[X] Juan Cortez should run for the city council.
S3.5E12: Talking Points
"So, Congressman, is this when I get inducted into the worldwide conspiracy?" Charles Gold, Ian's older relative and bigshot politician, had requested a mostly private meeting and even though Buffy was being flippant, she knew something big was up. Ian (and Vanessa) had been dancing around the subject of his family's influence for weeks, and Buffy hadn't pried. She'd figured it would come up eventually, and there had been enough problems on offer without inviting more. When she'd met the Congressman yesterday though, he'd had suspiciously clammy hands, just like Ian and his cousin Jeff, and she had a pretty good guess what was actually going on.
Ian looked a little worried at how casual she was being, but Gold just laughed. He was the kind of jovial old guy she imagined would be constantly smoking a cigar, even if he wasn't actually doing it. "I'm afraid it's nothing so grandiose. I will ask though, that your associate complete the lockdown of the room as discussed before we start. We take confidentiality about this very seriously."
"One Information Horizon coming right up, with newly added accessories." Willow was the last occupant of the conference room, and Buffy had been a little surprised she'd been the one to specifically be invited, privacy spells or no. Willow'd been doing a lot lately, but she wasn't running for City Council like Anya.
"You've addressed the sensor ghost you mentioned before?" Ian asked.
"It's definitely just one of Wilkins' leftovers." Willow was speaking confidently as she typed on her laptop. "I ran a time dependency analysis and it's more than a decade old, plus some of the arcane signatures are a partial match for work I've seen of his elsewhere. But I figured out a way to block it for this anyway, at least temporarily." Buffy saw the squiggly graphs do their computery things on the laptop, and Willow just clicked most of them away before creating a mirror image of the last one left. They cancelled out, and Willow said, "There. We're less likely to be overheard in here than in the depths of the Pentagon. At least as far as I know."
"Ian told me you're a technopagan?" Gold asked, seeming not quite sure of the word. "What I've heard of you seems rather more… accomplished, than what I'd thought they were capable of."
"I learned a lot from one," Willow said. "I have more resources than most of them have to work with though. The UC Sunnydale supercomputers are top tier, and the Wilkins leftovers have been more applicable than you'd think."
"The wave of the future I guess. You wouldn't believe the runework that goes into a nice basement. But we should get down to the brass tacks," Gold turned to Buffy. "I think you've got a pretty damn good chance of winning this thing. From what I see of Ian's poll numbers and what I saw happen in the council debate yesterday, I think Ian's chances are pretty good too. I've talked your situation over with some of our best people, and we think it's worth putting our cards on the table. Provided you can still agree to confidentiality, of course?"
"Even if you tell me something that mandates I slay you, I'll do it very quietly," Buffy assured him.
"I can keep a secret," Willow said for her part. "I can keep secrets so well that I won't even give an example of a secret I've kept."
Ian blanched again, like a kid embarrassed by his friends meeting his parents, but Gold just nodded and continued. "As I believe Ms. Summers already suspects, our clan are demonic in origin. What we endeavor to keep completely secret though is that we're Reptilians."
"You mean, lizard people?" Buffy asked surprisedly. "I thought that was just a myth. Like leprechauns! Not that there's anything wrong with that."
"Nothing at all. In fact, that's exactly the intention." Gold said calmly.
"But I've never even seen Ian go all… scaly," Buffy said. "Not even once! Willow, you haven't ever-?"
"Nope," she said. "I didn't have any idea. He'd been perfect."
"It's not actually like it is for most demons," Ian said. "We don't just change at will or in response to stress; these are very well cultivated masks."
"I guess that's sort of safer? As long as you don't get into many fights at least." Buffy said. "But probably majorly uncomfortable."
"They breathe very well," he replied.
"OK, so Reptilians," Willow said. "Great. But if the rest of the conspiracy theory about you wanting to rule over the whole world was true I don't think we'd be the sort of people you'd tell? World domination tends to go over poorly with this crowd."
"Well, the rumors are intended to be a smokescreen. In reality our goals are far more reasonable. I might even call them conservative, but that kind of language could rile up some of my constituents," Gold chuckled at his own joke. "Our extended clan has inhabited this region of Earth for a very, very long time. We were some of the first demons to colonize."
"Wait, Giles always talked about the untold eons of demons walking the Earth. Do you mean before that?" Buffy asked.
"No, no, I mean, I guess you could call it a recolonization, if you were being pedantic," he said. "I mean after that, after the Sundering. Demons were thin on the ground in this dimension for a long time. How else do you think humans got so established here?"
"I think I've seen a couple of Wilkins' books mention that before," Willow said. Buffy definitely hadn't, but she didn't read as much. "You mean after the Old Ones all vanished?"
"When the dimensions broke up," he explained. "It's ancient history, even by demon standards, so in your … more applied line of work, I can understand how it wouldn't come up much."
"Oh," Willow said. "So that's what that meant. I was going to ask Giles about it but we've all been so busy lately, I never think of it when he's around." She paused and then looked at her laptop. "CyberWillow, remind me to ask Giles about the Sundering next time I see him."
"OK. But should I remind you about that before or after I remind you to argue with him about the time budgeting for the museum archival?" her voice echoed from the computer.
Gold's eyebrows shot up, but Ian said, "That's just her program."
"Is it a familiar?" Gold asked warily. "Or she? She's very…"
"Realistic?" Buffy asked.
"That. She isn't a security risk is she?" Gold asked.
"Of course not," Willow said easily. "She's just a weakly general artificial intelligence patterned off a fractal imaging of my own mind. She's totally under my control, and even if she wasn't I could predict whatever she was going to do. Safe as little computer houses."
"Well, you're the expert," Gold said, shrugging. "Anyway, we're wandering into the weeds a bit here. The point is that the area is very important to my people, and more than anything we want it to be stable and safe, both for us in particular and for everyone else. To that end we've embedded ourselves in politics and other important industries here, and try to reduce friction between the mundane and the supernatural. Even as far from the Hellmouth as Los Angeles, the walls between dimensions are relatively unstable, and there's much more demonic activity and immigration than you get in most other places around the world."
"That's a nice mission statement, but Sunnydale has seemed pretty frictive to me. And I've lived here so long that I'm running for mayor," Buffy said. She was privately wondering what the big deal about their secret was for if they didn't want to take over the world or anything. Plenty of other demons seemed to get by on less than Fort Knox operational security.
"The Hellmouth itself has been an exception ever since Wilkins got himself set up here. Ian was something of an ambassador, though I realize how awkward a position it was to be in," Gold gestured a bit helplessly with his hands. "We didn't really have the resources to tangle with him, and he had our secret hanging over our heads besides, so there wasn't much we could do. As for how that ended, Ian didn't get the details of what was planned in time for us to do much of anything, and even if he had, a lot of our people were too scared to mess with Wilkins. It's not like he was going to merge Earth into a hell dimension or anything."
"I'm sure giant snakes are great for stability," Buffy snarked. It felt kind of weird to be so flippant with a Congressman, but strangely him being part of a secret demon society too balanced it out a bit. The latter one she could deal with.
He shrugged, "We're better at soft power than hard power, and Richard Wilkins wasn't big on playing ball. Ian assures me you're a different sort however, which is why we're all sitting here in the first place."
"But if the mayor never listened to you anyway, why did you even have an ambassador?" Buffy asked. "Sorry Ian." Ian made an apologetic gesture.
"Well, we sort of thought he might?" Gold said. "Take it from me, people are wrong about other people all the time. The mayor told us he was preparing for something, but he had led us to believe it was more about perfect immortality, infinite wealth, normal stuff like that. He even demonstrated the invincibility thing to Ian at one point, didn't he?"
"It was quite disturbing," Ian agreed.
Buffy knew as well as anyone how sneaky Wilkins could be, even if her recent experience from her dreams seemed like a bad thing to share. It wasn't relevant to getting elected, anyway. "That's fair. And yeah, it was totally creepy."
Willow had one more question though, "OK, so you seem pretty justified and non-evil, especially by demon standards, but there's one more thing. Why are you even telling us all this? You could've kept being shadowy and standoffish and stuff, even while you were still helping us."
Gold nodded and answered. "Well, honestly, a lot of that is down to you, Ms. Rosenberg. Ian advised us that recent incidents suggested a pattern of you and your brand of magic being very hard to hide anything from in the long term. With my nephews already on your radar, it was felt that it was only a matter of time until you made an unfortunate discovery, so we wanted to get everything settled politely and prevent any misunderstandings."
"Well. Can't argue with that logic, I guess," Willow said, seeming happy to be a danger to secrets everywhere.
"So then, if we've all decided not to kill each other yet, we can talk about the other big issue," Gold said.
"The debate tomorrow, and all of the everything that goes with it," Buffy said. She'd been cramming on policy even more for the past week with Vanessa and Ian, and she felt like her head was going to explode. She'd never studied this hard for an actual test. "We've been planning for it, and we already have some accomplishments to point to, but it's going to be hard for me to outtalk Mr. Big Real Estate when it comes to city planning. There are so many angles he could come from."
"Well, his family may not have been very politically active until now, but that doesn't mean Gervais is going to be a wildcard," Gold replied. "Wolfram and Hart are a big deal politically in the area too, and we're not exactly enemies, but we see a lot of each other. They're up to their elbows in this guy, and they have a tendency to think a certain way, bring up certain things. I saw it from some of their cronies in the city council debate yesterday, and we'll probably see more of it tomorrow."
"So you think you can guess his moves and I can have canned responses ready?" Buffy asked. "It feels so much like being a politician."
"Well, 'guess his moves' is a little strong. Maybe I could say I've got an intuition. But the first thing Wolfram and Hart will have done is dig up absolutely any dirt they can get on you. Maybe they'll spring it on you at the debate, maybe they'll wait and use it later, but they won't sit on it forever. So I have to ask, and you can rest assured that I will be completely confidential, what skeletons do you have in your closet? You already know about ours."
Buffy thought immediately of Harmony, but decided that was something she really could keep absolutely secret. Maybe things had been a little suspicious, but they'd been careful enough, and it wasn't like it would be in any records or anything. But there was definitely other stuff she should talk about.
"I'm not sure if you already know this, but about a year ago, I was accused of the murder of Kendra Young, the first slayer called after me." This got a confused eyebrow raise from Gold, but she went on. That wasn't the important part. "What actually happened was a vampire got her at the school library, but I was at the scene and my old principal had it in for me, so the cops got involved and I had to get out of town for a few months. The charges were all dropped last summer, and all the cops that are left will swear I didn't do it, but it's there."
"It's not ideal," Gold said, "But the fact that it happened in Sunnydale is good for you. You can control the narrative here, blame it on that good old standby of gang violence. Heck, it could even be proof you were defending the city while you were still a Junior. What happened to this principal of yours?"
"He got eaten by Wilkins. Not a factor anymore," Buffy said.
"It's that kind of town," Willow cut in.
Unfortunately, not all of Buffy's run-ins with the law had happened in Sunnydale. "There's another thing. When I was first called as the Slayer in LA, there was one of those old, pretentious vampires lurking around Hemery High. There ended up being a big battle during Prom and I kind of had to burn down the gym."
"Arson's not great, but you can't have done time?" Gold said confusedly.
"I was never actually charged by the police, but the school people all pretty much knew," Buffy said. "There was a lot of confusion because of all the murders and destruction the vampires did, but we all know school administrators don't care about little things like proof."
"They have probably got into your school records," Gold said. "They've used them before. And even if you deflect this one with the usual gang story, Gervais could claim the issue followed you here. It's obviously bogus, but it could sting."
"Yeah. But that's not the worst part of it," Buffy hated talking about it, but it was just the kind of thing Wolfram and Hart might find out. She couldn't avoid it. "I tried to come out as the Slayer to my parents after. They had me committed for two weeks."
"Buffy!" Willow was shocked. "I had no idea! How could your mom do that?"
"I maybe wasn't the most convincing, it had been a really crazy night. And it's not like I still had a watcher to back me up, Merrick was dead." Buffy said. "Mom and Dad said they wanted me to talk to someone about it, and I thought he could help me make them understand. I didn't figure out it was an asylum until after they just left me there!"
"But couldn't you have just…" Willow mimed punching in an adorably incompetent way.
"I thought it would just make things worse, and I still wasn't sure if the police were going to go after me for arson," Buffy said. "I was still trying to talk my way out of it with the psychiatrist after they left, but he drugged my drink and then things got pretty hazy for a while. Eventually I just went along with what they said and they let me walk, but it was majorly hellish."
"Why didn't you tell us?" Willow asked. "Your mom seemed totally out of the know until this year."
"I just wanted to forget about it," she said. "And she doesn't ever mention it. She didn't even bring it up after I came home last summer, and that was fine with me. I'm sure she feels terrible about how it happened, but it's not like it's the kind of thing I want to fondly reminisce about."
Gold had been grimacing the whole time. "That's definitely a doozy. Not that I'm saying it's your fault. Clearly it was a terrible situation, and you were what? Fifteen? But if they've found that we could be in deep shit."
"Maybe we could try to get ahead of it?" Ian suggested uncertainly.
"Spinning it ourselves would help, but only if they actually have it," Gold said. "Otherwise we're egging our own faces for no reason. And they might not. Wolfram and Hart has a lot of potential, but it's all divided up and working against itself half the time. The actual competency of their individual lawyers and agents varies, even if there's a high ceiling."
"And we can't know for sure," Buffy said.
"But what if we could?" Willow asked. The room got quiet. After nobody said anything, she continued, "We know where Carl Gervais lives, and he's probably prepping for the debate too. A lot of it might not even be in person, the lawyers from Wolfram and Hart are based in LA. They could be using phone lines. They could have records on computers, or plans. His house might even have a security system."
"You want to hack into all their stuff? Isn't that kind of unethical?" Buffy paused, and then also voiced the larger concern, "Plus, are you sure you won't get caught? Does Wolfram and Hart have technopagans too?"
"If they have any with even close to the kind of power your friend's been throwing around, we don't know about them," Gold said.
"I mean, I guess I can't be totally sure, but I'm pretty sure," Willow said. "I won't get caught. Maybe they'll have some nutty defense that stops me, but they'd never be able to trace the attack back to us with all the virtual proxies I can put up. And I doubt they have everything locked up as tight as I do. Any scraps of information could be a big deal, and with CyberWillow I could even sort through everything we get in a day, easy."
"They probably wouldn't hesitate to do the same to us, if they could," Ian said.
Everyone seemed to like the idea, but it was a big step. They hadn't taken any offensive action against Wolfram and Hart yet, and who knew what kind of escalation hacking into their computers and tapping their phones could provoke if things did end up going wrong.
Vote: Does Buffy agree to have Willow try to hack into everything the Gervais family is doing, and everything Wolfram and Hart is doing related to them?
[] Have Willow and CyberWillow start the cyberwarfare. There are too many things that are too dangerous not to know.
[] Be more cautious, and just plan things out as best you can without hacking. Congressman Gold has a pretty good idea what WRH is planning anyway.
