One – Welcome to Sunnydale?
Los Angeles County, California – Early Summer of 1997
An antique car rumbled down one of the quieter roads in LA County (as though such a thing existed) at an appreciable speed considering its great age. Even more impressive was it climbing the hills as it was headed away from Los Angeles itself. The Interstate simply wasn't an option for a car that couldn't even manage fifty miles an hour. It was quite a vintage model, a Ford Model T. Though the license plates were modern and labeled the car as being from Massachusetts. The party of three within the car had driven quite the distance going by those. A radio was embedded in the car's slightly wide dashboard, both of which were a later addition. As were the speakers that sat in the thin doors that had a station local to the area delivering a weather report. Sunny, hot and miserable, as was common to the whole of the southern half of the United States and had been the weather report since Texas four days prior.
The driver of the car's name was Cornelius and he was a wizard. You could tell he was something magic for a simple reason, his car didn't have A/C, but he hadn't sweat a drop, despite his full white beard (which sort of matched his salt and pepper crown) and their being in the southwest. There was also the matter of his eyes, a bright violet that well, glowed. He had been in an odd hurry to leave the a lot of the South, but especially Texas, muttering the entire time about dark clouds on the horizon of time and something about real insidious evil that couldn't be defeated easily from border to border. He probably should've avoided the place entirely, not that any of its neighbors had better futures, he'd muttered about most of the places they'd been since they left the Boston-Washington Corridor three weeks prior...
It took them a trying amount of time to actually climb the mountains into California as he insisted on the slower and in turn, harder roads. They all managed to marvel at the splendor of the Pacific as a hazy blue line on the distant horizon, it had been over a hundred years since the wizard had last seen it after all and it was the little things when one reached his age and the youngest in the vehicle hadn't seen it at all. Cornelius's complaints about dark futures didn't stop, per say, but they slowed a little bit.
The passenger across from Cornelius in the front of the car was a far younger looking man with rich red hair and gray eyes who was clean shaven. His name was Roland and one of his forearms dangled just outside his side of the car's window as thin trials of cigarette smoke curled up toward the sky, or at least they would have if they weren't violently ripped away from the slowly incinerating tiny stick of tobacco, paper and Gods alone knew what other foul chemicals. Roland hadn't been paying much attention to his friend's mutterings until they were half way through New Mexico and only then because he noticed the complaints switched from portents of evil every few minutes to the far more mundane heat. It amused Roland, he'd known the wizard for a long, long time and remembered when the wizard was the cause of similar portents. Retirement did funny things to people.
The final passenger was a young girl named Gale who sat in the back of the car half buried among a veritable sea of cardboard boxes that held as many things in them as could be imagined ranging from the magical (the teapot was a sound-alike for Frank Sinatra) to the thoroughly mundane (the books were often just books). There were many times the number of boxes that the car should've been able to logically house in addition to its human cargo. It was a wizard's car, after all. Gale was a little over five foot and most of the way through being fifteen years old, though she was by no means done growing yet.
Gale wore her own strawberry blonde hair long to the point it pooled around her waist. She'd just finished her first year of high school back east and though it looked like she were ahead in her education that was due to the peculiarities of her birthday which was a few more weeks away on the twenty-fifth of July, deep within the summer holidays. On time but perpetually behind one of her old classmates once joked in a goodhearted manner. Unlike the two adults in the front of the car, Gale was fast asleep in pretty sharp contrast to their travel induced boredom. The horizon was only interesting for so long and the batteries to her GameBoy were in dire need of replacement.
Roland's only real action was to put what was left of his cigarette out against the palm of his hand with a sharp hiss, as the car didn't have an ashtray. It was a habit he had long meant to abandon and that was his last one. Whereas Cornelius kept his eyes darting around the outside world, ever looking for possible accidents waiting to happen. Be they mundane or otherwise.
Eventually what remained of the day passed by without much notice as they rolled along. Though they stopped a final time to swap driving duties and refuel the car. Roland always held the view that the wizard didn't have to sleep and shouldn't have trusted him with his antique car, but made no further issue of it when the immortal shut his eyes. It was a few hours after that when a particularly gaudy sign greeted them as the trio reached the border of their final destination. 'Welcome to Sunnydale!' it proclaimed against a background of green and yellow stylized to look like a sunrise. The hills yielded some time ago and the squat, sprawling but small town sat in a valley. The redhead noticed that the sign didn't bother trying to guess at the town's population. Ominously declaring it to be in flux. He slowed the car to a crawl, even for it, to just… stare for a minute or so. It may as well have been a different world in terms of contrast.
While it was by no means 'rural', with LA just over the rise; it was certainly 'quaint' for lack of a better word. Like most towns that sat ringed by mountains, a dense fog pooled around the valley that Sunnydale sat in, broken up by the squat and mostly low standing buildings of the town. The tallest buildings were lost to the horizon and fog consumed the base of one of the town's water towers. Off in the distance he could barely make out the existence of a tall sea crane, which looked most out of place.
"Where the fuck is this, Sleepy Hollow?" He intended his comment to be spoken to the open air and little else. Gale hadn't looked up from her GameBoy since she woke up, the muted sounds of Pokemon Blue occasionally making its way to the front of the car as one of the boxes had helpfully offered a string of double A's. As his initial shock wore off, the car rolled on. Occasionally if he listened harder he'd pick up the sound of music from the fragile ear phones that were perched on Gale's head, attached to a battered, blue Walkman. Roland had long since turned off the radio, until they figured out the frequencies for the state it simply wasn't worth the time as one could only listen to the weather and news so many times in his opinion.
"You've been to Sleepy Hollow, my friend. It was both smaller and quieter." Cornelius's voice was gruff as the older man shot up, awake and oddly alert for someone who had been sleeping deeply just as the car came to a stop outside a bland, thoroughly American townhouse that sat alone for a few yards in either direction. The wizard noted that it was an oddly specific shade of yellow in need of changing as he climbed out of the passenger side of his car and then opened the rear door on muscle memory.
Not a single box moved more than an inch as Gale clambered her way out of the vehicle to stand next to the wizard, her brown eyes were bright with the vigor of life as she took in the house, looking a combination of underwhelmed and annoyed in equal parts. She'd vied for Los Angeles proper for hours in an impassioned speech, at least for a child.
Roland had won her over with vague promises of neigh constant weekend trips down to the sprawling metropolis. It wasn't that far away after all, only a couple hours. He'd be there most of the time himself anyway, working at a place his old boss back east had a friend at and put in a good word for him and his work ethic. Protestants got billed with the cliché, Roland lived the cliché. When he wasn't hunting monsters, anyway.
Cornelius reached into the vehicle and retrieved a couple of boxes, they ballooned rather imperceptibly as he did so to their normal size, well, some of them did anyway.
"You all foreign?" A woman of about five feet with mousy brown hair walked up to the driver's side of the car and stared Roland down with a curious eye.
Roland himself looked up from the car as he locked the antique's drive side door across to the woman in the middle of a blink.
"No, I'm not." His accent wasn't too dissimilar to hers, Western American, the sort of generalized accent that most people thought that Americans overall sounded like due to Hollywood movies. It was practiced, but you'd have to have known him for years to know that.
"and you are?" Cornelius spoke up from the opposite side of the car as he filled his hands with boxes. The wizard stopped his extraction long enough to hand a lighter one to Gale who had pocketed her toy and was standing by listlessly, best to make sure she put her own things away, in fairness.
"Susan Fitzgerald, I'm the head of the neighborhood HOA. I live at 1628." She introduced herself, almost preening at her title and pointed across the street to a specific shade of blue house with wide open windows, the lights were on and did a bit to illuminate the front yard, even.
"God preserve me." Cornelius caught himself before he said that part aloud, at least. "New England." He inflected an accent of RP English. "Salem, specifically. Small town to the north of Boston, you may have heard of it." He managed a ghost of a smile and held out a hand to shake.
Susan blinked, whatever she was expecting, she certainly wasn't expecting a British accent. She nodded and shook the wizard's hand before she turned her gaze to Roland who had crossed the car with several boxes of his own precariously stacked between his arms. He set them on the bottom step of the house's short three-step stairwell.
"What about you?" Susan was almost accusatory as she fed her curiosity but her tone remained friendly.
"Across the way. Came here for work down in Sunnyvale." Roland said with a shrug, as a life-long urbanite he'd never lived under a home owner's association but the horror stories of the tiny dictatorships were familiar to him thanks to a combination of his suburbanite colleagues back east and general paranoia of putting that much power in the hands of 'little' people. The greatest tyrants were often the most genial and polite of people.
"Balmer." Gale smiled sweetly at Susan as she turned her attention to the teenager; it was the sort of smile that you could tell that you were being insulted by its use. Gale's accent was quite 'Southern' in its sound. Not quite the incomprehensible jargon of the Deep South, but definitely a passable North Virginian drawl that was common to hear in the two states that formed the top of the South, though inflected with too much rotation on her "r" and a tendency to drag out certain vowel sounds as was common to where she was from.
"Where's that?" Susan's gaze turned into a glare at the teen as she stepped up on to the sidewalk near Cornelius who chuckled as he fished keys to the house out his pockets. He'd bought the house shortly before they'd road-tripped to it, the Realtor had neglected to mention HOAs, how kind of them… He'd have to curse their house with frogs or something.
"Baltimore," Roland cast Susan a withering sort of
look that caused the woman to back up half a step. Astonishingly few people got to interact with his daughter in the negative and live, literally or metaphorically. Susan for her own sake recovered quickly but realized when she'd lost and a bubbly friendliness retook her tone.
"Well, welcome to Sunnydale. I'm sure you'll fit in just fine."
bunch of weirdos, the mousy woman thought as she walked away. She'd inevitably corner the homeowner, she was pretty sure it was the older man, and go over the rules and bylaws and how the only landscaper allowed was the one owned by her nephew and the limited color selection available for outside of the houses.
After Susan left none of the three of them gave much thought to their neo-feudal overlord as they unpacked the car. All in all there were about three hundred more boxes than the car should've been able to hold and it took them several hours to move them all with the two adults carrying on well into the evening after Roland shooed Gale off to a bed who shrugged and immediately pulled the small electronic toy out and resumed her quest for Pokemon mastery.
"I'm surprised there isn't a tower." Roland commented as the last boxes were set down which then organized themselves at a wave of Cornelius's hand, neatly piled by size and only half of them ballooned to their proper size.
"Stereotypes aside, I looked for one but those won't be in fashion for about twenty five more years, at least." Cornelius snapped his fingers and a few of the boxes opened, simultaneously the curtains shut themselves as a variety of items ranging from knickknacks to heavy leather-bound books flew from the cardboard and lined themselves up neatly along shelves ranging from the coat-rack just behind the door to a massive bookshelf that held many more books than seemed logical. Paradox? That was a video game company, right? Wait, no, they wouldn't exist for another few years.
"Tea?" The wizard offered as he directed a few more of the boxes to move into the kitchen otherwise unaided where they swiftly set themselves up. The stove and refrigerator were already there, standards, though looking at it he'd be replacing the gas trap with something electric as soon as possible. An antique kettle set itself on the stove and another flick turned the burner over to start the process of boiling water whilst the remainder of the pots and pans found cabinets they liked and settled into. Imagine that scene from
The Sword in the Stone, where Merlin is packing, but in reverse. It was like that, the work of a practiced master of their Craft.
Roland checked his watch, a cheap looking digital Timex. He set it to Pacific Standard when they crossed into Nevada. "Caffeine at midnight? Some of us are mortal." The teapot had started singing, literally.
Cornelius chuckled at the comment, which Roland amended, "some of us are mortal-
ish. I decline, it's late, good night." The younger man exited the kitchen and walked up the stairs to find a bedroom as the wizard removed the pot from the stove looking amused…
Here we go again, the wizard thought as he sipped at his tea. Perhaps they'd get further this time.
