Trace Coburn’s Plot-Tribble Sanctuary (snippets and offcuts, mostly Buffy-related)

[Death by Chains]

Scholastic Assistance Services, Balmoral Shopping Centre
15:23, Friday, March 29, 1996

"You're what?" Buffy blinked, a little blankly. "You're who the what now?"

"They gave you the 'one girl in every generation' speech, eh?" realised the crazy woman with the long dark-auburn hair and the faint Russian accent, her expression not unkind. "It's very Star Wars, gives a nice 'Chosen One' kind of feel to things, but there's a few problems with it. For starters, it skips a lot of really important details."

"You might be going a little fast, there, Taz," Misha noted dryly. "Give her a second to catch up."

"I... but... how?" the blonde finally managed.

'Taz' motioned for her to take her seat again, then flashed Misha an impish smile and quite deliberately draped herself across his lap, hooking one arm over his shoulders for balance and seemingly oblivious to the alarming creak from their plastic chair. (For his part, Misha caught Buffy's eye and gave her a helpless microshrug — tinged with a hint of smugness — before steadying his wife with both arms around her waist.) After a split-second's hesitation, she glanced at Giles and beckoned him over with a jerk of her head, waiting until all were seated before resuming. "Technically speaking, you're my replacement. There's a lot of politics and other bullshit around it, but the short version is, the British Council of Watchers have spent three years making an absolute dog's breakfast of 'running' the show out here. Back in November, they finally realised it, took a look at how hard it'd be to actually fix the whole mess, and decided it'd easier to just start fresh with a new Slayer."

Meaning me, clearly. "What do you mean, 'start fresh'?"

Taz unzipped the sleeve-pocket on her black aviator jacket, pulled out something that rattled, and backhanded it across the table. Buffy's reflexes absently snatched it out of the air, and she glanced down to look at it: a plastic vial, holding several mangled copper-and-grey lumps. "As 'retirement packages' go, four bullets in the back wouldn't have been my choice," the redhead observed sardonically. "Not that our 'employers' asked me beforehand. If they had, I would've warned them not to hunt what they can't kill."

"Some bastards just have to learn the hard way," Misha shrugged. "Rule One of Slaying: 'Dying is bad: don't do it.' Corollary to Rule One: 'If some bastard does kill you, take a breath, walk it off, then hunt him down and return the favour. See how he fucking likes it.'"

"But, since the Poms stuffed that up like they have everything else since March of '93, here I am, and here you are. And someone at the Council decided to actually put their brain in gear for a few minutes and make the best of things: they decided this" a handwave at the general situation "gave them a unique opportunity. Normally Slayers get trained by Watchers, and by-and-large they do an okay job — especially if you ask them! — but someone who can teach a Slayer the job from a first-hand perspective? That's a little less common."

"I'm... still stuck on the whole 'two Slayers at once' thing," Buffy admitted, giving the cuddling couple a baffled look. "I... how?"

"Killing a Slayer can be easy, or hard, but in my case, the trick is making sure I stay dead," Taz shrugged. "How'd I manage the Lazarus trick? I'm not telling!" she sing-songed at Giles.

"But she was dead, at least briefly, and that... led to your, uh, Calling, Miss Summers," Giles added.

"Oh," was all the blonde could manage to that. After a moment, she brightened. "But hey: if you're already here, and all up-to-speed with the local creature-features, you guys don't need me to do the Slayage thing. So, um... bye!" She all but bolted out of her chair, started to turn for the door —

"D'you mind returning my 'retirement package' before you go?" Taz asked with deceptive casualness.

Buffy froze and looked down at her hand, still holding the vial. Looked at the four bullets within.

"Don't worry: I'm sure the Council will arrange yours before the start of Second Term," Misha added meaningfully.

When the Californian looked up again, it was to give Giles a glare that held murder of its own. "You mean you people would —!"

"Oh, he wouldn't be the one to pull the trigger," Taz shrugged. "I doubt he even knows the people who would; they keep those things separate for exactly this kind of reason. 'Plausible deniability,' it's called. No, whoever arranges for you to meet with a mischief will be some 'renegade Watcher', someone 'acting on their own', 'against protocol and without official orders'." The acid on those phrases would have burned through plate steel. "That's who it was with me, after all."

"You have to understand, this 'apprenticeship' thing is a last-minute jerry-rigged idea, and not something they're married to — especially with how they feel about Taz being even vaguely involved, much less actively influencing a new Slayer." Misha shifted his wife in his arms a little. "There's a lot of people who don't think this 'mistress-and-apprentice' thing can actually work; there's a fair few who want to make sure it doesn't. And if you walk out that door, you'll be giving them the perfect excuse to either get a new Slayer to replace you and try again, or just 'cancel' the whole thing as a bad idea."

"I'd be interested in learning how you know so much about the Council's internal politics," Giles noted thoughtfully.

"'Get used to disappointment'," the younger man returned immediately, not even glancing his way.

 

[Death by Chains]

Inspired by a certain scene in A California Cainite in Mayor WIlkins' Court. This one is a scene (probable out-take?) from later on in She Came All The Way From America and contains mild spoilers for Falling Cherry Blossoms.




"Y'know, I actually got to do that, once," Taz noted offhandly. "'Snot nearly as practical as Cameron makes it look."

That got pretty much everybody's attention. Xander fumbled for the remote and paused the tape just as Arnie's inner HUD brought up the message { "HUMAN CASUALTIES: 0.0" }. "You used a minigun?" he blurted, wide-eyed as all his fellow younger Irregulars.

"We had a caper up in Japan a couple of years ago. The situation developed rapidly, as it does —"

Especially with you, Buffy noted, just a touch waspishly. She knew the older Slayer wasn't deliberately trying to overshadow her or make her feel irrelevant or inexperienced, but at times like this, when her barely three months of being a Slayer were compared to the redhead's three years — or was it eight? She'd said something about 'temporal folds' and 'parallel universes' earlier, right? — it was hard not to feel very much like the newcomer to the sisterhood.

"— and at the end, it turned into a stoush at a movie studio. It was a Yakuza thing, so there were goons with guns, their supporting mages, and the Demon Lord they'd summoned, joker named 'Zaszas'." Taz's eyes lost focus, and Buffy suddenly realised what people meant by 'thousand-yard stare'. "All kinds of bad news, that bastard."

After a moment, Misha's arm tightened around her shoulders for an instant, though he didn't look much better.

Evidently reassured, and jogged back on track, the Russian-born Slayer cleared her throat and went on. "Well, once we'd cleared out everything on the undercard, it was time for the main event, like it usually goes during these things. The three of us — me, and Misha, and Yukio — we all broke into the main ritual room. We got there about half a minute too late: their sorcerors had killed their victim and finished summoning Zaszas. So, we had to back off and go for some more firepower."

"And there was a minigun just... lying around?" Xander wondered, a faint note of hysteria in his voice.

"One of the props they had in the armoury," Taz shrugged. "They even had a pallet of live ammo, though Heaven alone knows how, considering Japan's firearms laws make the UK look like the Wild West. Tell you what, though? There's a lot of things that scene doesn't mention," she judged, a little ruefully.

"Oh?" Cordelia arched one perfectly-plucked eyebrow.

"First off, the weapon itself is the better part of twenty kilos, so anybody who isn't a Slayer or Mister T-800 there can forget moving fast while carrying it. Secondly, they're externally powered, usually electrically, so you need juice to run it; Arnie had a hidden extension-cord going off-screen, but the studio one had what was basically a car-battery in a backpack, and that was like twenty kilos in itself. Thirdly, there's the ammo: the backpack held a thousand rounds, about twenty seconds of trigger-time the way this one was rigged, and between the ammo and the feed-mechanism that was another thirty kilos in the backpack. Put together, the whole rig weighed more than I did!"

"Fourthly," Misha added dryly, "there's the teensy little detail of whether or not bullets will actually work on your target. I mean, we were shit-outta for other options, so we figured we might as well give it a go...."

"Zaszas saw me coming, all two-and-a-half-metres of him. He just smirked and held out his hands, and his war-kit just materialised in his hands, like that heater-shield and Godsawful chain-mace formed out of black smoke. I spun up the gun, he hunkered down behind his shield, I pulled the trigger, and... he must've reinforced the shield with magic, because when that bullet-stream hit it, it was like watching someone aiming a Roman candle at a glass window. Tracers deflecting up and around in all directions, FMJs sparking and bouncing all over the show — though thankfully, somehow, not back our way! — and the most hideous clatter.

"Worst part was, it did more to knock me about than it did him! My sunnies were enchanted for protection against flashbangs and noise, so the muzzle-flash didn't quite blind me, and the noise and concussion didn't quite deafen me; hell, in a confined space like that studio, the overpressure from the echoes probably should've outright ruptured my eardrums, so I ended up literally counting my blessings later. And all that recoil literally pushed me back across the floor by half a metre or so, combat-boots notwithstanding; I s'pose I'm lucky it didn't just throw me flat on my arse.

"Anyway, the minigun goes dry, and after a few seconds Zaszas peeks up over the rim of his shield and just smirks at me again, like he'd always known that was going to be a waste of time."

Cordelia arched one sardonic eyebrow. "You couldn't have shot around the shield?"

"After the first couple of seconds I went after all the pieces of him I could see behind it, mostly his feet and shins, his back shoulder, the top of his head... where the bullets didn't just bounce off, they tore away bits of flesh, but they grew back and closed over almost as fast as I could shoot 'em away," the older Slayer shrugged. "So, I hit the release on the harness, shrugged off the whole rig, and went back to doing things the old-fashioned way."

"'It was worth a crack, Nigel!'" Misha interjected. "'... uhhh, Nigel?'"

Taz chuckled at him sidelong, clearly getting a private joke. "The three of us ended up trying to fight this prick back-and-forth across and around most of the studio, usually two of us having a go at him with hand-weapons so the third could try to throw a spell at him, but none of that was making much of an impression. Didn't help having a thousand-odd loose seven-six-two casings scattered all over the floor, either. Of course, that worked both ways: more than once, someone ended up going arse-over-kite just as Zaszas was taking a swing. That morningstar of his had a head a good half-metre across, and the way he was swinging the thing, we'd've been crushed us to gravy if he'd ever managed a solid hit. Worst part was, as things went on we were starting to get tired and slow, and he just kept on trucking — probably using magic for extra stamina, or something.

"D'you know the most combat value we got out of that minigun rig? Bastard ended up tripping over the thing, so we finally had a decent opening. Yukio ran a naginata into his thigh, right up to the socket, and Misha gave him a kidney-massage with his axes. Me? I got the 'joy' of the finishing combo: first swing chopped off his weapon-hand, the backstroke carved open his guts, and when he stumbled to his knees, I grabbed my sword in both hands and gave him the Highlander Special." Another shrug. "So, yeah: there are some gribblies we can fight with firearms. And there are gribblies where a man-portable Gatling gun is most useful as a tripping hazard. The trick is knowing which is which in time to choose the right weapon for the job."