1632 Revello Drive
Five – Intermission
April 21, 1997 – Elsewhere, U.S.
Three thousand or so miles away from Sunnydale, a small girl with brunette hair ran up the steps of a house. The house itself was a run down, ramshackle thing. It was the end of the row of British-style row homes that the city was famous for in years past away but its once gleaming marble stairs had fallen apart after a sledgehammer had been taken to them before the girl was born and been replaced by ugly concrete that was poorly poured and already decaying because it did not settle well in winter. Its walls had a stuccoed outer layer that hid the generational rot beneath it very well… To think, the brownstones of New York were famous, too. Alas, this was not New York.
The outer layer of the front wall had a decorative carved facade that alternated square and rectangular shapes between concrete gray and a dull pink that used to be red in terms of color. The sidewall's stucco had failed completely, washed off in areas to reveal plain, weathered bricks and there was a long crack that ran up the entire side of the wall. There was a battered gray door made of steel on rusted hinges with a great dent in the center of it where a baseball bat had been used like a battering ram when she was six and not home. At least, that's what her dad told her. It opened without a sound despite the rust.
"Dad! I'm home!" Gale Marie Karling was ten when her mom got carted off to the hospital. She didn't understand it then and understood it less now at fifteen. She wasn't stupid by any means. Her unconscious mind decided it better to obfuscate the details from her.
"Welcome home, princess!" Her dad's voice called from further in the house. She followed his sound into the kitchen-dining room combination. It was less fancy and more the landlord was too lazy to install a separating wall before she or her dad were born. She probably shouldn't be that mean to her great-great aunt but whatever.
A raggedy oak table sat in the dining room portion of the room which was carpeted in a dull brown that worn so thin by successive generations it was barely there at all and in some places had yielded to the uneven boards of the floor which her mom had covered with throw-rugs years ago. Two of the four chairs were mismatched, one was green and the back was loose, one was yellow and wobbled. The other two matched but they were made of rough hewed, unpainted wood and would be uncomfortable seats without the small cushions that sat on them.
In the center of the table, which itself was also uneven, a large high walled plastic bowl sat with the world's most miserable looking goldfish in it as it swam in circles eternally loathing those who captured its ancestors. It did not hate Gale, after all, she fed it and called it Bubbles. That wasn't the fish's name, but the fish was not psychic and could not speak.
Gale sat at one of the matching ones which flanked the table and pulled her homework out of her bag. She also tapped the side of the bowl and smiled at the fish. She did the mathematics first only calling for his help when she got to the algebra. Pity for her that Roland was terrible at algebra too but unlike his daughter he had no restrictions on the use of calculators or the internet. The computer's case was slightly cracked from a time it fell off the desk it sat on but it ran fine aside from its software being outdated as it still ran on Windows 3.1 as opposed to the new Windows 95.
Literature was her favorite subject by far and the essay she had to write for English on the most recent thing she'd read consumed pages as the teen poured her heart into a much better result for a mediocre assignment from a teacher who didn't care that much to cultivate such a love, nor a system meant to foster it.
Social Studies followed but she called it History and it was a lot more boring, mostly because her dad told her all the ways the books got it wrong, especially when it came to early European history and the Carolingian empire. She wasn't sure why but she was pretty sure her dad was just that old. The way he talked about Charles the Great like he was an old friend really managed to tug at her imaginative heartstrings and how sad he got when he reached the end of the stories about Orlando and Oliver always managed to make her tear up just a little…
After she finished her homework they moved on to the evening meal. Dinner was some sort of roasted meat that she didn't eat, Gale was a vegetarian, along with roast carrots, French fries and tofu. Her dad had gotten used to buying it even if he didn't eat it. He figured it was a phase of some sort. She honestly didn't know, but she did know she didn't like the taste of meat that wasn't downright bleu, and she refused on principle to eat raw.
"How do you feel about moving to California?" Her dad broached the question as they sat in the living room, which was better paneled than the dining room. The walls were half wooden with a drywall cap that was painted in an egg-shell white that gave life to an otherwise joyless space. The dining room was done up in fake brown paneling from the 1960s. If she had to guess it probably was from the 1960s.
The floor was covered in a threadbare red carpet that was just as old. The walls hosted a plethora of pictures, mostly of her and her mom, the wall above the mantle was consumed by a gargantuan portrait of their entire family. All three of them, when she was so small she was new. Dad looked happy in that one, so did mom.
Off to the side of the big portrait was a portrait of an old man so old that it was in black and white, the kind of black and white that had been damaged by light over the years and was yellowed from age. As old as the picture was the subject's eyes still gleamed the lightest shade of blue-purple. That was her dad's friend and her pseudo-uncle. Roland was an only child as far as she knew so that was as close as it got to having a 'real' aunt or uncle.
The question caught the teen off guard, they did not have California money and she knew that all too well because that was her dream.
"Uh… Friends? School?" The first one was mostly a lie, she didn't actually have any friends, at least none that would miss her. It was a crushing isolation when even the teachers hated you. Even if they didn't really and it just felt that way sometimes. "Mom!" She half-yelled before he could comment on the other two, momentarily forgetting that her mother wasn't there but she still listened for the footfalls...
"We can't leave, mom's still here…" Her voice fell off progressively as she spoke reaching barely a whisper and her dad's face fell so far it landed in the earth's core. It wasn't a dark look per say, just a really, really depressed one. The light behind his eyes went out for a second… Gale's own look was about the same when it came to her mother. She may not have understood it for her own safety, but she knew enough to know that her mom wasn't all there anymore in any of the ways that mattered. Still, there were dreams and there was reality. Real life was she stayed here until her mom got better. If…
April 21, 1997 – Sunnydale, California
The Sunnydale High library's regulars were in the midst of discussion. The school day had ended and few people remained in the building other than them. Beams of late afternoon sunlight filtering through the cheap curtains that covered some of the windows, when they weren't broken by demons, anyway. The Scoobies were gathered at the table in the center of the main floor, pouring over books, as was fairly normal at this point in their lives. Their librarian-occultist-watcher pacing the floor in front of their table as he thought when Willow spoke up about meeting someone.
"Wait." Giles had stopped mid-turn, and was now looking directly at Willow. "What did he say his name was?" Willow shrugged.
"Mr. Andius, or something? I didn't get a first name. Do you know him?"
"Yes." The pacing had resumed now. "Yes, very unfortunately, I do know a Mr. Andius." Giles's pace was steady and methodical as always.
"Is that a bad thing?" Buffy spoke up and tore her eyes away from staring at her compact. "Are they evil? Do I slay?"
"No, not yet anyway. Andius is a variant of Andinus, it's the name of a village in Italy that's called Virgilo today. It was a Roman town a long time ago. The word was carried by a family of magicians from there as their name some… two, three, thousand years ago." Giles crossed the floor to a book carriage and pulled out a thick leather bound volume that had pages so old in it that they were brittle. He began leafing through it, carefully of course.
"Sounds like it's definitely our area of expertise, then." Xander looked up from the occult book he'd been consulting for information on their foes, it never hurt to be as prepared as possible when you were the squishy one.
"Not precisely." Giles set the book down on the table. "If my suspicion is correct, Willow ran into Cornelius Andinus, a sorcerer of some renown." The yellowed pages told quite the story of a power seeking madman who sought to bring back the dead and never succeeded.
"That's different from witch how?" Buffy closed her compact and stared at her watcher intently after skimming the passage.
"Witch doesn't really work for such spell casters. He doesn't invoke the old gods as a witch does. Warlock doesn't qualify either as he doesn't invoke demons." Giles pointed to a passage in the book, the old letters partially faded from the simple march of time. "He invokes a different power all together. He's what they call a Mage, named after an ancient Persian priesthood magi in the bible.A sort of supreme magician who bends reality to their will. Last I heard he was still in New York, looking for dragon relics."
"He… Warps reality?" Xander spoke up a combination of disbelieving and a little numb. The amount of weird they'd been subjected to lately had opened the teen boy's horizons but that was a bit out there even for them.
"Dragons? Dragons are real?" Buffy felt smaller than usual at the thought, despite her usual courage and self-assured nature.
"Well as I understand he's beheld to certain rules. He can't do certain things without transgressing against some sort of higher power that's defined in vague notions about the consensual nature of reality. It's fascinating stuff from the occult perspective but it's also a lost practice. The last Mage that history kept track of was Hermes Trismegistus." Giles realized he was losing their attention as he rambled on and stopped short. "If Willow did run into him, the books all say he is a force of good, so we don't need to count him among our enemies, at least. God knows we could use the help around here and yes, Buffy, dragons were real, they're extinct."
"Oh, thank god." …
Feel free to skip the top of the chapter if you're missing the exposition of the OC cast.