Warning! This chapter is about three quarters author's note, you can skip if you want to. The story picks up after the second set of hashmarks.
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A/N On the Angel show Holland Manners, a dead lawyer with Wolfram and Hart, that Angel allowed Darla and Drusilla to kill, tells Angel the Senior Partners don't want to make an apocalypse, they're busy managing Armageddon. He shows him homeless people and people being cruel to each other and convinces him that this is the Senior Partners Grand Plan. In season five we're introduced to the Circle of the Black Thorn, the mortal instruments of the Senior Partners will, the self proclaimed 'Source of the World's Woe' and it's confirmed that this is indeed the Senior Partners Grand Plan. To engineer man's destruction of themselves.
Wilkins wanting to rule the world because like every dictator that ever existed, he thinks he can do a better job than the current administration, makes for a good motive to get started on his journey to becoming the embodiment of Olivican and like Jasmine, he maybe thought he could bring about world peace through enslavement to his will. Which would be a good reason to stay off of Wolfram and Hart's radar, at least until he Ascended. Illyria told Knox that in her day, they were barely above the vampire in terms of strength and Knox says they beefed up. Well they did have millions of years to do that. But Illyria, who is an Old One resurrected, feels they're of little threat to her. So Wilkins probably thought once he Ascended, he would be safe from them, at least. But definitely not before he Ascended.
When Wilkins began his journey, airplanes, let alone bombs that could be dropped from miles above ground level didn't exist and if the United States was willing to drop atomic bombs on humans in order to end WWII? Even if they never knew that Wilkins was anything other than a giant snake eating people, they still would have noticed him and reacted.
He mentions his wife, Edna Mae to Faith and implies they were happy until she grew old while he stayed young and unaging and than she began to hate him. Unless she was a brain dead moron she had to know something about his deals and activities, but didn't appear to seek to make any of her own. You've got to wonder why if she loved him, as he implied, she simply let herself grow old and die.
The pictures found in the Archives and the newspaper article that Buffy immediately links to Faith with no evidence to support her belief are both convenient, but so is the fact that evidence was left behind by the police.
Killing the Mayor was way too easy given what they found in the Chronicles, but him chasing Buffy into the Library can be attributed to his anger at her attempt to murder Faith and feed her to Angel.
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"So, any way we can find out which way he may have escaped?" A seething Cordelia asked.
"Probably not." Wesley answered. "If he's reincarnated, then his soul is now in an innocent unborn child. If he's in the after life, than the gods are dealing with him for his actions on Earth and if he's escaped into a living person and taken control of their body, well there's seven billion or so people on the planet, finding which one he may now have control of would be like trying to find a needle in a haystack the size of Mt. Everest or worse. If it's the last option, unless he chooses to reveal himself to us, we're unlikely to ever know."
"About the only thing we can do is check each other and have the Council check their people to make sure he's not a passenger in any of our bodies." Xander said gloomily.
"Great," Cordelia growled. "A century of murder, torture and sacrifice, active and passive and there's nothing we can do about it. Either he's free and clear or we have to hope he ended up in some after life and the gods are punishing him. And he really did make the people in Sunnydale sheep like."
"Which might mean the effect will begin to wane now that he's gone." Wesley pointed out.
"Which might be how we deal with another problem." Xander said thoughtfully. "We put off telling your parents about vampires and the supernatural and we convince them to move to, like San Francisco and we do too. Because staying here isn't an option for us, not with the fact that the local vamps know about me."
"Because sooner or later one of them's going to test just what you might be able to do to them." Cordelia agreed. "And innocent people could get hurt. And I know you don't want that on your conscience, watching Buffy struggle with her guilt just because of what Angel did to her has been hard enough."
"Yeah, it has." Xander agreed. "And you're right, I don't want to invite problems. We can start over somewhere else, without the baggage living here comes with and that gives the effects of whatever Wilkins did to make people sheeplike time to fade from your parents and then we can discuss introducing them to the supernatural."
"That means delaying changing me as well." Cordelia decided. "Until I look a little older anyway and there's not such a drastic difference."
"There might not be." Wesley pointed out. "The books make it clear, these immortals can both father and bear children and the nanites don't accelerate their aging. Willow's theory is that the mother's are capable of maintaining a bond through their own nanites and it allows them to hinder, temporarily, part of the programming on the nanites. Once the child reaches twenty five, the mother unconsciously releases the control because twenty five is what their default age is. Because that's what the nanites originally set them at. She's also theorizing that Xander's age was accelerated for two reasons, Anyanka based her granting of the wish on the Accidental Vampire, a book where the main character is forcibly deaged to 25 and because the original wish that Buffy made was for you understand Angel's situation. He was frozen in his mid twenties while he was still a vampire."
"Oh." Xander said. "That makes sense. You're not surprised Cordelia and I are planning to change her?"
"Please, we've been waiting for you to make that announcement for months."