A/N One of the jobs Buffy tried to do was construction at Xander's work site. She was strong enough to lift steel girders.

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Seeing Xander levitate wasn't quite convincing, magicians could do that.

Seeing Cordelia and Buffy both bend metal that Xander had gotten from the junk yard, that was convincing. Joyce couldn't even lift them, they were so heavy. After all, they'd once been part of the frame of a flat bed of a truck and were big.

"How is this even possible?" Joyce asked.

"There's more to the world than you know, Mom." Buffy explained. "Things dismissed as myth and legend have a basis in fact. Some are straight up monsters, the kind you'd think came out of a horror movie. Humans have been fighting them in the dark for thousands of years and at one time, everyone just accepted the fact that they existed. Somewhere along the line, the world forgot. But those things are still out there, still hurting people and humans are still fighting back. At least when they're aware of them, they fight. Xander, Cordelia, Willow, Oz, Ms. Calendar, they've seen what's out there and they've chosen to fight."

"And you? You've chosen to fight them too?" Joyce felt scared and proud and worried and a bunch of feelings she couldn't name.

Buffy laughed and it wasn't a nice laugh. "Funny you should ask if I've chosen to fight them. You see, I didn't choose, I was chosen. A group of cowardly humans, perfectly capable of fighting themselves, chose to make living weapons instead. I'm one of them. No one offered me a choice, I just woke up one day and my whole life had changed. A man walked up to me and told me I'd been Chosen, he showed me my power and said I could do what no one else could do. Only that's not true, you don't even need power to fight, just knowledge and willingness. It helps, it gives you an advantage, but at the end of the day, it's also unnecessary."

"Someone did this to you? And we can't tell the police, why? They could arrest them -."

"Mom, stop and think." Buffy said softly. "If there are cowardly humans willing to hide behind me, then it follows that there are cowardly humans willing to experiment. Willing to make more. More disposable, living weapons. Telling the police means telling the world, sooner or later someone will decide to study us. For the betterment of mankind. Or just to get rich."

"Or lump us in with the monsters." Willow smiled sadly. "Concentration camps for the 'different'. It's happened before." She looked away for a moment. "And then it snowballs and they justify doing it to others. We can't take that risk, we're not monsters, but they will call us that."

"And in the meantime, the real monsters will still be killing people." Cordelia continued. "And some bleeding hearts will say they're just misunderstood. They're not misunderstood. I understand real well when we find a body of what was a human before they decide to play rough with it. Rough, as in torture or eat. We're toys and/or prey to them. A lot of them can talk, they'll tell you themselves they kill us because it's fun."

"Oh, God, how can this be real?" Joyce wasn't sure why she wasn't just bolting herself and her girls behind locked doors. "Buffy, the gym - the fire -." She didn't even know how to finish that sentence.

"Vampires, something out of myth and legend and very real." Buffy answered. "Or at least they were, as of Halloween they no longer are. They were the largest number of the monsters out there that we're fighting and now, they don't exist anymore."

"What happened to them?"

"Dawn, you read comics, right?" Xander asked.

"Yeah, your costume was totally cool." She bounced on her toes. "Dr. Strange, the Sorcerer Supreme, one of the most powerful Magic users in the comics."

"The guy who sold us the costumes played what he considered a joke." Xander told her. "He turned us into our costumes. Buffy was an adventure seeking Princess, Willow died and became a ghost and I became Dr. Strange himself. Dr. Strange wiped out the vampires. The transformation spell ended and I remembered some of Dr. Strange's spells and I found I could do them. I used Magic to save Willow."

"Wow! So that's how you can levitate, the Cloak of Levitation, it stayed real!" Dawn squealed pointing at the Cloak he was wearing. "Did anything else stay real?" She asked hopefully.

"Like this?" Xander pulled out the Eye of Agamotto.

"The Eye! The Eye is real!" Dawn was so excited she couldn't stay still, she was vibrating with excitement. "Show me, pleaseeeee." She begged.

"Show you what, Dawn?" Joyce asked. "What can it do?"

"It can show me truth." Xander answered, raising it up and activating it, a third eye appearing on his forehead had Joyce gasping and Dawn cheering.

Xander on the other hand was shocked by what the Eye of Agamotto showed him regarding little Dawnie, his friend's sister. An energy he didn't recognize was embedded in her body. He carefully shut down the Eye, hoping his shock didn't show and chose not to say anything, not until he talked to Ms. Calendar. All he knew for sure was it didn't appear harmful, to either Dawnie or anyone else. But that still left the question, what was it?