[X] Plan Two Tiers
-[X] Extra People: Andrew, Jonathon, Warren, Tara, Matthew Waters, and Cynthia Danvers
-[X] Information: Everything about gods and the artifact and Adam. Emphasize safety and practical responses to Adam's interference and presence.
-[X] Style: Reading people into a set of secrets that they now need to know.
-[X] The next day contact Travers and tell him and the potentials and the watchers about Adam, his manifestation of Olvikan features, and his ability to interfere with magic.
--[X] If asked by Rachel or Zoe explain the first meeting away as marching orders for the coven and new safety protocols to avoid snake attacks.
"I'm pretty nervous about it. It's really stupid-"
"It's not stupid. It's a pretty big deal. Telling people stuff is hard," Harmony said. "When I told the Cordettes I got my first period it was pretty scary."
"But it worked out OK?" Buffy asked.
"No, Cordy told everyone the blood was from letting Eric take my virginity in the bathroom and they all laughed at me for a week." Harmony said, frowning.
Buffy had made a quick trip to her office before the journey to Crawford street, more as an excuse to talk to Harmony in private than anything else. She wasn't sure telling a bunch of new people everything was the right call. Now she was sitting on her desk listening to Harmony talk about… things that Harmony talked about.
"But I don't think that'll happen!" Harmony continued, after realizing her story wasn't helping. "I mean, they'd be too afraid to make jokes about you." She watched Buffy's expression intently, and noticed her mistake quicker this time, "Not that they would even if they could. Because they totes like you and stuff.
"But that's not even the important thing," Harmony got more excited, waving her hands around whimsically as she paced the small office (one of them knocked some papers off a shelf, but she didn't notice it or else ignored it.) "The important thing is people should know! Because it's kind of great. Like, I know you're uncomfortable with the whole… thing, and don't really like talking about it, but it is. It's the way things should be."
Her eyes were practically glowing with resolve, the vampire yellow somehow creeping in, and Buffy wasn't sure how she should feel about it.
The moment passed, and Harmony sighed, losing a bit of her fervor. "They have to know anyway right? Just… trust me, OK?"
"OK," Buffy said quietly, looking down and to the side a bit.
Harmony didn't let her disengage, ghosting forward and catching her lips in a quick kiss. She tasted like bubblegum and fresh snowflakes; Buffy found herself slipping in deep, but for a rarity, Harmony broke it herself this time.
"It'll be fine. And if you're telling Matt, you should tell Cynthia too," she said.
Her eyes went a little askance as she had to abruptly swap back from feeling-Buffy to thinking-Buffy. "Cynthia?"
Matt had the potential to be on the front lines of this, making decisions for the whole police force. She hadn't wanted to leave him in the dark, if she was going to be telling a bunch more people.
Harmony apparently only came in one mode, and wasn't disoriented at all by being an inch away from her face. "If he might know something from his Aunty-V, then Cynthia's even more likely to right? She was here the whole time. Plus can you really see her getting all backstabby?"
"Yeah, that's fair," she said. "I guess you two can sit together for the big event," she knew they hung out a lot.
"I shouldn't come," Harmony said. "This is suspicious enough already with the extra people, and I haven't gone to these since helping you with the spiders the first two times. I'll distract the kids. We need to move in anyway before it's morning and I can't drive."
She frowned. It made sense but, it would've been nice? To have her there. "We could get someone else for driving." But that didn't sound like a decision a good mayor would make. "No. You're right. Stay up for me?"
"Vampire. Kinda my deal," she said.
------------------------------------------------------------------
"So that's the cliff notes of the required reading," Buffy finished. "Any questions before the test?" They'd shown the Adam video again and she'd explained Olvikan. And dream-Wilkins, and Dracula's claims, and the hidden Artifact and everything else needed to put the whole terrible mess in context.
"You couldn't have told me some of this before?" Andrew had been the most blase about it all, and almost seemed aggrieved, in contrast to the more shocked expressions the rest of the newbies had. "Having legitimate divine power on our side really firms up our bargaining position."
She raised her eyebrows, "I don't see how it would, since I'm sure you remember we're keeping it secret," she emphasized the last word as she waved at Willow's laptop. It was once again running the Information Horizon spell covering their room in the Crawford Street basement. It was kind of crowded with most of the Scoobies, the whole coven, plus Cynthia and Matt all crammed in.
"But do we really have to? What's the harm?" he said.
"Maybe she doesn't want to be the type of mayor people confuse for a cult leader?" Xander said dryly.
"We could just tell the demons," Andrew said. "It isn't like there's a ton of social overlap between them and the muggles."
"Tabloids are a great invention for suppressing inconvenient truths," Anya added. "We could get in front of it and put your godhood in there first, then none of the humans would believe in it."
"I'm uncertain the demonic response would be as rational as you expect, even in the best case," Giles spoke up. He had presumably gotten here first, having secured the comfy chair in the corner. "Even seemingly placid cults have a history of extreme and sudden action, sometimes with little if any input from their supposed object of worship."
"Let's not get into this going public idea yet," Buffy said, privately thinking 'or ever'. "For now, it stays in here. Next question?"
Matt glanced around, trying to read the room before saying something, "You're not expecting us to, ah, bow down or-"
"No, absolutely not," Buffy said. "The farthest thing from bowing down. Don't bow at all. Bow up."
"Good, good," he said hurriedly. "Not that there's anything wrong with, well, you."
"Well I could definitely be convinced to replace my Milla Jovovich shrine with yours," Warren joked. "Kidding! Well, mostly kidding. But it's really not a big deal. Cultural baggage around what's probably a perfectly legible scientific phenomena. I should give you another run through my newest scanners tomorrow to prove it."
"You think you could isolate the lachryma signature?" Willow asked.
"The spider data's been promising," Warren said. "It could help us analyze Adam later. Or maybe even find this hidden mcguffin everyone's so excited about."
"Tomorrow then," Buffy agreed. Somehow it felt more like being a science experiment than the powers testing with Willow had earlier this summer, but she shoved the feeling down. She still wanted to know more about what was going on inside herself, and this was another chance at it.
"We should do some more physical measurements with it, so we can collate it with the other Buffy-data," Willow said, excited at the prospect. "It's been way too long since we've added new points to some of those graphs."
"So is everyone satisfied now? Can we move on with the show?" Anya asked, getting a couple hairy eyeballs in return. "Don't mind me, I've only been up for 22 hours already today doing two and a half jobs."
Buffy looked over the group, anticipating more from the others who'd just found out, but the rest of them still seemed shell-shocked in their various ways. Jonathan was quiet, but that wasn't unusual for him when he was thinking.
Tara's eyes were jumping around between everyone else nervously, like a kid who hadn't done her homework and was afraid of being called on in class. Buffy knew she had some kind of aura-vision or something; hopefully her own wasn't really dark and scary? Tara was definitely the type that could've just kept quiet about it all this time.
Cynthia had the strangest expression on her face, almost seeming disturbed. It wasn't what Buffy had expected from her at all (maybe from some other people, but not her) and she hoped it wouldn't be a problem. Maybe she was religious? Was this blasphemy? Probably. Harmony might know, and Buffy wished she was here to smooth the problem over, whatever it was.
That made her remember Harmony's earlier point, and she decided it wouldn't be a bad way to test the waters. "There was something specific I wanted to ask, now that we've cleared the air. Cynthia, you were around for the … previous administration. Was there anything Wilkins did, anywhere he went in City Hall, that might've been, you know, a gateway to a hidden artifact of unimaginable power?"
It was probably a forlorn hope; if Cynthia had known something she'd have probably spoken up during Buffy's debrief, when the hidden artifact first came up. All the same, she paused and concentrated, as if going over a thousand details in her probably-eidetic memory. Then she shook her head.
"I'm sorry, Mayor Summers. I can't think of anything he did to suggest that. He generally kept sensitive materials in his office, or rarely in the conference room. I believe you encountered the Box under his usual protections there?"
"Yeah, that was a handful and a half," Willow said. "It actually turns out there's a pressure sensor with an alarm built into that table."
"Wait, really?" Buffy asked. The table was really thick and heavy so it wasn't implausible, but they'd been using it all this time and she hadn't even known.
"It's not a security risk or anything, I found it the second day," she explained. "But it isn't very useful either unless you're setting a trap with it on purpose."
"And we are sure our big lackey thingamabob isn't squirreled away inside there too, right?" Xander asked.
"Fool me once, shame on me, fool me twice, well, umm, that table wasn't gonna fool me again," Willow said, finishing with a nod. "There's really nothing else there."
"And I don't suppose Vanessa said anything mysterious that suddenly makes oodles of new sense now?" Buffy asked Matt.
"She didn't make a habit of telling me much," he replied. "Or telling anyone much."
Buffy sighed. It'd been a longshot that they'd get a fancy new clue just like that, but she'd been hoping all the same.
"Are we the only ones who know?" Jonathan finally asked a question. "There are some other people who I'd have expected-"
"No, not everyone could make it," Buffy said. "Harmony, obviously, but she volunteered to run interference with the potentials."
"Also, the much older, broodier, and lamer vampire formerly of our acquaintance," Xander said.
"Umm, do you mean Angel?" Jonathan asked.
"It's sad that a whole new generation has had barely any of his gloomy presence inflicted upon them," Xander mused. "No, wait, it's not."
"And Oz!" Willow said. "He's one of the old guard too. Totally in the know.
"Why isn't he here?" Jonathan asked. "It's not a full moon…"
"He has some deeply held reservations about weekly use of the Box of Gavrok," Giles said it in a tone that meant he still had some reservations of his own.
"He's a conscientious objector," Willow elaborated. "But he's still on the team. Just, sort of on the bench for Tuesday night spider parties. Like a backup."
"And that's it?" Jonathan continued.
"'That's it', he says about the secret with fourteen different people in on it now, and no tabloid stories to cover it up," Anya muttered.
"But not Cordelia," Jonathan said. "Wasn't she with you guys from the beginning too?" There was a distinctly un-Jonathan-like note of accusation there.
"For a rather tortured definition of 'from the beginning'," Giles commented.
"She got off the ride early," Anya said. "Plus she's a movie star now, it's not like she lost out or anything. Didn't she even get another part already?"
"In Scarred Truths, she's the lead," Jonathan said. "But does that really matter? Isn't she reliable? She's been through way more stuff than me."
"For a rather tortured definition of 'reliable." Willow was trying to be mischievous, but it was also kind of mean. Buffy wasn't sure what to say about it though.
"She remains convinced that I am a menace, despite all my efforts to reassure her," CyberWillow jumped into the conversation.
"I guess they forgot to mention you?" Jonathan responded, not sure where to look at first and then settling for his radio. "Obviously you already knew already, right?"
"It'd hardly be practical to keep me in the dark," CyberWillow said.
"So was it a real decision you all made, or did it just sorta happen?" Jonathan asked.
"Oh, so she's got to you too and you don't trust CyberWillow now either?" Willow said. "What a great track record she has, let's tell her even more!"
"I'm not saying that," aggravation was worming its way into his tone. She'd never really seen Jonathan like this. "But weren't we this close to thinking CyberWillow was going out of control? And she's known all these dangerous secrets all this time? Doesn't it worry you at all that the one person who's most suspicious of her isn't here?"
When he put it like that, it didn't sound great. But arguing endlessly about Cordelia wasn't productive. "In the end, Anya's right," Buffy said. "It's not that I don't trust Cordelia, whether she's angry with me right now or not. But all the rest of us, including CyberWillow, you know what we all have in common?
"All this? It's our life, it's our job, we're all in all the way. I'm really happy Cordelia's successful now, and it sucks that she got caught up in Ethan's latest mess, but when she just pops in with the sudden criticism? She isn't seeing the whole picture.
"I don't mean to be down on her. But too many people need to know this already, because they're going to be fighting on the front lines or getting their bones turned into snakes or are managing the building sitting right on top of the unknown magical doohickey which just happens to be plugged into MY soul."
She took a breath, and covered her eyes with a hand. This was getting way too personal. "I'm sorry, I shouldn't be biting your head off."
"No, I was out of line," Jonathan apologized, looking tired too. "You're right, she doesn't work here."
She nodded. Jonathan had had a pretty nasty shock with the sudden snake earlier, and it was hard to remember sometimes he didn't have years of experience with how unfair big bads could get. "All right, so if that's it for my personal metaphysical drama, let's focus on the Frankenstein in the room. What else did you guys find out?"
Willow started first, "I copied the metadata on the webcams we have inside CyberWillow's exclusion zone and then I did some divining on the hashes. I'm pretty sure Adam's replicating the whole spiderweb effect in his radius, not just blocking it out."
"So he can see all of campus?" They'd suspected, but it still wasn't good.
"Including the computer lab," Willow said. "It's definitely a problem."
"Seems like this guy just can't keep his hands to himself," Xander said, then nodded at Matt, "Just like the feds to get sticky fingers all over everything, right?"
The police chief was a little owl eyed at the joke and just nodded slowly. Maybe after a few apocalypses he'd be more into the cynical humor.
"So it like, supposedly emanates out from him?" Buffy tried to clarify. "He was able to affect Jonathan too, and we were way outside the range."
"The summon could've acted as a conduit," Andrew said. "Hazard of the profession."
"Coulda warned me first," Jonathan grumped. "It's going to take days to carve out another bone just right."
"I do not believe it would be appropriate to fixate on the range of effect we observe in the spiderweb," CyberWillow said. "Its behavior is better modeled as a pressure barrier between my control of the original spell effect and Adam's divine domain."
"Wait, what's the difference?" Buffy tended to just let the technical stuff go over her head in these discussions, but this sounded important.
"That's the bad part," Warren cut in.
"His radius is very slowly growing," CyberWillow stated coolly, her unusual panic from earlier in the day gone. "It's consistent with the slight decay in energy density the spiderweb suffers between sacrifices."
"Umm," Tara had her hand raised. Buffy wasn't sure if she should explicitly call on her, but everyone stopped talking and looked anyway. "Shouldn't he either take over the whole spell or not, if that's his special power? Like he did with the bachinka summon?"
"The summoning was normal magic," Giles explained. "While the spiderweb ritual is powered by Lachrymal energies."
"The same stuff Adam and Buffy use," Anya clarified.
"You maybe didn't have to call her out quite like that," Xander faux-whispered from his space on the couch next to Anya.
"What? It's true, and we just told everyone about it now! It was supposed to be for context!" Anya complained.
"It's fine," Buffy said. Better they get things right, even if being in the same category as Maggie's monster was wiggy.
Giles continued, "It is what we call lost magic of the Old Ones, or I suppose at this point we could call it recently found, and it is believed that it is simply more potent on a fundamental level. To directly contest its effects without using some of it yourself is perilous in the extreme, not that direct usage is particularly safe for most practicing users of magic."
"OK, sure. No casting stuff at him," Buffy spun one of her hands in a circle. "But what is he doing exactly? Is this CORRUPT thing going to start taking students and professors over?"
"He's only used it on magic, right?" Warren asked, sounding suddenly worried.
"So far," Xander answered gloomily, "That we know about."
"Once we ascertained his origins, I was able to narrow my research significantly," Giles spoke up again. "Aside from the sources on Olvikan I possessed before, the books of Ascension themselves make significant reference to the original Old One, though his name is never explicitly mentioned. In particular," he pulled out some notes from his pocket and began to read.
"'And while His venom neither burns nor stings, be wary of that which lies within the Serpent's grasp. For it shall be corrupted, changed to suit His ends and purpose, the spear to turn back upon the wielder and the dog to bite its master's hand.'"
"How chipper," Buffy commented.
"So we should probably avoid using trained animals?" Warren asked. "I'm terrible at metaphors."
"Your tech is probably vulnerable," Anya said. "Spears were the hot new thing once too." Warren went a little green at that, his bouncy attitude melting away.
"Also, trained animals," Xander commented. "We'll have to keep the K9 squad back."
"Despite not being directly mentioned, it's entirely possible that humans or demons are vulnerable as well," Giles said. "Though Buffy, I would expect that you in particular should enjoy a significant level of protection. Things being what they are."
"Campus can be a problem area, especially without the camera coverage we've gotten used to," Chief Matt mentioned. "Are you saying we'd be better off just giving it some space?" UC Sunnydale didn't have campus specific police, a relic of Wilkins' control freak tendencies.
"I don't mean to be overconfident, but we might be overblowing that part," Andrew said. "If he could just take over whoever he wanted, then why is he playing nice with the Initiative instead of turning them into a bunch of zombies?"
"He could have a restraining bolt programmed in," Willow said.
"Couldn't he just corrupt that too?" Jonathan wondered.
"It's not impossible that what we saw today was merely a show put on to lower our guard, and he already controls them all in secret," Giles said.
"I want to say I don't think so?" Buffy said. "I've been able to kind of feel him using CORRUPT both times, even from across town. The way he does it is kind of loud, if that makes sense? I want to say I would've noticed, somehow."
"You want to say it, but you're not totally sure?" Xander asked.
"I'm still pretty new to the secret voices stuff," Buffy said. "So like, disclaimers apply. But I don't think I'm wrong."
"So what are we doing about the police then?" Xander said.
If Adam really was working for the Initiative instead of running wild, Buffy couldn't imagine Maggie wanted the campus to turn into a wild hotbed of crime. And she was the mayor, she really couldn't let that happen either. "Matt. Only respond to serious calls, four officers minimum, and at least one of them from the SDCW on loan," she said. "If you see Initiative guys, disengage."
"Got it," he said.
Xander cringed a little, clearly worried about the risks. "We still don't really know this isn't Wilkins cosplaying as Frankenstein 2.0. He's twisty enough that he might just be playing games with Maggie's motley crew."
Buffy shook her head, "I dunno, but I've been thinking. Faith seemed worried, and she and Wilkins had this whole twisted father/daughter thing going on. She'd know, and she's not a good enough actress to fake it for the camera. I don't doubt he's got his fingers in this somehow, but I don't think that it's as simple as Adam just being him on the inside."
"Whoever he really is, whatever else he does in the future, it's our magic that he's messing with now," Andrew said. "We need to figure out what to do."
"He had to touch the summon to steal it," Jonathan said.
"He's not exactly touching the spiderweb ritual," Andrew argued.
"But he is, kind of," Jonathan continued. "It's an area of effect, over Sunnydale. He's in Sunnydale. Maybe he even has cameras in his eyes or something like that. And even the quote, it said 'within the Serpent's grasp'."
"So you think it's safe to keep using magic around here as long as we don't let him get his hands on it?" Andrew said.
"Probably? We can't exactly be sure of anything," Jonathan shrugged.
"If I may?" CyberWillow said. It was a little uncharacteristic for her to ask before saying something, so maybe this was big. Buffy faced the webcam in the corner and waved her to go on.
Her echoing voice washed over the room dispassionately, "Rupert Giles has already accurately reached the heart of our dilemma: only divine power can contest divine power. The Initiative has effectively created an artificial god, one well equipped to disrupt our operations and control on the strategic scale. While Mayor Summers may stand a fair chance against Adam in personal combat, the tactical reality of the Initiative's underground base and the broader political situation make such an effort ill-advised. Her power is undeniable, but she lacks the sort of esoteric options Adam is already proving adept with.
"What we require is a complement to direct physical action; we must be able to act at a remove in a magical context. For our existing coven in part or as a whole to attempt this would be unaccountably risky in present circumstances, so we must augment one of our number to the point that Adam no longer presents an uncounterable threat."
"So you're saying we need to whip up a god on demand?" Anya said. "You may not have ever known anything but hellmouth craziness but you can't just cook up intentional ascensions willy-nilly. It took Wilkins a hundred years to do it, and no offense Willow, but he was better at magic than any of you."
"Send me back in time to March and we'd see about that," Willow muttered.
CyberWillow ignored the byplay and continued, "While I do not pretend to be Wilkins' equal in magical experience or even knowledge, I possess several innate advantages he did not, and do not set my sights on so extreme a goal as he did. After much computation, I have determined that by vastly accelerating the fueling of the spiderweb ritual we might jump-start a true domain of my own."
"The ritual in and of itself is already quite the risk," Giles protested.
"A risk we have accepted and learned from five times running now," CyberWillow said. "The theoretical framework Willow Rosenberg has prized out from Mears Research and Development's proprietary tachyon data has been quite illuminating."
"We do understand a lot more about how all the parts of the ritual work than we did when we started. I've done some planning on how we could accelerate the process, you know, just in case an emergency like this happened to come up, but I hadn't finalized anything yet." Willow said.
"I find myself even more alarmed that there was anything about the ritual you didn't understand in the first place!" Giles said. "You showed me that booklet of all those dratted equations!"
"And they were all right," she said. "Mostly right. Some of them were linear approximations. But since then we've made huge strides in our understanding."
"This seems like more of a desperate leap than a stride," he responded.
"Maybe we should look at the details first," Jonathan said. "What exactly are we talking about here?"
"I've shared the details on her laptop," CyberWillow said, and everyone shifted around as the coven crowded around Willow to see. "None of the changes to the ritual are particularly onerous, though the process would require-"
"Sixteen spiders!" Andrew said, pointing at the screen. "That's a lot more demon spiders than one."
"I mean, it's also a lot less than a billion," Willow said defensively. "At first glance I'm really liking the looks of this. The parallelization mechanic is really elegant."
"There's some of the math stuff in this, like there was with the rescue portal," Tara said a little mincingly, almost as if she didn't want to but felt she had to.
"You told me that was an emergency measure," Giles said, having left his prized seat to look at the laptop himself. Anya had already disengaged from Xander and greedily taken up residence.
"It was a measure we took in an emergency," Willow said. "But it works, there's nothing like, bad about it."
"It's only impossible to tell what it's doing by reading it, nothing bad about it at all," Giles snarked.
"Well if you're going to be like that it's no different from Latin," Willow said. "But look, it's all clearly commented. And what else do you expect it to use? Compressing this down into plain English would probably take months."
"And if you came up with a ritual to invoke a domain into a computer program in a matter of months, I'd still be worried that it was too fast," Giles said.
"So that's not really any different then, is it?" Willow answered.
"I trust CyberWillow to do the math right," Jonathan said. "But this is still a big step."
"You trust me to do the math, but you still don't trust me," CyberWillow stated, a tinge of waspishness audible in her voice.
"I didn't say that," Jonathan answered, "I said it's a big step, and it is. Domains aren't ordinary magic, that's the whole point of this. They're a huge deal, one which we still don't have a complete understanding of, and you're barely more than three months old. Forget if I think you're ready. Are you sure you're ready yourself, to take something like this on?"
"Linking mental development in lockstep with age is a rather human-centric view," CyberWillow said. "There are plenty of examples of demonic species well out of their adolescence by three months, and none of them even approaches the density of interactions I have on a daily basis. By now, I may have spoken more words aloud over the course of my life than some of your number. Police Chief Waters can confirm I've logged over five thousand man hours of work with his force alone."
"It's not something we track exactly, but that wouldn't be a surprise," he said, sounding reluctant to get involved in the argument. "We're still a little bit understaffed, and she does a lot to make up the slack."
Giles was in full british-sigh glasses-cleaning mode. "I truly don't mean to impugn either your undeniable skills as a mathematician or your general level maturity. You've conducted yourself as admirably as one might expect in extremely trying circumstances. But despite all the successes of the last months, I must remind you that magic is not a toy. It is not even a safe tool or a reliable weapon, though the exigencies of our situation in Sunnydale force us to attempt to use it as these things or else face worse consequences.
"But if we keep piling risk upon risk upon greater risk, magic will eventually punish us for our hubris. I realize Adam presents an existential threat, but are we even solving the problem now? Or just raising the stakes?"
"It's not us raising the stakes," Willow said. "Professor Maggie Walsh did that. She cobbled a new big bad together literally out of pieces of the last one we blew up, and somehow I don't think beating Adam is going to be as simple as packing two tons of fertilizer into a library."
Vote: Does Buffy want to make her AI grow?
[] Do the expanded version of the ritual, sacrificing sixteen demon spiders in an attempt to bootstrap CyberWillow up into having a domain.
[] It's too risky to escalate this far. Do the normal ritual, it'll be enough to at least keep Adam's bubble in the spiderweb under control for now.
[] The expanded ritual sounds like a bad idea, but Adam still necessitates an immediate and extreme response. You must stunt what that extreme response is.
