Successor (BTVS)
- Thread starter DeAnno
- Start date
- Mature
- Location
- Germany
[X] Buffy decides she's going to get a place for herself and Harmony, and that after creating this situation with Zoe and Rachel it's on her to keep an eye on them.
WyldCard4
Unregistered
[X] Buffy is wary of wearing the Mom-hat. Zoe and Rachel will do fine at the Crawford Street Watch House and it'd be a shame to waste City Hall's amazing bathrooms.
Seems to be the less popular choice, but something in my instincts says this is the right one. I'd gesture at Buffy kinda going crazy in season five or six when she needs to be parental.
Seems to be the less popular choice, but something in my instincts says this is the right one. I'd gesture at Buffy kinda going crazy in season five or six when she needs to be parental.
- Location
- Vancouver
[X] Buffy is wary of wearing the Mom-hat. Zoe and Rachel will do fine at the Crawford Street Watch House and it'd be a shame to waste City Hall's amazing bathrooms.
Yeah, I'll switch over too. Getting a proper place for Buffy and Harmony would be good, but they can start things slow. Taking in Rachel and Zoe too would be a bit much right now.
Yeah, I'll switch over too. Getting a proper place for Buffy and Harmony would be good, but they can start things slow. Taking in Rachel and Zoe too would be a bit much right now.
S4.0E8: Jurisdiction V
DeAnno
Sometimes words have two meanings
[X] Buffy decides she's going to get a place for herself and Harmony, and that after creating this situation with Zoe and Rachel it's on her to keep an eye on them.
"Well, Crawford is an option, but I was actually thinking me and Harmony would get a place," Buffy tried to be nonchalant. "Maybe you two would wanna join in? We could have a theme." Both the potentials looked surprised, and neither said anything, so Buffy decided to elaborate. "You know, fighty girls?" She mimed staking a vampire.
"So we'd all be in a house together," Rachel repeated.
Zoe seemed to be grasping for something to say before talking, "And Harmony'd be OK with that?"
Would she? Buffy remembered she and Rachel hadn't been the rosiest when they'd first met, but it'd been a while since then. And Harmony was always pretty chill about going along with her ideas. She'd put up with it for her, and then she'd probably end up enjoying it.
"Sure," she said confidently. "She was all hyped to be a sorority girl, I bet she'll think it's tons of fun."
"Doesn't she need, umm, special accomodations?" Zoe continued.
"I've kept an eye open the past few weeks, and Sunnydale's pretty good about that, for whatever reason." She thought about that for a second, and decided to be realistic. "Or well, probably a reason that starts with 'W' and ends with 'ilkins.' But there are a lot of houses around here extremely lacking in large windows. And what they don't have in windows, they make up for in basements."
"Was this your idea all along?" Rachel asked. The way she said it made it sound kind of nefarious.
"No!" Buffy responded a little too quickly. "It was just, you know, a spur of the moment thought. Everything was clicking pretty well yesterday, and I figure I should do my Slayer duty to the next generation. But we don't have to, if you don't want. You could do the Crawford thing instead."
The two potentials shared a look, and despite herself, Buffy angsted. Part of her was a little afraid they thought she was uncool. Or maybe they didn't like Harmony? She was completely safe, but at the same time it might be stressful to live with a vampire, especially given their council education and everything.
Or it could just be that they didn't want to be so close to the mayor. Would that cause them trouble at school? Faith being all buddy-buddy with Wilkins had been a totally different situation, and it was hard to make the Hemery Queen part of her brain plug herself into that mayor role and know what it would even mean in the gossip circles. Either way, she'd probably been way too forward about it, she would just back off the idea and hopefully they'd all forget this ever-
"Nah, I'm game," Rachel said. "Let's do it."
"Do you have some places already picked out?" Zoe said. "Do you want to look now? Because, well, we still don't have anywhere to sleep."
"I guess we could," Buffy said as she saw Cynthia's minivan pulling up the long driveway. "It's still a little bright out for Harmony though. Maybe you could hang with her at City Hall until sundown? I still have some work I should get done today." And if Harmony was distracted this afternoon instead of … being distracting, she might actually get that work done this time.
Buffy shared her plans with Cynthia as they loaded up the minivan, and while she was initially disappointed by her moving out, she quickly worked herself into a new planning frenzy to support the realty adventure, already quoting the details of several available properties as if by memory alone. Buffy would have to ride her bike back, so she hoped Rachel and Zoe would be interested in the topic as the three of them drove behind her.
Just before they were about to set off though, her radio rang at her. "What's up?"
"Mayor Summers, we've got ourselves a problem." Chief Matt was on the line.
"What is it?" She hoped whatever was going on with the police wasn't serious. The other three with her dropped their conversation and were paying attention too.
"One of our judges got antsy," he said.
She knew that Sunnydale County had a courthouse and its own judges in the abstract sense, but she hadn't had to interact with it much in her time as mayor. Chief Matt had been brought on board pretty quickly, and between him and his now-undead-and-fled aunt Vanessa they'd kept them pretty handled in spite of the various weirdnesses the force had to deal with.
"Who? Antsy how?"
"Judge Rester, the one we got on Ethan, she's making noise about a prisoner transfer. Supposedly there was some kind of sabotage on the Army base," he explained.
"They're telling judges about the Initiative base now?" Buffy knew she'd been pushing on the masquerade pretty hard, but she thought the government was more leery than that.
"No, the legitimate base, just out of town," Matt clarified.
Oh, that one. After the gang stole their first AT-4 from there years ago, she'd kind of forgotten about it. But this sounded pretty fishy. "It's probably the Initiative pulling the strings anyway," Buffy concluded. "And I think it's total bull, he was never there. At either of the theres! Was he?"
"Well, he won't say, got all cagey when we asked," Matt replied.
CyberWillow then inserted herself into the conversation, echoing over all four radios present in Buffy's vicinity despite the conversation only being on her personal one. "The aboveground base is in my range. I can confirm through camera records that he did not visit it, unless it was before meeting Rupert Giles in the Olivia persona."
"I thought you two were buddy-buddy? You can't get him to actually deny it?" she asked.
"He claims that answering the question isn't in his best interest," CyberWillow said, then added more in a very slightly petulant voice. "A similar situation came up in our game theory research yesterday; he's quite amused by the coincidence."
"So if we know for sure he wasn't there, do we have to give him up?" Buffy asked. "Didn't we throw the book at him, all kinds of charges and stuff? I thought we had dibs."
"You name it, we charged it" Matt confirmed. "Incitement to riot, grand theft, aggravated kidnapping, capital murder. But dibs aren't a thing, I hate to tell you. Feds walk all over locals in the court system."
"We can't like, have a lawyer off or something?" she asked.
"Judges have a lot of power over this kinda thing," Matt said. "And if we really made a stink about it, a lot of stuff could start coming out that makes everyone involved look like they're either crazy or lying their -, well, I mean to say, it wouldn't look great."
"Ugh. When is this happening?" She asked.
"They're sending people to collect him in an hour," Matt answered.
"More accurately, 48 minutes," CyberWillow interjected.
"I'll be right down," she said, hopping on her motorcycle and taking off. She noticed the others piling into the minivan and following, but she didn't have much attention to spare between accelerating on the road and straining her ears to keep up the conversation.
"There's more," the volume of Matt's voice had raised itself radically to deal with the rush of the air, either something newly programmed into the radios or just CyberWillow compensating, "Rester's setting bail on Jack Weatherby too, the bartender. Fifty grand."
"Is that low? Or high?" She had no idea what bail for people was supposed to look like.
"For intentionally poisoning drinks? It's a song. He's probably got someone on his way to buy him out too."
Buffy narrowed her eyes. In her line of work, once was barely ever coincidence, let alone twice. "I want to talk to this judge." Her motorcycle drifted past 100 miles per hour.
"Ah, that's not usually the way things are done," Matt prevaricated.
"Judge Susan Rester does not possess a radio, but I can link your call in through the normal telephone system," CyberWillow said neutrally. "As far as I can tell from my camera footage, she's in her home."
"Do it," Maybe Matt had a point, in a normal situation, but normal this wasn't. She couldn't do everything like a regular mayor.
The phone rang on the other end. And rang again. And again. Buffy ground her teeth.
After the sixth ring, it picked up. "This is Susan Rester. I'm sorry, but I can't come to the phone right now. Please leave a message after the beep. BEEP."
She tried to control her tone, but with the wind and the noise of the road it was a struggle. "Susan, it's Buffy. Or I guess you might know me as Mayor Summers. If you're there, I'd really appreciate it if you picked up the phone, and didn't make me-"
"Miss Mayor!" Presumably-Judge-Susan-Rester cut in. "I'm sorry, I wasn't- umm, expecting your call."
"Is there anything you'd like to tell me?" Buffy asked.
There was a delay before Rester spoke again. "Are you outside? There's a lot of interference, I'm not sure if I can make out what you're saying."
"I'm driving. To the police station," she said tersely.
"It's really not very safe to multitask while on the road, you know," Rester said. "There are statistics. I could mail you the study?"
Someone was a little slow in getting out of Buffy's way, so she skidded around. "I think I'll be fine. It's you I'm concerned about."
"That's very considerate of you, but I always make a habit of keeping both eyes on the road, ten-and-two," her tone was almost impossible to make out, but Buffy could imagine the desperation in her voice. It was probably time to get to the point.
"Tell me why the hell you're messing with my prisoners," she said flatly. "These aren't just a couple of shoplifters we caught at the 7/11."
"Be that as it may, everyone deserves fair-"
"Do you even know what Ethan was doing the last time he was in town? He was literally conspiring to kill babies!" She shouted at the radio where it was clipped to her handlebar.
It was infuriating. She was trying her best to keep things in check, and some bureaucrat was undermining her. Who knew what kind of trouble Ethan would get up to if the Initiative got its hands on him? Even that other guy was capable of a lot more carnage than had already happened if he put his mind to it.
"I didn't have a choice!" Rester snapped back at her. "Do you know the sorts of people I've been getting phone calls from today? Army Colonels, State Judges, House Reps. When Wilkins wanted… when he wanted the things he wanted, none of this happened! There was no outside pressure to deal with, he just kept it all under the rug. I can't toe the line for you all by myself!"
She bit off the first, nastiest reply she could think of, and then decided on something more productive. "I want names."
Those, Judge Rester was willing to give her. Buffy stewed, knowing CyberWillow was doubtless recording them for her.
It was the sort of problem she wanted Vanessa to run interference for, except that Vanessa was a vampire now and had skipped town weeks ago. Her blackmail files were still around, but they hadn't dug into them yet. She'd been hoping things had smoothed out enough that they wouldn't need to.
But would it work? Even if she did get the names of these people and then managed to back them off, was this even the game she should be playing? They weren't experts at these people like Vanessa was; if they pushed the wrong way, things could go out of control in all kinds of unexpected political directions.
Maybe she could hold onto Ethan and Jack some other way, or do something else with them. She could even just wash her hands of the situation, and let the Initiative do it. What would they really do if they got their hands on Jack? Poison the water supply? Wide scale messes like that weren't their MO.
And as for Ethan, she could only imagine they'd end up regretting taking him in the first place. The problem was she'd probably end up regretting it too.
Vote: What does Buffy do about her prisoners being clawed away by the Feds?
[] Do nothing, and let the justice system work. Losing Ethan to the Initiative and letting Jack out of jail seems dangerous, but they've been too outmaneuvered.
[] Dig into Vanessa's blackmail stash and fight back, trying to threaten the people pressuring Judge Rester into compliance. Without the external pressure on her she'll fall back in line.
[] Write In: Enact a completely different plan to try to retain control of Ethan, Jack, or both of them.
"Well, Crawford is an option, but I was actually thinking me and Harmony would get a place," Buffy tried to be nonchalant. "Maybe you two would wanna join in? We could have a theme." Both the potentials looked surprised, and neither said anything, so Buffy decided to elaborate. "You know, fighty girls?" She mimed staking a vampire.
"So we'd all be in a house together," Rachel repeated.
Zoe seemed to be grasping for something to say before talking, "And Harmony'd be OK with that?"
Would she? Buffy remembered she and Rachel hadn't been the rosiest when they'd first met, but it'd been a while since then. And Harmony was always pretty chill about going along with her ideas. She'd put up with it for her, and then she'd probably end up enjoying it.
"Sure," she said confidently. "She was all hyped to be a sorority girl, I bet she'll think it's tons of fun."
"Doesn't she need, umm, special accomodations?" Zoe continued.
"I've kept an eye open the past few weeks, and Sunnydale's pretty good about that, for whatever reason." She thought about that for a second, and decided to be realistic. "Or well, probably a reason that starts with 'W' and ends with 'ilkins.' But there are a lot of houses around here extremely lacking in large windows. And what they don't have in windows, they make up for in basements."
"Was this your idea all along?" Rachel asked. The way she said it made it sound kind of nefarious.
"No!" Buffy responded a little too quickly. "It was just, you know, a spur of the moment thought. Everything was clicking pretty well yesterday, and I figure I should do my Slayer duty to the next generation. But we don't have to, if you don't want. You could do the Crawford thing instead."
The two potentials shared a look, and despite herself, Buffy angsted. Part of her was a little afraid they thought she was uncool. Or maybe they didn't like Harmony? She was completely safe, but at the same time it might be stressful to live with a vampire, especially given their council education and everything.
Or it could just be that they didn't want to be so close to the mayor. Would that cause them trouble at school? Faith being all buddy-buddy with Wilkins had been a totally different situation, and it was hard to make the Hemery Queen part of her brain plug herself into that mayor role and know what it would even mean in the gossip circles. Either way, she'd probably been way too forward about it, she would just back off the idea and hopefully they'd all forget this ever-
"Nah, I'm game," Rachel said. "Let's do it."
"Do you have some places already picked out?" Zoe said. "Do you want to look now? Because, well, we still don't have anywhere to sleep."
"I guess we could," Buffy said as she saw Cynthia's minivan pulling up the long driveway. "It's still a little bright out for Harmony though. Maybe you could hang with her at City Hall until sundown? I still have some work I should get done today." And if Harmony was distracted this afternoon instead of … being distracting, she might actually get that work done this time.
Buffy shared her plans with Cynthia as they loaded up the minivan, and while she was initially disappointed by her moving out, she quickly worked herself into a new planning frenzy to support the realty adventure, already quoting the details of several available properties as if by memory alone. Buffy would have to ride her bike back, so she hoped Rachel and Zoe would be interested in the topic as the three of them drove behind her.
Just before they were about to set off though, her radio rang at her. "What's up?"
"Mayor Summers, we've got ourselves a problem." Chief Matt was on the line.
"What is it?" She hoped whatever was going on with the police wasn't serious. The other three with her dropped their conversation and were paying attention too.
"One of our judges got antsy," he said.
She knew that Sunnydale County had a courthouse and its own judges in the abstract sense, but she hadn't had to interact with it much in her time as mayor. Chief Matt had been brought on board pretty quickly, and between him and his now-undead-and-fled aunt Vanessa they'd kept them pretty handled in spite of the various weirdnesses the force had to deal with.
"Who? Antsy how?"
"Judge Rester, the one we got on Ethan, she's making noise about a prisoner transfer. Supposedly there was some kind of sabotage on the Army base," he explained.
"They're telling judges about the Initiative base now?" Buffy knew she'd been pushing on the masquerade pretty hard, but she thought the government was more leery than that.
"No, the legitimate base, just out of town," Matt clarified.
Oh, that one. After the gang stole their first AT-4 from there years ago, she'd kind of forgotten about it. But this sounded pretty fishy. "It's probably the Initiative pulling the strings anyway," Buffy concluded. "And I think it's total bull, he was never there. At either of the theres! Was he?"
"Well, he won't say, got all cagey when we asked," Matt replied.
CyberWillow then inserted herself into the conversation, echoing over all four radios present in Buffy's vicinity despite the conversation only being on her personal one. "The aboveground base is in my range. I can confirm through camera records that he did not visit it, unless it was before meeting Rupert Giles in the Olivia persona."
"I thought you two were buddy-buddy? You can't get him to actually deny it?" she asked.
"He claims that answering the question isn't in his best interest," CyberWillow said, then added more in a very slightly petulant voice. "A similar situation came up in our game theory research yesterday; he's quite amused by the coincidence."
"So if we know for sure he wasn't there, do we have to give him up?" Buffy asked. "Didn't we throw the book at him, all kinds of charges and stuff? I thought we had dibs."
"You name it, we charged it" Matt confirmed. "Incitement to riot, grand theft, aggravated kidnapping, capital murder. But dibs aren't a thing, I hate to tell you. Feds walk all over locals in the court system."
"We can't like, have a lawyer off or something?" she asked.
"Judges have a lot of power over this kinda thing," Matt said. "And if we really made a stink about it, a lot of stuff could start coming out that makes everyone involved look like they're either crazy or lying their -, well, I mean to say, it wouldn't look great."
"Ugh. When is this happening?" She asked.
"They're sending people to collect him in an hour," Matt answered.
"More accurately, 48 minutes," CyberWillow interjected.
"I'll be right down," she said, hopping on her motorcycle and taking off. She noticed the others piling into the minivan and following, but she didn't have much attention to spare between accelerating on the road and straining her ears to keep up the conversation.
"There's more," the volume of Matt's voice had raised itself radically to deal with the rush of the air, either something newly programmed into the radios or just CyberWillow compensating, "Rester's setting bail on Jack Weatherby too, the bartender. Fifty grand."
"Is that low? Or high?" She had no idea what bail for people was supposed to look like.
"For intentionally poisoning drinks? It's a song. He's probably got someone on his way to buy him out too."
Buffy narrowed her eyes. In her line of work, once was barely ever coincidence, let alone twice. "I want to talk to this judge." Her motorcycle drifted past 100 miles per hour.
"Ah, that's not usually the way things are done," Matt prevaricated.
"Judge Susan Rester does not possess a radio, but I can link your call in through the normal telephone system," CyberWillow said neutrally. "As far as I can tell from my camera footage, she's in her home."
"Do it," Maybe Matt had a point, in a normal situation, but normal this wasn't. She couldn't do everything like a regular mayor.
The phone rang on the other end. And rang again. And again. Buffy ground her teeth.
After the sixth ring, it picked up. "This is Susan Rester. I'm sorry, but I can't come to the phone right now. Please leave a message after the beep. BEEP."
She tried to control her tone, but with the wind and the noise of the road it was a struggle. "Susan, it's Buffy. Or I guess you might know me as Mayor Summers. If you're there, I'd really appreciate it if you picked up the phone, and didn't make me-"
"Miss Mayor!" Presumably-Judge-Susan-Rester cut in. "I'm sorry, I wasn't- umm, expecting your call."
"Is there anything you'd like to tell me?" Buffy asked.
There was a delay before Rester spoke again. "Are you outside? There's a lot of interference, I'm not sure if I can make out what you're saying."
"I'm driving. To the police station," she said tersely.
"It's really not very safe to multitask while on the road, you know," Rester said. "There are statistics. I could mail you the study?"
Someone was a little slow in getting out of Buffy's way, so she skidded around. "I think I'll be fine. It's you I'm concerned about."
"That's very considerate of you, but I always make a habit of keeping both eyes on the road, ten-and-two," her tone was almost impossible to make out, but Buffy could imagine the desperation in her voice. It was probably time to get to the point.
"Tell me why the hell you're messing with my prisoners," she said flatly. "These aren't just a couple of shoplifters we caught at the 7/11."
"Be that as it may, everyone deserves fair-"
"Do you even know what Ethan was doing the last time he was in town? He was literally conspiring to kill babies!" She shouted at the radio where it was clipped to her handlebar.
It was infuriating. She was trying her best to keep things in check, and some bureaucrat was undermining her. Who knew what kind of trouble Ethan would get up to if the Initiative got its hands on him? Even that other guy was capable of a lot more carnage than had already happened if he put his mind to it.
"I didn't have a choice!" Rester snapped back at her. "Do you know the sorts of people I've been getting phone calls from today? Army Colonels, State Judges, House Reps. When Wilkins wanted… when he wanted the things he wanted, none of this happened! There was no outside pressure to deal with, he just kept it all under the rug. I can't toe the line for you all by myself!"
She bit off the first, nastiest reply she could think of, and then decided on something more productive. "I want names."
Those, Judge Rester was willing to give her. Buffy stewed, knowing CyberWillow was doubtless recording them for her.
It was the sort of problem she wanted Vanessa to run interference for, except that Vanessa was a vampire now and had skipped town weeks ago. Her blackmail files were still around, but they hadn't dug into them yet. She'd been hoping things had smoothed out enough that they wouldn't need to.
But would it work? Even if she did get the names of these people and then managed to back them off, was this even the game she should be playing? They weren't experts at these people like Vanessa was; if they pushed the wrong way, things could go out of control in all kinds of unexpected political directions.
Maybe she could hold onto Ethan and Jack some other way, or do something else with them. She could even just wash her hands of the situation, and let the Initiative do it. What would they really do if they got their hands on Jack? Poison the water supply? Wide scale messes like that weren't their MO.
And as for Ethan, she could only imagine they'd end up regretting taking him in the first place. The problem was she'd probably end up regretting it too.
Vote: What does Buffy do about her prisoners being clawed away by the Feds?
[] Do nothing, and let the justice system work. Losing Ethan to the Initiative and letting Jack out of jail seems dangerous, but they've been too outmaneuvered.
[] Dig into Vanessa's blackmail stash and fight back, trying to threaten the people pressuring Judge Rester into compliance. Without the external pressure on her she'll fall back in line.
[] Write In: Enact a completely different plan to try to retain control of Ethan, Jack, or both of them.
- Location
- United States
[X] Dig into Vanessa's blackmail stash and fight back, trying to threaten the people pressuring Judge Rester into compliance. Without the external pressure on her she'll fall back in line.
-[X] Bring in Travers - bring up the situation to Travers and consult with him on how blatantly and how hard to press on people. This isn't his home turf and he might not know the important people here as well as he knows them in England, but he's still the one with the most experience at this sort of thing. Avoid sharing all the blackmail with him, especially anything that seems really good, but don't hold so much back that it's obvious.
-[X] Bring in Travers - bring up the situation to Travers and consult with him on how blatantly and how hard to press on people. This isn't his home turf and he might not know the important people here as well as he knows them in England, but he's still the one with the most experience at this sort of thing. Avoid sharing all the blackmail with him, especially anything that seems really good, but don't hold so much back that it's obvious.
Last edited:
- Location
- Vancouver
Well, that was a surprise. Looks like Maggie is trying to strike back. However... I don't think she has all that great reserves left after this. The Initiative has been a failure since nearly day one with Mayor Summers around. They lost most of their demons, had Faith accused of being a Communist Spy, haven't even been able to show off their cool tech or help deal with the big mid season supernatural attack on the town. I really don't think Adam is active yet either. So this must be her trying to get something to show her bosses, to prove 'The Initiative', is actually worthwhile. Probably had to call in some favors - or offer them - to get this to happen so fast.
Given that, I (and I admit this might be too risky) think we could lean into this. Cut a deal with Ethan beforehand and get him to be absolutely worthless to them. Fail to cast even the most basic of cantrip-equivalent spells for them. As that play fails, watch as the army deals with the Maggie-shaped problem they dealt us in the first place (or more accurately deal with Adam as Maggie goes nuts, but that's meta knowledge, and even then I think better sooner than later).
[X] Write in: Strike a deal with Ethan beforehand. Let him know he's pretty high on our shit list, and if he makes a wrong move, then one day no laws, or bars, or 'just a human chaos mage' argument, or even a secret military base will cut it - we'll squash his head like a pancake. The stakes of his brand of magic mixed with the army are too high a catastrophe waiting to happen to let it slide. But if he proves he can restrain himself, not give the Initiative any magic, anything useful, we can move him down on the list a bit. We've had dealings with Amy, and she's been able to get what she wanted, we can give him that 'second chance' too. But make the stakes clear.
That's my idea for the write in. It might be too complicated, we might just want to try counter-pressuring to stop Rester from giving him up, but I thought there was a chance here.
Given that, I (and I admit this might be too risky) think we could lean into this. Cut a deal with Ethan beforehand and get him to be absolutely worthless to them. Fail to cast even the most basic of cantrip-equivalent spells for them. As that play fails, watch as the army deals with the Maggie-shaped problem they dealt us in the first place (or more accurately deal with Adam as Maggie goes nuts, but that's meta knowledge, and even then I think better sooner than later).
[X] Write in: Strike a deal with Ethan beforehand. Let him know he's pretty high on our shit list, and if he makes a wrong move, then one day no laws, or bars, or 'just a human chaos mage' argument, or even a secret military base will cut it - we'll squash his head like a pancake. The stakes of his brand of magic mixed with the army are too high a catastrophe waiting to happen to let it slide. But if he proves he can restrain himself, not give the Initiative any magic, anything useful, we can move him down on the list a bit. We've had dealings with Amy, and she's been able to get what she wanted, we can give him that 'second chance' too. But make the stakes clear.
That's my idea for the write in. It might be too complicated, we might just want to try counter-pressuring to stop Rester from giving him up, but I thought there was a chance here.
It's a cool idea, but the problem I see is that as far as we know, the only thing that Ethan actually wants is to cause as much chaos as possible. So what would his 'second chance' look like? If the only thing he wants is the freedom to continue being a plague on the world, which obviously we can't give him, then we have no real leverage to force him to behave. I doubt threats alone will be enough to get him to fall in line.
There could be something here if we can somehow leverage his budding relationship with CyberWillow, but I'm not sure how we'd do that.
[X] Dig into Vanessa's blackmail stash and fight back, trying to threaten the people pressuring Judge Rester into compliance. Without the external pressure on her she'll fall back in line.
-[X] Bring in Travers - bring up the situation to Travers and consult with him on how blatantly and how hard to press on people. This isn't his home turf and he might not know the important people here as well as he knows them in England, but he's still the one with the most experience at this sort of thing. Avoid sharing all the blackmail with him, especially anything that seems really good, but don't hold so much back that it's obvious.
I mean.... we could just kill him. We could go pull him out of the jail this minute and kill him in a back alley and bury his corpse in some random spot. Who the hell is going to stop us? Dude tried to feed a bunch of babies to a monster, nobody that matters will care what we do to him.
This only gets fuzzy if the Initiative picks him up before we can remove him from jail and even then who do they have that keeps Buffy from ripping the doors off the hinges of their vehicle, dragging him screaming out and hitting him with a hammer in front of everyone?
... let's not. That sounds like a horrible idea, starting with the fact that CyberWillow cares about him in some capacity.
[X] Dig into Vanessa's blackmail stash and fight back, trying to threaten the people pressuring Judge Rester into compliance. Without the external pressure on her she'll fall back in line.
-[X] Bring in Travers - bring up the situation to Travers and consult with him on how blatantly and how hard to press on people. This isn't his home turf and he might not know the important people here as well as he knows them in England, but he's still the one with the most experience at this sort of thing. Avoid sharing all the blackmail with him, especially anything that seems really good, but don't hold so much back that it's obvious.
I'd rather avoid blackmail, but it seems the simplest solution.
- Pronouns
- She/Her
ooh, this I like. And showing ourselves to be pragmatic in the course of maintaining a working relationship with Travers could impress him ... and really irritate Mary. I'm here for this.
[X] Dig into Vanessa's blackmail stash and fight back, trying to threaten the people pressuring Judge Rester into compliance. Without the external pressure on her she'll fall back in line.
-[X] Bring in Travers - bring up the situation to Travers and consult with him on how blatantly and how hard to press on people. This isn't his home turf and he might not know the important people here as well as he knows them in England, but he's still the one with the most experience at this sort of thing. Avoid sharing all the blackmail with him, especially anything that seems really good, but don't hold so much back that it's obvious.
[X] Dig into Vanessa's blackmail stash and fight back, trying to threaten the people pressuring Judge Rester into compliance. Without the external pressure on her she'll fall back in line.
-[X] Bring in Travers - bring up the situation to Travers and consult with him on how blatantly and how hard to press on people. This isn't his home turf and he might not know the important people here as well as he knows them in England, but he's still the one with the most experience at this sort of thing. Avoid sharing all the blackmail with him, especially anything that seems really good, but don't hold so much back that it's obvious.
There is a really dangerous precedent here of the American Military recruiting evil wizards like Ethan that needs to be stopped in its tracks. Cooperating with Travers on this threat makes a lot of immediate sense and could be used as the foundation for future cooperation in this type of background government manipulation.
-[X] Bring in Travers - bring up the situation to Travers and consult with him on how blatantly and how hard to press on people. This isn't his home turf and he might not know the important people here as well as he knows them in England, but he's still the one with the most experience at this sort of thing. Avoid sharing all the blackmail with him, especially anything that seems really good, but don't hold so much back that it's obvious.
There is a really dangerous precedent here of the American Military recruiting evil wizards like Ethan that needs to be stopped in its tracks. Cooperating with Travers on this threat makes a lot of immediate sense and could be used as the foundation for future cooperation in this type of background government manipulation.
- Location
- United States
I don't really think Buffy is capable of this, at least not right now. If he was an active threat, or we thought killing him might undo a spell of his or something like that, then I could see Buffy killing him. Executing him out of convenience because of something that he isn't really even doing? I don't think that's really an option for Buffy.
- Location
- Vancouver
The idea would be some lesser harmful acts of 'chaos', or turning around to use him against our foes, but yeah. Ethan doesn't really respect our power enough to be wary of us, which is a shame. I really kinda wish we could just off him, Ethan has been nothing but a threat and a problem to us the whole way through, and him working for the military is bound to be even worse for everyone. Since we can't though (if more due to letting CW bond with him than anything else), I like your option of using Travers. It is why we have these guys around, so lets use them.
[X] Dig into Vanessa's blackmail stash and fight back, trying to threaten the people pressuring Judge Rester into compliance. Without the external pressure on her she'll fall back in line.
-[X] Bring in Travers - bring up the situation to Travers and consult with him on how blatantly and how hard to press on people. This isn't his home turf and he might not know the important people here as well as he knows them in England, but he's still the one with the most experience at this sort of thing. Avoid sharing all the blackmail with him, especially anything that seems really good, but don't hold so much back that it's obvious.
[X] Do nothing, and let the justice system work. Losing Ethan to the Initiative and letting Jack out of jail seems dangerous, but they've been too outmaneuvered.
-[X] Call Maggie directly and tell her that if Ethan gets away or kills anyone else we will hold her and the Initiative responsible and stop messing around with social games with her troops.
So I think Maggie is absolutely going to lose Ethan at some point if she is making use of him, and it will work as a last straw before escalating up the chain of command past her. If she is going to steal the murderers we capture then lose them it is time to stop engaging with Maggie and start calling the people that put her in her spot and talk with/cyberwillow espionage at them instead.
-[X] Call Maggie directly and tell her that if Ethan gets away or kills anyone else we will hold her and the Initiative responsible and stop messing around with social games with her troops.
So I think Maggie is absolutely going to lose Ethan at some point if she is making use of him, and it will work as a last straw before escalating up the chain of command past her. If she is going to steal the murderers we capture then lose them it is time to stop engaging with Maggie and start calling the people that put her in her spot and talk with/cyberwillow espionage at them instead.
[X] Dig into Vanessa's blackmail stash and fight back, trying to threaten the people pressuring Judge Rester into compliance. Without the external pressure on her she'll fall back in line.
- Location
- Internet
[X] Dig into Vanessa's blackmail stash and fight back, trying to threaten the people pressuring Judge Rester into compliance. Without the external pressure on her she'll fall back in line.
-[X] Bring in Travers - bring up the situation to Travers and consult with him on how blatantly and how hard to press on people. This isn't his home turf and he might not know the important people here as well as he knows them in England, but he's still the one with the most experience at this sort of thing. Avoid sharing all the blackmail with him, especially anything that seems really good, but don't hold so much back that it's obvious.
-[X] Bring in Travers - bring up the situation to Travers and consult with him on how blatantly and how hard to press on people. This isn't his home turf and he might not know the important people here as well as he knows them in England, but he's still the one with the most experience at this sort of thing. Avoid sharing all the blackmail with him, especially anything that seems really good, but don't hold so much back that it's obvious.
[X] Dig into Vanessa's blackmail stash and fight back, trying to threaten the people pressuring Judge Rester into compliance. Without the external pressure on her she'll fall back in line.
-[X] Bring in Travers - bring up the situation to Travers and consult with him on how blatantly and how hard to press on people. This isn't his home turf and he might not know the important people here as well as he knows them in England, but he's still the one with the most experience at this sort of thing. Avoid sharing all the blackmail with him, especially anything that seems really good, but don't hold so much back that it's obvious.
-[X] Bring in Travers - bring up the situation to Travers and consult with him on how blatantly and how hard to press on people. This isn't his home turf and he might not know the important people here as well as he knows them in England, but he's still the one with the most experience at this sort of thing. Avoid sharing all the blackmail with him, especially anything that seems really good, but don't hold so much back that it's obvious.
- Location
- United States
I'm not sure that there's enough time to go the blackmail route. There is less than an hour before the prisoner transfer and in that time we need to go through the blackmail stash to find the dirt on the people putting pressure on the judge, consult with Travers, put the pressure on at least 5 or 6 different people, have them contact the judge, and then finally have the judge rescind her order.
Wouldn't it be much easier to just lean on the Judge now either through blackmail or veiled threats and then go after the people putting pressure on her after that when we aren't under a harsh time limit?
Wouldn't it be much easier to just lean on the Judge now either through blackmail or veiled threats and then go after the people putting pressure on her after that when we aren't under a harsh time limit?
- Location
- United States
I sort of assumed that the blackmail option involves stalling of some sort to give it time to work - the Judge seems like she's pretty willing to do what we want as long as she's going to be protected from outside pressure, and she seemed scared enough about us calling her that I assume at least the veiled threats part is already covered, so she might be willing to delay stuff a bit. Also the lawyer idea got shot down because it wouldn't solve the problem on it's own, but it'd seem pretty plausible that lawyering up and fighting it could buy some time for blackmailing as well.
Last edited:
DeAnno
Sometimes words have two meanings
The blackmail option will indeed be a variety of things all being done at once to try to make it work, though stunting parts on it gives special import and detail to those specific parts. Like, if you specifically stunted a threat on the judge, you could actually go to her house and get something less like an implication and more like an actual threat. If you leave the judge unstunted you can assume Buffy will keep treating her mostly the same as she has been, rather than a particularly harder or softer sell.
Stunting can also control where Buffy is personally directing her efforts, as opposed to all the Scoobies. Like, with the Travers stunt Buffy would definitely call Travers personally, while for example maybe Willow is laying all the blackmail files out in the conference room and sweeping a webcam over them to let CyberWillow organize it all.
Stunting can also control where Buffy is personally directing her efforts, as opposed to all the Scoobies. Like, with the Travers stunt Buffy would definitely call Travers personally, while for example maybe Willow is laying all the blackmail files out in the conference room and sweeping a webcam over them to let CyberWillow organize it all.
So I'm not personally that interested in the blackmail option, but I think people might want to consider adding a bit as an extra stunt. Namely that the blackmail files can reasonably be expected to cover state judges and a house rep, but are incredibly unlikely to help with the army colonel. Cyberwillow should hopefully be able to take a stab at that, but I would not rely on her to actually do so if we don't stunt it, because the vote as is doesn't generate any new blackmail, just go through Vanessa's stuff. CyberWillow has a ton of parallel processing power, she can organize the blackmail material and generate new stuff at the same time.
Last edited: