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“Who are you supposed to be?” Steve asked Claudia as she walked out of her room in the hotel suite she and Steve were sharing. She raised an eyebrow at him and pulled a wooden stake from her bag.
“Buffy? Only the most kickass blonde ever to grace our TV screens, courtesy of the genius that is Joss Whedon?” she answered, adjusting her wig slightly. “Ring any bells?”
“Gotcha,” Steve replied as they left their hotel room and headed towards the elevator. They had just finished a standard bag and tag with Pete and Myka, and Claudia had managed to talk the senior agents to take the artifact back with them so that she and Steve could enjoy Halloween in New York. Claudia wasn’t about to let a chance like this pass her by, not when time off was hard enough to come by.
“Don’t tell me you’ve never seen Buffy!” Claudia groaned as they stepped inside and pressed the button to take them to the ground floor. “You unwashed heathen!”
“Actually, I’m Jimmy Olsen, but thanks for trying,” Steve shot back with a smile as he adjusted his bow-tie. Claudia, deciding that being mature wasn’t the correct answer, stuck her tongue at him.
“Cute,” was his only reply as he snapped a picture of her with his camera. Resisting the urge to make another face at him, Claudia followed him out of the elevator and towards the Halloween party they had heard about while on the case. It wasn’t far from their hotel, so they had decided to walk there.
“Good, the line’s not too long,” Claudia said when they arrived. It wasn’t that cold compared to how it was now in South Dakota, but Claudia wasn’t keen on spending too much quality time outside unless absolutely necessary.
They had been in line about five minutes when somebody bumped into her while she was talking to Steve.
“Sorry about that,” a British voice apologized as Claudia turned around and saw the culprit, a sheepish looking man dressed as a gladiator. Next to him was a stunning redhead in a skimpy constable outfit, and a man dressed in a tweet jacket, a bow tie, and a fez of all things.
“Lose your costume?” she asked, giving the third member of the group a critical lookover, doing her best not to smirk.
“Fezes are cool,” he replied in an almost affronted tone, adjusting the hat on his head while the other two exchanged an amused look, one which implied this had happened before.
“I told you we should have gone as the Peruvian folk band,” the woman said in a Scottish accent, looking her arms around the two men. “Me an’ my poncho boys, just like old times.”
“Be more comfortable than this,” the first man muttered, almost to himself. “Again, sorry ‘bout that.”
“No harm, no foul,” Claudia answered with a shrug.
“Happy Halloween, then!” the woman replied with a smile before she dragged the two men off to god knows where.
“You too!” Claudia called out after them before turning back to Steve. “OK, seriously? A fez? On Halloween? Did he have a costume malfunction or something?”
“I don’t know,” Steve said. “The bow-tie was cool, though.”
“Of course you’d say that, cub-reporter.”
“First, he was a photographer, and second, while yes, he was cute, he had the taken vibes all over him.”
Claudia and Steve continued to argue good-naturedly until they got inside, and soon, Claudia forgot all about their encounter with the odd trio. That was, until a strange blue box suddenly appeared in the Warehouse exactly a year later.
But that’s another story for another Halloween.