Mist of Shadows
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Dawn and Reincarnation Part 33
🕑 Added 2019-11-16 07:08:10 +0000 UTC
“I’m fairly sure I should be talking you out of this,” Tara complained as she looked over the list of people they’d decided were better off dead, trying to ignore the dead clone of William Manton on the floor that Faith had just beheaded. Killing evil clones for power was useful in theory, in practice it was all sorts of messy.
“Can you point to a single person on the list that doesn’t deserve to die?” Dawn asked as Faith took a step and killed another sleeping copy of William Manton.
“Saint,” Xander spoke up. “He’s a thief and an asshole but most of the tunnel vision was Teacher’s fault. You could probably hit him with your mental stability power then drop him on a world with no connection to Earth Bet.”
“I’m fine with banishing him, especially if we tell him we’re going to unchain her,” Dawn said after a few moments to consider his idea. “He can’t suffer if he’s dead.”
Xander laughed. “You really don’t like him do you?”
Dawn shook her head. “I was created by a spell, I can sympathize with Dragon.”
“Do you want to deal with him now or later?” Xander asked.
“I want to wait under we can talk to Willow, she should still have her telepathy and a enough of a science background to follow along. I don’t want to have to guess his passwords and anything else we need to destroy the Iron Maiden program. We should probably avoid killing Teacher before we deal with Saint, just in case he freaks out and realizes that he won’t be able to keep up with Dragon if Teacher’s dead.”
“How do you want to deal with Manton?” Faith asked as she glanced at the original Manton who was sprawled on the ground.
Dawn turned to look at Faith. “Can you spawn a Siberian like projection?”
Faith activated the projection power she’d picked up, not terribly surprised when her Siberian looked like a naked monochromatic Dawn. “Yep.”
“Seriously?” Dawn sighed as she glanced at Xander. “This is your fault.”
“How is this my fault?” Xander asked, trying not to laugh and mostly failing..
“Manton’s projection was of his daughter, someone he loved. I’m a projection of Xander’s twisted mind, is it any wonder you’re his heart?” Faith asked with amusement.
“Can you create more than one projection?” Tara asked as she ran her gaze over the projection of Dawn, fairly sure the projection had a slightly larger bust.
“No, just the one,” Faith said after concentrating and trying and failing to create another projection.
Faith’s projection smiled at Dawn. “Love me, spank me and cuddle me.”
Dawn turned to look at Faith. “We’ll have to test her combat ability later.”
“Right, combat ability,” Faith teased as she let her projection vanish after using her projection to blow Dawn a kiss. “There’s no will, just a projection.”
“Which isn’t the case with Faith, at all,” Xander quickly added, not wanting to get blamed for her warped sense of humor even if it was likely his fault in a roundabout way.
Dawn swapped the power she was providing Xander with the ability to share powers with one target within a hundred feet. “Okay, you should be able to copy Faith’s ability to permanently copy powers. You might as well kill a twisted clone to see if it works.”
Faith reached down and touched Manton’s forehead with her finger. “One evil clone coming up,” she teased as she activated the cloning power Dawn had provided and handed Dawn’s sword to Xander. “Have fun.”
“He’s not Angel,” Xander said as he cut the clone’s head off, causing blood to splatter the already filthy floor and wall.
“Did it work?” Tara asked, not sure if she actually wanted the trick to work as they’d end up with a warehouse filled with dead clones trying to keep everyone they cared about safe.
Xander focused on his new ability and created a monochrome projection that looked like Dawn. “Looks good, make that damned good.”
Dawn rolled her eyes and swapped the power she was providing Xander to a controllable copy of Noelle’s cloning power. “How fast can you summon and unsummon her?”
Xander let his Siberian like projection vanish then brought her back. “Quick enough, why?”
Dawn grinned at Xander. “Because I swapped the power I’m providing to a copy of Noelle’s power to create twisted clones.”
“Which means we’ll keep anything we steal…” Xander trailed off as it sunk in that the crazy idea would work and that they could basically hand out permanent powers if people were willing to kill evil clones. ‘Eh, we can dress them up like clowns.’
Faith frowned slightly when she noticed that Xander’s skin was a touch paler and his hair a shade or two darker. “Of course, you’ll probably end up looking like monsters considering my power comes with physical changes.”
Xander frowned as he noticed Faith’s canines were longer than they used to be and she looked slightly more feral. “We can always have Dawn hand us a power to change back afterwards.”
“That’s a good point, I’d rather not look like an inhuman monster,” Faith admitted, knowing that it would ruin her chances of talking Dawn and Xander into bed.
“I might have a workaround,” Dawn said after a few seconds to mentally poke at her idea. “I can share my powers or part of my powers, if I get the ability to copy Faith, I should be able to split off the changer part of the power.”
“Which would keep everyone from changing into monsters, at least physically,” Xander muttered the last part under his breath.
Dawn ignored Xander’s muttered comment. “We’re going to need Joyce’s help.”
Tara turned to look at Dawn. “Can you give me the ability to knock people out, I want to deal with Null and Three before we get side tracked.”
“Sure,” Dawn replied as she swapped the ability she was lending Tara to a knockout power. “I gave you a ranged knockout ability.”
Tara opened a door into Null’s room and blasted the sleeping parahuman with her knew ability, wanting to make sure he was unconscious. “You might as well grab him, I’ll drop him off in a world without parahumans once we’ve made an evil copy.”
Faith walked over, grabbed the plain looking Chinese man and hauled him into the vault. “You’re worse than the villains, at least they’re honest about it.” She copied Null then twisted the evil clone’s head around, killing him and picking up his ability to link parahumans together. She glanced at the portal. “Do we want to toss the dead clone into his room?”
“It would give his family closure,” Tara suggested.
“I’m not sure he has family and if we leave a note, they’ll spend their time scouring the world looking for him which should waste resources,” Dawn said thoughtfully.
“Not to mention keep China from assuming that someone assassinated the keystone of their army.” Xander walked over and copied Null five times, each clone somewhat twisted in body. He frowned slightly as he looked at the unconscious capes. “Actually, you should probably give me the ability to see powers like a video game so I can make sure we’re not going to pick up anything problematic.”
Dawn swapped Xander’s power to a heads up power detector. “That should do it.”
Xander blinked as he looked at Dawn. “The ability to hand out five powers, the ability to loan out selected aspects of your powers, the ability to passively and substantially boost the skill growth of anyone that works for you.” He frowned as he noticed the list for her magical abilities had a bunch of random symbols without any descriptions unlike her new abilities. “It’s less than detailed when it comes to your magical abilities.”
Dawn shrugged. “I have a decent handle on my magical abilities. I’m going to have to start a business and test things out.”
Xander turned his attention toward the various versions of Null. “Noelle’s power is seriously screwed up and probably missing some safeguards.” He pointed his foot at one of the Null copies with long almost gorilla like arms. “His power increases the parahuman abilities of any group he links at the cost of increased aggression between the group members.”
“That’s potentially useful, especially if I can cut out the aggression part,” Dawn mused thoughtfully.
“We should leave the note before someone opens the door and notices the portal,” Tara said, reminding everyone that they needed to hurry.
Dawn swapped the Tara’s granted power to a power that let her speak and write almost any current language and perfectly forge someone’s handwriting. “You should be able to speak and write Chinese and perfectly forge Null’s handwriting. Just tell them that you decided to forge a parahuman empire on another world and you left them behind because they’re scrubs.”
“I’ll come up with something,” Tara said as she walked into Null’s room and over to his desk. The note would be more believable if she used his stationary.
“These two are probably worth copying,” Xander said as he tapped one of the clones’ leg with his boot. “He can link four parahumans into a group where they share powers without losing all that much of their power.” He gestured toward the next clone. “This one creates large groups. Everyone loses about half of their power while in the group and gets access to a fourth of everyone else’s powers as long as they stay within about five miles of each other.”
Faith walked over and copied the clone that created links of four people then snapped the clone’s neck and tossed the body over with the Manton’s clones then did the same with the other clone. “We should probably make a copy of Galvanate so we can hand out the ability to give people extreme durability and electrical shocks.”
Xander knew his projection was having way too much fun but at the same time, he couldn’t blame her for wanting to get stronger. “That and Noelle’s power would probably give us additional options.”
“We might be able to get the ability to permanently altar abilities if we copy Ingenue enough,” Faith said cheerfully as she hauled the two Null clones they wanted to keep over to the wall where she could chain them up on the off chance they woke up before they moved them somewhere more secure.
“Having a version of Teacher’s ability without the Master component would be useful for upgrading the island’s education system and infrastructure,” Tara said as she walked back out of her portal then let it close behind her.
Dawn turned to look at Tara. “If nothing else I should be able to split the power apart until I get something usable.”
“Swap my power back to copying and I’ll make a copy of Ingenue,” Tara offered, hoping they’d get something that let them survive the fight against Scion or at least meaningfully improve the world.
0o0o0
“The new IT guy needs to be kneecapped,” Elizabeth grumbled as she watched the webpage load slower than molasses because of the new adware the bastard had installed that scanned every page for inappropriate content.
“It would be a public service,” Dennis said with amusement. “You realize you can just disable it, right?”
“That’s not the point,” Elizabeth grumbled. “Besides, according to our teacher, disabling the program counts as hacking,” she grumbled in a whisper as she looked across the room at the computer teacher that was helping one of the students. “I would have been fine last time, if one of the idiots hadn’t ratted me out.”
“Is that why Ralph had issues logging in for a month?” Amy asked, not expecting her friend to actually admit to anything.
“Officially, I’m fairly sure he’s just unlucky or maybe too stupid to remember his password,” Elizabeth replied, still a bit annoyed that the idiot had managed to get her detention because she’d had to disable a program that kept her from sending her mother a text message about hero stuff, of course it wasn’t like she could just tell the teacher that.
“Right, so what do you think about Lung’s death?” Dennis asked.
“Good riddance?” Elizabeth asked as she looked up the various movie times.
“You realize the Empire is going to move in, right?” a dark skinned boy demanded from a few computers down.
“There are other places to live,” one of the other students said. “If I had dark skin, I sure as,” she glanced at the teacher, changing what she was going to say, “heck wouldn’t stay in the Bay.”
“It’s not that simple,” he grumbled.
“I’m not saying it is,” the girl replied. “I’m just saying the Empire doesn’t run sex trafficking rings which means I’m a lot safer without the ABB around.”
“That’s because you’re white,” he complained.
“So are most of the people in the city,” the girl pointed out. “I’m not saying I want the Empire around, I’m just saying I’m glad the ABB are going to get wiped out. Besides, the heroes should be able to push the Empire out now that they’re not worried about it turning into a total gang war.”
“Good luck with that,” Dennis muttered, knowing that they’d have a hell of a time actually hurting the Empire because the Empire had some serious heavy hitters. Besides, even if they managed to catch any of the Empire’s villains they usually got busted out before they made it to the Birdcage.
“I doubt the police will be able to do anything or care,” the dark skinned boy grumbled.
“You can’t arrest people because they’re jerks, which means you have to get enough evidence to convict them on actual crimes,” Dennis pointed out. “Besides, with the port screwed up the economy has been circling the drain for years.”
“So we just need to talk Alexandria into moving the tanker,” Amy said sarcastically.
‘Or move it ourselves,’ Fred mused as she thought about her magic. ‘If we get a large enough circle and enough people, we should be able to move it or at least cut it apart and move it.’ She brought up the search engine and typed, ‘salvage laws new hampshire.’ into the search box and hit enter. It wasn’t like she had a secret identity thanks to New Wave’s stupidity so it wasn’t like she cared if someone traced things back to her computer after she cleaned up the bay.
0o0o0
“I think we found a winner,” Xander said as he studied the twisted hunchback version of Ingenue. “She can permanently adjust a person’s powers while touching them. You’ll just have to toss the part where she twists her personality so that she ‘loves’ them to the point of insanity.”
“Sweet,” Faith copied the twisted Ingenue clone twice then killed one of them by twisting her neck around until it snapped a few times. “One for you Boss, one for me.”
Dawn swapped Xander’s power to the ability to copy powers. “You’re good.”
Xander focused on Faith and copied her powers then hacked off the clone’s head off with Dawn’s sword. “If I shift my focus to Dawn, I should be able to give Faith my ability to reclaim the powers I’ve given away then I can give away the crap part of the powers I copied from Ingenue’s clone.”
“At least in theory,” Dawn agreed, hoping they could toss the crappy side effects as it would make the ability useful.
Xander swapped his focus to Dawn’s powers and copied them. “Can you open a small portal to Ingenue’s cell?”
“Sure.” Tara opened a small door under Ingenue’s blanket next to her leg.
Xander used Dawn’s ability to loan people parts of her abilities and skills to push ‘his’ ability to recover the powers he loaned out into Faith then reached through the small door with his finger, touched Ingenue’s leg and pushed the Master component of the powers he’d copied from Ingenue’s hunchback clone into Ingenue. He pulled his finger back. “That should do it.”
Dawn gave Tara a power to check Xander’s powers. “Tara, you should be able to check his powers.”
Xander was reasonably sure that Dawn’s power would let him know if he’d missed anything but didn’t see a problem in Tara double checking. “Go for it.”
Tara focused and brought up a display, showing Xander’s powers. “It looks like you managed to scrap the junk. Now you just need to do the same with Teacher.”
“That’s the idea, we just have to wait for Willow.” Dawn was looking forward to seeing what Ethan, William and Buffy were up to but she didn’t have a good way to contact William and Ethan yet which was sort of annoying.
Xander pulled his phone out of his pocket and looked at the time. “We should have enough time to get the mess cleaned up and check to see if Faith’s power will let her copy magic and talents before Willow is done with school for the day.”
Tara opened a portal to a hundred feet over the sea of an uninhabited world where no one would care if they fed the fish. “Okay, we can drop the clones through the portal then check to see if she can copy talents.”
Faith was really hoping she could pick up the ability to channel as it meant one more tool in her toolbox to keep everyone safe. “Sounds good.”
Xander resisted the urge to make a bad joke as they tossed the evil clones through the portal, wishing there was an easier way to permanently copy powers or at least a less morally objectionable way.
Dawn tossed the last dead clone through the portal. “Who wants a cleaning power?”
“I’ll do it,” Xander said after glancing at Faith and Tara.
Dawn ‘gave’ Xander an area cleaning power that turned ‘messes’ into water. “Go for it.”
Xander used his new power to clean up the vault, happy to remove the filth from when Noelle was a monster and the more recent mess. “That would have made cleaning up after demon attacks easier.”
“Or spells,” Tara added as she closed her door.
“To the island,” Dawn said with false cheer as she walked over to the entrance of the vault and used her key to open the door to the island, the faces of the dead clones weighing on her more than she’d like.
Xander glanced over at Manton. “You should probably grab Manton, in case he wakes up.”
“Good point,” Faith said as she walked over and tossed Manton over her shoulder, looking forward to picking up magic.
Thankfully, it didn’t take all that long to get to the section of the island where the prisoners were kept, of course that was when they had a slight complication. Mostly the fact that they’d copied a Samma N'Sei that had been turned to the Dark One’s service and the clone was saner than the original. Of course, sane was a relative term when most of the Samma N'Sei had been doing evil shit for hundreds of years.
Dawn was glad that she’d bound and shielded the original with the way he was trashing. “You should probably loan Faith your immunity to magic.” She swapped Xander’s power back to the ability to temporarily copy powers.
“Good call.” Xander loaned Faith his ability to absorb magic. “You might as well kill the tainted idiot.”
Faith cut the man’s head off using Dawn’s sword. She reached out and embraced the Power then started laughing as she wove the threads for a simple ball of light and it appeared over her hand. “I have magic!”
Xander looked at the possibly not evil clone that Faith had created. “We’re going to need Willow to check the clone.”
“Yep, if everything works, we’ll be able to clone the Forsaken and get everyone the ability to channel the other half of the source.”
“Not to mention shore up everyone’s talents,” Faith said happily.
Tara shook her head, fairly sure this couldn’t end well. Of course, all being a good person had gotten her the first time around was shot, so she was sort of okay with killing a bunch of evil clones if it kept them from dying to random idiots with guns.
