Just a short comment this time, Shayne. I still can't wrap my mind around the fact that the goings-on around Sunnydale would remain almost completely unknown to the general public because people would simply turn a deaf ear when someone tried to tell them about it. In my experience, there has never been a shortage of belief in the supernatural. It sounds absolutely incredible to me that people would refuse to be told about the evil of Sunnydale because they are too rational and/or scared to believe in it. And it will be a cold day in Hell (sorry about that) before the media refrains from reporting on a story like Sunnydale for fear of offending or scaring people and making them stop watching their programs or buying their papers. A story such as Sunnydale would shoot circulation through the roof!
But enough of this - if I want to read the rest of your story, I'd better accept its basic premise. And believe me, I could never stay away from a story written by you! (Or
almost never - I wouldn't read a Lois deathfic, even if it was written by you.)
In this part, I liked how you showed us that Lois was beginning to be attracted by Clark. I, too, certainly like romance, but in this case it probably shouldn't be the focus of the story.
“You were attacked? By who?”
“I was coming out of the library and these two thugs grabbed me and tried to drag me down the alley.” Jimmy grinned and stared off into space.
“Jimmy?” Lois asked.
“There was this girl in leather pants…”
So funny! I love the way you wrote Jimmy here. And for now at least, Jimmy seems to be his own sunny self.
“She had a gun?” Clark asked. “A Taser maybe, pepper spray?”
“She had a stick.” Jimmy said. “I’ve never seen anybody move like that in my life. She was really fast….and she looked great in leather pants.”
“I’m sure her pants were really nice, Jimmy.” Lois said irritably. “But did you happen to get a name, or see which way the guys went?”
“One of them threw me into a fall face first, and that was all I could remember.” Jimmy hesitated. “I’m told that a girl brought me into the hospital though. Maybe they’d know who she was.”
Again, so funny! I love this dialogue!
Lois grabbed the bag and pulled out several file folders. One was thinner than the other. She opened it. Inside was the picture of an older man. It was an old daguerreotype, a photo from the eighteen hundreds.
“Richard Wilkins,” the caption said. “1898.”
She flipped to the next picture. It was a picture of the same man, but clearer. The caption said “Mayor Richard Wilkins the second, 1938.”
The third picture was from a newspaper at a ribbon cutting ceremony. It was of the same man, but the caption said “Mayor Richard Wilkins the third.” The date of the paper was 1997.
There wasn’t anything else in the folder, but what Lois had seen was enough. Three men who looked exactly the same had lived in the same town for a hundred years without ever seeming to age.
“You have a name?” Lois asked.
“Why?” The woman’s reply was suspicious.
“I think Jimmy would love to be able to put a name to a pair of pants.” Lois said.
“Faith,”
Another very religious-sounding name. Interesting. Lois doesn't seem to belong to that crowd, does she, with her rather prosaic and nineteen-thirties-sounding name?
And I've been thinking a little more about Angelica Cortez. She isn't necessarily on the side of the angels, just because her name suggests that she is. Ah, but then what little the Bible tells us about the origin of the Devil suggests that he was an angel too, only of the fallen kind.
Faith smirked. “No you won’t. Not unless you want to work for the National Enquirer. Nobody ever believes this kind of sh…stuff.”
I have to admit that the kind of stuff that the National Enquirer writes is often hard to believe. Once it wrote that the King of Sweden used to play hooky from certain public ceremonies he was supposed to attend, and then a well-known Swedish TV reporter helped out by dressing up as the king and pretending to be him. And as hundreds of enthusiastic royalistic subjects gathered around the "king" and waved their flags at him, and a few TV cameras always immortalized the event, no one, but
no one, ever spotted the difference between the TV reporter and the king. Eh, how likely is that? Take it from me, when the king has been on Swedish television, he has always looked just like himself and no one else - and he has most certainly not looked like another celebrity!
Faith said she reached into her pocket and pulled out a cigarette. She froze at Lois’s look, and then put it back into her pocket.
Hah! I like how Lois spooked the girl! School teacher Lois! No smoking!
“Someone made a deal with the devil. Well, a deal with demons anyway.” Faith shook her head and looked pensive. “He made a deal…in return for a hundred years of staying young and a chance to turn into something more powerful at the end of that time, he built a city right on that spot of concentrated evil.”
“The mayor, Richard Wilkins,” Lois said.
Faustian bargain!
Another Faustian bargain!
“So he got immortality for a while…what did they get out of it?”
“A twenty four hour a day all you can eat buffet.” Faith shrugged. “I’m guessing the local Chumash Indian tribes were pretty canny and hard to catch. White guys in suburbia are pretty slow by comparison.”
So
they - the demons - got human flesh to eat? That's why the death rate in Sunnydale was so high? (I wonder how Mayor Wilkins managed to get re-elected? What was his campaign slogan? "Vote for Wilkins, the Mayor who will serve you for lunch!"?)
“People have to be warned. If there are things out there…”
Faith said, “There are things out there. But people don’t want to know about it. They want to sleep in bed at night and feel safe.”
So they can be eaten without having a clue about what got to them. Eh. I suppose it won't even give the demons a bellyache if you serve them these poor bastards in a garlic sauce.
The younger girl hesitated, and then stared at Lois for a moment. “Did you ever do any fighting?”
“Brown Belt in Tai Kwon Do.” Lois said.
“That must be it,” Faith said. “You move like a fighter.”
Or maybe she has just been turned into a Slayer, Faith.
Okay, Shayne! I've made it pretty clear what I think about the utter ignorance and lack of interest in things Sunnydalian on the part of the outer world. But I like Faith, I like the Cortez family (though I'm in two minds about Angelica), and I love this Lois! Yay! I want to see her protect Jimmy, and Clark, and I want to see her do her bit of fighting the evil from Sunnydale, and then I want her to find out that Clark isn't just a hack from Nowheresville, and... well, I just feel thrilled about this!
Ann
(I sure remember Faith's old motto: Want - take - have.)
