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James Birdsong: I'm glad you like the story so far!
Chapter 19
The necklace
Willow yawned for the third time in a few minutes and rubbed her eyes. She was exhausted but didn't want to rest more than a few hours each night. Buffy was counting on them to discover new elements about the necklace and to keep the streets of Los Angeles more or less under control. Unfortunately, this city was far from the small area of Sunnydale and it was impossible for them to organize a patrol for all the districts.
That's why the witch regularly performed location spells in order to send the patrollers to the invaded places and this required a great deal of organization that she supervised.
The Scooby Gang had looked into the ancient parchment that a friend of Angel's had sent them from Africa for several days now. They had all been delighted to discover the original writings about the necklace that had allowed the First to be destroyed the previous year. Yet their enthusiasm had gradually cooled when they had realized that the parchment was written in an unknown language.
Giles had not worried too much at first and he had started researching the traditional languages of Africa but after long fruitless hours, he had realized that this language must be so old that it was not listed. Dawn had searched through the shelves of the campus library in the hope of finding a clue and Willow had done the same with those of the city, without success.
The witch gave herself a few seconds of respite and breathed to relax. She then left her desk for a moment and took a few steps into her room. Her gaze fell on a photo that never left her: it showed Xander, Buffy and herself during the year they had met in high school. They had all grown up a lot since then but fate had made sure that all three of them were still together eight years later, despite all the trials they had had to go through.
The young woman smiled sadly as she put the frame back. As the days went by, the atmosphere had become less serene within the group despite everyone's involvement.
Dawn and Andrew continued to try to get information through the multiple resources available on campus and the young girl had even asked her language teachers but she had learned nothing.
For his part, Xander was on the lookout for the slightest strange rumors thanks to the various construction sites he supervised throughout the city. He increased travels to the sites and his contacts with his colleagues, which had allowed him to spot a large group of demons and vampires who had taken refuge under a construction north of the city a few days before.
Angel was mainly in charge of the patrols and he did it every evening with attention. He also had regular news of the progress of the disappearances thanks to the city police. The cases of criminals mysteriously disappearing continued without any explanation. Among the police though, they were quite happy and they blamed settling scores between local mafias.
Finally, Willow and Giles spent long hours on the phone all over the world trying to find an expert on dead languages. They had read and reread each line with such consistency and attention that Willow regularly saw each word in her mind as soon as she closed her eyes.
They had also tried to call Faith again and had left a message in a hotel lost deep in the African savannah after being told about the probable stay of the second Slayer over there. Fortunately, Faith's behavior and physical appearance did not go unnoticed in this part of the world, which had allowed Willow to more or less follow her route on the continent. Yet they were not optimistic that Faith and Principal Wood would actually have this message or even that they would deign to come to Los Angeles if they had actually received it.
She wouldn't have blamed them for that, the young woman noted. After all, Robin had nearly died during their last battle and Faith wasn't the official Slayer in charge. Still, her love of fighting was important enough that she may be willing to join forces with them once again. At least, that's what Willow hoped.
Realizing that she had been letting her mind wander for several minutes already, Willow quickly sat back down in front of her computer and focused on the information on the screen.
The same evening, the Scoobies had gathered at the Slayer's house as they did every night while Angel went on patrol. The others were once again trying to discover the language that would explain the nature of the necklace.
"We must have missed something." Willow sighed, closing her book wearily.
At that moment, Dawn put a pizza in the middle of the table and invited everyone to take a break while they had dinner. Xander and Andrew immediately pounced on the food and the young girl's eyes widened. She decided to bring the second pizza that she had heated up then.
When Giles and Willow joined them at the table, they all silently ate their share. Giles was particularly concerned. He didn't understand his inability to decipher the parchment and it annoyed him prodigiously.
After a few moments, Dawn broke the silence. "I got an email from Buffy today!" She said happily.
"How is she?" The witch immediately asked next to her.
"She seems fine. But they haven't managed to get the book back yet…"
"Do they know where it is?" Giles asked.
"Yes, it's in a closely guarded cave and they gotta find a way to get rid of the demons first."
"Buffy will make it," Willow said with confidence.
"Yes, she will!" Xander added, stuffing a huge amount of pizza into his mouth. "Buffy'll defeat all the demons and we'll show her that we couldn't translate a text!" He added sarcastically.
"Xander!" The witch chastised him with a frown. "We'll figure it out. And it'd go faster if you helped us!"
"If you and Giles don't figure it out, I wonder what use I'd be," Xander replied with a shrug. "I'm not very good at unknown ancient languages!"
Willow sighed and pushed her plate away. Their frustration was growing and the snarky comments were becoming sharper by the day. Buffy's absence on the other side of the Earth was not helping them and their worry about the threat they knew nothing about was making them more fragile than they had expected.
"Sorry, Will." Xander sighed after a few seconds, "I know you're doing your best and as usual, I feel completely useless. And I'm worried about Buffy…" Willow smiled and nodded. She knew what he was talking about.
"You shouldn't worry, Xander. She's fine," Dawn reminded him. "And she'll be back very soon, I'm sure."
"Buffy leaving when a new threat manifests is a first," Giles explained, taking off his glasses. "It is normal to feel disoriented, but we mustn't forget that we can handle this. Besides, she'll be back very soon with a decisive element, I hope."
"We shouldn't have let her go alone," Xander muttered.
"She's not alone," Willow gently pointed out as her friend rolled his eyes.
"Xander, while I would have preferred that she left with someone else, Spike is one of the best warriors we have and he's proven it already," Giles chimed in with fatalism. "She's certainly safer with him than she is with any of us."
Willow shifted uncomfortably in her chair. No one in this room knew that the vampire was connected to the First except her. If they had, they would never have allowed the Slayer to go with him and she knew she had taken a big risk. Of course, the spell she had cast on the vampire had shown her that the nature of this bond did not put him under the control of the First but this nature could have evolved since then and she had no way of knowing. She sincerely hoped that Spike had told Buffy and that she was extremely careful.
The witch bit her lip as she remembered the feelings the Slayer and the vampire probably shared. Blinded by their emotions, they might not be as lucid as the situation required and it was all her fault, she thought anxiously.
Her thoughts were interrupted by Angel's arrival in the living room.
"How many?" Andrew immediately asked him. The vampire sighed but chose to answer the young man's question since he knew from experience that he would repeat it until he got the answer. "Six."
"I won!" Xander exclaimed, leaning across the table to retrieve the 10 bucks that Andrew reluctantly handed him.
"That is not fair!" Andrew whined.
"When you have as much experience with demons as I do, maybe you'll have a chance!" Xander rubbed it in his face, waving the 10 bucks in front of him.
Dawn and Willow giggled, happy that the atmosphere was relaxing again, but Giles didn't agree. "When you're done betting on the number of demons killed, maybe you could get back to work?" He suggested, grabbing new books and handing them out.
The boys grimaced and Angel examined the parchment once again, which kept all its mystery. "Any news from Buffy?" He asked.
"They've located the book and will bring it back soon," Willow told him, resuming her reading as well.
"The number of demons and their diversity is increasing," the vampire pointed out, turning to Giles. "I don't know what's going on, but it's getting stronger," he added darkly.
"What if we destroyed the necklace?" Dawn suggested. "It's part of this ritual that allows demons to multiply. If it no longer exists, the ritual will stop!"
"I vote for her idea!" Xander exclaimed, delighted at the prospect of doing something other than reading dead languages for a moment.
"That'd be particularly dangerous, I'm afraid," Giles interjected. "We don't know exactly what this necklace does. Suppose it releases all the demons in the universe onto Earth if we break it? We need to understand how it works first before we try anything."
The silence fell again and everyone wearily resumed their reading.
"I can't read anymore, my head hurts!" Andrew suddenly complained after a few minutes. They all looked up at him and Xander hesitated to say that he was feeling the same but Giles looked exasperated and it dissuaded him.
"Do you want me to get you some aspirin?" His girlfriend suggested. Andrew nodded and swallowed two of them that Dawn placed in front of him when she returned. "I stared at those damn numbers so much that they cross in front of my eyes to form others!" He added grumpily.
At these words, Giles froze and fixed his gaze on him. "What did you just say?" He asked frantically. The young man shrank into his chair. "I… I just wanted to say that… all these words… for days…"
"Of course!" Willow exclaimed. The young witch turned to the watcher, her eyes shining with excitement. "It's so obvious!" She added with a smile.
"What is it, Will?" Xander asked. "Did you find anything?"
Giles quickly grabbed the parchment placed in front of Angel while the group looked questioningly at him. "Why didn't I think of that sooner?" He murmured, eagerly scanning the lines he knew by heart now.
"I'm the one who found the solution!" Andrew repeated smugly the next evening.
The Scoobies had gathered again at Buffy's and they were waiting for Giles and Willow to reveal the full extent of their discovery. They had spent the whole day locked away deciphering the text they finally understood.
"You didn't find anything at all!" Xander growled, "You said you had a headache!"
"Well, it's thanks to me that Willow and Mr. Giles found the code!" The young man replied boldly. "I am useful!"
Xander considered grabbing the shorty in front of him to make him regret his words, but he had to admit that Andrew was right. His pride was hurt, but the only thing that mattered was the information they would get from the parchment to help Buffy.
"Xander is very useful," Dawn said to comfort her friend. "He's helped my sister many, many times." The young man smiled gratefully as Dawn moved closer to her boyfriend because he was now hurt that she was defending someone other than him.
At the other end of the table, Angel sighed. He had never understood the Slayer's friends. With the exception of Willow, he even found them dangerous since they barely knew how to defend themselves. Paradoxically, he knew that Buffy drew from them a balance that allowed her to be the great warrior she had become and he could not explain this strange phenomenon.
He turned his attention to the Slayer's sister then. She looked a lot like Buffy, he noticed. Not in a physical way, but her aura was similar. Her character too. Although she was in reality a mystical creature, she gave off a very human but sharp power. She was definitely not the damsel in distress during fights, he sneered inwardly.
Finally, Giles and Willow appeared in the living room. All faces instantly turned towards them as silence fell. Everyone then waited impatiently to discover the full scope of what the parchment had revealed.
"Well, it's pretty clear," Giles began, removing his glasses from his tired eyes.
"You translated everything?" Dawn asked.
"Absolutely everything," Willow replied with a broad smile. "There are still a few obscure passages, but once the code was discovered, it was child's play!"
"So it was a code," Angel noted.
"Yes. It's a shift cipher, an extremely simple code that has been used since antiquity," Giles explained while putting his glasses back on. "Fortunately, this parchment is old because we would never have been able to discover the code with a more recent coding."
"What code did they use?" Dawn asked.
"A variant of Caesar's cipher," Willow explained in turn. "The text is probably older but the guardian of the moment, at the time of Caesar, surely wanted to protect it by encrypting the content and one of the first known codes is the one Caesar used in his secret correspondence."
"What is it about?" Angel asked, curious.
"The ciphertext is obtained by replacing each letter of the original plaintext with a letter at a fixed distance, always on the same side in the order of the alphabet," the witch continued excitedly. "For the last ones, you just start at the beginning of the alphabet. Caesar used a three-letter shift in the order of the alphabet. Here, the shift is seven letters."
"And you managed to discover all that in one day?" Xander asked in astonishment.
"Thanks to computers, breaking the encryption key is very easy. Frequency analysis of certain letters is used, but at the time, the encryption key had to be transmitted to the recipient in order for them to decrypt the text," Giles said. "Once the code is cracked, the text appears in Babylonian, which is very likely since it was the literary and diplomatic language in the Middle East at the beginning of the 2nd millennium BC. The writings on the necklace are probably from that time."
At these words, the Watcher took a few sips of water and nodded to Willow to continue explaining their findings, this time about the translation of the parchment.
"As we suspected, the necklace is as old as the First," she began. "Actually, it was probably created when the essence of the First was discovered. How that was possible, I don't know, but it definitely matches the creation date of the Slayer's powers."
"What is it for then?" Angel asked.
"It's a bit strange but the parchment states that the necklace is both a weapon against the First and an essential part of its presence in the world."
"It doesn't make sense," Xander said, frowning.
"On the contrary, I think it all makes perfect sense," the young witch continued confidently while the Scobbies, with the exception of Giles, looked at her in surprise.
"What are you thinking about, Will?" Dawn urged her.
Willow glanced at the Watcher at her side and Giles nodded, encouraging her to explain her theory. "I think the necklace is a balance, a way to regulate the power of Good and Evil on Earth," she said calmly. "That's why it allowed us to defeat the First and at the same time, it'd explain why it seems to be used by demons who are starting to multiply again!"
"The book!" Xander exclaimed, "It's about the balance of power; it can't be a coincidence! Well done, Will!" He added.
"That would also explain why Spike mysteriously reappeared," Angel noted. "Now that he's connected to this necklace since he wore it, its activation by the demons probably brought him back at the same time…"
"That's entirely plausible," Giles confirmed. "All we need now is the book that Buffy and Spike are going to bring back. As soon as we have it, we'll know what to expect."
"I'll send Buffy an email and tell her what we found out!" Dawn exclaimed as she rushed to Willow's laptop.
Willow relaxed in her chair. She felt relieved. Finally, they had found something. Finally, there was hope of understanding the situation and with it, the possibility of defeating the threat. I's up to you now, Buffy, she said to her friend inwardly.
The Scoobies bring some humor and I think it was needed after the depressing atmosphere of the last chapters!
I hope you had fun.