Bringing Faith into the group and telling her their secrets hadn't been difficult, she too thought the ship was cool and Alexander and Corda being 'two in one's' as she called them, didn't bother her. And she wasn't letting go of that pulse pistol they'd given her. It made it so very satisfying to dust the occasional vampire that showed up in Sunnydale with it.
A Watcher, named Wesley Windam-Price, showed up a few weeks later.
"Unless you're actually here to help and fight, you're not welcome here." Alexander told him. "We have no use for cowards who hide behind little girls and pretend it's the will of the gods."
"The Slayers need us to guide them. That is the role set out for the Watchers."
"I need my mother to guide me." Buffy said. "I don't need armchair quarterbackers hiding in their castles pretending they're fighting a war, when they don't even know what the enemy looks like for themselves."
"I'll have you know, I have dusted two vampires! It was part of my graduation from the Watchers Academy."
"Yeah and how old where you or them, for that matter?" Alexander asked. "And did you go hunting for them or were they restrained like that one in the box that Quentin guy had?"
"They were captured fledglings that a retrieval team had brought back. And I was twenty seven."
"I thought so. Like I told that Quentin guy, I was barely sixteen the first time I dusted a vampire. Buffy was fifteen. Slayers are anywhere from the age of ten to eighteen when you send them out to fight your wars for you." Alexander was growing more annoyed with the Watchers then ever.
"It is the duty of the Slayers to protect humans! It is the will of the gods!"
"No, it is the will of the cowardly humans who created them to hide behind. Humans don't need Slayers to fight their battles for them, we never did. Your Chronicles detail often extremely successful human demon hunters, most of whom outlive Slayers by decades. A Captain Daniel Holtz for instance, who pursued Angelus for years and dusted hundreds of vampires while doing so. He and the few men who followed him had no need for Slayers to fight their battles. So like I said, either help us fight or go back to England. This is America and you have no authority here. In fact, you don't have any authority in England either, from what I understand." Alexander told him.
"I am not going anywhere! I will do my duty, just because Mr. Giles has lost control of the Slayers does not mean I will!"
"The Slayers don't need to be controlled. Guided, advised, yes. Controlled? No." Corda told him.
It was an augument that wasn't going to end so the group opted not to continue it. Mr. Windam-Price took to hanging out in the library and bothering Giles. He was not informed of Alexander and Corda's status or of the weapons the group was using.
"No doubt, he'll try to claim 'The Authority of the Watchers Council.' " Was Johnathan's sarcastic statement on that matter and everyone agreed.
Oz and Johnathan succeeded in making their own reverse engineered pulse pistol from Earth tech. It was slightly larger and bulkier then the Alteran version, but with refinement, that would change. It also meant Buffy now had her own pulse pistol to use. She and Faith were doing most of the patrolling now. Alexander, Corda, and Johnathan were all eighteen now officially, with Oz being a year older. That meant they could officially begin their business, the Altimah Project, with the four of them being equal partners. Oz began working to reverse engineer the protective shield and Johnathan worked on understanding and recreating the scanner's programming. They were both making considerable progress and would be able to make more as soon as the school year ended and Johnathan completed his senior year.
Then something happened that forced them to launch the Altimah again.
"Alexander, that cloaked satellite you put in orbit is registering a really large asteroid, heading towards Earth," Johnathan informed the group. "One moment it wasn't registering anything and the next it was. It seems to have been accelerated into our system, then once the gravity of the various objects in our solar system began to have an effect on it, it started to slow down. But it's still moving at quite a fast rate and it's on a collusion course with Earth. It's as big as the one that is believed to have destroyed the dinosaurs!"
Alexander took a look at the information on the screen and then swore.
"It's comprised almost entirely of Naquada. It's not from this solar system. This system had little in it to begin with and we depleted what little there was a long time before we ever left this galaxy."
"Then the enemy we believe Earth has made, they may have sent this as a means of attack." Corda said. "There is too much energy potential in that asteroid to just out right destroy it. It's too close to Earth at this point. It would cause massive damage anyway. We need to redirect it's course or slow it down and/or some combination."
"What if we could get it to the Kuiper Belt?" Johnathan asked. "It's larger then the asteroid field and a safe distance from Earth, with enough distance between the objects that the risk of collision drops to nearly zero. And Neptune could handle an impact far better then Earth if it did impact a planetary body."
"That's a good idea, Jonno. We'd have to tractor it and we'd have to decloak to do it, which means we'd briefly be exposed to Earth's tracking systems, but hopefully they won't be looking in our direction at that moment. " Alexander agreed. "Places everyone, let's see if we can do this."