10

If these were going to be his last words, these were going to suck. But then again, they were still better than “oops”. “I'm sick and tired of being Bob's avatar. I wanna be Bob, and I figure you're the guy to help me do it.”

For a very long moment, nothing happened. There was no noise, no movement beyond the random flickering of the light beneath him. Logan wondered if he would even know if he was dead. This seemed pretty hellish. Although, if his past experience taught him anything, it was that hell was simply a dimension imposed on you, and usually a god or a supernatural connection of a similar type was the only way to get a ticket to someone else's dimension. But if he died while summoning Yama, would that override his connection to Bob? Maybe. He didn't know, but he now realized he almost didn't care. At least if he was honestly dead, no matter where he was, no one would expect anything from him.

Then the landscape changed. Logan found himself now sitting up, not impaled, on a bare metal floor. His hands were shackled behind his back, and chained to the floor, in such a way that even if he popped his claws, he wouldn't be able to cut through the chains. Well, he was a god – he would think of everything.

Now water was filling the room, and Logan had time to wonder what this was supposed to be before realizing that Yama had already found something he was afraid of: drowning. He'd done it before, of course, but he honestly hated it. There was no worse death than one by suffocation, especially when the suffocation was caused by water filling your lungs. It hurt when your lungs seized up, but even worse was the panic. Your brain just freaked out when deprived of oxygen, when liquid was coming in when it shouldn't. You could tell yourself to be calm, to stay calm, but your brain fought it all the way.

It was lukewarm water, the temperature of blood, and he wondered if that was a deliberate choice as it began to build rapidly, already up to his waist. “What the fuck is this?”

“You insult my intelligence with an obvious trap?” The disembodied voice boomed, as the water kept rising.

“It's not a trap! Even we're not that dumb.”

“That's what you'd want me to think.”

“Look into my head! I can't lie to you!”

The water stopped at about mid chest, and he was relieved, but he doubted it was over. After a very long moment, Yama asked, “Why now?”

“I've been tired of Bob for a long time, but he doesn't give a shit. Not like there's something I can do to stop being an avatar, is there? But he's scared of you. I can't kill Bob on my own. Or at least I can't kill him and have him stay dead. That's where you can help me. I gotta keep him dead long enough to ... to fix things. Then fuck, I don't care, tear me apart, whatever. But I want Bob gone, and I know you do too.”

Logan waited, but there was nothing but silence, save for the sloshing of the water. Was Yama going to accept him, or was he a dead man?

He waited to find out.

There were days when Angel was sure he shouldn't have bothered to leave the hell dimension. This was turning out to be one of these days.

Saddiq was, bless him, the emotionless rock he almost always was, and was attempting to put together the information they had and reach a logical conclusion, but there was no logic to be had here. Rogue was furious at Logan for storming off like a “drama queen”, Bren was visibly anxious but trying to work with Saddiq on spinning gold out of dung, and Kier was just lolling on the sofa, looking as calm as could be, probably because he never even tried to make sense of this. He may have been Canadian by birth, but he had the L.A. attitude down pat.

Bob was gone too, but that was expected. Rogue was pissed off Logan hadn't come back yet, but Angel figured Bob had found him and taken him wherever he went, whether he liked it or not. That was what Bob usually did.

But even as he said that, he wasn't sure. Bob was up to something, he knew that much, something odder than usual. Still, he was a god, and he knew by now that completely trusting a god, or trying to fathom their motives, was a useless waste of time. He could only hope that Logan wasn't getting caught in the crossfire.

Bren finally made a negative noise – not quite a curse, but close – and threw up his hands. “I give up. Can I give up now?”

“There must be something we're overlooking,” Saddiq insisted.

“Like what?” Kier wondered, sounding more curious than anything. “Guys, you've done everything but lick the pavement. If Giles, Helga, or Marc could get in contact with us, they would've already.”

Bren shot him a stern look. “So you're just giving up on them?”

“No. I'm just saying we should try to work some other angle. Okay, we have nothing, what does that mean?”

Rogue scowled at him. “You're goin' all Zen on us, aren't you?”

“No,” Angel said, considering his point. “I get what he's saying.”

“Can you fill us in then?” Bren asked.

“The lack of clues is a clue.”

She rolled her eyes. “We know that.”

“So who's powerful enough to take them all away, and why?” Kier urged. “What's the point?”

“A god could,” Rogue replied. “Logan was right about that. It probably was that Llama guy.”

“Yama,” Saddiq corrected.

“Whatever.”

“What about another kind of demon?” Kier asked. “We're being besieged by demons here.”

Angel considered that as he crossed to the bookcase and looked for the demon bestiary that Giles kept there. “Maybe.”

“Are there teleporting demons?” Rogue asked.

“Have we totally ruled out mutants?” Saddiq asked. A fair question.

Angel had just found the old tome when the office door opened, and a familiar voice exclaimed, “Holy shit, did I miss a wholesale demon slaughter or what? Marc said it was target practice, but I had no idea.”

“Faith, hey,” he said, surprised. He was shocked to see her, but he was also very glad. They needed all the firepower they could get. “When did Marc call you?”

She shrugged, her long brown hair sliding off her shoulders. She was wearing black denim and a yellow tank top with a silver sparkly number seventy three on it. It seemed to show off the new tattoo on her bared left arm, a Japanese kanji that he knew meant Faith. “Few hours ago. Just got back from Tokyo last night. I'd have been here sooner, but shit man, I had to fight my way from the Tagawa building to here. I can't even remember the last time I saw a ghoul. Where are they all coming from?”

“God shit,” Bren replied dismissively, then gave her the shorthand version of what was going on. An advantage to having an experienced Slayer around was none of what she was told seemed to surprise her in the least, or even made her change expression.

“So where's Logan?” She wondered. Were they still a couple? Angel wasn't sure anymore. “Off with Bob?”

“Or brooding,” Rogue said bitterly.

Faith just shrugged. “He does that. But he won't miss a fight. So what's our next move?”

“We're trying to figure that out,” Kier said.

“Shouldn't we hurry up? Sundown's in an hour, and if the ghouls came out in this number, I'd hate to see how many vamps we're gonna get.”

“It's that late?” He turned and checked the clock, and was stunned to see how late it was. Time was slipping away, almost as fast as everyone he'd ever known.

“We can't fight a battle with this small a group,” Saddiq said, pointing out the obvious. “If we can't find Bob or Logan within the next twenty minutes, we need to call in the reserves.”

“I agree,” Angel replied. “Too bad we don't have a reserve.”

Faith tried calling Logan on his cell, but much like them, she got the message that his phone was turned off. A call to the Way Station also wasn't productive.

After some debating over whether they should try to call in the X-Men for help – dicey, especially since they were probably defending New York – Faith sighed heavily, and fixed him with a knowing stare. “I never thought I'd say this, man, but desperate times and all that shit.” She took a deep breath and seemed to steel herself. “Do you know how to contact Buffy?”

Angel now wondered if he had actually left the hell dimension at all.

Marc learned a long time ago that if you didn't know where you were, you played dead until you could get your bearings. Sometimes this scared one night stands, but hey, it was a risk you had to take.

What he heard was what he considered “green” sounds, wind through grass and tree branches, quiet noises of calm, and since he last remembered emptying clip after clip into rubber faced demon monstrosities in the middle of a Los Angeles street, this didn't track. After letting his ears confirm he was alone – or whoever was watching him was a master at not moving or breathing – he slowly reached for a gun he knew he had, and opened his eyes.

He still had the gun. But there was something wrong with his eyes. Namely, it was dark. Weird dark, though, not night dark. He could make out shapes and some colors through the smoky glass of his goggles, but that was it. It took him a moment to realize what the problem was: he was seeing everything as it really was, the goggles on his face included.

His infrared vision was gone.

Bracing for the worst headache of his life, he sat up and slid his goggles up to the top of his head, squinting in advance of the flood of bright light. But while the light flooded in, it wasn't the kind that would kill him. In fact, it was just normal daylight, a blue sky and yellow white sun illuminating a copse full of evergreens, where the trees were spread out just enough in irregular groupings to convince you none of these were planted deliberately. Canada?

But as he stood, looking around at everything, he realized there was no smell to anything. Oh, there was soon as he realized there wasn't, he started smelling plants and trees, but only because he expected to. What the hell was that? And now that he was wondering where the birds were, here came the bird sounds. Wrong.

He stood up and shoved the gun into the waistband of his pants. Probably wasn't going to help here, wherever here was. “Okay, I got it. You took my powers away so I couldn't see how phony all this was. That worked, didn't it?” He had no idea who he was talking to, but he didn't much care either. Captor would probably do for now as a descriptive. He wondered if he was still poisonous, but at the moment had no way to test it.

He started walking into the woods, wishing he had Logan's sense of smell, but hey, if this person (demon, god, whatever) could take away his infrared vision, it could've taken away Logan's sense of smell too. It was bizarre to see everything as it was, not by its heat or cold signature. Usually when he walked through the woods, he saw a billion different variations of signatures, the heat of decomposition contrasted with the ground's radiant heat, the warmth of a thousand different species, from worms to bugs to birds and raccoons and other beasties that few ever saw. But of course nothing living (or dead) could hide from his view for long, because everything reflected heat, had its own heat, or had no heat, meaning there were very few ways to hide from him. At first, when he was a teenager, it was a fucking pain in the ass trying to process all the visual information, it was like looking at the world through an abstract painting, but once he learned how to process it, what every variation in hue meant, he wasn't sure how normal people could live in a world where they didn't see things as they truly were. The surface of things was pretty, sure, but it was nothing; it told you nothing about the thing you were looking at, not beyond the basics. Now he felt like he was stuck in a 2-D world, and it was as disorienting as it was boring. “Mat?” he called out, not caring if he attracted attention. He wanted to attract attention; he wanted to know where he was and what he was dealing with.

This wasn't Canada, was it? A bit warm for Canada. Spain? Spain had some awesomely impressive forests. There was no way to tell right now, as he couldn't trust his sense of smell or hearing, and the undergrowth and trees were too generic, too global in their habitat, to be of much use. “Mat hon, c'mon. I'm sorry I called you fussy.” Well, he was; Mat could be a bit of a priss, really. But beyond that he was one of the coolest guys he'd ever met.

Why would someone take them out of a battle and toss them into fake Spain, or wherever the fuck this mindfuck of a place was? Somehow he got the impression that Yama would kill them if he got the chance, what with being a death god and all. So why just punt them away? This wasn't Yama, was it? Damn it, he should have asked Logan how many friends Yama had and what they could do. Maybe this wouldn't have snuck up on them so much.

He reached for his phone, only to find it gone. So he was left with a gun (well, maybe two or three; he hadn't checked all his hiding places), but not a cell? Weird. So whoever they were, they weren't afraid of guns, but they were afraid of phones and infrared? That made no sense. Or maybe they overlooked the guns; maybe they didn't even know what they were. A god was supposed to know everything, but that didn't mean they couldn't be obtuse at times.

“Marcus, is that you?” A voice called out, but it wasn't Mat, 'cause it had a British accent.

“Yeah, it's me,” he replied, following the general direction of the voice. He found Giles sitting on a fallen tree in a clearing, head in his hands. “You okay?”

“I'll live,” he said with a sigh. “I just picked a bad day to have a cold.” Giles then looked up at him, almost doing a double take, brow furrowing in concern. “What's happened to your eyes?”

“Are they all pupil?”

“It appears so.”

“Nothin' then. That's how they look. It's just my infrared ain't working, so I didn't need the goggles. Christ on a crutch, I forgot how flat and uniform the world looks to you people. How do you stand it?”

“Your infrared isn't working? You're being blocked?”

He could only shrug. “Guess so. Something ain't working right. Otherwise I'm fine. You got your phone?”

Giles searched his pockets. “Have you been doing reconnaissance?”

“Not really, just trying to figure things out. There's no chance we're dead and this is an afterlife, is there?”

“I don't think so. I would be in a hell dimension.”

“Yeah, well, I wouldn't be?”

“You've never communed with dark powers, so no.” Giles stopped searching his pockets. “No phone. Do I guess yours is gone as well?”

“Yeah, but I got my gun. I think I may even have a concussion grenade. Explain that.”

Giles gave him a quizzical look. “Why do you have a concussion grenade?”

He did a mock boycott salute, and said, “Always be prepared.”

He raised his eyebrows, and assumed a very dry British look. “I see why Logan calls you.”

“Hey, I'm a mutant. When the government comes to put me in a camp, they're gonna get a face full of missile. I never go quietly. It's bad for my image.”

“Do you really think the government would round mutants up?”

“I think they'll try.” In fact, sources he had within the military told him a basic plan had been mapped out for years. The problem was figuring out a way to get the mutants without massive property damage and “above nominal” casualties, a nut they hadn't fully cracked. Although it was unlikely they ever would, there was no way in hell he was betting on it.

Giles shrugged, but in a way that conceded the point, and then said something that sounded a bit like Latin, holding the palm of his hand up, as if expecting something to appear there. Nothing did, so he said the same thing again. The result was the same.

“Trying to do some magic?” Marc guessed. Giles just nodded. “So you're blocked too?”

“It would appear so.”

“Is it possible to block magic?”

He had to think about it for a moment. “It is possible to create a “no magic” zone, but that in itself is magic, and takes so much power as to be absurd. I could have been stripped of my abilities, but I'd have felt that. The easier answer would be to ...” And here Giles hesitated, which you just knew was bad.

“Don't make me play twenty questions.”

Giles fixed him with a very serious stare. “The easy answer is we were sent to a dimension with no magic. And no mutancy, it seems.”

“Dimension? As in we're no longer on Earth anymore?”

“Not an Earth we would recognize.”

He had considered the possibility of being punted across an ocean, but across realities? Holy shit. How were they supposed to get back? “On a scale of one to ten, how fucked are we?”

Giles considered that for a long moment, his lips thinning, and finally said, “Keep the concussion grenade handy.”

Yeah, that's pretty much what he thought.