Title: Ninja Prowess

Author: Jedi Buttercup

Disclaimer: The words are mine; the worlds are not.

Rating: K+

Spoilers: Post-series for B:tVS; Eureka Season 4ish?

Summary: "Technologically enhanced ninja prowess," Jack scoffed to himself as he reached for his radio. "You just had to say it." 1650 words.

Notes: Originally posted August 27 + 28, as part of the Twistedshorts annual challenge. Yet another fic where I assume Buffy finished her degree...

Jack Carter shook his head as he stepped out of the behavioral scientists' lab at GD., leaving the visiting psychologist- a woman named Buffy Summers- inside, packing up her belongings. Unless the missing artifact somehow turned up in the next few hours, her time in Eureka was going to be a bust, and she'd have to head back for Los Angeles without completing the research she'd come for. And like all the scientists he'd met since coming to Eureka, she was very vocal about the interruption of her schedule.

Unlike those scientists, however, there was something about the petite woman that set the hairs on the back of Jack's neck on end. She sounded angry about the thingamabob being missing, and talked a good game about the creepy effect it had on the perceptions of anyone who spent more than a few hours in its presence and how useful it would be if they could prove the strange patterns on its surface actually altered people's physical senses rather than just affecting their moods. But he couldn't shake the fact that she looked more relaxed now than she had when she'd arrived, not less.

"But unless Ms. Summers was somehow in two places at the same time..." he suggested, glancing at his former deputy and current head of Global Dynamics Security.

"No; I checked," Jo Lupo replied with a sigh. "She isn't a twin, she never got near the cloning project, teleportation research is still illegal, and the hologram systems are all safely locked up. So unless she somehow snuck all the way across GD, lifted it, stashed it, and got back in no more time than the time the video shows her spending in the bathroom, there's no way she did it."

"And the fact that I work in a town where anything other than the first option is even possible will never stop blowing my mind," Jack said dryly. "But seriously, barring some kind of technologically enhanced ninja prowess, she couldn't have stolen the latest missing artifact herself."

"I can't believe you just used the phrase ninja prowess," Jo snarked back, eyebrows arched bemusedly in Jack's direction. "Spent a lot of time playing video games with SARAH, lately?"

Jack scratched at the back of his neck and gave her a sheepish smile. "It, uh... does wonders for hand-eye coordination?"

Jo huffed a laugh. "You just keep telling yourself that, Carter."

"Right, right. You say that, but if I just so happened to ask SARAH how many games you played when you were rooming with us..." he teased back.

"C'mon now, focus," she grinned. "There have to be other suspects."

He sighed, letting the smile fade. "I only wish. No one else gives a damn about the artifact, and the security systems in the storage area don't record anyone else entering through the door in the timeframe where it disappeared."

As he spoke, the door of the lab opened again, and Ms. Summers stalked through it, carrying two duffel bags brimming with cords and laptops and the private collection of artifacts she'd said she brought to test in conjunction with the one secretly unearthed at the Vortex last month.

"Don't leave town just yet," he reminded her as she walked by. "If nothing else, you'll want to set aside some time for your exit paperwork."

"More paperwork?" she threw over her shoulder. "Can't I just get out of here? It's not like I even learned anything to not tell anyone about."

"Sorry, it's procedure," he shrugged, not feeling particularly sorry about it. Something was just strange about that woman.

It wasn't until she disappeared out of sight around a corner that Jack realized Jo was still staring after her, too. "Problem?" he asked, frowning.

"It's... it's probably nothing, but... how heavy would you say those bags are?" Jo replied, wrinkling her brow. "You helped her put a few things in them while you were talking. Could you lift all that one-handed? While carrying another one just as heavy in the other?"

Jack thought about that just for a second, adding things in his head... then shared an alarmed look with Jo and took off down the hall. But Ms. Summers was nowhere to be seen when they rounded the corner; and she'd have to have vanished through a wall or run faster than humanly possible for that to happen.

"Technologically enhanced ninja prowess," he scoffed to himself as he reached for his radio. "You just had to say it."

Buffy's legs were sore and she was almost out of breath by the time she finally crossed the EM shield around Eureka, heavy duffel bags still in hand. She'd planned to walk out through the front doors of Global Dynamics like any other scientist, but the Sheriff's overactive intuition had leaped ahead of her to warn all the security in the building, and she'd had a tough enough time just getting past the rotunda without hurting anyone, never mind trying to get to the car she'd left in the lot.

Willow was waiting, curled up in the passenger seat of Kennedy's Jeep, tapping away at her laptop. She looked up instantly as Buffy crossed the invisible barrier surrounding the town, alerted by the same magical sense that had connected her to the entire Slayer Line since she'd used the Scythe to awaken all the Potentials.

"Hey, there you are!" she called. "...Without your car. Buffy, what happened?" She set down the laptop and then called to Kennedy as she slid out of the Jeep; her girlfriend must've been patrolling the town's boundary line, because she jogged up out of the woods immediately and came over to take one of the duffel bags.

"They on to you?" Kennedy frowned, hefting the bag as she carried it around to put in the back of the Jeep.

"Yeah. Wills, you mind doing that bouncy castle thing we talked about?" Buffy confirmed as she followed suit. "We were wrong, by the way; it's definitely not a Hellmouth."

"It's not? But the ambient magic I felt when I tried to cross..." The witch shuddered as she stepped up to the invisible wall, holding out a hand as though to touch the electromagnetic energy that made up the shield. It flared, coruscating through a vibrant range of colors as she concentrated; then it settled into a faintly visible rainbow sheen, like a giant soap bubble stretched over the town. "It's unbelievable. The only place I've ever felt anything like it before was Sunnydale."

"I don't know what you sensed, but it's not dark- it's just weird," Buffy shrugged. "We had our share of geniuses in Sunnydale, but you remember how many of them went off the deep end. Here? It's almost creepy how eager they all are about the science over personal gain- or any kind of restraint. Even the super-egos have all these crazy enthusiastic scientific explanations for everything, it's like they can't even see how weird it is from the inside."

Willow frowned, stepping back from the shield. "Well, it is a pretty selective think tank..."

"Yeah, no, not even," Buffy shook her head as they finished settling the duffles and climbed back into the Jeep. "You remember how bizarre things got the last few months in Sunnydale? And even before that- Marcie, the nightmare kid, the crazy demon science the Initiative was doing?"

"Better head south rather than back to Salem if we're being followed," Willow patted Kennedy on the arm, then turned to look over her seat at Buffy as her girlfriend put the car in gear. "Yeah. Are you saying- this is something like that? Willpower affecting reality?"

"Fed by all the magic in the air," Buffy replied. She'd been very careful not to think much more than 'nothing to see here, move along' the whole time she'd been in town, especially on Tuesdays. "I tried to get into the files, but I'm not you; the most I could figure out was that there used to be some crazy powerful old artifact in Section Five that they thought might be connected to the Akashic Field, but it went dark a couple of years ago- as though all the energy had been dispersed."

Kennedy whistled, stomping down on the accelerator. "The Akashic Records? I remember my Watcher mentioning that. A compendium of mystical knowledge supposedly encoded in the astral plane, right? I thought scientists didn't believe in it."

"Well, it apparently believes in them." Buffy snarked. "My bet? The energy from that thing is the real reason so many of Eureka's recent products carry traces of magical energy, why the Sheriff always seems to know exactly what question to ask despite not understanding any of the science, and why the EM shield blocks the town off from outside magic as well as technology."

"Maybe next time, I should go in," Willow said wistfully. "If we could get Giles to contact their director..."

"Yeah, no; the last thing we need is them taking the more cowbell approach to supernatural research the way they do everything else," Buffy shook her head. "We should just count ourselves lucky the shield keeps most vampires and demons away; the artifact you sent me in for was the only originally magical thing I saw in there. If any of them got turned, and got into the experimental tech vaults..." She shuddered at the thought.

In the rearview, receding in the distance, she saw a brown Jeep marked with the Eureka Sheriff's logo speed up to the shield... then bound backward as though fired from a slingshot. Buffy winced as she watched it go; the magic Willow had used would keep the occupant from getting hurt, but probably not the car itself.

"That's gonna leave a mark," Kennedy observed wryly.

"So will my report," Buffy sighed. "Too bad. I kind of enjoyed getting to use my degree for once."

-x-