"Cordelia's going to be fine." Diana assured the three teens assembled in her kitchen. "I checked on her after I did a magical evaluation of Billy Palmer. After my own nightmare come to life -." Finding Faith dead, a shudder passed through Diana at the remembered nightmare. "and Faith had called me to inform me of her own nightmare and encounter with Billy Palmer. Cordelia had already left the hospital. It's odd through, most people appear to not show any physical after affects, while Cordelia has evidence of faint injuries to her throat."
"Was it a vampire?" Xander asked, remembering Cordelia appearing in his own nightmare and accusing him of being too slow to save her. She'd been attacked before he'd heard about it, so how could he have been too slow?
"Most likely. Cordelia doesn't remember much, but she does remember a few bits and pieces. The vampire identified himself as Angelus -."
"Angelus?" Xander asked, startled. "I know that name! How do I know that name?!"
"You may have read it in the Chronicles. Angelus was a very well known and particularly terrifying vampire who disappeared about a century ago. He was known as the Scourge of Europe and was a member of a group known as the Whirlwind. The founder, Darla, sired Angelus, who sired Drusilla, a human with a powerful psychic ability whom he drove insane before siring her and Spike, aka William the Bloody. Liked to torture people with railroad spikes and has killed at least two Slayers."
"That doesn't explain how Cordelia would know the name." Jesse pointed out. "I doubt she ever read the Chronicles Mr. Giles had in the Library before he moved them out. And if her injury has healed than it was just part of the nightmare, wasn't it?"
"I'd say yes, except for the fact that she still retains traces of the injury. Everyone else has no physical evidence of injury."
"How is that possible?" Faith asked.
"Holodeck." Xander and Jesse chorused. "Hypothetical, science fiction inspired technology." Xander explained. "That uses force fields, also hypothetical, energy fields, it gives the impression of an impact on a body. Safety systems keep the field from impacting enough to cause actual injury, just a physical sensation at varying strengths."
"What happened was caused by Magic, but Magic does follow some of the laws of physics." Diana nodded. "The physical effects experienced may have mimicked this theoretical holodeck. In Cordelia's case, using your analogy, the safeties were reduced and consequently an actual injury formed. With the Magic that caused it ended, the injuries seemed to have ended as well. Which does make sense given it was essentially a massive hallucination. Magic can and does kill and Cordelia might very well be dead now if it hadn't been a hallucination."
"And Billy?" Faith had her arms wrapped around herself, remembering her own nightmare made real, that she wouldn't get to see her baby grow up. And how much she'd wanted to protect Billy.
"There was a write up in the paper about Billy. He was found after a little league game, he'd been beaten unconscious and slipped into a coma."
"The ugly man." Faith muttered. "The weird, sort of human with a club like arm. A baseball bat! Someone used a baseball bat on him!"
"His little league coach actually." Diana said grimly. "Billy woke up when the nightmares stopped. He identified his coach as the man who beat him. Billy dropped a ball during the game, the coach decided to blame Billy and that dropped ball for the game being lost." Diana struggled to rein in her own anger, the law would deal with him. "Anyway my evaluation of Billy, shows traces of Magic on him. My theory is that Billy was trapped in his own nightmare by the coma and someone pulled a piece of him and the cause of the nightmare, the ugly man, out of his mind and made them manifest. Billy kept trying to run away from his nightmare. The energy given out by the Hellmouth may have interacted with the energy of the Magic, causing other people's nightmares to manifest. First relatively benign ones, followed by most definitely not benign nightmares as the Magic dug deeper."
"Any idea who did it?" Faith wanted to pound someone's face in, give her a target and she'd annihilate them.
"Whoever it was, they're very skilled and left only faint traces of their Magic, not enough for me to get more than a very faint ghostly image. It might be enough for me to recognize them, but I don't know, it was very faint, barely there."
"What do we do now?" Xander asked. "What are people in Sunnydale going to do now that they know Magic exists?"
"Most of them have already forgotten it, it didn't even take the Mayor's office announcing a gas leak of all things, before people were already forgetting." Diana frowned. "Honestly, I don't know why they're forgetting about it. Maybe whoever worked the Magic originally used Magic to make them forget? Lethe's Bramble can be used to make an individual forget something, with enough power that could be amplified. But it would take a lot of power to affect an entire town, the kind of power that takes decades, at least, to acquire. Multiple Magic users might be able to accomplish it, but that would imply a conspiracy. But it doesn't explain why this was done in the first place, what was the point of the whole exercise?"