3.8 Jaded

Quotes

Rachel: "I felt the magic thing coming again. So I made muffins. Muffins are better than explosions."

PeanutGallery [re: witch vampires]: "Witchiers? No, Vam-bitches...."

Stefan [at 2:30 am]: "I'm calling Chase. Everyone else is here goddammit...."

Rive: "Gabe is a green blob. And Jade is frozen."
Stefan: "And Stefan is pissed off at being woken up at this ungodly hour. So get over here -- I'm sure it is much more exciting than whatever you're doing."
Chase surveys party with Cute Boy headed her way
Chase: "I seriously doubt that."

Chase: "Sorry I'm late, but I had to get out of "hot date with drinks'."

Deaver [to watchers re: vamp witches]: "This is the "not good' part of the report ..."

Gabe: "So how bad is this? Is it "grit my teeth' bad, or is it "pee in my pants' bad?"
Stefan: "Option "C'."

Deaver [musing]: "What is the opposite of "discreet'? Is it "crete'?"

Deaver: "Doing the math, we're looking at around 500 vampires."
Chase: "... I think I need another beer."
Deaver: "No, wait. More like 1200. I forgot to carry the two ... "

Stefan: "I agree to anything at four in the morning."

Stefan: " I heard the words "plumber outfits'. I am NOT showing my crack."

Stefan: "If Gabe kills a vampire in the forest and no one sees it, does anyone believe him?"

Gabe: "That's ok, he's going to be really hurting. I'm just going to be ... immobile and helpless."

Flashback: Homecoming weekend. There's a sweet slow song on the stereo system and the floor is packed with dancing couples. Gabe and Rachel slow dance with a notable lack of grace, but Rachel looks blissfully happy. Glancing down, Gabe realizes they are dancing about a foot above the floor, floating effortlessly. No one around them seems to notice, but Gabe tries to tone it down anyway. Suddenly, the air around him changes subtly. The music seems odd and a little wrong. The wrongness quickly escalates to something loud and discordant and creepy. Rachel looks up at him, still smiling. He watches as her pupils seem to grow and grow, spreading outward until her eyes are entirely black. Her hair blackens from the roots and changes to a wiry texture. Her smile now a little sinister, she starts babbling in a guttural language that Gabe can't understand.

[Jen: FYI, I pulled the above from the "The Demon in Me" summary verbatim. Why? Because if this was a book, that's what I'd do. So.]

Rachel awakes with a start. She takes a deep breath, glancing down at Stefan's sleeping form next to her. She gets out of bed and wanders to the kitchen.

[insert Jen notes here]

* * *

Jade and Gabe wander through campus. It is quite late -- around 2 AM. Jade tells Gabe that she has finally done it, and left the DoH. She says that it wasn't quite as violent as Rachel's defection, apparently, but she still thinks the acquitted herself pretty well. She grins at the memory. Gabe starts to congratulate her on her newfound freedom when Jade stops suddenly, her head cocked toward voices only she can hear. Turning to Gabe, she quickly says, "Someone's in trouble," and takes off for the woods at a sprint. Having little choice except to follow, Gabe goes bounding after her.

He skids to a halt in a clearing just as Jade cries out "Becca!" and kneels over the still body of a young woman. Gabe looks quickly around the clearing just in time to see four vampires leap into the clearing from different points. He starts flinging mojo at them, but it turns out one of them can fling mojo right back of him, and Gabe finds himself flying backwards before he smacks in to a tree. One of the vampires closes on him and clamps his fangs into Gabe's neck ...

* * *

Rive is out on patrol when she hears a girl shouting in the distant trees. She takes off running and barrels into the clearing where Jade is holding her friend and Gabe is in danger of becoming an early breakfast for fang-face. Rive quickly dispatches the vampire who has latched on to Gabe, and then turns to stake one of his comrades. Jade frantically checks Becca for a pulse, while Gabe dusts himself off and starts spell-slinging at the witch-vampire again. Not finding one, she moves to start casting herself ... when the body of Becca reaches up and grabs her and firmly says, "Hold!" Jade freezes in place. About then, the witch-vampire hits Gabe square in the chest with a spell, and Gabe suddenly finds himself encapsulated in a slimy, green goo, barely able to breathe.

Rive dispatches the vampires she can find including Becca and the other witchy one (who Gabe knocked unconscious just after his opponent's spell went off), and calls Stefan hurriedly for backup in case there are more of them.

Stefan races in to the clearing in sweatpants and a "wife-beater" with his sword strapped to his back (hey, it's 2:30 AM), with Rachel right behind him. It turns out Rive didn't find anything else in the woods, so he's just in time to be totally useless. Jade is still frozen and Gabe is still gooed, however, so there is work to be done. They call Deaver to come un-spell the witches, and call Chase to get her to patch up Gabe, once they can see him again. Deaver arrives pretty promptly despite the early wake-up call. Chase, on the other hand, is running late, still wearing hipster party clothes and looking irritated at having her night out interrupted.

Once Jade and Gabe have been restored to normal, discussion starts on what exactly just happened. Back at Chase and Rachel's apartment, Jade tells them she thinks she was just ambushed by the DoH -- they are far from thrilled that she walked out. After all, she was fairly high up within the organization. When the scoobies mention the oddity that is witch-vampires, and that there have been more than a few of them lately, Jade tells them her theory.

There is a woman in the upper echelons of the DoH named "Mama Aidan", who is reputed to be practically ageless, powerful, and very wise. She has a big hand in steering the organization. Jade has actually met her. She is a beautiful woman, especially considering that Jade did some research and found her in a Phillipi yearbook dated 1801. She had originally assumed that Mama Aidan was taking some kind of youth serum, but has come to the realization that she is in fact a vampire. And, unfortunately, Jade has also unearthed some evidence that makes it seem likely that Mama Aidan is convincing some of the DoH members to volunteer to be turned ... her pledge-sister Becca among them, apparently.

This coupled with the recent surge in vampire activity brings the group discussion around to Bannon. Mama Aidan is most likely a member of the Alumni, given her age and alma mater.

Suddenly, pieces of the big picture start to come together ...

About six months ago, the magical barrier protecting McKennit was dispelled. How? The intrepid scoobies broke the enchantment by waking Brandon ... who they found when they were unearthing a posse of Alumni vampires who had been buried in that exact spot.

By helping the gang to find information on Devon's planned Belial ritual and practically leading them to the spot, Bannon brought about Devon's neutralization. He was Bannon's only regularly annoying adversary and threat to power.

While the barrier was down, Bannon quietly brought about history's most epic family reunion. Once all of his children were inside, he needed the barrier back in place to keep everything else out that might get in his way, and to keep his children from wandering. The scoobies were happy to oblige, innocently seeing the obvious merit in a spell that would keep more bad things out, not really realizing how many had already gotten in.

So how many Alumni ARE there? That requires knowing how old Bannon really is. Deaver explains the vampire aging process to the group -- in their thousandth year, they begin a transition from human form to pure demon, after which they are infinitely more powerful and can never reassume their previous appearance. Something in the explanation jogs Chase's memory, and she suddenly remembers something weird about Bannon that she noticed at the beginning of the semester -- he was looking fangier than usual. Since vampires are either "game-faced" or not, it struck her as odd - you can't be kinda fangy and still look "normal". Uh-oh. Given the timing, the group makes the guess that Bannon is starting his transformation, which is why he has chosen his time to act. That makes him MUCH older and stronger than they had ever imagined. And he's got the scoobies right where he wants them.

If Bannon is a thousand years old ... the scoobies start doing the math on the number of children and their posses that he could possibly have, and the count is daunting. Deaver immediately calls the watcher's council while the others sit in worried silence. He gets about five sentences in to his story before the watcher on the other end of the line asks him to hold and patches his call through to the head of the organization, some guy named Giles. The phone is picked up immediately. Deaver starts his story again, leaving nothing out, including the potential vampire army of three thousand or more, their collective role as Bannon's pawns, the emergence of a slew of vampire-witches also loyal to his cause, the barrier, and the stated relevance of the Prophecy of St. Saul that The Keeper had imparted to them on their little astral jaunt.

The Prophecy is old territory for Giles, who tells Deaver the basics of the story. It is derived from a little-known work of medieval art, and states that:

Two by two through a sea of blood march the children of St. Saul to bring on a new age.

St. Saul is in fact a vampire, and a crazy one at that. His name in life was O'Bannon, an Irish priest, most likely in the eleventh century. He is one of the truly mystical vampires. When Deaver starts to draw the obvious parallels, Giles cuts him short -- they already know very well where St. Saul is, and the Bannon in McKennit isn't he. St. Saul is over a thousand years old, having completed his transformation, and has been living in Oxford, England for quite some time. (Chase points out here that Bannon, too, claims to be an Oxford graduate, but there is no record of his attendance on file at the university). He has a history of working with humans to achieve his own ends. It is irritating to the watchers that they haven't been able to bring him down, but at least they can keep tabs on him.

Giles readily admits that there are too many coincidences to ignore, and tells Deaver that it may be best if he and those closest to the situation come to England to meet with the council, explore St. Saul's territory, and see what they can learn firsthand. Deaver readily agrees and says he will discuss it with the others and let Giles know how many of them to expect. He also gets Giles to agree that in the event that this Great War is to take place in McKennit, the Watcher's Council will send an army of their own - potentials turned slayers to fight against the tide. Giles agrees to put some plans in place, and to make immediate arrangements for their travel.

After Deaver's lengthy call to England, the bleary-eyed scoobies are still faced with the task of finding and eradicating Mama Aidan and her "girls". According to Jade, Mama Aidan's ritual room is located underground, connected to a shed in the backyard of the DoH meetinghouse via a tunnel. There are a couple of doors off of it that are most likely her living quarters, with a big ritual space at the end. When prompted, Jade realizes that it is physically under the Kesslers' house. They're the next-door neighbors. A true 4:00 AM plan evolves, and they put it in to action the following day ...

Gabe magically freezes some of the plumbing under the Kesslers' home (not all of it, because that would be obvious, and magical mayhem actually is a chargeable offense in McKennit). They get Kelly, their friend and computer expert (cough hacker cough), to reroute the Kesslers' phones to ring in her room, where Rive the "plumber" convinces the Kesslers that they'll need to leave the property and let the plumbers do their jobs. The "plumbers" (Rive and Stefan) show up and the Kesslers depart.

Once they're in, Gabe and Jade hustle in with supplies and start setting up an anti-magic ritual in the back yard, centered over the heart of Mama Aidan's living and ritual space. Since that kind of spell makes a sphere, it will extend underground, and stopping a Big Witch from casting stuff at you seems like a good idea. (Sure, you can't cast either, but comparatively, does that really matter?)

Deaver then shows up with Geoff and Rachel in tow and the bulldozer (yes, bulldozer) he's rented. And he got lots of insurance. All the non-magical types stopped to see Brandon, so they have enough magical juice to get past the non-witch barrier that surrounds the DoH meetinghouse. They roll right through the fence and knock over the tool shed, which hides the entryway to Aidan's lair. With the building obliterated, another pass with the bulldozer slides the foundation slab away, letting light into the basement area below.

About then the DoH who are IN the meeting house (duh) come barreling out onto the back porch, demanding the scoobies desist and looking for explanations. Instead of apologies, they get knocked out cold by a ruthlessly efficient Stefan.

The troops then scurry down into the hole, carrying large mirrors. Deaver instructs everyone where to put them so that the sunlight will be reflected the whole way down the hall, towards the ritual room at the end. Just as they all hit the ground, a woman's voice echoes around them. "You are not welcome here." Rive and Stefan lead the charge towards the door at the end, knocking it down together in one well-choreographed leap-kick-tv-combo-thing.

Inside, the light streams through the broken door, highlighting a few still-human girls in its path. Other girls lie cold and still on the floor, and in one shadowy corner, a beautiful woman with blood streaming down her face glares at them as she presses her wrist to the mouth of the limp girl in her arms.

Chaos erupts.

Stefan and Rachel take to staking the not-yet wakened bodies on the floor, while Rive erupts and brings all her training to bear on the other girls who have already turned and are standing back in the shadows.

Deaver and Geoff use their mirrors to keep the ray of sunlight centered squarely on Mama Aidan. She drops the girl she is holding and cries out as she starts to smolder. Rive efficiently finishes her off.

As Rachel turns to dust the last vamp on her side, she abruptly stops mid-stroke. Lying there on the floor is Trisha Boyd-Townsend. As Rachel winds up to stake her, Trisha suddenly opens her eyes, and there is eerie laughter coming from the walls. A woman floats through the stone, her hair and eyes equally black. Rachel freezes in horror, and Trisha looks at the woman and says, "Mom?" The woman grabs Trisha with one hand and Rachel with the other, causing Rachel to double over and start convulsing. Her eyes go jet black, and her shiny blonde hair starts turning black at the roots, the color coursing outward. She screams. Stefan intervenes immediately, kicking the woman in the chest and getting a severe shock for his effort. The woman backs away from Rachel, as he attacks again. With another eerie laugh, she collects Trisha and the two melt away into the wall.

Rachel lies on the ground, her convulsions finally subsiding. Stefan starts barking questions about what happened. Jade tells them that the witch's name is Brionne, but that she's never seen ANYTHING like that happen when someone was touched by her before. Rachel suddenly wakes. She's exhausted, and her eyes are still inky black and specked with silver. Stefan is desperately worried about her, gently stroking her hair and insisting that she let them help. Rachel finally tells the group the truth that she has been trying to keep from them: they can't help. It is already too late. She is dying, was meant to die a year ago, and the balance has to be maintained. She doesn't regret the year Gabe gave her - far from it (she smiles at Stefan), but the Universe is still owed. How the black magic figures in to it all she isn't exactly sure, but death may not be a completely physical thing in her case.

The group is somber as they help Rachel up, still insisting that there must be a way to help her. As they leave the chamber, Geoff's cell phone goes off in the darkness, bringing back some kind of reality. That is, until he answers it.

The phone call is from Simone. Devon Boyd-Townsend has been found dead in his bed, charred to a crisp ... although nothing around him is even singed. After reassuring himself that she's okay, Geoff tells her he's on his way over. Hanging up, he mutters under his breath that it looks like he's now dating the mayor of McKennit ...