My Life is Different Ch. 09

Faith led us cautiously away from the wargs and eventually found us a door that she was pretty sure led down to the basement. The door was locked, but Faith simply grabbed the doorknob and yanked the doorknob and the locking mechanism out of the door with one loud, wrenching pull.

Having a slayer or two around is always helpful. They're very strong.

The three of us stood in the doorway and I looked down the stairs into the basement. The stairs were made of concrete and painted grey. I looked down those stairs and noticed some shadows moving across the floor. Then I heard a male voice call out, "Nathan! Hey, is that you? Don't you know how to knock? It's not all that..."

Then, I saw the shadows become sharper and more organized, and suddenly a naked man walked into my line of sight.

During my years in high school, I had dreamed about catching glimpses of some naked guy (mostly Xander), but this guy was no eye candy. He looked to be at least thirty-five years old, and he had far too much body hair. And in stark contrast to the hairiness of his chest, abdomen and groin area, his head suffered from a serious receding hairline.

The hair around his groin was so severe, it almost looked as if he didn't have a penis. This guy was in desperate need of some shaving, or maybe some laser hair removal.

"Holy crap," the unpleasantly hairy man exclaimed, "You're not Nathan. You're the ones the oracle warned me about."

I was so focused on the naked guy's physical appearance and poor grooming habits that I totaled failed to consider that he might be a threat. Oh God! It was almost as if I was turning into Cordelia! And when he whipped up a spell that could have killed me if I just stood there with my mouth gaping open.

Massive icicles of different sizes suddenly streaked through the air and I was slammed into the floor as Faith tackled both Buffy and me. Being knocked to the floor hurt, but it also saved my life.

For a few seconds, Buffy, Faith and I lay there on the floor and I used that time to assess the damage of the flying ice-missiles.

Quite a few of them were the size of javelins or spears. Several of them hit the basement door and somehow ripped it off its hinges. One of them had hit a large chandelier and ripped the lower half of it away. Several others had embedded themselves into the far wall of the lobby. Another one had struck a warg in the throat and killed it. The warg just lay on the floor with a massive icicle jutting out of its neck and a massive pool of blood formed underneath it's still twitching corpse.

"Thanks," I said to Faith. Her reflexes and quick thinking had saved my life, probably Buffy's too. She'd come a long way from her days as the mayor's evil henchman.

Or henchwoman.

Henchperson?

Whatever. It was good to see her back on the side of the good guys.

"Anytime," Faith replied as she slowly crawled off Buffy and me. And is it wrong and disturbing that I noticed how shapely Faith's ass is when she crawled off of me and across the floor?

The two remaining wargs padded over to the body of the warg that had gotten punctured by a giant icicle. They sniffed at the dead quadruped briefly and then let out a long, mournful howl.

"I don't think they're happy that their friend got killed," Buffy commented as she helped me up off the floor."

"They sound pissed," Faith said.

After twenty seconds or so of ear-splitting, mournful howling, the two remaining wargs took off in a gallop and hurtled themselves down into the basement. I had visions of the wargs attacking the naked guy who had cast the icicle-spell and ripping his throat out, however, shortly after the wargs launched themselves down into the basement, everything went quiet.

The growling stopped, the howling stopped, and even the sounds of the large warg toenails clicking against the hard floors stopped.

"What the hell?" Faith asked softly, almost whispering.

"It doesn't sound like the wargs tore that guy to pieces," I whispered back.

Faith, Buffy and I cautiously crept back over to the basement door and risked a glance downstairs. It didn't take more than a second to see that the bloodthirsty wargs that had rushed down into the basement were now helplessly frozen in a large, oddly-shaped, thick coating of ice.

The naked guy saw us and gestured with his hands. A thick cloud of fog sprung up around him and I could see snowflakes floating in that fog. I immediately guessed that he was in the midst of casting some sort of spell, and then he pointed a finger directly at us.

This time, Buffy and Faith both grabbed me and pushed me out of the line of fire. When his spell hit the top of the stairs, there was nobody there to be a target.

Instead, the spell hit the top stairs and the floor where we had been standing. Those top stairs and a section of the ground-level floor were now covered in a coating of ice about six inches thick.

"Your plan isn't going to work," I heard the naked guy shout at us from down in the basement, "The Oracle told me that you'd come to try and steal my greatest prize from me! But I'll kill you if you try!"

Faith got a look of angry determination on her face and she yelled back, "You kidnapped a guy! He's a decent, trustworthy kinda guy, and I'm gonna break him outta this place! You try and get in my way, and I'm gonna kick your ass!"

After Faith made this announcement, I could hear the naked guy's mocking laughter in response.

The look on Faith's face went from angry determination to seething outrage in a split-second. She sprinted towards the door and hurled her battle-axe down into the basement, screaming, "Laugh this off, asshole," and then sprinted back away from the door.

"Oh, I'm afraid that didn't work," the naked wizard called back a few seconds later, "I'm still alive and now you've got no weapons!"

Faith looked mad enough to spit nails, and then suddenly, I got an idea.

"I think I've got a plan," I whispered to Buffy and Faith, "I think I can defeat him."

I huddled together with Buffy and Faith and quietly whispered my plan to them. My plan would require split-second timing and a spell I'd never used before out in the field, but I was pretty confident it would work.

Buffy and Faith were both pretty dubious, but I held my ground and said, "Hey, I brought down the barrier spell they had put up around this house, didn't I?"

That seemed to win them both over, and I began the process of putting my plan into motion.

Magic is tricky business. Even if you know what you're doing, there's always somebody out there with stronger magic or a smarter way of working their mojo. Sometimes there's a hidden weakness to your spellcraft that you didn't realize and another witch, warlock, wizard or some other type of practitioner will be able to take advantage of that weakness.

Anyway, I gathered up my courage and marched over to the doorway and stood close enough that I could see my opponent. The naked wizard looked up the stairs at me and his mouth set into a grim line of determination. He gestured with his hands and another thick cloud of fog appeared with snowflakes floating in the cloud.

"You girls are persistent" the naked man announced in his loud, booming voice, "But persistence won't gain you anything if..."

And before he could finished that sentence I worked my own magic.

I pointed my finger at a spot just above the naked wizard's head and I spoke the words, "Transfundo ternas Oceanum."

The naked mage glanced up suspiciously to the spot where I was pointing. A hole opened up in the fabric of reality and the wizard reflexively attempted to aim his own spell into the hole I had created.

It was a bad move on his part. The spell I had cast opened up a hole between him and the Atlantic Ocean. Gallons of ocean-water spilled out from the hole and onto the wizard. By casting his own spell of freezing cold, he succeeded in encasing himself in a massive cocoon of ice.

Faith grabbed me by the waist and threw me to the floor again. I grunted as I hit the ground, and I'm sure I bruised my hip.

"I appreciate your protective instincts," I told Faith, "But I think you overreacted this time."

"Reflex," Faith replied, as if that explained everything.

Faith and I got up off the floor, then we joined Buffy at the top of the stairs. We looked down at our adversary in the basement, and the news was all good. My plan had worked. The wizard was totally neutralized.

"Did we win?" Buffy asked. "Are there more bad guys to fight, or was he the last one?"

Buffy still had her battle axe. She held it up in front of her as she cautiously made her way down the stairs. Faith and I followed behind her.

"Is anybody alive in here?" I called out.

For a few seconds there was only silence down in the basement, and then I heard a female voice call out, "I'm alive."

The female voice came from a female mouth. Upon further investigation, I learned that the female mouth was attached to a female prisoner.

"Are you guys here to rescue me?" the female prisoner asked.

Buffy and Faith covered me and examined the room for more threats. While they did that, I talked to the female prisoner.

"We're the good guys," I assured her.

I tried to keep maintain eye-contact with the prisoner, but it wasn't easy. She was naked and her wrists were shackled high up, above her head, lifting and displaying her perfectly-shaped, perky breasts. Her belly was flat, toned and her fear and tension was causing her to tense up, highlighting her strong stomach muscles. Her pubic area had been shaved bald and her pubic lips were clearly visible. Her legs were long, athletic and looked like they belonged on a professional dancer.

Okay, maybe she was a dancer. I just met her, I had no idea what her life's story was.

"My name's Willow," I told the naked girl, "What's yours?"

"Stephanie," the girl said timidly, her eyes wide and pleading for mercy, "Are you gonna get me outta here?"

I stood up on tiptoe and attempted to examine the shackles on Stephanie's wrists. They looked like they were made of iron. They also looked very heavy and sturdy. I examined the very old, primitive-looking lock intently, but then I remembered that I knew nothing about picking locks. Why was I bothering to study the lock so closely, if I'd never be able to pick it?

"Faith, do you know anything about picking locks?" I asked my associate with the criminal past.

"I know that if you have the key, you don't really need to bother with lock-picking," Faith replied somewhat teasingly.

I looked away from Stephanie's shackles and over at Faith. Over on the south side of the room were two chairs. A disorganized pile of clothes had been stacked on one of them. Faith went through the pile, and examined each garment, one at a time. When she found anything with pockets, she turned the pockets inside-out until she found a keyring with about a half-dozen keys.

"Betcha one of these does the trick," Faith said, holding up her newly acquired collection of keys.

Stephanie watched Faith wide-eyed, as Faith tried one key after another on Stephanie's shackles. Eventually there was a loud click, and the left shackle popped open. The same was just as effective at unlocking the right shackle.

"Thanks," Stephanie said when both of her wrists were freed. She looked nervously from Faith, to Buffy and then to me, rubbed her wrists, one right after the other and then said, "You guys aren't the police, are you?"

Faith and I shook our heads in negation, and Buffy replied, "We're Scoobies. We don't have badges, but we have a long-standing habit of helping people."

"The bad guy said that someone named the oracle warned him that we were coming," Buffy said to Stephanie, "Does that mean that the oracle is here? Are they in the house? Are they going to attack us?"

Stephanie scoffed at that suggestion.

"The oracle is just a bartender named Lara. She works at a club down on Detroit Avenue. She doesn't hang out here. She never did. Kenneth and Nathan only talked to her because they thought she could predict the future."

"So, she can't predict the future?" I asked.

Stephanie rolled her eyes at this and said, "If she could predict the future, why would she be tending bar? If I could predict the future, I'd be using it to play the stock market and make myself rich. She's a fraud. She's got to be."

I wondered about that. If she warned the bad guys that somebody was coming to raid this house and do a rescue mission, maybe she wasn't the fraud Stephanie believed she was. Maybe she really could predict the future. I didn't say any of this out loud, but filed the idea away for future reference.

"We're here to rescue a guy named Hypnos," Faith volunteered, "Do you know where he is?"

"Hypnos?" Stephanie asked, and then before we could elaborate, she said, "Oh, you mean the freak."

"Freak?" Buffy asked, raising one eyebrow. Faith furrowed her brow and frowned at the girl. She practically saw Hypnos as her messiah. I think she took offense at Hypnos being referred to as a freak.

"He's a real odd one," Stephanie said, her eyes still wide and nervous, "I don't think he's actually human. He's got-"

There was a long pause, as if Stephanie didn't trust herself to complete the sentence. But Buffy, Faith and I just silently stared at her, and the silence just got louder and heavier the longer Stephanie hesitated.

Faith looked annoyed, like she was going to grab Stephanie and shake her, and scream, "He's got what? Two penises? An addiction to catnip? A tab at Zanzibar? What?"

After her long, dramatic pause, Stephanie finally completed her sentence, and said, "wings."
"Wings," Buffy asked, skeptically.

"Growing out of his back," Stephanie elaborated, "Only larger than any wings I've ever seen. Eagle wings look tiny compared to the wings Hypnos has."

Buffy, Faith and I shared a look, and then Buffy asked, "Can you show us where he is?"

Stephanie crossed her arms protectively in front of her, partially obscuring her breasts, and said, "Okay. I can do that."

Stephanie then turned her back on Faith and me; walked away from us; and headed for the massively-huge, creepy fireplace on the other side of the room.

As Stephanie walked away from us, I couldn't help but notice how cute her butt was. She was still naked, so I could make out the shape of each buttock perfectly. Her butt was soft around the edges with muscle definition near the hips.

Buffy noticed the way I was hypnotized by Stephanie's adorable buttocks. She gently poked me in the ribs and whispered admonishingly in my ear, "Hey, stop staring."

"Sorry," I whispered back, and I felt my face grow hot with embarrassment. I thought I had been subtle, and didn't realize anyone had noticed me checking out Stephanie's ass. I then began to very studiously study the fascinating workmanship of the watch on my left wrist. Yep, a stainless-steel Seiko with a black dial. I never noticed how impressive that looked until just that moment, when I was trying to prove I wasn't a leering pervert.

"You're so cute when you blush," Buffy whispered, and I let out a sigh. All I did was stare at one naked butt. Did Buffy really need to tease and torment me for that? It's not like I reached out and grabbed it or anything.

A sudden noise; like stone grinding on stone; made me look up from my watch. When I did, I saw that the large, creepy fireplace had rotated and revealed the secret passage behind it.

"Seriously?" Faith asked, looking admonishingly at Stephanie, "Isn't that a little bit cliché? I'm in a group called the Scoobies, and the bad guy has secret passages in his house?"

"Hey, I didn't design this place," Stephanie replied defensively, "I'm just an innocent bystander that got taken prisoner. It's not my fault if this creepy perv has secret passages everywhere."

"She's got a point, there," Buffy said to Faith.

"Let's just rescue this Hypnos guy and we can all go home," I said. Faith rolled her eyes and I expected her to say something about how she was trapped in a Saturday morning cartoon, but then she shrugged her shoulders, did a neck-roll and somewhat reluctantly followed Stephanie.

Stephanie and Faith led the way, while Buffy and I brought up the rear. I had to admit, the bad guy's secret passage was impressive. Every fifteen feet or so there were overhead lights that illuminated the passageway, but they only lit up if you were standing near them. They lit up the section you were walking through, but once you passed through, the lights switched off again.

I'm guessing there were probably sensors underneath the floor that sent a signal to the lights whenever it detected the weight of somebody standing on it. I felt it was kind of clever. It was a system that kept the passage dark most of the time, and reduced the bad guy's electricity bills.

"So, what's the deal with this bad guy?" Buffy asked, "He kidnapped you, he kidnapped Hypnos, is he holding you guys for ransom or starting a collection, or what?"

Stephanie made a disgusted noise in the back of her throat and responded, "He thinks that Hypnos is some sort of god or something. He thinks that he can pressure Hypnos into granting him wishes or something."

"Wishes?" Faith asked, skeptically.

"Yeah, wishes," Stephanie said, "Things like immortality, eternal youth, a goose that lays golden eggs...things like that."

"And Hypnos wasn't down with granting the bad guy his wishes?" Faith asked.

Stephanie sighed and replied, "Hypnos said he wasn't willing. I think he wasn't able. I would have given the disgusting perv just about anything to get out of his creepy hideout. He captured me, so he and his son could take turns sticking their dicks into me. Apparently, the only way either one of them could get a girl out of their clothes, was to forcibly abduct one off the street."

There was an uncomfortable silence after Stephanie revealed the fact that she had been kidnapped and repeatedly raped. Faith finally broke the silence, in a way that only Faith could.

"Yeah, well, both those assholes are dead now, so their days forcing their dicks into defenseless women are over. Score one for the good guys."

"Both dead?" Stephanie asked, "I saw Mister Blackpool get frozen in a block of ice...and I have no idea how you guys managed that...but Nathan.... he's dead too? You sure about that?"

"He got eaten by wargs," I responded, struggling not to stare at Stephanie's naked butt, "I'm pretty sure he's never gonna recover from that."

Stephanie trembled and then said, "Those wargs always creeped me out. They were scary as fuck. I'm glad they were finally good for something."

The secret passage Stephanie led us through was long, but eventually she led us out of it and into the room where Hypnos was being held captive.

Based on the information Giles gave me, I was expecting Hypnos to have deep lines in his face, a long white beard, white eyebrows and white hair.

I certainly wasn't expecting him to look like a teenage boy.

I also wasn't expecting him to be naked.

"This is Hypnos?" I asked, looking from the naked, male captive, to Faith and then back to the naked, male captive again.

He was actually quite cute for a guy that was supposed to be thousands of years old.

"This is him," Faith assured me, "We just gotta bust him outta here and all of my problems will be solved."

"Faith," the naked guy said, in a voice that was smooth as silk, "I am pleased that you and I may finally meet in person."

The voice really did something to me. Hypnos was really cute in a smooth, slender, almost androgynous sort of way. He had soft, smooth, delicate skin, dark, silky hair and beautiful, expressive eyes. I couldn't help but think he looked like Demi Moore would look, if Demi Moore was a teenage boy.