars, crewed by skeletons wearing tattered rags as they manned the guns.
A Corsair dove at Xander, bullets belching from both wings as the World War Two fighter sought to rend him into his component parts. He dodged upwards and to the side, flashing a bolt of fire into the plane's fuselage. The was no fuel onboard to explode, but he did snap the airplane in half. And as it fell to its doom he thought he saw the markings of the Black Sheep Squadron on its side.
World War One biplanes swirled around them, side by side with all of the major aircraft from World War Two, and even a few after, fighters dogfighting angels while Flying Fortresses circled, their turreted machineguns strafing at clouds of black smoke, probing at any hint of white cloth or feather.
Amy dodged in to slash downwards with her sword, severing the wing of another fighter as it passed by him, and proving that the angels were both far more nimble, and faster, than the fighter aircraft that were attacking them.
A stream of bullets passed by his face as Xander dashed aside to make his own kill on a Mustang, sword passing through the metal wing effortlessly.
Incongruously, while the skeletons at the controls were all decomposing, and the movies had always shown ghost ships and planes in a similar shape, the machines they were manning looked brand new, in straight out of the factory condition. The navy below them was sparkling, ship shape and Bristol fashion, able to pass inspection at that moment.
If you ignored the rotting crewmembers, that is.
Willow drew back a longbow to her ear and let loose a shaft that penetrated deep into a strut holding the wing of a Stratofortress to its body, severing enough of that vital support the stress of its own flying was enough to do the rest, tearing loose the wing and sending the bomber down to crash.
Animated as they were by magic, fuel or engines didn't matter, so wings were the easiest way to score a kill on these ancient aircraft. It was that or cut their entire fuselage in half.
Lightning crashed as angels fought back with swords, arrows and magical energy, darting in to sever a wing here, detonating a fuel tank there, and proving once and for all it was so far a completely one-sided battle.
The angels were winning.
The ancient aircraft had barely even slowed them down.
Glancing down at the fleet of what had to be over a hundred warships, including, if he was not mistaken, the Yorktown, Xander's inner senses told him they could take it, if they wanted to. But sinking a fleet of old warships was not their goal for today, and if they spent their energy destroying that fleet their real target, the Mayor, would get away. So he turned his face back towards town as the last of the old aircraft fell.
The ships no longer had power to block or delay them.
It was only a narrow stretch of water left before they were over the coastland of California.
"He's been busy!" Harmony cried, seeing what now defended the town.
OoOoO
It was mid-morning when Giles came out of a convenience store, a newly purchased bottle in a brown bag held carefully in one hand as he fumbled for the keys to his car, when an unfamiliar spell washed over him.
Drunken as he was, an old instinct left over from his Ripper days caused him to counter its effects on himself, then he watched in amazement as every single person in town simply stopped what they were doing, closing up shop where necessary, and simply headed home to go to sleep.
It was like they had practiced for an air raid drill, or something. Action simply ceased, and they all, every one of them, reported back to their beds. From listening in on a purloined radio, even the Watchers and their squads of assassins just called everything off to trundle off to their motel rooms and tuck themselves in.
This was odd enough he spent an hour driving around watching it.
Then, once the living were safely tucked away, safe in their dreams, the undead appeared.
Giles was near the warehouse district when it happened, and he would never have believed it otherwise. First, the doors to dozens of warehouses that had never before been the center of any kind of vampire activity he was aware of slid open from inside.
Then it became plain why no vampires had ever used them - there was no room.
Sitting at the wheel of his '63 Citroen, what Xander jokingly referred to as the Gilesmobile, the Englishman could see inside of some of those massive sets of doors, and discovered the entire space within those warehouses was stuffed with bodies packed like cords of wood reaching clear up into the rafters.
Bodies which began to move, streaming out the entrances to form ranks like professional troops of soldiers.
Giles killed the engine on his Citroen and began to stay very still so as not to draw their attention, as thousands, possibly even on up into the millions, of the walking dead formed ranks and units of troops of zombies and skeletons on the streets around him.
Then the equipment warehouses got opened.
Giles just tried to stay very still in his seat as the undead remnants of a Scots Highland Brigade marched past, towing 80mm Howitzer artillery pieces behind them.
Tanks rolled out to form their own brigades. Field artillery got deployed. Roofs got pulled back on buildings he had never paid any attention to before so that emplaced guns inside could have clear fields of fire. Rocket batteries got emplaced, mummies dashed about, running from place to place with their sickle-shaped Kopesh swords out, monsters he had no seen outside of the pages of books stalked the streets, and undead infantry was everywhere, some armed as soldiers out of this modern war or that one, others carrying gear that marked them as Roman Legionnaires.
By the time noon rolled around, Sunnydale had been transformed into an armed camp, the likes of which had not been seen since the heights of heavy fighting during World War Two.
OoOoO
Xander looked down from above on a Sunnydale teeming with armed undead, dug in units of infantry, emplaced artillery, and some formerly innocuous buildings and land features now revealed to be bunkers, with air cover in the form of hundreds of creatures of dozens of different types, and no longer felt that his attack was overkill.
The odd thing was, vague memories were playing at the back of his mind of a time when he was five, and again when he was nine, of just going home in the middle of a day and going to sleep, then dreaming of explosions.
Nobody else had ever remarked upon it, so he'd never paid it all that much attention, but if he was honest with himself, today could not have been the first time that their Mayor had repelled an attack during this war.
Since the man would have to defend himself periodically from attacks, it made sense that he would put spells in place so that the citizens of the place where he lived would ignore the fighting, if he wanted to maintain a low profile.
OoOoO
Author's Notes:
When they killed the mayor in the series, it was when he'd just transformed into a demon and gone into a feeding frenzy, a frenzy where he had consumed, among other people, Principal Snyder, who'd always supported him loyally.
The way I consider it, and I think the official show supports it, the Mayor knew ahead of time that feeding frenzy was going to happen. That was why he'd arranged for all of those nice delicious students to be nearby for snacks. But at the same time, he'd put everything he did not want to accidentally eat at a good, far distance away so there wouldn't be any accidents about munching on someone who might be hard to replace or important to him later.
So, for purposes of this story, all of these resources I am showing him to have, would not have been available to him immediately after his transformation, because he would not want to accidentally devour them.
Two other things I want to tell you. One: When I wrote chapter one I filled that shop with the most useless accumulation of junk imaginable. I had plans for only one thing: the copy machine. Everything else was an experiment in just how useless something could be, and then no sooner did I put them in there than I challenged myself to use some of them.
Some of that's gone on pretty well. Every time I come to a "Hey, wait, X has to happen but I'm stuck on how to do it," I dip into that shop merchandise again. One of the first times I ran aground was "Hey, wait, I want them to use this Prodigal Sorcerer card, but they have none of that color of mana," and when I went back and found the paint, that worked so well it was completely cheesy.
But it was unplanned.
Another time was "But they promised Cordy diamonds," and when I went back and found that street vendor's jacket, that again became a staple among their tools.
I took the Book of Exalted Deeds written entirely in Thieves Can't from an article about useless items, which is also where we got the Star Trek phasor without any batteries. And lately I used that princess dress to cure a Slayer of her problem, and invoked 'magical mayhem' concerning the change so I could multiply her, as I literally could not think of anyone who I wanted to share bodyguard duty with her, who wasn't already in a role. But I originally had no plans for any of those items.
I am still flummoxed by things like the guy's living toupee. But at the time I'd thought that pad of receipts and label maker were just as useless, and they have wormed their way in as indispensable tools.
Second Thing, is that my friend katdemon18 has just posted the first chapter of a story about a nonstandard Halloween that I quite like, and would like to recommend to all of you. You'll find a link to it among my favorite stories.