Lois & Clark Forums Forums Fan Fiction Lois & Clark Fanfic Comments: Strong (3/?)

Well, what do you think?

I'm not a Buffy follower, but I'm not having any trouble following your story so far.
That's something that doesn't happen that often in Metropolis - unless cloning's involved.

I'm just going to re-iterate creepy, creepy, creepy! It's great!

Reading and loving to pieces! I love how serous and dark and scary it all is! More, more, more!!

I'm seriously starting to regret that I didn't manage to stick through Buffy longer... I kinda missed the whole Glory thing which makes me insanely curious... ^^

I like your story a lot - its mystery and creepiness... everything!

I'm also getting the strong and reassuring feeling that Clark's... just Clark. Superpower and all.. he gets uncomfortable at the mention of floating men... Lois gets warm while he looks at her (heat vision!)... sounds like your ordinary superstrong, supervision, heat vision, flying neighbourhood-alien.

But I'm really curious what's up with Lois. Got my suspicions of course... but still... curious!

Me wants more! Please!

Sira.

"That was the night Rachel came back"

Enter the Vampires!

I'm really fascinated by this (although I agree with the post above, I now wish I had followed Buffy a little closer--I don't remember these chain-mailed guys either)

Vonceil

Great piece. But, as many others, I don't remember the guys in chainmail. Anyway, I'm curious to see where this is going.

Mellie

Let me start with a few general musings about this part.

First, Sunnydale is a place where the death rate Yet no one seemed to notice this horrific fact at all. Scores of people were killed in separate incidents, and TV, radio and national newspapers didn't seem to have a clue that anything the least bit unusual had taken place. And now that a hundred murder victims have been found on the rim of the crater of the sunken Sunnydale, Marcus, the man who examines the corpses, tells Lois that In other words, in your story there is a cover-up conspiracy of gigantic proportions, apparently instigated by the government and/or other authorities and important players in society, including the media. And I have to ask myself, why? Why would the government and media, whose job it is to inform the American people about the country they inhabit, instead work their little behinds off to keep the enormous and unfolding tragedy of Sunnydale a complete and total secret from the public?

One reason why I could never believe the claim by UFOlogists, that the American government covered up the repeated visits to the Earth by space aliens, was that I couldn't understand what the American government could possibly stand to gain from keeping such a thing a secret. Also, assuming the aliens were here at all, I couldn't see how the government could ever make them disappear simply by denying their existence. If these alien beings had travelled across light-years to come and visit us here on Earth, surely their technology was advanced enough to withstand whatever weapons the American government might aim at them? And if, by some lucky chance, the government managed to, say, shoot down and defeat one such alien spacecraft, how could they possibly just spirit away the tens of thousands of other UFOs that so many people claim to have seen? Did the government just make all these aliens disappear by denying their existence?

No, if the aliens themselves wanted to keep their presence on the Earth a secret from the earthlings, surely they wouldn't keep showing themselves to so many people in so many countries for so many years? If, on the other hand, they wanted to reveal their existence to humanity, surely no government on the Earth would be able to prevent them from doing so - by landing their spacecraft in the middle of Manhattan, for example?

So I concluded long ago that there is no government conspiracy to cover up the visits to the Earth by space aliens. (And therefore the aliens either aren't here, or else they are too sophisticated for us to detect them.) But in your story, Shayne, there is certainly a huge government conspiracy to cover up the extremely sinister goings-on in and around Sunnydale. Okay, so why would the government want to cover up such a thing? And how could they possibly accomplish it?

I suppose the government wanted to hush the whole thing up because... they didn't want to create a panic? All right, I can buy that, if there had been just one horrible incident taking place in Sunnydale. But unspeakable things seem to happen here all the time. Come on... surely no American administration would be content to just cover up and cover up and cover up the never-ending tragedies of Sunnydale? Surely they would want to stop those tragedies from happening? Surely the government wouldn't just act like a bunch of storks, not only burying their own heads in the sand, but digging three hundred million other holes in the sand to shove the heads of the entire American population into these pits of ignorance?

It's very hard to understand why the American government would want to do such a thing. The second question is, assuming they wanted to do it at all, how could they accomplish it? How could they carry out such a massive, massive, massive cover-up?

The only answer I can think of is, well, foul play of the supernatural kind. Maybe the vampires (or their boss? Old Nick himself?) have somehow cast a spell on the American authorites? Maybe they have frightened these worldly guardians of America into an unholy panic of inaction and cover-ups, or maybe they've just made them blind and deaf to anything that happens in Sunnydale? And maybe the vampires have planted their own moles in the government? Maybe the government people who travel around to cover everything up are really vampires themselves?

There was another thing in this part that really had me thinking. Those murder victims that were examined by the coroner here seemed to be taken straight out of the Middle Ages. They wore helmets, mail shirts and armoured gloves, and they were armed with swords, maces and crossbows. They all wore a special sort of undergarment, the Vestis Angelica, which was worn during the Middle Ages by people who felt that their death was imminent, and this garment would supposedly give them the benefit of a monk's prayers.

In other words, these people were dressed like people from the Middle Ages, they were armed like people from the Middle Ages, and, not least important, they were apparently thinking just like people from the Middle Ages. And you know, if something looks like a duck, and walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, chances are that it is a duck. So chances are, in other words, that these people were really from a time before the Enlightenment.

And therefore it would seem as if people from the Middle Ages have somehow "broken through the portals of time" and arrived in "our" time period (or at least the period of Buffy and Lois and Clark). These medieval fellas came here fully armed and prepared for war. Because they all realized their end might be nigh, each of them wore a Vestis Angelica. They ran into vampires, and all of them - or at least all of those who are now in the morgue - were killed.

The Middle Ages was a fascinating time. Superstitions of all kinds ran rampant, the world seemed to be swarming with demons and devils, and people prayed to the saints and the angels to save them from evil - but sometimes, when the saints and angels were slow to deliver, some people allied themsleves with the demons and devils instead.

I am fundamentally a skeptic. I believe that reality exists independently of us humans. I believe in a world of atoms, of quarks, of photons, of fundamental forces of physics, which creates a reality that has given birth to us, but which hasn't put us at the center of all things. But we put ourselves at the center of the only reality we can truly imagine, our own world; we think of the world as made for us; and we give the forces of the world around us more or less human faces.

I believe there is only one true reality. But I also believe it is extremely hard, laborious and in the end perhaps impossible for us to fully understand this stark reality of a cosmos of physical forces. We humans, on the other hand, create our own realities, built from what we have sensed and experienced with our own imperfect senses, and from what our family, friends and other important people have told us, because of what their family, friends and other important people have told them. And because we have been seen it on TV.

I think that we live inside our own "reality bubble", which determines how we see the world around us. Some peoples in Africa and South America name and use only three colors in their language and their native art, black, white and red. If your language offers you only these three colors, is it even possible for you to think to yourself that the sky is very blue today and the grass is very green? Then again, according to physics "blue" and "green" are just imprecise names for two fuzzily determined spans of electromagnetic waves of certain wavelengths. Do we know what blue and green really is?

The point I'm trying to make is that we learn to think of reality in a certain way, and then it is very, very hard, sometimes impossible, to unlearn it. A more important point I'm trying to make here is that - you know, those medieval people? They came here, encased in their own reality bubble. Inside that reality bubble there are innumerable beasts and demons and devils and angels and saints. There are vampires there. And when the people of the Middle Ages came here, their own belief in their own reality was so strong that - well, they brought their own mental paraphernalia with them. And they believed in all that stuff so strongly that it became "real". Not "real" in the sense that it truly became a part of the physical reality. But "real" in the sense that it invaded other people's reality bubbles and became real to them. And "real" in the sense that these mental monsters could really kill. Personally I believe that the beliefs of some people literally kill other people.

In the end your story can't be explained, Shayne. It can't be "translated" into a real scenario. In the end, those medieval people came here, bringing their belief in vampires with them. Personally, I will need some very, very hard evidence before I believe in either time travel or undead people. But it is fun to suspend one's own disbelief for a while and play around with concepts that can only exist in other reality bubbles, or in the realm of magical make-belief.

Sorry about my babbling, Shayne. Maybe I will post a better comment on this part later (but then again, maybe not). Anyway, this was a great part again, as usual and as always!

Ann

TOC, first I'd like to say I'm impressed with your reasoning and step-by-step breakdown of things. If I weren’t a Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan, or a fan of the supernatural type in general, I'd probably have a lot of the same questions and problems accepting elements of Shayne's story as well.

But, as a Buffy fan I've noticed that you and several others are having trouble with parts of the story... parts that were integral in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer television show, which are in fact canon of the show, and are only being used by Shayne, not created. Some of the questions and conjecture have actually made me wince :p I'll do my best to explain.

The government cover-up ties into "The Initiative," a secret military operation that took place in Sunnydale (well, actually, in an facility underground UC Sunnydale). To Buffy and the Scoobies (Buffy and friends nicknamed themselves The Scoobies in reference to Scooby Doo and the Scooby Gang solving mysteries) The Initiative seemed at first a well-meaning government operation to fight demons; they later learned that experiments involving demons were taking place. Most notably the big evil of the fourth season was Adam, a Frankenstein-type conglomeration of demon (note: there are many other demons besides vampires), human, and computer. He turned on his creators and wished to create more of his kind. Adam was eventually defeated by Buffy and her friends, with the use of a spell that brought her friends powers into Buffy's body.

The Initiative was a secret operation. The general public was kept unaware. As for demons, vampires, magic... who would believe someone when they said it was real? It almost seems like a learned mindset for the town to ignore everything and to explain death by BBQ fork or wild animal attacks because they're more likely than being attacked by such a ludicrous thing as a vampire. As for government involvement of demons... well, the former Mayor of Sunnydale was technically a demon, one that ascended into full demon form before being blown up in a "gas leak" at the high school graduation (note: the Scoobies planted lots, and lots, and lots of explosives to make the big snake go boom).

Magic. In BTVS, Magic is real. You can do almost anything with magic, but there are rules. The rules, as they've been touched upon in the show, are similar to physics. Magic is energy, it can neither be created nor destroyed, but it can be harnessed.

The guys in chainmail are the Knights of Byzantium. They were fist introduced in Buffy during season five, in the episode, "Checkpoint." They're a military order made of up knights and clerics. They're the enemies of Glorificus, a Hell-God thrust out of her dimension by fellow Hell-Gods and into our dimension and bound to the body of a newborn male. She remained completely repressed, but over time her strength grew and she was able to assert her control over her host's body from time to time (for Stargate fans, it would be rather similar to an immature Goa'uld talking control, except that when Glory takes control the host body morphs into a female form). The Knights seemingly have existed throughout the ages, passing on their ideals but living in modern times. As for the medieval weapons, it's been noted in the series that most modern weapons (i.e.: guns) will only piss off a demon and cause some pain. Most can recover easily from a gunshot wound, but decapitation will kill most everything dead as a doornail. A few exceptions in the show were the explosion of the high school to kill a giant snake demon, and a grenade launcher used to kill a demon known as "The Judge," whom "whom no weapon forged by man could kill." The only problem with that was that The Judge didn't originally exist when things like rocket launchers existed. His body exploded into several parts, but should they ever be reunited again he would become whole again (and alive).

The Knights came to Sunnydale seeking to destroy what Glory sought: The Key. The Key is literally a key to dimensions, a mystical ball of energy that can rip open dimensional barriers. Glory needed the Key to open a gateway back to her home dimension. The guardians of the Key are an order of monks, known as the Monks of Dagon. They've protected the key for millennia, but as Glory began her search for it they felt the need to send it to someone who could better protect it, namely, The Slayer. They gave the Key human form, thereby binding it's power, and used magic to created false memories of Dawn, Buffy Summers (The Slayer) younger sister. The body created for the Key was about twelve years old and the first twelve years of her "life" were false memories implanted into everyone.

The Knights of Byzantium, knowing that Glory had begun searching for the Key swore to destroy it before she could harness it's power. To destroy the key meant that they had to kill Dawn. Buffy and the Scoobies were unable to continually fight the onslaught of the Knights and Glory's minions who were searching for the Key, and decided (Buffy and company) to make a run for it. They were ambushed on a dessert road and holed up in an abandoned gas station for protection. The Knights laid siege to the station, but due to a shielding Spell performed by Willow Rosenburg (the witch of the group) they were able to hold them off, that is until Glory arrived.

Glory decimated the Knights. Glory, similar to Clark, is invulnerable for the most part, though not entirely. It's her fingernail that's found in the skull of the Knight. She single-handedly massacred dozens of medievally armed men. Which leads you to the mass grave of men in chainmail.

I'm sleepy and in a bit of an allergy fog, so I'm gonna come back to this tomorrow and see if I missed anything... I hope my explanations may help anyone who's having some trouble.

KatieKate

Thanks for the summary of BTVS--I watched the first few seasons, but sort of drifted away after that. So, I knew the "basics" refrences, but didn't know anything about Glory and had forgotten the stuff about Dawn.

Thanks again.
Vonceil

There's a lot of backstory in any television series, especially those with continuing story arcs. It's one of the things that makes reading crossovers difficult when you don't know one of the shows.

I'm hoping that this story will be a little more accessible, because this is all new to Lois. She's learning everything, and while she learns it, the reader is learning it too. Those who have seen the other show just get to be a step ahead maybe.

I'll try to address the conspiracy issue in later chapters, Ann. Some of it is indeed canon, but even that I'll try to explain in a way that makes sense. Sometimes even in the best series there are plot holes and things that are hard to understand.

Actually, Ann...you may have given me a few ideas.

I almost wish the backstory wasn't so clearly laid out and cut in stone. Personally I think ambiguity can add a lot of mystery and fascination to a story. Being told this about the knights was a bit of a letdown for me:

I guess the reason why I'm disappointed is that the clash (or even the friendly meeting) of two people who don't know each other's reality bubbles at all is more interesting to me than the meeting of people who just disapprove of each other's takes on reality. Moammar Atta, the man who flew one of the planes into one of the twin towers of World Trade Center, certainly knew very much about the reality of modern Western civilisation and how it is perceived by the people belonging to it. His problem was not primarily that he didn't understand or know our reality, but rather that he just hated it.

Another way of rejecting the modern reality of the West is to live inside it but nevertheless keep yourself separate from it. The Amish people live in modern times but refuse to move their personal life styles out of the eighteenth century. Similarly, I guess, it is with the Knights: they must know our modern world if they live in it, but they just don't want to have anything to do with it.

If the Knights had been brought here straight out of the Middle Ages, they would have been absolutely "innocent" and "pure" in their medieval take on reality, and that would have made their meeting with anything in our modern world more interesting to me. I once saw a film about a medieval mining village somewhere in northern England, which was threatened by the horrible plague that swept across Europe. The village sage, a circa thirteen-year-old boy, told the villagers that the bravest of the men must embark on a heroic quest to find the greatest church in Christendom and bring the finest copper from their mine to this church and cast a spire and raise the spire to the top of the church. If they can do this before the next new Moon, the village will be saved.

And a ragged contingent of miners set out on their quest. After a sort of dream-journey down a nearly bottomless pit in their mine, they emerge on the other side of the world and pop their heads out of the ground to find... England of the 1990s. We who watch the movie immediately realize that that is where they are, but the villagers themselves are clueless. And impressed. So many lights! They stare in awe at the streetlights and all the other lights illuminating a mid-sized city in the north of England on a dark November evening. To the villagers, all the lights prove that this must be the City of God, but they are mystified by the fact that they can't spot the great Church they are looking for. Everybody knows that the church is always the tallest building in any town or city, so why can't they see it?

Eventually, after many trials and tribulations and run-ins with modern horrors like cars and trains and TV screens, the rag-tag band of villagers manage to find a foundry (which is about to close down for good) and persuade the founders to cast a spire for them on their last night at work. Finally, they manage to bring their newly-cast spire to the church (which is of course not the tallest building in the city) and raise it to the top of the church. It is the young boy, the sage, who finally puts the spire in place, but afterwards he plunges to his death on the ground. The village is saved, the plague has been averted, but the young boy had to pay for his village with his life.

Actually, the entire journey probably didn't happen at all. It was probably the young boy who just told the other villagers a story about how the bravest of them made their way to the City of God and found His Church and put a spire on the top of it and saved their village, at the cost of only one brave soul among them. (Soon after finishing his tale, the boy came down with the plague and died, but no one else was infected.)

But the amazing thing is that the boy apparently saw an English city of the 1990s, but he could only describe and understand what he saw using medieval terms and medieval ideas. He saw what we see, but he was unable to see what we see. Wow.

To me, almost the best thing about the movie was the meeting between the soon-to-be-unemployed founders of the 1990s and the ragged miners from the fourteenth century, trying to outrun death. The tolerant but weary founders regarded the miners as some kind of weird Hare Krishna people. They couldn't understand who these strange and wild people were, but they could sense their desperation, and in a gesture of utterly human sympathy and good will, they agreed to cast the spire for them.

So all I can say is that... when people are exposed to things that are not part of their reality bubbles at all, the result can be... wow. And to me, the natural is rather more fascinating than the supernatural. Or maybe my problem is that demons hold only a limited fascination to me. A real, honest-to-God visitor from the Middle Ages is so much more amazing for me to imagine than a modern army fighting demons with medieval means. But then I believe in the Middle Ages, but not in demons, I'm afraid!

Again, this is not a criticism of your story, Shayne. It's rather that your story sent my thoughts scurrying in all directions. And if your story ultimately won't give me the spine-tingling mystery and ambiguity of colliding "virgin realities" - inhabited by people who have never come into contact with conflicting world views, and are therefore "reality virgins" - it is reward enough for me that your story brought me back to that amazing movie I just talked about, and to the dizzying question of what the heck reality is in the first place.

Now I'm ready for Lois the vampire slayer and her Scoobies, Jimmy and Clark(?)! Bring on the action, Shayne!

Ann

If you look at it as the reality of science and the reality of supernatural meeting, then you've got some pretty good interaction and clashes. Can you imagine Lois' reaction to Marcus' story? Remember her reaction to the Invisible Man of the first season of L&C? - total disbelief until she was given proof. Remember Perry being skeptical of a flying man until Superman flew into the bullpen with Lois in his arms? Now as Clark has traveled the world I could see him perhaps being less skeptical, as he might have run into unexplained phenomena that could potentially be explained by the supernatural (i.e. death by exsanguination, with two holes in the neck).

Who, besides Lois and Clark (and Tempus, Andrus, and H.G. Wells) will believe in time travel or alternate reality travel? If they talked about it to other people (well, except for Martha and Jonathan perhaps) they would be labeled insane.

You can look at dimensions and realities from a scientific standpoint, albeit theoretically. Time travel too in fact:

Alternate realities, as we've seen in Lois and Clark, are side bye side, running concurrently, with each realities growing progressively different the farther they are apart. A reality exists for any potential action, whether the reality has always existed or only came into existence when a particular action took place is unknown. With the Alt World we saw in L&C, Lois was supposedly lost in the Congo before ever meeting Clark. That's a pretty big difference from the reality of L&C. But, as things besides Lois' absense were present (James Olson owning The Daily Planet, Perry White running for mayor) the Alt World had already been set on different path. Something as minor as a person deciding to have a tuna sandwitch instead of a BLT could create a minor change to an alternate reality, one that might not even be noticed unless it was combed over with a fine-tooth comb.

Dimensions are successive layers of the same reality. They sit one on top of the other. Think of it as a cup full of liquids of differnt densities (i.e. oil floats on water). There are ways to get around the layers and "punch" the way through to a different layer. If you were to put a drop of soap in the oil layer it would push to the edges of the glass, thereby revealing the layer beneath it. The same is with dimensions. Dawn Summers, being the human form of the Key, can be used to skirt around or even just punch a hole in the dimensions.

What I forgot to post last night was that the Knights wished to kill Dawn before Glory could use her in a blood-letting ritual would not only allow Glory to get home to her dimension, but it would indiscriminantly rip open all dimensional barriers and quite literally bring Hell on Earth.

I'm rambling, but what I'm trying to say is that in essence, worlds are colliding. Lois is and will be learning about a world entirely unknown to her.

Oh! As for the dreams she's been having, the blood on her hands, etc... they could very well be Slayer Dreams. What are Slayer Dreams you ask? Well, each Slayer has prophetic dreams to a certain extent, including dreams of past slayers. Some have stronger precognitive dreams than others, depending on their natural inclination towards such things. The blood on Lois' hands could very well be from her time in the Congo and what she had to do to save herself, but it could very well be a dream of something to come or of something already passed.

Reading Ann's comments, I am reminded of the work of Wolfram and Hart (evil law firm--redundant, I know--from Buffyverse ) and wonder if that might play into the conspiracy.

On top of all of the other explanations, it's a fact of the show that the town was originally built on a "hellmouth" (a place where evil mystical energy leaks into our world) by an evil wizard who was using it to accumulate magical power so that he could eventually become an immortal giant snake demon - part of the spell to do that was presumably something to stop people noticing the appalling body count.

Viewed in any sort of "realistic" way and ignoring the magical component it makes very little sense, I'm afraid, in the show most normal people seemed to be unable to think about the problem, and more or less unaware of it except as whispered rumours.

Bet you didn't think you'd see a smiling, laughing graemlin in this feedback thread!
Anyway, I stuck with Buffy and Angel through the whole dang thing, so all those improbable things like the High School being destroyed and the whole town goint silent ("Hush" and awesome episode) is very familiar to me and I'm loving the references.
When Senor Cortez said "La Boca del Infierno", that's "Hellmouth" in Spanish.
Just great Shayne. Keep it up!

Artemis
A question from Part 2:
What is the reference for a "Diener" being the body mover/clean up guy? I never heard that in Buffy. Just curious

It's really what the coroner's assistant is called.

To quote Wikipedia:

The word Diener is German for servant.[1][2] In English, it is used to describe the person, in the morgue, responsible for handling, moving, and cleaning the corpse. It is derived from the German word Leichendiener, which literally means corpse servant.

Dieners are also referred to as morgue attendants.

They do all the grunt work.

As for demons in the Buffyverse...they were treated as metaphors for life's real problems. It's what most science fiction, horror, and fantasy really is anyway: an extended metaphor for real life.

I like it! I like the fact that not only is Clark concealing his enhanced abilities, so is Lois. Nice turnabout on the cliched "You've been lying to me!" rant whenever Lois learns Superman's secret identity.

I'm not Buffy-literate, but I'm not having any problem following this story. I agree, Lois is learning as she goes, and there's no Giles around to guide her. I only hope that Clark doesn't assume that she's been co-opted by the forces of darkness before they fully earn each others' trust.

Next chapter, please, Shayne? And keep the little hidden funnies coming. They're unexpected but great.