Warren walked into the hotel brimming with confidence. He'd been briefed that Angel and Cordelia were good friends of that bitch Buffy, but they'd both moved to LA before he had the misfortune of meeting her. They wouldn't know him from Adam. This should be easy. Yup, there was Cordelia, sitting at a desk in the lobby.
"Can I help you?" she asked.
"Oh, you certainly can," Warren replied. "Just one quick adjustment first." He flashed the neutralizer at her and her face went blank. Well, blanker. As Warren was trying to decide whether to have her strip down right here or take her into a back room first, his gloating was rudely interrupted by a baseball bat slamming into his skull. Warren dropped with a cracked skull and a severe concussion. Poor guy. He'd had such a great gloating villain-monolog planned, but it was one of the many memories permanently destroyed when Fred rearranged his cerebral cortex with a Louisville Slugger. Fred, who'd been standing right next to the door with the bat raised for several minutes by then, dropped the thing gratefully.
"About time he got here. He didn't even bother to look around when he came in," she said. "What a pathetic loser. Your vision really said this guy was dangerous?" She looked up to see Cordy staring blankly. "Cordy?"
"Yes, mistress," Cordy said in the slurred monotone of the stereotypically hypnotized. Fred looked from Cordy to the neural neutralizer lying next to the unconscious would-be nemesis, then back. A mischievous grin spread across Fred's face.
"Do the funky chicken," she ordered. Cordelia obliged, still looking blank as she flapped her arms.
"This could be very interesting," said Fred. "From a purely scientific perspective, that is." She picked up the neutralizer. |