The Scoobies were having a meeting at the Magic Box, after dark.
"Look, I know Mom wants to gather and make with the merry tomorrow night, but with everything that's going on..." I trailed off.
Willow walked up behind me. "This is exactly what you need." She sat between me and Tara. "A 20th birthday party with--with--with presents, and funny hates, and--and those candles that don't blow out." She looked at Tara. "Those used to scare me."
"Me, too," Tara told her.
"I just don't think this is the best time to break out the party pinata," I told them. "We need to stay focused if we're gonna find a way to stop Glory."
Xander and Anya sat on the other side of me.
Buffy sat across from me, between Tara and Xander.
"We're going up against a god," Xander told us. "An actual mightier-than-thou god."
"Well, you know what they say," Willow told us. "The bigger they are..."
"The faster they stomp you into nothing," Anya told us.
Everyone looked at her.
Giles was standing nearby, looking through books and papers.
"She's right," I told them. "I've thrown everything I've got at her, and she just shrugs it off."
"Then we have to find something heavier to throw," Willow told us.
"That might pose some difficulty," Giles told us. "From what the Council's been able to discover from the Book of Tarnis, and--and--and other sources, Glory and two of her fellow hellgods ruled over... one of the more seriously unpleasant demon dimensions."
"There's more than one?" Buffy asked.
"Oh, there are thousands of demon dimensions," Anya told us. "All different."
"All pushing on the edges of our reality, trying to find a way in," Giles told us.
"I guess Glory found one," Buffy told us. "The question is, why?"
"There's nothing to indicate that here," Giles told us. "Just... vague references to... chaos and destruction."
The teakettle started to whistle.
Giles stood to get it.
"Okay, so, we know where Glory's from," Buffy told us. "What do we know about her? You know, she's tough, yeah, but--but no bolts of lightning, no blasts of fire. Shouldn't a god be able to do that kind of stuff?"
Giles poured tea. "Uh, usually, yes, but, um, being in human form must be severely limiting her powers. All we have to worry about right now is she's immortal, invulnerable, and insane."
"A crazy hellgod?" Xander asked. "And the fun just keeps on leaving."
"From what I've been able to gather, her living in this world is... seriously affecting her mental state as well," Giles told us. "She's only being able to keep her mind intact by, uh, extracting energy from us. Well, from--from the human brain."
"She--she--she's a brain-sucker?" Tara asked.
Willow and Tara exchanged a look.
"She, um..." Giles started off, leaning over to read from the book. "'Absorbs the energies that bind the human mind into a cohesive whole.' Once drained, all that's left behind is, uh..."
"Crazy people," I finished.
Giles poured more tea. "Which is, I'm afraid, why there's been a marked increase in the ranks of the mentally unstable here in Sunnydale."
YOU ARE READING
Sister, Sister (Book Five, BTVS)
FanfictionWhat if Zoey Francis, the other Slayer in Sunnydale, was never an only child? What if she had Dawn as a sister instead of Buffy? That she and her mother Layla had to deal with Glory and her minions trying to take Dawn as the key to the other dimensi...
