Successor (BTVS)

[X] Xander Harris
[X] Rupert Giles
[X] Willy the Snitch

The rain was still going the next night, but it had settled down from a full thunderstorm into a consistent drizzle. Buffy wasn't sure if it was just Dracula being a drama queen or some necessary consequence of however he'd moved his giant castle to town, but Buffy had been advised not to complain about it. Even though the weather made Ian cranky, California's constant water shortages meant it was more of a blessing than a curse.

As she opened the front door again, she noticed the foyer had been spruced up, and even without Dracula here, it was clear where Buffy was supposed to go. A trail of black roses led up the stairs and deeper into the castle, and Buffy rolled her eyes as she followed the path. Harmony had been pretty concerned about this kind of thing when she drove her out here again, and Buffy had almost just told her to come along, but it would've been pretty awkward, and she was half-concerned that whatever mystical mumbo jumbo Dracula was planning would blow their secret somehow. There were some things a slayer had to do herself.

The room she finally emerged into was comfortably furnished with couches and well decorated with hangings on the wall, though thankfully he hadn't been so classless as to lead her to an actual bedroom. "I hope you bought these roses local. It'd be a shame if Sunnydale missed out on the business."

Dracula was peering out a narrow window when she entered, but quickly turned to address her, ignoring her jibe. "So. You have come. You wish to find the root of your darkness."

"Well, you don't have to get all negative about it like that."

"Hardly. As you suggested, the Hellmouth is a place where the dark flowers thrive. Where others would perish, you have prospered."

"Prospered how? You said you knew my true nature. What's this big revolution going on in my slayer side?"

Dracula paused, glancing back out the window and thinking before continuing. "Such revelations cannot be approached carelessly. Tell me what you have felt inside, how this all began, and perhaps we may find the answer together."

"And I thought I was done with high school teachers and their leading questions," Buffy said in annoyance. Dracula just raised his eyebrows expectantly, and she went on. "Fine. It was about two months ago, right after my involuntary promotion. I was fighting this dragon in a basement, and I was kind of having some trouble with it."

"Some trouble with a dragon. How surprising," he said mischievously.

"It tried to get in my head, and I was totally on my way to being pyramid-scheme Buffy with optional lame briefcase, but, well, I had this vision. I was in some desert, or a savannah, or something, and this voice-" she thought about fudging, but she needed real answers. Even if that part was mondo disturbing. "My voice, it told me to KILL. In big capital letters. So I did, really extra-well. Slayer skills extra crisp, dragon weak spots helpfully categorized."

Dracula's eyes rose a bit when she mentioned the savannah, but otherwise he nodded along calmly. "So you did. And there was nothing before this? Nothing else that happened on that day?"

She wracked her brain, trying to call back the specifics of that first hectic week. "I think I had the first Wilkins dream a couple days before." Dracula merely looked on curiously, and she figured some explaining was in order. "He was the mayor before that I had to kill, on account of him trying to turn into a giant snake and eat everyone. A lesson to everyone about unsustainable diet plans."

"It was a great achievement, killing a sorcerer of such power on the day of his ascension," Dracula said, "But now he haunts you?"

"Not really in a spooky way. More like a busybody who's always poking his nose into everything. He has this whole spying field or whatever on City Hall."

"A curious disposition for a vengeful spirit," he acknowledged. "Certainly more modern, more civilized than the heart of your power, but undeniably connected now. Why?"

"Aren't you supposed to be telling me?" She was getting a little annoyed, though he did have a point there. Suited mayors and primal voices were pretty unmixy.

He tsked, and then gestured at the hammer she'd been carrying around the whole time. "Let us change the subject for now. Where did you acquire that fine instrument?"

"You want to talk accessories now? Is this really the time?" She raised an eyebrow.

"This is all about you, Buffy. And I have seen the way you move, the way you fight. You do not wield it as a weapon, but as an extension of your body, as smooth as the clothes over your skin. I am no novice who does not understand how unbalancing something of that mass should ordinarily be, and I think neither are you."

"Well, it's a little magic, I guess." Buffy said. "If you want something like it for yourself, you could shop with Ivgol in LA. I can get you his address."

"While I have no doubt your supplier was capable, I think you may have made an error in attribution." Dracula gestured for the hammer and Buffy paused for a second, but handed it over. It's not like she couldn't take it back if she wanted to. He didn't quite struggle with the weight, but as he lazily moved it back and forth a few times she noticed it didn't look very smooth in his hands, and his footing was suffering from the momentum. "I believe that my physical strength is similar to yours, not to mention my greater height and weight. And yet." He handed it back, and she was more conscious of how much the hammer let her cheat when she effortlessly grabbed it again.

"So what are you saying? It likes me? What does that have to do with the price of shoes?"

"You like you. Your instrument thrums with your own magic, Buffy, not that of another." It was weird to think about. She had powers, but calling it her 'magic', as if it was something she could twist around like Willow, it was a new thought. "Really look at it, do not just see. Listen, do not just hear."

She wasn't sure what kind of sounds there were supposed to be, but she dutifully looked down at her weapon. It really was pretty ridiculously oversized for her, and between all the spikes in practically every direction and how much it weighed it was kind of surprising it didn't just accidentally wreck things. She'd definitely smashed stuff she wasn't supposed to with way smaller weapons than this one before.

Now that she thought about it, there had been tight doors. Crowded streets. Cramped sewer tunnels. Harmony's car. But it had never seemed to really get in the way. She tried to remember exactly what she did with it, but it was surprisingly tricky, like trying to draw a diagram of how you got out of bed in the morning.

Something else spontaneously came to mind. "I never named it. Nothing seemed right."

"Would it seem right to name yourself something different?" Dracula asked.

"I wanted to be Power Girl when I was ten." She shouldn't have said that, but the whole town probably knew by now anyway with that stupid video going around. Dracula laughed at that, proving her right. "So is that how we're the same? Your magic lets you teleport castles, turn into mist to dodge around, and do whatever else the internet got right. Mine lets a big hammer be convenient." She affected a little pout.

"Ah, but would you trade that away?" he asked knowingly.

"...No," she said, giving her hammer a little hug. "But still. Different sized bags of tricks here."

"I am older, and have had more time to grow, but you should not sell yourself short. You have demonstrated to me just yesterday more of your magic, even if some of it is defensive in nature."

"The anti-mind whammy and the weapon skills?"

"I suspect there is even more in that vein that you do not yet fully understand, hidden from casual viewing. But is it so surprising? Your Domain is so fundamental, so elegantly simple. You are no magician with flashy stunts, you are the Slayer, the Killer who strikes from ambush, the master of Sun and Shadow."

She hadn't mentioned the sun and the shadow in the vision, but it was easy to remember now. All this hinting at stuff he probably already knew was driving her bonkers. "What do you mean domain? Isn't that usually a thing from the math dimension?"

"It is time for me to show you something," he declared, crossing the room to one of the hangings. He took it down from the wall and negligently threw it onto a couch, revealing an old-looking mirror. Despite its form, what it showed in the glass was distinctly not mirrorlike.

A distinctly less pale, but also slightly translucent, version of Dracula was in it, and even though a vampire in a mirror was pretty strange already, that was the least of the surprises. Next to him was another apparition, even more faded. She was a savage-looking African woman with white war paint covering her face and all over her dreadlocks. In contrast with her gritty appearance, she was wielding a shiny red axe. The background of the image was a pattern of shadows punctuated by bright spots of light.


Buffy startled a bit at the weird sight, and even more when the woman reacted, but mirror-Dracula's calm demeanor made her suspicious. After moving her arms around deliberately she figured out the woman wasn't actually doing anything individually, it was just some weird reflection of herself. "When Willow looked you up on the internet, there was lots about turning into animals, but nothing about trick mirrors."

"This is no petty show," Dracula stated proudly. "An ordinary mirror shows you the reflections of the objects within. This one shows instead the objects of the reflections within."

"Can you vague that up for me some more?"

"My image is humble, yet it may illuminate the situation," he said. "You see within the man I was, hundreds of years ago. A vampire is, in the most fundamental way, a reflection of a person, so an ordinary mirror will show nothing. A reflection has no reflection."

"I'm pretty sure that isn't what I learned in science class, or at the mall for that matter, but sure. That makes as much sense as any of this crazy stuff. So you have a backwards mirror. Who's she, my past life? I'd like to think I had better hair."

"She was the first of the human slayers, Sineya. Any slayer would see her in this inverse mirror, though I suspect for you her image is more real."

Buffy zeroed in on the shiny axe, which was right where her hammer was. "And she had a special weapon too? Does this mean my hammer had a past life?"

"That is… not uninteresting. But you have not even noticed the most striking quality we see here," Dracula said, leading her on again.

She peered closer, but she couldn't see anything else through the clouds of darkness with their little sparks inside, "Are you sure? This weird stuff in the background kind of gets in the way of everything. Has your magic mirror been near too many magnets? Maybe you should get it degaussed?"

Dracula didn't laugh at her this time; as she turned to him for an explanation, his expression was solemn. He carefully took the mirror down off the wall and held it in front of them. Then he pivoted it at an angle, revealing the rest of the room, to the side. Wait-

"Where did all the darkness go?" She said. She moved in front of the mirror again, and it was back, along with Sineya. He pivoted it again, and she saw human Dracula, alone in an empty room. She moved back into the field of view, and Sineya was back, with all the … rest still behind her. It seemed so vast, now that she really looked. She wondered how it could fit.

"Any slayer would show Sineya," he repeated. "But on the other hand, my dear, if I was to put any other slayer in this mirror, she would not show us an Old One behind her."

Buffy moved her arms back and forth again, and this time she noticed that while Sineya's ghost moved in the foreground, the massive dark sworls waved behind. She winked, and saw one of the bright lights flicker out and reappear. "Anya said it didn't work that way. That I couldn't have just… caught it from Wilkins like that," she argued weakly.

"And you did not. That is not Olvikan you see, is it? What did you think the source of the slayer's power was? Moonshine and fairy dust?"

"I, but… Why me? You don't even have one!" She accused.

"I have crafted the shape of my power over centuries, slowly melding it to mine own plans." Dracula intoned. "Yours has somehow fed upon the Hellmouth for mere months, and it is a wilder, more primal thing. It takes back much of the shape it once had, long ago."

Buffy couldn't believe this. "So what are you saying? I'm going to go all Wilkins 2.0 and turn into a giant shadow monster?" She should've known that random superpowers didn't ever come for free.

"It may not be so grave as that-"

"May not? So my fate is only maybe to be a shadow monster then, great!" The darkness in the mirror spun with turbulence, reflecting her rising panic.

"Even your predecessor, this Wilkins, could not have truly become an Old One. There is no space in our tiny world for something of that grandeur. There is no space in any world, not anymore. He would've merely been a-" he paused. "A Successor. A small god in Olvikan's image."

"The image is the whole problem!" Buffy screamed.

"I have had a measure of my own Divinity for hundreds of years! We can keep the situation well in hand." Dracula said firmly. "If we can find the exact source of this rapid growth, some kind of artifact perhaps, we might redirect it somehow. We could slow the changes and give you a greater measure of control."

"Yes. Slowing. Control. Good ideas. Wait, you're saying you're a god?"

Dracula shrugged as he put the mirror back on the wall. "More than half of those living on this world know my name and I myself have lived longer than but a handful of its permanent residents. Is it really so surprising? Surely you are cosmopolitan enough to know that not all gods reside in books."

She had dealt with Pan's minions pretty recently, but he was a distant power in some other dimension. Like the things she'd heard the spell squad invoke from well, books. "But on Earth? You? Me?" It was just too crazy. Surely Giles would've mentioned something.

"As I said, this world is not large, not in the sense that matters, even by the standards of the modern cosmos. Its gods are not quite so grand as you might expect. I suppose education on such affairs is not what it once was."

She wanted to snap at him for waiting a whole day to throw this bombshell on her, but without him here she wouldn't have known anything at all. Either way, there was definitely no more time to waste. "OK, well, whatever. The important part is that artifact power thingy you were talking about. We have to find it now. For all I know I could get all… like that." She gestured vaguely at the mirror, and she could see both Sineya and the Old One gesturing back.

"Of course," Dracula agreed, seeming nonplussed despite the gravity of the situation. "But I assume you have not been idle for these months, and I doubt my own abilities are equal to the task alone."

"That's fine," Buffy said. "I've got an idea."

Vote: Who does Buffy get to help them search for this mysterious power source? Those who aren't chosen as the winner might still end up participating, but they won't be first on the scene, and it'll mainly be the winner's methodology in play.

[] Buffy's convinced this must have something to do with Willow's sensor ghost at City Hall. With Dracula there maybe they can finally find the source.

[] The Rat King is a master at controlling the Hellmouth's weird radiation, and if the power is being drawn from the Hellmouth he might be able to figure out what's doing it. Amy Madison would be coming along for the ride though.

[] With all his work in the museums of Sunnydale this summer, and his research on her weird condition, Giles can probably put the pieces together.

[] Anya has a lot of old friends in low places, and Andrew's growing network of demon gossips isn't bad either. Between the two of them maybe they can find out where this thing is hidden.