[X] Xander's group goes down into the pit to explore immediately, with Warren's Beastman robot leading the way. It could be dangerous, but letting whatever's going on fester could be worse.
The comforting light of day retreated as they carefully climbed down into the pit of wrecked concrete. Xander would've thought Warren's robot would have serious trouble, but it managed just fine, using its twisted rebar club as a sort of walking stick.
"Got any flashlights in that bag of yours?" Rachel said. Warren was carrying a bulky duffel full of who-knows-what along with his big toolbelt.
"I can do one better. Beastman, activate light." At Warren's command, a bright light shone out of the minotaur's snout. More of the construction they'd glimpsed from above was revealed; it was propped up by wood in the style of an old mining tunnel, running across the motorway and towards the college. Nothing and no one was evident in the part they could see, but there was a bend in the passage about fifty feet ahead.
"Do you think this is going to collapse any more than it already has?" Xander asked.
"The damage looks like it was caused by some kind of shock," Warren said. Xander had no idea how he could tell, but he sounded like he knew what he was talking about. "CyberWillow, is there a nearby seismometer you can check?"
There was a pause, and then CyberWillow responded from Warren's radio. "I have access to the output of two in the Los Angeles area, neither of which have picked up a significant tremor today. There is also one at UC Sunnydale which I am investigating now."
There was a pause. "And?" Warren said, clearly used to CyberWillow being pretty quick on the draw.
"I apologize; I should have been more clear," she answered. "Lacking a webfeed or well-positioned camera, I enlisted a student at the computer lab to collect the data for me. Regrettably this may take a few minutes."
Xander hoped that however she'd done that hadn't caused another problem, but he couldn't afford to be too picky right now. "So do we have to wait for that?"
Warren scratched his chin for a second before shaking his head. "No, it should be fine. If there hasn't been anything as close as LA I doubt it was a real earthquake, I'm betting they got a little too excited with their explosives instead."
"You heard the nerd. It's safe enough, let's do it," Rachel agreed.
Warren ordered his robot onward and they followed it into the tunnel. It was cramped enough that it had to duck down, but there was enough headspace for the rest of them.
Warren flicked a spotlight from his belt at one of the wooden boards as they passed through. "Like new. The wood hasn't aged at all since they put it in."
"How long would it take people to do all this?" Xander asked. He didn't know much about tunneling.
"Depends," Warren said. "A couple humans without good equipment? Months maybe. But if you had demons and power tools you could go a lot faster."
"Wouldn't people hear that?" He asked. "Do normal people in Sunnydale even think random underground construction noises are out of the ordinary? What am I saying, of course they don't."
"Wasn't too smart for humans to- wait, what the hell is that?" Their thoughts on underground construction were interrupted by a group of figures rounding the bend ahead, still half obscured by the huge robot in the way.
"Beastman, attack!" Warren said. Xander hadn't been sure how it'd fare in the tunnel, but it looked like they'd find out. It charged forward gamely with its big rebar club held forward like a spear.
Rachel was pulling out her tomahawk already as Xander said, "I'm hearing the sounds of the common minion. Supersoakers instead, we have a good wall to shoot past." He'd handed one out to both her and Warren before they'd come down here.
There was clanging in front of them as the vampires tried to fight Beastman head on, and it didn't look like it was going well for them. Xander and his allies shot their holy water volleys around the edges of the huge robot as best they could, and from the sounds of dusting and sizzling it was working.
Before too long though, a vampire got through the robot's guard, sneaking around low and to the side as it was busy with another. The lighting situation made it immediately harder to see as it charged at them, and Warren frantically got his spotlight out again as the other two kept shooting.
Xander was about to drop his watergun for a nice axe to ward the thing away, but Rachel was faster, moving forward to meet it already with her goofy two weapon setup. In the confines of the tunnel Xander was worried he'd just get in her way, so he decided to keep shooting and hoped she wouldn't get herself killed.
Maybe he shouldn't have been worrying about her quite as much as he had. She definitely wasn't a slayer, but the vampire she was fighting wasn't great any shakes either. He was beaten up and burnt already too, and in the first exchange she made him look clumsy as he missed her a couple times and she buried her tomahawk in his neck.
It didn't quite get all the way through, and the vampire took advantage of her opening with a frantic kick at her gut. She was knocked back, but Xander was ready to rush forward and finish the much maligned minion off. He grabbed for the axe still buried in its neck as if he meant to finish the job, and when it predictably sidestepped away his right hand already had a stake with its name on it.
"Made you look."
"Seriously?" Rachel complained, half-huffing as she got up.
"You're just sore I stole your kill," Xander said.
"I think I got the lion's share either way," Warren bragged. Xander noticed that the sounds from ahead had quieted; the other minions had all been either destroyed by the robot or fled.
"Let's just keep going, there are probably more where they came from," Rachel said, moving forward again after claiming her weapon from the pile of dust. She was acting fine, but Xander could tell she was breathing a little hard. Hopefully the hit she took hadn't bruised anything serious.
There were no other vampires visible around the corner, but the tunnel sloped down, heading to a switchback another fifty feet away.
"I wonder if it's mole people," Xander said, trying to break the tension. "Did the Watcher's Council ever have a seminar on mole people?"
"Looks like vampires, dusts like vampires, and you think it's mole people?" Rachel said.
"Lots of various demons employ vampires," he said.
"Mole people don't even exist," Rachel complained.
"I don't think this is just random tunneling," Warren commented, ignoring their argument. "This is the maximum safe grade for descent, it's like they found something here and then wanted to go down."
"Why not just dig straight… down then?" Xander asked. "I mean, vampires or mole men, it wouldn't be as much of a physical challenge as usual."
Warren continued, "Yeah, it wouldn't make sense unless they wanted to get-" As they turned the corner, they could see Beastman's light illuminating a ladder at the end of the next tunnel, going up.
"Underneath something," Rachel finished.
"Is your robot going to be able to deal with a ladder?" Xander asked.
"No," Warren took another look at the wall with his spotlight. "He might be able to just climb up? I'm not sure, I haven't tested anything like that yet."
"We could just go up ourselves," Rachel said.
"Gonna have to veto," Xander answered. "The three of us are barely enough to handle one vampire on our own, without this thing we have zero business being down here."
"Do you smell smoke? I smell smoke," Warren said as they neared the ladder. "I think they had to blow the ceiling open."
Xander was feeling worse and worse about this, because there was more and more that he didn't understand. Why hadn't they just gone in from above? He swallowed his doubts though, because whatever this was seemed increasingly urgent.
He sidled up to the robot to get a better look. Glancing up through the hole showed a nondescript roof of some kind of room above them, and he couldn't hear anything coming from it. "Send it up I guess."
"Beastman, climb and guard," Warren ordered. It ignored the flimsy ladder completely and started scrabbling at the wall with its big club. As it did, Xander checked in with CyberWillow.
After a quick summary, he finished, "I'm not saying the situation has me worried, but the situation has me worried."
"Andrew is still twenty minutes away," she said. "However, an Initiative tactical squadron has arrived onscene and is currently engaged in conversation with the police you left as a perimeter."
That was both good and bad. "Faith?"
"Is present, but does not appear to be in command," CyberWillow elaborated. "Special Agent Finn is demanding entrance."
Xander was worried that whatever was happening, they might make it worse. Then again, he felt undermanned, undergunned, and overconfused down here himself. And they did turn into another headache, he still had some leverage on Faith at least. "Give me our cops." The radio clicked once. "Let them through the perimeter. But they'd better not shoot me or my people in the back this time."
"Roger that, Captain," Jack confirmed.
By means of gouging out some big rents in the dirt, the robot had made enough progress by then to reach all the way up to the opening. It put its rebar club on top first and then hauled itself all the way up.
"It's not attacking, so it must not see anyone up there," Warren said. "Maybe that was all of them?"
"Not the way our luck works," Xander said, but he was positioning the ladder and climbing up already. When he got to the top, he reconsidered his words; maybe this was the way their luck worked, in dreamland. The crypt he'd entered had one huge difference from all the other crypts he'd seen in his Sunnydale days; this one was full of gold and valuables.
"Magnificent merciful Midas!" he exclaimed, looking around. Time hadn't done any favors to the wall hangings, but pearls and gems were still piled everywhere, messed around and disorganized as if-
"You won't take this from me too, geek!" The 80s vamp he'd fought in Psi Theta on Thursday jumped out from behind the coffin and attacked, bedecked in enough jewels to make a Cordette blush.
He'd been too distracted to be prepared and she would've probably ripped him in two, but luckily Warren's robot stepped forward and interposed the nasty rebar club, getting in her way. More importantly, the sharp edges on it tore up her outfit.
"The nerve! I didn't even steal this a week ago!" she turned her attention to it and landed a flurry of attacks which seemed to knock it off balance and even left a few dents. Whoever this was, she was no minion.
Luckily, Xander had just the thing to take advantage of her distracted outrage. He smashed his heavy water balloon right into her face and she screamed like the demon she was as the scent of burning vampire filled the air. As she lunged back at him the big robot grabbed at her wildly, probably saving his life again.
Unfortunately, that meant when Spike appeared and shoulder checked it from the side, it wasn't steady enough on its feet to avoid getting knocked back down into the hole, leaving Xander alone with an even scarier vampire. And there he was, fresh out of water balloons.
"Well this isn't good," was about all he had time to say before Spike's fist met his face and he saw blackness.
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"Don't you dare pull that trigger!"
"He already took Forrest! We can't just let him get away!"
Xander woke up to his parents screaming at each other as he was falling out of bed.
Wait, that didn't make any sense.
"If you'd told us about that we wouldn't even be in this mess right now!" Rachel shouted.
"This is a military operation!" someone Xander didn't know said.
"You want a fight so bad, British? Just let the idiot go and we can dance," and there was Faith.
"You think your underpowered taser is going to hurt him? The holy water didn't even do anything!" Warren argued.
"Little cramped for my preference down here, love," the last voice sounded like it was right by his ear, and he couldn't quite place it.
"I really hope I'm not done waking up yet," Xander mumbled, his eyes still closed. For a moment, all the screaming stopped.
"Well, well, aren't you the earlybird today," Spike said.
Xander's eyes cracked open, and he was in the tunnel again, surrounded not only by the people he'd come down with but also by Initiative soldiers. Spotlights from their guns tracked crazily around the tunnel, making an eye-wrenching display combined with the robot's mostly-blocked floodlight.
Spike was dragging him from behind, and he could feel the uncomfortable sensation of a hand on the back of his head. His neck was one twitch from being snapped like a stick. It was still better than waking up to his parents fighting, but that was about all he could say for the mess he'd got himself into.
"Xander, did you see how he got the regeneration effect?" Warren asked the question as Xander was contemplating his chances of survival. It sounded like a wonderful addition to the situation, and even better, one Xander knew nothing about.
"Again with the kidnapping me Spike? You're starting to sound a little like a one-note band," Xander said, trying to buy time for the piercing pain in his head to pass. Maybe he could put all this together if he just had another minute. He noticed that the robot looked mostly fine even after its fall, but it was a ways behind them now, holding still at the foot of the ladder.
"But it's always so bloody convenient. If you first succeed, better to just do it again," Spike said.
Xander couldn't help himself. "With that attitude, I can see why Drusilla got bored."
Spike growled, and Xander heard the telltale grindy face-changing noise. "You know, considering I'm probably immortal already, I think I can probably lose the-"
Xander saw Agent Finn aiming and pulling the trigger just before he did it and exploited Spike's surprised flinch. Bright electricity crackled and Xander dived away, the beam winging him and ratcheting his headache from a six up to a nine. He landed in the dirt flinching.
The electrorifle had been more of a surprise to Spike than a threat; he was laughing now as more and more beams pointlessly converged on him, the lightning doing all of diddly squat. He lazily drifted forward and grabbed Finn's gun right out of his hands before bashing his skull with it and sending the bigger guy to the ground in a spray of blood.
"Leave him the fuck alone!" Faith screamed.
"Now this is what I came here for!" Spike was alight with anticipation, and also residual electricity.
She moved in the blur of speed that was a slayer going full bore and crashed into Spike, sending the both of them rolling down the dirty tunnel and sending up a cartoon-like cloud of dust as they traded blows too fast for him to track. Through it all Spike didn't stop his full throated laughter, even after they disappeared past the switchback. Some of the Initiative boys charged after with their zap guns, and Rachel was running right behind them, but somehow Xander didn't think they'd be much help.
Warren was trying to bring his robot to bear, but too many soldiers were in the way and the tunnel was too small. When it reached the knot tending to Finn, it just used its club to push them aside, knocking them down like bowling pins as it advanced towards the fight.
"What the hell?"
"Get control of that thing!"
"It's more useful than any of you are down here!" Warren replied angrily. He kept moving behind it, but paused for a second as they reached Xander's prone form. "Do you need-"
"No, keep going, I'll catch up," he said. Warren took him at his word and kept hurrying up the tunnel.
Xander took another slow breath and tried to use the wall to drag himself to his feet. He might've managed it if his head wasn't spinning like a circus ride, but it wasn't to be and he crashed back to the ground. Wiping the new coat of dirt off his face, he decided to lead from the back for a little while instead.
He spoke into his radio, "Andrew, where are you?" He didn't have the time or coordination to punch his code in and hoped CyberWillow would just take care of it for him.
"You escaped?" He asked, ignoring the question.
"Don't worry about me, are you at the sinkhole?" Xander said.
"I just got here, should I-"
"Spike's got some kind of magic and he can't be hurt, we need the Salamander," He didn't seem to want to tangle with the robot, so big was probably better, and the Salamander was the biggest summon Andrew had. Maybe it could wrestle him into submission or something.
"I'm not sure how well it'll fit in there…" Andrew worried.
"If it blocks up the whole tunnel that's better, I don't want him slipping away," Xander really wished Andrew would stop arguing and just follow orders.
Luckily, he was done arguing, "As you command."
Xander heard a couple notes from Andrew's flute before the radio cut off. "CyberWillow, give me the general channel now, everyone on the scene."
"Done," she said.
"Anyone who doesn't know yet, Spike's fighting Faith. He's a really scary vampire, so don't make the same mistakes I did and let him punch you in the face. Stay out of the pit and in the sunlight." He strained his head, trying to remember, "Holy Water isn't feeling so holy today apparently, so don't bother. Guns only if you can get a clear shot. If anyone has a net or something, give it a try." He wasn't sure which vans would be here by now. He was pretty sure one of them had a net.
He got some scattered confirmations back, and for a solid half minute or so he deluded himself into thinking things would be basically OK. He dragged his sorry carcass up the wall again, managed to stay on his feet this time, and started stumbling his way toward the switchback. Aside from the soldiers tending to Riley, the rest had followed the fight up the tunnel, so it got pretty dark. At least it seemed to make the stabbing pain behind his eyes a little less awful.
Then the shouting and screaming started on his radio, and he forced himself into sort of an ambling jog. He wasn't sure what he could do when he got there, but he'd figure that out then. As he got farther and farther, he kept expecting to run into the back line of soldiers holding the tunnel and boxing Spike into the shadows of the collapsed pit.
More and more concerningly, he never did, until he eventually emerged into the ruins of the sinkhole itself and found nobody was there anymore. Had Spike gotten through into some bolthole in the wreckage maybe? But that didn't make sense, if he did then people would still be down here. He could still hear a fight somewhere off in the distance.
"Someone tell me what's happening," he shouted.
The radio at his waist answered. "Spike appears to also be immune to sunlight, and at least highly resistant to bullets," CyberWillow stated flatly. Well shit. "The battle has proceeded roughly 70 meters West. Despite his invulnerability, he is avoiding engagement with the robot designated 'Beastman' or Andrew's salamdricar demon."
When he finally managed to scramble to the lip of the pit, Officer Bernie helped him the rest of the way out. There were injured everywhere, but there was no time to worry about that. A few moments of frantic looking around later he spotted where the battle had ended up.
He could barely see Spike and Faith still fighting up on a university rooftop, four stories above a crowd of Initiative soldiers and Warren's robot. There was some hope for help though; the ten-foot salamander wasn't similarly stymied, and was crawling straight up the building's wall on sticky feet, unnoticed by those on the roof. It was maybe a moderate PR disaster, but Xander couldn't really bring himself to care about that detail now. The scattered college kids watching the spectacle from afar weren't panicking, so they probably didn't even think it was real.
Spike had his back to the edge when the salamander when it reached the top and it dived at him, but he ducked underneath and Xander lost sight of what was happening, the angle not good enough to see anything. Faith seemed to go after him, but then something went wrong and she went careening off the roof and into the branches of a nearby tree. He'd be worried about her if he couldn't hear the storm she was cursing up all the way from where he was. He briefly saw Spike showboating on the roof again, and then he was racing off out of sight.
"CyberWillow, can you track him?" Spike in daylight was going to be a disaster for the civilians.
"No. There isn't enough coverage that I have immediate access to, and even if I woke Willow she would not be able to force connections quickly enough at this distance," she sounded slightly more emotional than she usually did. She was obviously frustrated, eerily like the real Willow when she was trying to hide it.
He looked around for Andrew, and spotted him by one of the vans; he'd probably been puppeting the salamander remotely. "Can we get some monkeys to try to track him?" They weren't ideal for broad daylight, but they were all they had. If what had happened earlier was any indication they'd hopefully be written off as movie props by most people.
"I'll try, but a vampire as adroit as William the Bloody won't be easy to find," he got to playing his flute again, and flying monkeys arrived in a swarm and flew off in the direction Spike had gone.
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Half an hour later, nobody had managed to find Spike, not even Andrew's monkeys, but they had found the warehouse he'd been working out of, on the other side of the road from campus. Inside, they'd found ground penetrating radar, digging supplies, and the man the Initiative had apparently lost last night, minus all his blood. Xander really wished people would tell him these things.
"Look, I'm not trying to tell you what to do with your guy. But it's a huge risk, and there's only one time we even know about where it hasn't turned out to be a bad one," Xander continued.
"You're just trying to tell us that Harmony's more special than Forrest," Xander was kind of shocked that Riley Finn was even on his feet after the pounding he took, giant bandage or no, but head wounds did usually look worse than they were. And a dead friend was a pretty powerful motivator; he knew from experience.
"He won't be your Forrest anymore. Harmony isn't even the old Harmony anymore," Xander stated. She'd probably even agree with him, if she was here. At least about that detail.
"Look, maybe we were a little close-minded at first," Riley said. "Clearly there's a lot of paraphysics in play that we don't have any data on. But that goes both ways. He might still be in there somewhere."
On top of everything, the residual headache from his concussion-adjacent adventure wasn't quite gone. Maybe that was why Xander couldn't help but get sarcastic, "And you don't think anyone's tried to just bring the inner human out of a vampire before? People have been going at this since the first two watchers were saying oogah-boogah and hitting each other with sticks."
"Maybe a slayer hasn't tried," Riley said. "At least until Buffy did with Harmony."
And that was harder to argue with, "Even if that's true, if there's some sort of wacky slayer mind-whammy or something, do you really want to put your friend through that?"
"You've had doe eyes for me before, too," Faith said, walking in behind him. "What, do you think you'd be better off as dust?"
"You'll do it then?" Riley asked, sounding desperate.
"I'll try. Forrest was cool, I owe him that much. But I dunno if it's gonna be all kittens and puppies like you guys think it will be," she hedged.
He knew this was going to go all hellmouth special, but there was nothing he could do about it. "I still don't agree, but like I said, it's not my call," he hoped he didn't get overruled at some point when it was one of his own people. He shook his head resignedly as he walked back out of the warehouse.
There was still a lot to do, but he felt like the whole world was on his shoulders and he just needed a break. If this was how Buffy felt all the time he didn't envy it. He didn't have much time to stew before Faith followed him outside.
Xander looked over. "If this is about the Forrest thing, I can ask Buffy to compare notes when she gets back. I don't think it'll do any good, but that doesn't mean-"
"Not about that, but thanks," Faith said. "Look, it's the other thing. My knife."
The sheer greed of it evaporated whatever camaraderie she'd earned from Xander in the fight. "It hasn't been a week. And I was listening real hard back at the suck house, but I didn't hear any explanations of where your top secret info was coming from."
She got defensive. "That was then, this is now. Would you rather have that invincible vampire of yours running wild, or can you table your urge to get me to squeal?"
"Spike has what to do with your memento?" Xander said, not quite seeing what she was getting at.
"Do you think it's just for sentimental value, dipshit? A gut wound from that knife put me in a coma for almost three months. Slayers don't have a habit of staying down that long when they're not in the ground already."
He hadn't actually thought about it that way, but it was a compelling point. "You think it can hurt him through whatever mojo he's got?"
Faith looked conflicted for a second before answering. "It's some ring. He was gloating about it when we fought. I figure if anything can cut it off, it's the knife Wilkins gave me. Unless you think baby Xena back there has a better chance of getting him with it than I do?"
Vote: What does Xander do with Faith's Knife?
[] Give it back. Even if Faith isn't trustworthy at all, Spike's a much bigger threat. Nobody will be as good a bet as Faith in hand-to-hand with him until Buffy is back.
[] Keep a hold on it. Faith's trying too hard to keep her source on Buffy's whereabouts secret, and besides, it isn't like the SDCW can't try to use the knife against Spike themselves.
