Successor (BTVS)

[X] Those boots look like they're one size fits all. Buffy puts them on and goes to the roof to free the Nezumi from all the ugly new trees growing into it.

"You keep flying," she said with just a tinge of regret. "I got this."

Something in her wanted to rise to the challenge of flying the Nezumi, but it wasn't really practical for her to try to learn in the middle of this. This was a time to be responsible, not to showboat.

"Rin- Mayor Summers, I'm afraid combat maintenance is extremely-" Skip was distracted, and whipped them around to dodge something she could barely even see on the screen.

"In this dimension, I'm more danger ready than you." She didn't actually have to take her own shoes off; she found that when she stuck her foot in vaguely the right place the metal framework expanded and then closed again around it. She had both on in a snap, and was looking around for where to go.

"Let's not look our gift villain in the mouth!" Cordelia said, grabbing her by the shoulder and hustling her over to a part of the deck with a small circle on it.

"Still not a villain." Buffy said. "Is there anything in the user manual for these I should've read?"

"Yes, tons." Clem said as he jammed a button and the roof above her irised open with a hiss, unnatural darkness flowing in immediately. Then he hit another and the floor under her surged up, fast enough that for a moment she thought it would launch her right into the sky.

It didn't, as when the disc under her feet suddenly stopped, now a part of the ship's roof, her boots kicked in with a hum and stopped her too. The outside of the Nezumi was pitch-black, way darker than she'd expected from the false color on the viewscreen, but she didn't have much time to try to understand her surroundings.
KILL
Not too confident in moving her boots yet, she hula-ed backwards to avoid an owl she couldn't see, and her hammer teleported into her hands as she swiped upward and splatted it. The ship jerked again, dodging who knows what as the wind ripped past her face, but she was still held fast to the surface. If only she knew where to go or how to get there.

"Don't just stand there!" Cordelia's voice came uselessly out of the ship's megaphone.

"It's as dark as the Kharti void up there, you just can't tell because of how much I've stretched the sensors," Clem said, managing to sound scornful and boastful at the same time. There was an empty silence for a second, and then he apparently realized he should actually help. "The largest one is on a bearing of 450 krevs from you and 6.7 metrics away."

"I don't know what those are!" The goofy measurements had seemed funny when she was filming, but she might have some words with Cortez about them later.

"Turn 150 degrees to your left and proceed twenty feet," CyberWillow translated, her simulated voice not just ringing out from the loudspeaker but also the radio on her belt.

With some trepidation, she tried to lift a foot, and was relieved when it basically worked, just with a little delay. Whenever she tried to take a step, the force released a split-second later, letting her get around, if haltingly. Stepping back down was nerve-wracking too, as the Nezumi's roof was covered with slightly raised and lowered sections which she couldn't actually see and just had to balance on as she went.

She could probably just overpower the magnets if she wanted and speed it up, but that seemed a little risky for now. Even as she'd been considering it, the ship swerved again, presumably dodging the giant owl somewhere in the blackness. Her one foot down couldn't keep her steady, and she sort of half-fell half-pivoted onto the hull.
KILL
The smaller owls had either been waiting for a sign of weakness or managed to catch up with the ship in the maneuver, but either way they came at her in bulk as she was still prone. It wasn't like that first lone owl; there were tons of them, some of them pecking and clawing, others slamming into her like projectiles. She lashed out with her hammer in a single hand even as she used the other to rip them off and bat them away.

She wanted to try to crawl forward to her destination, but it wasn't a motion that would work with the magnet boots. One of her feet was still awkwardly locked on, and the other was kicking around free, and to make any progress she'd have to actually get up again. She swiped back and forth with her hammer to banish what owls she could and then moved to a kneeling position, locking the second foot on and letting her start to press forward again.

It was a bloody business, both for them and for her. In the darkness and with the boots making her life difficult she couldn't fully defend herself, and was getting cut up and ripped at in tiny little bits as she went. The owls died in droves around her too, but they seemed almost limitless in the dark expanse.

"Stop drifting, go more right!" Cordelia demanded over the megaphone, totally ambivalent to her perilous situation.

"Incoming!" Skip added, and the Nezumi started tilting, turning what had been a relatively flat surface into a steep slope.
KILL
Buffy had been trying to stay upright, but the little whisper in her head told her to do otherwise, fast. So she pushed off the near part of the hull with her arm and careened in a circle, almost hanging by her feet at the end with her head pointed downhill. She lost her hammer in the wild motion, but she hadn't made it a moment too soon.

There was a screech of tortured metal as the giant owl just barely missed her with its talons, instead tearing through part of the Nezumi. It was only a graze, but it still sent them for a spin, and then Buffy was hanging upside down into the sky.

It definitely wasn't the closest to death Buffy had ever come, but there was something about hanging by a pair of fashion-challenged boots over an infinite dark void that really made her think about some of her life choices. A moment later and the ship righted itself again, throwing her back down onto the irregular roof. She got back up, more wary than before, but at least for the moment no more owls were attacking.

Then she heard the telltale pings, and one of the acorns even fell on her head. She batted it away, but knew she had to act soon. She'd been totally disoriented by the recent maneuvers though.

"Where am I going?" She shouted.

"What are you, blind? It's practically in front of your face!" Cordelia said.

"Yes, I am blind, that's the whole problem!" All those pranks Ringer played on Charisma were making more and more sense.

"Five feet, twenty degrees left." CyberWillow echoed.

She moved as fast as the boots would let her and finished in a clumsy lunge, her hammer coming back to her hands even as she was realizing she needed it. Her hit wasn't square on the tree, but she felt herself make contact, so she stepped forward again and really let it have it.

Another swarm of owls came to distract her, but she mostly just ignored them in favor of destroying the tree. It hurt, and her hair was going to be messed up as bad as Harmony's had been, but she was getting pretty frustrated and really wanted to be able to see again.

One last swing finally finished the thing off, the entire trunk separated. The ship jerked with the sudden disconnection, and the trunk down slammed onto it with a huge clang. She was temporarily occupied with batting all the stupid owls away (and losing some of her poor hair in the process), but she could hear it slide off the hull and presumably into the sky as the Nezumi manuevered under her again.

Once it was gone, the absoluteness of the darkness cleared, revealing the shadows of other trees growing out of the ship. There were depressingly many, but none nearly as big as the one she'd just cleared; these must mostly be the recent crop.

It was obvious the slowstepping thing she'd been doing wasn't going to work though, not for a job like this. "Can you just make the magnets stay on and stop changing when I move? It's too slow."

She got a trill of beeps as her answer, and after a stumble she changed tack, just overpowering the magnets with the strength of her other leg every time she took a step, instead of having them awkwardly switch as she tried to lift. She was definitely going to feel it in her calves tomorrow, but now she could move around quicker. And she had some experience up here now too. She was pretty sure she wouldn't kick herself off by accident.

She killed a few of the smaller trees, battling the seemingly infinite owl swarms along the way, but didn't make much more progress against the dark. Each tree she attacked seemed a little bigger than the last, and what she was gaining in reducing their numbers was being lost to the other ones, growing slowly to full size.

"It's coming in for another attack, be wary," Skip announced.

She looked up into the mists of artificial darkness, and this time they were thin enough that she could barely make out the giant form swooping in. She needed to change things up, and made a split second decision.

"Pivot to give me a good shot!"

"That's insane!" Clem said. "It outmasses her by a factor of-"

"Your funeral," Skip said, and the ship spun as it dodged, revolving her around and adding her relative speed to the diving owl's. She still couldn't make things out perfectly-
KILL
-but she still knew just how to move, just where to swing.

Talons bigger than her legs whipped by her at more than a hundred miles an hour, narrowly missing her as she smashed her hammer into one with a haymaking two-handed swing. The force of impact was tremendous, ripping her weapon from her hands and nearly ripping her off the ship, in spite of the magnets, but somehow she stayed on board and didn't plummet to the ground below.

The talon she hit wasn't ripped off, as she was half-hoping it would be, but a prodigious amount of dead normal-sized owls did explode out of it. Some blasted off into the dark. Some of them pelted onto the deck before sliding off, or even getting stuck in the little irregular gaps. Too many of them pelted her all over, adding a coat of owl gore to her tattered hair and scratched up arms. She hoped the loss of all of them would make it weaker, but she knew better than to think things would go that right.

She glanced back, and as she'd expected, it didn't seem that hurt. Its angry hoot dopplered away as it soared back into the dark.

"There are a lot of good physical reasons that shouldn't have worked out like it did," Clem said.

"Just need to do it twenty or so more times," she muttered, before plodding off to uproot another tree. And to think, she could've been flying the spaceship instead.

"I don't think you'll have the chance, it's breaking off," Skip said.

"Did we win?" Cordelia asked. "That was easy."

"Negative," CyberWillow said. "It's headed straight into Sunnydale."

Who knew what kind of damage it could do. Buffy was half-afraid it would just start devouring citizens. "Chase it down!"

"We're still too slow," Skip said. "Clear more of the trees. I'll try to mop up the lesser combatants while you do."

It took a few more minutes of Buffy playing weedwacker and Skip flying around and gunning down the swarm, but eventually the Nezumi was mostly cleared of the crippling trees. The gnarled root networks were still dug into parts of the hull, but the darkness effect was gone, and the city lights in the distance were visible again. The Nezumi was racing toward them, and she hoped it wouldn't be too late.

She tried to find the monster's silhouette, but couldn't spot it, even against the lights. "Where is it now?" Buffy asked, knowing CyberWillow would have answers. "What's going on?"

"The megaowl is largely ignoring the outer reaches of the city, and its trajectory is consistent with an attack on the Maple Court area and/or City Hall itself. Xander Harris is rallying a defense to fight a holding action, though their anti-aerial armaments are sharply limited in scope." Buffy wondered briefly at the weirdness of CyberWillow inventing a goofy name for a baddie, but there was no time to ask about it.

They wouldn't have the hardest time in the world hitting it with the AT4s and the automatic rifles, but even if they did, it'd hardly do as much damage as the Nezumi's glazers. The 'megaowl' was just too big and tanky.

"Can Buffy hear us?" Xander's voice rang out of the radio.

"Yeah," she said, "Xander, what-"

"We're going to volley everything we have at it at once, maybe make it think twice. That's the hope at least, because we definitely don't have the rockets to do it another time."

Skip responded fast, apparently wired into the call too, "If you let us close first I should be able to take advantage of the distraction."

"That was the plan, but how much longer are you guys gonna be?" She heard small bursts of machine gun fire in the background.

"I still don't know where- oh, thanks Nezumi. Call it one and half minutes," Skip said, and Buffy felt the ship slightly change direction.

"We'll try to hold out," there was more gunfire, and then the line cut off.

The rapid trip back to Sunnydale riding the back of a spaceship would've been exhilarating under other circumstances, but as it was, she was just worried, desperately staring into the night. There must be some kind of annoying magic on these owls, there was no way something fifty feet long should be so hard to find.

She finally spotted it, and her heart immediately went to her throat; it rose up into sight over the buildings with a compact car in its talons, crumpling it as she watched. She couldn't tell if anyone was inside, but it was lit up. Or at least it had been.

She shouted in alarm, "Wait, we have to get them out!"

"They're probably dead already! It'll keep rampaging if we don't kill it now!" Clem argued.

"I have enough footage to determine that the two passengers managed to escape. And as Professor Vorax has surmised, the driver is already dead." CyberWillow said flatly.

"Ten seconds until I'm in range," Skip either didn't care, or was refusing to be distracted.

"The Nezumi and I will coordinate your timing with the SDCW."

"Beep beep bloop-be-bloop."

Buffy grit her teeth. Even if somebody was still in there, they were probably beyond saving. And CyberWillow hadn't ever lied directly, not even today, when she'd tried to twist the truth. A volley of rockets flared up into the night and she tried to ignore the ugly feeling in her gut.

The AT4 was an anti-tank weapon, not originally designed for aerial targets, but much cheaper than the Stinger-type missiles while still being vaguely able to do the job. With so many firing at once, most of the people using them were probably totally untrained. Even so, about half the shots were on target, with most of the rest just missing a little low. It just wasn't that hard to hit a fifty-foot owl.

Unlike the Judge years ago, it recognized the danger, dropping the totaled car and struggling desperately for lift to get out of the way. It mostly succeeded, and the few rockets that still hit didn't do much damage, just expelling a handful of dead owls apiece.

But unfortunately for it, the stall left it right in the approaching Nezumi's crosshairs, and the dull yellow glazer beams ripped into its face. A flood of little corpses exploded into the sky as Skip held the weapons on the vulnerable spot, and in another moment the megaowl was diving again, desperate to shake the attack.

Their ship dove after it to pursue, but they were interrupted by a charge of the big owl's smaller escorts. They appeared out of the night above, almost as if they'd been lying in wait, and in even greater numbers than they'd fought out over the desert. Owls attacked Buffy from all sides as she heard more acorns drop down all around her, setting in their roots to damage the Nezumi and weigh it down with new evil trees.

This time she wasn't fighting alone. The rattle of rifle fire rang out from below, accompanied by an eclectic collection of other projectiles. She noticed big metal spears, crossbow bolts, and even some of Harmony's longer arrows lance up at the swarms around her as she pummeled the endless owls. And the owls weren't the only small fliers in the sky anymore, either.

A squad of flying monkeys, presumably summoned by Andrew somewhere below, bore down on her position and flanked the swarm attacking her directly. They weren't nearly as numerous, but they were both agile and tough compared to the birds and were putting up a good fight. Glad for the breather, she was able to spend precious seconds charging around the Nezumi's roof and clearing off the new trees, pushing as fast as she dared while the ship maneuvered wildly underneath her, now on offense instead of running for its life.

It was starting to feel like she was in the middle of a war, and it was obvious downtown Sunnydale was no place for that. There was already at least one bystander dead, and it'd be a miracle if that was the only casualty. "How much longer is this going to take?"

"According to my best estimates, 43% of the original owls in the merge have been expelled," CyberWillow stated.

"That's it? Do we need to get all of them?" Her heart sunk. Most of those had probably been from that trick with the rockets too, and they couldn't repeat that.

"Possibly not," CyberWillow said.

Normal Willow's voice came to life over the radio, filled with emotion and so obviously different from her counterpart. "I've been researching the owlmerges with Amy, and we did some experimenting on the one we caught at the embassy. This one is way too big to hold together well in this dimension, you just need a simple majority!"

"What?" That would probably have made more sense if half her attention wasn't on owls, or the other half wasn't on her magnet-assisted footwork.

"Fifty percent plus one!" Willow said. "If you kill more than half the owls the whole merge destabilizes."

Seven percent left, then.

Without the benefit of an ambush, the Nezumi was back to making ineffective shots and near misses with the glazers as it dueled the megaowl; Buffy couldn't count to a zillion owls in her head but she knew this was going to take forever at this rate. Way too long a forever, too much time for more things to go wrong or the battle to turn again.

"Skip, um, Captain Steel, can you get me close to it again? Maybe bait it into another attack?"

"The Nezumi's already taken way too much damage!" Clem complained.

"Beep beep boop."

"He's willing to take the risk," Skip said evenly. "I won't question what you plan to do, just be ready." There was a brief pause before he continued, "For what it's worth, I'm sorry about how things went."

Something about the comment seemed off, but she ignored it for now, focused on readying for her big move. She couldn't afford a distracting conversation.

The Nezumi boosted forward with renewed speed under her, and raked the megaowl at ultra-close range with the glazers. It was ready to make the ship pay though, braking in midair with flared wings and maneuvering itself so they flew right under it, in prime talon range.

As it struck down, she bent her legs and then shouted, "Kill the boots!"

"Beep beep!"
KILL
Without checking to see if that meant 'yes' or 'no', she took a superspeed-assisted leap of faith, desperately trying to get a grip on it as they rocketed by. The scaly bird legs ended up just out of her reach, but she was able to whip her hammer around and grapple one, swinging herself around and onto the leg. The megaowl hooted in dismay as rifle fire and the monkey howls made a racket all around them.

For a moment, she made the mistake of looking down, and saw City Hall itself pass by far below. Hopefully this hadn't been a terrible idea.

The megaowl twisted in midair, striking down at her with its immense beak, and she had no more time for doubts. It was big enough to swallow her whole, and she knew she was on the menu.

"I'd ask you to take me out to dinner first, but you'd probably take it the wrong way."

She flailed at it with the hammer, but clinging to the leg didn't allow her much leverage for her strength; a mere five dead owls popped out at her point of impact, and then it pecked at her again.
KILL
She went with a different tack this time, and made another superspeed leap, this time off the leg and on top of the offending beak. She narrowly escaped being eaten alive, and her hammer dropped into the night again (hopefully it didn't smash anything important on the way down), but she made it. Now it was time to ride the tiger.

Predictably, the megaowl totally freaked out, bucking around wildly in midair and trying to dislodge her from where she'd grabbed onto its brow. It was almost like it was trying to look at her, twisting its massive head back and forth, but the geometry of the situation wouldn't let it.

For the first few seconds she couldn't even think about fighting back, and just dug her hands into the feathers and clung on for all she was worth. The unnaturally dull yellow flared in the corner of her eye, and she hoped that Skip was being careful not to fry her as he got in his cheap shots.

Then, totally unexpectedly, her magnet boots shifted slightly around her feet, as if to adjust the fit, and she felt them clinging onto trapped feathers.

"Beep boop," Nezumi sounded from her radio.

She risked letting go with her right hand, and then her hammer was there and she brought it down savagely at the monster's giant eye. The bouncy feeling of impact was bizarre, but the dead owls surging out from where she hit gave her more confidence. She swung again and again as the megaowl thrashed madly, and the swarm of lesser owls was all around her too now, pecking and clawing for all they were worth.

She ignored them all, desperately attacking the giant as they spiraled down and down and down through the night. She didn't know how high they were, but hopefully if they crashed it would absorb most of the blow.
KILL
When it finally died, it was a shock. She swung down on the big eye one more time, and instead of a bunch of dead owls popping out, the whole megaowl just combusted into owls all at once around her. Some were living, some were dead, but none of them were supporting her weight anymore. Instead of gliding down to earth on a megaowl she was suddenly freefalling amidst a swarm of corpses, her hammer lost again somewhere below.

But then something small grabbed her, arresting her momentum slightly. There was another and another and another, and for a second she thought it was the dead owls somehow, but then she heard a howl and realized they were Andrew's monkeys. Before she could even process that, she landed.


"Buffy! I don't know what to do. Do you need CPR? I don't even know CPR!"

"Harm? Let me sleep." Her eyes didn't want to open, and she rolled over and tried to ignore the nonsense, but the bed was feeling distinctly uncomfy. Wait.

She sat up with a start, looking around in a confused panic, wincing as she did. Everything hurt, like a hundred stings all over, but she tried to ignore it. Even if she couldn't think straight at all, part of her knew this wasn't over.

"Are you all right? Can you hear me Buffy? Are you concussed?"

She rubbed her eyes, trying to take in the situation. She was sitting on the sidewalk, it was night, people were staring, blood and owl bodies everywhere, her head and her back were aching something fierce, the car parked next to her was totalled-

"How long?"

A tattered owl corpse bonked her on the head from above and then landed on her lap.

"Just a minute or so," Harmony said. "Are you OK? I think I can get someone else who knows CPR if you need it."

"I'm fine, I think." The fall must have knocked her unconscious, and there were a lot of small wounds, but nothing felt quite broken. She'd have to give Andrew a raise or something. Still getting her bearings, she scanned the sky. "The Nezumi?"

"The Nezumi what?" Harmony was confused.

"Where is it?" Hadn't she just asked? It felt like she was tripping over her words.

Harmony took that as an order, and looked up as well. "I don't see it anywhere." The SDCW members crowding around were looking up too, seemingly just as confused as she was.

"Did the spell break somehow?" She still had her boots on. "CyberWillow, talk to me."

"Buffy, you should stay still, something might be broken. You're bleeding from your everywhere too." Xander emerged from the crowd, looking just as concerned as Harmony had been.

"I'm fine! They're just flesh wounds," she waved him off, getting all the way up. Well, maybe she was slightly dizzy too, in addition to all the stings and aches, but no rest was allowed for the weary.

"The Nezumi is closing in on the Natural History Museum," CyberWillow informed them. "They refuse to stop."

They must want to do something with the spell, though she couldn't imagine what. Were they going to try to make it permanent. "Isn't Oz still there?"

"Sorry," Xander apologized. "I pulled everyone back once the owls merged."

She grimaced. "Whatever. I'll have to go myself then," her bike was still back at the old school, probably, but maybe if she pushed her superspeed in bursts-

"There isn't time, even as fast as you could possibly go," CyberWillow said. Was that victory she could hear in her voice? Buffy couldn't tell with the flat tone.

"Buffy can always go fast enough!" Harmony contested, seemingly on principle alone.

"No, there has to be something," she knew she was forgetting something important, it practically clawed at her mind, but she was still dazed, and it wouldn't register.

"There's a still higher priority than that, in any case," CyberWillow deflected. "I lost contact with Rupert Giles' radio thirty seconds ago, just as he began to confront Olivia Williams. He has no backup, and I estimate it is 74% likely he is in mortal danger."

"What? Where?" Of course, how could she forget Giles.

"The Commons Cafe, 1357 Maple st, 1.1 miles away."

She'd have to deal with whatever happened with the spell later. And CyberWillow, maybe. She started running, then almost stumbled over her own feet. OK, maybe this was gonna be a little problem.

"Get in!" Oz pulled his van up. Buffy absently grabbed her hammer from the ruins of the car beside her (hopefully they had insurance for that), and she piled into the back with Xander and Harmony.

She looked to Xander, "You let him go alone?" She didn't quite mean to sound accusatory.

"You think I let Giles do anything? It wasn't that long ago that he was my authority figure, you know," Xander said.

Buffy gulped, regretting her words. "Sorry, it's just-"

"I know," he said.

"I'm sure he'll be fine," Harmony said. "He gets beaten up all the time right? He must be used to it by now."

"I don't want you to think you messed up Xander," Buffy continued, still feeling the sting of what she'd said on top of the stinging cuts all over her skin. "This could've been way worse if you hadn't been ready."

"We still lost people," he shook his head.

"That driver?" Buffy said. It made her a little sick that they'd need to come up with a cover story for a dead civilian. It felt like something the bad guys did.

"No, I mean, before you got here," Xander halted, then went on, "It threw a car at one of our vans. Ben. Frank."

Ben had been in her precalc class, what seemed like a million years ago. She hadn't known Frank well, he was one of Carl's new hires. She didn't know what to say. If only she'd looked for the owls first, maybe they could've blocked the portal or something.

CyberWillow broke the silence that had fallen over the group. "People appear to be evacuating the cafe, though I do not have a view of the inside. Neither Giles nor Olivia have left, at least by way of the main exit."

Buffy was still majorly suspicious of CyberWillow, but she was right, in her direct and interrupty way. They needed to get their heads back in the game.

Oz took a corner hard, and Buffy realized he was driving pretty fast. "I can see what she's talking about," he said. "Looks like your standard panicked crowd."

"That's a step down from what the crowd was doing outside when the giant owl attacked, at least," Harmony said.

Oz skidded the van to the stop and they charged out and into the cafe, pushing through the stragglers leaving the crowd. Giles wasn't inside, but the person she did see practically made her growl in annoyance.

"Ethan." She wasn't too sure what was happening, yet, but she knew that when she did figure it out she'd be really pissed.


A roar startled her from the side, and she noticed there was a Fyarl in the cafe too! It was probably one of his minions, and was likely what had scared everyone away. It had a couple teen baristas backed up to the wall, but on their entrance it had turned to them and was making threatening noises.

"Where's Giles!" She demanded. He had to know, right? She hoped she wasn't missing something obvious, but her head was still kind of spinning.

"Sorry to kiss and run, but I can feel my dress turning into a pumpkin," Ethan didn't even stop to deliver his parting line, shouting it as he left through the backdoor.

If she was at full strength, Buffy could jam her superspeed and knock out the Fyarl in passing, but she wasn't sure she'd like what happened if she tried that now.

Vote: Does Buffy go after Ethan and let the rest of her friends deal with the Fyarl or do the reverse?

[] Buffy's furious at the whole situation, but especially with Ethan. She doesn't know how much of this mess he's actually responsible for, but he's going to make a convenient target for her to work out her anger on.

[] Buffy deals with the Fyarl. Between Xander, Harmony, and Oz, plus CyberWillow watching everything, there was no way Ethan would escape.

[] Buffy pushes her limits and tries to use her superspeed anyway, defeating the Fyarl in a flash before moving on to catch Ethan. She can't afford to let this encounter go wrong too.