Title: Buffy & Spike, Lost in Cyber-Space Author: Anne Rose Email: anne3rose@yahoo.com URL: http://annerose.cjb.net Rating: R (but nothing you haven't seen on the show, at 8pm, in fact due to mentioning the show.) Disclaimer: Joss and Mutant Enemy, etc... own BtVS. No infringement intended. Any resemblance to people living, dead, or undead, or to real life events is all in your mind, is downright scary, and means you seriously need to get a life. Spoilers: Season 6, but story is set after 'Once More With Feeling' where Buffy lives, and a little later in Fic-land. Summary: S/B, Willow has been using her computer to do a little inter-dimensional hacking. Spike finds it and wacky Internet hi-jinks ensue. It gets a bit more serious as it goes along. Answer to Challenge from Stephanie Honey. Archive: I would be honored if you want to archive it. Please let me know where so I can visit it. Author's Note: time passes differently in different dimensions. So it can be almost end of Season 6 in one place and Season 5 in another. Oh wait, that's syndication. ;-) And don't get on my case about screen names. I'm just keeping them simple. Thanks to the Buffy Dialog Database (http://vrya.cstone.net/index.htm) and the Buffy Guide (http://www.buffyguide.com/episodes.shtml) for help with research and parts of episodes. Thanks to Clare009 and Hubby for beta reading. (c) April 25, 2002 --------------------- [Spoiled_Spuffy] fanfiction group challenge from Stephanie Honey Hey fic writes! I got a challenge for ya'll! Here it is: Requirement 1. Humorous Fic!!! Requirement 2. Buffy and Spike find a fanfic group. And can't believe some of the stuff fans write about them!!! Requirement 3. PG-13 or higher Requirement 4. e-mail it to me at honeymajandra@hotmail.com Option 1. Try to mention these members: Honeymajandra (me- Stephanie Honey), Sophie_limbourg (Sophie), Sarafina120 (Melissa), Lochnoir (Jerri) --------------------- Buffy & Spike, Lost in Cyber-Space By Anne Rose ~*~*~ Spike was waiting for Buffy to come downstairs so they could patrol. He could hear her upstairs, debating Dawn's wardrobe for the evening with her. That was going to take a while. Even for a slumber party, her ensemble had to be just so. Looking around, he noticed that Willow had left her computer open on the dining room table again. Spike looked at what she had had open. The witch had been using it for her magical hacking and it was still on. He sat down at the keyboard. "These things just kept getting smaller. Next thing, people'll be wearing those Dick Tracy wristwatches," he muttered. The last time he had been on a computer was when he was trying to find easy meals for Dru. 'Ah, cyber-cafes,' he thought, 'a little latte, a little biscotti, and a little over-sexed porn surfer to wash it down with. Dru preferred the girls with the pale skin and black lipstick. God, that girl loved irony.' He smiled at the memory. The password had timed out on Willow's email, but the browser was still open to google.com. He sat for a moment, and then touched the keyboard. A shock zapped through his fingers. But when he touched it again, nothing. 'Hmm, must be leftovers from Red's last spell.' Ignoring it, he typed in Spike and hit enter. He waited a moment, and then he saw 'Results 1-100 of about 927,000 hits. Search took 0.38 seconds.' "Hmmm, gotta love the internet. You can get a whole lota nothin, so much faster these days." He changed his search to 'Spike Vampire' and hit enter again. "*Only* 55,100 hits this time," he muttered as he began absent-mindedly scrolling through the endless list. He paused. This was tedious. "A little music would be nice. Let's see what's online." He searched a bit and found a number of his favorites. "You gotta love DSL," he chuckled as the files appeared on the hard drive. He picked up the earphones that were beside the computer and put them on. Clicking on the player, he set it to run the songs continuously. Then he set about exploring the rest of the computer. Going back to the list, he continued scrolling, until something caught his eye. 'What's this?' All the hits were about Buffy. The whole Internet seemed to be in on the fact that she was the Slayer - 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' over and over. He'd better alert her to this. It wasn't going to make her happy. But in the mean time, he wanted to find out what they had said about him. He eventually found a site discussing William the Bloody. He opened the page and was shocked to find an illustrated history of himself. He shuddered to see what was probably his worst poem quoted. And how did they have pictures of him, Dru, Angel, and Darla, back in the day, in color? He bookmarked the site for further study later. He scrolled on through the list of sites and visited several more. While he was looking, Buffy walked downstairs and said good-bye to Dawn at the door. Then she walked into the dining room and noticed him at the computer, bobbing his head up and down to whatever was playing over the headphones. "Spike, isn't that Willow's computer?" "Yup, nice one too." He said, as he continued surfing. Buffy raised an eyebrow "Does she know you're using it?" He paused, looking up, and grinned at her. "Nope -- remind me to apologize later." 'Right after hell freezes over,' he continued, to himself. He pulled off the headphones and pointed at the screen, "Here, come have a look a this, but you'd better sit down first." She sighed, but still walked over and sat down in the chair next to him. "I thought we were going to patrol." She said, leaning over to look at the screen. "What is this?" He clicked on a link and another page opened. There were pictures of her, the Scoobies, Spike, Giles, Dawn, everyone. They sat there; mesmerized for several minutes, as they read brief life histories of several of their friends. "How do they know all this? Who are these people?" "I don't have any idea, but it sure seems like this might be a little more important than patrolling tonight," he replied. "There are hundreds of these pages." He clicked on another link for a site discussing William the Bloody, with some cryptic initials A/S/X in the site description. The page popped open displaying a huge picture of him, Angel, and Xander. Their grinning faces had been pasted onto a set of bodies that were doing things that managed to offend even him. "Bloody hell!" He swore, closing the page. Buffy's jaw dropped and she just sat there for a moment, then she started laughing hysterically. "We have got to bookmark that page," she managed to say between giggles. "I so need that picture to blackmail you and Xander." "Over my dead body! And that was clearly a fake picture!" He looked at her as she laughed, and his face began to soften. It had been so long since she had laughed like that, not since before she died. Since she had been back, there were times when he wondered if he would ever hear it again. "Here now, you know it's fake. Have you every seen the Poof smile like that?" She continued chuckling harder, as she nodded. "Good point, I don't think Angel's smiled like that in his whole unlife." She wiped her eyes and took a couple deep breaths to calm herself. "Ok, what other surprises have you found?" He began clicking again, and she asked, "By the way, how did you find all of this?" He shrugged. "I just thought I'd search on Spike. I put in Spike vampire, and all this came up." "Why are there all these links to me when we searched on your name?" She asked, as she scanned the screen. "Wondered that myself. Bloody unfair if you ask me." "I'm not. Go back and search on Buffy and vampire." He put the search string in, and hit enter. Immediately there was a list of sites with titles like 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer', 'Buffy and Angel Forever', 'Spike and Buffy', and a couple even mentioned Riley and Buffy. She just stared at the computer, too stunned to say anything. Spike, on the other hand, had already had a chance to get over his initial shock and was surfing through the pages to see if there was some sort of pattern or indication of who was behind it. "Slayer, I think I'm on to something." He pointed to the screen. "See here? They refer to lists of members. Here it is again on this page. This one is called Spike_Buffy_6." "Six? Six whats?" She asked. "I don't know. Every time I click on a link that's suppose to take me to it I get an error message," he growled. "Oh, this one is priceless!" He had clicked on http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Spike_Buffy_6/ only to arrive at a page saying, 'Oops... There is no group called Spike_Buffy_6.' "Do you think it's some kind of security measure? Maybe we need a password to get in there?" "I don't know," he grumbled, "but now I'm annoyed." He did some further searches and finally he slammed his hand down on the table, "Aha! Found it." He looked at her smugly as he typed in, " http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Spoiled_Spuffy and hit enter. "What the hell is a Spuffy? And why is it spoiled? Sounds like a bad thing," she grimaced. A red page popped up, and they scanned the text. "It looks like more code. I can't understand what it's talking about. Can you get to the messages?" Just then, a picture finished loading. They both stared at the computer as a picture of the two of them stared back. They were holding each other; her head was pressed against his chest. She looked blissfully happy, and his expression while not quite a smile looked very content, with an undercurrent of possessiveness. It was as if he was challenging anyone who dared to take this woman from him. Once she caught her breath, Buffy shook her head and repeated the question. "Can you see the messages?" His head jerked up straight again, "Uh, right. Let me look." After a minute he said, "It looks like I need an account to get in, let me see if I can set one up." Spike typed away creating a fake profile for himself at Yahoo. "Wonder if these wankers know that a yahoo actually is?" Spike snickered. He hit enter, and the screen came up red. "What do you mean those fields are required? Bloody Nazis! What do they want to know that for?" "They probably want to sell you blood, mail order. Too bad Fed Ex doesn't deliver to crypts." "Very funny," he said as he entered more fake information. She looked confused. "Why are you going to all that trouble? Why don't you just use the free AOL account?" She asked. Spike instantly stopped typing. His mouth fell open as stared incredulously at her. "What?" She asked defensively. "Look, I may be evil, but even I draw the line at using AO-Hell. You want to consort with dark forces? You go use it," and he went back to typing, shaking his head. She drummed her fingers as he navigated the complexities of creating a fake identity and joining the list. "So, what is a yahoo?" "Hmm? Oh, that. It's from Gulliver's Travels." He replied. "They were primitive humans who lived on an island with intelligent horses." "Hunh?" "It's a metaphor... an analogy," still no response from her. "The humans were animals and the animals were human." He looked up at her. "What are they teaching you in school these days? No wonder this country is in the shape it is." She smacked his arm. "Oh, and I suppose having blood-sucking demons all over has nothing to do with it?" He chuckled. "Here Pet, look at this. We're in." He pointed to the list and smiled, quite pleased with himself. "Where do you think we should start looking?" "I don't know, at the beginning maybe?" There were a lot of messages. "Didn't your mum have a computer? Willow has ICS setup, we could connect it here and it would go faster with both of us searching." "Ok, I'll go see if I can find it." She got up and went to look. TBC...