FicWad

The texaswookie is teleported into a room and groans as he gets back up, wondering just what it is that he will be facing this time. He looks around and doesn’t see anything off hand, wishing that he had some type of chocolate after that run in with the Dementor. He suddenly begins to shake in fear as the lights go out and large green mutated rats from his nightmares start showing up. “No, you’re not real.” The writer says, as he takes a fearful step back, a cool wind blows and he looks behind him to see Barbus the demon of Fear standing behind him with a mocking grin on his elderly face.

“Are you absolutely sure that they’re not real?” The writer just swallows nervously as the Green Mutated Rats come ever closer. "I must congratulate you, it has been quite a while since I’ve had to do mutated rats even if these aren’t the biggest ones that I’ve ever done.” The texaswookie just stands there and shakes in fear. “There, there it will soon all be over.”

“R-Right.” The writer says disbelievingly. “Tell you what, I give the disclaimer you make these things leave.”

“Well, I suppose I can work with that.”

“Fine, good, great even. Whoa!” The texaswookie jumps backs as one of the rats takes an angry swipe at him. “Crap,” the writer croaks, as his throat becomes too dry to talk.

“Aguamenti!” Ron Weasley says, shooting a stream of water at the writer from his wand, and soaking the writer to the bone.

“Couldn’t you have just made a glass out of something?”

“Oh yeah.” The Weasley boy says with a blush, as he made a wooden cup appear. “Hear ya go mate.”

“Thanks.” The writer says dryly.

“Thank me by getting rid of those bloody green rats of yours.”

“Right, I the writer of this story lay no claim whatsoever to any of the characters in this story that I have written. They belong to various companies and writers and if you’ll look through the other chapters you’ll find the exact names of the people that own the characters I am using.” The rats and Barbus gave disappointed looks but disappeared in a cloud of smoke. “Well that was a kind of fun that wasn’t.”

(The green mutant rats actually were an old childhood fear of mine that I actually got over, though sometimes I still see them when I close my eyes.)





_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Meetings & Bribes


Buffy forced herself up from the nice comfy chair that she had been sitting in, and looked at the concerned faces of all of the people gathered in this room. ’All right, almost all of the people.’ She thought, as she saw the glare of Kennedy, though it did have a bit of respect in it now. She also saw the looks of indifference that the Brotherhood of Mutants had to her struggle to stand. The only one of the Brotherhood who seemed to actually be paying her any mind was the bucket head guy. What did he call himself again, Magenta? She swallowed before she began to address the people in the room giving a quick glance to either side of her where the two ensouled vampires sat. “I hate to admit it people, but we’re still getting our collective butts handed to us despite the numbers we now have. The fact that every human that died and left a body, or was at least buried in Sunnyhell rose up and attacked us probably has something to do with that though.”

“You think?” A dozen different people muttered at her sarcastically.

Buffy smirked lightly at that response. “Yeah I do. After all as the person in charge I happen to now have the power to state the oh so very obvious, and I can look pretty while doing it too.”

“She’s got a point you know, she does look better saying it when you compare her next to a balding General.” Jack pointed out, getting some more chuckles and a few scandalized looks.

“All right, now that we’re ready,” the Slayer said getting serious, “how do we stop this invasion from hell? We may have hurt them, but they’ve still got a lot of people and bodies to use against us. What are the losses anyways?” The Slayer asked hesitantly, afraid to know what the answer would be.

“We’ve lost Hagrid from the Wizards, and Colossus from the X-Men, they are both so beat up that it’s a miracle that they’re even alive actually. Slayer Faith is severely wounded with almost no use of her right arm at the moment, though she should be nearly completely healed by tomorrow, we’ve lost a number of soldiers and wizards and witches, and we’re down to four Jaffa counting Teal’c, the rest of us are hurt and tired from all of the fighting that we have been doing over the past few hours.” Sam Finn explained to the woman before her.

“Any ideas what the First’s numbers are like?” The blonde asked to the gathered group.

“Unknown, but we do know that the First still has the loyalty of the Demon Ninja, they are just currently without a leader for the moment.” The woman said as she looked over the papers.

"That Amy witch is still out there to though yo." Faith pointed out from where she sat next to the scoobies. "Don’t know if any of you noticed, but that bitch has some serious mojo going for her. If it hadn’t been for farmer boy and Streak, I don’t think she would have had to run off. Hell I don’t think that she would have dropped her shield if it was just us."

"Beast you look like you have something to add." Xavier said looking at his student whom had looked up at the mention of the alien and Rogue.

"Nothing to do with the enemy statistics we are currently in conflict with.” Dr. McCoy assured his mentor as he looked up from a clipboard that he was working on. “I am merely going over the skin sample I picked up when we were doing medical scans for our various patients. This particular one is Rogue’s. It appears that the enhancements she withdrew from Kal-El have yet to fade away as Magneto can attest for us with her enhanced muscular ability. In fact from what I was able to ascertain, the abilities from your dimensional polar opposite of your adopted Extra Terrestrial kinsman may be permanent addendum to her physical condition that she will have to acclimatize herself to."

"In English?" Dean, Jack, Wolverine, Ron, Prue, Xander and Buffy growled in annoyance at the blue furred scientist. They spoke with the tired air of people long accustomed to reminding someone that not everyone understood these sorts of things.

"He said that the powers Rogue got from Kal-El aren’t all going away sir." Carter said loudly enough so that everyone could hear her. "In fact they appear to be becoming permanent and she might need to learn how to deal with it."

"Well why couldn’t he have just said that?" Jack asked getting an eye roll from various people.

"Why do that when he has someone to translate for him?" Daniel returned with a smirk at his friend.

Jack scowled at the dig that his friend had just taken at him. "Right, whatever." The colonel said waving the archeologist off.

Buffy sighed as she realized that she had to get the conversation focused back on the bad guys now that Jack had eased the tension in the room. "Anyways, what about the dark wand waving wizards?"

"They appear to be incapacitated at the moment. It is likely that the vast amount of magical energy used in raising the large amount of inferi has tiered them out. Much like raising and holding that fire shield around the base did our own wand wavers. Even more so if as we suspect the dark mark is able to feed the magic of the Death Eaters into Voldemort."

"Well that’s good, so they’re either out of it or waiting to heal up that means we got a really narrow time to take them on and kick their butts right?" Someone said hopefully.

"Fraid so kiddo." Methos told the speaker.

"Great, anyone got any super butt stomping ideas?" Buffy questioned hopefully.

"The Brotherhood has already participated and done all that it plans to in this battle." Magneto said from his seat. "I shall take any of you with special abilities with me when we take our leave. Sad though it is, it is obvious that the Earth is not going to survive the coming darkness, if those in this building are all that will be standing against it."

"You just got here, you sure you don’t want to hang around and see the sights? We could show you all of the cool cemeteries. You simply can’t come to Sunnydale and not at least stop at one of the cemeteries." Xander shot off at the mutant leader that was already preparing to run again.

"Do not annoy me human, I have very little patience for your kind." Magneto threatened, while Pyro stepped up to meet the man a lighter in either of his hands.

"That’s enough." Duncan said sliding in between the two. "If you don’t plan on helping then I’m going to have to ask you to leave us be so that we can do what we can do."

Magneto nodded and waved Pyro away from the two men. The boy glared as he placed his two lighters away. "Very well, if you are all sure that you wish to die for a planet that will never accept you for what you truly are then I will leave you here. Just remember this though, that even if you were to somehow miraculously win that you will not be winning the planet not for yourselves but for the hypocrites that would hunt each and every one of you down and then kill you for your abilities."

"True, but it gives life a bit of excitement." Ritchie said with a cocky devil may care grin.

Magneto turned and looked at the various people and saw that while a number of them looked nervous and scared they all had a grim look of acceptance. "I see, you have all decided to needlessly waste your lives then. Myself and the rest of the Brotherhood cannot chance failure and would rather take leave of you while we can."

"You mean take the coward’s way out?" Rogue asked from where she was hiding. "Always got some fancy speech ready about how you’re going to sacrifice for mutant kind. Yet when the time comes you find convenient ways to use someone else as a sacrifice since you think you have to be the king and all."

"Careful of what you say child or I may have to test the limits you now have. Come Brotherhood we shall leave these here to their fate and watch from above. If any change their mind in time we will save you."

"Uh huh, yeah well g’bye we got stuff to do now." Phoebe said waving the mutant off.

"Are you so sure you and your sisters will not join us child? Abilities such as yours could be extremely useful." Magneto coaxed.

"I think I’m going to have to take a pass on that one." The wandless witch replied to the Master of Magnetism.

"Very well then my dear." Magneto said, as he had his mutants follow him, he paused on his way in front of Xavier. "Charles." He said with a deep sadness and respect.

"Eric." Xavier returned at his former friend, the two men looked at each other sadly before Magneto walked on.

"Come Pyro."

"John." Bobby said holding his hand out to his old friend. "You don’t have to go with him." Bobby pleaded looking at the person he had gone to school with.

The mutant teen turned to face his friend, for a moment the two teens weren’t in a council of war but rather their thoughts were on a group that snuck away from boring tours sneaking around the Xavier Mansion, and one upping each other with Rogue. The teen’s dark brown eyes then hardened as they stared in the blue pleading eyes of Bobby.

"My true name is Pyro, remember that Iceman." The other boy said darkly as he shut those memories away.

"My true name is still Bobby." The Ice elemental told the Fire elemental.

"If you say so." Pyro shot at his old friend, before he followed after Magneto.

"Well that was fun." Buffy grumbled as the last members of the Brotherhood trooped out.

"You and I obviously own different dictionaries." Bobby said not turning to look at anyone but Rogue.

"Yeah, sorry about that, wish you had time think this out Bobby but we don’t have time for that. Can you listen?" The mutant nodded as he retook his seat.

"Okay, so back to how do we deal with the First? We’ve got to go up against around 200 demon ninjas, a super witch with a big grudge against Willow, a few idiots with inferiority complexes with space guns that think that they’re following the word of a god, and maybe a handful of the wand waving wizards did I miss anyone or anything?"

"Bringers, whatever Immortals are left, and super vamps." Dawn said, ticking the groups off on her fingers.

“Thanks Dawn, sometimes you really know how to make a person feel good about the odds they’re facing, you’ll make a great Watcher one of these days.”

"Oz, how are you by the way? Those hellhounds really tore a chunk out of me. I’d hate to think what they did to you when they were trying to turn you into their own personal chew toy."

"I’m good." The werewolf said from his seat where he was sipping on a healing potion, he also had yellow goop covering several of his deeper scratches.

"Uh huh," The slayer said disbelieving of him, she and Oz were probably the only two that were conscience and had wounds, all of the others that had been wounded had died for the most part or were unconscious.

"So how do we stop all these things?" Dean asked wanting to get to the heart of the problem.

"Well, as of now all artifact hunting jobs are cancelled." The Slayer informed everyone.

"What? But there are still so many things that we can retrieve." Daniel started, only to be cut off by the Slayer.

"Sorry doc, but look around you, we lost a lot of good people trying to clean the city out, and that was only on one artifact mission and one information gathering mission. Now just imagine what our numbers would be if we hadn’t prepared for that sort of thing? Face it doc if it hadn’t been for the Dukes and Hagrid we would have lost a lot of people getting all of that stuff out of there, we would have been trampled. I sure won’t risk the lives of my family just to salvage stuff that might be useful."

"But..."

"Hey Daniel, we’re talking about the fate of the world here."

"Really Jack? I must have missed that memo somewhere."

"Right, well consider the memo served." Buffy said rolling her eyes, "now then, we need to find a way to shut the First down cause we’re still reacting folks, all those fights and mini wars that we just fought we were just reacting to the forces of the First, and while we may have won them for the most part we also just barely walked away from them as well. Face it folks, the First is toying with us, pulling its punches while it prepares itself for one really big shove. All of the fights that it’s made happen have been nothing but testing us seeing what our real skills are, like some of those same tests were probably meant to keep some of us back and keep us too worried about anything else, so the million dollar question is how do we hurt the First?"

"No argument we have to hurt that son of a bitch." Dean agreed, "I only got one question, where is the bitch vulnerable."

"If only there was a place that held all of their forces then we could just blow them up." Havoc said wistfully.

The core scoobies all looked up at this comment. A decisive place where the First could be hurt was already known in fact it was where any and all likely reinforcements that the First could get would likely come from.

"Just how crazy a plan do we need exactly?" Xander asked curiously.

"You’ve got the beginning of one don’t you?" Riley said with interest.

"Well maybe." The one-eyed carpenter admitted as he turned to Buffy. "Why not take out the First’s reserve troops?"

"It’s reserves?"

"Yeah think about it Buffster, what would happen if you stopped the hellmouth in its throat? It’d stop the First from spewing anymore super vamps at us. For all we know it’s a simple matter of blowing the seal up as well. Magnet boy would have been real useful for that."

"Doubtful Xander, the seal is the magical opening to the hellmouth I doubt even someone who can alter magnetic fields with their minds could do much to the seal." Giles informed the young man.

"It does have merit though." Carter said, as she got a thoughtful look on her face. "While we may not be able to destroy the seal we, should be able to do a large amount of damage to whatever it is that’s on the other side, it could damage whatever forces are currently there, and stop them at their very source of power."

"Add in the fact that you can add a hellmouth to the list of things that you’ve either blown up or helped blown up. Shoot Carter this one might go right up there next to blowing up a sun."

"Surely an explosion of that magnitude would be counterproductive to saving the Earth O’Neill." Teal’c said stoically.

"You blew up a sun?" Several people asked, ignoring the Jaffa’s question, as several goofy grins spread across the faces of the various people.

"-Anyway you might-"

"-be willing-"

"-To show us that memory?-" The Weasley twins asked the astrophysics Major pleadingly.

"And I thought blowing up the High School for graduation was impressive." The Slayer said impressed with the Air Force Major

"Your High School?" Dean asked with a dreamy grin pointed at her.

"Hey it seemed like a good idea at the time." Xander defended.

"Buffy, Xander no more! Do you want the First to come back as Snyder?" Willow asked with a sickened look on her face as her friends opened their mouths to say more. The three scoobies shivered at the thought of the image of the obnoxious little troll with a stick the size of an Emu stuck up his butt, none of them wanted to ever see the vile little man ever again.

"So we take the fight to the First then?"

"Good defense is a good offense." Wolverine said with a grin.

"Your right." The slayer said in agreement, she felt the heavy weight of the amulet that Angel had brought in her pocket, somewhere on this makeshift base of theirs was hopefully someone who could wear the amulet, unfortunately they didn’t know who the hell was supposed to, they didn’t even know what the thing did. Add in to the confusion of how it was meant for someone more than human, did that mean someone like one of the mutants or Jaffa, or someone mystically more, like the various witches and wizards or maybe even Sam Winchester or maybe it was one of the Immortals they definitely seemed to be a bit more than your average human.

"If we do this, we may have to split our forces." Samantha Finn said, as they all began to seriously plan on how they could destroy the army hidden beneath the seal. "I seriously doubt that the troops on the outside are going to let us just hurt their army without something to say about it."

"Your right on that, you can’t just try and take out the army if the advance guard is making it more difficult for you to get where you need to be." Methos said from his own seat.

"So we let some people deal with the army of super vamps while some of us deal with the rest of the forces up here, they only got a few Immortals a load of ninjas, witches and wizards, and whatever else they can manage to scrape together." Ritchie said with an air of someone who was unconcerned. "It’ll be a piece of cake right Mack?"

"If it’ll be so easy then perhaps you should deal with it while I stay at home and protect my head." Duncan said dryly to his younger companion.

"Gee Mack, you’re just showing the love tonight aren’t you?" Richie complained to his friend.

"If we do disable them like you’re suggesting, then we are going to need everyone available for the job that means we’re going to need to get our wounded out of dodge."

"I say we just air lift our wounded out of here," Jack said briskly, "we’ve lost a lot of our power, but like you said there’s a chance that this Darth Vader wannabe was weakened enough that he and his people will be out of the fight long enough for us to do something."

"Old guy has a point, we make our move in the next 24 hrs we might have enough of an advantage to hit them back hard wait much longer than that and we probably will get the stuffing knocked out of us."

"Then we better radio those helicopters to come and make a retrieval then so we can disable their reserves."

"You do that, but we’ll portkey our people back to England, it’ll save your people some time in loading up."

"Yeah, besides I’m sure they really wanted to load that Hagrid guy up."

"Here’s a question, are there reserves down there, or are they the main army like some of us suspect? Remember the forces that we’ve been facing so far are the ones that have already been spread out on the Earth for a while, at most you would consider them the first wave of troops. The disposable troops if you will.” Bra’tac said, several of the others nodded with the old Jaffa’s thoughts.

"In other words, the First is just trying to tire us out with these guys while it prepares its army by the time its army is ready we’ll all be so tired and probably be completely out of tricks cause we used them up on the people that are already here to affect the balance in fact by destroying them all right here at this moment it could in fact give the First the strength it would need to force a large army up out of hell to take its place."

"So, if we gotta go down I want to be facing the big guns not the distractions." Buffy growled out at her assembled people and family. "That means that we are going to hit the Hellmouth as hard as we can and hope we hurt the First’s army badly enough that they can’t get out. I think we’ll also add the Winchester’s binding circle around the seal as well it might slow it down somewhat."

"Well if you gotta go this seems like the way to do it."

"Yeah we got lots of guns, hot women and I’m sure we can scrounge up some booze." Dean added with a lazy grin. "Seems like we got all the things needed to make a really nice party."

Buffy smirked at this. "All right, I have a few other ideas that might give us the extra umph needed but I think that only the group leaders need to know about that if it involves you we’ll let you know." Nodding people filed out of the room until only O’Neill, Finn, Bra’tac, Moody, Remus, McGonagall, Xavier, Cyclops, Wolverine, Faith, and the core scoobies, along with Angel and Spike were the only ones left in the room. They all listened quietly as the Slayer described her plan to them and pulled out her two wild cards the Scythe and the amulet.

"So what do you think too wild and crazy?"

Giles sat there for a moment and cleaned his glasses before he looked at her. "It’s probably the most rash and crazy idea that you've ever had, I think its bloody brilliant."

Faith looked serious for a moment before gracing her sister slayer with a devil may care grin while nodding.

Bra’tac nodded in agreement as well. "If we are to succeed in protecting your world Buffy Summers of California I believe that these measures are indeed needed. What say the rest of you?"

"Militaries in no matter how crazy we think it is unless we think you uselessly throwing away peoples’ lives, but this way we might actually be giving the rest of the world a fighting chance."

"The X-Men will be at your side as well little cousin."

"We’ll stand with ya as well lass." Moody growled out for the wand wavers.

"Agreed. Angel?"

"I’m there." The dark haired vampire said.

Willow reluctantly nodded as well she would do her part as well.

"All right, it’ll be game time soon, everybody get some rest. Angel, Spike stay here.” The vampires nodded, but that didn’t stop them from sending glares at the Sunnydalers, though Angel’s eyes softened when he looked at Faith who gave a shaky grin.

"Um B, should I stay in case they can’t behave?"

"No they will behave, or they will find themselves on the next ride out of town. Right boys?” The two vampires glowered at each other but nodded in agreement. "See no problem."

"Right." Faith drawled, but left anyways.

Buffy waited till the others were gone before she turned to her two former lovers. She pulled the amulet out and held it out letting it dangle by its chain reflecting some of the lights. "This is supposed to be worn by someone who is more than human Spike."

"So you automatically thought that it meant one of us did ya." Spike asked, as he looked at the amulet with a hungry look of one wanting to prove themselves.

"Actually it belongs to a Champion." The slayer said emphasizing the last word.

Spike looked at the amulet for a second longer before his face fell in defeat. He looked back up though when the amulet was thunked down in front of him, he was about to gloat at his grandsire when the elder Vampire began talking.

"You are the Champion’s Champion Spike, trust me she may not be doing you any favors by offering you that piece of jewelry."

“I’ll take my chances mate." Spike said as he grabbed the amulet off of the table and slid it into his pocket.

"Good," Angel said, "come on, we have to get Buffy back in a bed and load her up on healing potions."

"Too right."

"Do I have to?" The blonde slayer whined.

"Yes!" The two vampires answered.

"Hey, you two actually agreed on something." she teased them.

"Don’t change the subject Slayer, you’re going back to the medwing."

"If you do it, I’ll see if I can’t save you some chocolate pop tarts." Angel added in with a knowing smirk.

Buffy’s face fell at that to one of annoyance. "No fair using chocolate bribes." She growled at him, but got back up and was lead back to the medwing. The vampires walked with her and made sure she drank all the required potions and then had a couple of wizards create a couple of leather couches that they could doze on while they took turns watching over her.