Fool's Adventures: A Demon's Souls/Buffy the Vampire Slayer Quest

Your drink is finished and the cup laying empty beside you when you decide on your area of choice. Your servant, Annie, is still close, though she left the garden after you dismissed her. You will not need her potential assistance for this, your body has grown fully accustomed to your new power now that you have had time since awakening. Gracefully rising you leave the garden and enter the entrance hall. Your servant looks up from the table in the dining room where she is fiddling with her stake.

"I am leaving. Guard the house." You tell her, watching her face become nervous and concerned before she schools it and nods at you. Those feelings are still there however, hidden by her unconscious reaction. You are not concerned by it. She will learn.

The sun is approaching the horizon when you walk out the front gates with your seeming in place and past the car which is quietly pinging with the sounds of cooling metal. Your first order of business is to go to the alley where you initially scented the insect to see if it passed by again and left an actual trail for you to follow instead of just a spot. After that you'll go to the Bronze, prime hunting ground for this creature. Pulling the shadows close, you set off.

It takes about half an hour to get near where you found it, the sun dipping further. People are starting to return home and you can distantly see that the school is mostly empty by now with glimpses you take at the structure through the surrounding buildings. The people driving their cars and walking home do not notice you as you speed along in the back alleys and other hidden paths.

Another few minutes of sneaking around and you find the scent spot again, fainter, burnt off and smothered somewhat by the heat of the day making the trash strewn about the alley smell stronger. You pace around inside the alley, neatly avoiding any of the foul things left about as you track it and note how it changed over time.

Satisfied that it hasn't come back by now and with an understanding of how it changes as it fades, you leave. The trip is short and you come to the tracks quickly. Passing over them you head deep into the shadows amongst the buildings. It doesn't take you long to smell the warm bodies, drinks and food of the Bronze.

This close to his domain you are also watchful for Angel. Much like the Warrior you have little interest in talking to him just yet. All you sense of him is his scent, lingering about the area. He likely is not home.

As you approach the Bronze, you notice something odd under the music and scents of inebriated celebration. You pause where you are, lingering in the shadows of your current alley, and focus on what you are smelling. Not a moment later you determine that it is an insect scent like what you smelt before. But this time it is different, a totally different individual.

Hmm…?

Your head tilts left. You did not exactly expect there to be two of them. Is it a mate? You wonder to yourself. The scent does not reveal that information to you. Looking up as you track the faint trail of the scent, you see that it is pointed in the direction of the Bronze. There is a small crowd in front of the mortal gathering hall and you examine its members closely.

They all have human Souls. Nothing seems amiss with them. Perhaps inside then? You summon a Mirror Image and send her off into the alleys and shadows to your right, widening your perspective of the building. From two places you look through the walls at the Souls pulsing within. You do not see anything initially and send both of your bodies climbing up to the roof of the buildings you are hiding against with a combination of weak levitation and inhuman strength before settling in to wait in the shadows.

After a couple minutes staring at the Bronze, you are rewarded for your watchfulness. A Soul has separated from the masses, and it is… misshapen. Too pointy and sharp edged to be a human Soul. This is likely the creature you are looking for then. Looking at it, you judge that it is likely of little threat to you. Too dim. Too weak.

Your singular Mirror Image will suffice.

Time passes, the sun sets and the flow of people in and out of the Bronze changes frequently. All while you watch the Soul. It fades in and out amongst the crowd, though you never lose track of it entirely again. As you wait you spend time considering the nature of the Mind Flayer guards, sometimes called Octopus Men, that guarded the Tower and their Paralysis Spell.


Your Sigils achieve a similar effect, for less cost you are sure because of the ritual aspects involved. The question is how similar it is to its unbounded form. Your mind flows through the idea while you wait, the darkness deepening and several hours passing.

Eventually you hear an angry voice on the air, accompanied by a burst of that insectile scent. Emerging from the Bronze is a girl-child, not much older than the Warrior. Long black hair, slender and curvy in a way you think exemplifies the current beauty standards of mortals, and showing most of it off in a rather revealing red dress and sparkly pink heels.

She is currently holding a device to the side of her head and talking into it from what you can see and distantly hear. She seems frustrated and angry, her posture tense and twitching as she heads away from you down a side street. You adjust the position of your bodies, moving after her through the shadows and watching her from the rooftops.

The creature does not seem to notice you and you her conversation begins to become clear as you move parallel to her path.

"...Mom! Why now? I was just having…!" You hear her saying tightly as she gesticulates aggressively, before she stops, apparently interrupted.

"Tone? Tone!? Well don't step in my life!" More objections from her, though this time you can hear a quiet buzzing from the device which seems to be a distorted voice.

You're close to her now, only a dozen meters or so behind her. You send your copy forward, speeding up and pulling ahead of her along the rooftops. Reaching the proper distance your copy then drops down. Directing it out into the street, you wait, unnoticed by the teen monster as she starts yelling into her device.

"What if I found a pretty boy Mom!? What then?" Her voice is scathing, and seems to have a rather low estimation of the intelligence of the speaker on the other end. You hear it try to start speaking, but the girl-monster butts in with a shouted, "I don't care!"

It is at this point she notices the shadow cast by your mirror image and looks up. She freezes in shock when she sees it, her triade silenced as the device buzzes with the voice of her "Mom". Your copy leans forward, its expression twisting into something terrifying.

"You should scream, little girl-monster." You croon at her through the image, your voice an imitation of sweetness and light. You call a spell to the image's hands, the glowing light under lighting your inhuman expression as emphasis.

The girl monster twitches, violently, and then shrieks at your image before her form ripples into that of a large bipedal mantis like creature and the device in her hand clatters to the ground. Your image does not react in any way beyond launching the spell it holds. The creature dodges it, as you expected, moving with the enhanced strength based speed you have found to be common to demons of this realm.

It does not dodge the spell from your original body, however which you fired as you dropped down behind her. The spell spears into the lower back of the bipedal mantis thing, right above where the thorax meets the abdomen of the creature. The thing shrieks and violently writhes as its yellowish green ichor bubbles out of the steaming hole in its cracked and shattered hide.

Your next spell slams into its torso and sends it tumbling to the ground with a shriek of primal terror. You direct your image to move to downed the creature as you approach the quietly buzzing device on the ground. Pulling it upward with your magic you grab it and put it to your ear.

"..aren? Karen where are you!? Karen honey, pick up the phone! Please, Karen!? Karen…?" The voice is that of an older woman, though it is tinged with a buzzing and warbling distortion you put down to the speaker also being a giant bug thing.

"I'm terribly sorry. 'Karen' can't come to the 'phone' right now." You say, letting your own inhumanity leak into your voice as you start laying down a verbal trap. You also direct your image to shoot the creature you were fighting, eliciting a rather messy sounding shriek as it dies.

"What… who are you? What have you done with my daughter!?" The woman on the other end demands of you. You pay it no heed.

"I've killed her of course." You pause for a moment as your image consumes the Soul of the girl-monster. "Her Soul was delicious." You finish saying, imitating a pleasant demeanor.

This is not entirely a lie, since her Soul was of a higher quality than the average human of this town from what you have seen and tasted. You'll have to keep that in mind for later.

An intensely hateful buzzing screech blasts out from the "phone" as you lower it from your ear and start manipulating the buttons. After a moment and a press of the red button labeled "End", the phone goes silent. You look around and find nothing except for your two selves and the rapidly cooling corpse of the mantis thing.

Hearing sirens in the distance you leave the alley and fade away into the shadows as you dismiss your image which wafts away in a puff of quickly evaporated fluid and dark motes.

You are satisfied with this turn of events. The trap you have laid should cause the Mother Mantis to start searching for you and spreading her scent all over town while she does so. The question now is what you do in the meantime while waiting for her trail to spread to the point you can find and burn out her nest.

Carefully storing the phone in a fold of your belt you walk through the alleys as you ponder your next task. The first option your mind delivers is that you could go to the cemetery, though this time you would be mainly focused on the vampires and the forces of the Master. More specifically you could find a vampire near there and attempt to interrogate resting places out of it.

It would also allow you to ask questions about Darla, the Master's most powerful currently living lieutenant. There is also the "anointing" that your servant spoke of, though you doubt any lackeys will know much about that.

The second thing you could do is stay here and hunt vampires near the Bronze while you wait for the creature to show herself. There don't seem to be very many out here tonight, but that may change. It is still early after all. You do run the possibility of encountering Angel if you do this, but you think you could avoid him. You've gotten better at picking him out from amongst the crowd.

So… what to do… you muse silently.

What do you do?

[] You stay here and linger by the Bronze, picking out, interrogating and killing vampires as they trickle in while you wait for the Mother Mantis to possibly show up.

[] You go to the central Sunnydale cemetery and hunt down vampires within it, interrogating and killing them while you wait a few hours for the Mother Mantis to leave a trail you can follow.

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New update yay! Pardon me for indulging my desire for references. Now onto more administrative business based on a concern raised by some, which may be affecting more people than I can readily see, I'm going to be running an experiment for the rest of this week, i.e till Sunday, and see how something like a 24 hour voting period works.

What this means of course is that the updates will be a little slower, and will likely be posted in the morning for me instead of the evening, but as a trade it has a decent chance of improving my ability to edit updates and generally make better stuff with less risk of burning out from my current mad pace. And it means more voters can come in and do stuff which would be amazing to me.

Please let me know throughout the week what you all think of it.

Vote lock will be at 12:00 am UTC time, ~24 hours from when this goes up, June 28th.