5. Omake - DOOM R&R
- Location
- The general area. Possibly behind you.
This is the result of an idea that originated on Discord, and wouldn't let me get back to writing the things I am actually working on until I got it out of the way. So you get some wordz 
Crickets chirped in the night, the sound covering the more distant noises coming from miles away of cars on the interstate. Other than that it was as quiet as the grave, appropriately enough considering the location.
A light breeze added a faint susurrus to the ambiance as it moved the leaves of the trees and whispered through the grass of the unkempt and ill-maintained cemetery, disturbing the flowers left at a couple of fresher burial plots. A rabbit, hopping through the undergrowth, froze at the sound, ears alert and nose twitching, then relaxed and continued about its business.
Shortly afterwards, it stilled once more, immobile and staring as a misty dark pink cloud appeared out of nowhere in among the crypts. The strange manifestation was completely silent, but radiated a certain menace that even a simple animal could easily pick up on.
A second or two later a tall figure stepped out of the cloud, appearing as if it had walked around a corner that wasn't there in a manner that would have made a human observer wince. The heavily armored arrival looked around, the matte purple helmet moving from side to side, then it pulled out some sort of device from somewhere and inspected the thing briefly, before nodding and turning to the north, in the direction of the center of the town on whose outskirts this resting place of the dead lay. It studied the scanning device again, then put it away, before raising its hands to its helmet and removing it with a faint click.
Once the helmet was lifted clear, it revealed a young woman with long wavy black hair and piercing green eyes which moved across the dark scene, not apparently having any trouble with the night and the lack of illumination, only relieved by a thin shard of moon high above. She sniffed, then smiled slightly.
The rabbit moved a tiny amount, then froze again as the armored young woman snapped her head around so fast it wasn't even a blur, to stare directly at it in the long grass with unerring accuracy. Then she smiled faintly.
"Hello, bunny," she said very quietly, looking at the animal, which peered back, before twitching and spinning around then hopping away. The woman watched it go with mild amusement for a moment or two. Eventually she tucked her helmet under her arm and pulled out her scanner once more, flicking a couple of controls with her thumb and looking at the results with interest.
"Huh. Worth investigating, I guess," she mumbled to herself. "I could do with a nice relaxing vacation anyway. Let's see what that is."
Having made a note of the direction to what her instruments indicated was some sort of dimensional breach, she put the device back in her armor and began walking through the graveyard, looking around with an air of one who's seen it before and wasn't impressed the first time. As she walked she put her helmet back on.
Eventually she left the unusually large cemetery and found herself on a road which led towards the main part of the town, street lights in the distance illuminating the horizon with a dim glow. Glancing up at the sign at the entrance, she read it, then shrugged.
"Sunnydale. Never heard of it."
She turned her back on her arrival point and casually walked on, her power armor making surprisingly quiet but menacingly heavy footsteps in the dark.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Half an hour later, a head poked out of the still-there pink mist, looking around with quick motions. It wasn't even slightly human, glowing eyes inspecting the landscape with caution and intelligence. Seconds later it vanished again.
A short period later and it came back, complete with the thing it was part of, who was at the head of a procession of even more bizarre figures who followed it as it headed deeper into the graveyard. When the last of them was clear, the mist faded from view. The night returned to quiet and calm.
Until the screaming began a couple of hours later, much of it underground in the extensive network of tunnels that underlay the entire area.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
"What are you supposed to be?"
The voice came from a dark alley Taylor was walking past, causing her to slow as two figures emerged into the pool of light produced by a nearby streetlamp. She'd been aware of them for some time, and knew there were others in the area, including three more down the same alley.
Stopping, she looked them up and down as they did the same to her. Both appeared more or less human but clearly weren't as they had no real biosigns as far as her armor's sensors were concerned, read as ambient temperature, and had deformed faces. She could see elongated incisors in the mouth of the one that had spoken, who was roughly as tall as she was but about twice as wide, dressed in clothing that would have been in style in the sixties at the latest. His companion was shorter and skinnier, and was wearing a baseball cap backwards over slicked back hair. Both of them had somewhat puzzled expressions on their faces, easily discernible even past the distortions caused by whatever was wrong with them.
She smiled a little inside her helmet. They felt almost like some of the things she encountered in her travels but far less interesting and so weak it was laughable. The sad part was that based on their body language they thought themselves to be predators.
It was rather amusing in a way.
"Halloween was months ago," the same one said after a few seconds, smirking at her as he tried to look through her faceplate. "Nice costume, though."
"Thank you," she replied politely. "What did you go as?"
The creature stared at her, then laughed loudly. "Ha. A sense of humor. Won't help, but that was pretty funny, girl."
She shrugged and resumed walking. Both of them stepped out in front of her, causing her to stop again, then sigh faintly. "Really? What do you want?"
He leered at her. "Maybe see what's inside the wrapping?" he replied, reaching out for her shoulder.
Taylor calmly broke his arm at the elbow, then said, "Don't touch the armor. No one touches the armor."
The creature recoiled, his right arm hanging limply, echoes of the meaty crack dying away in the quiet streets. Which were far quieter than seemed plausible, she mused as she watched to see what would happen next. "Bitch!" he screamed in pain. "That fucking hurt!" Grabbing his arm he massaged it, exchanged a look with his companion, then both of them lunged at her.
Sidestepping she grabbed him by the top of the head and gently squeezed, the result being a sound best described as a mix between 'crunch' and 'pop.' The headless corpse stumbled a single further step then flashed into a cloud of dust which settled to the ground with a very quiet hiss.
"Oh, shit," the second one managed to say before she punched him in the back hard enough to send him flying about eighty feet into the side of a parked truck, which rocked on its suspension and vibrated with a loud clang. He slid down the now-dented side, landing on the street on his face, then slowly climbed to his feet shaking his head. When he turned to look at her he just had time to have his eyes widen before a low-power shot from her plasma rifle turned him to an expanding cloud of vapor, the shot also punching a hole completely through the truck behind him.
"Oops," she muttered, somewhat embarrassed, then looked down at the weapon and made a couple of adjustments. "Too much power. Drop it another, hmm, forty percent maybe?"
Pointing the gun to the side she pulled the trigger three times, the shots going down the alley. "Yeah, that works. Hardly any collateral damage at all."
Satisfied, she put the weapon away again and resumed her pace, while three piles of dust settled out behind her.
"I wonder what those things were?" she said to herself as she walked, following the readings on her scanner which she consulted every now and then. "Meh. Not important. Neat the way they dispose of themselves though."
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
"Just what I wanted," Drusilla softly said, holding Spike's hand, as she stared at the horned blue demon. Looking up at her from his wheelchair, the blond vampire smiled a little, before going back to examining the newly-resurrected Judge.
As he was about to say something, a brilliant orange-yellow fireball came over his head from the direction of the down to the tunnels below them, impacting on the Judge who didn't even have a chance to say anything. The demon exploded into gibbets of steaming meat as all the vampires present froze in shock, then as one turned to look to where whatever it was had come from.
"We serve HER will," the huge and vastly more impressively horned creature standing behind half a dozen human-sized brownish creatures remarked with a nasty grin on his face. "We deal with the minor problems that are beneath HER notice, so that she might concentrate on the more important ones."
"What the fuck are you?" Spike shouted. He was furious, but also looking warily at the smaller demonic figures, two of which were holding fireballs in their hands and clearly ready to fire. He'd never seen or heard of either type of demon before, which was worrying.
The large one stared at him for a second or two, then laughed in a deep unsettling voice. "We are HERS to command. SHE leads, we follow, and all join her or fall before her might." It took a step closer, its huge hooves clomping on the stone floor, and raised a hand which began to glow green. Spike's eyes widened in horror. "Unfortunately for you, vermin are unworthy of HER."
The last thing any of them saw was a green fireball the size of a car.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Giles walked out of his office, where Buffy was napping with her head resting on her folded arms, to meet Angel walking down the stairs from the stacks. As he was half-way through asking a question, he was interrupted by the vampire suddenly stiffening, raising his eyes from the book he was holding to the door out of the library. The Watcher quickly turned to look in the same direction. "What is it?" he said urgently, well aware how much better than human Angel's hearing was.
"Footsteps," Angel replied in a low voice, sounding worried. "Heavy ones."
"The Judge?" Giles was appalled. "Here? Now?"
"I don't know," the other man said, closing the book and dropping it to the table, then heading for the door. Everyone stopped what they were doing as they became aware something was wrong. Quickly moving back into his office Giles grabbed an ax from under one of his desks and went back into the main room, just in time to see Angel's body come flying through the doorway, removing one of the doors from its hinges en route. Xander and Cordelia ducked as the vampire went overhead and slammed into the book cage with a crash that shook the room, then dropped to the floor.
"Good lord," Giles stammered, watching in shock, then turned as solid footsteps became audible, moving at a completely even pace towards the library from the corridor outside. The entire group of people tore their horrified attention from the groaning vampire on the floor and also looked back at the door.
A moment later they recoiled in shock as a tall figure wearing some sort of high tech matte purple armor appeared in the entrance, lifting a hand to casually brush the remaining door half out of the way, while the other hand was occupied with a small device that was emitting a series of chirping sounds and blinking a display of some sort. The new arrival's entire attention was on the thing as it entered the library, ignoring everyone present aside from stepping over Xander who had hit the deck when Angel came past.
"Excuse me," it said absently, sounding like a young woman. She waved the little device around slowly, the sounds coming and going, until she stopped with it pointing at the far side of the room.
Directly at the capped Hell Mouth, Giles realized with a sinking sensation.
"Aha!" she exclaimed, sounding pleased. "There it is." She moved towards it.
Angel, who had recovered from what must have been an enormous impact, climbed painfully to his feet then lunged at her with his entire unnatural speed and power.
Without looking at him she back-handed him so fast and so hard that Giles couldn't even track the motion, the vampire abruptly reversing course and ending up right back where he'd begun, with another crash. The armored woman completely ignored him and walked over to the large table that was sitting on top of the cap, then easily slid it to the side with a screech from the legs on the floor. She showed no sign of effort from shifting something so heavy it normally took half a dozen people to handle.
"What do we do, Giles?" Willow said in a hoarse whisper, behind her hand, as she stared fixedly at the armored woman, who was now bending over examining the cap closely. "Who is that? Some sort of demon?" Jenny was standing next to the girl, gaping at the purple armor with a look of complete disbelief on her face, while Xander had got to his hands and knees and quickly crawled over to Cordelia, both teenagers now hiding behind one of the other tables and watching cautiously.
"I don't know, nor do I know who or what that is." He shook his head, frantically going over every demon he could think of to try to identify their unwelcome visitor. None he could think of used armor of this nature. It looked, aside from anything else, more like some form of technology than something magic-based, although his own mystical senses were screaming that it was radiating a sort of magical energy that utterly dwarfed anything he'd ever experienced in his life. Even in his wild younger years.
"Hmm. Crap job, it's leaking like crazy," the woman commented as she ran another device over the seal. He couldn't work out where she'd got it from or where the first one had gone. "Dimensional flux is unstable too. Whoever did this has no idea how do it properly." She didn't seem to be talking to them, it was more like she was making notes to herself. "I knew this would come in handy sooner or later, though." She produced yet another widget, this one in a shape that was hard to look at. "Crazy reptiles know their stuff, unlike whoever did this," she mumbled, making some adjustments on the whatever-it-was while glancing between it and the seal.
Giles had a very bad feeling about what was going on.
"Demon! Get away from there!" Everyone jumped as Buffy came zooming out of the office, having apparently just become aware of what was going on, and launched herself at the armored woman in a flying high kick.
And immediately found herself dangling from one ankle which was held in the armored gauntlet of the woman, who had straightened, turned, and lashed out so quickly the movement made the Slayer look like she was moving in slow motion. Giles gaped in complete shock, not having ever seen anything living react that quickly. It was far faster than even a Slayer could move.
"Hey, stop that," the woman said mildly, lifting the much shorter blonde to eye level. "I'm busy. If you want to fight, it'll have to wait." She lowered Buffy to the floor again and let go, the girl tucking into a roll instantly and rebounding towards the armored woman in a blur of lethal blows.
"What did I just say?" the woman sighed, grabbing Buffy by the clothing and lifting her clear of the floor again. The girl lashed out with hands and feet, which achieved absolutely nothing.
"Holy shit," Giles heard Xander say in a tone of wonderment. "Who is that?"
"Look, if you want to play, I'm game, but I really am busy right now, so if you could just calm down that would help, OK?" Whoever was in the armor walked over to a chair and firmly put Buffy, who was going red with fury and still kicking and punching the arm holding her without any effect at all, in it. "Sit. Stay. Good girl."
She let go and turned around, then sighed heavily as Buffy was suddenly on her back, trying to unscrew her head.
"Really? Can't I go on vacation without idiots attacking me all over the place?" the woman grumbled as she unpeeled the furious blonde, then casually kicked Angel in the stomach as he again attacked her from the other side. For the third time he slammed into the wall then dropped on the floor, this time on his back, looking dazed. Buffy shrieked in rage and struggled harder, to no avail whatsoever. "Weird deformed dead people all over the place, this idiot, and blondie with anger management issues," she went on, holding Buffy in the air with one hand while she felt over her armor with the other one. "Which, coming from me, is hilarious. Ah." She produced a small gun-like device and pointed it at the struggling blonde girl, then fired it before anyone could do anything.
There was a faint hiss and a moment later Buffy relaxed completely, a smile on her face. "Better," the woman said in satisfaction. "This time just sit there, all right?" She put Buffy back into the chair, then let go, before quickly grabbing her again as she threatened to slide out of it. "Whoops. Dose was a little too high," she remarked to the room at large. "Oh well. She's got a fast metabolism, it'll be fine."
"I can see everything," Buffy said in a dreamy voice. "It's made of lizards."
The entire room, including Angel, stared at her.
She giggled. "So pretty..."
"Yeah… Definitely too high a dose," the woman finally said, shaking her head. She patted Buffy on the shoulder then went back to the Hell Mouth and resumed fiddling with the odd looking device.
"Who are you?" Cordelia erupted, standing up from where she and Xander had been hiding. The boy put his hand over his eyes and remained where he was.
Turning to her, the armored woman looked at her for a moment. "My name's Taylor," she replied without rancor. "I'm not local. Just passing through. I needed a little relaxation and this dimension seems interesting." Then she went back to whatever it was that she was doing.
"Ah… What are you doing, Taylor?" Giles asked very carefully. "And for that matter, what did you do to Buffy?"
"Buffy?" The woman who called herself Taylor glanced at him, the lights reflecting from her golden visor in a way that was rather unnerving, then looked at the inanely grinning blonde who seemed to be fascinated by her own fingers. "Really? Huh. It's just a mild tranquilizer gas. People I picked it up from use it for non-lethal takedowns. Seems pretty effective." She chuckled a little. "She's going to really want a drink of water when it wears off though. And she might be missing a few minutes. It's safe otherwise."
"I see," Giles replied, lying through his teeth. None of this made any sense whatsoever. "And your purpose here in this room?"
Taylor indicated the Hell Mouth cap. "Picked up the signature of a dimensional breach, thought I'd come and have a look at it. I've seen something like this before and it was good fun sorting it out." She sounded almost eager, in a way that made his blood run cold.
"That's a portal to hell itself, you crazy woman," Cordelia screamed.
"Hell?" Taylor looked at her, then down at the seal, before reaching up and pulling her helmet off. The face under it was of someone perhaps nineteen or so, with eyes that were much too old but sparking with a bizarre sort of humor and high intelligence. "Yeah, no. It's not Hell, I can guarantee you that. I'd know. It's just a parallel micro-universe full of hostile and xenophobic kind of aliens. I've seen that before. They're really entertaining for a while," she explained patiently, holding up the device which was even more difficult to look at now. "Not much of a challenge but sometimes it's amusing to have endless waves of enemies coming at you, you know?"
She looked somehow nostalgic for a second, if a grin that horrifying could be termed as such.
"Anyway, I'll just pop this thing open and I'll be out of your hair," she went on, putting her helmet on the table next to her, then raising the device in her hand.
A crossbow bolt hit her in the back of the head and exploded into fragments.
Everyone turned to see Angel holding the crossbow it had come from, then turned back to look at Taylor, who had apparently not actually noticed.
"Oh, shit," the vampire said very quietly indeed.
"There we are. Got the resonant frequency locked, so all I have to do is find the second harmonic and put it in antiphase, then ramp up the gain, and..." She prodded the thing. A deep rumble made the room vibrate, while a very high pitched whine like an angry mosquito accompanied it.
The floor smoked inside the seal, then it cracked. Otherworldly light spread upwards from the ground, filling the room with an unholy glow.
Taylor smiled widely, lit from beneath with reddish illumination. She bent over the widening opening, peering down with an expression of interest, as everyone else simply observed, unable to think of anything to do in the face of completely insane armored women from nowhere. "Oh, cool, that's even better than I hoped," she exclaimed happily. Making the device vanish, she picked up her helmet and put it on, the thing sealing with a click, then was suddenly holding an enormous gun unlike anything any of them had ever seen before.
Buffy pointed at it and giggled.
"See you later," the mad woman called, then dived head first into the gaping Hell Mouth with a whoop.
A couple of seconds after that there was a screech of rage that made the entire building shake. Glass shattered somewhere.
The Hell Mouth slammed shut with a boom.
Silence fell.
Nearly five minutes went past with not a single sound from any of them.
Then Buffy hiccuped. "Wow, I'm thirsty," she commented brightly, shaking her head as they all looked at her. "Hey, what's going on? Why are you looking at me like that? Giles, you broke your glasses!"
He looked down at the distorted mess in his hand, then sighed.
A very faint roar came from somewhere he couldn't pinpoint, making Buffy cock her head and look around for a moment. "Did anyone else hear that?"
Angel put the crossbow on the table, then sat down next to it and stared at the Hell Mouth with a completely blank expression. Giles went into his office to look for his spare glasses.
"Why does my mouth feel like I ate a pound of sand?" Buffy complained. "Yuck. Gross."
He wondered how much scotch he could add to his tea before anyone noticed.
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