Successor (BTVS)

[X] Her friends outside can handle the assassin, Buffy has to try to put out the fire and pull the alarm before it gets out of control. This is a giant complex and tons of people could get hurt.

In a moment of terrible clarity, Buffy realized that the City Watch should've had fire safety training, and that she should've been there for it. It definitely would've been more useful than sensitivity training. Absent such a luxury, Buffy fell back on instinct. "Willow! There's a fire! What do I do?"

"What?" Willow said, confused. "Umm, get a fire extinguisher? Pull the fire alarm?"

"Yes, right!" Buffy said, looking around the apartment and failing to see either of those things. She ran outside the open door and looked around frantically.

"Buffy, it's in the other direction. There's an extinguisher and an alarm six doors down from you." From the suddenly calm sound of her voice, Buffy knew that had to be CyberWillow. Trust the robot to keep her head in a crisis, she supposed.

She pulled the alarm, sounding a high pitched shriek, and then smashed through the glass barehanded to grab the extinguisher. She was back in Brewer's room before anyone had even opened their doors, but the fire had spread in her absence, filling the apartment with smoke. Most of the kitchen was now aflame, though the area over the stove was the worst, and it still seemed to be fed by the active burner. It looked like she'd used some kind of oil, because the whole surface was burning in a way that metal wasn't supposed to burn.

"Extinguishers are most effective when applied in sweeps over the base of the fire," CyberWillow added. Buffy followed her advice, making sure to focus mainly on the stove. The burner was making it harder, but after one sweep over the control Buffy stopped and risked reaching in and spinning it off. Her hand got a little scorched, but she just shook off the pain and went back to spraying.

Meanwhile, Buffy's team had apparently engaged with Vanessa Brewer. "Buffy, we're kind of getting owned here," Andrew said.

"Ow, ow, no fair stabbing me with your cane thing, that's supposed to be to help you walk!" Harmony's complaining could be heard in the background.

"I'm a little busy!" she shouted, then she coughed from the smoke. It probably wasn't a great idea to breathe too heavily in here. In spite of that, she was making good progress, but just when she thought she might get it under control, the fire extinguisher ran out. "Already? You have to be kidding me. Is there another fire extinguisher? Should I just use water?"

Real Willow was speaking again now, "Don't use water, that could make an oil fire worse. And all the other ones I can find are too far away. Maybe you could smother it somehow?"

A frantic look around the apartment netted Buffy a nice looking quilt. It probably wouldn't look nice when Buffy was done with it, but that was the least of her problems. She beat it frantically around the kitchen, and she made some progress, but that ran into problems too eventually. "Now the blanket's on fire!"

"When trying to smother a fire, wetting the implement you use may be useful," CyberWillow cut back in. "Baking soda is also noted to be effective in some cases." Her even voice contrasted with the still wailing fire alarms in the background.

The sink was luckily pretty safe right now, so she turned on the water and got the quilt soaked before it totally burst into flame. Then she had the awkward and dangerous job of trying to smother half a room's worth of fire with a very wet quilt that was bigger than she was in a room that was increasingly full of smoke. Superstrength and Slayer toughness had their advantages though, and after another minute of struggling with it the fire was mostly reduced to embers.

"Is everyone OK down there?" Buffy asked through the radio as she jumped to the fire escape and out of the room's smoky confines. She was feeling tired and a little scorched, but she knew she had to keep moving.

"Sorry, Buffy, she got away," Jonathan said over the radio. "She was able to dodge around Andrew's monkeys and none of my illusions could trick her."

"I got stabbed!" Harmony whined. "If I was human I could be like, dead or something!"

"I'll be down there in a second, maybe we can still get her," Buffy said. She wasn't hopeful though; with all of LA to escape in the technically blind assassin would be almost impossible to pin down.


"Jonathan, you still have that contingency ready, right? Don't let it go unless we need it." The next two hits after Vanessa Brewer had gone well, but the one after those had been gone. Buffy hoped that it was just a coincidence, but there was a chance the alarm had been raised.

"It's not easy to hold onto like this," he said uncertainly. "But I think I can keep it going for a while longer."

"OK then, let's do this." With a single swing of her hammer, Buffy smashed the dingy basement door off its hinges, but this time there was nobody on the other side. "Ugh, another one. Gone."

Harmony followed her in, still eager for a fight despite her hastily bandaged wounds. "Are you sure? Maybe it's hiding." She poked around the crummy studio, but there really wasn't much of anything to hide behind.

Andrew entered too, and opened a dusty chest in the corner with a greedy look in his eye. "This could contain the riches of a hundred battles!"

Harmony made a raspberry. "In a dump like this? Not likely."

"Maybe he just likes the ambience," he argued. "And look, it's full of all this white powder. Umm. Holy Hannah, is this-"

"It's salt, Andrew," Giles said, sounding a particularly Gilesy combination of tired and put upon. Buffy didn't like him still walking around with his injury but he'd waved off her concern and persistently stuck with the group and not in the minivan. "Mohra demons need enormous quantities of it to survive, it would make sense for it to keep a large supply in its home. If it's any consolation, it was probably loathe to leave it."

"We probably don't want to get into the drug dealing business anyway, being part of the government and all," Jonathan said. Buffy definitely shared the sentiment, money was nice but that would be major ick.

"Willow, you don't have any helpful visuals nearby, do you?" Buffy felt she had to ask, but she wasn't holding out much hope.

"This neighborhood doesn't have much at all in the way of camera coverage," she said, her voice sounding a bit tired too. It had gotten late, and Willow's constant overwatch duty for both them and Crawford street had to be stressful, even with CyberWillow helping. Buffy was still worried that some kind of counterattack would come at Sunnydale, but just had to believe the people she'd left there could handle it. "Also, more bad news, target #14 left his place five minutes ago, but he's too far away for you to really pursue from where you are."

Buffy shook her head. "I still want to try for everyone left. Even if most of them have heard we might still catch one or two more." They all turned to leave the way they came in. Buffy led the group back down the building's dilapidated hallway and then up the stairs into the alleyway that led into it.

The moment she stepped outside something felt off. She thought she heard some quiet rustling from behind a dumpster.
KILL
"FOG! NOW!" She shouted, already dodging, and Jonathan let his hand burst open. Even as the alleyway filled with a whitish mist the gunfire opened up, and the human members of her team retreated back into the cover of the doorway. Demons joined the ambush, bursting from the windows of the opposite building, and Buffy charged into combat. "Harmony, deal with those gunmen!"

"Gotcha covered!" Harmony raced off to the side, and Buffy knew her vampire senses would give her an advantage finding them in this murk. For her own part, Buffy swung her hammer at a skull headed demon and managed to snap off one of its curly horns. The fight was on.


Buffy danced through the fog swinging her hammer with wild abandon, but despite being heavily outnumbered she wasn't really getting dogpiled. She knew from experience that the fog was more opaque to Jonathan's enemies than his friends, and even besides that, she noticed a couple illusions of herself as she moved from demon to demon, and in the confusion they were getting a lot of attention. One of the demons dodged back frantically from a swing one of her doubles made only for her to literally knock its head off its body from behind as it left itself vulnerable; blue blood spurted everywhere, and regrettably her outfit wasn't as inviolate as her hammer. Hopefully Cynthia had yet another change of clothes in reserve in the minivan.


The facial deformities were strong with this crew, some of them the skull-horns-and-spines combo she'd seen first, and others with skin like a burn victim complete with facial features warped all over the place. None of them were too tough individually, but they were still more competent than your average vampire so it was taking some time to work through the crowd. She could still hear the guns going off in the seeming distance, muted by the eerie mist, and hoped that Harmony wasn't going to get overwhelmed wherever she was. She saw a giant scorpion appear at her side, and luckily she'd trained with Andrew frequently enough to know it was one of his summons. Rather than accept the help, she gestured it off in the direction Harmony had gone.

Soon enough, she faced her first real challenge. A green demon dressed like a Samurai jumped from the fog and attacked her with something she was pretty sure was actually a katana; she figured this was the Mohra they'd expected to find here. She focused her initial efforts on shattering the fragile weapon with her hammer, but the toughness of the demon was incredible, and he was able to take strikes from her hammer on his body while never allowing his blade to be sundered.


After another exchange they ended up a few feet apart, and the Mohra took a chance to taunt her "Your hold on your power is as clumsy as your hold on your weapon."

They clashed again, and this time both of them were more aggressive. She managed to slam him into the wall with a solid blow to side, but at the same time he ran his blade over her left forearm, opening up a nasty cut running all the way down it. Buffy grit her teeth and got ready to give it another go, but before she could she was attacked from behind.
KILL

A big scaly demon had tried to grapple her, but it clearly hadn't reckoned on her full strength. Just as the Mohra was coming in for another strike, she threw the scaly one right over her back, bowling both of them over. The Katana went flying, and Buffy smoothly caught it with her good arm while she kept her hammer available in her left. "Hey, looks like I'm holding both weapons now!"

The demon samurai scrambled forward from the ground to reclaim his stolen sword, but she stabbed at at his head with it as he did. He blocked the strike with a panic she hadn't seen from him before, knocking the katana blade-first out of her hand with his arm. Even though he'd succeeded in getting it out of her grasp, the resulting wound was a bad one and covered her in another spray of blood. It was green this time to complement the blue from before, and she guessed she was quite the sight now.
KILL
Freeing his weapon was far from a victory for the Mohra. Buffy used the opportunity given by his flailing to choke up on her hammer again and directly batter the not-so-decorative gem embedded in his forehead. When she hit, it shattered into a million pieces, and the demon screamed out a last horrified cry as it disintegrated into nothing. She followed through by twirling her hammer through a full rotation and then pulping a just-now-recovering Big 'N Scaly into the solid brick wall.

The concealing fog was spreading out further and further now, starting to fade into invisibility. As it did Buffy surveyed how the battle had gone so far. The guns were silent, and Harmony was in vamp face back by the dumpster, but she looked pretty beat up, and the corpse of the scorpion summon was already disintegrating by her side. In spite of her wounds, the look Harmony was giving her spoke like whole volumes of a trashy romance novel but that kind of thing was really going to have to wait until later.

Giles and Jonathan had managed to hold the apartment door leading back down into the basement, a couple demon corpses piled in front of them and Andrew presumably casting from behind them. A couple illusionary Buffy's were still bouncing around too, but without the fog they probably weren't going to fool anyone. For Buffy's own part, she'd been really worried about the gash on her arm, but it seemed to be healing up before her eyes. Whether it was more powers weirdness or something else, she would have to postpone an existential crisis about it.

The remaining forces of the enemy were gathered on the other side of the alley, cutting off access to the street. There were a handful of demons of the same types they'd already killed, but they were bolstered by a bold-looking new contingent near the center made up of the same type of whatever demon Lorne was. They looked less like flamboyant nightclub owners and more like medieval mercenaries, unfortunately.


Before the final fight could commence though, a vehicle skidded down the connecting street, turning into the alleyway to crash the party. It looked like you could only make so big a commotion in LA before some people just had to take notice.

Metavote: Who else showed up to the full scale battle Buffy's team is fighting with Wolfram and Hart's gang of assassins and mercs?

[] Angel's here to save the day in his vintage convertible, but Doyle's looking pretty leery in the passenger seat.

[] LA native Charles Gunn is here with his crew, and his tricked out truck has some kind of cannon set up in the back of it.

[] Detective Kate Lockley has had just about enough of all this chaos in the streets, and she's here with her partner in a patrol car.

[] Nathaniel Smith is in the passenger seat of that Mercedes, and Buffy thinks she can recognize his father in the driver's seat.