- Location
- va
[X] KILL
Successor (BTVS)
- Thread starter DeAnno
- Start date
- Mature
[X] LIE
I am fairly certain that vampires are immune to telepathy and mind control (of all types except maybe specific master vampire to fledge vampire mind control)?
I also see having Harmony wear a swimsuit didn't make it in - a shame. Were none available? Anyway, Harmony as a character remains great, both from in-story perspective and out-of-story one.
I am guessing that if we took care of police first, we could have gotten the dragon as it hatched, perhaps subverted it? It seems fairly young.
On the vote, I can't figure out what "DEMAND" means. KILL probably means "attack now", and "LIE" means "pretend to be controlled". The only ideas about "DEMAND" I have is maybe "negotiate" or "turn control attempt against the dragon somehow"? But that doesn't make much sense.
I also see having Harmony wear a swimsuit didn't make it in - a shame. Were none available? Anyway, Harmony as a character remains great, both from in-story perspective and out-of-story one.
I am guessing that if we took care of police first, we could have gotten the dragon as it hatched, perhaps subverted it? It seems fairly young.
On the vote, I can't figure out what "DEMAND" means. KILL probably means "attack now", and "LIE" means "pretend to be controlled". The only ideas about "DEMAND" I have is maybe "negotiate" or "turn control attempt against the dragon somehow"? But that doesn't make much sense.
- Location
- Vancouver
I'm not entirely certain either, but it might be her rage induced state way of overpowering the dragon and trying to force it to work/submit to us. Normally the dragon is a bit stronger than us, but if she's channeling the First Slayer then she should easily be able to overpower it. Of course a lot of that is speculation on my part.
Well the dragon did reach into Buffy's brain or spirit or something to attempt to control her, and mixing with the place the first slayer has some sort of presence is a risky play. The voice might be able to make demands of the dragon through Buffy. As is I'm torn between that and kill, faking being under the dragon's control does not appeal to me.
WyldCard4
Unregistered
Mind reading, yes. Mind control, no. Angel was caught with the body swap, a necromancer could control his body, and the cyborgs had a big plan involving controlling Angel with a magical artifact off the top of my head. We also have Willow's wish spell in season four convincing Spike that he wanted to marry Buffy. Any psychic resistance is fairly narrowly tailored.
Edit: Jasmine? What she controlled seemed based on how much she liked the race more than anything, but it got Angel but not the soulless vampires.
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This might be it.
In principle, I am not against working with a dragon, if it is not evil (if it was hatched in the police department, it might have taken over in order to survive / following its natural instincts). On the other hand, Buffy's modus operandi so far was "if it attacks me, kill it, if it is not attacking, give it a chance"... Hard choice, really, here. I am going to go with
[X] DEMAND
For now, on the assumption that we can kill it later, if needed, and redeem it if it is a young dragon / hatchling, as I suspect.
- Location
- Tarn-Vedra
[X] Kill
- Location
- The Medium
[X] KILL
[X] Demand
- Location
- Germany
[X] KILL
S3.5E3: Thin Gold Line V
DeAnno
Sometimes words have two meanings
[X] KILL
With the sound of the Word, The heat of the desert sun faded away, the shadows retreating with it, and reality came rushing back into focus. In fact, things were somehow a whole lot clearer now.
"Audit! Audit! Audit!" The dragon was whining in her high whiny voice, bouncing her goofy looking head back and forth on her long flexible neck. She still held Buffy down with one heavy claw, the points cutting through her clothing and drawing blood. The dragon's comparatively narrow wrist was exposed and undefended though, left out of position with the rest of her body.
"Will you just shut up already?" Buffy grabbed at the wrist with both hands, wrenching in in just the right way to cause maximum harm, and the dragon's whine turned into a scream. The pressure let up, and Buffy slipped herself under the claw and inside the dragon's reach, following up by launching a full body kick upwards into her chin. She finished a backflip with the momentum and landed on her feet. Vendoat tried to attack with her wings again, but Buffy had anticipated it and was already moving.
The strange grace the dragon had seemed to have before was really just Buffy's inexperience fighting something with her body plan. But a part of her remembered now, remembered what it was to fight something this size, with four claws and two wings and a nasty bite with fire breath. Buffy could see all the flaws in the monster's haphazard style now; for all her physical power, she was really just a newborn. She'd never been in a serious fight before, getting by on a well defended nest and mind controlled cops.
Those cops weren't much help to Vendoat now though. The room was littered with unconscious or badly injured officers, and most of those who had gotten through the battle mostly intact seemed to have fled the room, either because of Harmony's efforts or the dragon's weakening control. A couple were still trying to take potshots at Buffy from around the door, but their narrow angles let her use the dragon herself as cover. They could've 'safely' kept shooting, since their small caliber bullets would never penetrate Vendoat's scales, but they didn't know that, so their fire was stifled.
For her part, Harmony seemed to have learned from her failed melee encounters with the dragon, and was just throwing random things at it from across the room. None of it was heavy or sharp enough to do real damage with Harmony's poor technique, but Vendoat was showing her inexperience again and paid the projectiles some mind, leaving Buffy more openings. She couldn't really afford to be leaving Buffy any.
The slayer's hits were telling now. She wasn't any stronger or faster than she had been, but she instinctively knew how to strike, where to hurt. She could punish vulnerable areas, hit where it mattered despite the armor. This wasn't like her past surges of resolved power fighting the Master or Angelus; she didn't feel invincible. The dragon just seemed clumsy, inefficient, pathetic. Just a child really, if a dangerous one.
Vendoat was getting desperate, and made another mistake. She reared back for another breath attack, but it was too slow a weapon for such a young dragon to use in melee like this. Buffy darted forward and punched her hard in the throat, making her gurgle on her own fumes for a second. While she was disoriented, Buffy grabbed her by the nose and violently pulled down, jarring her head even as she flipped herself over it, narrowly grazing the low ceiling and getting her hair soaked by a near pass with the sprinkler.
She landed in a three point stance, whipping her hair to splash the water out at the cop who now had a clear line of sight to shoot her. The momentary distraction was all she needed to grab her sword back into her hand from the soaked pile of contraband on the floor, and then she was on the move again. Best to end this quickly, before anything else could go wrong.
She engaged the dragon once more, ignoring the half-blind gunshots ringing out to either side of her. Harmony's thrown stereo speaker made Vendoat raise a wing to deflect it, and Buffy punished her for the error by stabbing at the sensitive point just between bone spurs. "Who even taught you about ponzi schemes? Do dragons just know that out of the shell these days?"
The dragon's only answer was a shrill scream, as she pivoted her injured wing away and came at her with her opposite claw. Buffy had seen it coming, and stabbed out, targeting the vulnerable wrist again, as if she'd done it a hundred times before. Her sword struck home, grinding against bone nastily and getting soaked in dragonblood. The mundane steel wouldn't tolerate that kind of treatment for long, but Buffy didn't need much longer to win at all.
Injured on one side and still smarting on the other, Vendoat leaned in for a savage bite, but Buffy flowed around the motion, ending up with her legs draped over the dragon's shoulders. She panicked, and tried to shake her off, but the abrupt move left her eye exposed at just the wrong angle.
Buffy jammed the sword home, directly into the iris and forcing the way through the narrow slot in the skull for the optical nerve. The sword's hilt went in up to the eyeball, and the dragon dropped like a puppet with cut strings. Vendoat the Gold was dead, and Buffy landed smartly astride the corpse. The gunshots had stopped, and the room was quiet but for the sprinkler system and the smouldering remains of the fire.
"Are you done?" Buffy shouted at the door. "Or am I going to have to arrest every cop in this station myself?" A couple bedraggled police slowly came into view after that, hands in the air. Buffy just sighed.
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"So you're saying that you just happened to bring the dragon egg in as suspicious evidence when investigating Wilkins' 'disappearance'." Buffy made some air quotes for that obfuscation. "And then it immediately hatched, and you were all mind controlled for the past week into rifling through the town for valuables to feed to the walking talking investment scam." She had Chief Monroe in the interrogation room, and he was being just as slippery as Vanessa had predicted.
"A likely story," Xander snarked. "Sure, Buffy killed a dragon here, but how do we know you weren't already looting the town to the bedrock before you all got mind-whammied? I'm sure Wilkins didn't leave out his dragon egg to just be picked up in the first place you looked." Xander had had his forming city watch ready to come in and secure all the compromised police after Buffy made them surrender. He had a couple people watching them in holding cells now.
Monroe cringed, leaning back and raising his hands as if to ward off their skepticism. "I know this looks bad, and that some of you in this room may have grudges against me for what happened in the past." He didn't just look at Buffy there, but Vanessa too. "But what could I do? I know about the sort of fishy stuff that goes on in this town, but the mayor gave his marching orders and I followed! If I tried to defy his wishes I would've ended up just as dead as the Deputy Mayor did when he turned against Wilkins."
Buffy and Xander were a little flummoxed by this misunderstanding, but Vanessa didn't know enough about Faith's story to be confused and tore into her old rival, "You went above and beyond any vileness he required of you. I know that before you were around the police at least occasionally tried to save people; how much did the change have to do with your policy of not responding to 'animal attacks'?"
Monroe responded indignantly, "Our officers weren't prepared for that! The mayor wouldn't let me equip them properly for it, and even if he did we could've gotten in even more hot water if we'd ever stepped into his way by accident. What do you think would happen to one of my cops if they killed one of his vampires?"
"And what about your rampant corruption then?" Vanessa said triumphantly, "I've got evidence that your sponging of this city reaches back far longer than this past week. You were only allowed to get away with it so long because you've always been the mayor's lapdog."
"Everything we've done here has been in-bounds," the chief argued. "I know you liberal types don't like civil forfeiture or ticket collections, but those are entirely legal, that's how the government is supposed to operate in this country."
"So are you some paragon of law and order or are you just another helpless victim?" Buffy asked sarcastically. "You can try to hide behind the old mayor's grave all you like, but the fact remains that you've been a bad police chief for everyone here. Do you know how much harder you've made my job for the past three years? Not even just by inaction! A year ago I had police shooting at me when I was trying to save the world from getting sucked into hell. I'm pretty sure not even Wilkins was on board with that."
"You can blame Snyder for that particular fuck-up," Monroe said. "He apparently heard a ruckus in the library and ordered some cops in against procedure. You've been complaining about how we don't interfere with vampires, and that's a great example of how things can go wrong when we do. Besides, it's not like we pursued the case against you for more than a couple days. Once I got wind of how that happened I shut it right down."
"As I remember it Giles was the one who got you to cool your jets," Xander said. "He's probably outside by now along with everyone else, we could go ask him."
"And him coming in was how I read between the lines," Monroe said. "Do you expect me to be psychic? Or maybe I should drop murder cases whenever the perp says she didn't do it?"
"Urgh." Buffy had the urge to hit the interrogation table, but the city could ill-afford to pay for a new table. "Come on guys, we aren't going to get any more out of him. Let him stew in here while we figure out what to do with this mess." She walked out, and Xander and Vanessa followed her lead. Monroe just sat there with a righteous look on his face.
Buffy leaned against the wall outside with a pensive expression. "I don't know what to do. I kind of just want to tear down the whole corrupt organization here and put you in charge Xander. Maybe this could merge into that city watch thing you wanted to make with the '99ers?"
Xander was a little floored at the suggestion for a second, but managed to reply, "I'm a little young to be chief of police, Buffy. Short of experience too, and I'm not even the one among us who scored 'Law Enforcement' at the career fair."
"I'm a little young to be mayor Xander," Buffy said. "You probably have more relevant experience for this than I do for mayoring."
"I'm not saying I wouldn't do it. There'd be a lot of friction though. Not just about me, but between the kids and the cops in general, if we got all mergey with the togetherness." Xander hesitated. "You know how much I hate to be a responsible adult, but maybe the best option is to mostly leave things alone? Chief Monroe is a corrupt coward, but he might be your corrupt coward now. Anyone who saw what you did to that dragon would be a little afraid of you."
"I might have a middle way," Vanessa said. "My nephew grew up in Sunnydale, and he's an actually respectable police detective in San Francisco now, as opposed to the scum like Monroe we have here. He isn't terribly experienced with the night life, but he knows enough to not be surprised, and we could read him in for the job. The officers might be a little less … resentful, at someone being brought in with some years in a uniform already."
Buffy still wasn't sure. On the one hand, she could trust Xander absolutely, and a unified force for keeping the town safe would probably be more efficient. On the other, it seemed a little tyrannical of her to dispose the police chief only to replace him with one of her best friends. The police had been solidly beaten by her today, and she was pretty sure they would mostly stay in line both due to fear and guilt whatever she did. But was that really how she wanted to run things? Who was she going to make the new police chief?
Vote:
[] Chief Monroe might not have been the best thing for the town before, but with Buffy riding herd on him he should be loyal enough. He does know a lot about how the town operates already, and he could probably get the most out of his officers.
[] Vanessa's nephew is probably the best choice. Buffy knows the least about him, but he's likely to be safe enough without getting the cops too demoralized. Plus, anyone Vanessa thinks is good for the job is probably reliable, right?
[] It has to be Xander. The police have the potential to wield too much power and Buffy wants it close at hand. Besides, if Xander merges them with the '99ers forming a city watch, the whole group will be more efficient at controlling low-level supernatural threats.
EDIT: Added a pic at the top
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- Location
- singapore
[X] Vanessa's nephew is probably the best choice. Buffy knows the least about him, but he's likely to be safe enough without getting the cops too demoralized. Plus, anyone Vanessa thinks is good for the job is probably reliable, right?
[X] Vanessa's nephew is probably the best choice. Buffy knows the least about him, but he's likely to be safe enough without getting the cops too demoralized. Plus, anyone Vanessa thinks is good for the job is probably reliable, right?