[X] KILL Wilkins by attacking his ghost
On the surface, it should've been an easy call. Adam was a literal monster, and Wilkins was just an affable old guy. He'd made every effort over the summer to mend fences, almost acting like a mentor figure when Buffy was most uncertain with all her new responsibilities. Wilkins even knew the world was ending much-too-much lately, and had agreed it needed to be addressed.
But it was all just words, and that was what made him so dangerous. He could've been the one to tell her what she was becoming. He could've shown her this place at any time. He could've even warned her he was manipulating Adam. Instead he fed her little nuggets of wisdom and dollops of info, just enough to play the mysterious old wizard role. She wasn't buying it.
This was the endpoint of his evil villain plan. It was happening in his evil villain lair, and his evil villain lackey was even here to see it through. For all she knew, there were five more steps to go after this, at the end of them he'd be even more unstoppable than he seemed at graduation, and then he would eat everyone in the city, just like he had wanted to all along (as much as he clearly hoped she'd forget that little detail.)
While Adam was just a big monster who sucked up magic. She was pretty sure she could handle that.
As she decided at that last moment, he must have seen it in her eyes, and he said wryly, "Guess you can't win them all." The
golden light swirled around them madly.
It was a massive effort to drag herself into range, and she couldn't have forced out a reply to him even if she could think of one.
"No!" Faith shouted like she was the one dying as Buffy lunged with all her might, driving her hammer down straight through Richard Wilkins' head and body. There was a moment of immense resistance from the bundled energy surrounding him, and then it shattered and his ghostly form exploded into mist.
KILL
She'd already lost her footing as she attacked, and the massive explosion that followed lifted her completely off the ground, blasting her back towards the dome. She felt a titanic rush of power and she was slammed into the wall like a ragdoll.
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CORRUPT
She opened her eyes, levering herself up from a prone position. Had she been knocked out?
CORRUPT
The room was mostly as she'd left it, but the wild rush of
golden light had calmed, and the normal flow out from the stairway to the runes had resumed. Adam was turned away from her, gazing down into the depths of the stairway from the edge.
CORRUPT
"Ah. Of course. I saw so much, and yet I understood so little," he opined.
She finished rising quietly, hoping to ambush him while the hypnotic effect of the deeper stairway had him lost. If it was anywhere near as crazy as it'd been for her-
"Good," he turned, utterly unsurprised. "You're awake. We have a lot to discuss."
"You haven't won," she said, not so sure if it was true. He looked weathered and worn down, with his dented faceplate, broken gun, and several new minor injuries (maybe from the explosion?) But she was feeling her wounds too. Bullets to the shoulder and a rib, a pounding headache from her collision with the dome, plus a mess of smaller scrapes and aching leftover from his draining tentacle effect.
KILL
But most decisively, whatever he'd been trying to do with the artifact seemed to have worked. There was something different about the feel of his domain now; it was sharper, more precise. More itself than it had been before, in some hard to define way. She had the sense he'd become more dangerous to fight, not less.
"I agree," he said. "I haven't won yet. There is much to be done."
She summoned her hammer back from wherever it had ended up. Maybe she could smash the artifact instead of attacking him directly? It was obviously connected to the hellmouth, so that could go all kinds of wrong, but letting him control it was even worse. It appeared undamaged from all the earlier chaos, but there was a world of difference between incidental collisions and intentional smashing.
"I can perceive your fear," he said. "And determination, however misguided. But it's in no one's interest for you to act hastily, least of all those you wish to protect. This construct is still barely stable, but destroying it now might precipitate an extradimensional vacuum collapse."
Had she been that easy to read? "You're lying. But just to be totally clear, what do you mean by that?"
"An apocalypse," he said. "Or more precisely, a merge. While the ensuing chaos would be beautiful, neither of us would survive to see it."
She'd been afraid it was something like that. "That's exactly what you'd say if you didn't want me to smash it."
He shrugged. "Even so, are you sure you really want to? It's still half yours."
"What? No way." Hadn't he just spent her impromptu naptime taking it over? She wasn't even clear why he hadn't tried to finish her off, given such an opportunity.
"Search your feelings, you know it to be true," he intoned.
Was she still in dreamland? "You didn't just quote Star Wars at me."
"I admit to a certain sympathy for Darth Vader," he said.
She shook her head, just in case there were more cobwebs leftover, and tried to reach out again with the sixth (seventh? eighth?) sense she'd picked up just minutes ago. And when she did, she was pretty sure he was right. Something was still channeling into her, from the stairway up and through the runes. It was less, but the flow still seemed immense, and she dimly wondered how that worked, what it was doing to her exactly. Doing for her? She had a momentary feeling of a deep and confusing well of potential untapped within herself, but this wasn't the time.
"Why? You won. Unless your domain is secretly 'sharing' after all," she said.
He chuckled, disturbingly rolling his mandibles around. "No, nothing that banal. But this stairway, its behavior is … peculiar. I believe cutting you away from it would be an unnecessary risk. I would have taken it regardless when I first came into being, but the late mayor was an effective instructor in caution, if nothing else."
"So what then? You want to just let bygones be bygones, forget this ever happened?" Just like Faith trying to sweep all her treason under the rug. Wait.
"Where's Faith? How long was I out?" She snapped. The other slayer was gone from the room, and Buffy would be damned if she let her get away after this latest act of villainy.
"She is currently moving through the sewers," CyberWillow joined the conversation. "You were unconscious for 284 seconds, as far as I can determine. Some of the elements that were previously gathering for emergency reinforcement are in pursuit of her, but I estimate only a 29% chance of success."
"A rat scurrying away to hide," Adam commented. "She is ultimately insignificant. A rounding error to be corrected later."
"Not still friends?" Buffy said.
"It was an alliance built on a man that is dead and an institution that's soon to be," he replied.
"You're finally going rogue then? Betraying the Initiative?" She didn't know where he was going with all this. Had staring down into the incomprehensible broken his brain after all?
He walked towards her from the lip of the pit, opening his arms in a sweeping gesture. Her instincts didn't read it as an attack though, and his domain didn't press out against hers.
"This world has so much wealth. So much potential for violence and destruction. Yet it sits unmoved by either peril or opportunity. Does it ever frustrate you? Do you ever stop to wonder why?"
"Do you mean the government interfering with this? Seeing everything the Initiative's done for me with my tax dollars, I kinda wish they did even less," she said.
He shook his head. "Your experiences have taught you the wrong lessons, and you do not see the totality of the picture. Their error was in the other direction. They made only the meanest of efforts, too little and too late. My birth was its only real achievement, and its negligence in all other respects has allowed my situation to evolve as it has.
"Earth's leaders are mired in their petty politics, and their institutions are blinded by an antiquated masquerade. Time runs short and the vultures circle close. What will happen here, Buffy? What happens to Earth when you finally fail?"
"I won't fail," she said. "The world doesn't have to end."
He shook his head, looking almost regretful. "It is the nature of all things to seek their lowest energy state, their primal form. The cosmos remembers what it used to be, and someday it will be that way again. When all are one, and one is all."
The last line was chilling, resonating with something already within her. "So what, you're saying the world's fated to end, so we might as well let you be the lucky winner and end it? I'm not compelled."
"I don't want to destroy Earth," he said. "I want to remake it, to reforge its brittle strength into something real. With our leadership and guidance, what makes this world unique will survive the next merge and thrive in the new reality."
"You want to take over the world? You think I'm going to help you take over the world?" She was floored. At least it was a new and different kind of crazy from anything she'd seen so far. "You're insane."
"Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results," Adam said. "You save the world, it wanders back into danger, and then you save it again. How many times has it been now? Six? Seven? Join me. Try something new."
"OK, I admit things look a little bleak. But why would I ever try this? What's to stop you from killing me and all my friends the first time it's convenient? How is you taking over the world going to look any different than your average hell dimension?"
"You undersell yourself, and your organization. True, the Initiative was a failure, but you are not in their mold. You've been wildly successful at everything you've attempted." He looked down and to the side, making what looked like it might be a conciliatory expression. "The entire purpose I've chosen for myself is to cultivate strength. We can compromise, to a degree. Massacring or even antagonizing useful allies would be self-defeating."
"Oh, but massacring other people, that's not off the table, right?" She said sarcastically.
"You can't make an omelet without breaking some rotten eggs," he said. "And even considering your alignment, you're a death goddess. I'd expect you to understand the idea of culling the weak for the good of the rest."
Somehow, having her status stated so plainly threw her off, despite it being something she already knew.
Adam noticed, and continued. "You find yourself uncertain in your new identity, and moreover I can tell the subtler mechanisms of its function are opaque to you. I could help you achieve your full potential if you cooperate."
Buffy didn't know what to say to that, so she changed the subject. "So what's the first step of the master plan? March into the UN and demand they all surrender? Or maybe you want to go campaigning in Iowa instead. Primary season's right around the corner."
"As amusing as either would be, no," he said. "I believe local politics are important, and we have housecleaning to do here first. Assist me in taking full control of the Initiative, and I will consider you sufficiently committed to my side."
"Are we talking a peaceful takeover, or are these some of the people you think need a massacre?" She asked carefully.
"It might get a little bloody," he smiled, and his mouth made it uniquely awful to see. "But If all goes as planned, I should be able to recover the use of any … human resources lost in the conflict."
Vote: Is Buffy moved? Might she possibly give this unlikely alliance a spin?
[] Definitely not. This has to end now, before Adam has a chance to cause more damage or gather even more power. Attack him immediately.
[] Probably not. But she isn't sure she can win this fight right now, and she's willing to play along for a while with an attack on the Initiative.
If you think she can have a more positive opinion of Adam's proposal than the above, stunt her reasons onto the "Probably not" vote.
