Sweet's Journal

I smoked back to Grant's place after the power failure. The lights were on, there, but I soon found out that the supply was coming from the generators that Cathy had brought in. Apparently the power supplies for the whole area had failed, ( it didn't seem likely that plugging the recorder had caused that, but I didn't think I'd plug in any of my gear at Grant's place until I knew more.)

It didn't seem a good sign that his place had been affected. It's a fair distance from Sunnydale, but possibly not far enough. Grant had offered me a kind of base at his home and, although I hadn't been around to anything like the extent that he probably expected, it'd been helpful in more than one way. Humans have a lot of different societies and they change fast. Smoking around can tell you enough for a gig, but to cope with a place longer-term you need to know about it from people who belong there.

I needed a lot of time alone, though. They have no shielding at all, and Grant's depressed and Samantha is very emotional - well, anyway, I was on the point of smoking back to base when Percy told me that somebody was wandering about in Sunnydale. She was near Cathy's shop and apparently they expected her to go there.

So I checked out the area of the shop. Part of the trouble was that I didn't know quite what I was looking for. There were people I know coming from various distances and directions. There was someone I might have thought very dangerous, if I hadn't known her already - Erynne seemed to be heading for the Mall fast.

The trouble was the others, much nearer to the shop. There were at least two vamps, hungry and hunting. There was a mind that sometimes felt like a lost child and sometimes like a creature so old that it'd outlived its world. There was a strong sense of magical power with that one, and I wasn't sure if it was human or not. There was something depressed and frightened far on the outskirts. There was also a group of 'Bringers, moving through the darkness as confidently as sharks in water, finally in their element. I'd never known them to move so fast outside their caves, they had to be orienting themselves partly by echoes.

They were all converging on the same area. The darkened town cowered in a silence that seemed to be waiting to be broken by screams.

So I cast the musical mojo, with a strong suggestion that a 'Bringer should do a number from Chicago. It actually set off one of the vampires with an impassioned Heavy Metal schtick, and the magical backing for that shook the shopfronts and sent the 'Bringers away, in disorder, but faster than they'd been coming!

It worked nicely, up to a point. The trouble was that, by the time the others got to the rendevous-point, there wasn't anyone to rescue. Ernnye arrived a few moments after the rest of the group, and offered to go looking for the stranger. I saw her slip into a doorway to change before she took off, but I'm not sure if anyone else saw her go. The area seemed to be pretty well cleared by then, so I smoked off back to base.