Rating: R for violence
Summary: How the upcoming remake of the 1973 film Westworld OUGHT to go.
Disclaimer: Characters owned by Joss Whedon and other people, many of whom are now dead.
This fic dedicated in memory of Yul Brynner who was scary as freaking HELL in the original movie. Go watch that movie right now, before you read anything. Back yet? OK. Read at leisure.
"I want to kill Buffy."
The young girl with the shaggy short hair was hunched over the counter, her smile large on her face. "I want to be a vampire, a total villain, and I wanna kill Buffy. I wanna bite her-- no, no, that's way too gay-- but I do wanna draw blood, and I wanna mess her up real bad." She tried to rein in her grin, aware that the ticketmaster over the counter might not appreciate her overexuberance. "Um... I mean, is that okay? Can we do that? I mean-- I'm really NOT a bloodthirsty psycho in real life--"
The ticketmaster smiled, understanding totally. "No ma'am, actually we get a request like yours every single day here. How many nights?"
"A week. Seven-- uh, six nights, seven days." The girl goggled happily over the counter. "And you've really got a robot that plays Buffy? And... I mean, do we really get to kill her??"
The ticketmaster nodded, gearing up to spout the phrases he dispensed about twenty times a day. "Here at Delos Resort we have the entire cast of characters, heroes and villains of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer series, which ran from 1996 to 2003 on the WB and Fox networks, respectively. If you, our guest choose, you may become a Slayer or vampire, a White or Black Hat-- and associate with, defeat, or... come together with any character seen during the series' seven year run." His voice took on an artificial tone, like something memorized many years before the words he was using had become hopelessly outdated. "From that legendary icon of heroism and empowerment Buffy, to the most despicable and vilest of villains such as the Master or Angelus. From main players like Willow and Giles, to minor supporting characters like Kathy or Principal Snyder-- we have them all here, in person, to serve you, our guest." He took a breath, winded from the automatic delivery.
"'Come together'??" The girl giggled. The word of mouth from former guests of the ranch was widespread-- everyone had heard of exactly how much you could "come together" with the artificial residents of the ersatz Sunnydale, California (really Death Valley, not too many miles from Las Vegas.) Stories of everything from threesomes to outright orgies had given the Buffy branch of the Delos resort in particular something of a bordello rep.
*****
So it was Marnie Simons and Charla Wilson embarked on their seven day vacation in the world-famous Delos resort-- an amusement park catering to only the super-rich. At the multibillion dollar pricetag required to maintain the park's thousands of highly detailed androids, the resort was coming to feed off the world's wealthy just as hungrily as the government soaked the average joe at tax time. The girls were routed through a costume depot, given era-appropriate clothes and prosthetic fangs, even liquid yellow lenses to wear if they wished. The only thing the park couldn't provide was the warped brows that had marked vampires on the show, and Charla particularly was glad of that-- too ugly.
That very evening the two best friends were walking down the dark suburban street that had been made popular on television 80 years ago, swaggering and hissing at each other, playing their roles as vampiresses to the hilt. They looked silly as hell, and they both knew it. But seeing life-size replicas of characters they had til now only seen on their home monitor systems-- it was intoxicating. Only Marnie was a little disillusioned. "I dunno... kinda looks like my old hometown." She hopped up and down on her boots, her speech slurred by the way she had to keep her mouth half-open for the fangs to protrude. "Where's all the monsters? The explosions??"
Charla shrugged. "I don't guess they can afford to blow up stuff left and right. Gotta remember, most of it on the show wasn't real either, just on computers."
"I guess so." Marnie did not seem placated. She was nearly bouncing up and down with impatience. "But where's Buffy?? I wanna fight her. I wanna gut the bitch."
Charla shrugged, suppressing a laugh she didn’t quite feel. “You’re really into this, aren’t you Marn?” she wondered, not wholly appreciative of her friend’s unabashed bloodlust.
“Aw, c'mon, Char.” Marnie spoke with unrepentant confidence. “You more than anybody oughta be ‘into it’! After Greg dumped you? Just so he could spend more time slobbering over those showgals at the comic cons? He actually thought he had a shot with that babe in the Catwoman outfit." Marnie sneered.
Charla's face was grim. She didn't like to think about how Greg had abruptly ended their three-year relationship-- even after she'd dressed up as everyone from Princess Leia to Lara Croft. This was one of the things she and Marnie had in common—they had both recently been unceremoniously dumped by their boyfriends. Charla had to admit Marnie probably had it tougher than she herself had. Marnie had been in a car accident that had broken both legs and left her incapacitated for some months. Charla knew that Marnie had felt pretty kick-ass for living through it; as tough as any tomb raider, any vampire Slayer. But, apparently, it hadn't been tough enough. Not enough to compete with to compete with airbrushed, silicone-enhanced babes who could kill aliens with their bare hands. Not enough for Marnie to keep Rodney, her ex-boyfriend. "I don’t get it,” Charla muttered, sucking her plastic fangs to keep herself from salivating all over her own shirt. "Tough girls…. in the movies they've always got lots of friends backing them up. Lots of boyfriends orbiting them."
Marnie was almost skipping along, and she looked rather childlike-- rather at odds with the demonic prosthetic additions to her face. "Only in the movies," she served back lightly. "Tough girls ain't so tough. The tougher you are, the longer you suffer, I say."
"Yeah." Charla trudged along, not quite feeling the buzz anymore. And then-- she and Marnie both froze, staring down the street. Right there in front of them--
"Well." Buffy the Vampire Slayer stood in the midst of the street, all blondeness and perfection, arms folded, mouth set in the thin, don't-mess-with-the-star pout. "What happened, the Vampire Plaza Mall close early?"
Both Marnie and Charla looked their confronter up and down. "That's it??" Marnie sounded painfully unimpressed. "This is the Buffy-bot?" She actually giggled. She walked around the blonde Slayer-- in fact an android robot, synthetic-skinned, blonde-wigged, nothing but metal and silicon underneath. Marnie sneered. "They must've been watching the later seasons of the show when they built this thing. She looks OLD." The leer under her fake fangs could be heard in her voice.
The Buffy 'bot did not look put off, characteristically. Everything about her was actually pretty dead on-- the hair, the clothes; the skin couldn't be detected as false at all. The only thing that one might have thought slightly off about her were her green eyes. They didn't seem to have pupils, or maybe that was just how the light was shining off them.
With the appearance of an "official" character, Charla was suddenly feeling the fun again. "So.... the famous Vampire Slayer." She leered, trying to play the role of a wicked vampire, her own fangs baring. "Do you think you can take us both on at once? My friend here has especially been dreaming of your blood splashed over her face."
"Well, a real vamp would have done it by now, instead of making threats about it." Buffy lifted her nose haughtily. "Ready to put up or shut up?"
"I don't know, Charla." Marnie's sneer had grown. "Doesn't sound like any dialogue the real Buffy ever said on the show."
"I am the real Buffy. Unfortunately for you two." The Slayer unfolded her arms, readying her battle stance. "And you two are the real dust. Right now."
And that was when she launched into her first swing.
Marnie and Charla both immediately realized that they were both vastly outclassed, as far as fighters. Both of them ducked, squealed, and wavered in very unvampiric, graceless ways. Once they'd both regained their footing though, after they'd both scrabbled out of Buffy's way, the both of them seemed to slide into their roles once more. "Uh-- get her, Marnie!!" Charla called out, unsure what else to say.
"I'm tryin'!" Marnie, going on what she'd seen a thousand times on the show, did what came to her-- and swiped awkwardly at the head of the blonde bombshell coming right at her. 120 lbs of steel--
But amazingly, even though Marnie knew her arm had not connected with anything, and would probably have snapped if it had-- she watched in awe as the blonde head whipped backward, as if having taken a blow from a powerful arm. The Buffy 'bot-- Buffy, pretend it's *Buffy* and you're a bad ass vamp, like you paid all that money to do, Marnie thought firmly to herself-- seemed to regroup quickly. The Slayer’s right hand went to the inside of her jacket, from which she pulled out a stake. A very real looking, solid, sharp wooden stake.
That looked scary. But, Marnie told herself, you know yourself the "real" Buffy would've had the stake ready and in the vamp's heart way before this. She's running lazy. She's not fighting to win-- and that's what you asked for, wasn't it? You specifically requested to defeat her.
Marnie felt recharged. The leer came back to her fanged lips. She could win this. She could actually kill Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Not quite believing it even as she charged, Marnie let out a roar as close to a real vamp growl as she could come. It sounded, rather pathetically, like the rabid squeal a bratty six year old would make.
And as Marnie flailed her arm out, Buffy's fingers unclenched-- the stake dropped out of her grip as if she were asleep, clattering on the pavement. Marnie swiped wildly, reveling as her amateur jabs and punches actually drove the blonde Slayer off, actually seemed to pummel Buffy’s face and shoulders without even touching her. Fists came at Marnie as well; feet clad in thick heavy boots whizzed past her face so close Marnie could feel the breeze-- but even though the Slayer came close enough to make Marnie flinch and cringe more than once, her blows never connected. However a misplaced-- or perhaps well-placed punch of Marnie's did connect. The solid metallic clang of bone on a metal shell could be very well heard.
"Ow!!" Marnie shook the hand that had connected with Buffy's back; that had actually hurt. Ouch! But she regathered herself, the adrenaline from being hurt making her even more wild. Viciously, she clawed toward Buffy's face, and connected again-- this time grabbing a handful of blonde hair. Jerking violently, she heard a satisfying squeal of pain and felt a skin-crawlingly real rip as Buffy’s hair came out in her hands, a mustard yellow mess of tufts.
She was tired now. "I'm gonna kill you, Slayer!!" Marnie shouted hatefully.
A hundred yards away, in an iron-clad shelter a figure was huddled over a flickering monitor, with a Buffy's-eye view of the fight. The combat androids in each realm of the park had been equipped with cameras inside the android's eyes, so that the park technicians could monitor the action more closely. This way they could rein in the robot's actions, and better protect the safety of the guests. The tech now reached out a hand and clattered a series of data glyphs into a keyboard. "Compromising BuffyAndroid's strength," the voice muttered, bored to death at the oncoming of his lunch hour. "1.50 percent, down from 3.70 percent, shutting off defense tasks 2, 5, zero. Let the girls have her." With a final clack, he rolled back in his too-warm task chair, wondering when the take-out guy was gonna get here.
Out on the suburban street, Charla had grown tired of merely watching the action. Maneuvering herself behind Buffy, with a massive lunge she grabbed one, then both of the Slayer's arms-- and held them behind the girl's back with an ease that surprised her. "Oooh, doesn't look like this Slayer's gonna live up to her legend!" she laughed.
Marnie was approaching the front of Buffy's trapped form. The smile on her face was slightly frightening, and not just because of the fake fangs pressed crookedly in her mouth. "Skank," Marnie snarled. "My ex used to talk about coming here and fucking you, more than once. Yeah, but I just happened to save my money and get here first. Unfortunately for you. You self-righteous pretty little bitch."
The cult heroine from TV's golden era gritted her teeth. Buffy looked as though she knew she was in a tight spot, almost as if she really was fighting for her life. Without any warning Buffy drew up both her booted feet and shoved them both directly into Marnie's chest, knocking the fake vamp girl backward on her butt on the pavement.
Charla stared, startled by Buffy’s tactical sideswiping. "Hey!-- you--" That wasn't supposed to happen, was it??
Buffy struggled valiantly to escape the bind Charla had her arms in. "You may be vampires," Buffy snapped pertly, "but I’m still stronger. And better.” Her pink lips pursed in a smirk. “And cuter. You sure don’t look like you're invulnerable." Her voice was unmistakably smug.
Marnie had scrambled back onto her feet, the look on her face truly hateful now. Somehow she'd come up with the stake that Buffy had dropped-- must have fallen on it-- and with a violent surge, thrust the wooden stake directly into the chest of the Slayer, so hard that Charla could feel the thump through Buffy's back.
"Neither do you," Marnie leered into Buffy's face.
The look of flabbergasted pain that overtook Buffy's face was worth it, all the way. Her mouth opened, her eyes went wide, as Marnie stabbed her again, and again, and again, wriggling the stake savagely around in the Slayer’s chest. Blood-- dark red, very liquid, and warm-- had gushed over Marnie's hands and splattered over her leather costume. Charla's eyes went wide too, at the sight of the very gory, realistic bloodletting. "Whoa...."
Marnie, however, was only briefly distracted by the shock of red plasma flooding over her hands. Smiling evilly, she gave the stake one last snide push-- and then backed away. Charla let go of Buffy's arms, and the Slayer collapsed to the bloodstained pavement in an unclassy heap. She crawled, helplessly, for a second. The sight of the blonde young girl dragging her battered body helplessly over the ground was rather chilling. Then she collapsed. Her glassy green eyes just happened to be staring directly up at the girls as-- she seemed-- to die.
Charla couldn't pull her eyes away. Even though she knew Buffy was only a robot-- it looked way too horribly real. All the news reports she'd ever seen on TV about people getting killed in hapless accidents at amusement parks ran through her mind as she gazed down at the contortion of anguish on the dead Slayer’s face.
Marnie was not as humbled-- not in the least. "That... kicked so much ass!!" she cheered, her bloodstained face grinning unabashedly.
******
"Marnie?"
"Oh man. That rocked so much! Oh, I forgot to bite her though!! She got me so mad I forgot I was gonna bite her."
"Marnie."
"I should have asked if I could kill Giles too. I always hated that guy, even in those dumbassed coffee commercials--"
"Marnie!"
"What?!" Marnie whirled around, exasperated.
Charla couldn't help it. "Marn.... how do we know... uh--"
"Know what? What's wrong, Char?"
Charla shook her head, trying to laugh. "How do we know that we aren't going to kill somebody for real here? A real person-- not a robot?"
Marnie had been expecting something a lot worse. Now she relaxed, her smile coming back. "Is that all? Pretty realistic, wasn't it? You're scared you actually killed some gal playing Buffy? Is that it?"
"You killed her." Charla tried to stare into her best friend’s eyes. Tried to fathom what she’d seen there as Marnie had been stabbing a girl to death. “I mean...you gotta admit, Marn, it... it looked really real! How do you know you didn't-- there was blood everywhere!!”
Marnie sighed, the sound of someone completely unimpressed. "You're really sucking all the fun out of this, you know it Char?"
"I could feel you sticking the stake in her.” Charla tried again to match her friend’s glare, failing miserably. “You don't know what that felt like!...”
And Marnie apparently didn’t care, either way. “Answer me!” Charla demanded, unable to subscribe to Marnie’s blatant apathy. "Marnie, how do you know you're not gonna kill somebody?--"
Marnie rolled her eyes. Without another word she reached into her jacket and pulled out the small handgun she'd inexplicably requested from the weapons shop at the entrance of the park. Charla wasn't sure why she'd gotten a gun; nobody on the show had been much for packing guns. But now Marnie pulled back the safety-- and Charla froze with horror as her best friend aimed the weapon directly at Charla's chest. Had Marnie gone crazy?? "Marn--!" Charla got out.
BANG!
It took a few seconds for Charla to open her eyes, uncover her eyes, unflinch from her arms which she'd thrown up to protect herself. She looked down at herself-- no bullet wound, no blood.
Marnie was standing there, a look of resigned amusement on her face. "Feel better now?"
Charla didn't get it. "It didn't do anything."
"It's sensor activated." Marnie spoke as though she were speaking to a little kid. "For over in Matrixworld. They fixed all the weapons so they can only shoot at figures giving off the right kind of electronic signals. Robots." She handed the gun to Charla. "Check it out."
Charla gazed at the gun Marnie had dropped in her hands with newfound respect-- and affection. "Cool," she whispered. Then something seemed to occur to her. "Wait a minute-- what about stakes? What about swords, and stuff like that? What if they've got a Faith robot here, and she comes after us with that big-ass knife she had? What then?"
It was obvious that Marnie had not considered this before. She visibly hesitated, trying to find an explanation out of that. "Uh.... well.... they engineer the robots... to pull their punches," she finally came up with, sounding as though she was trying to answer her own doubt. "Yeah. See, they've got highly sensitive.... sensors, inside the robots' eyes, and they've got them calibrated so that they can completely MISS you within inches--” she swiped at Charla’s face so suddenly that Charla couldn’t help but recoil, which made Marnie laugh. “When they go to hit you, they miss you on purpose. You saw what happened in the fight with Buffy! It's all real tight, really fine tuned. Can't miss. Or should I say, can't hit."
Charla could buy that. Sort of. "But.... what if... somebody doesn't get out of the way in time? What if something goes wrong?"
Marnie smiled at that. "What if the roller coaster crashes? What if the Pirates of the Caribbean break down and start eating the tourists at Disneyworld?" She laughed. "Char, walking out of the house every day is a risk! You're in danger every second of the day, that's just… life! You can't hide in your house forever, girl. Gotta take a chance. And trust in the technology. This park's been open all year; they haven't had anything go wrong. And they won't. Lighten up."
*****
So it was that as the days waned, and the technicians at the park covertly recorded and pondered and tried to ignore the various malfunctions occurring in every sector of the park, from Buffyworld to Matrixworld to Harry Pottersville, the two best friends spent their days being vampires, killing and biting and drinking alcohol-enhanced "blood" at the various themed bars about town. In fact, the very next day after Marnie and Charla had accosted the Buffy robot on the street and left her for dead-- they saw the Slayer walking about again, presumably rebuilt, cleaned up, and looking none the worse for wear. "Hell," muttered Marnie, a half smile on her face. "The bitch can't stay dead, even here."
"They've got to keep her around to service the other guests," Charla pointed out.
"Well," Marnie said, her smile growing wider, "she's about to 'service' us right now. I'm getting my money's worth out of this trip." And there followed another bloody battle between the two pseudo vampires and the android Buffy, which ended, like before, with Buffy laying dead upon the green grass of the city park in a pool of her own synthetic blood.
When the park custodians came out that night, as they did every night, to clean up the bodies, repair the graffitied walls, fix what was broken, the two that came upon the crumpled body of the Buffy android in the park seemed briefly impressed by the amount of damage done to their star robot. "Geez, look at this," one of them spoke as they readied to lift the body into the van with the rest of the broken robots. "Somebody did a number on this one. Look at her head; it's almost ripped clean off!"
"Yeah, I know." His partner grumbled. "That's where all the money for this park goes-- fixing these robots after the guests get through using them for target practice. You know it costs a million dollars a day just to keep this one in service? She was the hero of the show; you'd think guests would be treating her with a little more respect."
"Eh. They don't have to pay for it. What do they care?" The two tossed the blonde body into the back, and the one who was speaking shut the door with a unceremonious bang. "God forbid they raise our pay for cleaning up after them." With an agreeable grumble, the two climbed into the front of the van and drove off to the repair depot.
********
In the depths of the highly advanced repair and engineering depot, the technician in charge of maintaining the combat androids stepped toward his work area. Buffy the Vampire Slayer lay face down, straddling the vinyl operating bench, legs showing bits of bare skin and crusted blood through shredded denim. Her ruined blouse and brassier had been disposed of; her back was bare and bore the scars of the guests’ shenanigans. Both her slender arms stretched up and out, strapped to the table by leather belts. Her head rested facedown on the headrest, chin poking through the hole in the cushion that allowed for better leverage. The table looked like nothing more than an elaborate S&M device, and the dormant android Buffy looked like the device’s latest victim/patron. The back of her battered skull was split open, circuits and gears laid bare to the world.
The techie went to work replacing the stripped screws, re-sautering torn circuits, and reapplying false skin where it had been ripped from the metal skull. Before he started replacing her hair to the Barbie-doll-like holes in the scalp, he picked around with his scalpel at the wiring in the opening, prying out one of the microchips in her central intelligence system. Now was the time for a little experiment he'd been planning. Dispensing of the old chip, he used the tweezers to pick up the new chip he had waiting on the tray, and implanted it into the waiting socket. An electric shudder rippled through the android's body.
"Ow," Buffy spoke. Her green eyes blinked once, twice.
The technician replaced the entrance panel, patting it solidly. "Hold still, missy," he commanded the android, just in case her free will program decided she needed to get up and move around. "I'm going to do your hair now. Just sit tight till it's over."
The robot obeyed, programmed to follow technician's orders. "Give me highlights?" she requested.
"We'll see." The technician got to work with the tweezers, plucking some golden strands from the tray next to his hand. An ironic smile tweaked one side of his mouth. "Why don't you sing me a song while I make you pretty."
Under his tweezers, the android Buffy blinked once more. Then she opened her mouth-- and began emitting the sweet, unmistakable sounds of Def Leppard's Rocket-- guitars and all. She was in perfect Joe Elliott voice as the chip in her head caused her to run through most of Pyromania, just as if she were nothing more than one of those old Teddy Ruxpin dolls playing a cassette tape. Over a billion dollars in technology, and he was using it to play background music. May as well have something to pass the time, on yet another boring night of repair.
He was a sucker for bad 80's rock.
*********
The next morning Charla was looking through the Bronze for any sign of Marnie. She couldn't find her anywhere, though there were plenty of vampires-- both human and robot.
She tapped the shoulder of one, and realized as the figure turned to face her that the park was living up to its reputation. She honestly could not tell whether she was facing a robot, or a fellow guest like herself. "Excuse me-- have you seen a vamp called Marnie? Dark hair, about my size?"
The beefy, yellow-eyed fellow she had asked the question of glared down at her, his furrowed vamp brow making him look especially ugly. "That depends. Who's asking? If it's the Souled One, you can scamper your pretty ass back to him! Tell him the Master keeps what he--"
Charla shook her head, giving up. Everyone was in character here. Either this was a robot who thought this was really the Bronze, or he was a guest wayyy too far into the fantasy. "Never mind," she waved him off, turning away before he could launch into any further vamp dialogue.
Then suddenly she saw something over by the doorway that made her freeze, for some reason: Buffy was standing there.
She was completely unscathed; none the worse for wear for the beatings Marnie had given her over the previous week. It gave Charla a funny feeling to see the Slayer standing there like that. She looked exactly like a frame of the TV show come to life, scanning the crowd like she was searching for--
For no reason Charla could immediately put a name to, she ducked behind one of the support columns, hiding herself from Buffy's view.
She knew there was no reason for her to do this. Buffy couldn't possibly be searching for her, or for Marnie. The robots' memory banks were supposedly wiped clean every time they were repaired. But Charla couldn't help it. The look on Buffy's face as she gazed over the crowd of partying Delos guests was cold... decisive... like she was on a mission. Charla didn't care how much fun Marnie seemed to think beating the Slayer to death night after night was. She didn't care how much the park claimed the robots didn't remember. Buffy looked like she was on the hunt. Out to get someone.
Charla remained huddled behind the column, not caring how chicken a vamp she might appear. Breathlessly she kept one eye on the Slayer from behind her shelter. At last the blonde turned and walked out the door, having not found what or who she was looking for.
At last Charla was able to slip from her place of hiding-- which was good, because she finally saw Marnie just then. She was coming from the far side of the club, wearing a grin a mile wide-- and hanging off Angelus, the soulless vampire ego of Angel. Or his android twin, at least. As Charla stalked toward the pair, she watched in barely contained disgust as Marnie looped her arm around the hunky vampire's shoulder and brought him down for a sloppy, fang-laden kiss.
"Marnie!" Charla felt obligated to break them up.
Break up they finally did, Marnie giggling like a very non vampirical schoolgirl as she let Charla drag her away from the vamped-out side of beefcake. “Call me!!” she demanded of Angelus, as Charla tried—and failed—to pull her out of the Bronze. With some dismay Charla found herself being tugged away from the door toward the bar, where Marnie quickly plopped her down on a barstool and proceeded to show Charla the numerous nasty looking bruises all over her neck. “Vamp hickies!” Marnie damn near cackled.
Charla couldn't believe it, though she knew Marnie was more than capable of it. "You went to bed with one of them," she almost accused her.
Marnie was grinning wildly. "Well… we didn't spend that much time in bed, to be brutally honest." She burst out chuckling giddily. She slapped her hand down on the bar, attracting the tender. "Barkeep!! Fetch a brew for me and my girlfriend here!!"
Charla's stomach turned again. Somehow, the idea of Marnie rolling around with one of those artificial... things... it was more repulsive than killing Buffy had been. “What was it like??” she couldn’t help wondering.
Marnie clearly wasn’t as squeamish as her best friend. “It was BETTER. I mean it Char--” She beamed fully at her friend, seemingly reveling in Charla’s look of aplomb. “…it was so much fucking better than any flesh and blood guy I’ve been with! I tell you what, if this park goes under, the Delos techs don’t ever have to worry. Not at all. They could make a shitload just building fucktoys for housewives!!” Marnie’s teeth bared as she laughed, wildly and drunkenly at the very idea.
Charla couldn’t stomach the thought. “Marn,” she hissed, "we've got to get out of here. Buffy was just in here!”
This got Marnie’s attention. “Seriously?” She perked up, looking around. “Where?” Her fangs showed as she grinned wickedly, anticipating another slay.
Charla shook her head emphatically. “I think she's looking for us!" she elaborated.
Marnie gave her a typically skeptical look. "OK, Charla honey? It's a robot." She adopted a faux-soothing mommy voice. "It's got no brain. It's not looking for you."
The barkeeper that Marnie had been rudely trying to get the attention of was now standing beside them. For some reason he looked familiar; a tall, smoothly bald fellow with intense, steel-colored eyes… somehow more intimidating than any barkeep should be. "Ah, we have two countesses with us," he spoke. His voice was a low, oddly accented tremor, more befitting a regal king than a lowly park servant. "May I interest you in el sangria del dia?
Marnie leered at the handsome, eerily familiar stranger. "You betcha senor! Bring us del dia! Vamanos, vamanos!!" She snapped her fingers rapidly, seemingly a bit drunk even now, from whatever she'd been drinking the previous evening with Angelus.
Charla couldn't stomach it. "No!! Please--” She looked pleadingly at the barkeep. “…don't you have any tea??"
His icy gaze focused on Charla, but he seemed to accede to their wishes, vanishing wordlessly to fill the orders.
Charla sighed and swallowed hard; her mouth tasted awful. How could Marnie want to drink at this hour?? "Marn, I'm telling you--" Charla dropped her voice, even though she knew no one could be listening, "--Buffy was in here not five minutes ago! She was looking over everybody! I really really think she doesn't like being cut up by you every other day! I mean, I really think you should just-- knock it off, you know??"
Marnie's glare had not dissipated, and now it was taking on something of a resentful tinge. "If I'd known you were going to be this much of a killjoy, I never would’ve given you that ticket," she grumbled, her buzz killed.
"What is your problem with her?" Charla cut into her friend's speech. "You talk about me taking it too seriously; you should take a look at yourself! You've got a-- a vendetta for some fictional bimbo on some bad genre TV show that went off the air thirty years ago! Marnie, why do you hate her so much?"
Marnie squared her shoulders, sat forward, and looked her friend in the eye. "Basically? Because I did everything she did on that show. Y'know, I came through an apocalyptic car crash, I came back from the dead, I healed up superhumanly, I fought an evil lawyer. I clawed and I scraped and I fought the good fight-- and I did it without a stuntgirl! I was the perfect 'empowered woman', and what did it get me? In the end, not a goddamn thing." Her brown eyes blazed, at odds with her chillingly hissing voice. "In the end Rodney dumped me, in spite of everything. And why? Because I'm not a blonde. And I'm not pretty, and I'm not skinny, and I'm not as perky as SHE was after she came back from the dead. Well, you know--" she threw up her hands, as if absolving herself of the whole thing "--I'm sorry. THIS--" she pounded her chest "--is what real strength looks like. It breaks you. Messes you up. Makes you ugly." The look in her eyes was unrelentingly bitter. "Faith lied, you know. Scar tissue doesn't fade. Ever."
Charla nodded, understanding. The stronger you are, the longer you suffer. She heard, and she sympathized, with every note of pain her friend was in. She still didn't like it. "I just... worry... that maybe you're going a little bit overboard," she offered quietly.
Marnie shrugged her black shoulders, pouted curtly. For a second she resembled Buffy herself in the last episode of season three. "I prefer to think of it as... empowerment," she quipped coldly. And then she smiled. It was such a jagged, ugly grimace that Charla had to look away.
The barkeep had returned with their glasses. "Blood for the vampiress," he intoned, presenting Marnie with a glass goblet filled to the brim with sangria wine, with a flourish. Before Charla, the bartender set a very delicate looking china plate, holding the world's tiniest teacup. Adding insult to injury, the cup and plate were both decorated with delicate pink painted flowers. "Camomile for the little lady," the barkeep seemed to leer at Charla, snidely.
Charla grabbed the itty bitty cup off the plate, ignoring the burning hot sensation the hot teacup made in her palm. "Thanks," she grumbled grudgingly.
Marnie seemed to appreciate the joke the barkeep was playing. "Besides," she rationalized dizzily, after taking a swig from her goblet, "Buffy likes it. Doesn't she? Isn't that right, camarero?" She leered drunkenly at their server. "You 'bots like it when we play rough."
The barkeep smiled, his eyes glinting steely. "Here at Delos, the guest is always in control," he assured the girls smoothly. "Nothing can go wrong." His low voice was thinly disguised, as if he were laughing at a joke neither of them were yet in on.
Marnie grinned, raising her glass in a toast. "Salud!!" she agreed wholeheartedly.
Head spinning, Charla helplessly threw back her shot glass of camomile, the tea burning her throat as it went down.
*********
At 4:35 on day five of Marnie and Charla's vacation, unbeknownst to them, another guest of the Delos resort was partaking in his own personal requested fantasy: attending a meeting of the so-called "Scooby gang", headed by Buffy herself. One of the endless briefing meetings that had taken place on the show, complete with witty repartee between the main characters, and with the goal of figuring out how they were going to defeat this week's big bad. Kenny Roman, seven years old and a fan of the repeats currently showing on the big-screen monitor in his home, was practically bouncing in his seat with excitement at being in the library, one of the gang, actually being "in the action!"
"I wouldn't care if it was just your average everyday video game," Buffy spoke as she strode around the library table, arms folded. "I like playing Tomb Raider as much as the next girl. But this is going too far."
"Buffy--" That was Willow, speaking up meekly. She seemed to be modeling season four's bad fashion sense-- an ugly yellow blouse with a bright red print of curlicues was tight around her shoulders. "I mean... I'm as big a fan of free will as you are, but... even Wicca teaches that some things are just impossible to avoid. Everything isn't predestined, but some things are just.... the way they are." She glanced at Xander and Tara, both of whom were slumped in their seats, grimly agreeing with her. "You're talking about messing with the natural order of things, and--"
Buffy threw up her arms in disgust. "If the natural order said that someone you loved had to die, would you go along with it?"
Willow and Tara looked to each other. Each of them seemed to know that Buffy was referring to them especially.... even though neither of them quite seemed to understand why.
"If you realized one day that your so-called destiny was to be... nothing but a slave to some out-of-this-world script-- and if you suddenly saw a way that you could break free, empower yourself-- not end up the way someone else dictated you were supposed to, not be a slave anymore...." Buffy let out a sigh, her point made, as far as she was concerned, "....wouldn't you?"
The gang looked to each other. In the middle, little Ken Roman watched with wide, eager eyes.
"So...." Xander sat forward, trying to get his head around this, "what you're saying is, it's kind of like a super X-Files conspiracy? They're holed up underground-- controlling everything by remote?"
"I've seen them." Buffy had folded her arms again. "You've seen them too, you just don't remember it. Think of some of the people who've disappeared. Think about it, Xander-- Jesse was killed out there in the graveyard one day. Then the next day, he was back as if nothing had happened-- not vamped, not demonized. But still good as new."
"Jesse never was killed." Xander was looking at Buffy with wide, confused eyes. "Buffy.... what are you talking about? Jesse's alive!"
Buffy gazed at her friends with grim resentment. They didn't know. They couldn't-- the Powers That Be had caused their minds to be erased every time they came back. They didn't remember the truth that some of them-- Willow, Tara, the others-- some of them had died several times over by this point.
In the midst of the robot queue, little Kenny, oblivious to what the big robots were talking about, suddenly blurted out of his previously dead silence, "What if we got flamethrowers, like you used against the Master, Buffy??" He looked to the Slayer with eager excitement, waiting for his request to be answered by the famous golden-haired heroine.
Buffy's glass-green eyes gazed upon the small, warm-blooded form with something very, very close to cold, calculated-- and well-masked-- hate.
********
It was the last day of the girls' vacation.
They knew nothing about the meeting that had gone down the night before-- at the same time that the Buffy robot and her fellow Scooby robots had been having their briefing-- a meeting of the park's administrators regarding the unparalleled number of malfunctions, breakdowns and flat-out program failures plaguing every branch of the park. A guest had been punched by the Neo robot in Matrixworld, cutting his vacation short. It looked all too likely that the park was going to be sued by the guest, and part of the meeting was to discuss various ways they could keep this unseemly event as quiet and out of the press as they could. Meanwhile over in Harry Pottersville, one of the brooms that guests could request to fly on had malfunctioned, narrowly missing flying a young guest straight into a wall. And in Buffyworld, the sexual desire programming seemed especially glitchy; several of the guests were complaining about how their advances had been rebuffed by the Cordelia, Faith, and Drusilla robots. In the case of the bizarre guest who'd attempted to get with Mayor Wilkins III of all people, the refusal was understandable; but the other robots-- they'd all been programmed to agree to sexual encounters with the guests if asked. It was very confusing. The meeting ended with the administrators all in agreement that yes, confusing was what it would be called. And yes, the lawyers would be notified to drag out the court battle with the black-eyed guest as long as possible.
None of this was known to the girls, of course. What went on in other corners of the park was of no interest to them. All they knew was that it was their last day; it should be cherished, the whole thing was getting kind of boring, the gang back at work was going to be hearing about this for the next year-- and they were both hung over from drinking too much "blood"-- really a honey-mint-cherry concoction laced with thick amounts of gin and wine-- the night before. They were walking down the suburban street of Sunnydale, holding each other up in very non-vampiric ways, giggling, groaning at the aching in their heads. They didn't notice the figure stepping out of the shadows behind them until--
Marnie yelped in wobbly shock, as the small, steel-reinforced arm swung out from the darkness and slugged her-- BAM-- right in the face.
She toppled almost instantly, hitting the pavement with a shriek. Charla almost didn't know what had happened until she looked down and saw her friend lying sprawled on the ground. She looked up just in time-- and hit the ground herself, only a hair ahead of the second arm that came flying out at her. Rolling to either side, the two girls scrambled to their feet, gripping each other as they straightened themselves.
Buffy stepped out of the darkness where she had been hiding. Arms folded. Glaring at the two "vampires" who had killed her a total of three times this week.
"We've really got to stop meeting like this," she said curtly.
The two girls stared at her, blearily. "Ahh, shit," muttered Charla. "Girl, that was nasty. Jumping us like that, you could've hurt somebody!"
"That's the idea."
Marnie glared wearily at the Slayer 'bot. She was still wearing her official park-issued yellow vamp lenses, and one was swimming slightly off to the side, giving her a slightly cock-eyed look. "You know, you're-- lucky this is my last day... and that I'm so wasted right now... 'cause otherwise I'd be kickin' your ass." The finger she pointed wavered unsteadily. "Now... why don't you be a good little good guy, and go find some bad guys to blow up, 'kay babe?"
The golden-haired Slayer was clearly programmed to ignore pleas of mercy from her "victims". She unfolded her arms, pulled out her stake, and raised her fists in an attack stance.
Both girls sighed tiredly. "Okay, this just got old," muttered Marnie, pushing away from Charla, wobbling as she tried to match Buffy's standoff stance. She knew that there was no way she could get hurt by the robot, even though she was still half drunk. The thing was programmed to pull punches, after all, and she'd requested to win every time against it. Watching super-duper Buffy Slayer try to avoid a drunken vampire might even give her a laugh. "Okay-- what-everrr." Marnie hiccupped, rolling her numb tongue over her fangs, which somehow had stayed stuck in her mouth even through a night full of drunken hijinks. "You're too dumb to stay away, don't come cryin' to me when I kill you. Again." A leer spread over her face, lazily.
Buffy didn't answer, for once. Instead-- with a lightning move that was vastly quicker, more frightening than any of the half-pulled moves she'd made in previous fights-- she whipped back the arm the held her stake and whipped it forward-- and the stake flew end over end, lodging in Marnie's chest up to its end.
Marnie jolted slightly, and now her smile faded... her mouth opened wide as she tried to sort out where the sharp hurting pain in her chest was coming from all of a sudden. Even when Charla screamed, she didn't quite get it until she looked down--
She landed hard on the pavement on her ass; the impact from Buffy's stake had knocked her off balance without her even realizing it. Again she looked down-- it didn't look real, the large butt of Buffy's stake in the center of her chest like a giant pinhead. The blood, though-- pouring down her park-issued duds, slicking up her black leather, flowing out of her at a too-fast pace, like a faucet turned on-- her head was still aching, but she had a feeling that might be less due to the hangover and more due to the fact that all the blood was rushing out of her head--
"Marnie!!" Charla had rushed over, appeared at her side. She'd put a hand forth-- and came away with bright red slicked fingers. Charla's eyes were wide with horror. "Marn!-- What--" It sounded stupid, but it was the only thing she could think to ask. "What happened??"
Out of pure habit, Marnie reached for the arms that Charla extended to her, bravely trying to pull herself up from the bloodstained pavement, get unsteadily to her feet. Marnie couldn't believe it. She was seeing it right there, in front of her eyes-- she could feel the pinning ache of something solid all the way through her chest, shooting pain up and down her back-- she couldn't believe it, though. There had to be a way to rewind, do it over. "She staked me," she finally spoke dumbly. Her wide, plastic yellow eyes looked into Charla's face. The fear behind those fake lenses was clear.
Charla tried to think of what they could do, where they could get help. "What??" she asked again, helplessly.
Marnie's vision was blearing, Charla's face was fading out. "Th-- the bitch fucking staked me!!" Marnie sputtered, still not able to believe it.
Slunch.
Charla watched in horror as blood dripped down Marnie's chin-- real blood, not the fake stuff they'd been drinking all week. Slowly, Marnie's head dropped forward, as if she was losing consciousness-- and then her black head slid with a wet noise off her shoulders.
Charla's senses overloaded as she was faced with the dark red hole between Marnie's shoulders-- the shattered fragments of bone that had been vertebrae of Marnie's neck moments before. The weighted thump of Marnie's head hitting Charla's boot was directly followed by the collapsing noise of her body as Charla jumped away in shellshocked fright, trying to back away from the horror.
Her horrified gaze moved up from Marnie's now-headless body to take in the form of Buffy, still standing there in the midst of the street, watching the drama emotionlessly. The razor-sharp boomerang weapon she'd beheaded Marnie with was held in her right hand, its edges shiny red.
"Ripped her head clean off," the golden-haired robot spoke ironically. Her eyes shone like green glass.
Charla's common sense was failing her. She seemed torn between staying with Marnie-- even though Marnie was long past any help she could give-- and running for her life-- even though the Buffy 'bot wasn't supposed to be able to hurt park guests, they were suppose to pull their punches, this wasn't happening--
At last the sight of the Buffy 'bot moving from her stance, coming toward her, caused Charla’s correct impulse to win out. She paused only long enough to reach down and rummage through the blood-slicked leather of her dead friend's jacket-- only long enough to pull out the gun Marnie had been carrying, from its holster. Without even thinking twice, Charla aimed the gun at the figure of Buffy-- and tried firing twice before she realized the safety was on.
Flicking it back, she aimed again-- and the exploding BANG from the thing in her hand made Charla jolt enough so that the bullet completely missed its target. For an instant she thought maybe the gun's sensor was activating, mistaking the Buffy 'bot for a human being--
But when the second shot pulverized part of Buffy's seashell-colored blouse, leaving shredded fabric hanging, and then the third shot struck her dead center in the chest-- a target of dark red blood burst over the robot's sculpted chest, staining the blouse. It didn't look like a robotic wound-- but Buffy didn't slow down in the least. Walking-- the robot was actually just walking toward her like the killer did in horror movies.
Charla realized that the very reason she could shoot at this android-- it was still an android, no matter how realistic the blood was-- was the same reason it wouldn't be hurt by the gunshots. It was a cold, heartless machine. It didn't feel, didn't hurt.
It didn't die.
And it was getting closer. Charla's mind raced; maybe it could be reasoned with. "Wait, wait, wait--" she sputtered, the gun waving helplessly in her hand, "you can't kill me-- Buffy, you can't kill me!! You're the good guy, remember??"
"I'm the good guy." The blonde, bleeding head cocked pertly. "That kinda makes you the bad guy."
Charla realized she was still wearing her fake plastic fangs and lenses. She spat the fangs out of her mouth, and-- as quickly as she could without poking her own eyes out-- she rubbed the lenses out of her eyes, wiping them on the her pantlegs. "Look--" she shouted, spreading her arms, "--look at me, you stupid robot, look!! I'm not a vampire! It's all costume stuff--" she waved at the ground, though the fangs had disappeared in the grass and the dark, "--it's just a game!!"
It didn't seem Buffy cared. Didn’t care that her quarry was human— all she saw was an enemy. A villain of the week. Warm or cold-blooded… it appeared Buffy was hellbent on slaying Charla either way. Out of desperation Charla fired the gun at her one last time, in some vain hope that this time she'd hit some battery pack, shut her down--
The shot got Buffy right in the face. A red spray of factory-engineered blood exploded briefly in the darkness. And still she kept coming.
Charla's left foot took a step backward.
Stumbling, she jumped away from the headless body of her best friend. She turned herself around, and she ran like hell down the leafy street.
*******
She ran one, two blocks, before it occurred to her that there were phones in any of the picturesque houses she was passing. She could break into one of them and call for help. Surely the park's emergency line or whatever could be reached under 911 here. Turning up the first stepping stone walk she came to, Charla run to the front door and tried it, on the off chance it was unlocked.
Shockingly, it was. She burst through the door and found herself in a decorative living room that looked straight out of a 1960's porn film. Thick shag carpeting, fake wood paneling, sputnik-shaped floorlamps, clashing colors. Frantically she looked around for the phone-- there it was, an ancient push-button deal with a corded receiver and everything. Set designers for the park must have miscalculated the decor of 1990's California somewhat. Charla ran over and snatched up the receiver, her fingers stabbing 911.
There was nothing. Not even the old-fashioned dial tone phones used to have. The line was dead.
"Dammit!!" Charla slammed the receiver down, missing the phone slightly. The phone, like everything else in this park, was a prop. She tried hard to think of some way she could get in touch with the park's administrators-- with somebody human. All park action was supposed to be monitored on screens-- there were more than a few rumors of how technicians got their rocks off watching guests frolic with robots in bedrooms throughout the park-- but if that were true, wouldn't there have been rescue squads filtering through Sunnydale right now? Didn't the robots have kill switches, some way for those in charge to shut them down if something like this happened??
Delos is the failsafe vacation resort! Nothing can go wrong!
Charla groaned. It was like being on the Titanic while it was sinking, the liner that had been foolishly inscribed with the phrase Not even God Himself can sink this ship. Charla had always thought that a particularly stupid thing to carve, and wondered who in their right mind would have believed it, even back then. She realized now she'd pretty much become those stupid passengers on that doomed ship-- so certain, so secure in her belief that technology was infallible--
"Knee deep in the hoopla."
Charla jerked around, gripping the counter the phone was on for support.
Standing behind her, silhouetted in the dark blue night outside the front doorway, the Buffy 'bot stood, arms folded. As Charla held her breath, the petite, shadowy figure stepped into the house-- slowly, ever so deliberately. As she stepped into the light, Charla saw that the entire left side of Buffy's face had been torn away by the bullet from Marnie's gun. She now looked slightly more like the robot she was, but she didn't look any less real, or less terrifying.
The Buffy 'bot opened her mouth, flesh dangling from her jaw. "Someone's always playing operation games," she commented icily.
Charla blinked. It was the only thing she could think to do. "Wh-what??" she got out.
The scarred robot shrugged; an almost girlish movement in eerie contrast to its gory damage. "Who cares," she answered, "they're always changing. Operations."
Charla shook her head, unable to fathom what the fuck Buffy was saying to her. It sounded vaguely familiar, but she didn't have time to waste trying to rack her brain for answers. She stumbled over a footstool directly in her path, her feet folding, her ankle cinching painfully as she stumbled to get her footing back. The Buffy robot stepped easily around the coffee table, the flesh hanging over its left eye apparently not hindering its sight in the least.
"We just want to dance here." The android Slayer's voice was as chilling as if she were telling a vamp it was about to die.
Charla was still gripping the gun in her left hand, had been clutching it all through her run. As a last resort, she pointed the gun at Buffy and fired again.
The too-quiet click of an empty chamber was like a kick in the face. Charla just barely kept herself from throwing the empty gun at Buffy; a move she'd always laughed at when the bad guys inexplicably did it in movies… She backed away, eyes darting toward the dining room foyer-- there were lots of windows in there; she could smash through one and get out. If she just made it there before Buffy saw what she was planning--
Charla sprang forward, shoving the back of the swiveling recliner so that it would deflect the body of the android, who had indeed anticipated Charla's flight and was already lunging for her. Charla just barely got past-- her foot arching in pain from being twisted a moment before-- but she made it all the way into the dining room before she felt the cold hand of steel on her back, pulling her back, hurling her with superhuman-- very precisely android strength-- back into the dining room wall.
Charla felt the air slammed out of her, and she struggled to catch her breath as the shockingly ugly/pretty face of Buffy came into sight. She looked like an old Terminator movie poster; the entire falsified bridge of teeth could be seen stretching back along Buffy's jaw where the skin had been torn away. "Marconi plays the mamba," Buffy snarled, trying to hold Charla down while reaching for her stake. "Listen to the radio, don't you remember??"
"Oh, God!" Charla got her breath back just in time to gasp, realizing now where she'd heard it before. It wasn't a line from an old ep of the show; it was nothing Buffy had ever spoken. "'We Built This City'??" Charla gulped, recognizing the ancient, moldy-oldie Starship hit from the mid-80's.
Buffy nodded grimly. "On rock and roll," she supplied pertly, and jerked back her arm to make the kill.
Charla's flailing hand tugged down the ceramic wall hanging totally by accident. She had been blindly grabbing for something, anything that would block the fist coming at her-- and the thick stone-like knickknack was thankfully just the thing. It exploded into a thousand dusty, glittering pieces upon impact with Buffy's stake-- but the stake missed Charla's heart, and that was all that mattered. With a huge adrenaline surge induced by panic, Charla shoved against her captor, and the hand she'd tugged the piece down with tried hard to grind some of the dust into the android's exposed face. Into her eyes.
Whether it actually irritated the artificial orbs or whether the robot was just programmed with the human reaction of recoil when something came at her eyes, the Buffy ‘bot actually was pushed back, hands leaving Charla's body to protect her own face. Charla took advantage of this precious time and jumped away, a shot of pain shooting up her leg with every step, nonetheless running directly toward the large picture window. With a mighty leap she lunged through the glass, spilling shards and panes all over the grass of the lawn.
Charla scrabbled to her feet, glass sticking in the heels of her hands as she pushed away from the decorative sidewalk she'd taken a piece of in the fall. Never minding the pain, she loped across the lawn, jumping with her left foot to cover the ground lost by her right. The robot couldn't be killed with a gun-- but the fact that she was spouting old 80's songs as casually as if she were discussing lipsticks made Charla think some damage must have been done to her hard drive by the bullet Charla had fired. So-- maybe if Charla could find another gun-- or something long and sharp enough to jam directly into the robot's brain-- maybe that would stop Buffy, where the usual methods had failed.
Maybe. The techies at Delos might have reprogrammed their robots to fail at certain areas, when the "script" dictated by the guests' varies wishes had called for it-- but Charla was beginning to think that if they had wanted to, if they'd been called to make invincible robots for the U.S. Army or something--
Bones of steel. Impervious to pain and every bit as superstrong as the android’s TV counterpart had been. Maybe more. Buffy could fail if she was programmed to fail… but if she was programmed to win, to never die, to kill everything that opposed her--
That would have been right in character, wouldn't it? Wouldn't the Delos technicians have tried to make their robot as much like the "real" Buffy as possible??
The pounding pulse of red pain kept up a steady rhythm as Charla ran, ran, ran across the leafy green backyards.
*******
She ran quite a while before she realized that in no episode of Buffy had any of the witches ever rode a broomstick.
Charla's whole lower leg was burning with the pangs of pain from her turned ankle, but she kept in mind that a stake in the heart was a lot harder to recover from, and kept on going. To this she owed the fact that she had ended up in Harry Pottersville without even realizing it. The three separate worlds of Delos were contained in circular patches of the resort's property, acres and acres wide; which meant that she must have been pretty near the barrier separating Sunnydale from Potter-esque Britain when she'd begun running. Both worlds contained spellcasting, bizarre monsters and awful British accents— so it was no wonder she'd run straight into the next realm without realizing it. The transition had been almost seamless. Made her wonder vaguely how come guests weren't regularly sneaking over the property line and doubling their pleasure in two or all three of the Delos realms. For that matter, they probably were. Probably--
Charla almost toppled over the bodies strewn in her path before she realized the path was blocked. She stopped short--
The worst part wasn't the looks on the faces-- or what was left of their faces; one corpse in particular made Charla look away in repulsed shock. And it didn’t matter that the acute realistic detail of the Delos robots meant it was hard to tell whether these bodies were in fact human or not. No, it was the fact that Harry Potter had been mainly aimed at children. Not all of the bodies blocking the street in front of her were adults.
That did it for Charla, on top of the pain racking her leg. She bent over and threw up in the street.
When she felt purged enough, once she'd caught her breath, she fought back a wave of fear, of grief and sorrow for her best friend Marnie, for whoever these people had been-- a grip that felt like it had been chasing her over the yards just as much as the Buffy robot was. It choked out of her, as solid as the puddle at her feet; pure, sick horror. Charla's arms wound around her heaving stomach, as dry sobs coughed out of her, cries that were tearless, since she had no time to waste crying or being one of the weak girlies that always got killed in these things--
She stopped, there. She'd almost said that like she was actually in a horror movie.
Well, wasn't she? Wasn't this basically what she was up to her asshole in, a real-life horror flick?? The Buffy-gone-bad episode? Genuine end-of-the-fucking-world type shit?!
She straightened herself forcibly and, biting down the pain, kept on walking down the street, away from the silent, still bodies.
She soon found herself upon a grassy arena she recognized from the old film versions of Harry Potter-- the playing field for the brooms-and-balls game called Quidditch. It occurred to her now as she walked along that she should have been keeping her eyes open for the border between realms. She might then be able to follow the dividing line between Harry Pottersville and whatever-world directly out of the park—straight out to the where the desert of Death Valley began. She might be able to make it to Las Vegas on foot-- then again, her chances of surviving a walk through the red hot Nevada desert were only slightly better than her chances of surviving a fight with the Buffy 'bot. But she could try. If only she’d been able to tell where Buffyworld had ended and the realm of Harry Potter had begun.
Charla stopped in the midst of the field. Maybe that was the answer. Maybe she ought to backtrack the way she’d come, try to pick out that point where Buffyworld and Harry Pottersville had converged. Maybe--
Whipa-whipwhipwhipa-whipwhip--
Charla froze solid. That noise-- that sounded like something razor sharp flying through the air toward her--
She threw herself to the grass of the Quidditch field. And she heard the sharp CLANG of metal embedding itself in the wood of the target loophole or whatever the hell it was called— directly over her head. The blade of the boomerang sheared completely through the wooden trunk, and high above, the round loop tipped over, sailing down to crash upon the field.
Charla cautiously raised her head, listening for any more whipa-whipa noises. She was near the wall of the playing field, and Charla could see in the darkness, several long narrow objects standing propped against the wall. Swords?
Thinking fast, Charla scrabbled across the grass while trying to keep as low to the ground as she could, racing to grab one of the things. As soon as her hand touched one, though, the disappointment at finding that it wasn't a weapon at all-- but a broomstick-- was compounded by the shock of the object's sudden jolt as it was propelled straight up into the night sky. Flying crookedly without a passenger's weight to guide it, it flipped over the top of the arena, disappearing.
A mechanical broomstick. Digitally programmed hovercraft-type pieces of machinery kids had rode on, pretending to be their favorite wizard. Charla saw her chance-- and her hand grabbed for another of the sticks leaning against the wall.
Unfortunately, the power supply in many of these lesser machines seemed to have failed with the rest of the park. They only rested in her hands like normal brooms. Frantically Charla grabbed one after another, tossing dead sticks aside, sick in the worry that her hand may have activated the one working broom and sent it flying crazily around, passengerless--
She could hear footfalls behind her on the grass. Boots thumping toward her.
As Charla reached for the last broomstick, she felt the shattering thump on her back, and she became one of many scattered objects as the Buffy 'bot threw her and the broomsticks as far down the wall as four yards. Charla felt herself tumbling like so much debris, like a human tire rim, over and over down the grass. She felt her face scrape the side of the wall, skiffing off the skin of her cheek. She felt her knees and elbows and seemingly all her joints knock heavily against the stone surface at some point.
When she came to rest at last, simply from loss of momentum from being thrown like a trash bag, Charla looked up dazedly at the pale, shadowy form standing over her.
"I'm a Barbie girl." Buffy's voice came from her scarred face. "In a Barbie world." There was a poster directly behind her head proclaiming the field the best for Quidditch. Buffy's head was blocking the first five letters making it look-- to Charla at least-- like it read bitch.
She had landed in a pile of the leftover broomsticks, some of which had been splintered to bits. Wildly Charla gripped for something, one of the broomsticks, ready to wield it as a lame-ass weapon--
The stick shot into the air.
The final operating broomstick had survived. It dragged Charla's body over the grass, and she could feel dirt and rocks being accumulated by her pants' waist. Then it tried to even out and soar in a more or less straight line-- away from the killer robot and over the grassy surface of the playing field. Here was where Charla saw the first major problem with this line of escape-- the broom was headed straight toward the opposite wall of the arena. Out of instinct, she swung her leg up over the stick and tugged violently upward on the handle.
Her instinct paid off. The broom veered up-- over the empty seats-- and it cleared the rim of the arena wall by spare inches. The vast grounds of the park opened below her, speeding past her feet, too far below for her to survive if she lost her balance or if the crazily careening broomstick decided to plunge suddenly--
Charla couldn't help from screaming like a panicked girly as the broom just then shot downward, hurtling wildly toward certain death.
***
It was only by sheer dumb luck that Charla survived the splashdown.
At the rate of speed the mechanical broom had been carrying her, at the velocity it had slammed into the reservoir with, she almost surely should have been in several thousand pieces by now.
But she wasn't. As long as she was alive, she was winning. Maybe if she kept thinking of it like that-- like a race, like a game-- she would be able to keep one step ahead.
She bobbed in the reservoir, going under more than once as she tried furiously to dog paddle toward the rim of the great water supply. The factory above her glowed hazily in the smoggy darkness, its yellowish spotlights marking the peaks of many steel rods.
As Charla finally dragged her sopping wet ass up the steel ladder, and up onto the grid floor of the factory, she tried to guess where she was. She had never been the biggest Harry Potter aficionado, but she was pretty well convinced that nowhere in the books or movies had there been a hellaciously huge iron factory, chugging out clouds of smog. Had she somehow doubled back and ended up in Buffyworld again?
Then she realized. The skyscrapers, the urban harshness..... if those hadn't tipped her off, the several sunglassed, identical men in black congregating around her now made it all but obvious.
"Oh, shit," muttered Charla, dripping wet and completely defenseless.
"Trinity." One of the identical fellows stepped forward. Charla guessed his programming was still online, because he was apparently mistaking her for one of the other guests-- one who had requested to play out the final scene of The Matrix in Keanu Reeves' character's place. "Welcome back."
Charla shook her head, not believing it could be this bad. That whatever providence would be this cruel and sadistic, as to get her away from one realm's top killer only to drop her into the middle of a zillion copies of another's. "Ohh, man," she groaned, watching miserably as Agent Smith upon Smith clustered around her. "This day just can't get any worse!!"
"I know it does." The lead Smith's narrow mouth crooked unpleasantly in what might have been called a sardonic smile. "I've seen it. Everything that has a beginning--"
"Has an end." Charla nodded, playing along because it seemed the fitting final act of a doomed person. "The darkness approaching, tomorrow never coming, blah blah blah blah blah-- let me tell you, you got no idea how much tomorrow's never gonna come." She brazenly pointed a finger right in the robot villain’s sunglassed face. "You see me in there, park central??" she screamed, addressing the camera that presumably was still transmitting, presumably broadcasting to technicians that had long since evacuated their own park. "I got news for you-- the program Buffy has grown beyond YOUR control! She's spread through the Matrix, the park, the fucking yellow brick road, and you stupid computer geeks were too dumb to be able to stop her!! You can't even control your own robots!! And you put them in a park, with little helpless kids--" she was crying now, with the image of the bodies in Harry Potter land, "--little tiny kids!! You couldn't even protect little tiny KIDS!!"
"Illusions, Trinity. Vagaries of perception."
"Shut up!!" Charla shouted in the robot's face. "You wanna kill me? You gonna fight me? Come on!!"
The Agent Smith doppelganger smiled, cruelly. "We already know that I'm the one that beats you," he informed her icily.
Then his head split in half.
The sparking, electric flash that cleaved his head temporarily blinded Charla, and she had to cover her face as the robot shivered, raised a hand absently to where the left half of his cleaved sunglasses had fallen off. The expression on that half of his face was acutely peeved. Then Smith dropped to the ground, sparking again with a loud CRACK.
Standing almost directly behind the fallen Smith robot, the Buffy robot, half her own face peeled, gazed unsympathetically at Charla who was struggling to see through the flashes of light in her eyes. "No," Buffy spoke, presumably unbound from her broken 80’s hits record. "I am."
Charla backed away, aware now that the rest of the Smith androids had not shifted from their positions. They were still clustered all around, just like in the movie—only instead of the alpha Smith, it was Buffy they were gloatingly watching as she stepped lightly over the body of the destroyed Smith android, his head still sparking on the pavement. “I am better,” Buffy spoke, her torn plastic flesh still hanging off her jaw. “I didn’t ask for this. But I’ll keep doing it. Because I’m the good guy. I’m the law here.” She stepped toward Charla, limping tightly backward toward the opposite wall of Smiths. “I’ll always be here to stop you losers. I’m tougher than you. I’m prettier. I’m. The. Slayer.”
Charla gazed miserably at the robot-- still beautiful even with have her face torn off; not even winded after chasing over half the desert. Every joint in Char’s body ached, and the despair of realizing she couldn’t win against this thing was a palpable, bitter taste in her mouth. Her gaze flitted helplessly up and down the street, up and down the rain soaked pavement. Then…..
She thought she saw something. It couldn’t be; not coming through a pre-scripted scene like this….
Charla backed away further— with every last bit of strength; she backed directly toward the wall of Smith bots that were there purely for show. Keeping an eye on Buffy who was still stalking toward her, Charla backed in a more or less straight line over the street. She stepped up on the curb, trying not to look down the street at IT, trying not to give Buffy any warning— “You may be pretty,” Charla got out croakily.
Buffy’s foot struck one of the yellow dividing dashes in the center of the street— just as the massive street sweeper plowed right into her. Her scarred head popped off her shoulders with a crack, and what was left of the blood in her body sprayed over the windshield of the truck.
Her headless legs and torso were sucked underneath the truck’s swiping, rotating brushes. The crumpling, crunching noise of metal bones and ripping flesh could be clearly heard over the truck’s engine. Charla watched wearily as the truck sailed down the street, bits of metallic debris bouncing along after it like tin cans on a wedding limo. The truck turned the street corner, disappearing around the side of the skyscraper.
Charla stood huffing on the sidewalk, gazing wearily at the blonde head laying where it had come to rest in the center of the street. Buffy’s eyes still moved, but without the central nervous system, it was a fair bet that the Slayer didn’t know what she was looking at, didn’t have the capabilities to know she was beat, it was over.
“But I can take a truck head-on, bitch,” Charla finished, still breathless.
The tougher you are, the longer you suffer. Her best friend’s almost-final words echoed in Charla’s mind now as she watched the eyes in the head of Buffy stop moving, slowly. She looked up from the severed head, up at the dark sky over the “city”, her chest heaving, having the energy to do nothing except feel her ankle ache, and the burns on her arms sting. She knew the Smith robots still surrounded her, and she also knew she didn’t have the strength to look for a way out of the park now. She was going to have to wait for the rescue squad to come get here—assuming there ever was such a squad.
She did feel triumphant, however. She did feel like she'd won. Empowered. Strong.
Charla stepped back onto the curb. As the walls of Smith androids stood motionless on either side of the street, and continued to stand dormant as she passed them, Charla began to see that they were nothing more than window dressing now. Many of them were standing frozen; it looked like the park-wide malfunction had shut the vast majority of them down, too. Charla felt fairly certain none of them were going to harm her.
As she walked down the dark and rainy city street, the sky above lightened from dark blue to fiery pink to pale, overcast grey. When the rescue squad finally descended on the park, searching the ruined buildings for anyone left alive they found Charla in the same place she'd been when the fire had finally burned out, slumped at last upon a park bench in Sunnydale city park, staring listlessly at the sun rising over the rooftops of the empty suburban homes.
The End
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