[X] Buffy ignores the vampires for now, and chases after the Chupacabra. It might be distracted trying to bash down the door, and this could be a chance to finally get a solid hit on it when it isn't paying as much attention. Besides, if it's trying to bash down the door, there might be people behind it.
"I like to think of it as our town, really, but we can agree to disagree," Buffy said as she turned away from the charging crowd of minions and went after the Chupacabra. Her superior speed gave her a temporary reprieve, but the outspoken vampire in the lead was hot on her tail. She solved that problem by slamming a fire door in his face after darting through it, ripping off the doorknob to give herself more time. She supposed she should thank Wilkins for being so circumspect about fire safety.
Carefully peeking around the corner, she saw the Chupacabra was still trying to break down the door to the conference room and hadn't noticed her at all. Instead of following her instincts and charging in, she remembered its bloodsense, and quietly drew another knife and lined up her shot. It flew true this time, and jammed into the back of its neck, dropping it cold. She didn't have much time to appreciate her victory however, as one of the chasing vampires had caught up and took advantage of her own distraction, tackling her from behind.
Buffy rolled with the fall and threw him off, but the rest quickly caught up and she was taking blows from all sides for a few difficult moments. Compared to her though, they were all weaklings in the end, really. She managed to pivot onto one hand and swept her legs in a circle, tripping three of them and scaring the others back. A stake was in her other hand and one was dust before he hit the ground. She used the momentum from her blow to transition into a cartwheel, nailing another one through the heart before he recovered from his fall, and then she was on her feet against the four remaining vampires, only mildly bruised and dusty for her troubles.
Two more tried to charge her at once then, but she had their measure now, sidestepping to the right and swatting one in the head hard enough to crash him into the other. "I'm surprised you guys didn't work more on your coordination, I mean what else did you have to do in here all day? Filling out forms? Pressing suits?" Her latest move left one of the two still standing isolated in a corner and she finished him quickly. With their numbers cut in half, the remaining vampires had turned from confident to afraid. Suddenly though, hope blossomed in their leader's yellowed eyes.
"You might have won this time, Slayer, but you haven't seen the last of Digby Van Dyne!" Buffy was so stunned by a name even goofier than hers that the not-quite-dead Chupacabra took her completely by surprise.
The monster was on her again, a hurricane of claws and teeth twice as vicious as it had been earlier in the entryway. The knife she'd thrown was still sticking out the back of its neck, but it seemed to just be spurring the creature to greater feats rather than hampering it much. She took a bunch more small wounds, along with a more serious trio of cuts along her cheek.
Buffy decided she had had just about enough of this thing though, and took the opening it gave her with that last attack. She took hold of the knife already in its neck with her left hand, and then came across with another knife in her right, brutally scissoring its head off and spraying blood everywhere. As if that wasn't enough, it completed its annoying existence by melting into a bloody slurry that she couldn't really avoid getting all over her.
"Ugh. Giles couldn't have mentioned that part?" Buffy belatedly noticed she was talking to herself, as the remaining vampires had fled the scene. Typical.
She quickly made her way down, but surprisingly, the Sasquatch was already dispatched, lying dead over the stairs. Percy's irregulars had arrived, and the whole group combined with Xander and Giles had seemingly been enough. The whole area smelled like hot peppers and made her eyes itch, so she figured that the bear spray had played a significant role in the affair.
As she descended, she despaired for her blood-soaked appearance, but the looks it drew were more awed than derisive. She could really get used to this out-of-the-closet thing, on second thought.
"The good news is the Chupajawa is deader than Star Wars. The bad news is it's all over my outfit." Buffy gave Giles a meaningful glare.
Giles started for a second, and cleaned a bit of spray film off his glasses. "Ah, yes, perhaps I should've mentioned that bit. In any case, we were able to dispatch the Sasquatch with help from Percy and his allies, though I'm afraid it got some rather good blows in." Now that Giles mentioned it, Buffy noticed Xander was favoring his right shoulder, and a couple of the '99ers were nursing similar wounds.
"I don't suppose any of you saw any vampires skedaddling?" Buffy continued. "Some of Wilkins' last followers are still lurking in the building apparently, but they turned tail when I was distracted by the crazy scaly monster."
"Those cowardly vampires," Xander interjected. "Kill a few of them and they start running away like kicked, fangy puppies."
"Well, it is still daylight. They can't have gotten out of the building easily," Giles said.
A female voice answered him from above, "Actually, they probably used the basement sewer access. It's safe to come down now, right?"
"I can confirm this Sasquatch is completely slain and spiced to order," Xander said.
A thirty-something woman in a vintage dress appeared coming down the staircase. "It's very reassuring you're here," she said to Buffy, apparently not discomfited by her macabre appearance. "Digby's been pretty unstable since he came back with what was left of the thugs yesterday, I wasn't sure that he wouldn't just kill us all out of spite."
"Ah, thanks?" Buffy was getting the sense she was missing something again. "You seem to know me, but I don't think I know you?"
"Oh, of course, I'm Cynthia Danvers, your office manager." Her introduction managed to raise more questions than it answered, but before anyone could ask them she continued her spiel. "I make sure everything runs smoothly inside City Hall, buying necessary supplies, handling payroll and so on. Mayor Wilkins also liked to have me make sure everything was kept very clean." She looked at the bloody scene with a fair bit of exasperation, though not any fear. "There's a full bath upstairs, and I can even get you a change of clothes if you like. I think there's something appropriate in your size?"
Buffy gave everyone else present a look that said she would be happy if they took the lead, but nobody was taking. "I didn't know I even had an office."
At that, Cynthia finally appeared worried. "You came to take over everything, right? With you, err, defeating Mayor Wilkins in such a dramatic manner, we all sort of assumed you were taking control of the city? Even Digby was obsessing about it, and he was convinced he could take the city over." She started to approach Buffy, and then looked at her blood-soaked attire again and seemed to think twice about it. "There's so much to do. Everything's already in chaos with the transition, and without a strong leader to take his place anything could happen!"
As Cynthia's voice was rising in fear, two others appeared from above, following her somewhat more cautiously. Xander tried to break up the rising tension, "And who might you two be?"
One was middle aged, professional looking, and balding. "Ian Banks, I'm the Registrar of Deeds."
"Vanessa Waters, City Councillor." The other was an spry older woman in a cardigan. "The only one left at this point, from what I can tell."
Cynthia continued, "The recent months have had some attrition, and after the battle yesterday many more of the people who work here seemed to flee the city. We survived the latest attack barricaded in the conference room, and I think there are probably several others scattered around the building, but we really need help. The sorts of people Mayor Wilkins dealt with to run the town won't respect us, the police aren't listening to us anymore, and on top of all that we're so understrength now that each of us is doing three jobs worth of work or so."
Giles had been looking increasingly concerned throughout the speech, and finally spoke up, "Those are all very reasonable concerns, but Ms. Summers is the Slayer, not some kind of civil servant or town strongman. There must be some kind of legal means to address the situation."
"Not really," Vanessa cut in. "Things in this town have always been extremely unofficial, and baby smooth. Was that way ever since Richard the First was Mayor when I was a gal. This town hasn't ever even had to have a special election, I don't have a clue how it would even go. Besides all that, Cynthia's right. This town doesn't know how to work without a strongman, or strongwoman, as the case may be. If Ms. Summers isn't it, there might not be a town anymore come the end of Summer."
Buffy wasn't sure. They really seemed to need her help, but would she actually be able to mayor a whole town? She was only eighteen, she would probably just mess it up and make things worse. "I don't really know anything about mayoring. I got a C- in civics."
Xander shook his head, more resolved than she was. "It might not be the result you got at the career fair, Buff, but it kind of makes sense? You've been working hard to save the town since you've got here, this would just sort of be in a more official capacity. And with someone on the good side calling the shots, maybe we could clean up Sunnydale for real."
"And in Sunnydale, what does what we learned in school really matter?" Percy said, truly arguing from the heart. "People like you, and people are afraid of you. That's what this Wilkins guy seemed to be all about anyway."
Buffy grinned a little in response to their warm words (or at least, words intended to be warm) "There's really no one else though? Isn't there some kind of something that's supposed to take care of situations like this?"
"Well, I'm sure if worst came to worst, the Watcher's Council would be happy to step in and take political control of the Hellmouth." Buffy and Xander both grimaced as Giles said that, but he held up his hands in defense. "I'm not saying I think it's a good idea. The last thing Quentin Travers needs is more power."
Buffy felt sick as she thought about what the Council getting more deeply involved in Sunnydale affairs would mean. If she didn't want that to be the only solution, it looked like she would have to be a big girl and step up. "Well, we can't let Sunnydale totally go to the wolves, and bringing in the Council would be even worse. I guess I can help you. And Xander's right, we might actually be able to improve things this way."
All three of the civil servants relaxed a lot at that declaration. "We can help work you into it too," Cynthia said encouragingly. "There are a lot of things you won't have to handle personally if you don't want to, but without your face on the operation it would've been doomed from the start."
Buffy nodded. Then, looking to Giles, she asked, "What do you think we should deal with first? Sunnydale's a pretty fraught place already, and it seems like everything's gotten even fraughtier in the past day."
"Well," Xander spoke up. "Maybe we should deal with the Yeti possibly rampaging across the public beach? Just a suggestion."
"Oh dear." Giles said.
"The Yeti!" Buffy exclaimed.
"The Yeti?" Everyone else wondered.
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"How do you lose a Yeti?" Willow asked.
The sun was starting to set and the beach was fairly quiet. Giles had driven Buffy and Xander out, and Cynthia had even brought Percy and his friends in her minivan. The magic of cellphones had managed to finally summon Willow and Oz as well, but everyone was pretty embarrassed when they arrived at the beach and there was no Yeti to be found. Percy's contingent hadn't minded the detour at least, and were now throwing the football around over the dunes a little ways away.
"The Yeti was here." Oz said definitively. "The trail kind of ends in the ocean." That part was less definitive. A particularly big wave lapped up to their feet. The tide was coming in.
Giles had been asking some questions. Buffy would've helped, but she was still covered in blood, so accosting random people might not have been a great idea. "Somehow it didn't cause much of a stir. Some of the children noticed it, but most of the adults seem to think they were just getting excited about a beached whale."
"Maybe it went out to sea?" Willow wondered. "Do Yetis do that?" She put up her hand to shield her eyes from the sun as she tried to get a good view out over the ocean. If there were any Yetis out there, Buffy couldn't see them.
"There are a number of cases of Yetis just sort of … disappearing in the literature." Giles said. "Usually it happens in much less populated areas though."
"It could have just been Sunnydale Syndrome." Xander didn't really sound like he believed it. "I mean, it was just a giant Yeti. Easy for people to ignore."
"Well, this is probably good right? The Yeti isn't raging, and it just decided to leave, so one less big problem to deal with." Everyone looked at Buffy. "OK, I admit it, this is totally going to suck."
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Next time, on Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Buffy has reluctantly been persuaded to help run Sunnydale for the time being. While she's going to be generally helpful too, next episode her efforts will mostly focus on a specific area.
[] City Hall is operating way understrength, and Buffy wants to recruit some members of the class of '99 to various internal positions. She needs more people than just the Scoobies who are both in the know and unlikely to stab her in the back, and they're the most ready source. It'll take some effort to interview them and find the right ways to fit them in, but once she does they might be a lot of help.
[] Mayor Wilkins had a lot of ongoing deals with various darker elements of the Hellmouth, and Buffy needs to see which of them can be salvaged and which need to be dealt with. While all the really bad ones will need to cleaned out, smoothing over some less offensive parts of the demon population could go a long way to keeping things stable. Also, learning more about the town's denizens from the other side will probably be most synergistic with her primary job of actual slaying.
[] The police department has been doing an even more pathetic job than usual since Mayor Wilkins died. Buffy knows they were among the most corrupt and ineffective of the town's old institutions, and she's going to go down there and do something about it. She wants to both snuff out whatever malicious stuff they might be planning and beat the organization into something like effective shape for actually doing useful things. Having the backup at all hours would be really useful, but it might be hard to make them take her seriously.
[] Buffy isn't sure how trustworthy the remaining civil servants are, not to mention who else might be nominally working for the town and still doing bad deeds. She'll investigate various people and organizations on the town payroll looking for malice, and try to figure out the motivations of the people who remain from the Wilkins administration. It might not do any good to try to fix the town if the government is still sabotaging it from the inside, but on the other hand, she might be worrying over nothing while more obvious crises erupt all around her.
