Heading west from Pasadena, Faith easily handled the California freeway traffic. Along the way, the Slayer took the time to cynically consider it was just too fuckin' typical in her weird life for the number of her doubles to now match her favorite catchphrase: "Five by five."
Behind the wheel of her rented car, with the surfboards in the back reminding Faith she was damned well resuming her interrupted vacation no matter what, the woman driving still had to shudder slightly at the very thought this might only be the start of things. Like, maybe multiplying the whole strange business to forever hassle her with twenty-five lookalikes running around!
"Yeah, right," sourly muttered Faith out loud, rolling her eyes at the notion. Yet truth to tell, among the Slayer's exasperation, there was also in there an actual touch of…satisfaction.
She hadn't ever mentioned this to the Scoobies, if only because Faith wasn't all that clear about it herself. See, it was certain as hell those other women with her face weren't family in any way. Big fuckin' deal. Alla them, anyhow, every time they looked into a mirror, they were seein' her, Faith Summers and nobody else! Okay, so it was just the result of some stupid spell which magically created the different people from outta thin air. Didn't matter. You coulda say the same 'bout her, what with Momma Drunk sleepin' with some unknown dude nine months before she was born and startin' her crappy life. On the other hand, if she hadn't existed in the first place, neither would've those doubles. That gave her some sorta half-assed…connection with them, however anyone else mighta think 'bout it bein' completely bizarro.
Like she gave a shit. Faith wryly grinned past the windshield at the cars ahead in their lanes. The fact was, she kinda liked them all, starting with the new double she'd found about today, and the others, too. Sure, Agent Page (what's her first name, anyways?) was probably gonna complicate Faith's life even more, with the other woman bein' a cop and all. But this Faith-twin was a Fibbie, which meant she'd worked her butt off to successfully pass all the tests for joinin' the famed law enforcement agency. Now, that was fair and square damned impressive.
Nodding her head in unconscious approval, Faith paused while a sudden thought struck her. This lady's pleased mood quickly shifted into a deep frown. In due course, she soon shrugged and mentally tucked away the questions which had just occurred to her for later, when Willow and the rest of the gang had their usual conference about Faith's newest doppelganger.
(At this meeting several weeks in the future, Faith wondered to the witch how come she'd been recognized by those geeks as Agent Page right from the start? Wouldn't her double's Sunnydale Syndrome have made those guys back at their Pasadena apartment to think of and treat Faith as an entirely different woman than this FBI representative? Under the interested gazes of all there waiting for an answer, Willow blushed bright red, before sheepishly admitting the very same point had suggested itself directly after Faith's account of her meeting with Leonard Hofstadter, Sheldon Cooper, Howard Wolowitz and Rajesh Koothrapali.
It'd been totally her fault. During the whole uproar about the magical knife being acquired by an eBay purchaser who might have wanted to actually use this deadly paranormal weapon, Willow did a hasty scan of the buyer with her own mystical powers. Thankfully, there'd been no indication Mr. Hofstadter had any trace whatsoever of supernatural talents, so Willow hadn't further investigated him. She'd reported to Giles they needed to recover the knife as quickly as possible, causing the Director of the New Council to select Faith as the person nearest at hand to perform this retrieval. When the Slayer reported the four people in the apartment had known her as someone else, a baffled Willow looked more closely at Mr. Hofstadter and his friends, and the witch had discovered something entirely unexpected.
Aside from coming face to fanged face with an actual vampire, one of the other factors which can prevail over Sunnydale Syndrome is to have such a high level of intelligence to make you become aware of the things other, less-gifted people usually miss. The Caltech gang at the apartment had enough sheer brainpower to acknowledge their guest as the lovely woman they'd earlier met. Being the smartest of them all, Sheldon might've felt something odd was happening, but given his superlative incompetence at dealing with normal society, he probably paid no attention to it, since this wasn't all that interesting, unlike a good hack-and-slash quest on WoW.)
But that was yet to come. Here and now, Faith idly entertained herself while driving through miles of Southern California suburbia by contemplating how distinctive all her doubles were, compared to those of the rest of the Scoobies. The woman inwardly smirked at even her doppelgangers being as out of ordinary as herself, which was just fine with Faith. Ordinary was boring.
Like the first Faith alter ego they'd found, by pure chance as with the others. After all, nobody really took seriously Willow's mentioning that the monks' spell had swept not just over the entire world, but through time itself. What were they going to do about it, invent a WABAC Machine for journeying into the past and search through all of humanity, solely to see if their friend was right? Until it wound up with the whole group in the know taking a quick trip by witch-express to a Chicago Barnes & Noble bookstore, so they could gape from a safe distance at a striking woman in her mid-fifties during the book signing of this author's latest novel.
Alice Bloom had been writing ever since college, but she didn't become successful until putting into print nearly two decades ago her coming-of-age story of a ten-year-old girl taking place at the start of the 1960's, which the novelist always cheerfully admitted had been a thinly-disguised autobiography. A quick check of the bookstore produced a copy of this, which was also immediately purchased. Xander was then given the book and shoved into the direction of its author, with stern instructions to bring back something called That Night with a dedication to Faith Summers done on the flyleaf.
Several minutes later, this named person under her glamour spell gave a sniggering Xander the most painful wedgie of his life for convincing an amused woman to humorously inscribe, "To Faith Summers. I'm sorry you couldn't be here due to your late-night job as an alligator wrestler. Thank you for enjoying my book! Alice Bloom"
Anyhow, Faith managed to work her way through the hardback, despite never having been very much of a reader. She thought it was pretty good, even though the main character of a young girl growing up in a quiet, small-town Long Island block had a helluva different early life than someone barely surviving an alcoholic mother and Boston's mean streets. The Slayer especially liked the part where the kid had been hanging around with two neighborhood boys, some horseplay got out of hand, and while being dragged along the ground by her ankles, this youngster had lashed out with a kick and nailed one of her tormentors right in the balls.
Yup, Alice Bloom was okay, and best of all, she showed Faith that 'bout thirty years from now, the original version was still gonna be a fine-lookin' fox.