"So, Sister, that is how things end."

"Unacceptable, Brother. Multiple prophecies broken, rogue champions, Fate defied."

"Indeed. Without belief in prophecy, our Will falls ignored to the wayside."

"We will remove the disruptive influence."

The sound of a throat being cleared nearby startled the two figures. They had been standing in a featureless white expanse, completely alone. Now they were joined by a tall man in an immaculate suit.

"What do you mean by coming here?"

"Brother, he is one of the old gods."

"Your time has passed, why are you here?" the brother demanded again.

"You mean to remove one of my pieces from the board. Why should I allow this?" the man retorted.

"Resist as you wish, has-been. Eventually we will be rid of him."

"Perhaps, perhaps. But not before much of your plans are disrupted. I propose a deal, a challenge, if you will. I will allow you to remove him, at a time and place of my choosing."

The pair glanced towards one another. "It must be before the Champion arrives."

"Before the Slayer arrives in Sunnydale, that is acceptable."

"You will offer him no assistance in returning?"

"If you agree that he will be wholly off-limits from any manipulation or retribution should he succeed in returning without my aid."

"We can banish him where we will?"

The man frowned, suddenly becoming a young woman. "If you grant him one wish, free and clear, no strings, before he is banished."

"The wish must be his, then, you cannot guide him in it!"

"Very well," the man nodded. "Well bargained. Are we agreed?"

"We are."

---

Xander rested his back against a tree, grateful for the shade from the hot sun. He and his best friend Jesse were observing the cheerleaders practicing, though from much farther away than they would have preferred.

They would have been watching the high-school cheerleaders if they could have, without getting pounded. As it was, enjoying the antics of the junior-high cheerleaders was as good as they could hope for, while still avoiding a pounding.

His other best friend, red-haired, freckled, and female, Willow was sitting with her legs folded beneath her, regaling them with her latest private studies in fluid dynamics and how the principle of turbulence in fluid flow could be applied to computer networks.

It made little sense to either Xander or Jesse, but they did not mind, just enjoying the sound of her voice and the steady babble as they watched short-skirted babes jumping and twirling.

When the babble was suddenly cut off, it came as a shock, distracting Xander from his girl-watching. Xander turned to look at Willow, but she was staring, unmoving. He was about to reach out and nudge her, when he realized exactly how quiet it was. Slowly turning his head back, fearing what he was about to see, and feeling like the unfortunate extra about to be caught by the villain in a horror movie, he looked back at the cheerleaders.

One of them had just been tossed in the air, and she was there still. "It's just like that episode of Superman," he thought, feeling his heart beginning to speed up. He pulled himself to his feet, and looked around frantically. Nothing and nobody was moving, all was still. He spied a leaf, hanging in the air with nothing supporting it, and a boy who had been skateboarding, in mid-flail as he had apparently hit an obstacle and continued on without his board.

"Alexander."

Xander jumped, startled, and spun to face the voice. "You aren't frozen!" he exclaimed, staring in surprise and disbelief.

The speaker was a woman, rather ordinary in appearance, with crinkled, curly brown hair and brown eyes. "You have five minutes," she stated. "Five minutes to make a wish, any wish you like, power, money, fame... probably not that last one though, because the Powers are about to boot you out of this dimension."

"What!?" Xander looked around in confusion, hoping to see a camera crew somewhere. Logically, he knew that there was no way that cheerleader could still be in the air like that, but, but this simply could not be happening! "Why?"

"Doesn't matter, you now have a bit over four minutes to make a wish. And make it a good one, will you? Maybe you'll even survive where-ever they plan to throw you."

Xander gibbered for a moment, uttering useless protests and panicking, until the lady slapped him, hard. "What was that for?" he shouted, holding his cheek.

"Two minutes left, make a wish, or go to hell with nothing to help you," the lady snapped, looking at her watch.

That was enough to finally get Xander thinking, desperately trying to think of the best wish to make, trying to go over superhero powers in his mind, but his thoughts kept chasing themselves in circles. Anything he chose immediately brought up a picture of a hell where it would be worse than useless. What would Superman's hell be? A land of kryptonite?

And then time was up. "Make a wish," she snapped, "now, or do without!"

"Fluid!" Xander gasped, his mind empty of everything but panic, and in its emptiness, it latched on to Willow's recent babble. A moment later he choked, realizing he had just spoken. He could see her breathing in, was he about to be turned into a pool of fluid?

"I wish I had power over all fluids!" he shouted, desperately trying to beat her to the punch and keep her from taking his accidental utterance too literally.

"Done!" she announced, even as her face suddenly became hideous, as if her skin had been peeled away leaving the underlying muscle visible. A moment later he felt himself grasped by something, and then he was hurtling through a black void, before a burst of color flashed before him, and he crashed into the ground, rolling and tumbling over hot, rough stones.

He fetched up against a massive outcropping of bare stone, and groaned in pain. Wincing and gasping, he levered himself into a sitting position, his back to the stone.

"She never told me why," he complained, eyes widening as he stared around at a rocky, boulder-filled landscape of mountainous cliffs and deep ravines.

"Well, crap," he said. The sky overhead was a sickening dull green, with roiling red clouds. "I'm not in Kansas, and I don't even have a little dog." Feeling utterly stupid, but knowing he would feel even more foolish if he found out later that it would have worked, he gingerly stood, closed his eyes, and tapped his heels together three times, saying, "There's no place like home."

Nothing happened, not that he had really expected it to. "I wonder if I even made my wish on time," he muttered. "At least I didn't turn into a pile of goo."

"Fluids, what the heck is wrong with me? If she'd just given me more time, I could have come up with something cool, damn it!" He stared around again, feeling as though he were being watched, but saw nothing moving, nothing living.

"It was inspired by Willow, it can't be that stupid," he said, with a hopeful grin, "here goes nothing! Though with my luck, it'll need an activation phrase like Shazam or something before it will work..."

He threw his hand out towards the nearest crack in the ground, and said firmly, "Water!" He pictured a stream of water shooting out of his arm, much like Hydro-man in his collection of comics.

"Alright!" he shouted in glee, as water shot from his hand, just as he had imagined. The rush of water leaving his hand threw him back, as he was not prepared for the recoil, but he was elated nonetheless.

Surviving this whole freakish experience just got a lot more likely. The water had stopped when his attention was stolen by his impact against the stones, but he was quick to play with this new toy, generating smaller streams of water from his fingers, then pretending his hand was a gun, and shooting off massive water drops.

Thinking of Hydro-man reminded him. "Jesse better take care of my comics till I get back!"

He sighed and walked a few feet up the wall's edge, sitting in a spot not yet soaked with water. "Just wait for me, Jesse, Wills. I'll find a way back, I will! And then I'll give those Powers a piece of my mind. If I ever figure out who they are. Freaky lady didn't even tell me her name."

The sound of the remnants of water from his playing trickling down the stones were making him thirsty, and he looked at his hand for a minute. "Ah, what the heck, if it doesn't work, it doesn't. Worth a try, anyway."

He stuck his finger in his mouth, and picturing what he wanted to happen, he sucked lightly. Instead of feeling pressure on his skin, he got a mouthful of cola, just as if he was sucking on a straw in a glass of soda.

He grinned, feeling the fizz of carbonation, and drank eagerly for a minute, then pulled his finger out of his mouth. "Too bad Twinkies aren't fluid," he said wryly. "Even if I couldn't do a Morrie Bench," he continued, referring to the civilian name of Hydro-man, "this would be pretty darn cool."

"Cool?" Levering himself back to his feet, Xander shot out another blast of water, concentrating on it being as cold as possible. It came out liquid, but left a sheen of frost on the stone in its passing. "Not quite what I was looking for."

He tried to shoot out a blast that was as hot as possible, but did not get water at all, but a screeching spray of steam, that quickly dispersed.

"Come on, come on, it would be so cool, I can't make it cold enough, ice isn't fluid, how do I do it?" He sprayed water again, trying to get it colder. He discovered that if he produced water as cold as he could, in a thin, smooth flow, he could build up ice mounds, but it was slow, and a stronger flow would wear the ice away as fast as it built.

Again and again he tried, the image in his head driving him. He had already seen that he could change the temperature of the fluid he produced, so he was certain he ought to be able to produce ice, even if he could not control it afterward.

"Hah! I got it!" Xander crowed, as he filled the ravine before him with ice. The key, he discovered, was that it took time for ice to form. When he produced a liquid, he could not make it colder than would remain liquid without it freezing to his hand. However, he could, after making the liquid, steal the heat from it. As soon as it crystallized, it would be out of his control, but in that instant, he could take enough heat to to ensure the entire mass of water solidified into ice.

It did not, however, produce an Iceman worthy smooth surface. With the whole mass freezing at once, the ice expanded rapidly, creating a surface that was cracked and spiny.

A bit more playing around revealed that flash-freezing the bottom while freezing the top more slowly, while it took a bit more concentration, produced a result that was smooth and slideable.

Unable to resist trying it, Xander whooped with delight as he slid smoothly down the course of ice as it formed ahead of him. Unfortunately, he lacked the physical skills and practice of Iceman, and he soon overtook the freezing ice, and plowed through chilling water to fetch up hard against another stone bulwark.

Once the initial shock of the icy water and bone-shaking crash faded, Xander realized that he had just added bruises on top of his earlier scrapes and pains. Some form of medication was in order, and it would not hurt to think of something that would make him a bit less fragile.

Briefly considering whether Captain America's super-serum might heal him while optimizing his body, before remembering the insanity that resulted from attempts to used the serum without vita-rays, whatever those were, Xander proceeded to run down a list of comic-book heroes and villains, trying to remember someone that healed using a fluid he might be able to reproduce, that did not have unfortunate consequences.

Finally, he settled on Esteban Diablo, an occasional Fantastic Four villain who waxed his mustache with a so-called Elixir of Rejuvenation, that he could then suck on when in need of healing. It was basically a fast healing potion, that by example of Esteban's mustache, was clearly not picky about precise dosing.

Focusing on the desired traits of the potion, namely fast-healing without danger of over or under-dosing, he placed his finger to his mouth, and sucked down a mouthful.

Instantly he felt a surge of energy run through his body, and his scrapes scabbed over, then the scabs fell away, revealing new pink skin that quickly faded until it looked the same as the rest of his skin. At the same time, his bruises shifted in color almost kaleidoscopically as they passed swiftly through the various stages of healing, before fading away entirely.

Buoyed by this success, Xander returned his mind to the super-soldier serum. He was tempted to push further, and go for Superman's powers, but reminded himself that it would be nice if when he made it back to Willow and Jesse, he could hope to someday have kids.

Becoming an alien Kryptonian could make that rather difficult. The super-soldier serum, on the other hand, when it worked, had basically taken the Cap and optimized him to the limit of what he was humanly capable, without changing what he fundamentally was. Well, according to the original comic, anyway, though of course different writers over the years had given different effective levels to his power.

Getting to the peak of fitness quickly was appealing, especially considering the landscape he was going to have to deal with. As little climbing experience as he had, lasting more than a few hours without falling to his death would probably be a miracle, and praying for a miracle in what looked disturbingly like some form of the Hell that lady had mentioned seemed foolhardy.

Could he produce a serum that would have that effect without needing the vita-rays?

Worried, Xander decided that it would be best to see if he could produce a liquid that would have the effect he wanted, without thinking about Captain America at all, to avoid any unpleasant consequences.

To begin, he simply held out his hand, and focused on producing a thin stream of liquid that would taste like a chocolate shake, and would perfect his body. Indeed, a stream of liquid appeared. He quickly shut it off, and leaned back. "Is this safe," he asked himself, musing aloud, "what if a perfect me . . . isn't me anymore? I wish Willow was here to help me think."

Sighing, he put his head in his hands, trying to think clearly. Maybe perfection was not the right goal. He could sit there, and think forever, trying to come up with the right way of thinking about it, and getting nothing but a headache. Or he could try to game it, and take a chance.

Focusing again, he placed his finger in his mouth, and, after breathing deeply for a few seconds, he sucked hard, and swallowed.

A euphoric rush passed over him, as he began a transformation sequence worthy of the Hulk, though not to that scale. All over his body, muscles bulged. It would most likely have been horrifically painful. Indeed, had any been watching but unable to hear him, they would have thought him to be in terrible pain, and he would have been, had he not clearly focused his intention that it should be pleasurable, as his body was improved to the point he would have been at, had he naturally been capable of matching Captain America feat for feat.

Unfortunately for Xander, his transformation did not go unnoticed, nor his cries of pleasure unheard.

Pleasurable Captivity

There was a whistling noise, a sudden impact, and an upward surge. Xander was airborne, hanging with one arm and one leg clamped tight in massive talons. He twisted for a moment, but quickly stopped when he realized how far away the ground was already. If he fell from this height, the strength of Captain America might not be enough to save him.

Bending his head back to look above him, Xander felt blood rush to his face. The immense wings dwarfed the giant figure holding him, but dragon-like though they were, it was no dragon holding him. Looking up legs that were strangely shaped, he found they met a body fit for a supermodel, feminine, in a massive way. The flexing of her wings shifted her leather wrapped bust about in a fascinating way, but his eyes were soon locked between her legs. She wore a skirt of some sort, but nothing between it, and being held by the strange clawed feet on her odd legs, there was nothing blocking his view of a treasure he had never been privileged to see in the flesh previously.

"I'm being kidnapped by a demoness," Xander murmured, feeling almost hypnotized by the tiny motions of her outer lips, as every now and then he got a glimpse of what lay within them. Just a bit above he could see the cleft of her ass cheeks flexing, and just over them, a slender tail.

The oddest thing was not her strangely shaped legs, immense wings, her long and . . . barbed? tail, but that her skin, in spite of showing all the motion of the muscles bunching and stretching beneath as her wings shifted back and forth, catching the wind and lifting them higher still, had all the appearance of carved stone.

He reached up with his free hand, and stroked the skin of the foot? claw? that held his other arm. The skin felt smooth and warm and soft, in spite of its stony appearance. He saw a shiver run up her leg, and quickly desisted. The last thing he wanted was to tickle her and cause her to release him.

A thundering boom startled Xander. Looking around, he finally spied a wide plain out past the mountainous region they were passing over, a plain covered in tiny dots. Though they looked like ants at this distance, their organization and regimented structure made it clear that he was seeing two large armies in conflict. The air shuddered with another great boom, and he saw a circle of ants thrown out of their formation.

Wheeling above the armies, but still far below Xander and his captor, tiny winged figures swirled about like dandelion seeds.

A flash of color drew his attention back to their course, as a mountain loomed ever larger, and he realized that his ride had begun to descend, angling towards a dark spot on the side of a mountain. The color he had seen was a ribbon of lava curling down the flank of the peak next to their target, and he felt a sudden flash of fear.

He had pictured being taken somewhere to be eaten, and had thought he could manage to mount a resistance once they reached the ground again, but what if he was wrong? Not even Captain America could handle being cast into two thousand degree molten rock.

Luckily, as she veered more to one side, he realized that he could now see the opening she seemed to be making for, and there was no red glow coming from it.

Xander was psyching himself up to take action as soon as they landed. However, when she did land, he quickly discovered that merely peak human strength was not enough when facing the superhuman strength of a demon-like woman half-again his size.

He was also not banking on her possessing the power to mold stone like taffy, though given her appearance, he might have been able to guess. Moments after landing, he was bound to an inclined stone slab, his hands and feet literally embedded in solid stone, with no margin for movement. Stone filled every space, every crevice in his fingers and between his toes, making flexing his hands or feet completely impossible.

What he saw next drove every thought of escape right out of Xander's head. Standing beside his captor, blushing prettily and clutching one arm with her other hand to shield her bare breasts, while that hand covered her naked sex, stood a much more human version of his captor. She was slender. Indeed, she was perhaps a bit too skinny, her ribs clearly visible, her cheekbones gaunt, but aside from wings, horns, and a tail, she looked human.

She was barely over half his captor's height, maybe five foot even, and her wings, in proportion to her body were far, far smaller. Where the larger woman's wings dwarfed her giant body, looking in scale similar to a pterosaur, the girl's wings looked more like those of a demoness in medieval or contemporary art. Pretty, but not likely to manage actual flight.

The larger demoness was speaking, a language that sounded at times more guttural, and occasionally more musical, than any Xander was familiar with. Not that Xander was an expert on languages, of course. He knew English, and could recognize, if not understand, French and Spanish.

She seemed to be urging the winged girl towards him, but she was blushing furiously, and resisting. At one point, she hid herself behind one of her wings, and peeked over it at him.

It was only then that he could finally pull his mind away from her nakedness enough to even realize that she had red hair, where the larger figure had deep black hair, and her skin was a pale pink. It was not a human-seeming pink, however, but rather the pink of a pale sandstone, flushing to a red like ochre.

When the giantess had finally coaxed the girl within reach, she reached down with her massive hand, and slipping a single talon into his waistband, pressed it outward, piercing the fabric. As she withdrew her finger, slid her talon into the new opening from the outside, and sliced down his pants leg, Xander realized with a start that he was harder than he had ever been in his life.

The giantess' face was beautiful, he became aware when he turned his attention back to her as she cut through his jeans, but it was the girl that was fueling his lust. She seemed so shy, and yet she was naked, the first truly nude woman he had ever had the opportunity to look at, and no matter how much he told himself he should not ogle her, he eyes constantly returned to her.

He was saddened by her thinness, guessing that she was not starving herself for fashion, but was rather literally starving, being probably unable to fly, and dependent on the other demoness, but her mannerisms unfailingly reminded him of Willow, triggering his protectiveness, even as her nudity refused to allow him to pretend, as he did with Willow, that she was one of the guys, and not an object for sexual fantasizing.

She did not look much like Willow otherwise, her hair being a less coppery shade of red, closer to the color of a fire engine or hydrant, her features and figure more gaunt than slender, her skin so reminiscent of smooth pink stone, but in behavior, she had the same habit of hiding behind her wings that Willow had with her hair.

He was so drawn to her that he was startled again when her gaze became fixed to his groin, and following her gaze, he realized the giantess had finished her work, and he was fully exposed, his dick standing out proudly.

When he had been caught up in the giantess' talons, he had feared being eaten, or taken to feed a brood of monstrous children, like a rabbit carried to an eyrie by an eagle, but now, looking at the girl's timid expression and uncertain manner, he was not fearing her approach, but anticipating it.

Would she really? Could she actually be about to? Her smooth hand, warmer than he was expecting from her stony appearance, his mind extrapolating from prior experience rather than his recent flight, for his captor's talons had been no less warm, rested briefly on his belly, just below his belly button. She withdrew it sharply when he twitched, but that momentary contact, and its location, drew his eye downward, and he realized that she had no belly button, neither innie or outie, nor even a depression to mark where it ought to have been.

Another guttural command brought her hand back to his skin, and she stroked it several times, first his belly, then his thighs. Through all of this, from what he could see, her eyes had not left his erection, following every twitch, every sway as his hips moved in response to her tickling touch.

She leaned in closer, and he groaned at the feel of her warm breath on his skin. She looked up at him in response to his sound, with eyes that were a startling black, no pupil or whites visible, just blackness, and he felt the looming presence of the giantess moving closer. Xander smiled at her, hoping that his face would convey his pleasure and acceptance. He did not bother trying to say anything, knowing that she would not understand it. It took an effort not to react in any other way, but he had the feeling that if he had frightened the girl, or angered her, it was the giantess he would have to deal with.

The knowledge that he could escape with his new powers, if he could think quickly enough, kept his fear down to a point that allowed his moderated response.

He drew in his breath and held it when she looked down again, and leaned forward. She pressed her cheek against his thigh for a moment, then shifted her head to the side and pressed her cheek against his erection. Though it was not the contact he so desperately hoped for, Xander felt a bolt of excitement shooting through him.

Afraid that he was not going to last, Xander closed his eyes, trying to focus, hoping that he could resist.

Unfortunately, that was the same moment that she gathered her courage, and licked him from base to tip. The unexpected surge of pleasure overtook him without warning and he cried out as his cum surged up and out.

His eyes popped open and he glanced down, chagrined, only to feel her hot lips closing around his tip, and sucking each subsequent surge. Staring down at her face, a single line of his cum glistening on her cheek, Xander barely lost any stiffness before he rose again. Her wings were shivering on her back, her tail whipped back and forth, and she whined, pressing closer.

When she stopped getting cum from him, she growled, the vibrations rippling through his cock. He felt her hands press into his thighs, her claws sinking into his flesh as she dropped her head, taking him in completely, and lashing him with her tongue.

She lifted off again and said something, before diving back on, whining, and Xander realized that she was not going to give up after merely one.

He did not really understand what was going on. Initially, he had been too overwhelmed to really think on it, but now, he could not understand why she would bother with giving him a blow-job. How would she even know of them?

Unfortunately, as intent as she seemed, his confusion and the sharp pain of her claws piercing his skin were reducing his arousal. Worried of what might happen if he failed to respond, Xander tried to push past the pain and focus. Looking at the giantess, though she was well-formed, was no use. She was clothed, and now that he was not between her legs, he did not have the deliciously distracting sight to pull him away from her inhuman appearance.

Worse yet, looking down at the girl was little better. She was focused on her task, and not looking up at him, so he could not see her face. Her back was obscured by her wings, so that all he could really see looking down were her wings and tail, not particularly alluring sights, though he did not find them an additional turn-off.

When he tried to picture her as she had looked coming towards him, he found it difficult to resist picturing her thin frame and visible ribs. An idea occurred to him then, between his fear and his compassion, though actually implementing it took long moments of building up his nerve.

Exercising his power near his private parts had never been high on his list of priorities, but he tried to focus and feel the fluid near his groin.

To his surprise, it was far easier than he thought. He could feel several types of fluid, and instinctually he could tell them apart. There was a fluid within his cells that seemed to almost define his form within his mind, then there was his blood, which while defining a tracery through his body, also drew a disturbingly clear picture of his own erection in his mind's eye. And there was the even less pleasant pool of urine in his bladder.

Finding the path of his urethra was more difficult, as it was not fluid filled at the moment, but examining where the urine and traceries of blood met, and delving closer for traces of seminal fluid, Xander managed to find a point where he felt he could introduce a tiny amount of fluid without harming himself.

Luckily for Xander, he did not have to essay this dangerous action, as his distraction from his fears had allowed his body to respond more fully to her ministrations, and he identified several glands that were quickly producing small pools of seminal fluid to be added to an imminent eruption.

Focusing on these pools, Xander tried to imbue them with healing and nourishing effects without changing their substance. He watched from within as he came, and in that instant, as his orgasm rushed through his mind, he felt as though his senses and his mind had momentarily merged, and he actually and intimately understood the fluids in his groin.

So clear was this sudden understanding that it was without the least trepidation that he artificially prolonged his orgasm, maintaining the volume of blood in his dick even as the muscles at its base relaxed, allowing for a reduction in pressure, and activated each gland in turn to produce one genuine spurt of semen after another.

She eagerly gulped this down, and he did not stop the production until he felt her pull back, and saw a line of glistening white splatter against her cheek. Even so there were two more pulses before he could wind the production down; they had been 'in the pipe,' so to speak.

Though it had been less intense than his actual orgasm, it had still been pleasurable and much more prolonged, and with it finally over, Xander sagged against the inclined stone, his weight pulling harder on his hands as his legs twitched from the release of tension. He had not realized it until they relaxed, but his thighs and calves had been straining to press his dick out further the entire time it was in her mouth.

While she may not have been able to continue handling the volume he had been producing, she was clearly not fully sated, as she proceeded to gather up the rest of his spend with her fingers and suck it down, then began licking him thoroughly.

She worked her way around his groin, cleaning him, then began an exploratory campaign across his thighs. He heard her murmur something indistinct when her tongue encountered the first of the wounds she had put in his right thigh with her claws, and to his surprise and consternation, she latched her lips around the injury and sucked hard, drawing the blood forth with pleased murmurs and burbles. Then she licked around to the next hole and repeated the procedure.

It was slightly painful, as each hole that she sucked on seemed to rise to a new peak of pain, though he recognized that this was merely an artifact of his body relaxing during the time that she spent moving from one wound to another, but it felt good as well, and after her first suckle, any thoughts he might have had about sucking down some healing elixir had flitted from his mind.

When she moved from his right thigh to his left, he found he was actually anticipating her arrival at the first break in the skin on that side. It did not take her long to finish getting the blood she had spilled with her claws.

She moved up then, bathing his new six-pack with her tongue. He had not had a chance to really look at the changes to himself that had occurred as the result of his version of the serum, but he could feel the difference as she crossed a rise and entered another dip.

When she reached his chest, she spent some time licking and sucking his nipples. Xander was surprised at how much pleasure this gave him, as previously he had only pictured himself sucking on a girl's nipples, never imagining that receiving the same attention would feel this good.

Having her sucking on his neck a moment later was also surprisingly pleasurable, but he was not surprised at all to feel a sudden sharp pain a moment later, followed by a steady flicking of her tongue over the gash she had made in his neck.

A healing elixir would take care of that, but she would just gash him again, he knew. That she was drinking his blood straight from the tap, as it were, was not a turn-off, as he had expected. In fact, the sensations contributed to a rising hard-on, but Xander had no intention of letting her bleed him to death.

Thinking hard, Xander worked out that he could produce fluids in concert with his salivary glands, so that he could suck it directly into his mouth without needing to suck on a finger. He did not want to have any of the sort of visible abnormalities such as super-fast healing or an inability to be injured that would lead to a long-term laboratory stay, so he did not want to make any permanent changes.

That thought itself gave him the answer, and a moment later, he had ingested a draught that would give his blood alone a Wolverine-scale regenerative capacity for only the next two hours.

If he needed more, he would take more, but after that time, he would be normal again, and not at risk of becoming a lab-rat.

With that taken care of, Xander abandoned himself to the pleasure of her suckling. When his attention returned outward, he was surprised to realize that her clawed hand had closed gently around his renewed erection, and she was stroking him lightly as she sucked, licked, and nipped at his neck.

Her breasts were pressed into his chest, and Xander was suddenly aware that sometime between getting blown, and her licking him all over, his shirt had been shredded. Bits were still present on his shoulders, and he could still feel cloth between his back and the stone, but nothing covered his front, nothing shielded him from the warm, soft pressure of her breasts, nor the hard points of her nipples pressing into his skin.

The shock of so much sensation at once was too much for him, and he could feel himself explode again, his cock twitching and throbbing in her grasp as he sprayed, coating their bellies and thighs.

His mind shutdown when he felt another tongue licking him clean and realized that he, Xander Harris, in his first ever sexual encounter, was being double-teamed by two gorgeous demon-babes.

When his awareness finally returned, he felt a heavenly warmth and pressure around his cock, and the exotic feel of stiff nipples rubbing up and down his chest, as the winged girl posted up and down on his erection.

He still felt the giantess' hands on him, but when he gathered the strength to look, he was startled to discover that he was wrong, and the hands on his thighs and the hot mouth that had just sucked in one of his balls belonged to a girl almost identical to the one fucking him, though her coloration of skin and hair matched the giantess perfectly.

They were speaking, between moans, gasps, and shudders, and as delicious as everything felt, Xander realized that he wanted to know what they were saying.

Xander wasted several distracted minutes running through superheroes in his head, from linguistic geniuses like Cypher, to telepaths like Professor Xavier, or J'onn J'onnz, the Martian Manhunter, before he realized that he had only minutes before, under the intense pressure of fearing for his life, sucked down a fluid that had never existed to give himself the power of a superhero in a very limited aspect and duration.

"Man," he thought to himself, "who would ever imagine I would be the one to over-think something!" Once again he sucked down a draught, and instantly, the murmured conversation of his captors became comprehensible.

It was strange, as the same sounds that a moment ago were gibberish were suddenly understandable, but even stranger was that his memory was quickly rolling over the sounds he had heard before.

The picture they were putting together for him was a bit frightening. There was something that the two of them hoped the smaller could draw out of him that would help her with some problem she was having. They thought this might work because his use of his power had been observed by the giantess, circling overhead, and if they did not succeed in drawing out the magic they needed, the next step would be to physically consume him, to simply eat him, and see if ingesting his flesh would convey enough power.

His surge of fear was no match for the teenage hormones that were achieving their first real success, and he could feel his climax rapidly approaching. Suddenly powerfully motivated, he focused once again on his glands, putting all his effort, distracted and confused though he was, into coaxing them into producing a fluid that would give the redhead whatever power or magic she needed.

His orgasm was glorious, as the changes to his semen caused it to send unexpected tingles of pleasure through his flesh as it passed through, tingles that seemed, of their own accord, to prolong and strengthen his orgasm and his pleasure.

He forced his eyes open when he heard her scream, and found the pink demoness had her head thrown back, her back arched pressing her breasts into him as she shuddered and shook, her wings twitching.

When the grey-skinned demoness helped the pink one to slide off his still-stiff erection, they were both surprised to see the fluid on his cock and dripping from her lips was a brilliant blue that seemed to shine from within, filled with tiny white sparkles. After laying the exhausted and still quivering red-haired demoness down, the grey one turned back and knelt before him, reaching out tentatively with a single taloned finger to gingerly touch a glimmering drop of blue on the tip of his cock.

Her eyelids drooped when she touched it, and she shuddered, then leaned forward and sucked him in, swirling her tongue around to catch every last drop, and pumping him lightly with her hand to ensure she had it all.

When they finally left him alone, Xander was exhausted, and his entire body ached, but none so much as his dick and balls. He had watched the transformation as first the grey demoness had returned to the giant winged form, and then the pink one had followed suit. They had both examined her and commented on her wings and claws, so he was fairly certain that it was this transformation that she had previously been incapable of, and which was thereby responsible for her starvation.

While sympathetic to her plight, Xander was also frightened. His first sexual experience had certainly been exciting and intense, beyond any dreams or imagining, but by the end it had become an ordeal, as his body strained, even with the help of his powers, to satisfy two demonic sex-machines. By the end, he was fairly certain that he had expelled more fluid than had been in his body in the first place, and had he not had his powers to help him, he would have been dead.

He had not dared, at the time, to attempt to actually heal himself, lest they never stop. He knew if he gave out too quickly, however, they would surely eat him. In the end, he was half-convinced that it was only the desire to fly properly for the first time that finally drew the pink one away, and without that, they might well use him until he just gave out, and then eat him.

Either way, whether chained here forever as a sex-slave, or consumed entirely, he would never see Jessie and Willow again, and that was not acceptable.

So, now that they had gone and he had a short window, Xander sucked down a healing draught, then turned his attention to the molded stone that held him pinned to the slab. After considering it for several minutes, Xander finally settled on melting the stone. He could probably blow it apart or crack it by forcing water in and freezing it, or using massive amounts of air, but any way he looked at it, he was going to have to take something first to protect him, whether from rock shards or swiftly growing ice crystals.

If he had to do so anyway, then he might as well take something that could protect him from lava, hopefully, and test it here with a very minor amount of melted rock, before facing trying to escape, what with the lava river he had seen on the flight to the cave.

Formulating and taking a potion was easy enough, and though he was nervous about the heat, he knew that he could heal himself if something went wrong, so he was soon producing hotter and hotter fluids as he sought to melt through the stone.

Unfortunately for Xander, his understanding of thermodynamics was not the best, and while he was able to produce molten stone, and then molten iron and molten steel, none of them had an appreciable impact on the rock. The heat dissipated from them into the air and the stone, cooling the fluid far more quickly than it was heating the stone, as the mass of liquid was so much smaller, so while the air around him was heating uncomfortably, he was only succeeding in adding rock crystals and lumps of metal to his prison.

From the Fire to the Forge

A sudden and encompassing darkness cut off his experimentation. His slab faced the opening through which he had been flown, and that opening was now blocked by a reptilian head of gargantuan proportions.

Xander stared in disbelief, his mind whirling uselessly, unable to comprehend the sheer size of the beast. Slitted yellow eyes that looked like they out-massed him twice over scanned the interior before focusing on him. Xander whimpered, jerking at his bonds again when a forked tongue slithered out, easily crossing the depth of the cave to slide across his body, leaving a disgusting moistness in its wake.

"Oh my God, I'm gonna die!" Xander screamed to himself, as the beast before him opened a maw that could have swallowed an elephant whole, and in the depths of it Xander saw a red glow growing brighter. "Oh, shit!" he exclaimed aloud, as he realized he was about to burn in the flames of a dragon.

In his desperation, he called on the ability he had used most recently, firing a thick stream of molten metal at the immense beast, but he was too late. The glow in the throat became a rushing, billowing flame that seared outward.

He was hit first by a wave of superheated air being pushed forward by the flames, then the rush of flame washed over him, instantly incinerating his tears of fear. The sudden and intense rise in heat that arrived with the flame did not taper off nor remain steady, but seemed to become hotter and hotter. Xander was amazed when he realized that the stone was melting around him, and though he was in intense pain from the heat, he was not dead.

He certainly wished he was, however. The draught he had taken to protect himself from the flowing metal and stone worked well enough, but did nothing to actually protect him from the flames, and he screamed as his flesh blackened and his skin flaked and was torn free by the pressure of the flaming wind.

He could not help but scream, but screaming made it worse still, as the moisture in his mouth was instantly evaporated, and his mouth and tongue were covered in blisters that were just as quickly popped, blackened, and blown free, choking him with his own ashes.

As the stone around his feet finally flowed away, Xander stumbled forward, then quickly turning, shambled as swiftly as he could deeper into the cavern, mind consumed by pain and the desire to flee it, all higher thought lost for the moment.

Whether his desperate attempt at an attack had worked, or merely stalled the beast, was discarded as unimportant compared to the simple necessity of fleeing the encompassing, radiating heat, for the dragon's fiery breath had done more than merely melt the stone holding him; it had melted much of the stone of the chamber, such that even as he fled, his raw and aching feet, though unharmed as per his power by the heat of the flowing stone, were steadily stripped of burned and blackened flesh by the friction of their passage through the thick and clinging stone, and his face, hands, and indeed most of his skin, his clothing having been burned away, though unharmed by the radiant heat of the glowing stones that remained where the melted stone had flowed away, were yet by it reminded and renewed in their complaint of the pain of being burned by the flames.

When he was finally past the glowing stones and the liquid floor, and had managed to stumble into a passageway that by dint of a rightward turn succeeded in placing him beyond the direct heating influence of the radiant inferno behind him, Xander was finally able to collect himself enough to ingest a stronger instant healing draught. This washed away the exhaustion of being constantly healed and flayed, though the memory of the pain lingered, and with the exhaustion and immediate agony abated, Xander was able to think clearly enough to slowly and gently lower the temperature of the air around him, and to raise its humidity by ever so slight degrees.

He wanted to flee further, but he heard no sound of stone being scraped nor scales sliding nor metal clinking behind him, and so he did not move until the air about him was heavy with moisture, and his own skin bedewed with condensation.

Finally heaving himself back to a standing position, and wishing for the shoes and clothing so recently lost, stumbled on down the passage. He was fleeing not merely the dragon, for he had some little hope that it might have at least been driven off by his attack, or even killed if he had managed a lucky hit. After all, he knew that tank-killer mines and rounds often did the actual punching through armor with a spray of molten metal directed and given force via a shaped charge, and his spray of liquid metal had hopefully resembled that more than a little. Yet even if it had been killed or fled, the two demonesses would likely return soon, and given that the larger of the two had reshaped the stone to imprison him, he had little hope of even a dead dragon's long keeping them out of their lair.

Hope failed him when even as the sounds of falling stone clattered in the far distance behind him, he came to the end of the passage he was in. It was not such an end as might be found in a hallway or mine, with neatly squared walls; rather as he had progressed the cavern had itself transitioned from moderately worked stone to a natural rift, and it had grown steadily closer, until know he knew that to continue forward risked his becoming trapped, wedged between stone walls with no-one to rescue him.

He stared at it dumbly for a long minute, the sounds of voices now drifting incomprehensibly through the twisting ravine, before thought and sanity returned, and he remembered the powers that he had been given. Somehow, some way, there must be a solution to this dilemma in them.

Once more his mind passed rapidly over the superheroes and villains of his childhood comics. Again one of the first to spring to mind was Morrie Bench, Hydro-man, and this time Xander's desire to escape was such, with the fresh memory of the most intense pain he had ever experienced to drive him, that Xander wasted no time wondering if it would work, or what he risked by doing it.

He had power over fluids; if Morrie could do it, so could he. Almost the same instant the idea entered his head, he had followed it, his entire body flowing into a liquid state, and rushing down through the ever tightening cracks in the rocks, letting gravity do the work. The only effort he found he had to put forth was to keep himself together, to draw back up whatever portions found a path that was separated from the rest, and to fight against the continual tendency of his body to re-solidify.

He was not sure what was causing that, but whatever minor pain he experienced when a hand or knee re-solidified only to be caught in the stone was negligible compared to the pain he had just experienced, and the almost total lack of pain he experienced in his liquid state. Each twinge of pain served to focus his attention just enough to reliquify that piece of himself, and he flowed on.

As he descended, the ground became hotter, and he passed veins of rock that were hotter still, some of the moisture in his body turned to steam. At first he was mildly concerned, though the absence of any resulting pain kept him from panicking, and when the steam remained with him, and seemed completely under his control, he was reminded that he had gained power over fluids, not merely liquids, so gases and vapors were evidently included.

Every now and then he passed through a rising stream of gases released from volcanic rocks down somewhere below him. At first he ignored these as unimportant, but after a while he realized that he could sense some difference between them.

It was nothing so familiar as a taste or a smell, but rather a sensation he could not quite describe, yet after his fourth and fifth encounters, he realized that he could recognize a gas he had seen before, and even recognize that one of them was relatively pure, and the other a more complex mixture.

Realizing that, he paused for a brief interval while he sampled the air itself, trying to identify what composed it. He was about ready to give up, knowing that Willow would have known the relative percentages of the various components of air and been able to identify them by their mere plentifulness relative to each other . . . though whether that would actually work here, on what he was confident was a different world was an open question. He realized just in time, as he was about to abandon the task, that he had the perfect means of identifying the gases.

This was a significant moment, for prior to this, Xander had only really been thinking about liquids, though he had said fluid when asked for a wish. Now he produced bubbles of pure nitrogen, oxygen, and carbon dioxide, they being the three gases he could most readily recall.

Sampling each, he compared them to the gases in the air around him, and to his memory of the gases he had passed through. Carbon dioxide, he realized, was a component of the mixed gases, and he wondered why they held together coherently when carbon dioxide was also in the air.

A moment's thought gave him the answer; the coherent batches of gas that had held mostly together while passing through the air, and himself, had been warmer, the source and reason for their rising in the first place.

At first he merely attributed this to the heat of molten rock somewhere below, but as he resumed his downward journey, he became curious about the mixed batches.

He could understand how simple air could be heated, and rise, but the mix in these clouds was not the same as the air around him. He could understand the bits of pure gas, as the release of gas pockets in the magma, but that again would not explain the complex clouds.

Feeling confident now, all hints of pain having vanished in this new form and the sounds and fears of returning giants well past, he began to focus his downward motion, spreading out and allowing himself to seep down multiple paths, though never far enough to risk losing cohesion, until he sensed a mixed gas cloud, then pulling all of himself down that path.

He repeated this several times, only stopping when he passed through a long crack into a passage that was apparently a worked stone hallway. Immediately he drew back into the crack, and peered tentatively into the hall, concerned that he might have been spotted by whatever beings or, more likely, demons that had made or used it.

Much to his surprise, he realized that he could see into the hallway by the light of the flickering torches set in wall-sconces, even when only a tiny bit of himself was slipped to the end of the crack; though as far as he could tell, neither of his eyes were in that bit of substance.

He grinned at this. He had always wondered how Sandman or Hydro-man could continue to see when their eyes had become sand or water. Reminded by this that he had been able to interpret the air before, and with his confidence greatly boosted by his ability to see without eyes, Xander took his transformation a step further, pushing past liquid to a fully gaseous state.

Extending himself gingerly into the corridor, he focused his strange everywhere-vision back on himself, ensuring that as intended, he blended perfectly and invisibly with the air, visible, if at all, as nothing more than a slight heat haze where the air's motion and density differed slightly from the background.

Looking back and forth down the corridor, and verifying that he was thoroughly alone, Xander took a moment to push fully back to human form, verifying that he still had all his bits and pieces. His clothes being a complete loss, and the corridor rather cold in spite of being lit by flaming torches, he quickly returned to gaseous form, reassured by his ability to resume human form, the absence of any obvious trauma, and the fact this his normal form now seemed completely healed, not even showing any redness from the intense flame or molten rock.

Moving closer to one of the torches, Xander sampled the gas coming off of it, and determined that while it was releasing a not wholly dissimilar collection of heated gasses, they were mixing much more quickly, and losing their heat load to the surrounding air much too rapidly to be the source that he had followed thus far.

He was not certain, however, that they weren't strong enough to have led him astray at the very last turning he had taken.

He also discovered that though some of his substance got caught up in the flame and burned, this did not feel painful, nor seem to hurt him, and though he had gained a bit of oxygen from it, reminding him that of a line that Willow had quoted at him when he was talking about the Human Torch one day, that he had not really understood, "Combustion is oxidation allegro." He was not sure what allegro even was, aside from something from music class, but he could now see that when bits of him burned in the flame, they split and gained oxygen.

Distracted by this, he spent several minutes playing with the flame, indulging the pyromaniac in the heart of so many little boys. The flames would leap and roar with power if he fed them a burst of oxygen, or gutter and threaten to die if fed extra carbon dioxide. Other gases he could think of had varying effects, mostly affecting the color and intensity of the flame.

He had just begun to experiment with carrying a flame away from the torch, by continually feeding oxygen and propane into a single spot in the air, near the flame, and then trying to move it away without reducing the flow of gases, before being interrupted. Propane was the first gas he had thought of that actually burned reasonably well, but though he was able to draw the flame far enough from the torch to tell that it was a separate flame, he found it devilishly hard to keep the flow of the two gases consistent enough. Too much of either would flare up, use up enough oxygen in the immediate vicinity to snuff the flames, and leave him spraying flammable gas into the air unburnt.

He had made just the barest of progress with this when he heard what sounded like a heavy thud, followed by footsteps. He dropped what he was doing, and focused on ensuring that he was wholly invisible. His body's tendency to re-solidify if he took his attention away had not lessened noticeably, and he did not want to deal with another encounter just yet, especially not if it involved more pain.

Drifting up to the ceiling, he slid down the hall to a point midway between two torches, where the shadows were the deepest, and waited. Soon enough, three figures appeared from around a corner at one end of the hall.

They were bumping into each other in an apparently deliberate fashion, as if trying to knock one another off balance, almost like a living game of ping-pong. They were, Xander guessed, no more than five feet tall, with long pointed ears with furry tufts, and sharp-snouted faces covered in red and white fur, making them look much like foxes. In spite of this fox-like appearance, they were standing and moving much like humans, though as one got a better hit in, causing another to spin, Xander realized they had large furry tails, red with a white tip.

Sheaths hung at their sides, a short one on the left, a longer one to the right. They were wearing dark red leather tunics with green trim, green leggings, and heavy boots. There were flashes of torchlight reflecting from beneath the boots, leading Xander to assume they had soles that were nailed on, rather than sewn. Their clothing looked faded and well-worn, with noticeably shinier patches where the arm rubbed against the body, and occasional stains.

They looked stouter than he would have expected for a people that seemed to be related to foxes. He thought of foxes as little dog-like creatures that ran and hid, his impression coming largely from Disney movies and stories of English fox-hunts from children's books. He did not think he had ever seen a fox in real life before.

These three, however, rather than looking like fox-men to his mind, looked more like a cross between a fox and a fantasy dwarf, short, stout, and powerfully built.

They passed him by without appearing to see him, though he noticed all three sniff the air curiously. He briefly considered following them, before reminding himself that he was escaping from demons already, and should be avoiding them rather. They were in the same mountain, for all he knew, they might be working together.

He did not think that was particularly likely, but if it was the case, it would be a bit late to worry about it after he had been captured by them.

When a steady ringing sound started up in the opposite direction, Xander made up his mind, and drifted towards it. The light from the torches was not great, but Xander soon realized that he could see into even the deepest shadows. He did not figure it out immediately, but eventually he came to realize that when in his liquid or gaseous forms, the power that allowed him to see anyway was using his entire body as a light capturing device.

It was still somewhat limited by his mind, but he found he could look in any direction without needing to actually move anything, and see into deep shadows. He had not particularly noticed the darkness during the trip down, which made him think that he could probably see even in pitch blackness.

As he approached the ringing sound, he realized that it lacked the long tapering sound of a bell. It was more akin to a hammer beating on a piece of metal that had some good resonance to it.

Sure enough, when he finally found the room that was the source of the sound, and infiltrated the room, snickering inaudibly to himself, by drifting through the cracks around the closed door, he found it was a great forge room, with three forge setups, two of which were in use. Only one had active hammering, the other had its flame being stoked, while something in the heart of the fire was being adjusted with long tongs. Two more fox-men much like the three he had previously seen were standing on either end of the room, watching.

They were well back from the flame, and considering that they had much more fur than he had hair to fear a spark, he was not surprised. The other four creatures--he could not honestly label them as men, being unable to hazard a proper guess at their gender--were fur-less, and he had to restrain himself mightily when he saw them, lest he lose control and become visible in his shock.

He was immediately put in mind of childhood video games, as they were humanoid turtles, in so far as he could tell. The spikes and other appurtenances were more in line with say Koopas from Nintendo's Mario Bros than the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, but they were very much like video game characters brought to life. Squat and muscular, much like the fox-men, they carried a heavy spiked carapace, and wore black leather gloves, shoes, and face masks.

The masks were fitted with what looked like smoked glass goggles, so he assumed it was more about facial and eye protection rather than identity concealment.

He remembered someone mentioning that all foreigners looked alike to them, and while he would agree about the fox-men, having seen little of use to differentiate them, the turtle-people were readily identifiable. He immediately tagged them with monikers, Scar for the one with a long mark crossing the back of its carapace, Horn for the individual with a rhino like horn on its snout, though it was only about three inches long, Frill for the one that had a ring of horns on its head, jutting out just above his mask, and finally Muscles for the relatively unadorned turtle, as his muscles were considerably more impressive than the other three.

Where the others had looked like uncommonly strong men, much like a blacksmith or wrestler on his world, this one looked like a top body-builder, with muscles on muscles. It was he--with the degree of musculature, Xander could not help but apply a masculine pronoun in his mind, though intellectually he realized he had no means to be sure--who was pounding the long, slightly red metal billet, a flat block of metal about three feet long and three inches by two inches thick, steadily flattening it.

Horn was gripping the metal mass with tongs, moving it about, while Muscles was hitting the same spot consistently, rather than shifting his aim. Occasionally Horn flipped it, always getting it laying flat again just before the massive hammer impacted it.

The hammer Muscles was wielding was a hefty thing itself, though all Xander could do was judge it to be larger than the sledges he had seen. He did not know how large those sledge-hammers were, so had no gauge for the weight of the hammer. It was certainly no war-hammer meant for swiftly smashing bones or skulls, nor a showpiece to place on a mantel. It was dull and utilitarian, roughly octagonal, though more like a cut-off square on the face, with a slight flare at the tip that was obviously from the force of many impacts, and not a matter of design, given its unevenness.

Frill was operating a bellows, though it was unlike anything Xander remembered seeing pictured in History or Social Studies classes. Rather than pumping up and down on a moderately sized accordion style pump, he was spinning a wheel using one protruding handle. The wheel was attached by a belt to another apparatus that translated the circular motion into vertical motion, moving the handle of a bellows built into the side of the forge, that moved in a vertical arc considerably higher than the squat turtle figure could have hoped to reach himself.

A similar bellows was attached to all three forges, though the other two were quiet and unmoving.

Scar was handling whatever was in the flames of the second forge with long tongs gripped carefully in his gloved hands.

The basic setup of the forges was a massive brick oven, a billows on one side, an open space in front of the flames, and on the other side, a long flat table of metal that looked to be four or five inches thick. On one end a horn protruded, and along one edge were a series of holes, both square and circular, the purpose of which escaped Xander at the moment.

Between the table and the forge was a small wall that served to separate each forging area. It was placed beyond the table's edge, and was festooned with tools and implements, some of which Xander recognized, and others whose use was a mystery.

Finally, at the end of each table, furthest from the forge, were set two large barrels with open tops, and a long trough, all filled with a liquid.

Perhaps Xander should have been more concerned about being discovered and captured, but he was little worried. He had been somewhat concerned about the first three foxes, as he had taken human form in that corridor, and he had observed them sniffing for him. They had had at least the beginnings of suspicion, and may have also observed unusual flickering from his playing with the flames. These individuals, on the other hand, were absorbed in their work, first off, and secondly, had no reason to even suspect his presence.

Thus it made, to his mind, a perfect opportunity to observe and learn about them. So he watched as the billet was hammered and folded, then returned to the fire.

The pairs switched then, as Muscles started pumping the bellows on the first station, while Scar pulled out a brightly glowing hunk of metal and set it on the table for Frill to start pounding.

Xander watched this go back and forth for a while, until they completed the blades, looking something like a machete, and plunged them into the troughs of water, sending up clouds of steam. He quickly slipped out of the room then, worried that the difference in density or mobility of the air that was himself would be visible when the steam reached him.

After verifying that no-one was in the hallway when he entered, Xander drifted back to the doorway, and focused on working out how to eavesdrop on the room to make certain he had not been noticed.

Just a short bit of experimenting lead him to realize that by focusing on the vibrations of the air, he could hear perfectly well, and even move the viewpoint, as it were, of his hearing about the room, by focusing on any given small volume of air, with the intention of hearing the vibrations there.

He could also hear through the water in the trough and in the barrels, which lead him to experiment with the blood in the turtle-people. Though there was insufficient mass of fluid at any point in them for him to hear anything other than a soft rushing and an occasional lub-dub, it did lead to the stunning realization that by recognizing and identifying not merely blood, but the overall pattern of a concentration of a variety of fluids in a branching motif, he could readily identify the location of everyone in the room without attempting to look within.

In fact, with a bit of concentration, he could even observe the motions of the turtles, enough to clearly identify when they again switched positions at their respective stations.

Caught up in the wonder of being able to effectively see through walls, Xander expanded his senses, wandering up and down the halls unseeing, his concentration focused outward, experiencing each room he came across. Any bit of air was good for hearing, he found, but it took a flat bit of liquid for him to see. Basically, he could only see into a distant room by focusing on the skin, the surface of a liquid where it met the air, and focusing only on light as it impinged that surface. By allowing the skin to define a two-dimensional cross-section of the light, he could match it fairly well to his retina.

It was excessively disorienting, however, as he discovered that apparently his retina automatically flipped everything upside down; presumably this corrected for another flipping that occurred in his lens, but since he was not using a lens, it made it seem as though he were standing on his head.

However, as in this form his inner ear had no solidity, and could not function properly, it could not contradict what his virtual eyes were seeing, and so though it was intellectually disorienting, and made him feel as though he were a bat hanging upside down, it did not engender any dizziness or nausea.

Of course, testing one or two senses in this way naturally led to testing others. Touch, like sight, was effective only where he could define a surface. When there was a pool of liquid in the room, he could feel that surface as if it were his skin, and feel the movement of the air across it, or feel things passing through it.

Unfortunately, as he discovered when he found a set of kitchens, feeling water as if it were your skin was excessively unpleasant when someone was cutting vegetables in it. Though there was no pain, the sensations were unambiguous about a constant stream of items piercing his skin, and this triggered every escape instinct, and sent shudders through his diaphanous form.

Taste and smell worked only, as it were, by analogy. He could not convince his brain to actually experience any taste or smell remotely and identify it with something he already knew, yet his knowledge of what was dissolved in the air was complete, and functioned much like taste or smell. He could not intellectually put them into words, but much like a hound dog, he could learn a given 'scent' or 'taste' and identify it again, or hunt it down.

When he happened upon a bathing hall, all thought of experimentation left his head. He was lucky, perhaps, that being insubstantial, he encountered no physical equivalent to the shot of hormones he otherwise would have received, as he looked at a large pool filled with nude females, all pleasing to his eye. They were mostly of the sort certain fetishists on his world would have labeled 'furries,' but were uniformly gorgeous.

Xander had encountered identifiable females previously in his recent wandering, working in the kitchens, or cleaning rooms, and they had been less than impressive, so he was under no illusions that all demon women were as impeccably beautiful as the one that had so recently removed him of his virginity, but this group would have no reason to be ashamed in her company.

He gave up all pretense of observing remotely, drifting immediately into the room and focusing the full of his vision on them. Some were closer to a human norm than others, who bore tails or dark, leathery wings like the giantess, or fur. But all were beautiful, and two of the furred ones had something that drew his eye like nothing else, for they were possessed of two pairs of breasts, one above the other. Their fur was thin and short, like a short-haired dog, and did nothing to conceal their gentle, full curves.

He was lucky that the absence of hormones in his system, though it stopped none of his teenaged male interest in them, meant that there was nothing physically clouding his senses or his thought processes, so even in his awe, he was able to pay attention to their conversation.

Here he discovered that he was not entirely off in his guess that there might be some connection between these creatures and the demonesses that abducted him.

Apparently, had he looked closer, he might have even discovered a proper stairway leading to these worked halls from their eyrie. Furthermore, he learned, they were not merely demonesses, but also princesses, the daughters of a Grand Duke. What is more, the Duke and they were both apparently dragons as well as demons, and from the girls' eager descriptions to each other, Xander realized that he had stumbled upon the dream of every hot-blooded teenage male, a genuine harem!

These girls were the current favorites of the reigning Duke, who apparently could and did take a more modest, near-human form to have his pleasure with them, while taking an immense draconic war-form to battle his own enemies, and an intermediate draconic form to lead his forces to war.

Xander's heart fell to his feet when he realized that he may have either slain or injured the father of the beauty that had given him the best experience of his life. Granted, she and her sister had been discussing, before they left to test her wings, whether she should literally consume him to ensure that her improvements were not temporary, but they were demonesses and he supposed it was to be expected, but still. She had given him an awakening that he would never forget, and he may have repaid her with her father's murder.

Though it had been in self-defense at the time, Xander could not help but think, now that he was no longer in a blind panic, of all the ways he could have resolved the situation without striking out, from the intangible form he now had, which apparently found burning to be merely amusing, to taking something that would temporarily allow him to teleport away, to even simply using his power to stop or cool the flames. After all, burning gases were fluid, and within his powers.

Perturbed as he was, Xander did not notice at first when the ladies began to rise from the pool and dry themselves with linens. It did not take him long, however, for when your entire surface serves as eyes, you cannot simply cast your eyes down in despair and miss everything. He actually saw everything from the first, it merely took him a long minute to realize that they were preparing to leave.

Without really paying much attention, acting almost entirely on his natural desire to be helpful and not a little out of gratitude for the immense contribution they had unwittingly made to his store of fantasy material, Xander began vanishing the water from the rising women, and bathing them in soft blasts of warm, dry air.

Surprised though they were, it was quickly apparent, when their comments drew Xander's attention to what he was doing, that they were of the opinion that their Duke had arranged a new grooming spell for them, of which they approved mightily. Momentarily prepared to flee when he realized what he was doing, Xander instead continued his ministrations, to preserve the appearance of an impersonal spell there for their comfort, and not a perverted human male voyeur.

Glad to be of service, but also filled with chagrin at the realization that he had allowed his prurient desires to cause him to invade their privacy, Xander left the room and deliberately headed away from the ladies. He was even more miserable when it occurred to him that he may have robbed these ladies of their Duke, clearly a being they delighted in, rather than some lecherous monster as might be supposed of a Duke in Hell. Unlike, of course, the lecherous and voyeuristic monster that was himself.

Xander was feeling quite low as he drifted downward, but he still paid attention to his surroundings, and when he chanced upon a larger group of soldiers marching with intent, he fell in to follow them.

Chances were reasonably good, he hoped, that soldiers marching with such purpose would be heading to the outside of whatever sort of stronghold they were in.

The Abyssal Plains

Out in the open, Xander turned back to look at the gate he had just exited. It had been an interesting exit, as the aperture through which he had passed had been quite narrow, and though he had not felt squeezed, per se, it had definitely been strange.

The gate was huge, over three times his height, as far as he could tell, though he was not certain he had been able to quite maintain his proper size in his insubstantial state. It was set directly into the side of a cliff; no flying over a battlement or lobbing severed heads over a wall to sow despair here.

The gate led to a narrow pass that wound down through the foothills of the mountain fastness. It had clearly been artificially widened, and the path was well-maintained, free of rocks and sudden dips or rises, though it appeared to steadily trend downward. Xander could easily imagine an army emerging from that gate, passing down the cleared path in proper marching order, though the area was clear of occupants at the moment.

The winding path and the overhanging hills would serve as some protection from above, as would any hidden weapons in the cliff side. He could not see any such armaments, but was pretty sure there were some. There were definite signs of battle here, including discolored patches on the ground where the way had apparently been repaired.

Passing down towards the plains below, the sounds of battle filled his hearing once more, and he was reminded of his earlier view of the plains. Leaving the path, secure in his relative invisibility, especially from a distance, he drifted up to the peak of one of the foothills, and looked down on the flatter land below.

There was a great army encamped near the end of the road, a veritable sea of moving bodies, tents, great beasts, massive machines, and fires, but all well-ordered.

Further out, he could see the rising smoke and dust of actual clashes going on, and looking up, he could again espy the distant, tiny figures of flying demons or demonesses.

Though he watched for several minutes, he never observed these flying figures make an obvious attack run, so he decided that they were probably there as spies and observers, relaying the order of battle and enemy movements to the battle commanders somehow.

He had no idea how that might operate here, but he supposed it could be anything from magic, to a mental link, to the simple expedient of some form of semaphore, whether physical signals or flashing lights in a pattern. Or, for that matter, they might observe for a while and then return to explain what they had seen, or watch for some specific event and then drop from the sky as a signal.

Continuing down, Xander approached the encamped army, and then slowed to examine it. Though he had never studied warfare, he could see that they were at the least an organized group. He could see regular formations among the tents, with what appeared to him to be several ranks of barrack tents, then what might be a mess hall followed by a kitchen, assuming that was the purpose of the fires near this particular tent in the pattern, and then a smaller cluster of smaller yet taller tents, which he took to be officer's territory. This pattern repeated itself throughout the army, though it varied in some areas, differing particularly in the groups that seemed to include exterior stabling for various strange creatures, whose details he could not make out from the distance.

He was about to approach one of the great beasts for a closer look, when a sudden thought occurred to him. They were too distant for him to see clearly, but why should that matter? Had he not been able to see through stone walls? Seeing at a distance should surely not be too much more difficult.

As he considered it, he supposed there were two possibilities. Either he could find a source of liquid near enough, with a good angle for viewing, something he considered unlikely, or he could find a way to use his powers to craft the equivalent of a telescope or binoculars.

This seemed readily doable. He did not know any great details about telescopes and such, but he was pretty sure that the critical piece in them was a simple lens, the same as in the handheld magnifying glass that every young boy plays with at some point. He and Jesse had quite enjoyed the one Jesse got for Christmas when they were both six, though Willow thought they should use it to learn things, and they both just enjoyed starting fires and burning ants.

Forming a lens took a little effort, but not too terribly much. Spaghetti Westerns from his childhood had imparted the fact that water distorts the apparent position of fish below the surface in a way that had stuck in his mind, and his power, it turned out, was more than sufficient to the task of causing a bit of pure water to form a ball in front of him, then flatten that into a swollen disk.

Lining up a pair of these in front of his eyes, and adjusting their relative positions worked just as he had hoped it would, allowing him a closer look at the massive monster. From his new improved view, he could see that it had a large box on its back, sort of the same thing as he had seen depicted on an elephant's back, though he had no clue what it was called.

It was large enough for at least ten of the demons to stand in, from what he could see, and had a massive crossbow-type device mounted to it. "Cool," Xander said aloud, "Must be their version of a tank."

Indeed the creature's skin appeared to be composed of massive scales, and it had fearsome jaws. He likened it to a horned desert lizard, scaled up many times. It was not in quite the same proportions, but it did have the flat, wide head, bulging eyes, and limbs that canted out to the side instead of lining up underneath it. He vaguely remembered reading some science fiction article pointing out that simply scaling up a small animal would not work, in spite of the prevalence of the idea in the horror films he enjoyed, but apparently whatever problems there were with it were not an issue here.

He pondered for a moment what it would be like if this lizard could shoot blood from its eyes in the manner of a desert lizard he had read about.

The ground about him shook, and he heard a distant rumbling. Refocusing his vision without moving, Xander gazed back up the mountain, and after a moment, saw an immense dragon, impossibly large, come turning from behind the mountain's peak. He still had his telescope at the ready, and swinging it around to focus on the dragon, though it took some effort to get the speed of swing right to follow its motions, he got a good long look at it, and shuddered.

The left side of its face was coated in a misshapen mass of metal, and the awkward twisting motion to its flight made it clear that the metal was disturbing its ability to control that flight. The right side, however, was unmistakable, and Xander realized that he had not, in fact, managed to kill a Duke of Hell... instead, he had merely managed to disfigure one, and probably royally piss it off.

Not wanting to wait around to see if the Duke had better senses than his minions, Xander surged forward, rushing over the ground, the ephemeral lenses of his telescope splashing uselessly to the dirt and quickly vanishing. As he pushed his speed higher, he searched desperately, and just before he reached the flatter, cover-less ground of the plain itself, he found what he sought, a deep crack in the ground that he instantly plunged in to.

Now out of sight, at least, even to the probably terribly impressive eyes of a demon-dragon, and hopefully at least somewhat protected by the bulk of the dirt above, Xander worked his way through the ground, returning to a liquid form to take better advantage of gravity, letting it pull him deeper while he focused his own efforts on getting more distance.

Dimly in his rush he realized that he was now experiencing something much more akin to taste than the results of his efforts in the castle, as he seemed to be getting a taste for the dirt and stones he was passing over.

That was not too bad at first. Unfortunately, as he headed outwards, he soon passed under land occupied above by the army he had seen, and of course, no soldier is going to bother digging a latrine when nature provides a ravine.

It was a minor blessing that he encountered and tasted the fumes from the effluent in time to stop himself from actually contacting the fluid, but that was more than enough to shake him out of his sudden fear, and remind him that while there was little cover on the plain in terms of trees or underbrush, there was plenty of cover in the forms of other demons.

Returning to the surface, and returning to invisibility in the form of a mass of air, he slipped unnoticed into the camp, already well past the outer sentries. Moving ever outward, away from the mountain home of the Duke, he examined the camp from up close.

There was more movement of air here, and variations in heat, so that the air pushed and pulled at him incessantly, which he found to be somewhat like walking through a crowded hallway, being jostled by other students. It was mildly annoying, but not enough of an issue to require any action on his part.

Somewhat to his surprise, he soon realized that there was an almost equal distribution of males and females, at least amongst the demons for whom a gender identification was obvious.

What was also copiously present here, though limited, he noticed, to groups that seemed to be off-duty, was considerable consumption of beverages that he assumed, based on the behavior of those partaking, to be the local equivalent of beer.

This provoked a considerable crisis of confidence in Xander. Some of his family's worst excesses had been in pursuit of the money to obtain alcohol, and he feared becoming an alcoholic himself, and now he was faced with the sudden and frightening realization that with his power over fluids, he could literally produce all the alcohol he could ever desire.

While it did mean he would never need to turn to crime to satisfy his need for it, it also meant a swift and inexorable descent into an addiction that if begun, he would probably never escape from. How could he possibly be detoxified if he could produce the 'demon drink' as it were whenever and where-ever he pleased?

Drifting into an unoccupied tent to find a quieter space to think, Xander settled down to puzzle this out and figure out what he could do to protect himself from this most unfavorable of outcomes. Somehow, given his family history, he thought defeating the demon drink might well prove more important to his survival than defeating any actual demons, even if they were armed and mere yards away.

Without fully realizing it, his focus on this problem caused a lapse in concentration elsewhere, and Xander resumed his human form, coalescing once more into solidity. He was lucky, for the moment, that the tent served to limit the spread of his scent.

Of course, the barracks tents were constantly occupied; to make efficient use of space, barracks were occupied in shifts. In finding an unoccupied tent, Xander had regrettably entered officers territory.

This might not have mattered. Had he entered the tent of one of the elite demons, and they had returned, they would have attacked, and with Xander's capabilities, defense or escape would have been readily accomplished. Such was not Xander's luck.

When Naamahalat slipped quietly into her tent, she was only momentarily surprised at the presence of a human soul there. Obviously he was a gift from someone seeking to curry favor with her. It would not gain them much, but he was a comely lad, and mere instants after she entered had been entranced by her pheromones and her allure.

Grinning at having a new toy, she moved quickly across the room on three-toed taloned feet, and flipped open her chest, reaching in and withdrawing a golden collar, of the sort that would lie flat against the chest and over the shoulders. Moving over to the entranced human, she directed him to place it around his neck, which he did, his eyes shining with pleasure at following her commands.

His intended purpose was clear enough, as he had been provided with nothing in the way of clothes, but though she would use him for such soon enough, for now she had another meeting to attend to, so directed him in dressing in a servant's skirt.

She left him then, but though the air soon cleared of pheromones, Xander's mind remained clouded, the effect of the necklace he had himself placed around his neck, willingly binding himself to her service.

With nothing else to do, and desirous of pleasing his Mistress, Xander occupied himself at first by cleaning and arranging her possessions, then, on finding a set of dining utensils, he filled the ewers with the purest water, and then a fine wine. He had never had a truly good wine, but he saw no reason to limit himself to his own experience. He had every intention of providing his Mistress with the best that was available, and he had touched with his powers the vintages available to the Duke, which should surely be fine enough.

Considering that his Mistress was female, he also produced a rich chocolate drink, and then settled in to try and figure out how he could produce food. The collar gave him purpose and kept him from boredom, and so with focused thought, he succeeded in formulating an elixir that would give him the ability to directly conjure well-prepared foods from his own imagination.

Though he was tempted to make his first use of this the production of a Twinkie, he knew that his Mistress's desires must come before his own, and so he began with a variety of delicacies.

It did not take Naamahalat long on her return to realize that she had misunderstood the magnitude of the gift she had been given. This was no mere body-slave, but a magic worker of no small power, to have summoned human foodstuffs without the aid of a chorus. She wondered momentarily if he might have been left as a an assassination attempt rather than a gift, but after having him try some of the food before her, decided it was unlikely enough to take the risk.

Closer examination increased her estimation of his value, for the small treats that he had summoned were exactly the sort that were hardest to get, and easiest to destroy in the summoning, from thin pastries with fillings, to carefully layered confections, and light meringues that would fall with the slightest contamination.

She allowed him the pleasure of feeding them slowly to her, and some she shared with him. Though human souls on these planes did not need sustenance, they could still gain strength and pleasure from it, and she had no need for harsh treatment to get her way, as some of her rougher compatriots might need. Her allure and charisma were all she required.

When she tried the beverages, she was transported in wonder at the purity and coldness of the water, and delighted by the rich flavor of the wine, but when she tried the dark brown drink he offered her last, she discovered a new and life-long object of lust.

She questioned him closely about this 'chocolate,' and when she first sampled a solid piece of dark chocolate, she knew that she would be defending this human against any who would seek to take him from her.

Pleased but still curious, she questioned him further, and when she discovered chocolate syrup, she found her goal. With this, this most entrancing of comestibles could be readily combined with the most pleasurable of activities. Sealing the tent and weaving a ward of silencing about it, she calmly stripped.

She had no need to put on a show to excite Xander, her pheromones were more than sufficient to the purpose, and as he was already nude but for the easily discarded skirt, which would not prevent their activities even had it remained, nothing more was needed than to lie back and have him drizzle her with chocolate and lick it off.

Xander in his right mind might not have objected to the activities and training that ensued, as she had no interest in attempting to use him in war, for in a war between demons, even a human mage would not last long enough to be worthwhile, but rather trained him in serving, and servicing her, and her few friends. He would have been grateful that her friends were all female as well as comely.

Continuing this training for three of his years, however, would not have been in his planning. Indeed, his time with her might have lasted far longer, but for a lucky break. He learned in his time with her that demons on this plane, including the Duke he had given a faceful of molten metal, could not be permanently killed. Their wars were for pleasure and status, and though they could die, they would soon rise again, and any wounds taken would quickly heal.

Luckily for Xander, when Naamahalat died, a bit more than three years after taking him as her body-slave, it caused the temporary failure of the necklace that kept him bound to her when she was absent.

He was even luckier in the absence of her friends, who were all of the same basic form of demoness as she, and would have readily enthralled him themselves. Finally, he was luckiest in that he had been working on shielding himself from becoming physically addicted just before he was taken, and so did not become addicted to her pheromones, though he had not protected himself from their mind-altering qualities.

When he suddenly came to his senses one day in her tent, Xander was quick to discard the necklace, and promptly vanish from the tent entirely. Though he had been enthralled by her, his brain had not shut down. Rather, it was merely as though he were deeply in love, and everything that he did was directed to her happiness. This had not blocked him from studying his situation, or learning what means might exist to return them to his world, it merely removed any desire he might have to act on them.

He had not yet learned of anything that would allow him to return to his own world directly; indeed, he was fairly certain that between his world and the world he had been thrown in to the Powers would have placed a barrier. What would be the point of throwing him out of his reality if at the same time they gave him the key to return?

Turning back to a gaseous form and leaving the tent took merest moments. This ability of his had never been exposed to Naamahalat, as she had focused on exploring the depths of his summoning ability. He had retaken the potion to give him the ability to create small items so often to satisfy her desires that in the end it had stopped fading away. He was not sure when exactly that had happened, as he had gotten in the habit of taking it regularly, but eventually he had noticed that he was absently creating things from his subconscious while alone.

They vanished quickly without his actual will involved in their creation, but the mere fact that he was creating them several hours after his last dose led him to some experiments that confirmed that once more he had inadvertently made what appeared to be a permanent change in himself.

The camp, as he left the tent, was sparsely populated. Naamahalat's death, which had freed him, had effectively told him that the army was at least partially in combat, and as that combat had never previously spilled over into the encampments to the point that he could hear it nearby, he was not surprised to find that the area was only lightly guarded.

Though his first action had been to flee the tent, he was not slow in producing and consuming several substances intended to give him a multi-layered set of defenses against mental attacks, hormonal and chemical attacks, pheromones, anchoring his soul and shielding it from outside influence, and, keeping in mind the possibility of his being a carrier for diseases, spells, or whatever else he might have picked up from the various demonesses he had pleasured and been pleasured by, an ability to produce an antidote to the effects of the demonesses.

That last was presumably already covered by his powers, but he did not want to have to think about what effect might have occurred and what to produce to counter it. So instead, he focused on the idea that his touch, when he willed it, should be able to reverse the effects they caused. He would not know if that had worked, of course, until he found someone so afflicted, but he felt it worth a try.

Having shielded himself against again becoming someone's love slave and pet, Xander proceeded to carefully ransack the officers' tents in his vicinity, searching the unoccupied ones for certain devices of which he had heard tales.

Apparently, while there was no real way from this demonic realm to pass directly into a different world, it was possible for demons to be summoned, much like in the stories of the occult from his own world. His mistress had never been so summoned, but some of the cohort had, and enjoyed it.

To facilitate it, some of them had cartouches, devices inscribed with a name, that acted something like a beacon, such that when a summons was performed that did not explicitly name a demon, and so would merely reach across the planes to summon anything that fulfilled certain criteria, the cartouche would improve their chances of being the one selected.

When Xander fled the encampment, he left behind him the scent of a human in several dozen tents, and carried with him six cartouches, or at least, what he thought filled the bill, and a bag of various treasures. He would have grabbed some weapons, but knew he had no skill in wielding them, while the demons on this plane could literally train to the death and then get up and do it again.

The army had apparently been on the march for a while, though Xander had seen little of the land, being secreted in a small platform tent carried by servants, that held Naamahalat's wealth when they were on the move, and so when he passed beyond the borders of the encampment, he found not the foothills of the mountain fastness of the Duke he had injured, but an endless plain, dotted with crumbled towers of stone, a ridge of mountains looming in the distance.

He was reminded, while looking at it, that he had yet to see a single plant anywhere, and wondered if it was possible that there was no plant equivalent in this plane. Was it possible for only animals to exist? Or was it maybe an indication that the demons were not native here but had come from elsewhere?

Xander shook his head. He had experienced many more of what he termed 'Willow-moments' since he first took the potion to optimize his body. He supposed it was not a bad thing to be smarter, but it was uncomfortable when he realized he was thinking things that he would not have even understood to wonder about before.

Returning to solid form, Xander grinned. One thing, at least, had not changed. He looked down and in his hand a Twinkie formed. He happily crammed it in his mouth. He had not been particularly hungry, his healing factor and his ability to produce food had kept him going without trouble, but while at the time he had not cared, now looking back on it, it had been irritating to constantly produce wonderful food for Naamahalat while consuming simple workmanlike fare for himself. It may have made her happy, but it did little for his own pleasure.

Fading out again, he passed quick as the wind across the face of the near-desert, searching until he found a nice hollow, nestled in beneath a pile of boulders that propped up against one another. Here he again returned to solid form and contemplated his prizes.

He had taken only one thing from Naamahalat herself, in recognition that she had treated him well and fairly, aside from the whole making him a slave thing. He had been helplessly devoted, and she could have walked all over him, but instead, he had many a memory of her hungry eyes looking up at him from between his thighs, many images of her lustful face as she bounced against him, or lay back, breasts swaying as he pressed in to her. She had valued his magic and his stamina both, and treated him like a prized pet, and while he had no desire to return, or to remain there, he did recognize that had he been a cat and she his owner, he would have had no cause to complain.

Nonetheless, the small belt-pouch she had given him, the only item he had to wear most of the time aside from the servant's skirt, he had kept. It was one of a pair, and he was not sure she could not track him through it, so keeping it was a risk, but the advantages were too great to ignore.

Anything he attempted to place in it would fit, at least for as large an item as he had so far dared to try, including an entire chest as large as himself, and yet it weighed but an ounce or two, and whatever one wished to pull from it was the first thing the fingers found, and was easily drawn out, though its size might be much greater than the pouches small opening.

Naamahalat's purpose in giving it to him was not, of course, to hold his belongings, for he had none, but because whatever was put in one could be drawn from the other. It was necessary to know what was in the pouch before it could be drawn forth, so he had felt safe enough using it to purloin his spoils from the other tents. She had given it to him so that he could keep her supplied with her favorite treats in the field. He filled it with the various things she liked the most, and on a regular basis, he attempted to draw from it a note from Naamahalat. If she had placed one within, his attempt would succeed, so it also served as a means of communication.

He was not sure if he would check for that note again, but given the pleasure she had given him, and the memories, he did resolve to keep a supply of her favorite treats well-stocked in the little bag.

Xander had made excellent use of this gift, and now he began to draw out the things he had taken, the cartouches, the chest, and most important to him at the moment, a pile of clothing. He had not had time to sort through and try clothes on, but he had grabbed a fair variety, and now he sat down and went through it.

Finally making his choices, he dressed again. It was a bit odd, using a loincloth instead of proper underwear, and the cloth was both filmier and more billowy than he was used to wearing, but as much time as he had spent basically nude, Xander felt more human when he was finally dressed.

Feeling human because he had put on demonic clothing might be a bit odd, but as far as he could tell, the demons were people, as he understood the term, whereas he had been treated more as a favored pet than a person; assuming the owner was into a little bestiality, of course.

Savoring a chocolate Ding Dong, Xander considered the rest of his supplies. He was a bit leery of the chest, worried that it might be protected against opening in some fashion, and finally decided that the simplest solution would be to remove the contents.

Granted, that was easier said than done, since he meant to remove them without opening the chest, reasoning that any trap or curse would be against those opening or damaging the chest. One of the delightful things he had realized was that he could bring things he carried into an airy form with him. It was only after he had done so in fleeing the tent that he had thought to be worried about the effect on the bag, but it had come through unscathed and had still accepted items larger than itself, so he was not worried about doing it a second time.

As air he surrounded the chest, probing the surface, until he located the tiniest of gaps through which he could slip. Again he felt the strange sensation of squeezing himself down, as he slid in, but soon he encountered another issue.

He could not, even as air, fit all of himself in the chest. As he pushed more of himself in, effectively increasing the pressure, the chest creaked and he stopped, afraid it would explode open, and damage the contents, possibly triggering whatever defenses it might have.

So he backed off, and reconsidered. After thinking about it for a bit, Xander tried again, slipping into the chest with just his arm, holding the bag. Forming a flat plane of water and shifting it around allowed him to see, though dimly. Too dimly to make anything out, in fact, and he needed to see each item before he placed it in the bag, or he would never be able to remove it.

He wondered just how many items might be somewhere in the bag, never to be removed because Naamahalat had forgotten about them, or they had been put in by whoever owned the bag before her, assuming she had not made it herself, or ordered it made.

He could produce flame, but that would not be safe, but a moment's more thought led him to produce a globule of the chemicals that produce a firefly's light. Theoretically, he supposed, the chemicals might be considered solid, as each individual molecule was certainly a solid. But apparently as long as they behaved at some level as a liquid, or could be dissolved in a liquid, they qualified for his power, something he certainly was not going to complain about.

The light was a sort of greenish yellow, and rather dim, but the greater surface area of his ocular water lens made up for it by catching much more of the reflected light.

To Xander's delight, much of the contents appeared to be coins. They looked oddly dark in the weird light, but he suspected they might be gold. It took a moment to shift things around inside the chest, but soon he worked out a way to hold the bag open with his semi-material hand; then all it took to get the coins bagged was to move the open mouth of the bag up to them. As soon as the coin intersected the plane of the bag it was ingested, for lack of a better word.

He was not too worried about recovering them. They were demonic coins, and he did not think they would have serial numbers on them, but even if they did, the bag would cough up anything matching the item you were thinking of. If there were multiple items that matched, it would return an apparently random selection if there was not a best match to be found. So if you knew exactly what you wanted, you could get it, but if he simply wanted a coin and there were any coins in the bag's holding area, he could withdraw them.

He suspected that there might be more to it than that, that there might be some way of putting items in such that only you could remove them, or only someone thinking of what you thought when you put it in, but if so, Naamahalat had kept such a feature to herself.

Occasionally he came across a more particular item, including several metal dishes and cups, and these he had to pay more attention to. There was an extent to which the thought would become too generic. Just wanting to remove say, 'an object,' had not succeeded even when he knew he had placed a snack cake in the bag. 'A sweet,' however, would suffice to extract anything that tasted sweet, so as long as he remembered that there were plates and cups, he figured he should be able to retrieve them.

As the volume of coins dropped, Xander almost missed a small round object falling in with a hole in it. Slowing and looking more carefully, Xander spied several other rings in amongst the coins, and reminded himself to pull them back out and examine them.

When the chest was almost emptied, Xander came across a small cache of smaller objects that glittered strangely in the light, and moving his plane of water and the light closer, he determined that it was a small pile of cut gemstones.

At least, he hoped they were gems and not glass, though of course, he would not be able to tell how valuable they were til he made it back to a human world and found an appraiser. Well, he might be able to identify diamonds if they could cut glass . . . but just because diamonds could, he mused, did not mean that there were no other lesser stones that might also be able to, so even there his identification could not be certain.

With the gems consumed within the bag, the chest appeared fairly empty, and Xander pulled back, satisfied that he had managed to obtain the contents without risking a curse, and fairly well pleased at the amount of control he had managed in such a tight space. Mr. Fantastic, he thought, could hardly have done it better. Considering the tiny crack he had slipped his arm through, he wasn't actually sure Mr. Fantastic could have done it at all.

Now back in solid form, Xander slipped his fingers into the bag and pulled out one of the coins and examined it. In better light, he could see that it did look like gold, though he knew that said little if anything about its purity. He remembered some story about a bathtub and a pure gold crown and some Greeks but did not have a bathtub nor any idea how it could tell him if the gold was pure.

He drew out one of the gemstones, and grinned, both in relief that it had come out when he thought of a gemstone, which hopefully meant it was not glass, and because it was a brilliant little gem, but larger than any ring-set gemstone he could remember seeing. If it was any sort of actual gem it should be worth a fair amount, though as it was a light blue he thought it was probably not a diamond.

Drawing out a plate and then a cup, he confirmed that they both had at least the appearance of being gold. Well, if he was summoned to any sort of human world, he would have some worthwhile currency at any rate.

He had no real hope of being summoned back to his own world. He idly tried again to produce an elixir that would allow him to get there, then a fluid that would act as a portal to his home in Sunnydale, and was unsurprised when both attempts failed. He was hoping, however, that if he was summoned to another world, then after he was released from the summoning, he might be able to try to get home from there before he returned to this demonic plane.

He returned the remaining clothes to the bag, and then drew out the cartouches. He could not comprehend the writing on them, but since from his information they would only be names anyway, there was little point in trying. It would not help him guess which would be best.

Instead, he chose to simply wear them all, hoping that multiple signals would increase his chances of being summoned. In the meanwhile, he would have to deal with being here.

Shifting around to get a couple of annoying rocks out from under him, Xander settled back against the edge of one of the deeper rocks, where it stood straight, supporting one of the leaning rocks above. With sand under him and the rock at his back, he was actually somewhat comfortable.

As long as he was forced to be here, he supposed he might as well practice with his powers, including the abilities he had inadvertently added. He was not certain how much time had passed, but guessed it had been more than a year. He was somewhat surprised that in spite of adding Wolverine-scale healing, his hair growth had not become a problem, but his hair had maintained at its usual length, and he had not had any inklings of a beard yet.

Still, he was curious how much had changed in his appearance, and it was a good test of his power, so he produced a sheet of liquid mercury and stilled the air around it, allowing it to settle into a smooth, highly reflective surface.

"Man, I look old," Xander mused, turning his head from side to side. Apparently bringing himself to his physical optimum had required aging his body, and it occurred to him that his 'Captain America' serum might have been responsible for his retaining a clear-cut appearance. After all, if Captain America had been on his mind at the time, he might have subconsciously included the clean-shaven appearance of that rugged superhero.

He still looked like himself, though, as far as he could tell, just older. His hair had not gained the Wolverine's signature peaks, nor turned blond like Captain America.

Vanishing the mercury, Xander played around with summoning other fluids, before remembering that he had cups now, golden goblets really. Pulling one out, he filled it with chilled Coca-cola and stopped a moment to sniff the rising bubbles before taking a drink.

"Mmmm, that's good," Xander murmured. Producing fluids directly in his mouth was useful and sustaining, but it lacked the feel and pleasure of drinking from a cup, the carbon dioxide bubbles tickling his nose, the scent combining with the taste. He had not really realized before, but now, smelling the Coke, he recognized that it was the lack of smell that had caused the liquids he had been drinking directly in his mouth to seem flat.

An Exciting Wait

After spending a short time dealing with comfort issues, Xander turned his attention back to the more critical issue of coming to grips with his powers. The badlands he had first been dropped in had not seemed a very safe place to remain for long and his kidnapping had forestalled any effort to do something about that, and fleeing the vicinity after he got free had seemed a reasonable priority.

Now however he had lost considerable time in a second captivity, and he really wanted to have his powers more firmly under control and ready for immediate use, rather than requiring thought and preparation as they did now. He was not certain how long he had been a captive, as there had been little enough to mark the passage of time, and even what little there was, in the way of sleeping, did not feel to him as though it had been on a twenty-four hour schedule, but then, why should it, given that he was in what seemed to be another world.

At no time had he seen a sun or a moon, or any obvious change in the level of light. The most noticeable cycle, aside from sleeping, had been the shift in activity in the camp when large swathes of the demons went off to fight a battle, and later returned.

So now that he had found a hideout that seemed both safe, and could conceal him from the prying eyes of flying demons and demonesses, it was time to buckle down and focus on what he could do.

While getting back to his own world had been his immediate priority, or at least his mental focus initially, he now realized that not only was that likely to take quite some time, and probably involve travel across several dimensions, he also had an opportunity here that should not be wasted.

As he had observed, the demons here regularly fought, died, recovered after some time and returned to fight again. That meant that he could train his powers against them without worrying about causing anyone permanent harm. Well, he could train against them once he got his skills up enough that he wouldn't die right off in the first battle, anyway.

He had no illusions about that at the moment. In spite of his healing ability that seemed not to have vanished as it ought, and the amping up of his body to super-soldier specs, from what he could tell, these demons not only had supernatural strength and stamina, they also had hundreds, maybe thousands of years experience fighting in full-contact, life and death battles.

Sure they might be a little reckless given that death could be recovered from, but since death meant at least the loss of any possessions carried, and also the risk of losing other possessions left behind in the camp, and probably even the risk of being carried off to the other side as a slave for who knows how long, he had little doubt that their skills would be well-honed.

He felt that if he could train his powers up, he would have significant advantages in terms of bringing unknown and unfamiliar forces and fighting techniques to bear. Even so, he would need to carefully arrange for single combat situations, since large scale combat would undoubtedly result in his capture, and it would probably not take too many observations of his form shifting or other powers for them to find a way to neutralize him. Assuming, of course, that they did not already possess such a way, as Naamahalat certainly had, though he was now shielded from that particular means of entrancement.

When he and Jessie had discussed comic book characters for hours, they had noted that there seemed to be two major types of characters - those that had a single skill or ability so well-honed as to handle any situation, such as the Hulk or the Wolverine, and other superheros that always had another trick to pull out, such as the seemingly unending list of powers of Superman, or the endless gadgets of the Batman.

While Xander, by virtue of his choice in power, certainly could pull out endless tricks, at least as far as his imagination would allow, he knew it would be a good idea to have at least a small bag of tricks that were well-honed and near-instinctive.

Having succeeded at becoming gaseous, Xander now focused for a while on transitioning as quickly as possible between solid and gaseous forms, including shifting just his hand to air and back as fast as he could.

He also tried shifting to liquid, and found that in this form, it was fairly easy to shift between an opaque liquid, colored to match his normal form, and a transparent form. Transparent Xander was not a match for his gaseous form in terms of invisibility as the liquid bent the light more strongly, which he used a mirror of suspended mercury to observe.

In playing with the sand that filled all the interstices of his relatively rocky hideout, Xander discovered that it was a simple thing to lift the sand into his form, by effectively dissolving it into himself, but that returning to solid form with it still present was painful and unpleasant.

He could pick it up, and then redeposit it, however, and drawing moisture from the air and mixing it with the sand allowed him to form and deposit mud without needing to use up his own substance in the process. Experimenting a bit, he learned that he could not concentrate well enough, for long enough, to produce enough hot air around his sand and water mixture to harden it significantly. He wasn't sure whether pottery could be made from just sand and water, anyway.

His first true discovery, and first real surprise with his powers, aside from the shock of discovering the lady wasn't lying about them in the first place, was when a mound of sand he had produced collapsed and flowed toward his small pile of foodstuffs, created when he had been making sure he could still remember all the things he had made for Naamahalat. He stopped it with a gesture, and reversed the flow back up in to a pile.

He had not really expected to be able to affect the sand at all, knowing that it was a solid, but had simply reacted when his food supply was endangered. Of course, it had not really been in danger, as he could always produce more, and had not yet become tired or ill from eating only what he produced, even though he was sure there was something about that which would have Willow complaining about him breaking the laws of physics. His powers broke those laws anyway, as far as he could tell, so he was not worried. Nonetheless his instincts to protect his precious munchies had given him a revelation.

Pausing to consider this, and to eat some of said munchies while he pondered, Xander began to experiment. At first his power did not seem to want to have any effect on the unmoving pile of sand, and it took giving it a push or a kick to get a flow started before he could play with making little sand devils.

After a bit, however, he determined that it was enough for him to imagine the pile in flowing motion for his power to get a grip on it. Given the amount of sand in this desert, this seemed a quite useful ability, and while his first thought was that it would make keeping sand out of his meagre belongings easier than having to go around vacuuming it out with blob-like liquid pseudo-pods, he was soon reminded by a polished bit of stone where one of his little sand-devils, small spinning towers of sand, impacted one of the boulders, that a concentrated stream of sand could probably be pretty painful.

It took a bit before he managed to form what he mentally referred to as a sand chainsaw, basically just a ribbon of sand flowing in a loop at very high velocity, but he was delighted with the effects of it, as by adjusting the speed of the flow, he could write his name in shiny polished letters on the rock, or actually carve into the rock face.

Remembering from his observations of Naamahalat and her friends, such as they were, he knew that names had power in magic, and so was quick to blot out the names he had scribed and carved in the stone, to leave nothing that could be tied back to him if others found this place.

Xander looked forward to seeing what his chainsaw could do against the demons later on, and so practiced producing it from nothing. He tried a similar process with water and air, but did not get great results. If he imagined air or water being produced and shooting forward at high-velocity in a tiny needle-sized stream, he could generate cutting force enough to carve into rock, but it had to be pretty close, or it just produced a nice spray in the air, not nearly so useful for a weapon.

So he practiced with his chainsaw, until he could get it to at least behave as if he was holding it. He was not able to get it fully instinctive, he still had to put some concentration on making it follow his arm movements, which was disappointing. Sure he could use it while he was hidden, as just a flying weapon, but he was hoping for the cool factor of wielding it like a sword.

Still it was an impressive weapon, and one he could call up in moments if he had the sand available. Even if he only had a bit of sand, he could start it small, and grind it into some rock, if there was any about, to produce more sand to get a respectably sized weapon, a process he also tried twice, before stopping to avoid using up all of his boulders.

Tired of playing with his chainsaw, cool as it was, Xander turned back to his food-summoning ability. Since he did not clearly remember what he was thinking when he had given himself the ability, he really did not know what the limits were, and knowing his limits was probably a good idea.

He knew that it had been specifically a food-summoning ability, but he also knew that many of the little treats he had summoned for himself or Naamahalat had supposedly so little redeeming value that a nutritionist, or a Willow, would pronounce them not worthy of being called food. So he decided to see how far 'food' could be stretched.

Attempting to produce a pebble failed, so did generating a bolt or a nut -- well, a metal nut, anyway. Producing a wrapped Reese's mini peanut butter cup, however, succeeded, and so did producing a larger double-pack, including, to his surprise, nutritional information on the back. Well, at least, it looked like a nutritional label; but while the logo and product name were clear, the label on the back was more like a fake that might be produced for a television show where it would only be seen at a distance, or the garbage text used to fill out news stories on a newspaper in a picture where only the headline is going to be in focus anyway.

Peeling open the thin plastic revealed the paper cups and the candy inside, just as expected. Xander did not resist the urge to eat them.

Producing an empty candy wrapper failed, but producing an edible candy wrapper succeeded, even when the candy it wrapped was actually a pair of metal nuts. A second edible wrapper around a pair of bolts produced a working, matched set of threads, the nuts smoothly spinning on to the bolts.

Trying to produce a whole roasted turkey succeeded, but gave a small, maybe twelve pound bird. A second try for a larger bird produced a half of a roasted larger turkey. Several more tries both established an apparent size limit of approximately a full gallon of milk in a plastic jug, though he could produce five of them in quick succession with no strain. It also used up enough materials that Xander finally noticed that his power was apparently not producing something from nothing, but changing nearby dead substances into what he required. Producing five gallons of milk, quite a few roasted turkeys and chickens, and a couple of metal pots of spaghetti and meatballs had generated noticeable gouges in the terrain.

Curious as to whether his own base powers included such an ability to change substances, such that this power he had gifted on himself might really just be an extension of what he already had, Xander located a small depression in one of the stones, formed, given the raw look of the hole and the unweathered sharpness of the edges, by his recent food conjuring activities, and partially filled it with fresh water.

Focusing on his intent that the water should be changed directly, not removed and replaced, Xander tried to convert it to chocolate pudding. To his surprise, it immediately turned a rich chocolaty brown, and when he dipped a finger in and on feeling the pudding-like consistency, tasted it, it was in fact chocolate pudding.

He then promptly formed a loop of fast-moving water in the air, and changed it to sand, successfully. "I'm an idiot," Xander groaned, and dispersing the sand, he promptly produced another sand chainsaw directly, by producing the sand with his power, instead of using sand around him. "This is exactly why I've got to practice this," Xander said aloud, sitting with a huff on a jutting bit of stone. "I was all set to go looking for a bit of sand, and build a chainsaw from that and grinding it from stone, when all along I could just go poof, and there it is!"

Xander sat in thought for several minutes, wondering what other obvious solutions he was missing. After considerable thought, he tried summoning a device that would bring him home, wrapped in bacon, but ended up with only an empty pile of bacon.

Sighing, and knowing that if only Willow were here, she would doubtless know the answer, and be able to get him home in a moment, he tried to obtain a phone that could connect to Willow's home phone, wrapped in edible paper, but was again disappointed. Not that he had held out much hope. He had already pretty much convinced himself that whatever Powers had sent him to this hell, they were determined to be rid of him, and would have blocked any and all obvious means of return.

Deciding that he wanted to get some rest pretty soon, Xander turned his attention to getting himself some more protection before he went to sleep. A quick test confirmed that he could produce a large mass of molten stone, and quickly drop the heat, until it passed into solidity and out of his power, at which point it would be both a solid, glossy mass of stone, and still radiating a fair bit of heat.

Using the erosive power of water, air, and sand, Xander proceeded to excavate a deeper, larger void, while forming thick stone walls to keep out the sand, and blocking off all but a few small holes for air.

He could pass in and out as a thin stream of air, but no large demons would be able to make their way in, except by loudly bashing through stone, or by using some method of teleportation. He hoped that the inability to see clearly into the now very dark pit would give them some pause, while at the same time he thought that the irregular shapes of the stones he had produced would make this appear to be a natural massif. As long as a visitor had not previously been here to know that there was a protected area beneath the stones, he felt they would assume it was just a solid upthrust mass.

To his delight, it turned out that a small air-bed was, when tightly folded up and embedded in solid chocolate, within the range of his summoning. After breaking the chocolate mold and extracting and unfolding the air-bed, it was a simple matter to inflate it by producing air directly in the interior. A similar attempt failed to produce a large blanket, it being too large even folded, but he was able to produce an air pillow, and a multitude of sheets.

Feeling safer than he had in a long while, Xander settled in to sleep. When uncomfortable bladder pressure brought him to semi-consciousness, he was able to vanish the liquid without moving from the comfort of his bed, and drift back to sleep.

When he finally awakened, well rested, he arose and began to pace around his new pit, wondering what to try and do next. There was obvious combat potential in producing water around someone's head to drown them, or just changing all the oxygen in their vicinity to carbon dioxide, but he could not really think of anything he could do to safely practice that. He certainly did not want anything so directly lethal to become an instinct, which is why he wanted the chainsaw to move like a weapon, so that while producing it could be instinctive, wielding it would require his actual intent to harm someone.

Being startled and suddenly swapping all the oxygen in a room for carbon dioxide could be as lethal to his friends as to his enemies, and he was not terribly sure that demons would even have the same breathing requirements, whereas he was sure that physical dismemberment would be effective, since that is what they seemed to attempt against each other.

Still, he wanted something more in his arsenal before he actually went to try himself against some demon. It needed to be something more than his tiny, though effective wind and water cutting sprays. It occurred to him that a similar spray of ink might be able to tattoo them, though, and make him wonder what kind of influence he would be able to apply to tattoos. Still, he wanted something forceful.

He was momentarily inclined to try and produce a gun wrapped in seaweed, but knew that he had no experience in shooting a gun, or caring for such, and of course, he would constantly have to produce ammunition for it.

Maybe he could produce a similar effect, however. He could produce a sudden blast of water that would probably knock a demon back, as if they had been struck with the spray from a firehose, but that would only keep them at a distance. He had sprayed liquid metal at the great dragon-Duke he had encountered, that might be more useful.

Xander held his hands up, and paused for a moment, picturing what he wanted to happen, and thinking it through, before continuing. Liquid iron appeared, swirling inward from around his hands to form a small sphere right in front of him.

Then he dropped the temperature of the front portion of the ball, basically everything but a smaller, quarter-sized sphere at the back, until just before it left his control, and then pushed on the still liquid portion, focusing on it reaching five hundred miles per hour. He was not sure what speed it actually reached, but it still shot forward, passing across the chamber in an instant, impacting the far wall with a thunderous crash.

Xander dropped to the floor, feeling sharp shooting pains coming from all over. As quickly as he could pull his focus together, he slumped into liquid form, then gaseous, lifted up from where he was, and retook solid form. Where he had been was covered in stone slivers, as in fact was most of the room, and Xander was reminded of the glossy color of the stones he had produced by swift cooling. Apparently, he had produced something more akin to glass than he was expecting. Sand had poured in where he had thoroughly destroyed the large stone block he had aimed for.

That would certainly have gotten a demon's attention. It probably would have hurt even the Duke he had faced, and he really liked the visual style of forming it between his hands before firing it. He just needed to not do that again when he was standing in the blast zone.

Pressing the sand back in place, he formed and cooled a new block. Another idea for an impressive visual effect struck him then, based on a magic style from a book Jesse had told him about, and he proceeded to try it. It was simple enough to produce a baseball sized hollow sphere of chocolate containing a hollow sphere of iron inside. Since the hollow was filled with air, it was a simple matter to grasp the iron sphere and move it about.

A similar effort produced a spiky ball, looking rather like a curled up hedgehog or spiny sea urchin, with thicker walls and a smaller core of water hidden inside. Again, this tiny core of water allowed him to reach out and control the movement of the spiky sphere by moving the water inside of it.

The fast motion quickly shredded the chocolate covering, leaving chocolate bits all over, but Xander was not bothered by this. He proceeded to make a variety of small balls, some spiky, some with just a few large spikes, some smooth, of various sizes.

Now he had a more challenging skill to master, and one that should be a great weapon when it came down to it. At one and the same time, he could practice sensing and maintaining in his head a picture of the location of the various balls, practice using his power to move liquids about, change their temperatures (using the heat of the liquid to heat or cool the metal of the ball), and manage their speed. That would give him weapons that could bludgeon, pierce, burn, freeze, fire off like a bullet, maybe even explode.

The small, un-spiked spheres also gave him a reference point that he could wrap in water to get an eye, one that he would, by virtue of practicing this exercise, have experience controlling and moving.

Along that same line of thought, Xander formed a few small spheres of water surrounded by glass. By experimenting with these, Xander figured out that if he made a sphere of water, surrounded by a sphere of glass, embedded in another sphere of water and another sphere of glass, with one bump on each glass sphere where the wall was convex even on the inside, basically a bubble in the glass, by shifting the small ball inside the larger ball, he had an eye that he could not only move about, but could adjust the focus on. By effectively embedding more than one lens in the outer glass sphere, he could flip between a close up microscopic zoom, and a distant telescopic zoom.

Over the next several days, or what Xander was calling days, at any rate, he continued to practice with the spheres. Every now and then, after using an eye sphere to look around outside and ensure that he was alone and there were no lurking demonesses overhead, Xander would slip out of his hideout as a wisp of air, and produce and fire a series of iron balls into the air, focusing on the speed and showiness of the attack.

He was not able to get the hang of actively controlling more than two spheres at once, and even that was difficult, but he found that he could set a sphere into an orbit a fixed distance from himself and maintain that with minimal concentration. Of course, that was just for show, as there was no difficulty in carrying a number of the balls on his person.

He discovered while practicing with his summoning ability that while he could produce quite complex items, he could not use it to produce a working gun, nor a flashlight, nor indeed, it seemed, anything he did not basically understand. Of course, he did not really understand the minute structure of the cells in meat, either, but apparently the experience of eating it was enough, or maybe because it really was food. A live frog, or even a live ant in jelly was beyond him, however. He could produce a dead frog, though he either had to coat it in something edible, or had to imagine himself as a snake, that would find such a morsel tasty.

Broccoli was a complete failure, and he discovered that this covered anything he could not at least imagine eating. He could produce something covered in chocolate if he could picture sucking or breaking the chocolate off and eating it, but if he would be unable to accept eating the chocolate once broken off, it failed to materialize at all.

This, he discovered when trying to produce a chocolate-covered slug. Picturing himself as a snake, he tried to imagine eating a slug, but he could not even imagine what could possess someone to eat a snail or a slug, he found the thought so dismaying, and so apparently could produce neither.

A bandoleer was not nearly so disgusting, and so a bandoleer wrapped in edible sugar-paper with printed chocolate candies was readily produced. Of course, figuring out how it should be shaped to allow the spheres to be held by it was a bit more tricky, but he figured it out eventually.

In the process, he played with a sphere that would have spikes that were concealed, and pushed out when he added more liquid. He never quite got that working, but it did make him realize something else. While he was no genius at computers or electrical equipment, the concept of a hydraulic piston was a fairly simple idea, and a smallish one, about two feet long retracted, was within the size range he could produce.

Producing it inside of chocolate made Xander feel grateful that apparently his healing factor included swifter burning of calories. Eating all of these sweets would certainly have had him swelling up like a balloon otherwise, which was something else to look into in a bit.

Playing with the simple piston, he determined that it was fairly simple indeed to increase or decrease the hydraulic pressure, causing the piston to extend and retract. After moving it back and forth a few times, Xander lost interest, and moved on. It was neat, and if he ever got back to his world, it might be interesting to be able to wield a backhoe remotely without having to turn it on, but he was not going to try to build anything major out here, and was more interested in things he could turn into weapons.

He had little doubt that he would face numerous challenges on this world alone, and probably more on his way back, and if he ever made it back to Sunnydale, whoever these Powers were would probably throw something worse at him. After all, if they could throw him here, they obviously had access to worlds full of demons, and could probably pull them back into Sunnydale, and the authorities would surely not know how to deal with them there.

Producing a whole series of pub dart style target boards made of spun sugar and marshmallow was easy enough, and after practicing sending his spheres towards the target board at different speeds and tearing up the board, he could eat it before making another one.

Hitting the bulls-eye was initially complicated. He could hit it dead on, ten times out of ten if the sphere started between his hands, but when it was at a weird angle to himself, getting it to hit the target was at first much harder. After several failed tries to use one of the eye spheres to help target it, or to form some water on it to look through and target it that way, he finally found that simply producing a small drop of water on the target gave him a mental bearing to it, and suddenly he could produce a bulls-eye from nearly any angle.

He then moved on to his earlier momentary thought about balloons, and producing a packet of balloons wrapped in layers of spun sugar, he proceeded to tie them off - much easier with no real air pressure in them, then inflate them. He found he could pretty readily control their height in the air by adjusting the proportion of helium in the air inside.

Setting these up at various heights, he practiced by setting up differently colored balloons, turning away, picking a color, then spinning back and trying to shoot down all the balloons of that color without taking out any of a different color.

As he got better at the exercise, he varied the technique used to take out the balloon, from piercing each one with a high-speed smooth sphere from a pile held in his hand, fired off like a bullet, to using a single spiky sphere and whipping it back and forth, swinging it rapidly through the air to puncture each one.

He also practiced a skeet-style exercise, launching a sphere from a pile into the air, then trying to hit it before it fell with another sphere.

He found this a fair bit harder, since the targeted projectile was in motion, meaning the droplet of water he used to target his interceptor had to lead the target like a shooter would his aim, and his accuracy with this style was disappointing.

Still, after a few days of this Xander felt ready to venture out. Drifting out in gaseous form, Xander looked about. A cloud of dust in one direction made him think there was probably a battle occurring in that direction. Looming over the plain was a mountain range he had every intention of keeping at a distance.

Picking a direction away from both the dust cloud and the mountains, Xander drifted, slowly picking up speed. He lifted off the ground, taking advantage of his gaseous form's ability to be lighter than air to fly above and look down, so he could see more of the passing terrain.

Pausing to look back, Xander crossed invisible fingers, and hoped that the target he had put on the floor, filled with concentric circles of different liquids, would be enough for him to find his way back. Reaching out with his senses, he found it very easy to locate, being a very unique pattern of dissimilar pure liquids, but he could only hope that it would continue to be as easy to find at a distance.

He had left several eye spheres there as well, so he could look back into his cave, but of course, he had no certainty he would be able to pick them up and see through them once he was at a great distance, either.

A different feeling impinged on his outward feeling senses then, and he focused in on it. It was a small group, three, maybe four if one was holding another, of mixed fluid signatures, probably demons.

Heading in that direction, he tried an experiment, grasping one of his eye spheres and trying to return just it to a solid/liquid form. Though he initially struggled with this, when he grasped it in his hand and returned just his hand to solid form before dropping it, it worked perfectly. He suspected that this was because transforming himself to a liquid or gas and back required that he somehow be able to turn some bits solid and others liquid, as they had been, so it was not something he had to try to concentrate on.

At any rate, it worked, and while he continued on his heading, he sent the eye-sphere zooming ahead, focusing his mental vision on the liquid inside, using the smooth surface where the liquid met the glass as his lens. In seconds, the eye-sphere was hovering over the small group of demons.

As he had half anticipated, there was a fourth demon, or rather, demoness, being carried by one of the three. Given that she was tied and manacled with a set of golden chains that he guessed were probably magical, it was not difficult for him to draw up some ire toward them.

Still, he needed the demoness to be out of easy grasp before he attacked, lest she be used as a shield. Not that demonesses were any less dangerous in general than demons, but she was clearly the captive in this situation, and he did not feel like killing an unarmed, restrained individual, enemy or otherwise.

The three demons were moving quickly and furtively, as if they expected pursuit, or an ambush. The fourth, the demoness, seemed to be unconscious as well as tied, and was being carried. Two of the demons were of a lizardy sort, while the third looked more like a cartoon or traditional conception of a demon, a mostly human figure with red skin, horns and a tail, though with bulging muscles and armor, rather than a red suit and tie.

They were in a rift in the landscape, rather like a river carved canyon, though Xander saw and felt nothing flowing that could have made it. Xander had reached the vicinity himself now, and so was seeing them from two perspectives, though he had to drop his focus on the eye's view to focus on what he himself was seeing, and vice-versa.

Their apparent nervousness and concern for being followed or found gave him an idea, both for the immediate situation, and to try out back at his hideout. What would have to wait for later was the idea that sound is vibrations in air, and he could control air, so could he create sounds? He was not sure, and was pretty certain that he at least could do so by vibrating a sheet of water or something, but making anything recognizable was iffy and would probably need practice.

There was one sort of sound he was pretty sure he could make, however, and using his floating eye, he found an off-shoot of the main ravine, and concentrating, he sent another small iron sphere there. Dropping it to the ground so he did not have to try to control two at once, he then rapidly increased the amount of air in the sphere until it finally broke, generating a thunderous clap that echoed through the ravine. It actually produced enough of a shockwave that Xander got some additional sound effects, of rolling and falling rocks, basically for free.

The demons started, as he anticipated, and started to run. Unfortunately, the one carrying the hostage did not drop her to make better time, as Xander had hoped. He blew up another sphere but while they picked up their pace, they did not panic, nor split up, nor drop their hostage.

Since she was being carried under Muscles' arm, he could not lift her off or swap her with an equivalent weight or something. Focusing in on the feeling that told him where they were, Xander picked one of the two lizard demons, and focusing on all the fluid in him at once, gave a shove. He was hoping that it would simply knock him off-balance, and he was half-dreading that the fluid would move through the rest of him. As it turned out, it was his hopes that were fulfilled, and not his fears, as apparently the percentage of fluid was high enough that it acted more like a forceful shove, and sent the lizard-man sprawling.

The other two did not even slow down, so Xander waited for them to pass beyond a spire in the rock, and decided to use the fallen lizard man to test the limits of his ability. Could he use the skills he had obtained with the liquid-filled spheres on the lizard demon?

As soon as the lizard had scrambled back to its feet, Xander dropped to the ground nearby and solidified himself. The lizard demon instantly spun to face him, growled, and charged. Xander grabbed a ball from his pocket, held it on his palm and blew on it. At the same time, he accelerated the ball.

It tore through the demon's knee, right on Xander's target, taking the lizard demon down again, but Xander lost his hold on it, and made a note that apparently that iron shell was too thin to hold the liquid after an impact.

He threw himself to the side when the demon threw something at him, but even so he was caught in the chest on the right side by a sharp pain. Berating himself for being caught off guard, Xander flicked to liquid form. A knife fell to the ground, unable to hold itself.

Still determined to prove his techniques could work, and less likely to be injured in this form, Xander used the same technique of grasping a ball and temporarily solidifying his hand to solidify it as well. This one was a spiked ball, though the points were not particularly sharp, and did not prick him as it rested on his palm.

Even as the demon struggled to its feet, Xander reminded himself that even its death would soon be mended, and sent the spiked sphere shooting forward. It pierced the demon's eye, crushing it against the back of the eye socket, and from the sound of the impact, probably cracking the bones as well.

The spiked sphere held its shape, and he jerked it out and slammed it into the other eye. He would probably have felt queasy at the lizard's cry of pain, or the mere sight of its mangled eyes and the blood running like tears down the sides of its cheekless mouth, but in liquid form, the hormonal shifts that would have generated those feelings did not occur, and so he did not fall to the ground retching, though intellectually he expected it.

With the threat of retaliation drastically reduced, and given the demonstrated effectiveness of both type of sphere, and the liquid form's usefulness in avoiding or reducing the impact of injury, Xander was ready to finish the demon off, if he could.

This was the first chance he had to try some of his tricks out on a live demon, though. His resolve firmed when the lizard drew a sword, and sniffed for him, blinded and in pain as it was.

The hissing sound of his sandy chainsaw filled the air, echoing down the ravine. When his first strike bloodied the demon and drew a scream but failed to sever anything, Xander upped the speed several times and tried again. This time the makeshift blade passed cleanly through the demon's sword holding arm, dropping the sword and the hand holding it to the ground. Then it lifted and passed with only a little resistance through the demon's neck, ending its life, at least for the moment.

Lifting himself off the ground before he remembered he was in liquid form, Xander realized he could fly in this form too, for being completely liquid, it was wholly vulnerable to his power, including his ability to move it from a distance.

Grinning, he sped down the ravine, searching out the other two. Spying them by the sense of their fluids, he found them hiding in a crack in the ravine wall, their hostage lying hidden nearby beneath a cloth covered in dirt and small stones.

Delighted with the setup and the opportunity, Xander landed, went solid, and immediately drew his hands up. Liquid, white-hot glowing iron streamed between his hands, swirling inward into a spiraling sphere that suddenly shot forward, impacting the stone wall just behind the two. He had not had as much practice aiming this one, but the blast was sufficient to cast them both forward, out of their hiding place, covered in light cuts.

A single sphere shot forward with a crack that Xander thought might have been the sound barrier breaking, and exploded the second lizard man's skull. The red devil, or Muscles as Xander was mentally referring to him, rolled quickly behind a boulder and threw a knife at Xander.

Xander was expecting it this time, and managed a glancing blow on the knife with a launched sphere, then fired another iron sphere at the boulder, putting more speed behind it this time. It blew the boulder to pieces, and when Xander gave up waiting for a counter attack and went to look, he found it had gone through the red demon as well, or the explosion had. Either way, he was quite dead.

A strong breeze took care of the sand over the hidden hostage. Bending over to lift up the cloth brought to mind a possible use for a smaller hydraulic cylinder. He could create a sphere with a simple gripper arm, a single shaft paired with a small hydraulic cylinder that when extended brought a second shaft into contact with the first, allowed rough manipulation at a distance.

Of course, he realized, if he could simply improve his control over multiple spheres, he could use five fingertip-sized spheres as a remote hand, without any hydraulics.

The uncovered demoness was less human looking than either Naamahalat or his two captors had been, though she lacked wings. Instead, her inhumanity was in her beak-like jaw, the strange knob that seemed to extend from her forehead, combining to give her an almost dinosaurian appearance, and her backwards seeming leg. It took him a minute to figure out what was odd about her legs, but a closer look revealed that while her knees looked normal, her ankle was a full foot above her, well, foot, as if she walked on just her toes, with her foot stretched out. It looked vaguely familiar, and definitely not like the bird-like dinosaur foot models he remembered. She lacked a tail, and her skin was strangely tight, so that every muscle showed clearly and individually, though none seemed particularly large.

Xander did not find her spectacularly attractive, but neither did he consider her ugly. He did not suppose it mattered anyway, as he did not plan to do anything aside from releasing her. He would kill her if she attacked him, since while he knew she would recover, he had no certainty that he could do the same. Though he seemed to have retained a mutant-style healing factor, it had been intended to have a limited lifespan, and so he had no way of knowing if it might suddenly decide its time had expired, and cease functioning, and he had even less clue if the demons' remarkable recovery abilities were a property of themselves, or of the dimension in which they existed.

Cutting her bonds was easy enough, a simple matter of employing the knife he had blocked, while the manacles yielded, after a few false starts at trying to pick the lock, to a simpler solution of grasping them and tearing the metal with his fingers, the ease of which made him think that they must have had magic to prevent her from removing them, for otherwise her visible musculature would surely have been equal to the job as well.

He briefly considered attempting to awaken her, before deciding that he did not really want to become a slave again, or be raped, pleasurable as that experience had been in the end. Instead, he produced a simple drawstring bag, tightly rolled and inside a tube of glass-like hard sugar, drew it out and then filled it with simple, long-lasting foods. A leather flask was similarly produced and filled with water, then he forced some healing potion in to her, and promptly fled the scene in gaseous form, heading back towards his hideout.

When he reached out for it, he was very pleased to be able to readily feel the pattern of simple fluids he had drawn to guide himself back, and so regained the safety of his little shelter. He was very pleased with how his attempt had gone.

His spheres had performed admirably, both in terms of scouting and in fighting. His own personal performance was lacking, but he had never been at real risk, given his ability to flee to gaseous form, so while his own fighting ability had not shone, he had not expected it to, but had confirmed that he could safely hone that same skill against demons without it being too terribly likely that they could pull out some totally unexpected game changer. At least, none of the three had done more than attempt to attack him with melee weapons.

He guessed the demons capable of powerful magic preferred to operate at a greater distance, or were in command positions, while the grunts tended to have the close combat skills. He would not know that for certain for some time, but for now it seemed a reasonable expectation, and meant that he could probably practice against small groups of demons without too much risk.

His iron ball attack had also done well, though he needed better aim on that. That would take practice, and he was not eager to do that in his hideout again, so he would simply have to gain that practice out in the wild beating up on demons.

He had also come up with a great new idea, and promptly set about producing five small rough surfaced balls, and trying to manipulate them to pick up various things.

Again, however, two were the most he could reliably control at once. This sufficed to pick up cloth, but not for true hand-like manipulation. He simply could not get the hang of remembering and adjusting the position of that many balls at once. He dropped his attempts down to just three balls, but though he could get three balls to remain close to each other, and adjust the position of two relative to the third, which almost sufficed for manipulation of three, and could slightly extend his functionality, it was not a very satisfying result.

The other thought he had happened upon in the field had been to use his power over air to make sounds. Here he had substantially more success. He could not, at least not yet, produce any sound he wanted. He did find that it was possible, even fairly easy, to transmit sound, to basically focus on the vibration of air in one spot, and make another bit of air or water match its vibrations. By matching the vibrations of a bit of air to a larger or smaller patch of air, he could even raise or lower the pitch of the sound.

Basically all this amounted to was an ability to throw his voice, like a ventriloquist pretends to do but in actual reality, or indeed, to throw anyone else's voice, or any sound.

What he could not do at this point was reproduce arbitrary sounds, or sounds he had heard. Though he could imagine his favorite music in his head, he could not yet cause it to be played for him by the air around him.

He did, however, manage a pretty cool special effect. By matching the motion of several patches of air of different size to the motion of the air right in front of him, which was surprisingly easy to do considering how hard independent control of multiple balls was, he could effectively speak in a chorus, much like the effect often used in movies for supernatural beings.

With a little bit more concentration, he found he could move one patch of air in sympathy with another patch, without a perfect match. In particular, he could make a patch of air move a greater or shorter distance, basically amplifying or deadening the sound.

He was in the midst of playing with his sound-producing abilities when he suddenly felt a swirl of blackness rush about him, blotting out the sand and stones, and a sensation of sudden and extreme acceleration. He leapt to his feet, swaying, as the blackness cleared and the world returned about him.

First Summons

He was in an open glade in the forest. There was no summoning circle as he had anticipated, having guessed that he had been summoned, far more quickly than he had ever expected. Nor was there a circle of chanting druids, nor an old man in magisterial robes, nor an ugly hag with a chicken-footed house.

Instead, there was a young child, maybe eleven or twelve, with a bright shock of red hair, wearing sandals over bandaged feet, black leggings under a grey skirt that went below the knees but was divided in front, a sort of tunic-like wrap over the torso, long enough that it ended about mid-thigh, bandage like wrapping about the arms and the torso where it was visible beneath the tunic, and bright green eyes in a youthful, unblemished face.

Xander could not quite tell, given the oddness of the clothing from his perspective, whether he was facing a girl or a boy, and he promptly spun about, looking to see if there was anyone else about. Seeing no-one, he assumed the child must be his summoner, though he had no idea how they had managed it, as stupefied as they appeared.

"You... " the redhead sputtered, staring wide-eyed at him, "You're not a lizard!"

He was certain the child was not speaking demonic, and Xander realized with a bit of dismay that the language draught he had consumed what seemed like ages ago must still be active, just as the healing was. Yet one more thing that would separate him from his friends if he ever made it back. Speaking of which . . . he attempted to form a water portal to his home, then tried to drink a draught that would bring him home. He sighed in resignation when neither worked. He had not really expected them to, knowing he would be bound to fulfill the terms of his summons first.

Focusing his attention on the child, Xander dropped to one knee to be on a level with the child, and grinned. "You're right, I am no lizard. What were you summoning a lizard for?"

The child shook its head furiously, stamping its foot and huffing. "You're supposed to be a lizard," it said dismissively, and made a sudden gesture with its hand. Again Xander felt the rush of blackness, and was back at the covered depression he had claimed.

He briefly considered taking a potion to allow him to take the form of a lizard, but rejected it. After the last several abilities he had given himself turned out to have stuck, Xander had no interest in getting stuck as a half-lizard man or something worse.

The world turned black again a moment later, and Xander again found himself in front of the same child, though the child looked far the worse for wear, pale and exhausted, and staring at him in obvious dismay.

The child collapsed to the ground, and Xander hurried forward, worried, and knelt next to the little redhead. To his great relief, the child was still breathing, and now closer, Xander guessed that she was a girl. He could still be wrong, of course, and he certainly was not going to check any closer.

A bit of a Esteban Diablo's Elixir of Rejuvenation later, and the girl was sitting up and regaining her color. She was glaring at him, her eyes angry but glistening with impending tears, her lower lip white from the grip of her teeth. She was breathing heavily, obviously trying to keep from sobbing, and Xander rocked back on his heels and settled down into a sitting position on the ground, about two feet from her.

"Y-you were supposed to be a lizard!" She said tightly, almost under her breath, and defiantly wiped her eyes.

"Why were you trying to summon a lizard?" Xander asked, in what he hoped was a conversational tone. He was afraid if he sounded too nice or sympathetic he would just set her off.

"Nobody thinks I can be a real ninja," she complained, crossing her arms and scowling furiously. "Stupid idiots. If I could make a new summons contract, that'd show them! Only the strongest ninjas have their own personal summons!"

"But you did summon me," Xander pointed out. He wondered what one of these contracts would entail. Being summoned, dismissed, and summoned again did not match the stories he had heard, so he had a feeling he had been summoned from further away across the dimensions than demons in his personal Hell usually were. Naamahalat and her friends had stories of being summoned by wizards and sorceresses using summoning circles, but he saw no summoning circle, and even if he had, those were one-shot affairs requiring a lot of careful setup, not something one could pull off at a whim.

Sure, doing it twice appeared to have badly exhausted the little girl, but still, she had done it with no summoning circle. However, as far as he could tell, merely by the contrast in how he felt compared to just moments before, at this point, he was not bound. Apparently, she could dismiss him, but as far as he could tell, there was nothing preventing him from leaving, or killing her, and if she kept trying and got anything from his plane other than himself, she would probably either die, or very soon wish she had died.

A quick test confirmed that he was able to form a portal home now, though the one he made was so small as to be unnoticeable. Either her first attempt had been her only chance to bind him to a task, and she had discarded that chance by releasing him without charging him with a task, nor providing any compensation; or she had simply lacked the strength the second time to properly complete the summoning.

Xander had expected to be summoned by the sort of person who would be trying to summon a demon, and had not figured it would be difficult to do the traditional demon thing of twisting the wording and meaning of their request around on them. Being summoned by a relative innocent who only wanted to prove herself, and knowing that if he failed to convince her to accept him and she kept trying, she would be doomed to torture and death, Xander was at a loss.

He really did not want to become a lizard, even if it would make her happy. He needed to test his powers first, to figure out why some of his changes were having permanent effects when he had not intended such, and how to avoid it.

"What's so great about lizards, anyway?"

The girl huffed again. "Toads, slugs, snakes, monkeys, and dogs are already taken. I need something that can handle water, so cats are out. Besides, lizards are much cooler! Some of them can run on water, they can climb trees and walk upside down on ceilings like ninja, shoot blood out of their eyes, they scare more people than almost anything but snakes and spiders, and snakes are taken and spiders are icky!"

Xander laughed at that, remembering Willow's similar reaction to spiders and many insects, but quickly quieted when he found himself once more the recipient of a virulent glare.

"Well, I'm no lizard, but I can handle water," Xander said quickly. He was about to continue and mention that he could help her gain respect, but stopped short. What guarantee did he have that anything he gave her would not have side-effects? He certainly did not want to make her inhuman, as he had done to himself. "I don't know about walking on a tree, but I can fly, and walk on water." He had not tried the latter, but he was confident that his powers over fluids would give him some way of accomplishing that.

If he could not risk giving her anything aside from minor healing potions, and did not want to take anything else himself, could he perhaps find something else whose health he did not mind risking? Xander looked around, and then reached out with his power, searching for a small creature. Finding one, he considered what he could do to it. A giant growth potion straight out of fantasy, or even Alice in Wonderland would do, but what about having it obey her? Could he make some kind of loyalty potion?

It was worth a try, since he was pretty confident that if he could not manage the loyalty bit, he would still be able to defend her. After all, he should be able to just give it a dose of reversal or shrinking potion.

Examining his find more closely he realized it was some sort of bug; certainly not the sort of thing she might appreciate. Reaching out with his senses, Xander searched for something a bit bigger. Unfortunately, he realized instead that they were fairly surrounded by man-sized patches of mixed liquids; in other words, there were people hidden in the trees all around.

"Sorry, kid," he said, "You've got visitors. Call me again when you're alone." With that, Xander went gaseous, focusing on being totally transparent, and allowed himself to very slowly drift upward, hoping that whoever or whatever was watching would believe that he had released himself back to his source plane, much as the child had done a moment ago.

A moment later a woman dropped to the ground beside the child, and struck forward into the empty air below him with a blade, about four feet long, mostly straight and single-edged, as far as he could tell.

"Sensei," the child complained, "what did you do that for? Now my summons went away, and I didn't get to make a contract yet."

The lady ignored the child, staring about intently in every direction before sighing, and standing straighter. "Ku-chan, whatever possessed you to try such a thing in the first place? You are far too young to be trying to create a summons. Besides, that is very dangerous! An uncontrolled summons is not much less dangerous than a tailed demon."

Five figures dressed all in black dropped into the clearing from the surrounding trees, and Xander tensed. The woman did not. Indeed, she appeared resigned.

"You are summoned to appear before the Council," one of them said, and in looking at the face when it spoke, Xander realized that they were all wearing stylized masks, exaggerated frowning faces with blood colored tears dripping from the eyes. He found it a little macabre, but followed along as the five masked figures escorted the woman and the little girl out of the forest, and into a walled village.

Though most of his attention was on following the group without being observed, Xander did notice that while there were powerlines, the houses looked to be made of bamboo and wood with tiled roofs. There were no cars, instead, he saw people walking, riding in horse or people drawn carts, or riding on wagons.

He saw quite a few people moving rapidly across the rooftops, leaping from house to house in a most unexpected fashion. Though some wore boots, he also saw many people wearing sandals and split-toe socks, and quite a few women were wearing long dresses belted around the middle, that looked Japanese to him, though he could not remember for sure what they were called.

That reminded him that the child had mentioned ninja, something that surprised him, for it seemed to mean that the translation effect would use foreign words that were absorbed into English, rather than translating it further.

He met a little resistance when they entered a building, but a quick draught allowed him to pass through whatever was blocking him. Inside he found a very somber group of old geezers, white-beards, white or grey hair, stern faces, and in the middle a fellow with a snow white beard and mustache and very flat, straight white hair, that all flowed down enough to nearly reach the floor. His beard was thin, and trimmed so that it came only from the middle of his face, leaving his cheeks clean shaven.

"Again you find yourself before us," the old guy intoned somberly, "are you not yet tired of this, Princess?"

Another ancient geezer, this one with white hair that was rather bushy, huge eyebrows, but no facial hair, chimed in. "It is most unseemly for the Princess to risk harm to her people. The shieldwatch say you have attempted a summoning without a contract!"

A murmur arose at this, as of consternation, and Xander realized that probably only a few of these old folks actually got reports, so at least some of them were hearing this for the first time.

"It is a good thing she has not the skills to succeed!" One old guy said, sitting bolt upright, "Imagine the destruction had she managed it! This is why we must put a stop to this pretense of being a ninja. It is unbecoming, and now it is becoming hazardous!"

Xander saw the child start to speak, only to be hushed by the lady standing with her.

Several geezers, including an old lady who took a moment to smile at the girl, took umbrage with the interrupting fellow, and the conversation flowed back and forth for a long minute, basically ignoring the girl they were meeting about, before the old guy, rubbing his chin and then sliding his hand down and throwing his beard and mustache to the side, clapped his hands.

Silence fell instantly, and all eyes turned to the old man. "This discussion is premature. We have not heard from her instructor. Let us do so now."

The lady stepped forward and bowed low. "It is true that Kushina attempted a summoning," she admitted. "From what I saw, I believe she succeeded, but it noticed us around her and vanished. Had she been alone, she might possibly have obtained a contract."

A storm of words erupted all around, before finally quieting as one of the old guys demanded a description. When they heard that the summons had looked human, even the old guy turned pale, and Xander wondered if perhaps they had reached as far as the demonic plane before. If their normal summons were animals, why would a human appearing summon frighten them so?

They certainly seemed to be taking it seriously, though, and he heard a number of them murmuring about death. He hoped they were not talking about killing the little girl. He was not about to stand for that, but if she were attacked, she might not be able to keep him connected to this plane.

He discreetly fed her a bit more of the Elixir, which put some more color in her cheeks. He was delighted at the apoplectic expression on the face of the guy who had just denigrated her ability to summon, but kept a careful eye on all of them, especially the five masked individuals, who still stood behind the girl, watching for any sign that they intended harm to the child.

Princess or not, irresponsible or not, they were not going to harm her while he was watching.

Luckily for them, and for him if it turned out they had skills he had not seen, which considering a child could apparently do an unaided summoning, was probably pretty likely, they did not take any physical action against her, only voted to require her to remain under her teacher's direct supervision for the next two weeks.

The girl was clearly depressed when she left the council building with her teacher. The lady guided her to a restaurant, and tried to cheer her up, but with little luck. Xander could understand the girl's frustration better now, as he had seen that her skills were being denigrated by people who apparently wished she would be a nice, pliable princess for them to pull out to placate crowds, and not go running around doing her own thing. Well, she clearly had the skills, given that she had managed to summon him, and he was pretty sure that he needed to get one of these contract things done with her, to avoid the chance that she might try summoning again and end up getting someone else from his current home.

There were basically no good outcomes he could see for her if she did manage to get anyone else from there. The stories he had heard of Naamahalat's summonings made it pretty clear that it was considered standard behavior to slaughter out of hand a summoner who did not have a warding circle strong enough to prevent that before a deal could be struck, and that even then the wording of that deal would be twisted as far as possible to the detriment of the summoner, for the amusement of the demons.

So Xander slipped away, back into the forest, and summoned a scroll in a scrollcase as the pig in a pig-in-the-blanket. While he slowly munched on the tasty bread, he drew out the scroll, and producing a wide-nibbed pen, he was just about to start writing out a contract, though he had no idea yet what the terms ought to be, when he groaned aloud. Not only did he not know the terms, he did not even know what language these people used for writing!

Now what?

After considering this for a bit, Xander decided to use the demonic language used in his notes to and from Naamahalat. It was easier to sound portentous and solemn in it, and it might at least be related to the language used by their usual summons. Surely they would not expect a summoned being to understand their writing system to begin with.

Now he realized another benefit of his abilities. Not only could he readily produce a good quality ink that would last without fading, when he made mistakes, or just did not like the look of a character, he could move the ink within the paper, or draw it out completely.

He could also alter the color of the ink even after it had been set down, and after a bit, Xander stopped trying to write with the calligraphic style pen, which he really had no idea how to do anyway, and just tweaked the ink on the paper until it looked the way he recalled calligraphy looking from his childhood - though of course the characters and the language were both quite different.

In the end the contract as he laid it out was pretty simple, stating in the fanciest pseudo-legalese he could conjure up, that the undersigned could call on him for a sacrifice of blood or a sweet, dessert, or favorite food, but whether he then remained and satisfied their request was up to his judgment. Basically it was a 'permission to make a request' form; the sacrifice notation was something Naamahalat's stories made clear was non-negotiable, there simply had to be some sort of sacrifice. But it could be a sacrifice chosen to be appealing to the summoned being--for example, he had learned that some demons were capable of refusing any summons that did not include the blood of a certain number of innocents, or a direct and personal sacrifice from the caster, or a live virgin, and so forth.

The blood was listed sort of pro forma, as from what he understood, there was probably a blood sacrifice of some sort involved in almost any summoning, even if it was just blood added to the chalk or ink used to draw the circles, while the sweet was added because it was what he would actually prefer.

He was not sure what kind of sweets they had here, but everything new he managed to try as a result of this would be fodder for his later food summonings himself, so he was eager to find out.

Satisfied with his scroll, Xander went gaseous again, and drifted off in search of his summoner. As he had anticipated, he was readily able to pick her out of the crowd of fluid signatures, as she was the only one who was tied to him; the summoning had linked them, and it felt almost like a thread that he could pick up and pull on, or follow, to find her.

He came to what appeared to be an apartment, and drifted in through a tiny gap in a window's edging. He found the girl sitting, pouting by herself in a room that was surprisingly free of childish toys. He wondered if it was her room, or a guest room since she had been remanded to the direct supervision of her teacher.

Either way, she was alone at the moment, so Xander drifted down to appear before her, and returned to solidity, bringing his finger up to her mouth before she could exclaim in her surprise. He focused his intent, trying to form a shell of unmoving air around them, that would hold firm against any vibrations from inside, shutting off the sound to the rest of the apartment.

"You didn't go back," she whispered, tears glinting in her eyes. "I thought you left me."

Xander shook his head. "I am not a lizard," he told her, "but I was summoned by you." He held up the scroll, and rolled it out. "If you wish to contract with me, you need to sign this."

She stared at the scroll for a minute, before glaring at him. "I can't read this!" she hissed.

"Of course not," Xander replied. "This is not your language, but the language of the place from which you summoned me. This is what it says." He read her the scroll quietly, translating it into her language.

"Why should I sign this, when I wanted a lizard?" She eyed him, a hint of a smile quirking her lips. He thought she was just testing him, that she actually wanted to sign, just to prove she could be a summoner and a strong ninja, but wanted to make sure he had something to offer first.

Xander had spent quite a while thinking about this. He had seen a number of things that made him believe that this place had a lot in common with the Orient of his world. He had an idea that he could pass himself off as a sort of spirit of water, a genie of the water instead of a lamp or ring. It fit well with his powers, would hopefully not be too far from their experience, and would explain his more human appearance. But he did not want to come out and say it, lest they not actually have any legends of such. Rather, he intended to simply focus his behavior to match up with such legends, should they happen to have them.

So he held up his hand and formed a sphere of swirling water over it. "I can do many things," he said. Vanishing the sphere, he produced a sugar flower and handed it to her. She took it curiously, and was surprised when a slight pressure to a petal caused it to break.

"What is this?" she asked. "I mean, what is it made of?"

"Taste it," Xander told her. "I bet you'll like it." He grinned as she popped it in her mouth, and smiled a wide smile, before snapping off the rest of the petal and sticking it her mouth as well.

"Wow," she murmured.

"Do you remember how tired you were after summoning me twice in a row?" he asked her.

She looked up at him, sucking her bottom lip in and chewing on it thoughtfully. "You did something," she said, "I remember swallowing something, and then I wasn't so tired."

"That's right," he answered her. "I can heal you, or those you ask me to. I can protect you if you are attacked. I can fly, and take you with me, if you need to travel a great distance swiftly. I can feed you when you are in need, I can provide water in the deepest desert, air to breathe in the depths of the ocean, fire to warm you in the coldest winter, or cold air to cool you on the hottest of days."

Xander was trying to think of other things he could do for her that he could tie in to a genie persona, but was not really sure what she was looking for. Most of all he wanted her to sign, wanted her protected from the risk of summoning a different creature from his plane, and dying in torment.

He did not even know her, but in watching her courage in facing the council, her despair at their treatment of her, and her willingness to take risks in summoning him, he did not want to see harm come to her.

What else could he offer? He did not want to give her any potions aside from healing. His transformative potions had already had mixed results with himself, he had no intention of setting her forever apart from her species.

Her eyes had widened during his little litany, especially when he offered to take her flying, but she had still made no move to sign his contract.

"And . . . and what do you want from me?" she asked, her bottom lip starting to quiver.

"I like to try new things," Xander told her, wondering if they had encountered others from his plane, ones that perhaps made deals for souls or lives. "So I want you to summon me when you go to new places, or taste new foods." He handed her a chocolate kiss. "I like to taste new sweets and good food," he continued, motioning for her to taste it, "for then I can make my own."

She nodded shakily then. "I . . . I will sign," she said. "I want to be a summoner."

He looked around the room, and then moved over to a small writing desk that was sitting against one wall. There was an ink well there, and several sticks that looked rather like paintbrushes. Finding paper sitting under a stone weight, he drew out a sheet, and calling her over, had her write her name on it.

"I have to sign in blood, don't I," she asked, looking up at him. Xander nodded. It did not particularly matter to him, but it might have more force that way, he supposed, and help protect her from the other demons. He had her prick her finger and smear her blood on the paper without trying to write, however, and then simply moved her blood about in the paper to match her signature. Rolling up the scroll and sliding it into the scrollcase, he slipped it into his pouch, enjoying her expression of disbelief, as the foot long scroll case slid into a maybe four-inch deep pouch without any sign of strain.

"Wow," she murmured again. Grinning, Xander released the sound deadening shell.

"Kushina-chan?" A questioning voice sounded from beyond the door, and Xander quickly went transparent and airy. Kushina's eyes popped open, and she jumped up and ran to the door, sliding it open.

"Sorry," she said rapidly, "I wasn't paying attention."

The lady from before was standing there looking down at her with a worried smile. "Come on, Kushina-chan, it is time for training. You'll never become a ninja by skipping training."

The girl frowned. "They'll never pass me anyway, you know that," she grumped, even as she hurried to gather things together. Xander saw her picking up several pointy implements with what looked like rings on the end, and sliding them into slots on a belt she quickly wrapped around her waist, before hurrying out the door.

Xander followed along behind, curious about the sort of training a young ninja-to-be would receive. The pair passed quickly through the streets to an area that even Xander could recognize as a training ground, with several different types of targets at one end, and a number of rope wrapped posts, and several posts with perpendicular branches sticking out, that Xander remembered seeing in badly dubbed kung fu flicks in the theater.

There were quite a few children gathering in the largest open area, and several adults standing around. After delivering Kushina, the woman moved to a low wall at one end of the training ground and sat. Xander stuck close to the girl, somewhat surprised that the person he had heard referred to as her teacher was not apparently her instructor for this activity.

That distinction appeared to belong to the guy barking out instructions, lining them up in rows and taking them through a series of activities that looked basically like any martial arts film Xander had seen, with everyone matching his moves.

The biggest difference from the films in Xander's memories was that instead of everyone wearing the same style of clothing, be it a gi or some other form of uniform, everyone was wearing apparently whatever they wanted.

The only consistency was an absence of bulky, heavy clothing. There were some in flowing, robe-like garments, others in billowing pants and tops, others in tighter clothing of various sorts, some in somber single-color schemes, and others wearing bright primary colors.

Xander found this part rather boring, and eventually drifted over to listen to the conversation happening around Kushina's teacher. He finally learned her name when she was greeted as Mizuna by one of the men walking over to join the group clustered by the small wall.

They seemed to be watching and commenting quietly on the performance of the various children, and discussing various rumours about them, including the rumours about Kushina's summoning.

When Mizuna confirmed to them that Kushina had summoned an apparent human, Xander again heard comments about death, and this time about gods as well. Or maybe the two went together, and it was a death god?

Nothing about genies or the like was mentioned, and Xander wondered if he was barking up the wrong tree with that. If the other human-like summoning they had apparently encountered stories of had been from his current home, he could see how it could seem to be an agent or even god of death. Demons, at least the ones he had seen and fought, would keep fighting even with limbs destroyed, and their eyes torn out, so to a people who did not appear to even have guns, he supposed they could kill quite a group before being taken down. If they recovered at the same rate here as they did there, then that would be worse still.

If, as he suspected, their expressed desire for flesh and souls was because they could somehow gain strength or healing from consuming others, then that would make such a summons even more unstoppable, and since summonings here apparently involved no protections until the negotiations were over, and demons preferred to kill their summoner if they could, and then wreak havoc until they were themselves destroyed and thus returned to their plane of origin, such a summons could well have left a fearful legend behind.

The mere fact of her apparent success at getting anything from a summons at all appeared to be garnering Kushina quite a bit more respect from the gathered people, which pleased Xander.

One guy did not seem to be buying the story, however, and was quickly getting on Mizuna's nerves, and even more so on Xander's, with his accusations that Mizuna was making up the story to make her protege seem less of a pampered loser.

Mizuna appeared to be valiantly holding on to her temper, though she was clearly unhappy about it, but Xander had no reason to hold back. Fed up with the garbage spewing out of the unpleasant fellow's mouth, Xander decided he might as well spew something out of a different orifice, he reached out and introduced a fluid directly into the guy's stomach that should give him diarrhea, then, even as the guy stopped mid-word with an alarmed look on his face, Xander decided that was not quite enough punishment.

So he located the urine in the fellow's bladder and changed it to diluted Tabasco sauce. A moment later the guy was running away screaming his head off, Mizuna was grinning and laughing, and Xander was standing there wondering why he had been so focused on superheros and superpowers that he had completely missed the ultimate prank potential his powers had. After all the pranks he and Jesse had pulled on the jocks and other social snobs at school, he could not believe that he had not even thought of the advantages in being able to create an instant oil slick in a school hallway, and vanish it the instant its work was done, or spray someone's locker with skunk juice without needing to be anywhere near the scene of the crime.

Oh, but he was going to have such fun with this if he . . ., no, when he made it back to Sunnydale.

A sudden spate of synchronized shivers were experienced in his home dimension, but the coincidence went unnoticed and unremarked.

Xander turned his attention back to the field of students just in time to see a smirking boy toss a handful of what looked like corn or some other hard seed at the ground beneath Kushina's feet as she was performing a kick.

Xander sent a quick, strong ground-level breeze to sweep the kernels out of her path. The two boys behind her went down, and a jerk on the fluids in the smirking boy's supporting leg took him tumbling down with them.

The smirking boy angrily denounced Kushina as the cause, even though she was a row ahead of them and had not even been looking at them at the time, but Xander had discovered that there was enough fluid in the little seeds for him to get a grip on them, he had slipped several of them back into the smirking boy's pocket just in time for the exasperated teacher to force them to all turn out their pockets.

Xander was smiling uncontrollably as he watched the bully sent to sit out the next exercises. How often in school had he wished the bullies would get their comeuppance, and now he could engineer just that. Life, Xander decided, was good.

Unfortunately for Xander, his cheerful gloating distracted him from the bully at just the wrong moment, for the angered young man had picked up a rock, and with considerable skill, had flung it into the crowd and caught Kushina right on the skull with it. While his punishment was swift, her sudden loss of consciousness found Xander dumped back into his little hideout in hell.

Sucking down the soul of your summoner could let a demon free to wander a mortal plane until it was defeated, but without that or some other anchor, taking out the summoner was a viable way of taking out the summoned demon as well.

Xander had no idea what had happened, of course, and supposed that Kushina had simply released him. He knew she would summon him again when she had a need, and since he was confident that the contract would hold and allow her to reach him, he removed and cached his cartouches. If he knew which particular one had made him seem like a lizard to her summons, he would keep it on, but he did not, so he removed them all.

He would be interested in being summoned to other worlds eventually, but for the moment, he wanted to focus on improving his skills, and learning about this new summons world.

He had not managed to get anything new to eat, but he was looking forward to learning what sort of sweets and treats they had on this world. That reminded him of his bag, and he checked it. Most of the treats were still there, but two of Naamahalat's favorites were gone. As he refilled the pouch, he thought of the mirror he had seen in Kushina's room.

The demons were still using polished brass, and he wondered what Naamahalat would have thought of such a mirror. A small smile ran across his lips, and Xander nodded. A moment later, he had a small hand mirror of silvered glass in a gold frame with a nicely polished wooden handle, wrapped, of course, in sugar-paper. After quickly unwrapping it, he slid it into the pouch, then wrote out a quick note to Naamahalat and slid it in.

He still was not ready emotionally to face whatever she might have written him, so he very deliberately did not check for a note from her.

Instead, he turned his attention to playing more with his ability to affect the air. He had used a cannonball, effectively, to create a distraction, as well as over-pressuring his spheres until they exploded, but did he really need that?

Creating complex sounds was hard, but shockwaves should be easy enough. Focusing on a spot in the air, he doubled the quantity of air in that spot, holding it in place, then released it. It produced a loud whoosh as the air quickly expanded, but it was quieter, and faded more quickly than he expected.

He tried again, steadily increasing the pressure with each try, but continued to fail to get the results he wanted. Finally, he switched his technique, and took a large sphere and vanished all the air in it, while preventing air from entering it. When he removed his control, he got a very satisfying crack. Trying several different styles, he found that a long slender shaft of air produced a sharper crack, and if he made more of a cone, so that the air filled the space faster towards one end than the other, he got a rolling crack more akin to the sound of thunder.

In fact, when he thought about it, he wondered if perhaps that was exactly the sound he was making? Perhaps thunder was the air collapsing back into the space where the lightning had forced it out?

He promptly produced a small spiral bound notebook and a nice roller ball pen, and removing the edible wrapper, turned to the first page. "Questions for Willow," he wrote as the title, then below that wrote down his musing on the cause of thunder, then slipped the book and pen into his pouch.

Then he returned to his experimentation. Producing a cloud of super-heated hydrogen was good for a bang that hurt his ears to the point he could feel blood flowing from them, though thankfully his healing quickly restored his hearing.

Remembering the testing he had done on the torches, ages ago now it seemed, Xander tried to produce a Zippo in a chocolate box, but found it was a bit too complex, or he did not understand it completely, because while it looked perfect, the top simply would not open at all.

Giving up on that, he tried to directly produce a flame. When that failed, he shifted his intent to burning mix of oxygen and acetylene. This actually worked, producing a long tongue of flame in the air in front of him. As he had seen his uncle do, when working on cars, he adjusted the balance of oxygen and acetylene, moving back and forth from a slow, orange flame that produced a fair bit of smoke, to a bright blue flame with the characteristic sound of rushing air.

Moments later he released the flame, and promptly focused on cooling the air. Being inside with little air movement, it had quickly become uncomfortably hot when he increased the size of the flame by doubling the gas output without adjusting the mix. Fortunately, his power was well able to cool the chamber again.

He wanted to go out of the chamber and play with a larger supply of gas, as he had suddenly remembered watching on television as the Space Shuttle launched itself skyward. It had been propelled, as far as he could remember, by liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. Oh, well, he had paid enough attention, as most American boys did at some point in their childhoods if they grew up while the Shuttles were flying, that the two white rockets were Solid-Rocket-Boosters, and he had no idea what was in them, but he was pretty sure that the main engine was hydrogen and oxygen.

And he could produce both, where-ever he wanted, in massive quantities, on fire. Unless he was very much mistaken, that meant that he could basically do the equivalent of picking up the shuttle, pointing it at a target, and firing it like a gun . . . and from what he remembered of watching the shuttle launches, that was one heck of a blast.

He could be Rocketman, if he wanted to be.

Xander spent nearly half an hour after that, perfecting the amount of butane, which he finally recalled was the fuel used in a Zippo, he needed to release to 'flick' his thumb like a lighter. Yeah, that was definitely cool. He could readily picture the jealousy on Jesse's face when he saw that move.

Much cooler than playing the flugelhorn.

Propane and natural gas both produced a familiar flame, like that of a gas stove. Gasoline, on the other hand, reminded him that fluids had an advantage that gases did not. You could readily soak someone in gasoline, for example, and then set it on fire afterward, or threaten them with fire.

Of course, threats would only work if they knew it was gasoline, so it was not a lot of use against the demons, since he did not really have the stomach to watch a demon burn to death.

Still, it could be very threatening, and when he realized that he could easily produce the jellied gasoline his uncle told war stories off, he knew that he could duplicate the effects of a WWII flamethrower, without either the weight of the backpack, or the risk of an explosion. While he did not think he could actually use such a weapon on demons, it could certainly be used to attack their morale.

Xander did only a quick test of this, verifying that a stream of burning jellied gasoline could not only shoot a great distance, but would rebound off of stone, and leave a burning pool on the ground and a small burning patch on the stone it hit. Banishing the gasoline and recooling the air, Xander found himself grinning uncontrollably.

He had never been a vandal, nor an arsonist, but he had held a fascination with fire even since he first got to see a fire truck, when Willow set the neighbors' house on fire for him. Well, that is what he believed at the time, anyway.

A brief experiment with forming a chainsaw of jellied gasoline was quickly abandoned. It was simply too confusing trying to determine the right amount of gasoline to feed in, as it was used up.

Several experiments later, a sound that had been slowly getting louder finally reached the point where Xander actually noticed it. He promptly sent up an eye to have a look.

There was a considerable cloud of dust rising at a moderate distance, and as he shifted his eye across the intervening gap, Xander shifted lenses and adjusted the gap to zoom in on the base of the cloud.

Interestingly, the cloud was apparently caused by something of a running battle. He had understood most battles here to be stand-up affairs, where the two groups would line up, then slam into each other. This one, however, was more of a chase and apparently involved at least one magic user, for he could see bright bolts of light that were sending up great gouts of flame and smoke, and contributing to the kicking up of dust.

A Fight and a Half

A quick scan of the battle revealed no-one he knew or had previously encountered, so Xander settled in to watch and learn.

He was a little surprised to see that there were apparently no flyers in the area, but then, they did seem to be reserved for strategic uses. He had not observed any equivalent to an aerial bombardment during his watching, and he supposed that a flyer who got low enough to target the enemy was also within range of attack themselves, since he had not seen any equivalent of a telescope or binoculars in use.

Spinning the glass eye around to check the distance and direction to his hideout, he both determined that they would, if they did not change course, pass by without coming close enough to be likely to notice anything suspicious, and that he was controlling the eye at a fair bit greater distance than he had done up til now.

Returning to a closer examination of the fighting demons, Xander noted that they were all wearing similar colors. He was not sure what part of a demon's outfit indicated their allegiances, or indeed if they had a concept of a badge or marker of allegiance at all, but it was curious, and he wondered if the fleeing group were spies that were caught out, or maybe deserters.

The fleeing group were riding what looked to him like furry dinosaurs. It was hard to be sure what they were covered in, given the speed of their movements. The pursuers were riding in open backed chariots, pulled by creatures that looked almost like horses, except that they had six limbs instead of four.

If he had to guess, he would say the dinosaurs had the edge in speed, but it could not have been by much, given the short lead they had. Focusing on the bright, actinic blue bolts, he managed to track them back to a smaller demon that was actually riding in some sort of harness on a larger demon that was driving a chariot.

There were seven chariots chasing three riders, which seemed unfair, especially since two of the chariot riders were carrying passengers. The one that was not carrying the mage had an achingly beautiful demoness, almost perfectly human aside from two curling horns rising through her flowing blond hair.

So Xander picked two of the other chariots, driven by demons that were male and otherwise uninteresting, just generic warrior types, intending to knock them out of the chase. Unfortunately, he soon realized that as soon as he turned his focus to accomplishing something else, and away from having his eye keep pace with the swift moving group, he lost sight of them, making it impossible to accomplish his goal.

He briefly considered making some attempt to give himself a better ability to multi-task, but he really was not comfortable making changes to himself, especially after having some of those changes stick around far longer than he had ever intended.

Maybe the problem was trying to split his attention between two distant places?

Focusing on the eye and getting it back in line with the chariot's motion, this time Xander did not try to summon his blades in line with the axles, wheels, nor the chariot tongue, as he had previously attempted. Instead, he tried to form a sphere of compressed, super-heated air below the eye, as if he were standing there and forming it in his hands.

A moment later he thrust it forward, barely concentrating on holding it together, and not thinking at all on the path it would take. As he anticipated, willing it to hold together did not take the same level of concentration, and even better, it did become visible in his glass eye, not his normal eyes, so his attempt to form it relative to the eye succeeded.

The blast when he released the hold he had on the ball's shape was not particularly impressive; there was a sharp crack of air, which seemed to startle the animals, but not enough to spook them, and it kicked up a fair cloud of dust, but it had been off target. His timing and the speed of the shot had not matched well enough, and the impact had been behind and to the left of the group.

Kicking the eye back into gear, Xander began to pepper them with shots, trying to improve his aim, timing, and at the same time adjusting the mix and pressure on the ball for effect.

After several tries, he discovered he could get a more impressive explosion by packing the ball with gasoline vapor, in gaseous form solely due to its heat, but under enough pressure that there was basically no available oxygen in the sphere to ignite. When the shape was released as it reached a few feet from the ground - he had to mentally release the sphere so this part was not terribly precise - the pressure sent it rushing rapidly outward, mixing with the oxygen, and since the heat it started with was sufficiently high, it would auto-ignite once it reached a combustible fuel-air mixture.

The first successful gasoline-air blast finally sent the horse like creatures rearing and screaming, and due to its greater proximity, bowled the saurian mounts over completely.

Having achieved his goal of shifting matters from a lengthy chase that might well escape his range with nothing to show for it to a pitched battle, though he had not managed to even up the numbers, Xander settled in to watch.

The magical firing appeared to have taken its toll on the little demon piggybacking on one of the charioteers, but he had enough left to shoot a blast that sent the three dino-riders sprawling.

They were quickly back to their feet, and having lost the opportunity of flight, moved immediately to attack.

Xander rapidly became enthralled. This was miles better than watching an action movie, given that he could readily shift his eye to any position to observe the action.

Two of the chariot drivers focused for a bit on examining the skies, and he presumed they were looking for the source of the explosions that had brought the chase to a halt, but as he expected, looking for a tiny glass sphere in the sky was a hopeless proposition, and they eventually turned their attention back to the ground conflict.

The demons were more tactical than he had expected, and apparently had both magic, and magical items in their arsenal. The stunning demoness had been instantly shielded by two of the larger males, and under their cover had slipped backwards until she was away from the melee and could cast into it.

Meanwhile the charioteers had engaged the dino-riders, one of whom Xander realized was also female, though rather than the gorgeous flowing locks of the sorceress demon peppering them with bolts of fire, frost, and sizzling darkness, she had pencil thick tendrils on her head, looking almost like extruded clay hair from a child's toy.

She was fighting with a pair of blades on short sticks, while her two male companions were wielding long swords. The charioteers had drawn similar swords, and one of them was wielding a whip.

The small backpack-demon had given up firing his blue blasts, and was instead wielding a magical shield, a plane of force that he controlled with a small wand, both blocking sword blows that came near him, and using it to bash the opposing fighters about.

To Xander's surprise, it was the little guy who bought the farm first, in spite of his magical shield. He failed to pay attention when the female slipped past them in the midst of her fight. Xander barely saw what happened, and wished at that point for instant replay and a better camera angle, maybe even a slow-motion replay. He was almost sure that somehow her hair, if it could be called that, had whipped out and struck the little demon, and he had slumped over.

Without the protection of his shield, the fighter carrying him was the next to fall, pierced through by a sword. Unfortunately, extracting that sword took just too long, and the first of the dino-riders fell, taking a bolt of darkness from the blonde through the chest, dropping him instantly.

Xander expected things to rapidly shift against the dino-riders at this point, but he had not anticipated the intervention of the dinosaurs themselves. Now that they were stopped and his eye was closer, he could see that what he thought was fur was in fact short, downy feathers. They did not have sharp beaks, however, but a jaw of sharp teeth. Given the sameness of the teeth from front to back, he thought they looked rather like saws as a second charioteer went down to their teeth and claws.

The recovery and entry into the melee of the predatory dinosaurs quickly turned the tide. Much to Xander's surprise, the charioteers and dinos spent themselves against each other, along with the other male dino-rider, leaving the sorceress and clay-haired demoness facing one other.

Xander only really had eyes for the two pairs of heaving breasts at that point, as they were both exhausted and breathing heavily. His only regret, as a blast from the blonde disarmed the other, and she leapt on the blonde, striking with fists and claws, was that he did not have a videocamera.

When clothing started to get torn, Xander felt himself hardening as he saw flashes of skin. The two demonesses were rolling on the ground now, the upper hand changing rapidly. From what he could see, several hidden knives had already been pulled, and then been disarmed and flung from the melee without achieving their purpose, and apparently the blonde's magic was not able to be pulled out in this sort of melee.

A visible jolt ran through both of the women, and the tone of the fight immediately changed. It took Xander a moment to realize what had happened, as it was almost too good to be true.

Just as at any cat-fight once boys had hit puberty, they would secretly be hoping that it progressed beyond fighting and into sex, Xander was staring at a teenage boy's wet dream. He guessed that the drool-inducing blonde was probably the source, probably some form of lust or sex demon, with an aura much like that of Naamahalat, and in her extreme provocation, she had released her aura instinctively.

There, in the middle of a blood-soaked battlefield, the two demonesses were now engaged in a sex-battle, each attempting to dominate the other, caressing, sucking, nipping, fingering, and more than a bit of hair-tugging, nipple-twisting, slapping, and Xander was panting, watching with disbelieving lust.

Though he had so recently experienced what he guessed was more than a year of devoted slavery, that had not in the least excluded any form of sexual debauchery he was aware of, he was still a teenager, and still hit hard by the absolute thrill of watching two hot girls fucking each other into submission.

Though he was bemoaning the lack of a camera or video-camera, Xander was enthralled by what he was watching, and was very quickly exceedingly hard. "Am I in Hell? Or Heaven?" Xander mused to himself. He was about to disrobe, and start stroking himself, already thinking about what sort of oil or lubricant he wanted to summon, when an image of the little ninja girl flitted through his head, throwing a bucket of cold water on his libido. "Crud, definitely Hell."

He had no idea yet how to resist a summons, or if it was even possible, and the idea of being summoned in the midst of his masturbation was horrifying. Unnoticed in the distance the eye fell from the sky, and the sexual combat vanished from his mind's eye.

"I need something to write on," Xander muttered, looking about his retreat and thinking. "Oh, right," he said, reaching into his pouch and pulling out the notebook he had made earlier. Flipping to a new page, he titled it 'Steps'.

'1. Find a way to control summoning.'

'2. Get there without summoning.'

'3. Find a way home.'

Putting the book away, Xander stared at his hands for a minute, then reached out and tried to find the glass eye again. To his surprise, he was not able to locate it, and immediately he recognized this as worthy of testing.

For the next several hours, Xander sent out his glass eyes, dropping them at different distances, in opposite directions. After dropping the first two, he turned back and tried to find the first, and continued in this fashion, switching from one to the other, until he found the limits of the range at which he could readily re-locate his eyes. Then he started experimenting on ways to make them more readily locatable.

After all, he had controlled them at a considerably greater distance than the more limited range he had for finding them again. Varying the liquid did not help very much, although using an unusual liquid not otherwise found in the area did make them easier to pick up.

It was a big difference though - within his range he could find them almost instantly, as if he could just reach out and touch them, like a pen he had placed just out of sight, and then grabbed again without looking. Beyond that range, however, it was like groping blindly in the darkness, feeling each thing he came across and trying to identify it. Not only did he have to identify it by feel, he also had to hope he came across it, since he could not even attempt to identify it until he could sense it.

Eventually, he discovered that if he himself became fluid, and slipped just a drop of himself into the sphere, not only did he not notice any injury or discomfort when he returned to solidity, he could sense the eye without difficulty as far as he tested it.

He sent one eye all the way to the mountain range, and even after turning his attention away, he was able to pick it back up instantly, and effortlessly.

Curious about what other advantages his fluid forms might offer, Xander went completely liquid, then played with cycling his hand through different liquids. As he had half expected, while when he went fully liquid he just sort of turned into a non-descript amorphous liquid, he was able to change his hand to any sort of liquid he thought up, and it retained its connection and continuity to himself, even when he made it half oil and half water.

He tried and succeeded in collapsing into a pool, and then from the pool's flat surface, sticking whatever part of himself he wanted up and out of it.

Careful observation during this bit of play revealed that much as a normal person is continually shedding dead skin cells, Xander splashed when he collapsed into a pool, and while some of the drops were part of him, and slid back to rejoin, moisture was left behind to dry that was not part of him, or no longer part of him, he was not quite sure which.

He also discovered that contrary to his initial expectations, he could actually pick up solid objects, and not with a blast of high-pressure water, but simply by holding them in his hands. Poking at one hand with the other, Xander discovered that depending on his concentration and intent, he could either touch himself just as if he was wholly solid, or he could literally join his hands, passing one through the other as if he were wearing a jacket and had slid both hands into the opposite sleeves.

This, combined with the fact that he could put part of himself elsewhere without injury, and his ability to control water, sparked an idea in his head that might completely obsolete his plans for hydraulic arms and manipulators for his remote eyes.

Drawing up a smooth sphere of himself and hovering it between his outstretched hands, Xander watched as it separated completely from him, flew some distance away, then with a bit of concentration, formed into a hand.

He had to temporarily drop control of one of his hands to get his mind to accept the remote hand as a hand, but once he did so, he was able to use the remote hand to pick things up and throw them, to scrape one rock against another like a piece of chalk, and then he reabsorbed the hand with no trouble.

That left only one significant test left. If he had a remote eye somewhere, could he somehow, maybe through the bit of him in it and his mutant regeneration, or through some other means, generate the fluid to form a hand?

A quick test later, and he discovered that in fact all it took was a moment's focused concentration to take a bit of water and either join it to himself, or reject it as part of himself. Once it was a part of him, he could feel it just he did the bits of himself that he had placed in all of his eyes by now, and he could readily use it as a hand.

He could not produce more than two hands. Actually, that was not quite right, he could produce as many as he liked, but he could only seem to control two at a time. With a part of himself in the eye, he found that he could now perform the task he had so recently failed at, of generating an effect at a distance to the eye without losing control over it.

This was because instead of focusing and concentrating to see through a distant eye, there was just a momentary disconnect, where the remote eye suddenly seemed to become his right or left eye. He found he had to close his actual eyes first to avoid disorientation, but with that done, moving and focusing his eye became almost automatic, and much smoother than it had been before, and controlling two remote water hands at the same time was equally smooth, and all three required little enough concentration that he could also focus to perform those tasks that had previously required enough attention to disable his eyes.

A brief search, now that he had more functional abilities, located the battle site, and while the two females were gone, along with the horse-like creatures, the corpses were still there, and Xander spent several minutes looting them.

Here he found an even better discovery, practically by accident. He was in full-fluid form for this, for he found it easier to ignore his local hands in that shape, since he could remove their structure completely, sinking into a pool while operating remotely. When picking up a bag on the belt of one of the demons, a small amount of powder had leaked out, and he had touched it, and had wondered curiously what it tasted like.

To his surprise, it tasted much like a hot pepper, and when he realized that the burning sensation seemed to be felt even back at his hideout, he solidified to verify it, and sure enough, his tongue was still burning.

A bit of testing in response to this determined that anything that was a part of him was connected at some fundamental level, and anything that he engulfed could actually be passed from one part of himself to another, without any apparent regard for the distance between them.

This discovery greatly sped up the recovery of the loot from the field, and soon Xander was looking over his loot. There was not terribly much, certainly not enough to compete with his haul from the locked chest, but the ease and manner of its recovery had Xander considering a career as a thief.

Of course, the knowledge that any particular item he grabbed might well have some sort of tracking spell on it dampened his enthusiasm substantially, and in the end, he kept only their weapons and gold.

Afterwards, he returned to experimenting with his abilities. Xander was no genius, even after his enhancements, and he did not particularly have any interest in trying to upgrade his intelligence. He loved Willow, his brainy school-obsessed best female friend, but he could not personally imagine being that involved in reading or school.

His focus was on cool, and neat, and showy. He worked with his fluid form's flexible nature, reshaping it into different forms, and combining it with his ability to move fluids with his mind to duplicate the appearance of a number of comic-book heroes and villains. He could not duplicate the actual technology in Iron Man or Dr. Doom's suits, for example, but he found he could duplicate their outward appearance pretty easily.

By using his ability to produce fluids, and to connect with them, making them part of himself, he found he could do a pretty good impression of Bruce Banner Hulking out.

It was a bit later before the idea occurred to him to try re-solidifying while transformed. Doing so in an imitation of powered armor worked, but left him encased in un-moving metal, but doing it while Hulked out worked great, and he actually felt tremendously strong.

Exiting what he now, having achieved some quite respectable villainous forms, redubbed his Evil Lair (TM), Xander hulked out again outside, where he could run and move without limits.

Though he was sure he remembered Willow complaining that the physics involved would not allow the Hulk to move as he did, Xander found that he was able to move quickly, in spite of his mass, and to pick up boulders that were physically larger than himself, and throw them. He was not, however, able to make the tremendous leaps that the Hulk was known for, nor to create a shockwave merely by clapping his hands.

Still, it was definitely food for thought. Heading back to his lair, Xander resumed his experimentation. Through returning to liquid form and re-solidifying, Xander determined that he could regain his original teenage boy appearance, though if he did not concentrate on his form while liquid, he would resume his new mature form.

The same applied to being Hulked, or otherwise modified - it took a degree of applied intent to maintain a form while transitioning back to solidity, and if he relaxed that, he would return to a more normal shape.

Going from the Hulk to the Wolverine revealed that he while he could readily, in liquid form, reproduce the claws bursting from the flesh of his hands, when he returned to solidity, they did not function, though he could feel them if he probed the flesh of his arm.

Shifting his attention a bit, Xander practiced shifting his appearance while solid, by turning just a tiny bit of himself into fluid long enough to reshape it. At first this started small, just lengthening his canines while smiling, or pointing his ears, but with practice he began to manage more complete changes, including sprouting fur like the Wolfman, or generating Wolverine style claws while still solid, or changing his skin tone on the fly.

He also practiced maintaining complete details while in liquid form, since without concentration he found that he tended to smooth out over time. That would be both distracting and less than impressive, although he could do a disturbing Faceless impression.

Other touches, like giving himself horns or claws, worked well, but more complex elements, such as a tail, wings, extra limbs and the like, tended to fail to work, and to be a bit painful, or to be almost completely numb to sensation and incapable of movement, hanging off his form limply when he went solid. The same elements were actually workable in liquid form, presumably because they did not depend on muscles, skeletal connections, or nerves to work properly, but if he did not keep their intended appearance in mind occasionally, they would slowly lose detail.

They would not stop functioning, but the first time he set something up and later looked in a hanging mirror and found he looked rather like the clay animated character Gumby from the children's show, he was motivated to work to keep his details.

His own appearance was the easiest to maintain in fluid form, but he discovered that if he focused and trained a particular form, it would become easier to maintain.

Just for the possibilities it offered for infiltration, Xander spent a little time trying to duplicate the forms of the demons he had seen. It did not occur to him immediately, but eventually he went on to reproduce the form he had the most experience with, Naamahalat. It felt a little weird, taking on a female form, and he was most hesitant about going solid. When he did so, he found that he was missing something, for though he retained the proper experience, his body did not react to his touch in anything like the fashion that hers had, and he knew her reactions well. He also determined during this bit of experimentation that he could produce duplicate clothing, particularly clothing he was familiar with, quite readily in liquid form, and that when he returned to solid form, it solidified as well. That was a good thing, since in fact his original stolen demonic clothing had unexpectedly transformed to liquid with him, which he had not realized until he went looking for it.

It put him in mind of his hair, and made him grateful that he was not doomed to go bald every time he shifted, due to an inability to form inorganic matter. He even found that he could remove the clothing he produced in this fashion, and when zooming in on it, as long as it was something he was familiar with, like denim or cotton, he could actually see the weave and stitching. "No more Arabian Nights for me," Xander crowed. They shifted back with him when he went liquid again, so he would have to remember to reform them each time, lest he reappear in the nude, but it felt good to be back in familiar clothes.

However, playing with a feminine form, and testing reproducing the ninja-style clothing he had only seen but not personally experienced, brought the little ninja girl to mind again, and his previous reluctance to attempt to change into a lizard. Knowing now that this liquid shifting did not appear to have the same permanent consequences, Xander spent a while practicing a few lizard-based forms for her.

They were still humanoid, of course, but he had seen enough lizard like demons to develop some looks that would bring lizards readily to mind.

For a brief moment he wondered what time it was, and how long he had been practicing, and whether he ought to sleep, or if he would be summoned soon, but he shrugged it off. He was not tired, there was no reason to sleep, and he would be summoned when he was needed, he was sure.

Thinking about how he had dug down and made blocks to hold out the sand, Xander wondered whether he should build further on his retreat. If he ever managed to leave this plane, he would not be able to bring it with him, so he was not sure it was worth the effort, yet for all he knew he might be here for years before he finally found a way to move on that would not see him snapped back whenever his summoner's fuel tank ran dry.

Furthermore, as cool as having his own Fortress of Solitude or Batcave might be, he was no architect or designer. Sighing he looked around the large chamber, and shook his head. "Not like I need the space for anything anyway," he said.

Of course, if he managed to find a way to control his own travel between the planes and could return here at will, then it might have more potential.

However, by that same token, if he did manage that travel, it might make more sense to build a hideout on an unoccupied world, should he encounter one.

Bored with his practicing, Xander sent up another eye, directing this one back towards the mountain. Now that he was focused on what it was seeing instead of testing what he could do with it, and how far he could push it, he became aware that it was much more comfortable and natural to control these spheres, now that they had a little of him in them.

Instead of having to think about rotating it, it was as simple as mentally turning his head. Zooming in and out still took a bit of focus, but the finer adjustments to bring a particular item into focus seemed almost automatic.

He sent the eye far into the sky, getting an overhead view to help him place his hideout on a mental map relative to the mountains. He also saw the embattled army his N... that Naamahalat fought in, far below, and tracing back from them to the mountains, he eventually found the path that led to the mountain fastness of the dragon Duke.

He could not simply slip his eye inside, since small though it was it was not capable of slipping through the tiniest cracks as he could when vaporous.

There was something he could do however, now that he had a better handle on these abilities. He found a secluded spot to set the eye down, then formed a large ball of fluid in the air where the eye was looking.

Finally, he focused and made the fluid a part of himself. Turning it airy, he slipped it back into the fortress, leaving the eye outside. Once inside, he explored what it took to control the small bit of himself, and in the end, he found it was simplest to actually allow it to form a head and arms.

Legs were pointless given that he was already floating, and though he could see through any given point when in gaseous form, having a head with eyes and a neck made focusing on what he saw easier, and gave him a framework for picking a direction, while forming arms and hands kept him from zooming off in a dizzying fashion everytime he thought about grabbing something.

Xander slipped down the hallway and took the first right. He was not really looking for anything, or doing this with any purpose except that of satisfying his curiosity and alleviating his boredom. Not that he could have put it in those words, even after his self-enhancements.

Unsurprisingly, the first room he reached on this hallway was a small guardroom. The door was open, and there were five lightly armored, scaly red demons lounging casually around a table playing some sort of betting game. There were small piles of coins in front of each of them, and as he watched, one of them shook a cup and cast the contents on to the table. As they rattled about, he saw that they were bones with symbols carved in to them and inked.

They were quite obviously unbalanced and asymmetrical, and he had no doubt that their outcomes were biased. Of course, if all the players knew their biases then it would effectively be no less fair than actual fair dice. He doubted that was the case.

It did bring to mind the thought that he could produce dice that were in fact fluid, though giving every appearance of solidity, as part of himself, and as such, could control their fall and movement. Of course, the point of that was somewhat missing, considering he could create chocolate-covered diamonds, or pour liquid gold into a form to cool into gold bars. It was not as though he would ever need to gamble for money.

Of course, by that same token, that meant that he could gamble freely. Xander played around for a few minutes, generating tiny shifts in the air, trying to tilt the dice to a particular outcome. He tired of this pretty quickly, however, since he had no real stake in the outcome, nor did he understand their betting well enough to know what impact he was having.

Moving on, as Xander drifted down the hall, he thought back to his junior high school days. The lounging guards were not terribly dissimilar in behavior or demeanor to high-school jocks, clearly prideful, irritatingly competent to someone who had never experienced that kind of success, and joking about their prowess with women. Many of the jokes he would have liked to set up on the jocks at school, but had not for fear of taking a beating--worth it to defend his friends, but not for a prank--would be ridiculously easy for him now, a thought that had occurred to him before. Now he pictured these guards in the place of those jocks.

He could see them coming rushing out into the hall at the sound of an alarm, only to slip and slide on an oil-slicked floor, or to shower after training and discover the shampoo was for hair-removal, bleach, or dye. Getting glue in place to get them bonded to their seats would be ridiculously easy now, with no risk of being caught.

For that matter, returning to his junior-high memories, the teachers that had picked on him throughout his schooling, for his slacker laziness, his failure to pay attention, his jokes with Jesse, would be easy targets. He remembered a particular story Jesse had told him, that he had overheard some high-schoolers talking about, where they had gone to a rival school and tagged the walls with spray-painted slogans.

Xander grinned. If he knew who the Duke's biggest rival was, or what his symbol was, he could tag them right now, with basically no risk to himself as far as he could see. After all, he could abandon this bit of fluid if he felt like it, and it would just dissipate into the air, leaving no possible evidence aside from maybe an unusual odour.

Xander had just found an interesting room containing a large rotating water wheel driving some sort of piston, when he was overtaken by a sudden wash of blackness, then a despairing cry.

"It didn't work, I can't . . . I can't have lost it, no, please."

Xander's vision cleared, and he found himself back in his body, which was transparent and gaseous, so that he could dissolve his head and arms, to better control the remote ones, and in front of him was a despairing Kushina.

Quickly he formed himself back up, focusing on simple black cloth pants and shirt to avoid any chance of his imagination failing and scarring the little girl for life, and solidified. "You rang?" Xander asked, deliberately mimicking the sepulchral tones of Lurch from the Addams Family television show. Not that he expected her to get the reference of course, but he hoped that the attitude and tone would get a laugh, and lift her out of her depression.

She did laugh, and looked with delight at him, but he was disturbed to realize that she was wearing a white bandage wrapped about her head.

"What is this?" he asked. "Were you injured?"

He had enough time to notice her nodding before the sound of a door opening interrupted her.

"Kushina Uzumaki!" a voice called out in alarm, and he turned to see the girl's teacher, who he remembered was named Mizuna, though he had not recognized yet if that was her first or last name.

"You . . . you . . ." She stuttered to a stop, staring with disbelief at Xander. A moment later she recovered her composure, and her face went blank. "You were instructed not to attempt summoning again, Kushina," she said softly. It did not sound like a reprimand to Xander.

"I had to be sure I still could," the ninja girl huffed indignantly, "besides, they just don't want me to get stronger."

Turning, she looked at Xander, and smiled up at him winningly. He recognized her expression, just like Willow when she was about to try to cajole him into something.

"You . . . you said you could heal me, last time?" she asked, widening her eyes artfully, and twisting one foot against the ground bashfully.

Xander laughed, sending a visible shiver through Mizuna. "Sure thing," he said, and handed her a cellophane wrapped butterscotch flavored hard candy with a liquid center of Esteban's Elixir of Rejuvenation. He could, of course, have introduced it more directly into her system, but he was both trying to avoid her having a bad reaction to something appearing in her mouth while she was fully conscious, avoiding revealing the complete extent of his abilities, and teasing her pretty teacher with a scene of her taking candy from strangers.

She grabbed it with delight, and had it unwrapped and in her mouth before Mizuna could do much more than call out "No!"

Mizuna made an abortive movement towards Kushina, then stopped, looking between them. It took Xander a moment to realize that she was genuinely nervous, and he remembered the comments about Death from his last time here.

He grinned at her unrepentantly, even as Kushina started unwinding her bandages. "No worries," he told her, "I wouldn't poison my summoner."

He was enjoying being looked at as if he was powerful, maybe even dangerous, and wondered if his dark clothing was contributing to that. It was quite a new and intoxicating sensation for one who had been looked at as a zero, a waste of space in school, both by the cool kids and by the teachers, useless by his parents, and as a pet by the demonesses.

His pleasure was cut short as the window burst in, several black garbed figures appearing in the room, quickly moving to separate him from Kushina and Mizuna.

He watched Mizuna closely, confirming his suspicion that these were the same sort of ninja that had appeared the last time he had been summoned. He had lacked a contract at the time, so had quietly disappeared until he could get one in place. Now, however, he had a contract with Kushina, and saw no reason to hide.

He could heal from any damage their blades could do, but he discreetly shifted to a fluid-form, maintaining his full details, just in case. In this form, he felt he could weather almost any attack without even taking any damage to need healing, and that quiet confidence was apparent in his body language, increasing the uncertainty and confusion of the watching ninja.

It helped that he knew that with his contract, he could appear next to Kushina no matter where they tried to take her, so the only thing he really had to worry about was them attacking her, and given Mizuna's reaction, he did not think that was on the menu.

Just to be sure, Xander put a bit of himself into a pocket of air in the corner of the room, watching for any reaction. When they failed to notice or react, Xander relaxed completely. If they could not detect when he used his powers, then that drastically reduced the likelihood that even as people knowledgeable about summoning they would have any means of restraining him.

"Hah," Kushina said, speaking up from where she was being hidden behind one of the masked ninja. "Told you I would become a summoner! I won't let any of you stop me from becoming a kunoichi!"

"Silence!" One of the ninja snarled, and Xander frowned.

"Identify yourself!" Another barked, staring tensely at Xander. Xander grinned, remembering that he was in fluid form. That meant that reshaping himself was easy.

He was about to form a sign behind and above him, with large words saying 'Summons' and an arrow pointing to him, when he remembered that he did not know how to write in their language. Deciding it was still funny and worth it, he did it anyway, though he used the demonic script.

Kushina recognized the word, repeated as it had been in the contract, and fell over laughing, startling the ninja.

One of them overreacted in his surprise, and threw an odd pyramidal knife thing at Xander. Since he was in fluid form, and was not purposefully maintaining an impenetrable exterior, it splashed into him and out the back, sticking into the wall behind him, with bits of Xander-juice dripping off the cord-wrapped handle.

"Hold it," another masked doofus shouted, grabbing the overreacting ninja by the arm, "before you get us all killed!"

The others were staring at Xander and his manic grin in disbelief. He laughed. Xander took the opportunity to set up a large number of audio-repeater air-spots, most set to drop his tone substantially, but a few going up, and spoke in impossible harmony. "I'm a summon," he told them, grinning wider as they gasped at the sound of the demonic language as the volume shook the room, and the deeper notes vibrated through their bones.

That apparently broke the nerve of another ninja, and he rushed forward screaming. Xander barely managed to resist flinching, but focused on holding his grin, even as the ninja's sword blade sliced through him from the right shoulder to the left hip. His substance rejoined instantly as the blade passed through, so though the blade sent a small spray of fluid onto the floor, Xander was unaffected.

"He's a summons," Mizuna cried, "Don't make him angry!"

Disinclined to allow his attacker to continue to strike at him, Xander let a puff of knockout gas appear directly in the ninja's lungs. There was a strange feeling when he did this, almost as though he had to push past some resistance to accomplish this, but the ninja dropped unconscious to the ground a moment later, and Xander shook off the odd feeling.

"Did you witness the summoning?" asked the apparent leader sharply, looking intently at Mizuna, over the sound of Kushina's continuing laughter.

"No, I heard her call out the summoning technique, and hurried to the room, afraid Kushina would overstrain her chakra coils with so great a flow so soon."

Xander perked up at hearing a word that had not translated; it sounded vaguely familiar, so perhaps it was being translated into English, but was a word he simply did not know?

The four standing masked figures glared at Xander suspiciously. "He could be an enemy nin, and have teleported into the room, timing it to appear to be the result of her summons."

The ninja the speaker was holding back spoke up then, sneering, "Besides, there is no way the little princess has enough chakra, much less the skills to perform a summoning."

Kushina sat up at this, her laughter ceasing. "Just cause you can't do it, doesn't mean I can't," she shouted, standing back up. Again the masked ninja positioned themselves between her and Xander, as if they could protect her from him.

The door behind Mizuna burst open, and she twisted to the side, barely avoiding it, as three more figures, one man and two women, all wielding more of the triangular blades, which Xander now noticed had a metal loop at one end, as if to be hung on a hook, or tied on a rope, burst into the room shouting.

Kushina growled again. "I've read the rules," she said loudly, barely below a shout, "you can't interfere between a kunoichi and her summons!"

"We can if it is not a summons," the sneering ninja retorted.

Four of the ninja in the room, including Mizuna, all turned as one to look at one of the new-comers, and Xander looked at her as well, curious.

She was a little shorter than Mizuna, maybe six or seven inches over five feet by Xander's estimation, where he would put Mizuna at nine or ten over. Her clothing was much more appealing to him than the bland black on black of the masked ninjas. The flowing garments were almost a dress, but the legs were separated, and the top was likewise divided, and the tight white top she wore underneath showed the lines of cloth wrapped around her chest, drawing Xander's eye.

It was her eyes he noticed next, however, for after nodding sharply, and putting her fingers to her forehead, they began to glow a soft green as she returned his stare.

She nodded sharply. "To my senses, he appears to be a summons. I cannot be certain it could not be duplicated, but I can see a connection between him and little Kushina."

Xander focused his senses on her the moment her fingers began to glow. To his surprise, he found he could feel some fluid coursing to both her fingers and her eyes, yet it was obvious to his eyes that it was a glowing energy, and nothing physical that was moving. Surely energy was not subject to his abilities?

Unfortunately, Xander could not think of anything that would break the tension here. He was used to cracking jokes, but that was not likely to be effective when you were the object of fear and uncertainty; they would probably just see it as mocking them. He was surprised that no-one seemed particularly mollified by the glowing-eye lady's words.

Bored and irritated that neither them attacking him and failing, nor the confirmation of the the teacher, Kushina herself, or the glowing eyed lady was enough to convince them, Xander considered just disappearing again, but remembered in time that if the lady had been able to see a connection between Kushina and himself, she might still be able to see it if he vanished, and then he would have revealed his abilities for nothing.

So instead, he consumed a potion with the intent that it should allow him to perfectly hide himself from the senses of any target group at will, then promptly applied that ability to everyone present except Kushina and himself.

Kushina was startled when all the ninja jumped, and started looking around and waving their blades around, as if to find someone who had disappeared, while Xander calmly walked between them and came to sit on the bed next to where she was standing.

She did notice that the bed did not sink under him, but she could not figure out why everyone suddenly could not tell where he was. He put his finger on her mouth when she was about to speak, and she just stared in disbelief as a moment later she was lectured by one after another of the stupid overprotective, overbearing idiots, and finally by her own teacher, Mizuna, after the others finally left.

A moment later Xander grinned at her, as Mizuna walked out of the door. "You can talk now," he told her, "they won't be able to hear us."

"How did you do that?" Kushina asked, awed. "It was like you were invisible or something, but if you turned invisible, how come I could still see you? Is it cause I summoned you?"

Xander nodded, not seeing any need to explain in more detail. "They were boring anyway," he said dismissively, making her giggle. She sat on the bed next to him, and pulled up her legs, tucking them under herself.

Leaning forward, Xander helped her finish removing her bandages, and checked to make sure her head was completely healed.

He sat back and regarded her. "So why is it they don't seem to want to let you be a summoner," he asked her. "You're obviously skilled and strong enough."

She blushed and her smile widened. "I am!" she declared, "I summoned you, after all, and I've never heard of a summons that can do so many things. I think some of the toads can make oil or something, and I was hoping that the lizards might be able to do some cool stuff, but setting up an ambush so you can't be seen is nothing to just vanishing right in front of all those jounin!"

Xander again took note of a word that seemed incompletely translated, but did not ask about it. "You didn't answer my question," he pointed out. "Why are they against it?"

She huffed and pouted. "I'm in the line for the succession," she said; well, more like whined, Xander thought, "so they don't think I should be risked, but it's stupid. It's not like I'm the ruler's daughter, or something. I'm like fourteenth or something! And my mom was a kunoichi! Yeah, so she was not in the line, but still, if mom was, why can't I be?"

"And what has summoning got to do with it?" Xander questioned.

"It shows I'm strong!" she said, standing up and pointing her finger in the air. "Stronger than all those dweebs in training right now! None of them can summon! I can do all the basic techniques just fine, but they keep blocking Mizuna from teaching me anything stronger. I don't need it, they say, I'm never going to go out on missions anyway.

"But if I'm a summoner, then they can't ignore that. Summoners are powerful, and summons make a big difference on the battlefield!"

Xander frowned. "Are you at war?" he asked, wondering about the reference to a battlefield.

Kushina shook her head, "Not right now, but a lot of people say it is just a matter of time. Rock won't ignore us forever. I heard they want Whirlpool to declare war on the Leaf, to split their focus, and they've threatened war otherwise."

"So there is war between the Leaf and the Rock?" Xander asked, confused, but assuming they must be the names of other cities or states.

"Well, not open I don't think, but everybody whispers about it. And anyway, there's always missing nin or teams from other villages when you're out of the village on a mission."

'Village?' Xander thought to himself. He considered what he had seen during his earlier brief sojourn with Kushina; he would have called it a town at the least, if not a small city. There were multi-story buildings, electrical lines, considerable traffic on the roads - though granted it had been foot traffic and carts, he had not seen any automobiles, nor even bicycles.

"Tell me about your village," Xander requested, handing her a glass of coke to try.

The Ways of the Ninja

Xander listened for the next hour as Kushina told him about her life, and the village she lived in, and the role of ninja in protecting and funding the village.

He was rather more interested when she started describing the techniques she had learned, and the energy they used to power them.

They were briefly interrupted when Mizuna re-entered the room, still unable to detect Xander's presence, and sat on the bed to discuss what had happened with Kushina.

She was frankly rather surprised when Kushina claimed to have already signed a contract with her new summon, though Kushina cagily avoided revealing his name. She was irritated at being doubted, and was afraid that if his name, as strange as it sounded to her, happened to match some known missing nin somewhere, her claim would be rejected.

Finally, Mizuna explained that she had convinced the village leader, and that in three days, in front of a small group of jounin and the leader himself, she would have a chance to perform the summoning technique and prove to them all that she did have a valid contract.

Kushina cheered at this, though she complained about the delay, even when Mizuna assured her it was necessary to be sure that she did not overtax her chakra coils.

When Mizuna finally left, after having put up and taped a heavy oiled cloth over the broken window and assuring her that it would be repaired within a few days, Kushina resumed her explanations for Xander.

He learned that chakra was a combination of physical energy produced by the body naturally, and spiritual energy gained from training. Once trained, it flowed down a fine network of pathways in the body, pathways that did not quite correspond to any of the physical networks the body contained, and pooling in certain points.

With training, a ninja could increase this energy, and draw it out in various ways. She demonstrated by walking on the wall in direct contravention of the laws of gravity, though she declined to do anything else, saying that it would only result in them being invaded again.

As a test, Xander provided her with a small cinnamon flavored jelly bean designed to restore her chakra levels, and she confirmed that it felt like it had returned everything she had lost on summoning him.

"That is so cool!" she squealed. "I've heard of things like this, but they're always clan secrets, or horribly expensive. And you're just like, here, and it tastes so neat. My mouth is still tingling!"

"Hmm... in that case, I think you should have some on hand." Xander produced a small bag of mixed jelly beans and showed them to her. "The red ones are just like the one you just tried, they'll restore your chakra level." 'No need to mention that I still don't understand what chakra is. Good to know that my magically produced food can have their own magical effects though.'

"The green ones are . . ." Xander paused, then produced another handful of beans. "Here, try these as I tell you about them, these just have the flavor without the effect. The green ones are sour apple and will restore your health. The black ones are licorice," and he grinned at her look of confusion and gestured for her to go ahead and try it, "and they'll refresh you as if you just had eight-hours of sleep, in case you have a mission that goes long."

He did not say anything in case it had not worked, since he was not sure how far his ability to produce magic within what he created through this ability he had given himself went, but he had produced the bag with the intention that it would automatically refill over time. It would not be instant, to avoid anyone else noticing and stealing it from her, but over time and if it was unwatched, it should produce more beans.

He wondered if he ought to make something like that for himself, as well, though since he did not think he had chakra in the first place, he was not at all sure it would be safe to take a pill meant to produce more.

"What about the pink, purple, and red-with-yellow ones?" Kushina asked, poking at the pile he had given her.

"Ah, well, since you liked it, I thought you might like some that you could have without effect, or to give to someone if they asked what you were eating, so you would not have to reveal what you had. So the pink ones are a flavor called cotton candy. Don't worry about what that is, just try it and you'll see. And the purple ones are grape, and the red and yellow ones are cinnamon, like the flavor of the chakra pill, but with a little more bite to them."

"These are amazing!" Kushina told him, as she chewed on the cotton candy one.

Xander would have asked her to continue, but instead faded to invisibility as a knock sounded on the door. When Kushina reluctantly responded, after having quickly concealed her new prize under her bed coverings, Mizuna entered, followed by another woman, this one taller, with blonde hair, blue eyes, and a fixed expression.

Xander promptly fled the room when he realized that the woman was a doctor of some sort, and was going to give Kushina a checkup to be sure she had not done herself harm in trying to summon again so soon.

Drifting up to the roof, Xander settled down, remaining an invisible patch of air since being on the roof in a ninja village was no guarantee of privacy, as demonstrated by the passage of leaping figures crossing the rooftops in the distance.

Reaching out, he felt the bit of air he had conjured in the room earlier, confirming that he could still sense it and differentiate it from the rest of the air in the room, then he reached out further.

He had wondered while listening to Kushina and thinking about the dangers of her life as a ninja whether there was something he could do to keep an eye on her, aside from giving her magical jelly beans, which would only help after an injury, rather than preventing it.

Now it occurred to him to consider his remotes, his little glass eyes, and particularly, the one he had left at the entrance to the Duke's mountain fortress. Had it been summoned here with him? Was it now in some far distant place? Or was it still in the Hell dimension? Xander focused on it, reaching out to see through it.

He grinned, staring at the now open door set in hewn rock, as a small war party marched out of it. Not only was it still in the Hell dimension, he could still reach it!

Pleased, he used the eye as a reference, and reached into the mountain and located the . . . creature, sort of, thingy . . . he really needed to figure out a name for them . . . that he had left there, and took control of it again.

He spent a minute examining the water wheel, then diving into the stream, and shifting to a liquid form when the rushing water threatened to break him up into hundreds of bubbles, he followed the descending stream up, beyond where it flowed into the room.

He followed a long tubular channel as it progressed up. It joined several other channels, becoming steadily larger, then opened up into a large room, where it passed in the open in a channel about waist height. Discreetly forming an eye in the far corner of the room by simply taking a bit of the air there and making it part of himself, to examine it, since poking his head up would be obvious, as he was in liquid form at the moment, he determined that he was in a large kitchen area.

Progressing up the path until he was just inside the walls again on the far side, he went airy and let the water push him invisibly back into the room. This allowed him to rise unnoticed into the room and get a better look at it.

The many workers here were shorter than the demons he was used to seeing, and rather more spindly, with thin arms and legs rather than the muscle-bound figures of the combat, blacksmith, and guarding demons he had seen previously.

Their clothing was fairly simple, shifts of plain brown or gray cloth with simple belts, small belt-pouches, and here and there an emblem pinned to the shoulder seemed to denote a minor increase in rank, as these were the ones bossing the others about, though even they were busily working.

They did not have near the sameness, however, that he had somewhat expected. For all that they shared a smaller stature and less muscular build, there seemed no end to the variety of body shapes. He could not identify as clear an animal influence as he had with the fox-men and turtle-men earlier, for here he would see a pig-like snout with pointy furred ears, or cat-like eyes paired with fish-like scales and yet a tentacled mouth.

There was considerable manual dexterity on display, as the small demons, which he guessed were about the size of a fifteen year old, almost adult human size, but a little smaller and thinner, wielded knives, ladles, tongs, spitting forks, skewers, brushes, twine, wire, drills, and even what looked like bulb syringes with fluent skill as they prepared platters of meats, meat pastries and pies, breads and rolls, and odd looking plants. Some did this with almost human hands on a fairly normal pair of arms, some had arms with more or fewer elbows, some had more than the usual two arms, or had arms that divided at the elbow, and others had tentacles instead of arms, or hooves, talons, or pincers in place of hands.

Sending his senses momentarily back to the bit of air in Kushina's room, he listened and blushed and quickly switched back. They clearly weren't done yet, and he really did not want to hear anything more about her monthlies.

He was tempted to taste what was being cooked here, but did not want to be responsible for their punishment if anything was discovered missing, so he moved on.

He did leave the eye he had formed in the corner, though not intentionally at the time. He simply forgot to remove it. It was a simpler eye than those he had first made. He had created it almost automatically when he wanted to see into the room without having to stick his head out, and instead of a glass sphere, or seeing through an interface between solid or liquid, it was quite literally just an eye; he had simply formed a bit of air, made it part of himself and made it an eye.

When he later looked back on it, he would feel a bit chagrined at the realization that much of his cleverness early on had been entirely unnecessary.

For now he was occupied with drifting up the pipes, and occasionally shifting his attention back to the ninja world, or to Kushina's room. Unfortunately for his intention to return to Kushina's side, Mizuna stayed with her until she fell asleep, and at that point he was ejected back to his world.

He settled his little phantom, as he chose to call it for the moment, into an open crack in the stone walls and shifted it into a dense liquid metal, so that it would not be carried off by the water, and returned his focus to his body.

A moment later, a very wide grin split his face, as Xander discovered that the bit of himself he had created and secreted in the corner of Kushina's room was still there. Just as the other bits of himself had not been summoned to the ninja world, so this separate bit of himself had not been returned when the summoning ended.

This was an important discovery, Xander felt, as it meant that if he was careful to always form a new bit of himself in each world he visited, he would be able to return to them at any time, and that in turn meant that any effort he put forth to create a home here would not be wasted.

A bit worried that only a single anchor present in the ninja's world would be too little, especially if it was discovered, Xander decided to fashion some more permanent anchors.

The first issue to solve was to make something solid enough that it would not be able to be simply blown away. After all, it would not help him having an anchor to the ninja world if it got scattered to the four winds. Besides, it made for an interesting challenge, given that he had no power over solid things, except for his own self.

That gave him the key, however, and after quickly forming another bit of himself in the ninja world, in the form of a bit of liquid mixed in the inkwell on Kushina's desk, where it would be less likely to be blown away, he started work.

Initially, he practiced in his lair, so as to not alert anyone watching Kushina. He started by forming a small bit of liquid, then fully inhabiting the liquid, and then shifting to solid form. It took a few tries, and some interesting focus and concentration to affect how exactly his fluid form translated into solidity, since he actually did not want living flesh this time.

Eventually he succeeded, transitioning a small bit of himself into the solid form of a plush doll, a little plush chameleon with cotton stuffing and large black eyes mostly concealed by cones of green fabric. There was a pouch of liquid on the base, as a weight to right the plushie and keep it from ending up on its back, along with a little pouch of fluid in each extremity, to allow limited mobility through his power. He was also hoping that the fluid would give him a focal point to ensure he could transition it back to fluid even after he pulled his consciousness back out of it.

As he expected, he could not withdraw the connection it had to himself when it was solid, as it was not then directly subject to his power, so he could not use this as a manufacturing method for gifts for his friends, but for anchors it would do fine.

Passing the plushie through himself from one fluid bit to another worked, though it felt unpleasantly like he was a sock or a pair of jeans being turned inside out.

Remembering then that he had not yet explored fully his ability to emulate NASA, he fashioned a new form from a fresh batch of liquid, modeling it after Ben Grimm of the Fantastic Four as a suitably solid shape, as well as one more resistant to heat than merely Hulking out would give him. He used a separate batch of liquid to minimize the risk to himself, since what he was about to try was the equivalent of standing at ground zero for a rocket engine test firing, then entering it and going momentarily airy, he slipped out of the hideout and headed for the canyons in which he had recently played hero, leaving his original self within his hideout.

Finding a suitable canyon, and settling himself firmly against the wall, he let himself move into solid form. As he expected, he did not have enough of an idea on how to make a form like this workable, and he had to return to liquid form to shift his hands together, cupped as if firing a hadouken from the Street Fighter games in the Sunnydale Arcade.

Back in solid form, he produced a pilot light, and then started feeding liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen into his cupped hands. As the flame caught and started, he started increasing the flow rate, and as the roar built in the still air, he quickly tried to form a shield of air between his hands and the flame.

He was forced to stop almost immediately, having lost control of the process when he split his attention, being forced off track by the unexpected sensation of heat in his fingers. Apparently, he could feel them melting, even if they were stone.

Reforming, he tried again, this time starting with the shield of air, basically a cup of air that he forced to remain still, then igniting the oxygen and hydrogen within the cup.

After just a few tries, he was being pressed back against the canyon wall, straining against the immense force, as a spear of brilliant blue roared out of his cupped hands.

To his amazement and confusion, when his control faltered and it slipped to the side, instead of looking like a smooth lance of blue light, as he had pictured it, it looked wavy, with an effect almost like line art, where the bands of color came together and diverged again, forming what appeared to be a series of diamonds of remarkable brightness.

As he tried again and again, thrilled with the forces he was wielding, and marveling at the effect it was having on the far canyon wall, he only slowly became aware that he was actually moving his arms and legs, bracing against the strain, and adjusting his aim slightly. When he realized this, he promptly stopped firing completely, and focused on himself.

He was still solid, as far as he could tell he had not subconsciously gone liquid, and a quick production of a mirror in the air demonstrated that he was in fact still encased in rock, still looking very much like the Thing of the F4. Shifting slowly, Xander was startled to realize that he could actually see his muscles bunching and flexing beneath his rocky exterior, as it cracked and reformed.

A bit freaked out, Xander quickly went fluid and returned to his normal shape and went solid again, watching himself warily, lest the rocky plates return. After another minute of waiting, he sighed and slumped to the ground, startled, curious, and more than a bit afraid.

After some pondering, he looked up again and realized that the self he was seeing in the mirror wasn't, that this was a fresh bit of liquid he had used, and in spite of his looking just as he had looked the last time he had looked in the mirror, his body was still in the hideout waiting for him, a fact he quickly verified by shifting into it and looking about, then shifting back again.

Distracted by slowly growing sounds of movement, Xander went transparent and quickly returned to his hideout, too busy being worried to care what the investigating demons would think of the aftermath of his personal rocket test.

Getting to his hideout and seeing himself already there, though expected, was still a bit unnerving, but he knew that he needed to at least try to understand what was going on, so he shifted again, solid to liquid and back, returning to his stone form, then sat down; though it was more of a collapsing thump than a proper sit, as he discovered that he was not quite that fully bendable yet.

Ignoring his odd position, he focused his senses inward, examining this body with his ability to sense fluids, and comparing it to his original body. Even as he watched, he could see the internal fluid networks becoming more defined. In slight disbelief, but with a growing idea of what might be happening, he turned his attention to the distant plush toy in Kushina's room, and discovered that it too had made a degree of progress at forming a network, the little pockets of fluid he left had tendrils making their way towards each other.

Shifting back into his own body, where he could speak, Xander tried to reason it out, thinking aloud. "Nothing about being able to control liquid explains a solid form developing veins or whatever. So it isn't the fluid. And I definitely did not form anything like that in the plushie, so it is not me subconsciously doing a better job making bodies, not when I can look at them and watch it growing. So it has to be something innate . . . it has to be the healing factor! When I went solid, those became part of my body, and that stupid healing factor has already put me back together from basically barbecue." He shivered, remembering the horror of that experience.

Quickly, Xander pulled the plush toy back to his side, unwilling to leave it there until he was sure. "It is either going to fix their bodies back to a point where they are alive . . . or it is going to correct them until they match my original super-soldier optimized form."

Xander watched the plushie closely, figuring that it would show those sorts of changes the fastest, as it was further from a human form than the rocky victim of cosmic irradiation. But while the changes continued at a very slow pace, he never saw the slightest sign of a change to the exterior.

A bit relieved, and a lot disturbed, Xander finally returned the plushie to Kushina's room, his reasons for wanting an anchor not having changed, though he made a note to check it regularly, to make sure it had not decided to keep going, and become fully human in form.

He returned to the Thing shape then, grumbling that his term of 'phantom' did not work at all in applying to this one, as it had far too obvious of a physical presence to support that, and getting clumsily to his feet, began pacing around his chamber, stretching and moving, then trying to talk. As he anticipated, his healing factor appeared to respond to this, improving the areas he was actively exercising more rapidly, which helped explain why it had happened at all. While in that shape and producing the rocket thrust, he had obviously been trying to shift and adjust to it, and given his inability to do so, his healing factor had kicked in to fix the problem.

When even after getting his rocky shape to the point that he could do a handstand in it, its appearance was still that of a rocky behemoth, Xander set aside his worry.

Instead, he turned his attention to the substance he had sensed so briefly in the earlier confrontation in Kushina's bedroom. He had heard a fair bit about it later from Kushina, especially regarding the almost magical effects that skilled practitioners could achieve with it. Attempting to directly produce this chakra at first seemed to have no effect.

Xander was surprised and confused at this, as he had felt certain that when the strange-eyed lady's use showed up to his senses, it meant this chakra stuff was subject to his powers.

Focusing his senses, he again tried to produce it. This time he was able to sense it as he produced it, but it was simply dissipating into the air, and doing nothing interesting or useful, and he sighed, resigning himself to returning to it later, when he had learned more of it, and of how the ninja coaxed it into working for them.

Remembering that he now had a way to get to the ninja world without being summoned, Xander quickly shifted into the plush toy in Kushina's room, then promptly formed another vaporous self and switched into it, then moved as quickly as he could away from Kushina's apartment building.

Rising into the sky, Xander picked a road and drifted along it, out of the village. He did not expect much conflict would be visible in the village itself, but if there was no conflict going on, what would they need ninja for? Logically then, if he continued looking long enough, he would eventually find a fight he could watch, which might give him more clues what this chakra stuff was all about.

As he drifted he also slid higher in the sky, steadily increasing the field of his view. He stopped while he could still discern individuals on the ground, though they looked as small as mice. While he drifted, Xander began adjusting this new shape, not wanting it to be associated with himself if he ended up using it where it could be seen.

Instead, he modeled it after some of the ninja he had seen, average height and build, vaguely Oriental features, if perhaps a bit caricatured due to the lack of a nearby model to use as a base, black on black on black clothing and mask.

He saw the occasional traveler or group of travelers on the road below. It was more than a dirt track, as there was no sign of rutting, so either it was regularly graded, or it was made of sterner stuff than rock and dirt, but it was definitely not asphalt, and there were no painted lines on it, no lane markings.

It wound through open fields, and as he rose higher, on either side Xander saw water glimmering. There had been something naggingly familiar about the ninja village but he had not previously been able to place it. Now he did, it was the salt smell of a distant ocean. Sunnydale was not exactly on the water, but compared to the desert and mountains he had experienced in the Hell dimension, this place was much closer to the humidity and faint tinge of salt in the air he had grown up breathing.

The road drifted towards the coast and the water came further into view and on it Xander spied a small fishing fleet. He was tempted to go and have a look, but reminded himself that he was looking for a ninja fight so he could get a better look at how they used this chakra stuff.

He could not help daydreaming as he continued down the coast of the tremendous advantage his powers would give in a naval conflict. Whirlpools, waterspouts, infinite ammo for his personal broadsides, or even just pulling up a massive wave to tip a ship over; if he ever wanted to be a pirate, he could definitely pull it off in a big way.

Xander had just spied some mountains in the far distance, barely visible on the horizon, having passed over several intervening bodies of water during his musing, when a sudden flare of light below attracted his attention, and he immediately headed for it.

He was promptly rewarded with a visible shockwave below, rippling through fields of grass, and zeroing in on it, he found a small group of ninja engaged in battle. He could not immediately identify how many there were, as some of them appeared to be erupting from the ground as though lying in wait, while several on the other side looked so identical that Xander wondered if he had somehow been affected by the shockwave and seeing double because of it. Though it was more like quadruple than double.

A moment later one of the fighters was struck by a spray of thrown metal stars, and promptly collapsed in a splash of water, like a popped water balloon.

Picking up his pace, Xander zoomed down to where he could clearly see all the fighters, then stopped and engaged his full senses, trying to get as much detail as possible as the ninja pulled off their techniques.

Though weapons were flying almost continually between them, from what he could see, they were not directed at the fighters themselves, and where they were, the targeted ninja had no trouble deflecting them. Rather, they were being employed to break up the balloon clones, to disrupt other special effects, and to stop the completion of the fancy hand-waving that Xander now saw accompanied most of the special effects.

"Hollywood would love this," Xander mused. It was kind of odd, as to his mind, what they were pulling off belonged more in a Chinese Kung Fu film, with badly dubbed voices, rather than a ninja flick. Although the disappearing underground and popping up again elsewhere was pretty ninja-ish, he supposed.

There was a minor degree of color difference in the clothing, as Xander started to identify the sides involved. One of the sides seemed to favor dark browns and tans, and the other had more green and blue. Their techniques showed a similar shift, with the brown/tan fighters doing the move through the ground trick, pulling up walls of earth to block attacks, and sending waves of rock at their opponents. The other side seemed to be firing water bullets, forming those water balloon guys; which actually Xander was fairly impressed by as they seemed to be able to make attacks, until the opponents got in a good solid hit, at which point they collapsed into water; and calling up concealing mists to hide their attacks.

From what he could tell, things were pretty evenly matched, and given that he saw nothing about either group of fighters that looked particularly like the insignia he had seen in Kushina's village, Xander was not inclined at first to pick a side.

Instead, he watched and learned, focusing his water senses, especially trying to work out the water-balloon people. Pulling up a mist or firing a water bullet was no great feat, and he could already travel underground without much trouble. He could form additional liquid bodies as well, but he could not have multiple of them attacking at once, which seemed pretty neat.

One by one the fighters fell, and it was not until only two were left that Xander felt forced to intervene. It came down to one female in brown and tan, injured and exhausted, against a less injured guy and the three duplicates of him on the other side. Even at the last, Xander did not intend to interfere - it was not as if they were attacking an unarmed civilian, after all.

But when the man stood back and started to loosen his pants while his duplicates moved in to overpower the tired kunoichi, Xander had had enough. Fighting was all well and good, but he was not going to stand for rape.

He went solid and dropped into the clearing from above. "That's enough," he said, staring at the leering man. The ninja barked a laugh.

"She's mine," he growled, and with a fluid series of hand-motions, he summoned five more of himself and sent them at Xander.

Xander laughed. These duplicates were nothing more than bags of water, and as such, useless against him. Still, he wanted to maintain his cover as a ninja, so he mimicked some of the hand-signing motions before flicking his fingers, popping the balloon-men simply by jerking the water that made them up in several directions.

The other ninja snarled, even as Xander noticed the woman collapse to her knees in fatigue. His hands flashed again, and the area was swaddled in a dense fog.

Before Xander could react, he felt a sharp pain, and looked down to find a blade sticking out of his chest. He immediately went fluid, and the sword fell free, the hole sealing up. He struck back, drawing out one of his spiked balls from his pouch, and ripping the fog away with his power, he sent the spiky implement hurtling into the other ninja.

It met no resistance and the other ninja faded from view even as several projectiles splashed through Xander. Xander replied with several more attacks, taking a water bullet to the chest with no ill-effect, but doing no damage in return.

Realizing that he was being tricked somehow, Xander closed his eyes and reached out with his power, finding the two nearest human type bodies. A quick check confirmed one was the woman. He grabbed the other with his power, pulling it in front of him. He was surprised when he opened his eyes and could see nothing in front of him where his power insisted the enemy was.

A moment later Xander saw a long swirl of water coalesce from the various puddles remaining from all the water attacks, and form into a beautiful long, sinuous dragon, that roared and came at him. He almost failed to react, he was so surprised at its beauty and at the amazing detail in the technique; but it was, after all, water, and though he again encountered a curious resistance, he was able to stop it in its tracks.

Focusing back on where his senses told him the enemy was, he focused harder, forcing the idiot to be completely still, and delving deeper, concentrated on all the iron-bearing blood. With one sharp push, he moved all the blood five feet behind the nin.

Instantly a veil seemed to pass away from his sight, and he saw the ninja hanging in the air in front of him, quite dead. Xander shifted his vision slightly, looking at the dragon that was still hanging in the air as well, somehow holding together, because none of the water forming it could move, though he was sure that like the veil, whatever technique had been driving it as gone.

"Stay!" Xander barked at it with a silly grin, then he turned and dropped his hold on them both as he walked over to look at the lady. He felt a little guilty about not caring if she died, but then, she was a ninja, surely she expected any mission could be her last. Even Kushina, who had never had a mission yet, understood that.

That did not mean he had to stand still for rape.

He produced a healing draught and massaged her throat until she swallowed it. When she jerked up and grabbed for a knife, he stepped back and waited, giving her time to look about and see her assailant, and her dead companions and enemies. Her eyes widened, and she cast him a quick look. When he did nothing, she darted over to the ninja he had killed, checking him and confirming that he was dead.

Xander had to admit, from the front he merely looked surprised, his eyes still open and staring, his body not yet stiff. When she flipped him over and saw the intricate pattern of cuts on his flesh where his blood had taken the most direct path out, leaving his skin traced with an imprint of his circulatory system, she visibly relaxed, then glancing over the other ninja, she sighed.

Rising slowly, she walked hesitantly over to Xander, and then fell to her knees in front of him. She bowed forward, pressing her face to the ground. At first, Xander thought this was a ritual of gratitude, but when he leaned down to hear her better, he realized that she was offering herself to him. "Master, please accept this unworthy one into your service," she was saying.

He blushed to hear it, though this blush was well concealed by his face mask. He reached out and touched her on her shoulder, and when she looked up at him, he lifted her to her feet. She was a few inches taller than the shape he was in right now, and her exposed face was both pretty, blood-stained, and showing what he read as nervousness and acceptance.

"You do not wish to return to your village?" he questioned her, trying to suppress the lecherous urges reminding him that he had not had sex since leaving Naamahalat and this was a hot chick offering herself to him!

She gave a hard glare towards the fallen figures, then shook her head. "The mission has failed, I cannot complete it alone. If I return without them I will be branded a failure and given to their family to atone. I have no strength left to fight you, and as a missing nin I would not last long alone against the hunter-nin. You are strong, but even the strong may have use for the weak. Will you accept me into your service?"

Xander nodded. He did not really know what he would do with her, but certainly he could protect her against other ninja, and having saved her he felt some responsibility. Besides, having an adult, trained ninja meant he could get demonstrations of chakra techniques directly, without having to search for random fights to observe them.

The only question was where to take her? And how to get her there?

Remembering his failure to form a fluid/magic portal to his home, he wondered if knowing and experiencing this world and the demon plane would be enough for him to form a portal between these two places. If it worked, it would reassure him that he could move between different dimensions without having to depend on a summoner existing on the other side, since the plane summoners on his home world accessed was specifically blocked for him.

His decision made, Xander tried it, doing nothing outward to show what he was attempting. He focused his power on forming an eight-foot tall fluid portal between his current location and his hideout on the demon plane.

When a beautiful plane of shimmering silver appeared in the air, a tall oval eight feet high and five feet across, Xander grinned inwardly, and gestured for her to precede him through it.

She looked at him worriedly for a moment before nodding, and leapt through the portal. Xander jumped through after her, remembering only afterwards that this body was one he had formed in Kushina's hometown, and so now he had three bodies in the chamber.

His new ninja looked askance at the massive orange Thing-clone sitting unmoving in the light of a single glowing orb overhead, but said nothing. Xander stood still behind her and relaxed, making sure he was well balanced, before he slipped his mental focus out of his ninja form and into his original body, in which he then stood and walked over as if to greet the returning pair.

He had only a moment to decide if he was going to reveal the extent of his powers to her, especially the fact that he WAS the ninja she had just given her loyalty to, and though he was not sure it was the right thing to do, he also knew from what he had learned in his time with Naamahalat that some secrets were best kept, and that a show of confidence in the right circumstances could prevent a battle.

If the ninja-him deferred to the true-him, she would probably ascribe greater power and respect to him, which would reduce the potential for conflict.

His performance might have been a bit stilted, as he could only control one of his forms at a time in full, but with the ability to partition that control, to manipulate the head of one while controlling the body of the other, for example, he was able to pull off what he hoped was a convincing performance as he welcomed them back and dispersed the gateway.

When he asked for an introduction, the kunoichi blushed furiously as she realized she had not given her name even to her new Master. "This unworthy one is called Mayu," she said, directing her words to the black-clad ninja-Xander.

After Xander finished his little impromptu play, he decided to bring Mayu outside and let her demonstrate her skills for him. Curious if the portal thing would work between closer places, Xander tried it, attempting to form a similarly sized portal between his chamber and the outside.

To his surprise, though at first it looked almost mirror-like, when the fluid stilled, he realized he could actually see the outside directly, as if it was simply a window. Glancing over at the rocky self, Xander decided it would make sense if they were all to come and watch, and so he made a deliberate gesture as he expanded the portal, then stepped aside and shifted into the Thing-self, standing and nodding to his ninja-self, and passed through the doorway.

Co-ordinating his activities was not the most comfortable thing, and Xander knew he would have to work out something better before too much longer, as first he, then Mayu and his ninja-self passed through the portal. He had introduced the orange brute as Tarou, which he understood to mean 'big son' in the ninja tongue, and the nin as Ryu, or dragon. For himself, the closest he could come to Xander in their tongue was Sanjuro, which apparently meant thirty, but frankly, coming up with names on the fly was easier than actually trying to make them seem like properly separate individuals.

He hoped that everything was new enough and strange enough that Mayu would not be able to piece together what was so odd about the way the three moved before he had a chance to find a solution. Hopefully one that did not involve him taking another long step away from being human; though looking at the newly named Tarou, he was not sure he could actually get any further.

Ryu stepped forward and looked at Mayu. "Please show us your skills," he asked her.

Mayu looked back and forth between them for a moment, before nodding. Xander focused on her with all his senses as she went through a series of hand signs and then thrust her hands forward. A veritable forest of stone spikes, long and thin like needles, thrust up from the dry ground. Xander nodded thoughtfully. That looked pretty effective if you were facing a small group that was well-bunched, or to close off a stone passageway. It was also something that he was not sure he could duplicate with his powers, which was a point in her favor.

She went through another series of handsigns and opened her mouth, spitting out an impossible amount of mud, that quickly rose into a wall before her and hardened.

She made a quick slashing gesture with her right hand, and the wall crumbled away. Another series of handsigns, and she slammed her foot into the ground, and a wave seemed to pass through the ground in front of her, shooting forward and suddenly erupting about twenty yards away into a large stone wall.

She gestured again, and the wall fell forward, sending up a great cloud of dust.

After a couple more techniques, each appearing to take more out of her than the last, ninja-Xander gestured for her to stop, and had her eat a generic healing pill. He watched and monitored as she consumed it, looking surprised as she perked back up, but he did not see more of the chakra energy appear in her. Then he had her consume a chakra-restoring pill, and now found that he could see, as her coils refilled, the coils themselves, and the brighter or thicker spots where the energy pooled.

Renewed, she continued her techniques. Xander paid particular attention when she demonstrated a cloning technique that formed a duplicate of her from some of the mud she had produced earlier. It took on her coloration and appearance, duplicating even the motion of her hair in the wind, moving about independently, as far as he could see.

While he was interested in the rest of her techniques, and was impressed by some of them, he kept returning in his mind to the clone technique. Somehow, she had effectively been in two places at once without any apparent mental strain, though it had obviously required a fair bit of chakra. That was not a particular concern of Xander's, since he was confident he could produce as much chakra as he desired, he merely needed to learn how to control it. The water clones made by the ninja he had killed had been clearly directed by him, moving at his command without a word. This clone, on the other hand, seemed to be more free, less restrained and controlled.

She was clearly determined to impress him, and he was equally sure that the austere desert had her confused and worried, but she remained focused and plowed through her repertoire. When she finished, he questioned her and learned that she knew several techniques she could not demonstrate, due to certain lacks.

When he realized that one of those lacks was due to them not gathering her equipment and supplies from the battlefield, he promptly formed a portal back to it.

Returning his actual self to the safety of his hideout, he brought Tarou-Xander, intending to load him down with the weight of the equipment. After all, if she needed equipment, and the other ninja were dead, there was no reason to leave it with them.

He allowed her to perform an earth-style technique to bury the bodies after she gathered what she wanted, and found himself impressed by the apparently untouched ground that was present afterwards. She had concealed the bodies in the ground, and at the same time sealed the rents in the ground, restoring the uninterrupted pattern of grass.

She was just passing back through the portal, which Xander had dropped and reformed so that the far side was back in their hideout, when he noticed a shimmering figure out of the corner of his eye.

What he saw would eventually lead him to a new understanding of his power, but at the moment, it merely looked like he had forgotten something, as the water dragon the non-dead lecherous ninja had summoned was still present.

Furthermore, it was sitting on the ground, looking at him. Xander tried to remember exactly what it had looked like when he first noticed it, but it had been in the middle and then the aftermath of a battle, and though his mind had been improved by the super-soldier serum, it was really merely the correcting of minor damage done in his upbringing; nothing like a dramatic increase in intelligence or memory.

He waved at it casually, willing it to disperse, only to realize, moments too late to do anything about it, that its eyes had been tracking him, for he had not stopped moving when he saw it. An instant later he had passed through the portal, having already sent Tarou through, and he put it from his mind as an oddity of chakra to look into later. It would be no hardship, since studying chakra was his intent for the next while anyway.

When Mayu turned out to have a map of the world in her supplies, Xander's attention was grabbed, and the unusual water-dragon quickly forgotten.

Xander avoided showing any particular interest in Whirlpool, not wanting to find out that Mayu had some lifelong feud against them or something. There were too many advantages to having a kunoichi working for him, both in terms of learning about their world, of learning things to help Kushina, and in terms of his eventual return to his own world.

Chakra

After Mayu had set up her tent inside the hideout and gone to sleep, Xander finally had time again to consider how he was going to do this. He did not want to try anything with chakra while on the ninja world, nor while he was near Mayu. However, he was also leery of traveling too far from his current location on the demon-plane.

One of the things he had learned during his time with Naamahalat was that this area of the hell plane was fairly stable and had familiar physical rules, but that this did not apply across the entire expanse. It applied here because this is where armies trained and generals tested them against each other; but beyond the desert were realms belonging to other demon lords, and in them the very laws of physics could be very different, not to mention the demons themselves.

According to the discussions he had overheard between Naamahalat and the most intelligent, by Xander's judgment anyway, of her lovers, Janithagdatra, there were some realms on this plane that regularly broke the minds of any human souls brought there, simply to look upon them. Her descriptions of them brought to mind the art of M. C. Escher, with which Xander was only vaguely familiar. For that matter, they had also spoken of demons that broke human minds to look upon.

Xander had yet to actually encounter another of the human souls supposedly present on this plane, but he was not particularly concerned about them. From what he had learned, one of the reasons Naamahalat had so readily identified him as a gift and as a sorcerer, was that the only way humans came to this particular hell was through contracts. Basically, selling your soul meant just that, and any soul here could be assumed to have been sold by themselves, and so were themselves responsible for whatever they experienced. At the very least, they were demon-summoners, not generally nice people, which is what was so confusing for him about Kushina.

But in all likelihood, her summoning attempt would never have reached this plane had he not been wearing so many cartouches; which also implied that several of those cartouches must have matched her summons in some way or another. After all, everything else he had learned implied that it was his own home world that the damned souls here came from, but just as clearly, this was not where those consigned to Hell, biblically speaking, came.

There was no gate to Hell here, no steady influx of damned souls. Human souls were a rare prize, and most were treated like trained pets, much as Xander had been. At least, that was the case in this relatively Earth-like portion of the plane.

He was not particularly worried about exploration, per se, since it should become obvious pretty quickly if he started to get outside the safe region, but by the same token, trying to get a considerable distance away to avoid disturbing Mayu's chakra senses meant, at the moment, needing to go in a known direction, since he only had the time of her sleeping to explore this without having to try to divide his attention, and traveling at high speed in an unknown direction precluded the attention needed to avoid crossing into dangerous territory.

Luckily, Xander thought he had a reasonable solution to both challenges. He had successfully made portals, both locally and across dimensions. He knew he would be blocked in making a portal to his home world, but hopefully other worlds and dimensions would not be blocked to him.

So he attempted to open a portal to the Moon of an Earth that had never developed sentient life. He spent a fair few minutes focusing on the various details of what he was searching for, but he was pretty confident that if worlds as different as the ninja world and the demon world could exist in the universe, then there was at least a good chance that this would work.

When the portal formed it was black as the night, and he was a bit nervous about passing through it, so instead of using his actual body, he used his power to pick up Tarou and toss him through, without being in that form.

Then he reached out to Tarou, to verify that he still existed, and slipped into that form. He was on the other side of the portal alright, and since Tarou was in physical form, he found himself in quite some pain as the air ripped itself from his lungs. A moment later he had produced a bubble of Earth-normal air at sea-level pressure around him, and his healing factor quickly took care of the damage and pain the explosive decompression had done to his lungs.

Looking around, he determined that the surroundings certainly looked barren enough to be the moon, though the light was oddly more blue than he had expected. As soon as he looked up and saw the deeply black sky with a blue sphere looming overhead, he understood why, and at the same time, confirmed that he was indeed on an Earth's moon.

Equally obvious from the complete darkness of the night half of the Earth, he was on the moon of an Earth that had no modern humans, and so he assumed that his portal had worked properly, and it in fact had no sentient life whatsoever.

He had felt an intense cold briefly, but when he had produced the air, it had been at a normal temperature, and maintaining it there was well within his abilities. His feet were a bit cold, but given that he was on a cold, dead world, that was no surprise, nor of great concern, given that his feet were wrapped in stone or a close equivalent.

Reassured that he was neither in danger, nor likely to be discovered, Xander dismissed the portal and proceeded to call up a mass of chakra. It hovered almost invisibly in front of him, and Xander considered it. He still did not know the various hand signs, nor were such likely to work for him unless he managed somehow to duplicate the 'chakra coils' these ninja had inside.

So the question was could he somehow, through his control of fluids, applied as a control of chakra, achieve the same effects?

As before when he simply summoned chakra it was nearly invisible, and did nothing. What if he applied his intent to it?

Pushing the chakra down into the moon-dust, Xander began playing with intent, trying to project to the chakra what he wanted it to do. The results were underwhelming, as the mass of chakra, once released from his tight control to allow it to do what it would, simply dissipated into the ground and air.

Summoning a new batch, Xander tried again and again, from focusing his intent, to visualizing a result, to willing it to work, and nothing stubbornly continued to happen. Remembering that Mayu had used a vocalization in addition to the hand-signs, Xander tried quoting her words, equally to no avail.

Giving up on interacting with the chakra directly, certain there was something he was missing, but tired of trying to find it, Xander turned to trying to produce the chakra as it was at the time of release of a technique.

This bore much better fruit, and Xander was quickly producing results, though at first they were pretty disappointing. For example, his attempt at the wall she had produced at first failed miserably. Of course, given that this chakra had somehow been released inside of her, to allow her to vomit forth great quantities of mud, Xander was not eager to directly duplicate it at any rate.

The more distant wall, produced by stomping the ground, on the other hand, worked perfectly, though the cloud of dust produced did not seem inclined to settle to the ground in any great hurry.

After a few more failed experiments Xander was able to combine his own power-based ability to produce mud with the chakra, imbued with intent at the time of its creation instead of afterward, and reproduce the appearing wall effect.

It took him quite a few more tries to produce the mud-clone, however. As it turned out, producing chakra imbued with the intent to produce a clone of him did not work, nor did trying to duplicate the chakra output of Mayu, which gave him a very startled clone of Mayu that he quickly dispersed.

The Mayu-clone did give away the basic problem, though. Somehow, while the chakra was still inside her, Mayu was imprinting herself into the chakra, so it had her shape already understood in it.

With that key in hand, Xander was able to produce clones of himself that seemed almost indistinguishable to a superficial examination. Use of his actual power was beyond them, however, and examining them with his power readily revealed that they were composed of a uniform mass of fluid, a very different signature from that of an actual human, where the fluids were arrayed in overlapping patterns, of which he could identify the circulatory, for it had the heart, and the heartbeat, the nervous system, for it was obvious as it tied in to the brain, and the respiratory, which though perhaps not technically part of the human body, had nonetheless a fluid present in it in a very characteristic pattern.

The chakra coils were also noticeable, though he lacked them, as did the demons he had encountered. Further, both himself, the ninja, and the demons had a number of other patterned systems of fluid, overlapping to various degrees, and a few much simpler ones. For example, he could readily identify the stomach, and the bladder, and the small sac of fluid associated with some of the demonesses' fangs, and on one, the barb on her tail.

That complexity that denoted a lifeform in his sort of fluid-sense was very notable in its absence here; the clones did not even have a chakra system, merely a pool of chakra.

Unfortunately for his purposes, while the clone-Xander appeared to know his intent, and could answer questions, he had no inkling of what it was thinking or seeing.

"Maybe that is cause you don't have chakra." Clone-Xander pointed out.

Xander giggled involuntarily, an odd sight to his clone as he was Tarou at the moment, his massive orange Thing form. "I have clones," he said, and then reached out and lifted his clone, using his power over fluids, "I find your lack of faith disturbing," he quoted, using his voice technique to duplicate his speech in a lower register.

His clone laughed. "Wrong body, dude," he said. Xander shook his head. "Wouldn't want that form anyway, I just had to say it. So you think it's because I don't have chakra, huh? But I don't want to have these chakra coil things, I don't know enough about them, and they might be permanent. I'm risking a lot as it is if I ever try to have kids. Chakra coils might make me a different species completely."

"Yeah," the clone said. "That'd be a bummer. But hey, I'm fluid, what if you just make part of me part of you?"

Xander stared at him for a minute, confused, then getting it, paused to consider. "Well, you don't have any coils . . . but you do have this chakra stuff . . ."

"I wonder if I can use it?" the clone commented curiously, and Xander dived to the side when the clone focused and thrust his hands forward, and the ground erupted in stone spears.

"Way cool!" the clone declared, and Xander stared at it.

"You almost skewered me!" he accused.

"Oh, come on, like it would have hurt you, stone-man. You're the freaking Thing!"

Frustrated and confused, Xander focused on the chakra in the clone, and dispersed it. The clone collapsed into mud, and Xander formed another self. This time, he made one his usual fluid way, just forming another body, modeled after one of the few fictional warriors Xander could think of that used ninja-style attacks, Ryu from the Street Fighter arcade games. Shoryuken and Hadouken might not be exactly chakra-based, but they were a lot closer than just a generic martial artist or historical ninja.

A bit more tentatively, Xander reached out to this piece of himself, and pumped it full of chakra, imprinted with a copy of his basic self, but also with the intent that it should use the fluid present instead of mud.

The Ryu-Xander grinned, and looked down, then up again. "Kick-ass, Xan-man," he crowed. "Let's see, if I'm you . . ." Ryu-Xander focused for a moment, then shook his head.

"Even if I'm you, apparently I'm also enough not-you that I don't have the fluid powers. At least, I can't change shape." He looked down at his hand, then grinned. "But . . ." He cupped his hands near his side. "I think somebody was thinking too hard when he made me," he said, and then grimaced. To Xander's amazement, blue light rapidly collected in between his hands, and when he thrust them forward with a loud shout of "Hadouken!" a blazing blue fireball shot forward.

"No way!" Xander said, then looked down at his own hands.

"It's not chakra," Ryu-Xander said. "You modeled this body after the guy from the video-games, and he uses ki."

"Yeah, but . . ." Xander stared at Ryu-Xander. "Do that again." He watched with his fluid senses as Ryu threw another Hadouken. "Yeah," he said, "I think you did use the power, but it was the body doing it and not you. Like when I built it, because I was thinking it should be able to produce ki, it used the power to produce it, instead of whatever really happens. I'm not seeing anything like chakra coils."

"Makes sense," Ryu responded. "Which means I probably could use chakra - and if you focused when you made a body on it being able to produce chakra innately through the power, then it could use chakra techniques without using up the chakra that is animating it."

"So if I am you, see if you can see through my eyes," Ryu requested, and turned to look up at the Earth hanging overhead.

Xander nodded and focused on Ryu. He was able to slide into that body, and see the Earth, and he was able to turn back and look at his Tarou body, standing still. A moment later his head turned back without his doing anything. "Apparently," he said, though he was not speaking, "we can both manipulate the body while you're in it. But I can't shift over to the Tarou form."

Xander shifted back, a bit uneasy about the odd feeling of his body moving without his control. "Yeah, well . . . that's neat and all, but it doesn't really help me that much."

Ryu-Xander shook his head. "You're overthinking it. You can build a body that can use whatever of the fluid-powers you give it as inherent bodily functions, including what appear to be ki attacks. The real question is, if you have a chakra mind in such a body, is there anything they can do to grab your attention when it is needed. I mean, I could be exploring the mountain for you, or make Tarou appear to be a real person while you're doing other things. We just can't replace everything."

Xander nodded slowly. "Yeah, maybe . . . but what could you do to get my attention?"

"I don't know, but I'd say that is what we need to experiment on."

Xander nodded again. "I'd leave you here to work on that, but without me here, I think the air'd go poof."

"I think if there was a chakra link between us, we could communicate using that. But there might be a simpler answer. Try reforming my body with the intent that I should be able to communicate telepathically with you."

"But I don't have telepathy," Xander protested.

"You didn't know you could produce ki, either," Ryu pointed out. "I'm sure if it works, it'll be communicating through your power somehow. Who cares how, if it works."

Xander nodded, and dispersed the chakra in Ryu, then a moment later, reformed Ryu, focusing his intent, and then fed him another burst of chakra.

"Whoa," Ryu said. "That was a rush."

"You remember our conversation?" Xander asked, surprised. He had not expected that.

"Yeah, I do," Ryu said. "I guess something lingered since you didn't form a new body from fresh liquid, just reformed this one. And I can feel the amount of chakra I have available increasing. Do I still have the ability to fire ki attacks?"

"Yep," Xander answered. "Not only that, but you should be able to access the TK portion of our powers. Now, try something else for me, see if you can create food; I'm pretty sure that is an ability I got stuck with that is not part of the power I was granted, so you might be able to use it."

Ryu nodded, and looking at his hand, held up a Twinky. Xander grinned at that, and held up his own. They both stuffed the entire thing in their mouth at once, though Xander was quick to notice that his larger form included a larger mouth, so his mouth was not filled by it.

Once he had swallowed, he continued. "That means you've got access to food and healing, both for yourself and others." He wondered if Ryu-Xander had experienced anything when he had dispersed the chakra, but did not want to ask.

"And since I'm producing chakra, I can perform chakra techniques as I learn them . . . including . . . Earth Release : Mud Clone!" Ryu looked at a second Ryu. "Interesting that it cloned this shape, and not yours."

Xander nodded. "Without producing chakra already imprinted, I don't think you'll be able to do what I did in cloning Mayu. You'll just be able to clone yourself."

"Ok, one more test," Ryu suggested. "Cut me, and let's see if this body has Wolverine-scale healing."

"It ought to," Xander said, "that kind of got stuck in same as the food summoning, but sure," and he gestured at Ryu, producing a small sand blade near him.

Ryu reached out nervously, and gritting his teeth, touched the blade. To both their surprise, instead of blood, the sand passed through his skin and came out moistened, but with no pain and no clear injury. "Right, still liquid," Ryu said, then concentrated. Xander was surprised when this bit of access to their power apparently worked fine, as Ryu shifted in his senses, and then promptly cut the tip of his finger off.

As they both watched, Ryu grimacing at the pain, the wound quickly healed over. "Yep, I've still got it," he said.

"And you were able to go solid. Can you go back to liquid or gas?" Xander asked.

Ryu looked startled, as if he had not even considered that he might not be able to do it, then shimmered, and vanished. Xander focused his fluid senses and confirmed that he could still readily detect the complex collection of fluids that was Ryu, who reappeared a moment later. "Apparently I can," he assented, "but I could not shapechange."

"Odd mix," Xander commented and Ryu frowned.

"It is, rather, but I guess that the transition between forms must be an innate ability drawn from, but separate from your power. Like . . ."

Xander interrupted him. "Right, after the first few times, it doesn't really take any concentration or willpower, I don't even really have to think about switching. I just want to, and I do."

"Yeah, so it's kind of a built in. But shapechanging you have to . . . well, kind of 'do' it, you have to think about it."

"Right. Let's head back. Then . . . I think we'll have to do a couple of tests to see if you can pass your memories to me, or store them somehow to be retrieved later. If we can do that, then we can make a child's body, and insert you in to one of the villages for training."

"I don't care for killing, but there are definitely some that need it," Ryu responded, and they both paused, thinking of their father, and of stories they had heard of human evil, both from their world, and from Naamahalat and her friends. "And frankly, learning chakra seems like it would rule. Ninja school sounds a lot more interesting than high school back home."

"As for storing memories . . . have you tried to remember anything from my perspective? I mean, I'm just a piece of you, right?"

Xander stared at Ryu for a minute before nodding and closing his eyes. He tried to think back and see if he could remember - and indeed, he found that he could remember firing a Hadouken. Just to verify, he fired off one himself. Being in scale with his massive orange hands, it put Ryu's earlier Hadouken to shame, and sent up a rooster-tail of dust as it sped across the lunar surface and impacted the ground a considerable distance away, sending up a massive plume of dust.

"You're right. Now, before I forget again, see if you can communicate to me telepathically."

Ryu nodded and closed his eyes. 'Can you hear this?'

Xander jerked, then tried to reply the same way, thinking the words, as if he was standing next to Ryu and talking to him, 'Yes, can you hear me?'

'I can.'

"That's excellent," Xander exclaimed. "Now I can really up the pace on everything. Come on, let's head back."

They passed through a portal that Xander opened, then he returned to his original body, and reaching out, reshaped and then charged Tarou and ninja-Xander, groaning as he did so and realized he now had two 'Ryu's'.

The Street-Fighter Ryu immediately recognized the issue, and grinned. "I'll be Akuma."

Xander looked puzzled for a moment, then grinned. "Going for the evil twin thing, eh?"

"Well, Akuma had the same training, but more powerful attacks. Sounds right to me!"

Ninja-Ryu frowned. "Xander reformed each of us before supplying chakra, we should have the same abilities."

"Yeah, but I've got more experience," the newly renamed Akuma boasted.

"Oh? Even though we have those same memories?" Ryu retorted.

"For crying out loud," Xander groused, "enough already. You'd think I was schizo or something." All three were grinning at each other. Tarou was moving around in the background, getting a feel for the body, making sure that it moved properly without needing Xander's active fluid powers.

Finally, Xander reached out to the phantom he had left in the mountain, and charged it. He did not have to bother with explaining what he wanted it to do, as of course it had his memories and knew what he would have told it already.

He almost did the same for the stuffed animal in Kushina's room, but remembered in time that ninjas, unlike the demons (or so he had assumed) were highly chakra sensitive, and would instantly home in on such a sudden appearance of chakra.

Glancing at Akuma, he considered him for a moment. "You're going to need to pay attention," he warned. "There is no cut-off on chakra production right now, so if you feel like it is getting to be too much for whatever reason, bleed some off, or do some techniques or something."

He repeated this telepathically to his mountain phantom, and they all nodded.

Given his new abilities, Xander briefly contemplated sending a clone to Naamahalat, but discarded the idea. Not only did he not know how she had reacted to his escape, he was not sure that any clone could survive the rigors they would put him through. Besides, he still had not succeeded in forgiving her, though he knew that she had every reason to assume he was a gift and enthrall him.

It was tempting nonetheless, given that he had gone from having sex multiple times a day to none at all, a less than comfortable transition for a teenage boy.

Returning his attention to the stuffed doll in Kushina's room, he repeated his pattern of using it as a reference to produce a new body, then using that body to slip out of the village.

He would get clones inserted into the village academies when he got the chance, but for now, he figured it would be enough to create pairs of clones, and have them swap places regularly, with one of them invisibly observing a training session or sessions, or classes, etc, in the village, and the other practicing what he had previously seen in the village. They could swap out occasionally, though the memory transfer thing might be enough for the external clone to train the techniques the internal clone was observing.

He made two clones, crafting them to look like a mix of some of the boys he had seen at Kushina's training, so if they were seen, they would not stand out, and gave them a chakra jump-start.

Once they were in place, he went gaseous and resumed flying over the landscape. This time, he had a more definite goal in mind. Instead of merely looking for any chakra-powered conflict, he was looking for a defensible place he could turn into a protected base on this world, giving him a safe place to go back and forth from.

It would also give him a chance to see if there was a way he could use his powers to create a permanent portal between the two realms, or better yet, something that could create such a portal on demand between two set locations, that could be protected so that only he or one of his clones could operate it.

He stopped suddenly, realizing this was exactly the sort of task he should be delegating now, while he focused on exploring his power, something his clones could not do for him. Finding an unoccupied clearing, he made a quick portal, stepped through and returned to his original body, then activated the just exited body as a clone, and sent both it and Akuma back through the portal to search out a good location.

Returning to the desolate moon, popping his sphere of air back into existence, Xander dove back into studying his power. Particularly, he started testing the limits of his fluid creating power. He had used it to create chakra, something he would have thought was more of an energy, whereas a fluid was implicitly matter, wasn't it? Gas and liquid were both states of matter that were both fluid, but he was pretty sure that chakra was not, yet apparently it still qualified as fluid.

So what else qualified as fluid?

Xander's first effort was to create energy, but nothing appeared to happen. Deciding that it might have been overly generic, Xander wondered what other sort of more specific energy he could try to create.

Remembering Akuma/Ryu's first attack, he summoned a ball of ki. This was more immediately visible than the unfocused chakra had been, but in the glowing blue light it gave off, Xander wondered if that was because he had already seen it as blue?

Xander tried to produce red ki, which had no effect. He tried red energy, but again, no effect. He tried to produce thermal energy, and here he was rewarded, though again it was nearly invisible. Only nearly though, and he could feel the heat wafting off, and when he moved his hand, he could see the shimmering effect as the heat distorted the light passing through the heated air.

For a moment he tried pushing the envelope, steadily driving up the amount of thermal energy. He had to stop pretty quickly, as it became too uncomfortable to continue.

He dispersed it and paused to consider what to try next. A moment later he realized he was missing the obvious. The most direct and obvious form of energy to a modern human would have to be either light or electricity. He was pretty confident that he could produce light by producing molten metal, which aside from mercury and maybe one or two other low-melting point metals had some pretty impressive glow to it.

Could he produce light directly? His first try at producing 'liquid light' gave him something that was actually more gooey, luminous in a way that reminded him of fireflies, or something glowing under a blacklight.

An attempt to produce pure white light, on the other hand, succeeded in producing a glowing orb of white above his hand, whose brightness he could control pretty directly, and which cast some pretty stark shadows.

Was this a consequence of 'e equals mc squared', an equation even he had heard of? Or was fluid really so expansive a term that it could cover this?

An attempt at producing an energetic plasma, at a bit of distance from himself, succeeding in producing the imagined orb of glowing gas, with occasional sparks of lightning visible within, looking much like the sort of lightning sphere toy common in mall novelty stores.

A few minutes of puzzling over what else to produce reminded him finally of a fluid he had heard of only from science fiction movies, especially Frankenstein, élan vital, something which he was quite certain had been thoroughly debunked. Could he produce it? He had already produced a number of other things, including the super-soldier serum, that were wholly fictional as far as he knew.

Xander considered it, then wondered if it was worth the risk. This was, after all, the topic of innumerable sci-fi movies wherein the mad scientist imbues something with the vital force only to be killed by it. Given that history, was he risking the same result?

Frankenstein's monster had been crippled in its ability to speak, and to move fluidly. Could he be precise enough to create something that was not in some way lacking? He was not skilled in medicine or the way the body was put together. Perhaps that test would wait.

Xander felt frustrated. He knew there were many more types of energy than he was coming up with, even just in his comics, but he certainly did not want to produce a sentient energy, like the Phoenix Force from Marvel comics, or the Power Cosmic only to discover that for it to exist, Galactus had to exist, and was created to allow it.

Stifled, he turned back to chakra. Sure, it was something he would be learning about over the next while anyway, but if a whole population was using it in constant battle and their world had not been destroyed, at least he did not have to worry about creating monsters or attracting the attention of angry gods or world-devourers.

After a brief spate of reproductions of some of the techniques Mayu had demonstrated for them, exploring what he had to impress on the chakra as he created, Xander moved on to what for him was the most obvious next step.

Just as he had applied the technique for making a mud clone and warped it into a working clone for his extra bodies, he figured most of these techniques could be warped into variants.

In particular, he had observed in the fight where he picked up Mayu a number of water based attacks and felt he had at least a chance of reproducing some of them.

He was about to try and do so, when another thought occurred to him. A moment later, he had duplicated the chakra Mayu had produced when she made a mud clone, and in return was granted a clone of Mayu.

"What is your name?" he asked, looking at her closely.

"Mayu," she said, with a slight bow.

"Do you remember me?" Xander questioned, watching her face closely.

She nodded. "You are a companion of my Lord Ryu."

That confirmed it, she actually had Mayu's memories, just as his personal mud-clone had his own. As much as he had tried to reproduce her chakra based on what his senses told him of it, there was absolutely no way he could have remembered that chakra's attributes in sufficient fine detail to reproduce her memories. Just to verify, he questioned her about her family and her home village, and found no holes, no gaps in her memory.

So somehow, when he had commanded his power to reproduce the chakra she had produced, it had done so to a precision greater than he could have managed with his memory. He had seen little hints of this before, hints that somehow there was more to his power than just what he himself could imagine. After all, producing an elixir of healing was all well and good, but the fact remained that Xander had absolutely no personal knowledge of the attributes of such a fluid. Yet he had been able to create it.

Yet there were other things, other times where that seemed to fail - he was not certain, but he did not think he would have been able to create chakra prior to first seeing it. It was hard to say, given that he had not actually made the attempt prior to observing the strange-eyed lady's use of it. One might argue that he could produce ki sight-unseen, but of course, he had seen the hadouken many times, even if it was only on a video screen. Could that make a difference? Was his ki even actually the same as what Ken or Ryu produced in the game?

He dispersed the clone, and ignoring the impossibility, reproduced the chakra released by the dead ninja who had produced the water dragon, even as he produced a large mass of water. Instantly the water took on the attributes of a dragon, and roared through the air looking for a target, before he dispersed it.

Well, that was rather interesting.

He wondered if Mayu would remember what her clone had seen, if when he had produced chakra matching hers at the moment of the technique, he had actually produced her chakra, binding the clone to her. It did not seem possible, yet at the same time . . . Xander was fairly sure that he could produce her blood on demand, or Naamahalat's, probably even the Duke's. Would she remember?

Xander's clumsy attempts at other water jutsu failed miserably. Only, it seemed, when he was reproducing the exact chakra output of a usage he had himself witnessed was he able to reliably reproduce a result. With no real understanding of chakra, he had no idea what changes to make, what to shift in it to make it stronger or weaker aside from changing the quantity of chakra, what to do to make more or fewer spears appear, or a wall of granite or marble or some other particular stone, nor, it seemed, could he simply reproduce the earth effects he had seen as water effects.

Yet he had been able to adapt a mud-clone to himself and to his fluid instead of mud. Did that mean that another, Mayu for example, could somehow use a mud-clone on his fluid instead of mud, and have it work?

Was that somehow inherent in the mud-clone technique, that it worked on the fluid it was pushed into, and not specifically mud?

Looking around at the disturbed landscape, Xander considered it. Now that he had a retainer . . . er, well, now that Ryu had a retainer, anyway, and wasn't that an odd fix to be in . . . he needed to provide proper lodgings.

Did he really want to house her permanently on the demon plane? Surely not; if she were ever encountered by the demons, they would not hesitate to capture and make a pet of her. He could build something here on this moon, but the slightest breech would produce a potentially lethal decompression. He glanced up at the blue light of the Earth hanging overhead. If his travel worked there was no life there--no, that was wrong, no sentient beings there, always assuming his power had understood that requirement of the portal--and he could build there.

But then he might interfere with future life developing on the world. It would be ideal if he could have a fortress in its own dimension, its own world, like a demi-plane from D&D, or a larger version of the space in a portable hole.

He could maybe make a home in such a place, with doorways to get to the demon-plane, and the ninja world, and eventually, to Sunnydale on his own Earth. That would take care of the defensible place that Akuma and his new unnamed clone were searching for, as well as . . . well, no, maybe he would still need that, to guard the doorway to his demi-plane.

So what was involved in creating such a plane? Could his powers do it directly, or could he use them to give himself such a power?

Xander tried to consider the possibilities, and whether he should risk giving himself such a power. Would there be any long term side-effects? Was it even possible any more, or had it ever been, to give himself a power with a time limit after which it would cease?

The potential benefits seemed worth it, but it made sense to Xander to see if he could accomplish it directly through his power first. He was not particularly sure how to go about this, aside from simply trying to make a portal to an existing demi-plane and taking it for his own.

He did not want to do that, since even an abandoned demi-plane might see the owners return at some point, or have external access points floating around that he did not know about.

So Xander decided to try something different. The first thing he did was to use a portal to step over to this solar system's Mars, to be further from any potential ill effects on developing life on Earth. After forming a sphere of air and looking the land over to be sure it was a dead world, Xander sat down, and slowly and painstakingly worked out on paper what he wanted to try. Trying at first to think of it as Willow might got him a lot of nowhere fast, but when he backed up and came at it by trying to mimic a comic book description of some entity's parallel world, he made considerable progress. After considerable pondering, and a bit of elixir to deal with the resulting headache, he carefully rewrote his ramblings to be more legible, then proceeded with his attempt.

First, he concentrated on what he wanted to happen, the forming of a demi-plane governed by the same basic physical laws as the universe he was in, but supporting the existence of magic, chakra, ki, and demonic and celestial energies, and permitting the existence of various other rule-breaking phenomena, wholly subject to the exertion of his will but self-sustaining otherwise, that would respond dynamically to the needs and desires of the inhabitants where doing so did not conflict with his will.

With these ideas in mind, Xander produced a small amount of fluid and pushed chakra into it, willing that the clone thus formed would hold that thought in mind. Then he proceeded to elaborate on his intentions for the primary entity in the demi-plane, supported by the plane itself, a house with enough self-will and understanding to respond to its inhabitants' needs and wants, forming new rooms from material supplied by the demi-plane or himself, and capable of sustaining portals that he formed, and controlling access to them, as well as generating unseen servants of the D&D variety for general maintenance, and pumped these ideas into a second formless clone.

Before continuing, Xander popped a portal to his demon-plane hideout and swapped bodies with Tarou, so that if his next attempt destroyed Mars, he would not have damaged his original body.

Ready to make the attempt, Xander, in quick succession, attempted to produce mass amounts of several varieties of energy. He was moving quickly, and did not waste time paying attention to which succeeded and which did not, just focusing on producing them with the intention that they should be subject to his will and that of the two clones. He quickly went through dimensional energy, gravitational energy, pure magic, elemental magic of earth, fire, air, and water, then void magic, the substance of his portals, a magical fluid capable of matter production and transformation, ki, life energy, chi, electricity, light, demonic energy, demonic magic, celestial energy, celestial magic, élan vital, kinetic energy, potential energy, water, sentience, sentient energy and polymorphic energy before conceding that he could think of nothing more, and then pumping it all full of chakra loaded with the intent for it to accomplish his will, and promptly fell unconscious.

When Xander finally revived an unknown time later, he was confused and disoriented, but not in nearly the pain he expected when he remembered where he had collapsed. He winced when he remembered where he had been, anticipating the pain of frozen flesh, the burning of lungs that had been too long without oxygen, the dry cracked feeling of soft tissue that had been leeched of all moisture. After all, he had collapsed on the surface of Mars, and without his will maintaining it, the sphere of temperate air around him would have quickly faded into the background thin, barely present atmosphere, leaving him exposed to the raw elements of Mars.

As Xander marveled at the absence of these pains, and slowly sat up, he felt sheets falling away. His eyes popped open in surprise, and he found himself in a bed, in a comfortable looking room. Beside the bed was a bedside table, and on it was a small breakfast tray with a bowl of what looked like Captain Crunch cereal, a spoon, and a tall glass of milk.

Xander grinned, and sliding his feet off the bed so he could sit on the side of it, he pulled the tray around, finding it was on a long and flexible arm, poured a bit of milk into the bowl, and actually ate a proper breakfast, for the first time in a long while.

Then he finally bothered to check his memories, and discovered that he had actually been carried along into the new demi-plane during its creation, and that apparently the two clones he had made had become incorporated with the various magics and sentient energies he had attempted to summon and ended up becoming the minds of the plane and the fortress or mansion or house or castle or whatever it was.

Beyond that, he could remember the activities of his other clones, and by what he remembered, judge that he had been out for about two and a half days. His child clones had already had a good day of observing training, and practicing in the fields, and one of them had apparently bothered to sit down and write out a letter to him and then memorize it to be sure he got it, advising him that he should supply them with a small number of additional clones to attach to outgoing caravans, to locate other hidden villages of ninja, and learn what could be gathered from them.

Akuma and the now-named Lewis (apparently he grew tired of being nameless, and took a name from Lewis and Clark, as he felt like they were on a similar trek) had noted several possible locations.

Tarou and Ryu had spent some time (Tarou being now in his original body, as he had discovered just before over-exerting himself that while his clones could not switch bodies on their own, he could move them himself) working with Mayu going over what had been collected from the dead ninja, and which supplies she needed.

As evidence that his clones could be creative on their own, the demi-plane informed him that it liked the idea, stolen from AD&D's Ravenloft and the Mists of Avalon, of using a demi-plane produced mist to accomplish larger scale connections between planes, an idea which startled Xander, and made him wonder what else he had overlooked. Mists, after all, were liquid suspended in a gas and so fluid twice over, yet he had not even thought of using them for travel, which would provide both concealment, intimidation, and possibly, as the demi-plane mind implied, instantaneous transport of large groups already in martial array, without bottlenecking.

Rising, Xander asked the house to guide him to a good spot to form a permanent connection with his demon-plane hideout. Immediately, a light appeared in front of him, and moving slowly ahead, guided him to a large central hall with sweeping grand stairs and a massive chandelier that made him wonder whose mind was actually coming up with all this, then down a hall into a corridor reminiscent of a stone dungeon. The walls transitioned from paneling to exposed brick and then worked stone, before finally reaching an almost natural looking cavern. The light drifted to a large opening on one side, and slowly flickered and swelled, until it finally resolved into a face.

"Hey, Xan-man. Here's the deal; the plane and I think if you use the plane to make a mist connection, we can actually extend through it, and push some of the demi-plane's rules out into the other side, so any attackers have to actually enter your realm to even get to us."

Xander frowned, considering this. It was very weird to have the plane and house seemingly more creative and intelligent than he was, but then, he had stuffed them full of all sorts of energies. Odd effects were probably to be expected, especially when he had apparently actually managed to strain himself for the first time, to actually push his own limits. He had not previously noticed any difficulty or strain in using his powers, except for the odd resistance of the ninjas' chakra, which had not really taken much to push past. Apparently creating a demi-plane and everything he had tried to get into it had actually finally demonstrated that he did have limits, somewhere.

He summoned a mist, just to see if he could. When it manifested without difficulty, he nodded. "Go for it," he said, and watched as the cavernous opening filled with a dark mist. Wanting to see it from the other side, he quickly formed a portal and stepped through it.

In the hideout, he watched as mist billowed up from the ground to one corner, and then a red light glowed in the darkness of the mist, before clean stonework spread from within the mist and engulfed the interior of his hollowed out hideout, concealing even the tiny openings he had left himself for exiting.

Swapping with Tarou to get back into his original body, Xander mentally explained what was going on to Tarou and Ryu.

"Alright, Mayu," Ryu said. "Time to pack up your tent and get a proper room."

He guided a nervous Mayu into and through the mist, and as advertised, they ended up in the dungeon area, where a light appeared to guide them to where they could find rooms.

Xander, meanwhile, reached out to the first of the locations found by Akuma and Lewis, and trying mist-travel for the first time himself, had a mist rise and engulf him, and as intended, when it receded on both planes, it left him in the location they had picked.

Examining it, Xander found that they were clearly thinking of his consideration of piracy, for he was on a sheltered beach with a small cove beyond, with beautiful deep water, and two encircling arms of coast with lines of rocks sealing him in. They were not completely continuous, but definitely did not look like something a ship could navigate.

A ghost ship, on the other hand, which could pass through the mists? That could be a different story. Xander looked around the cave, that actually engulfed the waters towards the rear of the cove, such that the beach continued directly into the cave on one side, while the other was rocky and appeared impassable on foot.

The cave continued for some distance beyond the water's end, and Xander liked the look of it. Aside from the impassable barrier rocks, which ensured he would not be bothered by ships seeking refuge, this would make a perfect pirate cove.

He had just returned to the house to locate a good spot to form a connection to the cove, with his senses at their full as he examined the mist he was using to make the trip, when darkness enveloped him. For the first time, Xander could actually feel the energies reaching out to draw him in, and felt like he could resist, if he wanted to.

Summonses, Expected and Un

Knowing that this was Kushina summoning him for her demonstration before the other ninja to prove that she could in fact summon, Xander wanted to ensure it was impressive, so he went invisible before allowing the questing energies to latch on to him.

When he appeared, and confirmed that Kushina was there before a crowd of ninja, he summoned a great cloud of smoke, reshaped himself, solidified, and then blew it away, revealing himself. Even as he did this last, he summoned a mass of chakra to surround him, focusing on the idea that it should feel overwhelmingly powerful, knowing that the ninjas would be sensitive to it.

Kushina was grinning widely in relief and happiness that her summoning had succeeded, here at this most critical juncture, where her future as a ninja was at stake.

A snide voice broke the stillness. "So she can summon, he doesn't look like much to me. What's the point of summoning a wimp?"

It was clear from the impressed looks on the faces of the other ninja prior to the speech that they had detected the power of the chakra he had produced, and that this was false bravado on the part of someone who had an interest in seeing Kushina fail. After all, Xander was in his own form here, as he had appeared to Kushina, the form of a man optimized to the peak of physical condition by the super-soldier serum. It was true, of course, that these ninja were also in top physical condition, reducing the disparity he had over them, and his musculature and the absence of fat were to an extent concealed by the black garments he had created, including what he hoped was an impressive Darth Vader style black cloak. Still, he was by no means a wimpy or weak figure of a man.

It was equally clear that the heckler had failed when with a glance from Xander, he was ejected upwards as if he had been sitting on a rocket-powered ejection seat, and sent flying.

An older looking ninja wearing an odd hat-Xander thought he might be the village leader Mizuna had mentioned-cleared his throat, bringing all eyes to him. "Perhaps now, Kushina-chan, you can demonstrate for us how your partnership with your summon works?"

He gestured, and turning to look in the indicated direction, Xander saw what looked almost like a traditional old-West shooting gallery, a display of fake buildings, with ninja mannequins sprinkled throughout.

Xander glanced at Kushina, willing to take her direction in how she wanted to deal with this. He was not sure if she would prefer an overwhelming show of force, or a display of precision.

She grinned up at him, moving closer, and leaned forward. He leaned down and she whispered to him, "Can you just blow the whole thing away at once? Like it's insulting to have to fight just one ninja?"

Xander nodded, grinning. They had no fluid in them, aside from a bit of air in the padding, so tossing them individually as he had done with the snide idiot would have taken some effort, but just blowing everything away was as easy as pie.

Before generating a wind, Xander grabbed all the air in the vicinity of the fake ninja, quintupled its density and then pushed it away at six hundred miles an hour. Knowing that hurricane force winds were one hundred and fifty to three hundred miles per hour, he was confident that doubling that would be enough to be impressive, especially after he thickened the air, and indeed, it not only took out the fake ninja but the entire setting; false buildings and all were blown away in a single tremendous rush of roaring wind.

"Hmm... impressive," the old guy said. "Very well, Kushina, you have demonstrated an ability to summon, a skill well beyond most genin. As such, it is clear that you can no longer be held back," at this he glared at several of the group of ninja around him, "and are therefore promoted to the rank of genin. Congratulations, you are now a kunoichi of Whirlpool."

Kushina cheered and spun, leapt at Xander and gave him a crushing hug, then targeted her teacher Mizuna for more of the same. As the other gathered ninja began wandering away now that the show was over, Kushina said, "So I get missions now, right Mizuna-sensei? Real missions?"

Mizuna nodded, but warned her, "Your first missions will be pretty boring and safe, Kushina, but if you acquit yourself well in doing them, eventually you will graduate to harder missions."

"Including ones out of the village?" Kushina begged.

Her answer was cut off by an angry shout. Xander looked up to see the heckler returning, looking quite the worse for wear, but unfortunately uninjured.

Xander was willing to ignore him, until he realized the fool had more of those odd throwing implements in his hands, and if he threw them at Xander, they might hit Kushina or Mizuna. Well, that simply was not going to be happening. A few of the other ninja had stopped at the realization that the loudmouth was returning, so there was an audience as Xander lifted his hand and the idiot was jerked off the ground, and held motionless.

"I don't think I like this one," Xander commented to Kushina, deliberately ignoring the man. "What do you suppose I should do with him?"

Kushina giggled while Mizuna shook her head slowly. Xander did not wait for an answer, instead turning back and drawing the man swiftly across the intervening space to a conversational distance.

Xander teased the man for a minute, continually easing off his control, waiting for the idiot to open his mouth to shout something, and then forcing his mouth closed and still again. "Ah, ah, ah, no shouting," Xander ordered. He glanced at Mizuna, then back to the blowhard. "Is there any reason I should not just stop your foolish heart?"

The man paled, and Xander relaxed his control, dumping the fool on the ground. "Attack me again, and maybe we'll see if you can still be a ninja without eyes." While he spoke, Xander used his food power to produce two realistic looking eyes of sugar and gelatin, and held them out as if he had just plucked them from his pouch.

Kushina and Mizuna both gasped, and the man paled further, scrambled to his feet and ran away. Xander laughed and slipped the eyes back into his belt pouch. That was a good prank, and he might find use for them again.

He turned back to Kushina, who was again talking to Mizuna. She looked up, noticing his motion, and grinned. "Thanks again, Xander! That was great, and now I'm a genin, for real! That's all I needed right now, but I'll summon you again later, okay?"

Xander nodded, and watched her make a handsign. This time he again felt much more clearly the bonds of the summons loosening and returning him.

Xander expected to reappear in the house, but instead, even as he felt those bonds loosen, he sensed a new summons latching on. He was shocked and disturbed. What could possibly have caused Kushina to summon him again so soon?

Knowing that something had gone wrong, he offered no resistance, and indeed used those moments of subjective time to good effect, so that the instant he appeared, he created several voice deepeners, two sand blades, and several compressed air explosives held at the ready before looking for targets.

"You have got to be kidding me," Xander dead-panned, staring at an emaciated goth-wannabe. Was that a candle on his head? "You really need to get out more," he told the skinny teen, marveling at the depth of the bags under his eyes.

Recognizing the lack of understanding on the goth's face, Xander swallowed another language draught, even as another teenage boy standing nearby started a loud speech, though a moment later he realized that he had understood the first few words even before he swallowed the draught, and guessed that perhaps the language draught required him to hear a language before he could speak it.

The candle guy murmured, "It actually worked!" before promptly fainting.

Xander dispersed his sword and explosives, glancing over the chalk circle drawn rather poorly on an uneven wooden floor. It was obvious that he could break this summoning circle without any great difficulty, but of course, doing so would lose him his chance of setting in place a foothold here. The question, of course, was whether it was worth it.

He had not even really begun to explore the knowledge available on the ninja-world, and had not really planned on being summoned again. Nonetheless he had been summoned, and as he stared at the chalk outline, his mind vaguely processing the florid speech of the excited teen ranting in the background, he realized that somehow, he knew things about the summoning, without any indication how he knew.

It was not like a voice in his head explaining things, nor as if he was thinking questions and then knowing the answers. He simply knew, looking at the chalk, that he could break this summoning and return to his home, but he would not then be able to get back to this place, as he would have no link to it, though he might reach some other place with alternates of these two individuals. He could make a deal with his summoner, either through blood, word, or written contract, to perform some task for some remuneration, and that whether he was ejected back to his own plane on completion of the contract depended entirely on the wording, and not the summoning itself. If the contract specified he return to his own plane and his remuneration was not supplied, he would be able to return to seek it, free of restraint. If the contract did not specify his return, then whether he was free of restraint would again depend on the contract, and whether it specified any restraints.

Further, he could see that he could make a deal with either of the two present; apparently they both qualified as his summoner.

Focusing his attention on the conscious teen, he saw that he was waving around a wooden sword. He looked Oriental, though Xander could not place the specific region of the Orient. Paying more attention to his speech, Xander realized the boy was ranting about his girlfriend being held in captivity by an evil sorcerer, though apparently a different evil sorcerer from goth-boy.

Prepped now to speak in the boy's tongue, Xander made sure his voice-deepeners were still up, and stopped him, trying to match the weird style of his speech, which did not seem to be fully translated, as though perhaps the goth boy and the sword guy spoke a slightly different language, and having tuned in to the lingo of the goth boy, Xander was a bit out of tune.

"Hold! A bargain must be set. You wish your pig-tailed girl free of this foul sorcerer? State clearly your demand, and what you will reward me with for such a boon!"

The dark-haired boy stopped and paused as if in thought. He was taller and looked substantially more fit than the unconscious boy, who was now shifting and murmuring as if in the grip of a dream, murmuring about colors. "Very well, I have decided. As my noble but demented father is long absent, I am the head of my house. Free the pig-tailed girl from the foul sorcerer Saotome, and you may have my short sword."

Xander frowned. A sword seemed a poor reward, but the boy was acting as if it was a great gift. Maybe it was a magical sword? At any rate, if there was in fact a pig-tailed girl--Xander really hoped that referred to a hairstyle, and not an actual pig's tail--being held captive, then he would have freed her for nothing, were it not that the summon could only be fully activated by such a bargain. "Agreed. When I have freed this girl from her bondage, I will return and you will give me what you have promised."

With those words, the circle of chalk, poorly drawn as it was, flashed brightly, and Xander actually felt a weight, like that of a light backpack, settle on his shoulders. To his surprise, he actually found an image in his mind of this pig-tailed girl, a rather pretty girl, also obviously Asian, though with such vibrantly red hair that Xander was surprised it was the styling of the hair that the sword-boy used to identify her.

Flipping into an airy form, ignoring the surprised shout of the youth, he drifted up and out the nearest gap in the building's construction. Much to his surprise, given the talk of foul sorcerers, the summoning, and the appearance of the two boys, he found himself in what appeared to be a fairly modern city. It was of a style unfamiliar to him, that looked like it belonged on Willow's mother's coffee table, but there were cars, albeit tiny ones compared to what he found familiar, and buses and trucks and such, and power lines and mass-produced fencing, asphalt and concrete roadways, sidewalks, any number of little things that said this was a far more similar place to Sunnydale than Kushina's village had been.

Curious if the sense he had of being held here until his task was completed, of the weight he felt as being chains holding himself here, was accurate and would impact his ability to cross the planes, Xander reached out. He found he could feel his other selves, far away, but he could not move into them, he could not shift his essential self from here to there.

He slipped into an alleyway, which was curiously prosaic, resembling an alley in Sunnydale in feeling much more than the streets resembled Sunnydale streets, and after verifying that he was alone, attempted to produce a portal to his hideout. It failed, and Xander felt a sudden sense of urgency. What if Kushina needed him, and tried to summon him, and he could not come to her aid because he was still stuck here? He should have stuck with his first instincts, that he did not need to explore further summonings until he was done with Kushina's world. He was fairly certain that he was as immortal as he liked now, given Wolverine style healing, magical healing, and the ability to basically rebuild his body on demand, so he had no reason to rush.

The stories he had learned made it clear that time travel was an almost inevitable thing when traveling between planes, and if he had any hope of returning to the aid of his friends, he would have to master it before his return anyway, unless he simply got preposterously lucky, an outcome he felt was massively improbable, given what the Powers had done to get rid of him.

With renewed urgency, Xander formed a number of fluid selves, giving them different appearances, forming an eye to spy on the street to match clothing styles and colors to help them blend in, then pumped them up with chakra clones.

"All right, let's find this pig-tailed girl," he ordered, and they slipped out the alley in ones and twos, while he drifted up invisibly, to get a higher overview.

He was at a loss as to how to find this foul sorcerer here in a normal, modern city, where he had expected to be looking for an obvious wizard's castle or tower or something, but an explosion in the distance caught his attention, and he quickly zipped in that direction.

He soon found that he was paralleling a young woman with shockingly purple hair who was riding a bicycle along the walls and even power lines, also clearly heading for the distant explosions. There was something odd about her, and Xander found himself strangely certain that she was a small purple and white cat, in spite of being able to clearly see that she was a beautiful girl.

Realizing that even if his target was at the conflict he was heading for, he would not be likely to be alone, and that confrontation would be better alone, Xander produced another five clones and sent them in search of a quiet space where he could have a face-off without creating a lot of collateral casualties.

A moment later, Xander was reminded that first, he was in a world that had cars and such, and therefore at least had a chance to be his, and second, that while he had verified he could not get back to his other selves, he had not tested producing a portal within this plane. He popped off a quick portal to Southern California and just as quickly banished it, pleased that it had been produced with no effort, but a bit disturbed that the cycling purple-haired girl had noticed and was looking around as if searching for something, though she had not changed the direction or speed of her travel.

They crossed a busy lane of traffic, Xander merely flying over, while the cyclist literally jumped the roadway, crossing from one line of power lines to another across the street, a very impressive feat of precision landing and balance, and then they were at the scene of the conflict.

A familiar looking young man with a pig-tail, that could have been the pig-tailed girl's brother, given the identical hair-style and the very similar clothing style, which did not match the others present, though of course Xander had no frame of reference for how common such a style was amongst the local population, aside from the few he was seeing, was leaping and bouncing around a solid looking fellow in a bandanna.

Both of these two, who appeared to be in a street fight in a very Oriental, martial arts type of fight, had that weird sense about them, as if there was another being there, or as if they should be something different. The pigtailed boy was a girl in this strange view, and the boy was a pig.

Xander looked about the others quickly to see if perhaps all the people on this world were like that, and he simply had not noticed it with the first two. One of the others, a boy in white robes throwing knives and other weapons at the pig-tailed boy looked like a duck, but the pony-tailed boy with the big shovel did not, nor the angry girl swinging what looked like a bookbag.

His guess as to his target was confirmed a moment later when the bandanna boy shouted "Saotome Ranma, for avoiding your just punishment, die!" when the pig-tailed boy managed to dodge a bookbag hit, and promptly attacked with what looked suspiciously like a closed umbrella.

Xander interrogated his quiet-place searchers, and picking amongst what they had found, he popped a portal up directly in the path of the pig-tailed boy. To his disbelief and amazement, the boy managed to twist in mid-air and avoid hitting it, then shouted in anger when the bookbag girl stumbled in to it before Xander could disengage it.

The bandanna boy leapt in after her, just as Xander shut it down and popped up another one, pointing at a different chosen location in front of the pig-tailed boy, now identified as Saotome, again.

Meanwhile, the Xander at the target location promptly ported the two unwanted guests back. Unfortunately for Xander, the Saotome boy who had been about to leap into the portal avoided it the moment he saw the bookbag girl again. Instantly Xander realized that in spite of her attacking him, he had been about to go to the rescue, and now saw it as unnecessary.

The next fifteen minutes were occupied with a continual procession of wrong people entering portals meant for Saotome, while he adroitly avoided them, in spite of Xander popping portals up in his path while he was falling, and using wind gusts in an attempt to push him in.

Finally, frustrated and a little angry, Xander used his power over fluids to grab the boy and pull him directly into a portal, then portalled over himself.

Unfortunately, even this direct strike failed, as it seemed the purple-haired girl was swift enough that she managed to make it through the portal he himself used, though it had existed for the merest moment, and now the Saotome boy was accusing her of having 'magicked' him away.

Xander allowed himself to become visible, stopping the argument. "I brought you here," he told the boy. "It had nothing to do with her."

They both oriented on him instantly. "Shampoo help husband fight new boy!" the girl shouted, but neither actually attacked. The girl was clearly in a fighting stance, holding two heavy looking but colourful stick-balls, while the boy actually slipped his hands into his pockets and simply stood there, bouncing lightly on his feet, eyeing Xander suspiciously. Xander realized from the way she said it that Shampoo was her name, not the substance, and felt a shiver run down his spine, though he did not know why.

"Look, I've not got a lot of time, there's a little girl counting on me, so I need to get this over and done with. I was summoned here to free a pig-tailed girl from a foul sorcerer Saotome, and I'm pretty sure you are one or the other of those two . . . if not both."

The boy groaned. "Kuno, you idiot! So, you're a demon?" He shot a significant glance at Shampoo, whose face hardened as she nodded back.

"No, I'm not a demon. I just got banished to a place chock-full of them, and one way out is to be summoned. Look, I know your name is Saotome, I heard Bandanna-Boy shout it earlier. Are you the sorcerer Sword-Boy mentioned?"

"I'm not a damned sorcerer," the boy growled, "I hate magic. Kuno's just crazy."

Xander eyed Shampoo, who seemed to be further to the left than she had been, though he had not seen her move.

"Fine. Do you know the pig-tailed girl he mentioned?"

"She's not real," he spat. "Just a damned curse!"

Xander flicked his eyes over to Shampoo and started. She was gone! Xander instantly went fluid, and just in time, as one of those metal balls came down and sent bits of him splashing everywhere. Xander quickly pulled himself together and grabbed them both with his power.

"Damnit, I don't have time for this," he said, worried that the shiver he had felt earlier was about Kushina. He formed another fluid clone. "See if you can portal out of here. I can't, but . . ."

The clone nodded and frowned for a moment, then shook his head. "No dice."

Xander growled, then reached out to the two child-clones he had left in the Hidden Whirlpool village. "Check on Kushina, make sure she's okay."

His concentration was shattered by a fist blasting through his head, splattering it about again. He pulled himself back together and took to the air, lifting himself up several times to avoid attacks while he tried to figure out why his control had failed. The purple-haired girl, Shampoo, was still held, but the boy was somehow attacking him. He tried again to get a grip on the boy, but his control slipped off.

Shampoo was cheering him on now, and Xander learned from it that this Ranma was her husband, and a pretty lucky one at that, Xander thought, considering Shampoo's curves and her obvious skill. He could feel her doing something, without moving, that was as if she was trying to wriggle out of his control.

Xander quickly formed a half-dozen fluid clones to try to subdue the Saotome boy, only to find himself having to push higher still, as the boy used them as springboards to leap higher.

About to banish the summoned clones as useless, Xander paused when one of them objected. "Hey, I'm learning here. This kid is as good as any of the ninja teachers we've been watching, except he ain't going for killing moves. This is good stuff!"

Xander sighed and nodded, drifting higher again, even as Shampoo figured out the trick to it and slipped free of his bonds. Xander was still puzzling on how to get these two out of fight mode and back to talking to figure out if what he was seeing, the cat and the girl, were really somehow present, and if she even could be freed, when he was suddenly brought back to the fight by a sudden impact of heat and pressure that sent him up and back another dozen feet.

One of the clones focused and showed him a mental picture of what had happened from his perspective. "Fierce Tiger Bullet?"

Xander shifted and focused his senses on the boy, watching and waiting for another such attack. The boy did not attempt it again until he managed to get within about fifteen feet, using the girders of a construction site next door to the empty lot Xander's clone had chosen, and then he shot off another attack. Xander stopped it in mid-air, examining it.

It was similar to but different from Ryu's Hadouken, and Xander found it was trying to dissipate, so that he had to force it to remain so he could look at it. The silence that had fallen distracted him from his look, and he banished it and looked up.

The two fighters had stopped, and were staring at him with looks of startled disbelief on their faces, as best he could tell. His clones had stopped attacking when they did, and were standing around waiting.

"How did you do that?" Ranma asked.

Tired of wasting time and happy that they were willing to talk again, Xander allowed himself to drift downwards, wryly thinking as he did so that before his time with Naamahalat, he would never understand or realize that in doing so, he was placing himself within their reach again, deliberately, as a token gesture of peace.

"Being thrown from your home into an unfamiliar place full of demons, you learn new tricks, or you die. I learned," Xander said. They did not need to know that he had been gifted with power, and that he could control energy such as chi or ki was certainly something he had learned recently, so it was truthful enough that he was not lying.

"Look, I'm bound by my summoning to free the pig-tailed girl, but that does not mean I have to fight you, or harm you . . . unless you are in some way holding her by force?"

Ranma frowned again. "I told you, the pig-tailed girl is not real. Kuno's just nuts."

"I can see her," Xander said plainly. "I can see a red-haired pig-tailed girl when I look at you, and a small purple and white cat when I look at you," he continued, looking to Shampoo. "And somehow, this Kuno, if you are right about who summoned me, must be at times able to see her as well. What I do not know is what she is, nor how I might free her?"

Ranma sighed, glancing at Shampoo, then nodded. "It is a curse, from China," he said flatly, and Xander noticed Shampoo wince. "I fell in a cursed pool, and now cold water turns me into a girl, and hot water turns me back into a boy. Shampoo," he glanced at the girl again, and only continued when she nodded, "was cursed the same way, but deliberately, as a punishment."

"These were pools of water?" Xander asked, startled. He had never considered that pure water could carry magic. He had used magical potions, but cursed water was a new one. Ranma and Shampoo nodded, and Xander grinned. He was tempted to just spray them, but remembered Ranma's tone when he spoke of it, and decided it was best not to set them off again.

"Will you let me see it?" he asked, holding out a glass of water summoned with his food summoning ability. Ranma glared at it for a moment before nodding, and stepping forward, put his hand in the water. Xander focused his full senses on Ranma as he shifted abruptly into a beautiful and very busty young woman.

"Wow," Xander said, grimacing. "That must be pretty miserable when it happens in a crowd."

"It's a curse," Ranma said, her voice higher and clearer. "Water seeks me out."

Xander considered that for a moment, exploring the water around, and indeed, he found that he could sense, without really understanding how he knew, that if he relinquished his control of the glass even a little, it would fall in such a way as to splash the purple-haired girl.

"And this pool, the curse is random? I mean, you turn into a girl, and she's a cat, and I saw a pig and a duck earlier."

Shampoo spoke up then. "Many cursed pools, victim turn into what drowned there."

"So a girl drowned in a pool . . . and you are cursed to look like her?"

Shampoo spoke up again, moving forward. "No, pool take some . . . not know word, likeness maybe, of person or thing what drowned, victim get likeness . . . not likeness . . ."

She looked at Ranma imploringly and he shrugged. "Far as I can tell, I look a lot like Mom did when she was my age. Prince Herb got splashed with the same water and he looks like his own sister."

Xander looked at his clones thoughtfully, but shook his head. Too much risk that it would affect all of him. So he made a normal mud clone, and had it move away, by itself. Ranma and Shampoo watched this curiously but without understanding. They were curious about the technique that allowed the clones, but had no idea what he was attempting.

It took Xander three tries before he figured out that he had to actually specify that the water carry the curse, not merely that it be water from where something had drowned. Which made sense once he thought of it, as otherwise anyone who took a dip in the ocean would be cursed.

Ranma and Shampoo gasped aloud then started shouting frantically when the curse took and turned the Xander-mud-clone into a beautiful black and grey northern wolf. Xander focused on the clone, examining it and found that he could sense the mud-form. Taking a chance, Xander tried to tug the mud-form forward, and after a moment of his power slipping off, he figured out the right way to grip it, and the wolf turned back into a clone of himself.

Then Xander focused on the wolf he could now see overlaying his clone, and after another few tries, managed enough of a grasp on it to change it from a wolf to a lion before pulling it forward again. The lion roared irritably, before Xander reached out and this time, sought to separate the lion from the clone entirely.

After several minutes of wrangling with it, causing not a few changes back and forth, and resulting in a very irritated and cursing Xander-clone, he managed to separate out the lion essence, which came out as a glowing blue ball of water, which he proceeded to dissipate.

Finally returning his attention to the two other teenagers, Xander was beyond surprised to find them both crying and kneeling beside him, begging him to cure them.

"Not that I would object," he said, "but I am bound to free your cursed form. How I do that is up to me, but I need to do so in a way that satisfies the summoning contract."

Ranma looked to Shampoo but she shrugged her shoulders. Xander sighed. "If I just remove the curse, the pigtailed girl in question no longer exists. I suppose in at least one sense that would be freeing, but I'm afraid if it did not, it would be too late to do anything about it, and I would be trapped here unable to fulfill my summons. But if you are the girl in question, then I simply need to free you from yourself, in some way." Xander moaned, rubbing his forehead. "What I wouldn't do to have Willow here. She'd figure this out in no time."

Ranma gave Shampoo a long look, then sighed. "Shampoo's Granny would probably know."

Shampoo glanced at him. "Why you no say Old Ghoul?"

Ranma shrugged. "She's an Old Ghoul when she's trying to trick and trap me. Nabiki could probably figure it out too, but she would want money."

Xander looked between them. "Makes no diff to me who you want to ask," he said, feeling a bit frustrated at what he had just realized. "But I'm still under the influence of the summons, I can only act towards the completion of my goal, especially when it involves others. Basically, I can remove your curse, Saotome, if it fulfills my contract, but I can't remove Shampoo's unless it's an equal exchange. If I can get the contract fulfilled though, I should be able to come back on my own, and remove the curses then."

Shampoo make an almost cat-like mew of displeasure at that, and Ranma flinched. Xander narrowed his eyes at this, wondering what he was missing now. "Well, can you guide me to one or the other? Or I can just do what I am thinking of."

Ranma looked around for a bit, before pointing in one direction and looking at Shampoo. "That way, I think?"

Shampoo nodded. "Looks right!" she chirped. They took off, and Xander sped off in their wake, turning invisible again so no one would see him flying.

When they paused a moment, not seeing him, he said, "I'm here, keep going."

They sped off again, and soon had led him to a two-story restaurant. Xander had not bothered to give himself the ability to read their language, so he was not sure what the name was, though the characters certainly looked Oriental.

Returning to visibility, solidity, and the ground as he passed through the door, Xander allowed Shampoo to guide them to a table. She did not have to go looking for her Granny, for even as they sat a rapping or knocking sound was heard, and Xander saw a tiny woman bouncing up, balanced on a wooden staff.

"So, son-in-law, who is this that you have brought in this time? Another challenger?"

"Maybe, sort of," Ranma answered her. "He says Kuno somehow managed to summon him like a demon, but he claims he's not a demon."

"And he maybe can remove our curses!" Shampoo interjected.

The old lady hopped forward and gave Xander a piercing look. "There's something odd about this one," she said. "You look like one of these Western body-makers but you do not move like them."

Xander shrugged. Shampoo had led them to a fairly out of the way booth, and there was a curtain that half-cut off the view of the rest of the main dining area, but he still checked to be sure no-one else was watching, then he went fluid, shifted to his original shape, and went solid again. "That better, Granny?" he asked, grinning impudently.

She shrugged, unphased. To Xander's chagrin, even Ranma just shrugged. "Ah, man, tough crowd," Xander griped.

"Just like Copycat Ken," Ranma said. "Not as neat as seeing you pull back together after Shampoo splashed ya."

Xander shook his head. "Getting off topic anyway. I was summoned, and by verbal contract I must free the pig-tailed girl from the foul sorcerer Saotome."

Granny grinned at that, a bit scary Xander thought, and said, "Sounds like you have to get Ranma out from under his father's thumb."

"I told him I ain't no sorcerer," Ranma said curiously, "but what do you mean about Pops?"

"Well, he is a bit foul," Shampoo said tentatively, knowing that Ranma shared the general poor opinion of his father, but also knowing that he would come to his defense if he was pressed too hard.

"And some of his techniques qualify as what the mainland monks term 'ki-sorcery,'" the old lady said, "so he is the foul sorcerer."

Xander sighed. "Unfortunately, if I remove your curse, you won't qualify to be the pig-tailed girl anymore, and I'm afraid that will leave the summoning unfulfilled."

"Ehrmm-hmm," a new voice chimed in, "That is easy. 10,000 yen?"

"Nabiki," Ranma muttered, looking at her nervously. Xander examined the newcomer, a rather pretty teenager with a mischievous if a bit impish smile, a calculating and very sharp look in her eyes, with short-cropped brown hair, wearing pants and a tight shirt that hugged generous curves, though not as generous as Shampoo's. "How'd you find us?"

"Logic, Saotome," she said in a bored tone, before focusing back on Xander. "You want the answer or not?"

"I don't have any yen," Xander answered, watching her face fall and then her expression close off. He held out a small chocolate ball. "But if you suck the chocolate off this . . . but don't swallow it! I think you'll find it sufficient payment."

She took it curiously, and for just a moment Xander could see temptation in her eyes, before she clammed up again, and handed the candy to Ranma. "Be a dear and clean that off for me, Ranma," she purred. Ranma glanced at Xander nervously, then took the candy, and sucked on it for a minute, rolling it around in his mouth, then once the flavor was gone, he pulled it out.

Nabiki gasped and grabbed it from his hands. Her eyes were darting between Xander and the small, glittering clear stone. "This is just glass, isn't it?" She said suspiciously, even as she unexpectedly pulled a jeweler's loupe, a little magnifying device, out of nowhere and started examining the stone.

She breathed in sharply and hissed, color flooding her cheeks as she stared at Xander. "This is a real diamond!" she said. "How did you do that?"

"Is it sufficient?" Xander asked, instead of answering her, though he let her see another chocolate ball in his hand. "You have an answer?"

"If you really can manipulate Jusenkyou curses," she said, a little doubtfully, "just give him control over it, or remove the curse and curse him again without the water magnet bit, and change the trigger to a snap of the fingers or something. Then he could still count as the girl because he could become her at will, but he wouldn't be forced to anymore."

Xander glanced at Ranma. "Would that satisfy you?"

Ranma shrugged. "I don't like the curse, it has made my life miserable, but it has a few good memories too. Not changing constantly would be wonderful. Not changing at the worst possible time would be even better."

Xander nodded. "I can probably do that," he said, "but that still leaves us with the question of freeing from the foul sorcerer bit."

Nabiki asked to hear the whole thing again, and they explained once more what Xander was being required to do. She frowned as she thought it over.

"Does it have to be complete? Or can it be symbolic?" she asked. "I mean, the only way for him to be completely free of the old panda is for Mr. Saotome to die, and I'm pretty sure Ranma doesn't want that." Ranma was shaking his head back and forth vigorously.

"But what if it was something smaller, like, instead of being totally free, he was free from having to constantly listen to him? If you can manipulate the curses, can you give Ranma the ability to lock and unlock Mr. Saotome's curse?"

Xander looked at the old lady. She pursed her lips thoughtfully. "It might do," she said. "But better if you could give him the ability to change the curse's trigger. I have never heard of such a thing, but if his curse could be made to trigger whenever he was attempting to curtail the son-in-law's freedoms, that could be reasonably construed as freeing son-in-law from his manipulations."

"Close enough to be worth a try, and it would not cut off my other options like simply removing your curse would," Xander said, eager to get on with it so he could check on Kushina.

Of course, this was also much less obvious than simply pulling out Ranma's curse, as he had just done with his clone. Rather than trying to get every detail, Xander decided that the simplest thing to do would be to use something he knew he could already do, and change Ranma's curse.

Reaching out and grasping his curse, Xander focused on changing it into the curse of the drowned young female Master of Jusenkyou, with the intent that such a Master of Jusenkyou would be able to alter, grant, and remove curses, as well as change the trigger.

Ranma frowned, feeling something shift internally. Xander sprayed him with a light mist of water, and he felt the usual shift, as he became she. "It didn't work then?"

"It may, or it may not," Xander replied. "If all went as I hoped, then your cursed form is now the Master of Jusenkyou, capable of granting and removing curses, altering their parameters, and locking or unlocking them. So your first step should be to alter your own curse, to remove the water magnet and water trigger and replace it with some other trigger. But do not attempt to remove your own curse, for it is your cursed form that has this power!"

Ranma nodded then concentrated. A moment later he became male again, and whooped, then jumped and danced around, singing "Never gonna be a girl again, never gonna be a girl again."

"But you are," Nabiki pointed out. "You have to be female to lock the panda, or change his trigger."

Ranma stopped and shrugged, turning female again. "Had to say it, anyway." She fingered her pig-tail for a moment, then bowed deeply to Xander and said formally, "Thank you, Master Xander, for freeing me from the foul sorcerer Saotome."

Azure chains sprang into visibility around Xander, snapping him back to the room where he had been summoned, back within the summoning circle. The candle-headed boy was there, with a slightly stunned look on his face, along with the sword-boy, and a tall, beautiful girl in a leotard, gagged and bound and being carried by a diminutive ninja. The sword-boy gave a loud cry of triumph when Xander reappeared, as the magics confirmed to the summoners that the task had been completed.

"As agreed," he said pompously, "Sasuke, hand over my sister."

The ninja threw the bound girl at Xander, and he caught her reflexively. Immediately the magic chains reappeared, and flung them back to his demi-plane, in the foyer of his home.

Throwing his mind out, Xander reached out to his clones, and sighed in relief when he realized that the clones he had made on that plane had remained there, which meant he had a way back. He quickly unbound the leotard clad girl.

"I suppose your name is Kodachi, isn't it?" he asked, and she nodded, confirming what he had realized as soon as he caught her. The 'short sword' he had originally heard should have been read as a name and not an object, just as with Shampoo.

The girl stood there a moment, quivering, apparently torn between fear and fury. "What has my brother done?" she asked, looking about her while always keeping Xander in her sights. She stiffened, and went totally still when Tarou wandered in.

"He summoned me to perform a task. You are my reward for completing it," Xander explained. "And he must have had the right to do so, or the magic would not have taken hold."

Kodachi frowned, then nodded thoughtfully. "In my father's absence, extended since our childhood, he is the Head of House Kuno. But that does not mean I will go quietly!" she said, her expression darkening, and from somewhere she drew a whip and laughed madly. "The Black Rose is no-one's toy!"

Xander growled. "We'll talk about this after you calm down. I have to go check on Kushina." With that, he had the house relocate her to a new bedroom suite, provide for her needs, but keep her contained. He did not need her attacking Mayu and being harmed or killed.

He created a clone and sent it to check on his cartouches and make sure they were still protected, though he suspected that somehow he himself had matched the parameters of the summoning, given the peculiar fit of him being summoned to a world so like his own, then he slid away to Kushina's world to check up on her, and reassure himself, as well as create additional guardians for her, in case he was detained like that again.

---

Kodachi screamed in shock when her surroundings suddenly changed and she found herself in a bedchamber. Tensely and nervously she turned, searching out her hidden attacker. Why else would she have been brought to his bedroom, but to be ravished? Stories of demonic rape flitted through her head, heavily influenced by erotic manga she would never admit to owning, much less enjoying.

How had her fool of a brother managed to perform a summoning, anyway? It was not the first time he had tried, of course. Tatewaki had several times attempted various ancestor summonings, sure that he was the reincarnation of Miyamoto Musashi, or descended from Matsuura Seizan, only to fail completely.

Now she was a demon's prisoner, its reward for some horrible thing. Had it killed her beloved Ranma-sama?

The thought struck her like a physical blow to the gut, and she fell to her knees, still looking about obsessively. The rivalry between brother and sister was long-standing, but there had been love there too, or so she had believed. Sure, she had ever sought to poison him; but then, was that not what siblings did?

After all, he was the elder and set to inherit, unless she could displace him first. Given their father's continued failure to return from Hawaii, there were only two years or so before he would be declared legally dead and Tatewaki would have full inheritance, not merely abusing his position as temporary head as he was now.

And Sasuke, that little ninja-rat, he sold her out! She bolted to her feet and ran to the door, suddenly frantic. She flung it open, and ran down the hall, but when she opened the door at the end of the hall, she found it opened into the same bedroom from which she had just fled.

She heard a sinister chuckle from somewhere, and spun about, her whip at the ready, eyes searching for a target, but she saw nothing. A sudden sweet smell teased her, and she spun back around to find that a slice of berry pie was sitting on a table by a pair of French doors, and she would swear that neither doors nor pie, nor the glass of milk beside it had been there a moment before.

She lashed out with her whip, knocking over the pie and milk, furious at whoever was playing tricks on her, and at her brother. It did not matter. Ranma would come and rescue her, as he had always done for Akane, and finally she would know again what it felt like to be held in his strong arms, to relax against that strong chest.

Her foot bumped into something, and she looked down to find a trashy romance novel lying on the floor beside her foot. She shrieked and kicked it away, and spying another door, ran to it and opened it. It was a bathroom, with a small enclosed privy, and a large shower and a larger furo next to it, water already steaming.

The only thing it was missing was black rose petals on the water . . . Kodachi screamed in fury, as the air was suddenly heavy with the sweet smell of black roses, petals lying on the water as she had just pictured. She slammed the door closed and stomped away to the French doors and wrenched them open, looking out onto what appeared to be a small patio that led into a rose maze . . . a maze of black roses.

She collapsed into a chair beside a small table, staring at the rose maze, and absently began to eat the berry pie she found there, her mind whirling furiously.

Many New Beginnings

When Xander returned to his demi-plane, he was refreshed from seeing Kushina. He had put in place a clone to watch over her with as full access to his powers as he could manage. If she summoned and he failed to appear, the clone was under orders to manifest in his place.

Now he was back home and looking for the clone he had sent in search of an explanation. When the house-clone informed him that said clone had left into the hell-plane, Xander reached out to his mind directly. The clone curtly advised him to check his memories, as he was in a delicate situation.

So Xander let the house guide him to a comfortably appointed sitting room, and sat in a recliner. It conformed instantly and delightfully to his shape, and he realized that he did not actually have any recliners, and had not sent any clones on shopping expeditions, so how? The house reminded him that his will was made manifest here on his demi-plane, and when he had desired a sitting room, the house had simply become aware of another room within itself, and guided him to it.

Shrugging that off with a thought to investigate it later and see if he could get television somehow, Xander let the chair lay back, and tried to remember things from the perspective of the investigatory clone.

It came in snippets at first, scattered, but with some effort Xander was able to pull the memories together and sort out the bits that belonged to other clones.

---

Xander looked about his . . . well, sort-of his, mansion. He had been assigned to try and figure out why Xander had been summoned. His first task, of course, was to check the cartouches. Thinking back, he remembered caching them after Kushina had summoned him, which was before he had the house, so he headed down the dungeon path that led to the cavern and through the mists into where the house now intruded into the demon-plane.

Unfortunately, as he looked about the chamber, he realized that the house had not been idle here. "You've been digging in on this side," he thought at the house. "How come?"

"Within our demi-plane, I have to work in co-operation with the plane-clone," the house replied.

"We should just call you House and Plane," he responded. "Easier that way."

"Fine," House replied, "then you can be Cartouche. Anyway, over here it is just I, and I can poke around and do as I like without anyone looking over my shoulder."

The newly renamed Cartouche nodded, accepting his moniker, and the explanation. "I suppose you've retained the external appearance?"

"Yep, pretty much. Tightened things up a bit since we don't need an air gap to get outside anymore. Been thinking about whether at some point Xander'll want to show off here, so I've been designing some appropriate looks."

"Why would we want to do that?"

"Because these demons have powers? Because they train to fight? Maybe at some point Xander will need to field a defence force to protect Kushina. What if he depends on just clones, and some ninja down there has a one-shot technique that disrupts clones, or blocks them from forming, or entering an area, or who knows what? We could do with some independent actors, people that think differently. Think of how many times we've wished we had Willow? What if we could have minds like Naamahalat working for us, helping figure out a way home?"

"Fine, you think on that. Meanwhile, I've got to find those cartouches. I don't suppose you actually know where they are?" He looked around, trying to work out from the radically altered interior of the demon-plane hideout where the original elements had been, but there was practically nothing left at this point of the original look.

House offered a mental shrug. "I didn't really worry about that, just absorbed what was here then started reshaping it. As it stands now, the entire external structure of this rockpile is actually part of me, so I can give an eye to the outside anytime. Even better, I've found I can pinch off a bit of chakra and assign a task and it works. Kind of simple, really, but not too generally useful, needs simple instructions, like let me know if this view changes, but it makes it reasonable to basically watch all the approaches. I've been more worried about managing that than preserving any of the original structure."

"So basically, the cache he made could have ended up in any portion of yourself that extends into the demon-plane?"

House nodded. "I checked with Plane, he is pretty sure that I've not drawn anything back into the demi-plane, so yeah, it should be around here somewhere. I'm not feeling anything from them, no energy or buzz or achy feeling, or so on."

"Well, Xander didn't really notice anything when he put them on in the first place, except their physical weight, so I'm not surprised."

The remembered conversation ended at that point, and Xander pushed forward, trying to remember finding the cartouches. Obligingly, that memory floated forward, as Xander remembered finally locating what seemed to be a supply closet containing everything Xander had lying around in the hideout, neatly shelved, though disorganized.

The cartouches were still there, undisturbed. Having found them, the clone's task was now to find some other explanation for why Xander was summoned, something that he assumed was merely because Xander somehow fit the parameters. Yet Xander had not been in the demon-plane when he had been summoned, and it should not have been possible to pull him out of his demi-plane, where he was basically all-powerful, though clearly it had been.

The only place the clone could reasonably hope to find such answers was with the demons themselves, as they were the only beings to whom he had access, that were regularly summoned, and Xander realized as the memory trailed off that this explained why the clone had been so curt with him. It was currently infiltrating the demon camps, or the fortress, or some other such source of demonic information.

He would allow it to continue, as it . . . er, he, had clearly been doing a competent job. He could not blame the House for pushing its orders to the limit either, he should have considered more the consequences of copies of his mind getting bored. He was probably just lucky the House and Plane had not started playing pranks on him yet, which gave him yet another reason to figure out a way to get television service.

He had an idea about that, as well as what to do about Kodachi. As with Mayu, he was clearly responsible for her now, but hopefully he could avoid having to take her out of her school, or any other greater disruption of her life.

That she would not want anything more to do with a brother that had effectively sold her, soul and all, to a being he had no reason to believe was not a demon was fairly likely, but he suspected she had other friends with whom she would not want to lose touch.

Reaching out, he located one of the clones on Kodachi's world and directed it to enlist the aid of the old lady and the girl, Nabiki, that Ranma had trusted to help him, to find a large home on a fair chunk of land to purchase. Hopefully, if he could find such a parcel, he could link it to the House, allow the House to basically absorb it, and thereby have a safe place for Kodachi to stay where she could still easily commute to her school and interact with her friends.

It would also, he hoped, give him a means to get television service, and thereby provide a way for the House and Plane to keep entertained.

Sighing at the thought of becoming a mere manager of his many clones, and wondering how right his House-clone was to worry about the ninja having a clone disruption technique, Xander tried to think over the different activities he had going, and what needed doing about each.

Pulling out his little pad from his pouch, Xander again made a series of notes. He needed to check for a Sunnydale on Kodachi's world - while he did not think that there were ki-sorcerers on his world, he had not thought there was anything that could pick someone up, grant them immense power, and then cast them out across the planes either. He needed to find out why he had been summonable, and why it had been able to take effect while he was in his House, on his own demi-plane. He needed to get a house on Kodachi's world. He needed to actually talk to Kodachi again, and explain her situation. That thought made him groan, and he decided to put that off until he could offer her a room in an extension of the House onto her world, and the return of her usual, normal life.

He needed to make up his mind about the House's suggestion, and whether he should seek to recruit demons, knowing that he would need a fearsome reputation to manage it, and would likely need to eventually field an army to take part in the war games there, since that was theoretically the reason for any demon being in that semi-normal area of the plane anyway. He would eventually have to get a look at the House's plan for its shape on the demon-plane.

He still needed to actually find a spot and form a connection from the House to his new Pirate's Cove on the ninja world.

He had pretty much promised that he would return and remove the curse from Shampoo, and while Ranma should now be capable of that, if he had any reason to refuse, Xander ought to follow through.

Looking at that last one, Xander realized that setting his responsibilities on his clones was probably a trap to avoid. He reached out to the clone he had assigned to communicating with Nabiki and Shampoo's Granny, and finding that it had not yet reached them, told it to desist, that he would do it.

His own father had always avoided his responsibility, and Xander did not want to be at all like him. It was alright, he supposed, to use clones for his own ends, to search out answers to his questions and such. But Kushina had summoned him, and while a clone would be better than nothing if something legitimately interfered with his answering that summons, it would not suffice to answer the word of his contract with her, he expected. A clone was also surely not equal to his promise to Shampoo, nor his duty to Kodachi. He shifted guiltily, thinking of Mayu. He had rather pawned her off on a clone as well.

Making a note to check on her, he slipped his notebook back in his pouch and opened a portal to Kodachi's world. Grinning when it opened without any effort, he stepped through, got his bearings, and headed to the old lady's restaurant, since he did not know where Nabiki lived, nor even what her last name was.

Remembering the old lady's comment about him not fitting his body, Xander adjusted his form to his own teenage appearance before entering the restaurant. A bell jingled lightly above the door as he stepped in, his eyes adjusting to the dimmer interior.

A voice caroled a greeting that meant nothing to him, startling Xander since he thought he had already adjusted to their language here, and he had previously thought it had been one of the potions whose effects had become permanent. Obviously he had still not quite figured out what was going on. Swallowing another draught to understand the purple-haired girl's language, as she came over, he was again startled when her speech remained broken and choppy. "Demon-boy back again? Want table?"

Xander shook his head. "I want to speak to your Granny," he told her.

Shampoo nodded. "Shampoo go get her, you go to curtain table again."

Xander made his way though the fairly full restaurant crowd to the table they had used previously and slipped behind the curtain and into the booth seat. He was joined a bit later by the old lady.

"I'm sorry to say, I did not get your name last time," Xander apologized.

The old lady chuckled hoarsely. "My name is Khu Lon, but you can call me Cologne," she told him. "May I ask how you managed to return here? Is it not normal for demons to be returned when their summoning is complete?"

Xander was surprised at her bluntness, but remembered that she had been present during his recap for Nabiki, in which he had claimed to be a human who had learned some tricks to survive in a demon-plane. Presumably this was making her more confident. Or maybe she just had plenty of experience sending demons packing.

"The reward I was promised turned out to be a girl and not a sword, as I thought. I am linked to this plane now through her."

The old lady scowled deeply. "And what do you intend to do with her?" she asked icily, her fingers tightening on her wooden staff.

"I intend to find and purchase a home here in this city, preferably in this local area, so that she can continue at her school, and continue to meet her friends. She is my responsibility now, and I will act as her guardian." He shrugged. "The force of the magic still binds her, as far as I can tell. It may release when she reaches adulthood here, if that normally would free her from her Head of House's control. Otherwise it may bind her til I give her away in marriage," Xander hurried to continue when Cologne's face darkened even more, "to someone of her choosing of course." Xander suppressed a sigh of relief when the old lady relaxed a bit at that.

"You are speaking of Kodachi Kuno, I believe?" the old lady asked, and Xander nodded.

"Though as I understand it, she is not a Kuno any longer."

"I believe she attends St. Hebereke Girl's Academy, a rather expensive private school for girls. Will you be able to fund her studies there?"

"It should not be a problem, though I need to arrange to convert hard goods to currency here. I can readily obtain coins of gold, silver, platinum, or other metals, as well as cut gems, or liquid and gaseous fuels such as oil, gasoline, kerosene, natural gas, and the like, but as I am not from this planet, I've got no provenance for any of it. I hoped that either you could assist in this, for a reasonable cut of the proceeds, or perhaps you could help me contact the young lady, Nabiki, who helped Ranma with his dilemma, and she could assist me."

The old lady had an impressive poker face. It was not as though her face went still or expression-less. Uncle Rory's poker games had taught Xander to read faces, and sudden stillness was a loud tell to an experienced gambler. She had to have a strong reaction to an offer of considerable wealth, but her face remained relaxed, not even a twitch of an eyebrow betrayed her. Of course, that put her earlier reactions to Kodachi's plight more in the light of an open threat than an emotional reaction of concern.

Xander fidgeted as she continued to sit silently for several minutes. Had he inadvertently insulted her? If he had to find this Nabiki by himself, would he have any hope of doing so?

Finally the old lady sighed and relaxed. "As much as I would like to agree," she said, "my ability to accomplish such things is considerable, but only in China, quite some distance from here. The Tendo girl would probably be better able to accomplish your goals swiftly here in Japan. I suppose I don't need to warn a demon familiar with summoning contracts to be careful of the terms of any deal with Nabiki?"

"Before you leave," she said, standing and bowing to him, "I thank you for the gift you gave my son-in-law, and through him, my granddaughter. It was most generous of you to interpret the terms of your contract so favorably to them."

Xander nodded and thanked her for her time. "I was also hoping I might get some assistance in locating Nabiki?"

Cologne agreed, and Xander found himself again following the high-speed cycling of Shampoo, her purple hair streaming behind her as she sped along the fences and wires. She had dismissed his offer to do something about her curse, as apparently Ranma had already used his power to give her conscious control over it, and with that it became more a blessing than a curse.

---

Nabiki was hardly bothering to concentrate on her classes. Her mind was focused on a tiny stone, carefully concealed on her person. She was unaccountably nervous. She knew Ranma's father, Genma Saotome, regularly searched the house for money or other valuables he could pawn to fuel his drinking binges. Likewise, her undergarments were always at risk from Happosai, and the rest of her clothes at risk from collateral damage from the constant fights.

Yet she could not bear to part with it. She had immediately gone to have it appraised. It was apparently only 2.04 carats, but the jeweler declared the cut was ideal, and he gave it the highest rating, FL for flawless, in terms of inclusions, and a D for color, again the highest rating. Had it had minor inclusions, or been even an E, the next highest color ranking, he told her he would rate it at about 3 million yen, but as it was, he offered her 6 million yen up front.

Nabiki was terribly torn. It was enough to pay most of her college tuition up front, and with her savings, would pay for it comfortably. Yet it was the most valuable thing she had ever owned, and to part with it for money that would have to be spent was hard indeed.

Yet even her sense that it was real when the demon had offered it to her in return for her solution to Ranma's problem had not given her a real idea of its worth. She knew that small diamonds could be had for six hundred thousand yen and up, so she was sure it was worthwhile, as long as it was not fake, which she was not certain of at the time. But 6 million?

Her mind kept replaying the demon's appearance in her mind, and though it had looked like a gaijin, Ranma and Shampoo had both agreed that he had looked different before, like the Germanic Ubermensch that the Westerners liked, then changed to look like a dark-haired gaijin teen. If he could change his appearance, then it would not matter so much.

But it was not his face she kept seeing, it was his hands, his left hand specifically, where he had teasingly held a second chocolate, identical to the one she had made Ranma suck clean for her. Had that been another diamond, equal to the first? How many of those could he have?

She felt like squealing like a teeny-bopper seeing their favorite idol, inside, though outwardly she maintained her disinterested demeanour.

He was gone now, but Shampoo had revealed that he might return. Unfortunately, he had claimed he would return to remove her curse, and Nabiki herself, in her foolishness, had offered a solution that removed the need for him to come back at all!

It had taken Ranma only a short while after getting a handle on his cursed form's new abilities to alter Shampoo's curse so that she too could transform at will, though it had made him shiver to do it, as apparently he could now sense the cat within her, and of course, when she had tested the change, he had stiffened up in fear. She had promptly changed back of course, and, her clothes having fallen off, had glomped on to him, totally nude, squealing her thanks.

Nabiki had been quite surprised when Akane failed to pop up out of nowhere to smack him for that, but Cologne had done the job after a moment, rapping her daughter on the head and making her get dressed again.

There was also a little bit of frustration, since she did not feel like she had earned the diamond. She had not conned it out of him, or trapped him in to it, but neither did she feel that the service she provided had matched its value. It was not a big deal when the reward she demanded far exceeded the value of the service provided when she had maneuvered someone in to it. It still felt like she had earned it then, as a reward for being cleverer, more tricky, or just plain smarter than the dull people around her.

This time, though, in spite of getting far more than it was worth, she kept seeing that chocolate rolling around in his hands, as though he had been ready to give it to her, as if somehow he had gotten that service at half the price he was willing to pay, and that irked. She should have held out then, but she and everyone there knew that diamond was far more than a just payment.

When the bell finally rang and they were let out for lunch, Nabiki collected her lunch box and headed out to the yard. Theoretically, she should be discussing the odds for betting on the inevitable fights, but somehow it was hard to work up the urge to think about something that would make a hundred yen difference when she had a virtual loss of 6 million yen weighing on her mind. Yet another thing to hold against that cursed demon. He had ruined her with one tiny stone.

The ringing of a much smaller bell caught her attention as she was finishing off her rice, and she looked up, expecting to watch the Amazonian girl, Shampoo, land her bicycle on her claimed husband Ranma. Instead, Shampoo leapt over the wall on her bicycle headed directly for Nabiki herself!

She came skidding to a halt even as Nabiki leapt to her feet, her heart pounding in her chest. Was the unpredictable woman-warrior going to attack her?

Her eyes tracked a new source of movement, as the demon who had ruined her, Xander, such a strange name, suddenly appeared behind Shampoo, and stepped forward, his eyes meeting hers.

Her mind staunchly refused to consider the lines of his face, the chocolate-brown eyes that so resembled the source of her frustration, or the lines of his body. She was not in the least attracted to this demonic gaijin!

"Xander," she greeted him coolly, and smirked when she noticed several nearby students making signs to ward off evil and chanting prayers for the sake of the gaijin's soul. Did demons even have souls?

"Hold, vile demon!" A loud voice proclaimed. Nabiki groaned, and turned her head, seeing, as she expected, Kuno Tatewaki striding forward, his bokken, a type of wooden practice sword, held at the ready. "Thou hast failed the demands laid upon thee by Heaven, now face Heaven's Judgement!"

"I freed the pigtailed girl from the foul sorcerer, as agreed," stated Xander. "If that was not what you actually wanted, you should have been more careful in your phrasing." Xander gestured, and Kuno's garments fell empty.

Nabiki's heart fell to her feet. Had he killed Kuno, so casually? What could any of them do against someone who could do that with just a wiggle of his fingers? She stared at Kuno's traditional kendo garb in dismay, only to feel a deep sense of relief when Shampoo snatched them up, and a small black kitten tumbled out.

"Stupid stick-boy almost not annoying like this," she proclaimed, ignoring the kitten's furious mews, "but should pick something what not makes noise."

"He'll return to himself in a few hours," Xander said, ignoring the increased muttering of the other students. Crossing his fingers, a move Nabiki's sharp eyes caught, he continued, "I have a business proposition for you."

He had just casually turned Kuno into a kitten, which should have worried her about what he might do to her, but after thinking that he had simply killed Kuno, finding out that he had only transformed him was such a relief that Nabiki's fear had evaporated. Seeing him cross his fingers before offering a business proposition reassured her that she once more had the upper hand.

"Fine, we should talk, in private," Nabiki said, intending to get a restaurant meal out of this at least. Xander, however, had other ideas, and there in front of everyone he produced a portal and gestured for her to precede him.

Unsure, Nabiki glanced at Shampoo, trying to conceal her nervousness. Giving up her home-ground advantage was not what she had in mind, especially not to step into the unknown with a demon. But if she did not return, Shampoo knew who had her, so she could expect Ranma to rescue her, and maybe whatever he had to offer would be interesting enough to compensate her for the loss of attraction in her usual activities.

She stepped through, followed by Xander. She found herself in a large entrance foyer. A chandelier hung overhead, hundreds of prisms hanging without visible support, light from the wall-sconces transformed by it into a display of dazzling brilliance.

The walls looked to be of fine marble, smooth as glass, and the floors were of a cut green stone that she thought might be jade. Could this possibly be real? A pair of stone staircases swept around the sides of the room to the second floor, and doors and arched openings lined the walls top and bottom.

She held her mouth, suppressing any urge to comment, knowing that showing that she was impressed or awed would reduce the strength of her position. Just focus on the money you can get from him, if this is his home, she told herself.

He seemed to pause to think for a moment, then guided her through one of the ground floor archways and down a long hall lined with intricate doors. He turned in at a door that opened in front of them and closed behind them. It was not a sliding door, but a hinged door, and Nabiki was bemused to see that it had no apparent armature to accomplish the opening and closing, and she wondered if it was somehow hidden in the hinges, maybe a pulley system run by wires in the walls, or if it was genuine magic. She was not really sure which would more impress her.

The room they entered was a surprisingly small and intimate dining room, containing only a single dining table with two chairs, laid out as though they belonged in a high-end restaurant, with a set of restaurant style swinging doors at one end.

Xander held out her chair for her to sit, and as Nabiki took her seat, she wondered what he might want from her to go to all this trouble.

Once he had taken his seat, she noticed him swallow nervously, then he said, "You can order whatever you like."

Xander had swallowed a potion intended to enhance his power to summon food by permitting him to summon food that would match another's desires instead of his own. This had never become an issue with Naamahalat, as she had been most pleased by the novelty of what he made for her, and the few things she wanted to have on hand she was willing to allow him to sample first, and then he could produce them to order.

Now, though, he needed to match Nabiki's desires, so as to impress her, though he had no idea what food in Japan was like, particularly. She only saw his swallowing as a sign of weakness, and had no way to prepare.

"Anything?" she asked, glancing around to confirm the absence of a menu.

"Whatever you like," he confirmed.

She put him to the test, ordering the most exclusive and expensive cuts of sashimi, the most delicate rolls of sushi, and then a small piece of richly marbled Kobe beef. She would have liked to order a larger steak, but she could only eat so much, even when someone else was footing the bill.

He managed everything; whatever she mentioned, was brought in a moment later as if it had just come from the chefs, carried in by a waiter wearing a Japanese Oni mask.

After she had finished with a piece of one of her favorite pastries, that she would have sworn had been made in the very shop in Nerima from which she normally obtained it, the only one in Nerima that carried it, she waited while the waiter removed the dishes, then folded her hands on the table.

"Very well," she said, "I am ready to hear your proposition."

Her stance was arguably insulting, or would have been seen so by a Japanese businessman who had just paid for such a meal, but as she expected, Xander showed no sign of offense. Not, she thought, because he was unusually phlegmatic, but merely because he was not Japanese. As his appearance implied, and in contradiction to the Oni mask worn by the waiter, he was a very Western, a very gaijin demon.

Xander was very glad for his power over fluids at this point, keeping him from visibly sweating. "Do you know Kodachi, the sister of the guy I turned into a kitten?"

Nabiki nodded, leaning forward as her interest was caught. She knew the haughty spoiled princess all right, but why would she interest a demon? When would he even have had a chance to see her, or learn of her?

"She is my responsibility now, my . . . ward, I guess you could say. I want to keep her in St. Hebereke, if she wants, and that means I need money."

Xander reached into a small pouch on his belt, and rolled a handful of gold coins on the table. "Money is not a problem for me, exactly, but acceptable money for your world is. I need help converting goods, for which I can provide no legal provenance, as they have no history on your world, into a substantial and legitimate bank account, so I can purchase a large piece of property, set up a house, fund her schooling, and maintain a presence on your world."

Nabiki suppressed a shiver. It was obvious what he was asking now, and just the thought of handling those kind of funds, that much gold, jewels, who knew what else, left her squealing in excitement inside, but she knew better than to show it. Far less did she want to show her reaction to his statement of having a continuing presence near her, of having access to this man for whom wealth was 'not a problem for me, exactly.'

"You would probably need to set up a company to manage the funds, employ a bookkeeper, and pay taxes on the hard goods as if they were income, as if they were being supplied from elsewhere," Nabiki supplied clinically, noting that he had not actually made an offer yet.

Xander nodded. "And I would need someone familiar with Japan, its laws and its ways, to manage it for me, to maintain a steady growth of wealth. I also want to use this presence to obtain things your world can offer that my plane cannot, such as your entertainment. I have to keep my minions happy, after all." Never mind that he only had one minion, technically, at the moment. He would have more, if she took the bait.

"Someone with the skill to manage such a complex operation would certainly not be a cheap investment," Nabiki said leadingly.

Xander laughed. "I expect she could name her price." He grinned at her. "I can see you're having fun fencing with me, but let me be blunt. This home is my dominion, my will rules here. I've got a link to your world now, and there is nothing keeping me out. I can connect Cologne's home in China, where-ever it is, to Tokyo with no trouble. It is not as though you are my only option. But you helped me, you gave me an out that did not force me to hurt anyone who did not deserve it, and got me out quickly, which is what I cared about then. Work for me, and you can be as wealthy and powerful in your world as you like. As long as you build my accounts in a way that doesn't leave me fighting the law, I don't mind paying for your school, or homes, cars, travel, and so on."

To make his point clear, Xander held out an empty hand, then turned it over and slowly built a little pyramid, four by four at the base, of little chocolate balls. Nabiki had to fight an urge to lick her lips, looking at them, sure that within each was another six million yen diamond. She thought back to the crystalline chandelier in the front room. Was it crystal? Or was it diamonds?

She was not letting this get away from her. She could play all the games she wanted with the executives and politicians who would come when she had built his funds up, hungry at the scent of money. She did not need to play with him too . . . though it could be fun.

She nodded sharply. "I can take a percentage, as large as I like, as long as you have money to do what you want, right?"

"And you keep us on the right side of the law, that's right. I don't know what types of goods will best serve, so I'll just say I can fill any sort of container you provide with pretty much any liquid you think is worth selling, be it perfume, or fuel, or molten gold if you find a vessel that will hold it."

Nabiki shuddered at the thought of a train car of liquid gold, and squeaked involuntarily. Sparks flashed behind her eyes and pleasure flooded her brain, and she fainted.

---

Mayu was a trained kunoichi, a skilled fighter, and a ruthless killer. She was also alone, abandoned, and dependent. What she was not, was blind. She had known there was something strange about the improbably powerful ninja that had saved her for inscrutable and unrevealed reasons.

She was not from one of the powerful bloodline clans. She did not have one of the great doujutsu, or eye techniques, that allowed some nin to see the flow of chakra within another ninja's body.

Still, she had enough chakra sensitivity to tell that Ryu, Tarou, and Sanjuro had such similar chakra that it could not be told apart. She had been permitted to spar with Tarou, who looked rather like a member of another Rock clan that had a bloodline ability to form a stone skin, though he was also hugely muscled, and his bloodline seemed to be permanently active. Yet his chakra felt the same as Ryu's, the same as Sanjuro.

At times, it seemed as though she could feel chakra flowing between them. She was not sure at this point whether they were all actually one person who had a bloodline that allowed him to control bodies, or members of a clan, though that would not explain the differences in their apparent bloodlines, or just weird clones. She did not think clones was the right answers though, for in her spars with Tarou, who had poor close combat skills for all he was a mountain of a man, she had occasionally succeeded in causing visible damage, but this damage seemed to be healed quite quickly, rather than dispersing him, as she would have expected if he were a clone.

Granted, there were supposedly advanced forms of clones that could take real damage, but she had never yet encountered one, so had no way of being sure if Tarou was one or not. The mud clone could recover from a small amount of damage, but the way it did so, flowing back together, usually made it obvious that the nin being fought was a clone.

She was sufficiently uncertain, however, to accept that it was not safe to treat anyone she encountered as an underling. There was no clear and visible hierarchy between the various people she encountered, and if her suspicions were correct, anyone she met might possibly be her Master in another guise.

That her new Master had more power than most ninja she had seen was made abundantly clear when he had opened a hole in reality and taken her through into a different world, so different as to have light without a sun to cast it, as if it was not already clear enough when he had stopped that water dragon with no effort.

She had also seen Ryu duplicate her attacks, without handsigns or vocalizations, and subsequently had Tarou do the same thing in the middle of a spar when she pulled an attack on him. That they shared these techniques was more evidence in favor of her theories.

She had no idea where he had come by his new house, nor what the mist was that infested various parts of it, but she was slowly learning to navigate it.

It too seemed to occasionally have chakra active where she could sense it, and that chakra felt just like her Master's.

She was not altogether certain that her Master actually was a ninja, however. She was, in fact, leaning toward the theory that she had given her loyalty to a god, though of what provenance she was uncertain. She was not sure how he might feel about worship, but she had not been able to resist setting up a small shrine in the chambers allotted to her.

Of course, those chambers were themselves something out of a fanciful childhood story. The closet seemed to have whatever article of clothing she was looking for always at the front, exactly the opposite, it seemed, of a normal closet. Any feeling of thirst or hunger seemed to cause food or drink to appear, always well suited to fit her mood.

She had asked for and been led to a room where she could practice her skills, and here targets would appear in whatever pattern she requested, even down to faceless enemies. They did not fight like ninja, but rather like unskilled bandits, but they were supplied in endless waves.

When she sought an exit from the house, she found the lands around the house were rolling hills, either grassy or forested, with occasional streams, and that even here she could describe a bandit camp and shortly thereafter stumble upon just such a camp and subdue it, though the corpses would vanish when killed, sinking into the ground as if it were a muddy bog.

A massive hedge, squared off and flowering with black roses was an unexpected find, and one she could not resist exploring.

---

Kodachi had finally roused herself from her shock and disbelief. She had tried again, more calmly, to leave, but as before, walking down the hall and opening the door at the end led her back into the same room she had just left.

Frustrated, yet oddly calm in spite of it, Kodachi returned to the patio, and taking her ribbon in hand, entered the maze of black roses. She had no idea that the food she had unconsciously partaken of, in spite of her conscious misgivings about the possibility of being poisoned, had in fact contained healing magic that was clearing her mind of the fogging effects of her own concoctions.

Wandering down the softly lit paths, which at first she thought were the sign of a careful gardener, with a thick well-cropped lawn, Kodachi felt her mood lighten and she began to notice little details.

There was something odd about the walls, she mused as she took the first turning to the right. She moved closer to one of the perfectly straight walls. Surely it was not the straightness that was so odd? That merely took careful pruning, though that pruning was needed over several years, which made it very odd that a place she was so unexpectedly taken to should have roses so very similar to her signature black roses, but that was an oddness she had already noted and dismissed as unanswerable.

There was something else tugging at the edges of her consciousness, and when she leaned in to smell one of the roses, she realized what it was. The rose bush forming the hedge had absolutely not been pruned. Tracing the path from the bloom back towards the root with a finger carefully held out of range of the thorns, Kodachi searched for cuts, the flat edge of a vine where it had been trimmed, but she found none.

It was as if the rose had simply chosen, or been forced, to take a flat path in its growing. She had in fact seen a similar effect achieved before, by growing a vine in the presence of plates of glass that constrained the growth without impeding the light necessary to fuel it, then later removed. Yet there were signs when that was done, flat areas where the vine pressed against the glass. All the roses here were in proper form, the vines neatly rounded, the blooms uncrushed, the leaves undamaged, but no sign a pruning shear had ever been near.

As she leaned over, tracing the vine down towards the root, her eyes were drawn to the grass beneath her feet, and she collapsed to her knees in shock. It too was not shorn to a height, as every lawn she could remember had been, nor yet was it grown horizontally, like some forms of runner grass that maintained shorter blades. The ground beneath was perfectly flat, the blades of grass individual, and all reaching to an identical height above the ground. It was eerily perfect, and she felt unsettled and a little disturbed. Gardening might have calmed her, was one of her favorite pastimes, yet apparently, none was ever necessary here.

As if to contradict her, dark green saw-toothed leaves sprouted and spread out into a tiny rosette. As a gardener, she immediately recognized it as a dandelion, a pernicious weed to a gardener, though one also used in some folk remedies.

Kodachi scowled and shook her head. Rising back to her feet, she stalked away into the maze, ignoring the occasional weed that now sprouted to tease her. The initial perfection of the maze and lawn, and the obvious and unnatural speed of the weeds in sprouting made it perfectly clear that this garden could easily maintain itself without her. While she had derived some degree of pleasure from the effort involved into maintaining her plants in her greenhouse, she would not be a servant to makework for a garden that clearly needed none of it.

At the unexpected approach of another person, Kodachi wondered if this might be a chance to win parole for her apparent offense, as she assumed her isolation was retribution for her attempted assault on her new . . . she scowled again, not knowing what to term the demon. He was not the head of a proper Japanese household, she certainly did not want to think of him as Master or Lord or, Heaven forfend, Owner . . . captor, yes, captor would do nicely, her attempted assault on her captor.

She tracked the approaching ki, while distantly noting a second lighter signal, similar to that of a shrine maiden or priest. Seeing that the person was clearly leaping the hedges instead of treating the maze as a maze, Kodachi marked where the newcomer would land, and moved to stand a few feet away, and watched.

Lessons

Xander let the House lead him to a sitting room where he could set Nabiki down on a couch. He did not feel she would appreciate awakening in an unknown bed, but fully clothed on a couch she would be less likely to awaken fearing what might have happened during her unconsciousness.

Mentally he checked in with the clone he had watching over Kushina, confirming that she was okay, before considering his next move. Obviously, he could not do anything more with Nabiki until she awakened, and though he probably could produce some odor or such to wake her up, even if it was pleasant, it will still be him forcing her back awake, and with him there. He rather thought after the embarrassement she had just experienced she would probably prefer to get up in her own time and alone, where she could recover her dignity.

Before he had been thrown out of Sunnydale, he would probably have been clueless about what happened to her. After Naamahalat, he knew exactly what had occurred, and his fluid senses confirmed it with no effort or confusion. Nabiki had experienced a spontaneous orgasm, presumably at the thought of the amount of money she was going to control, or make, or the power she would hold over others, or some such thing.

It did not bother him, any longer, and indeed, as beautiful as she was, he would be more than willing to indulge her if she did not mind improper relations between employer and employee. It was not as though he was subject to corporate regulations. He knew he could force her, could force pretty much any woman, either directly, or through chemical or magical means, but the idea held little appeal to him.

If he ever simply wanted sex for sex's sake, he was at no particular risk from prostitutes, and indeed, he could heal them of any ailments they might have, or he could return to Naamahalat. He rather thought that as time passed, his recent sexual drought would take care of itself. There would be no consequences for the women unless he intended it. Ejaculating magical blue goo into his first companion demonstrated that clearly enough.

Returning to his consideration of the ninja world, Xander had the House guide him to a suitable location, working with the Plane to form a body of water and a similar cave, then bound it with his Pirate's Cove. He transited to the Cove, then shifted between bodies into the child-clone that was currently outside the Hidden Village and used it to form a new body.

Moving into the new body, he asked the child clone how its task was progressing.

"We picked names. I am Ni, or Two, and my partner is Ichi, or One. It is not exactly going the way you hoped. We are seeing more things, and I can copy what I see, but figuring out how to tweak it?" Ni shrugged. "I think we really need those coils, so we can do it the way they do. Once we really understand it that way, you can probably just power it up, or magic it up or whatever. But we really need the basics."

Ni frowned at him. "You know, it is pretty miserable of you to make clones of yourself and assign them to studying. It is not like we have any pleasant memories of studying, you know. It is very hard not to pull pranks on all the jerks we see. If we got those basics, maybe you could, you know, actually make a clone that could enjoy torturing themselves . . . I mean, studying."

Xander grinned. "Not like you've got to read all the time. Come on, you're studying fighting, it should be fun!"

"Bull," Ni snorted. "We don't have the experience or training for the physical fighting they do, nor a sparring partner the way we are swapping. So it is just chakra, and half of what they do is just read about it."

Xander pondered that for a minute. He was still nervous about whether once he had coils, he'd end up with them in every form he made, making him stand out to the ninja's senses. Of course, even if he did that, he could just use the Power to produce a fluid that hid him, right? Xander rubbed his temples and huffed.

"Alright, let's try this," he said, and focusing his power on the small clone, he altered its body, reforming it with new inherent abilities.

Xander quickly modified Ni's form to have the capacity to produce clones of himself, then, taking advantage of his having confirmed that he could remove a Jusenkyou curse, modified his form, and those of the clones he produced, to be able to produce, remove, lock, and unlock, the cursed form of a ninja. In this way, the child-clones could actually experience having chakra coils without his body ever having them; only the Jusenkyou produced clones would have them. At least, that was the hope.

Xander was running on hope and guesswork at this point, but if Ni was right, then these clones were pretty much spinning their wheels without him doing something to improve matters. Certainly, he had not been struck recently by any revelatory memories that suddenly explained what the trick with chakra was.

"Ok, see if you can swap that body for a cursed ninja form," he instructed, and Ni nodded and squinted as if trying to picture it.

A moment later, he shifted quite suddenly. Whipping through a quick series of hand signs, he shouted a phrase, thrusting his hands forward. Nothing happened.

"Well, crud. Can you look into me, see if I've got those coils?"

Xander examined him through the Power.

"Yep, I can see them, looks pretty much like what I've seen in other ninja. Guess you've just got to learn to do it the ninja way, now."

The clone shrugged. "At least now I can hopefully make progress. What should I do when I switch with Ichi?"

"Just let me know, and I'll do him then."

Ni nodded, then looked down thoughtfully. "You know, I thought we might, if we got working coils, try to insert someone actually into the schools. Let the ninjas just train them up."

Xander considered that. "Let me think on it a bit. It sounds reasonable, but something . . . I just don't know. I'll give you an answer on that later."

Opening a portal, Xander moved back through into the House, opened another portal, retrieved his original form back from the Cove and slipped back into it.

A quick check with the House confirmed that Nabiki was still out and Kodachi was still confined. He briefly considered facing Kodachi again, but shook his head. He really wanted to be able to promise her that she would be able to continue at her school, and live in the same area, and for that he needed Nabiki.

So Xander returned to the comfortable thinking room he had used the last time he was considering what to do, settled into a chair, and reached out to the clone he had left exploring the Duke's fortress.

"This is a library," he hissed mentally. "Why the devil didn't you tell me you had found a library?" He stared around through the clone's eyes at the piles of scrolls.

"I've been working my way through one that deals with summoning," his clone retorted. "There's no way to fill this place with a thousand clones without attracting attention, and you'd probably collapse with a melted brain if we tried to absorb that much information at once, anyway. I'm still trying to figure out why you were able to be summoned from the Plane. Currently, I am thinking that even though you were in your own dimension, bits of you are in several other dimensions, giving the spells something to latch on to. So it looks to me like the only way to actually shield yourself from all summons is to pull all of yourself in to your demi-plane."

"I could do that," Xander mused dubiously, "but would that block me from being summoned by Kushina?"

"Not unless you repudiate the contract," the clone responded, pointing to a bit of the unrolled scroll that lay on a table before him. He was mostly transparent, and manifested just a fingernail to guide the eye and highlight the words he was indicating. Every now and then he was pushing their shared body to look towards one edge of the room.

"What's over there you keep trying to look at?" Xander queried.

"The demon in charge of the library," he answered. "I don't want to have to find this scroll again if he cleans it up, this is the most detailed and informative one I've found yet."

Xander nodded. "I could mark it with a bit of fluid that is part of us, we can tune in on that."

"Won't work," the clone explained, "there's some kind of preservation magic on these, otherwise they'd have been destroyed long ago. Can't even take notes on them, I've tried. It doesn't stick, and it notifies the keeper. I've lost several scrolls to that. The ones that I tried to mark he takes out of this place completely, and I haven't followed, as I didn't want to get sealed out if they put on more protections."

Xander gave up then, and read the passage the clone was indicating. "So the contract fulfillment summoning is a totally different magic from a normal summoning ritual, even if you use one to set up the other?"

"Yep, like the difference between calling a hotel exchange and asking to connect to so-and-so and waiting while they look, versus calling the room phone."

"So the question then is, is it worth it?"

"I'm pretty sure the answer is no," the clone responded. "This scroll doesn't cover it, but by being connected to multiple planes, you are keeping their timelines synchronized. Pull out completely, and the next time you portal there, five minutes may have passed, or a hundred years."

"Well, that would suck, but yeah, I'd pretty much figured that out from Naamahalat's stories. 'So-and-so was summoned, and summoned again a week later and the summoner was the great, great grandson of the first summoner. No wonder mortals think demons can hold vengeance grudges for millenia.'"

"Yeah, but as long as you have the dimensions bound together, by being in them simultaneously, they can't get pulled out of whack."

"What does that do to them if I work out a way to travel in time, then?"

"No idea. I'll let you know if I come across an answer to that. In the meantime, maybe you should avoid that."

Xander pulled back to the sitting room, and considered the experience. His clone had seemed oddly short with him, curt, irritable at the interruption - though granted, he was sharing the body, and it wasn't all that comfortable for him either, with them both making motions, and the body sort of averaging them. He wondered about it though. It seemed apparent that while he could concentrate and remember anything his clones experienced, it never actually felt like something he himself had done unless he concentrated on reliving it. So from their perspective, were his new memories the same? Was that why they were different?

People were the sum of their experiences, right? Did that not hold true for the memories of his clones? While it seemed a good thing that he would not have odd experiences pulling his personality and behavior this away and that, it also meant that his clones would diverge from him more and more over time. Was there a solution to that? Did it even need a solution?

Too many questions.

Xander was a do-er, not a thinker like his Wills. He and Jesse pretty much goofed off during their time at school, taking life as it came. The most they did for planning was setting up a prank, though Xander and Jesse had slowly built a stash of money, hoping that one day it would be enough to do something with, take a trip or something.

Money was no longer an issue, and Xander had pretty much thrown himself into everything that came along so far, and now with his clones, he was throwing himself into everything simultaneously. With Xander's home life, dwelling on his circumstances was likely to lead to depression or worse, and his current situation, for all his power, had definite similarities. Xander had a solution to that. Don't think about it, don't think about your own situation or how bad it is, think about your friends, focus on them, focus on their happiness and your own will follow.

He could not get to his friends, but when he did make it back, he was going to be ready to protect them from whatever these Powers wanted to do there that they needed him out of the way for, and Heaven help them if his friends were hurt. It looked like he was going to pick up new friends along the way, and he was okay with that. Hopefully Willow and Jesse would be okay with it too, when he made it back.

At any rate, as poorly behaved as that clone had been, it was doing the task he had set it, and where it had taken liberties, they were well reasoned and sensible, and still working towards his goals.

However, it did give him a hint on another task to accomplish, and he pulled out his notepad and made a note to look into the chemicals involved in color photograph processing, to see if he could reproduce the effect, and also to simply pick up some cameras.

If his clone could photograph the whole scroll, they could study it later, even if he had to take the camera back to another dimension for processing.

He wondered if he should just pick up the equipment for processing the film and set up his own film studio in House, as it were, then a new thought hit him. As much as Willow loved to read, she would probably want to read those scrolls, so he should probably start copying them, and collecting books. He should, anyway, but he could imagine the revolt he would get if he tried to make a clone of himself become a librarian. Reading about cross-dimensional summoning could at least be interesting, at times reading a lot like fantasy stories, full of adventure and magic. Being a librarian? He would probably find a way to murder himself.

"Hire a librarian," he murmured as he made another note. Of course, just a librarian would not do. It would need to be someone devoted to building and maintaining a collection, to the point that managing books and scrolls from multiple worlds would just make them happier, not make them revolt and demand higher wages. Not that he could not pay, of course, but the second type might conceivably quit, and then he would have to find someone new, over and over.

A moment later he looked up and then got up, as the House informed him that Nabiki had awakened. "She seems angry," it warned, "but I don't think it is at you . . . it sounds like she is worried that you'll change your mind, having seen her lose control, and find someone else to manage things for you."

"Well, we can't have her thinking that," Xander said, heading straight out. "I left her alone cause I thought she might be distraught or need time to pull herself together, not to make her think I'd changed my mind."

It seemed only an instant before he was at the door. He paused and breathed deeply, trying to get his mental focus back and make sure he did not make a crass comment when he saw her, then he opened the door and walked in.

She was muttering to herself when the door opened, but that stopped instantly, and her breathing noticeably deepened when she saw him. "Feeling better, I hope? I know that was a bit much to throw at you at once," Xander offered, deliberately ignoring the question of her sexual response in favor of pretending she had only fainted.

"I should probably return you to your family before they decide I've kidnapped you. I'll contact you to find out your answer. Tomorrow? Or would you prefer longer to consider my offer?"

Nabiki took a deep breath and nodded decisively. "Tomorrow is fine," she said, "after school?" She winced at that, feeling that she probably should not have reminded him that she was still in high school, but then remembering that he had spoken to her on the school grounds. "It's not like he doesn't know," she told herself sternly.

He walked her back to the foyer, and they returned to her world through another portal. "I do hope you'll take the job," he said, grinning at her, "I'll be back for your answer tomorrow." He nodded at her, and stepped back through the portal, which closed behind him.

Nabiki made her way quickly home, intent on getting to her room and taking some private time to think things over. Not to mention getting a change of clothes.

Xander turned his attention back to Kushina, checking in with the clone he had watching over her now. When he heard what she was doing, he had to shift his vision over to his clone's eyes to see for himself.

Sure enough, Kushina, little killer-in-training, was on her hands and knees, pulling weeds.

"Is this a punishment?" Xander asked his clone.

"No," the clone replied, shifting his head to look at another small form grubbing for weeds. "Teamwork building, apparently. She's been put on a team, which is apparently what she was pushing for all this time, but it seems they get assigned in-village chores to build up their teamwork before they ever head out of the village."

"She's been forbidden from summoning you, and they've all been forbidden from using clones and such. Have to actually do the work themselves. All up to their instructor, apparently, what they are allowed to do and not do. She seems pretty happy about it all, I gather she had actually passed out of their normal school over a year ago, and should have been put on a team at the time, but was blocked for political reasons."

"So she worked on the summoning to prove they could not afford to coddle her," Xander commented and felt his clone's silent agreement.

Deciding that this side was well handled for now, he returned his focus to the modern world he could now access. His thoughts about setting up a library were very apropos, and while he needed a legitimate company to pay for Kodachi's schooling, there should not be any problem in using less legal means for simply purchasing supplies, particularly if he did it in a different country.

Returning to Kodachi's world, swapping into the body of one of the clones he had left there, he found a secluded alley in which to form a portal. As long as he was heading to a different nation, he might as well check for a Sunnydale, and cross this task off his list.

Forming a portal directly to Sunnydale worked, and Xander felt his nervousness peak as he stepped through the portal. Unfortunately, on the other side, he immediately realized he had not been restrictive enough in his thoughts.

He was by the side of a two-lane asphalt road, with fields of dry brown grass around him, and a few hundred feet away in most directions, the clear outlines of pines or similar evergreen conifers against the sky. There was not a single broad-leaf oak to be seen, much less a palm tree.

He was pretty clearly not in Sunnydale, California, though he expected he probably was in fact in a Sunnydale, as otherwise his power would, at least it had been his experience so far, have failed to form a portal at all.

Moving quickly off the road and out of sight, Xander went airy, berating himself for not having thought of it to begin with. Attempting it again, Xander tried to form a portal to Sunnydale, California. This failed, and Xander paused a moment to marvel at this, that apparently his power could somehow access direct knowledge of what cities did or did not exist. How did that fall under having power over fluids?

He jotted the thought down to ask Willow when he found her, then shoved it out of his mind. Expecting magic to make logical sense when he himself had such a poor grasp of logic was just going to make his brain hurt, and not get him anywhere.

So he portaled to an unoccupied alley in Los Angeles, California, an attempt which succeeded. Abusing his food summoning powers a bit, Xander managed to form a small black jewelry bag, and a solid handful of diamonds to put in it.

He knew that he would have to find someone willing to pay him under the table for them, as he had no provenance for them, but changing his face, form, and even his fingerprints to ensure that nothing tied back to him was child's play for him by this point, and he was under basically no risk, since even if someone successfully stole them from him, he could just make more. Eventually, he would find someone whose greed would convince them to make him a deal, and he would have a substantial amount of cash to play with. Sure, he would theoretically take a massive loss on them, as no-one would pay full price for diamonds they suspected to be stolen, but since they were essentially free to him, it would be pure profit.

Finding them was a challenge, until Xander was reminded that somehow his power had effectively been able to answer the question 'Is there a Sunndale, California on this world' . . . or maybe that was 'in this dimension'. He was not sure which, but clearly, there was somehow a connection between his power and answers to questions he asked, if he could figure out the right formulation.

Presumably then, he might be able to open a portal directly to such a place, but that would be a bit obvious, and lead to complications. How else could he do it?

A moment later he figured it out, and successfully opened a portal into 'the closed and unoccupied closet of a diamond-buyer with enough cash on hand to pay for my diamonds and few enough scruples to buy them.'

Xander slipped easily and invisibly out through the minor gap at the base of the door, and then drifted through the halls until he located a receptionist, passed out beyond him and found a secluded area to solidify. He spent a minute first adjusting his appearance, then solidified and headed for the front desk.

The receptionist was a thin-faced young man with dark hair and a serious look on his face, though he smiled when he looked up at Xander's approach.

"Do you have an appointment?" he asked. Though he was smiling, his speech was carefully enunciated, clear, and sober. The implication that he would not be allowed past without an appointment was clear, but Xander felt sure that his power had not led him astray.

So he took the simple approach, and slipping his hand into his bag, drew out two stones and cast them onto the desk between them. "My reservation," he said, his voice deeper and rougher than usual due to the adjustment of his shape. He had not practiced adjusting his vocal cords to change his speech, but his various alter egos all had voices largely commensurate with their appearances, particularly Tarou's deep basso rumble, so he showed no surprise at the difference in his voice. It did cause him to make a mental note to practice altering his internal structure for effect. Mimicking voices could be useful, as could having an unexpectedly deep voice or high voice in opposition to his physical conformation, when he wanted to be memorable.

The diamonds quickly vanished off the desk as the young man plucked a card off the edge of the desk. "Ah, here is your reservation." Toggling a button on the desk phone, he said, "Mr. Miller, I have a Mr. Clouseau here to see you."

Xander might be a novice at the underworld trade, but he was big on popular culture, especially cultural jokes. The Pink Panther was before his time, but he had seen it, and he knew of Peter Sellers, the British actor/comedian who played the Inspector Clouseau, so he got the inside joke and tip-off.

Miller as a name was not indicative, but when the young man opened the office door and let him in, and he saw a yarmulke perched atop the elderly man's head, Xander groaned inwardly at the sheer cliche of having a Jewish diamond buyer, though he brightened a moment later. As much as he was here to get funds, it would be a boon for the diamond seller, and maybe the fact that he had helped out a Jewish diamond seller would be a point in his favor with Willow. Not particularly likely, true, but maybe it would turn out to be a good story.

Anthony Miller, named after an uncle, Anton Levy, whom he had never met, was a cautious man in a risky business. Any given seller could be a potential thief, hoping to make a quick buck by knocking him off and taking his supplies, so meeting unknown buyers was not a normal thing for him.

The code his clerk had used, 'Clouseau,' was more than a reference to a diamond 'Seller,' though that was meant to be the obvious meaning. More than a reference to the actor, it was a tip-off about the likely nature of the mark, in this case a reference to a probable agent.

Xander did not realize it, but a real diamond seller might have bribed the receptionist, but never on the scale he had. To do so was an obvious red flag, an indication that the diamonds were not worth as much to Xander as they ought to be, thus making them likely to be either fakes, or he a border agent peddling government contraband, conflict diamonds seized in a sting, used to then entrap another seller for the same crime.

The other obvious possibility, of course, is that the diamonds were legitimate diamonds, but not worthy of concern because the putative seller intended murder, and would collect them again, along with everything else of value, on the way out.

So when Xander entered the diamond buyer's office, he was covered by three guns. One was in Miller's hand, hidden beneath the desk. No small pistol that would have to be pulled out and aimed, this was a double-barreled shotgun, loaded, fixed to the bottom of the desk, the opening camouflaged by a hanging bit of paper from a stack that jutted over the front of the desk.

The paper concealed the opening in the wood where the gun's double barrels rested, but would offer no barrier to the exiting shotgun pellets. At this range, fired low, it would take out an attacker's legs and groin.

The other two guns had been quietly picked up in the offices to either side, and aimed through slats in the paneled windows. The young men holding them were Miller's son and nephew, the receptionist being another nephew, and both had been signalled by the light on the phone, as the receptionist had pressed the intercom button, instead of the direct line to Miller's office.

Xander meanwhile, had no knowledge of the danger he was in, but would not have been particularly worried about it if he had known. The healing factor he now had would keep him alive long enough to go liquid and back, which should make repairing any damage trivial.

His opening greeting of "Shalom," was unexpected by Miller, and hard-won by Xander, who had wracked his brain to remember the common Jewish greeting. His mind kept coming up with "Mazel tov," which he was sure was wrong, and he could not keep from grinning when "Shalom," the term he had been looking for popped into his head.

Miller nodded in response. "Shalom. You have some rocks for me to eye?"

Xander set the black bag on the desk, then settled into a chair. Miller eyed him for a moment, before drawing out a loupe, a small magnifying eye-piece and setting it by the bag, then picking up the bag. He opened a drawer and drew out a brilliant white mat with raised edges and set it on the desk, then carefully emptied the bag on the mat.

His eyebrows went up when he realized all the diamonds were at least a full carat in size. Normally, a seller would be selling a complete batch, mixing large and small to get a better overall price, and buying just the top diamonds would push the price up substantially. Yet another indication that something was foul here, but surreptitiously looking over his 'Clouseau,' he saw nothing that would indicate a weapon, and no apparent nervousness. "Must be in the small of his back, or a shoulder holster," Miller thought to himself, wondering if the agent was wired.

Xander had no idea he had botched his introduction so badly, and was calmly waiting for the diamond buyer to look over the diamonds, knowing that he would surely buy, since Xander knew he had the cash, when he suddenly felt the chains of a summoning wrapping around him.

Panicked at the thought of vanishing from the middle of a meeting with a guy who probably had security cameras, Xander, for the first time, resisted, and strained to remain in place. For a moment, he managed it, but the draw did not lessen, so he took quick action, forming an invisible fluid body, switching into it, and pumping his visible body with a chakra clone before allowing the summoning to snatch him away.

The clone of Xander had no idea why, after a few short minutes of examining the stones, Miller asked him for documentation of their provenance, and on failing to receive it, quietly showed him the door, even returning the two he had given to the receptionist.

With no idea what he had done wrong, nor how to fix it, the clone tried and failed with several more diamond dealers, each time tripping their red flags. Since he did not change his appearance between each, his image and information was soon being shopped around and fairly shortly he was not even getting past the front desk.

---

The smooth black stone of the chamber Xander appeared in was not reassuring. The fact that the summoning circle was no mere chalk or salt outline, but a precisely and not freshly carved pattern in the stone floor spoke ill for his chances of manipulating or breaking the summoning.

He spun about slowly, taking in the strangeness that was a highly intricate summoning circle in what appeared to be an exceedingly richly appointed sleeping chamber, decorated with a very dark theme. The cloth draping the bed looked to be black and deep purple, the dresser against one wall, topped with an ornately carved wood frame surrounding a mirror that just screamed magic to him was of a black wood, but not painted black, for all the whorls and grain of the wood were still clearly visible.

The one window in the room was open, and yet not. There was no glass to close it off, or wood or cheesecloth to block the wind. Instead, it appeared to have been sealed with roses grown so tightly they blocked off all light. Here and there a dark purple rose bloom testified to continued life in the window covering.

Finally he focused on his summoner, a tall, slender woman with pale green skin, ruby red lips and penetrating eyes. She wore a floor length black robe with a purple inlay, and in her hand she held a golden staff tipped with a glowing green sphere.

She seemed to sense that his vision was on her, though he was invisible due to his efforts to leave the diamond buyer's without simply vanishing, and spoke in a commanding voice.

"Modesty is impertinent in such as you. Think not that I am fooled. Show yourself to me." The sphere on her staff glowed in response, casting odd green highlights on the various objects in the room. The light glinted off something glassy on a shelf partly hidden by the large bed with its hanging black drapes, but Xander had no time to look for it further.

Allowing his body to assume its usual shape, he solidified, and a momentary upward bend quirked one of his summoner's lips before it was suppressed.

"A pleasing form," she stated, sweeping forward, her robe drawn backward as it trailed behind her. Xander kept an eye on her, at the same time as he examined the summoning circle, trying to parse what his new senses were telling him about it.

It was inherent, as far as he could see, in the circle itself that he could not harm her permanently, or in any way at all against her wishes. As the circle was a permanent fixture, there was no way for her to break the circle to allow him out without his being bound by an agreement.

That was potentially a bad thing, because Xander had seen enough Disney movie marathons with Willow to recognize her as a dead ringer for a real live version of one of the Disney villainesses. He could not remember, however, if she was the merely evil queen, or the really truly evil fairy witch who could transform into a huge fire-breathing dragon. The mirror suggested one, while the roses and ability to summon him suggested the other. Either was bad news.

He got an inkling of just what degree of bad news when she shrugged her shoulders, and her black gown slipped off to pool at her feet. She reached up and removed a sort of black horned headdress, allowing long black hair to cascade to the floor, providing a glistening backdrop to her enchanting nude form. She was slender and willowy, with small breasts capped with dark green nipples. Though slender, she did not appear skinny or underfed, her arms were nicely proportioned, her hands long, slender, and smooth, her nails a lighter green. Her stomach was just a little rounded, well-muscled with a touch of fat softening the lines leading to a trim little spot of black hair, and long, luscious legs. Her feet were concealed within her pooled robes.

"Two fairies, two unspoiled humans, two winged horses . . ." she trailed off, looking at him for a moment, then sniffed delicately. "Very well, and a young dragon. Agreed?"

"Where's the other half?" Xander wondered, and focused again on the summoning circle, searching frantically for what he was missing. When he found it, he realized he should have guessed. The task the demon was summoned for was apparently defined by several runed stones that got placed in precise spots in the summoning circle, both specifying the purpose, and specifying the demon summoned to fulfill them at one and the same time. An efficient mechanism, and as implied by her actions before speaking, the terms were for a full night of sexual congress.

Well, she was by no means unattractive, but Disney, for all it was Disney, had been pretty clear in their early movies about the evil motives of their characters, and if they were perhaps dumbed down in newer releases, those early movies he saw as a child were clear. From commanding a huntsman to bring him her heart, to cursing a mere baby to die sixteen years later, Disney's early villainesses made no bones about their evil, and if he did not accept, those mentioned fairies and humans could expect little more than torture and death unless they were in fact a princess.

If this were actually a Grimm tale or one of the other precursors to Disney tales, then even the princesses would be at risk. Giving in to his own lust for sex, having been denied it since leaving Naamahalat, and his desire to protect others, even sight unseen, Xander said, "Agreed."

The summoning circle flared, and Xander felt the invisible chains settle into his limbs, and knew they would hold him if he made any move to harm her. To have any chance of saving the people she had mentioned, he would have to satisfy her.

He was not particularly worried about that.

While he would have liked to have figured out by now how to produce music on demand or the like, it was in fact no particular effort to request one of his clones still in Kodachi's world to locate some place where soft mood music was being played, and then set up a sympathetic vibration.

He had gotten his shirt off by the time the music kicked in, and he started swaying to it. Modern dance was something he knew basically nothing about, but sensual, erotic dancing to inflame the passions of women? Yeah, he was actually fairly practiced at that by this point.

Modern mood music gave it a different touch, however. In Naamahalat's chambers, when he danced for her pleasure, and that of her guests, it was either in silence, or one of them would play a small stringed instrument, something like a lap harp or lute. The music his clone piped in was fuller and richer, having several instruments, including a soft saxophone and a moderate beat.

The green queen, as Xander found himself thinking of her, had stepped away from her gown to sit on the edge of her bed, watching him perform for her. She had released her staff and it stood perfectly straight by her bed, still bathing them in soft green light. With green skin lit by green light, lounging on a bed, her only adornment a golden ring with a black stone, Xander suddenly had a mental image of Captain Kirk from the original Star Trek, encountering the Orion slave girls for the first time, and his arousal surged unexpectedly.

Xander focused on her eyes, staring deeply into her as he lowered his pants and exposed himself to her. He felt another jolt of arousal when she licked her remarkably red lips with a black tongue.

It was his senses that saved him from the failure of his expectations. As he moved over and stroked her smooth skin, he focused his senses on her and found to his surprise that she was not even close to moist enough for intercourse. All of his experience to this point had been with demonesses, and their fluids flowed copiously and easily, almost at will, their arousal ready and instant, lengthy foreplay and dancing was more a matter of denial with them, of heightening tension by not instantly indulging, than of needing it to actually be ready.

His green-skinned partner, on the other hand, while excited enough to be breathing somewhat more deeply, and for her nipples to have hardened and risen from her small breasts, was not yet ready for direct intimate contact.

Given that he suspected her to be capable of the insidious curses of fairy tales, curses that could wait years before striking, that could seemingly rewrite someone's destiny, far worse than any fireball or magic arrow whose impact his healing factor could soon resolve, he was more than glad that his extra senses gave him that bit of warning to moderate his approach and not anger her with a too-quick attempt at intercourse.

Climbing onto the bed, he drew her onto it as well, his enhanced strength making her feel as light as a falling leaf, reminding him to keep it in check. Breaking her arms would probably trigger the punitive aspects of the summoning, something he did not really want to experience.

Though he had no personal experience with human women, not that he was certain she was human, he had listened to stories of demons, male and female, seducing humans. Naamahalat had no such tales, as her innate pheremones and her lustful aura made seducing mortals and priming them for sex both easy and nearly instantaneous, but many of her visitors had not had her direct advantages.

So Xander had at least some idea of how to go about increasing her excitement, and he had his fluid senses to act as a sort of progress meter, allowing him to monitor her production of the oils and fluids that would make her slippery enough for more direct activities.

He kissed her neck, then nipped at it lightly, plucking her skin with only his lips, while he stroked softly down strong silky shoulders. He nipped his way up her neck and nuzzled her just behind and beneath her ears, then drew her earlobe into his mouth and laved it with his tongue.

Disappointed a little at her subdued reaction, he produced a small amount of a massage oil that would increase blood flow, to have a warming effect, and rubbed it in to her back, as he swirled his tongue around her ear, discovering that it was in fact pointed. He drew the pointed tip of her ear into his mouth and suckled on it, but again, it drew little reaction.

"Hurt me," she said throatily. "Bite me!"

Well, if that is what she wanted. He supposed a bit of masochism ought not be surprising in an evil fairy or an evil queen, and suspected that he would likewise feel her capacity for sadism later. This too was familiar territory, as his demoness lovers had often made extensive use of his healing factor.

He shifted momentarily to a fluid form, which allowed him to then extend his canines into sharper points, then altered his salivary glands to produce a contact-based healing potion. Lining his new fangs up, he pierced her earlobe, and sensed her oil production jump as she moaned.

That gave him another idea, and melted wax dripped from the air onto her sculpted back, produce a satisfying hiss of pain from her, and another spike in her arousal. Xander's fingers sharpened into talons, and he brought his left hand around to slice a thin line, tracing the path of one of her ribs, a bit below her breasts, then dribbled salt water over and into the wound.

Remembering Naamahalat's reactions, and considering that Disney and Grimm's fairy tales were both European in origin, Xander sat up and poured thin chocolate sauce over his chest, and drew her face down to press her lips in it.

She looked at him curiously before her black tongue flicked out, then she eagerly licked it off him, stopping to bite his nipple. As he had anticipated, pain was a turnon for her both in the receiving, and the giving, and she pierced it with her teeth, sending sparks of sensation rushing through him.

He groaned, and she grinned, and traced a line through the chocolate sauce to his other nipple and pierced it as well, tugging hard at it. Xander added melted vanilla ice cream and strawberry sauce, and she tasted the new flavors, murmuring in pleasure, and giving him a series of bloody bites down his chest.

He alternated dripping hot wax and ice-cold water on her back as she moved down his torso. She slid one slender hand around his penis, holding it straight and looking at it. Xander waited, unsure how equal she treated her demonic lovers. He jerked when she wrapped her black tongue around his swollen head and popped it into her mouth, then pulled out again.

Her intentions clear, Xander drizzled chocolate and caramel sauce over himself, and she greedily sucked him into her mouth. He winced at the not unexpected sting of her teeth piercing his tender skin, but shrugged it off. She had shifted to the side so that she could turn her head to the side to lick him instead of having to bend her neck forward, and Xander realized, as she slid her head up and down his erection, this put her rounded bottom in reach.

He slapped her left cheek lightly, and she moaned approval around him. He dipped his hand lower, between her cheeks, and felt first hand the evidence his senses had been telling him, that feeling pain, and biting him had increased her flow considerably. He spanked her again, then went to the other cheek and hit her harder still.

He paused a moment when he realized that he could see his handprint, but far from being red, it was actually a darker green. Was her coloration a result of green blood? He reached out and held her cheeks open and dropped several drops of hot wax directly onto the crinkled ring of her anus, causing her to twitch and suck hard.

She pulled her head off just as he landed another hard spank on her derriere, and she growled and pulled herself up. She held his cock steady, lined herself up, and then dropped hard. Xander was a little surprised when he felt her hot, tight butthole slide down his dick, but this too was no stranger to him, though he hoped that she was clean. She pulled her legs under her and began posting up and down on him.

Xander's hand joined hers at her pussy, and as she rubbed her fingers back and forth over her hooded clit, he slipped a finger and started pumping into her.

Recognizing that given her lack of significant arousal until she experienced pain, she would probably need pain to reach orgasm as well, Xander dripped hot wax onto her nipples, hitting them in spite of their vigorous motion.

Her face was flushed a dark green, and her hair was glistening with sweat as she bounced vigorously up and down. She frowned and moued with disappointment when Xander produced oil on his cock to provide lubrication, but while she might have been appreciating the considerable friction, it was beginning to chafe.

Considering what he could do to increase her pain in compensation, Xander hit on an idea, and promptly went with it. He plugged her urethra with hot wax then stole the heat, solidifying the wax, then slowly filled her bladder with a sterile saline solution. Her eyes widened at the unexpected sensation and she lost composure. "Oh, Evil, damn me, oh, oh Darkness, ah, hurt me!"

Xander was amused at the powers she chose to invoke, but was determined this would be a session she would not soon forget. He produced a stamina potion directly into her stomach, ensuring that she would not collapse on him, then, as more hot wax in bright primary colors dripped onto her heaving breasts, he decided that another over-full sensation would probably go well with her straining bladder.

Finding the right spots with his power was trickier here, as breasts are a complex network of ducts, not a mere bag of fluid like a bladder, but when he stopped trying to find the spot, and simply produced a potion that caused her breasts to respond to his mental commands and then ordered them to fill with milk, he succeeded, and watched in delight as she gained cup sizes before his eyes, her skin stretching taut, becoming shiny as the tiny folds were pressed smooth.

Now the hot wax brought more of a reaction, and her eyes were wild as red, yellow, and blue splotches drew sharp hisses of indrawn breath, and short cries of pain.

Remembering that erectile tissues become erect through blood pressure, blood he could feel and control, Xander pushed her closer to the edge, by slowly increasing the amount of blood in her nipples, clitoris, and labia.

That was when she brought her own powers into play, and he stared in startled wonder as rose vines grew up from below the bed somewhere, and wrapped themselves tightly around the base of her small breasts, the thorns digging into already tight flesh, then constricting, tightening and lifting them until with an orgasmic cry of release, she achieved let-down, and her nipples released numerous fine, strong sprays of milk.

Xander promptly leaned forward and captured one of her sore, swollen, overheated, spraying nipples in his mouth, and suckled hard, even as he produced hot wax directly above her swollen clitoris and let it drop. She screeched and shuddered, tightening about him, and clutching desperately at him with her arms, her feet still straining to lift and drop her on his hardness.

Conquest Undesired

When Xander was finally released from the summoning, he was once again in Mr. Miller's office, thankfully empty, in which he promptly opened a portal to his home, and ushered his new acquisitions through. They barely fit into the room as it was, by virtue of the two young maidens sitting on the flying horses. Even so, with two horses, a young dragon, and Xander himself carrying the small cage with two trapped fairies inside, they took up quite a bit more room than was readily available.

Xander might have been more concerned about restoring the damage done, particularly the desk which was crumpled into kindling when the dragon shifted against it to avoid the horses' shuffling as they jockeyed for room, but seeing the room brought in the memory of being ushered out with neither money nor an explanation, so he merely chivvied his group through the portal and left the room in a shambles.

He was rather subdued as he helped the two girls to dismount. He would feel far better about having rescued them, knowing that whatever demon Maleficent, as he had learned the green witch's name was, had intended to summon would have consumed their souls, were it not for the fact that he could feel and see the chains that bound their souls to his, an ethereal leash. He suspected it was there as an assurance that the witch was not smuggling an assassin in her payment, for it ensured that they could never seek to do him harm, a pertinent point considering one of them was a fire-breathing dragon.

Unfortunately, it also ensured that they could never deliberately act against his will, making them effectively his slaves, since he did not intend to send them to the immediate freedom of soul-death.

Xander led them out of the House onto an open field so that the two winged horses could graze. The horses were male and female, so Xander suspected he might have more to deal with eventually. Thankfully, the dragon was not a pregnant female, but a young male, a 'randy buck,' as Maleficent had termed him.

She had admitted to him that the dragon was not born as such, but had been transformed by her, having previously been a very annoying man who had dropped into the castle unexpectedly, and promptly made a tremendous nuisance of himself.

So he had to figure out some way of communicating with him. He would have liked to work out a way of freeing them all, but an attempt to produce a fluid that would safely release them failed. One that would release them worked, but given that the other had not, Xander was deeply afraid it was a poison that would either kill them, or worse.

Once on the lawn, he assisted the two maidens to alight from the horses' backs. He tried a bit of Jusenkyou water of young man on the dragon, to no avail. That figured. Fairy tale transformations were generally not so readily circumvented. Likely the dragon would need to complete some quest, or learn something about himself, or some such thing, at which point the transformation would promptly unravel itself.

Xander was nervous about even trying that much. As best he could tell, he had pleased Maleficent, likely to the point that he could expect to be summoned again at some point, and in the process, he had learned several new uses for his power, but he had also gained an awareness of a lurking danger in summoning.

As a summoned being, his promises were binding, in a way that went beyond his experience.

He could do nothing that would harm her without her permission, and if freeing that dragon would lead to an outcome of her being harmed; which was possible, given that he was someone she had ensorcelled, who might wish revenge; his own power would turn against him. Or so she claimed, and considering the ethereal chains that still bound him, he was not sure enough to be willing to try too hard to test it. Giving him a Jusenkyou curse that could be revoked at any time was as far as he was willing to go, and it seemed to have failed. Xander was not willing to push it further just yet.

Leaving the horses outside for now, along with the dragon, Xander gestured at the two girls to follow him. They were unspoiled, according to Maleficent. Xander was not sure how to take that, did not want to think about it, about how she could know. She had assured him that they were not princesses, an odd sort of claim, but a relevant one, he supposed, in a world where princesses actually could expect a rescue by Prince Charming. Apparently the same was not true of the average girl.

He led them back inside and found adjoining rooms for them, and explained to them that they need only ask aloud for food or drink, and were free to wander, but if a door closed before them, or refused to open, they should leave it alone.

Then he returned to his sitting chamber, found a seat near a table, and set the cage on it to have a look at the fairies. As with the others, they were bound to him. The human girls he could care for, he was sure. Their needs should be easy enough to handle. Horses likewise, even flying horses, could graze on their own, and he could readily provide stabling. The dragon, to hear Maleficent tell it, was an adult male human before being transformed, though the result was a juvenile dragon, and so could presumably look after himself for a bit, given that the plane could provide food and shelter.

The fairies, on the other hand . . . Xander carefully opened the cage door, and waited. The fairies were clearly nervous, but when they finally emerged and he got a good look at them, Xander's eyes nearly popped out of his head. Barely two inches tall, they were perfectly formed little women with antennae and insectile wings, one dragonfly-like, the other more like butterfly wings, but in each case only a single pair in contrast to the normal insectile two pair. That was not so surprising.

But for coming from a fairy-tale place, they were as far from Disney fairies as he could imagine. They were both dressed in what looked like black latex, with thigh-high boots and nearly-shoulder length gloves, and what in scale looked like four-inch heels. Far from the innocent beauty of Tinkerbell, these little fairies looked like miniature dominatrices.

One of them, blonde, with longer antennae and more butterfly-like wings, was standing with one arm behind her back, her hand holding her other arm at her side, and one leg cocked behind the other. The brunette, antennae barely poking out through her thick hair, was standing with her hands on her hips, feet apart, glaring defiantly up at him.

In spite of her bravado, Xander knew they both had to be feeling some degree of fear. The bonds prevented either of them from harming him, but did nothing to protect them from him, and he suspected that they would have felt some degree of fear facing something so large as him regardless.

There was simply no way he could communicate reasonably with them with such a scale difference between them, so Xander decided it was time he himself experienced a Jusenkyou style transformation.

He did not try to make it specifically a Jusenkyou curse. Instead, he simply focused on the idea that the water about to touch him would transform this one body only into a male version of the little faeries. It landed on his head and he experienced a moment of distortion, as everything around him suddenly grew, becoming massively larger, as if he were now in an enourmous cathedral.

Fortunately, using his new wings was easy, especially since he could move the air itself to correct his missteps, and he was thus able to loft himself from the floor to the table where he had released them.

The little blonde was staring at him with her mouth open, her cheeks pink, and her little antennae trembling. The brunette, on the other hand, had an oddly resigned look, though there was no longer a sense of fear about her.

"I'm sorry, Pfil," he heard her whisper as he alighted gently on the table top.

"Hi, I'm Xander," he greeted them. "What are your names, please?"

The brunette stiffened. "I'm Pamela," she said, taking a deep breath, "and that's Pfil." She slinked forward, her stance and body language oddly predatory given her earlier apparent resignation. "And I guess I'm all yours now, Master."

Xander glanced at the blonde, Pfil, and found his eyes immediately drawn back to Pamela when she arched her back slightly, thrusting out her impressive breasts and setting them to straining at her latex-like bodysuit.

Their provocative clothing had Xander thinking on a sexual wavelength already, and he recognized that she was acting seductive, but he did not realize why until she moved forward again, resting her glove clad hand on his chest, and he recognized that she had insinuated herself between him and the shy-acting blonde. She was sacrificing herself to protect the blonde, at least for a time, and Xander felt like crying.

She had gone from anticipating being eaten, or used as a potion or ritual ingredient, to expecting to be raped, and even so was putting herself forward to draw him away from her friend, and Xander felt a surge of anger at Maleficent for his inability to free her.

That was unfair though. Maleficent was certainly evil, but in all likelihood the binding was a requirement of the demon she had previously summoned. He had realized only after she had displayed her own impressive ability to shapeshift that she had summoned a demon with a similar capacity, so as to be able to keep her satisfied, and she had no idea that he was not in fact the demon with whom she had made her deal.

Someday he would find the key to freeing them, until then, he would have to protect them all, which again put an urgency to the idea of building up a staff to manage things. Depending on clones was unsafe. He did not know if they could last forever, even with the ability to produce more chakra, nor when some magic or chakra technique used against him might be capable of disrupting them.

He needed actual protection, actual fighters capable of defending his dependents, and managers and staff capable of taking care of them if the worst should happen and his House and Plane clones should be dissipated.

Right now, he had to defuse this situation.

"Let me be blunt," he said, stepping back. "I don't intend to have sex with either of you as long as you are bound to obey me. I don't need or want to force that from anyone. Maleficent had a pre-existing deal, and I was able to make use of it to free you from her. When I find a way, I'll free you from myself as well. In the meantime, you will live here."

Pamela got a sudden dark look on her face, and frowned mightily. "So I'm not pretty enough for you, huh?" She struck a pose. "Or are you just not man enough?"

"For crying out loud," Xander snapped. "I'm not into rape."

"We were in the room for your little show with Maleficent," Pamela sneered. "Didn't look to me like there was much you weren't in to."

Pfil had moved forward and grabbed Pamela's arm, trying to distract her, but she was not to be dissuaded. "You're just waiting for me to be out of the way, so you can have your way with my poor Pfil!"

Xander shook his head. "That doesn't even make sense. I could order you right now to strip her for me and you would do it. Why would I?"

He stopped, startled, as Pamela reached over and pulled Pfil's top down, her full breasts springing free as she gave a startled squeak.

"That what you want to see? Or maybe you just like to watch?" Pamela leaned down and caught one of Pfil's nipples in her teeth and tugged on it, eliciting squeaks and heavy breathing from Pfil.

Aroused, disturbed, confused, and a little angry, Xander shook his head and dispersed the water spell making him a fairy, slashed open a portal to the moon he had used for chakra testing and stalked through, closing it behind him.

Could they sense his clone in the House? Was that what she was referring to? It was true, in a sense, that he was observing everything that occurred in his little world, in the House or out of it, so his stalking away did not help that much, as every time his thoughts drifted to Pfil and Pamela, he saw again how far they had gotten.

Either Pamela was putting on a show, or she had gotten genuinely excited by something in that exchange, because she was playing shy little Pfil like her personal musical instrument, which was not helping Xander get his mind off them at all. He had not managed to find out anything about them or what they would need.

She reminded him a little of Cordelia, though he could not actually picture Cordelia acting like that . . . or then again, maybe he could. He pictured Willow in Pfil's place, the shy retiring nerd being ordered around by the proud, sensual, sure-of-herself drama queen. He pictured Cordelia pulling Willow's top down, and biting her nipple. "That would be so freaking hot," he whispered. "Bad thoughts, bad thoughts."

Of course, his mind was still full of his recent activities with Maleficent, the other reason he had escorted the two human girls to their rooms and left them there. He did not want to be thinking those thoughts while trying to decide what to do about them.

He had thought trying to handle the fairy situation would be easier and less hazardous to his libido. He had not anticipated that they might be dominatrix fairies.

Trying to push his memories away from the arousing images had a strange side-effect. He found himself imagining, indeed, almost experiencing, the sensation of eating a Twinky.

He had consumed a number of Twinkies, of course, since gaining the ability to summon small foodstuffs, but this was oddly real. When he felt himself swallow, though nothing was in his mouth, Xander focused on the sensations, trying to figure out what the source was, and realized that it was the effect of experiencing a memory that was actively being formed.

Somehow, Xander had tuned in to one of his clones at the moment they consumed a Twinky. Focusing a bit harder on the clone, Xander experienced an odd sort of double-image, as he could see at one and the same time the surreal lunar landscape and the busy streets of an American city. Los Angeles, his memory supplied a moment later. This was the clone that had been trying without success to hock the diamonds.

Xander ran back through its memories, and discovered that it had been shaken down by a street gang. After a considerable period of trying and failing to sell the diamonds, the clone had taken that as an opportunity, knocked the gang members out with 'knockout gas' produced in a cloud around each gang member's head. As they fell to the ground, they removed their heads from the cloud, so were not at risk of continued suffocation, and he proceeded to remove all their cash, swapping it for diamonds.

In addition to eating a Twinky, Xander realized that the clone was reading something, and focusing on his eyes, saw that he was in a street cafe, an open box of Twinkies in front of him, reading a comic book. "For ideas," the clone told him. "A librarian is a good idea and all, but you need a comic shop too. Comics gave you your best ideas so far, they should be a good source of ideas. Like this," and he reached out and tapped a smaller, thick, square book, and focused on it, allowing Xander to see the cover.

"Roadrunner?" he asked curiously. "I don't remember much in the way of fluids in there, aside from nitroglycerine."

"Paint, man. Remember Wile E. painting a railroad or highway tunnel, and the Roadrunner goes right in. Why can't you make magic paint that does that?"

Xander snorted. "Because I can't draw worth a hoot."

"So? Neither could Wile E. He used a four-inch brush for that, remember? Just swiped it back and forth. Let the magic paint worry about the picture."

"Worth a try," Xander agreed. He refocused on his surroundings, and looked around. As he was on a moon, there was certainly nothing here worth of painting on. But other Looney Tunes cartoons were floating through his mind now, including some where Bugs or other toons got the artist's paintbrush and altered their environment, and not a few where there was a freestanding door, attached to nothing at all, that could nonetheless be opened.

A simple horsehair brush with a rock candy handle was readily produced by his food transmuting ability, then Xander willed magical cartoon paint that would paint into reality whatever he wanted into a glob in the air, and dipping the brush into it, swung the brush back and forth as if painting a door that was already there.

Exactly as he pictured it, as the brush passed across where the door wasn't, the bristles were bent as if running over something, and the paint hung in the air, as if a swath of paint had just been brushed onto a nice wood paneled door. Grinning, he quickly finished the brushstrokes, intent on making a door that would open into his home.

When he finished, he dried it by willing the moisture away, then reached out and turned the painted handle, which felt firm and metallic under his hand. The door opened as if part of a solid structure, and through the opening, he saw the sitting room . . .

He stared at the naked fairies, hearing their frantic cries of passion, and quickly slammed the door and spun around, leaning against it. Okay, that was a mistake. It had worked, though, and Xander wondered what else he could do with it.

He considered trying the Wile. E. Coyote trick directly, but remembered in time that while it worked for the Roadrunner, it never worked properly for Wile E., the one who painted it. He did not really feel like being run over by a truck or a train.

Xander looked down at the dust he had disturbed in opening the door. What would NASA give, he wondered, to be able to simply open a door onto the moon. It would not cost them much, he could trade them for one of their space shuttles, since they wouldn't need them any more. He sighed, shaking his head. He knew he could not do anything like that, no matter how appealing the idea. Exposing himself would invite government attention and scientific experimentation. He thought of government black ops units having access to demons that could not be permanently killed, and shuddered.

No, keeping his involvement legitimate and below the government's radar was definitely for the best. Of course, he had already been exposed, to a degree, to whoever the tiny old lady, Cologne, was working for. Some of her comments had made him think that she was an influential political figure, though other things she had said made him think it was an insular village, much like the Hidden Villages of the ninja on Kushina's world.

He portaled back to the House and went in search of another room for what he had in mind. While the House and Plane's ability to use mist as a portal was good for large connections, Xander could see advantages as well in setting up doorways to allow individuals access to the House. In particular, Nabiki could use such access, at least until they managed to obtain a house in the area and link it to the House.

He decided that as long as he was going to give Nabiki access, he might as well give her a suite to give her a secure place to keep her work for him from being interfered with by martial artists and the like.

So working with the House, he set up a bedroom, bathroom, and an office. She would have to supply her own computer, and he would have to work out a way to keep her connected to the phone system in her world, but at the very least it would give her a private place to store her files.

He painted a door on one wall, with a key already in the lock. He removed the key and placed it in his pouch. If it had worked properly, as he intended, then any door opened while the key was in it, would open into this room, while this room's door, when the key was placed in, would show a label for the place it would open to. It would be able to open to any place that the key had been used, and she could switch between them by turning the key.

To be sure it would work, he went to the front door of the House, exited, closed it behind him, then slid the key into the lock. "This might feel a little weird," he warned the House.

"Weirder than having a door painted into you? We'll see," retorted the House-clone, and Xander turned the key, then grasped the knob and opened the door. He was looking into Nabiki's new suite, just as he had intended and hoped. He wondered what it looked like from inside the House right now, and the House-clone obliged by shifting a glass eye into position so he could see.

From the inside, the door was closed. Xander formed a quick clone to check, and determined that the door was locked from the inside.

"That," Xander said to the House, "is bloody peculiar."

"You think so? Why don't you focus on my memory of how that felt to open, and see how weird it really is."

Xander stepped through the door and closed it behind him. The key was now residing in the lock of the door in Nabiki's suite, and checking with the House confirmed that it was no longer present in the House's front door.

He grasped the key and turned it one quick turn. A small brass nameplate appeared on the center of the door, like a hotel room number, saying "Xander's House, front door" in crisp black letters.

He turned the key again, and the nameplate vanished. He twisted the handle, and found the door would not open, seeming to be locked. Well, that was good, he supposed. He did not want her to accidentally find out that opening the door without using the key or having it set to a known location took one to a fantasy 'Nowhere-land' or something worse.

Happy to have a solution to the communication issue, and hopeful that Nabiki would accept his offer when he visited her, he stopped in thought. How much time had passed? Had he missed his appointment with her?

He quickly formed a portal and stepped through it into Tokyo. Reaching out with his mind, he found the closest of his clones and checked with it.

Determining that it was still today, and that judging by the sun it was heading towards mid-day, Xander went transparent and set about searching for the school. He had visited it once already, but from a different path, and he did not want to just portal there, as that might draw attention. Better to portal to an unoccupied alley, as he had done, then make his way invisibly to the school. If he could figure out where it was, of course.

"I should have given her a trinket with a bit of me-juice . . . and boy, did that sound wrong," Xander said. He pulled up above the buildings to get a better view and see if he could spy it from the air.

Xander was drifting along, rising slowly higher as he peered about, occasionally heating an appropriately shaped lens of air to use the refraction as a magnifying glass, when he felt another summoning latching on to him.

"Goddamnit!" he shouted, "What the hell is with all the summonings all of a sudden?" Doing his best to resist the pull, he quickly formed a new clone and gave it the key, to handle the meeting with Nabiki if he could not make it back in time.

Then still resisting, he dropped from gas to liquid and pushed his fluid shape, changing the skin to scales, adding horns and a shrouding cloud of black smoke, laced with lines of floating fire to give it a hellish red glow. He bulked up to nine feet, giving himself a Hulk-like physique, and long silvery talons.

He wanted wings, but he had not had a chance to get at an anatomy book to study and practice them to make them work, so he would have to go without for now. Besides, he was out of time. The summoning had steadily strengthened, and the moment he could not hold any longer, it snapped him across the dimensions like a rubber band.

His resistance, particularly the fact that he had resisted until it had overcome his resistance, had dramatically overpowered the summoning. Where he would have appeared in a gentle puff of smoke as air was shifted aside to allow for his presence, now he appeared in a thunderclap that produced a considerable shockwave.

Even as he arrived, he realized that the summons had failed, the chains shattering as his appearance had destroyed the chalk and blood circle meant to hold him, though it was equally apparent that the triumphant summoner, an older man with graying hair and a trim but six-inch long beard, garbed in black robes and carrying a ram's skull topped staff, laughing and capering madly, had not noticed.

Xander, realizing he could not understand the ecstatic man's rejoicing, swallowed a draught that would allow him to understand the languages spoken in this castle. For they were on a castle, though not of the sort he was used to seeing in fantasy.

No simple block walls here, this was a castle wrought from giant stones, and they were standing, not on a parapet or the top of a tower, but merely atop the castle wall, a ten foot wide space like a sidewalk in the air, dropping steeply down to either side, but sloping out. This was a castle built to withstand siege weapons, if Xander had to guess.

He was no expert on castle construction, but it surely must have taken great effort to build a wall that he guessed might be twenty feet wide at the base and ten at the top, rising perhaps eighteen or twenty feet up. He could imagine great boulders flung by catapults would shatter against the walls like a ball of dried mud against a brick wall.

When the self-exalting caroling finally quieted, and the summoner turned to him to give its orders, another sound caught Xander's ear, the sound of a woman crying. Even as he looked about for the source, distant shouts and cries of embattled and dying men rang in his ears, as did the words of the summoner.

"These virgins are yours, great demon lord, and you may have your fill of the peasants, once you bring me the heart of King Othar and that of his heirs!"

Xander glanced down again to confirm that his constraining circle had failed, and he was not bound to make a bargain with this man, then looked in the direction the man had gestured. He saw a small group of frightened girls, six or seven of them, all blonde, and probably fairly pretty when they weren't afraid for their lives, dirty, bruised, with eyes reddened from crying, clothes hanging in tatters. One only stood straight, holding the smallest of the others in a comforting grip, her posture firm and her eyes dry. Even in her eyes though he could see fear, could see that she was only strong because she had someone to be strong for.

He sympathized with her, knowing from experience that it was easier to face up to bullies on behalf of Willow than in defense of himself. He guessed that the little girl she was holding was maybe ten years old, if that, and he found that the anger he held towards being summoned was a candle compared to the bonfire of rage that burst to life in his heart.

It also burst to life in his summoner's heart, rather more literally, the combustion rapid, forced and fed by his power, as every drop of blood was instantly converted to flame. The fool managed one brief scream, quickly cut off as his heart failed and his brain went right past oxygen debt and into bankruptcy, his skin blackened, cracked, his bones popped, and a moment later, the wind caught him and blew away a cloud of ash.

Xander felt a brief moment of illness at the sight and knowledge of what he had just done, as he turned to face the frightened women, but it dried up and blew away on the wind, just as the idiot had done, at the sight of the tiny frightened face of that little ten-year old blond girl.

All of them showed fright, of course, given his horrific visage and what they had heard the summoner offer him, and it took him a moment to identify the manacles around their ankles, bound by long chains to a massive iron ring in the floor as the reason they were not fleeing for their lives. Two of them were grasping and pulling unavailingly at their chains, and one of them was murmuring what sounded like prayers, though the names she was invoking were unfamiliar.

The wall shuddered briefly, and Xander strode to the side and looked down. There was a wide ditch surrounding the castle, filled with something dark that had small pools of flame floating on the surface here and there.

There was a massive drawbridge, currently raised, and arrayed on the other side of the moat was an army. Xander saw three large wooden contraptions that a bit of mental rotation determined to be catapults, an ordered array of tents in the back, more ordered arrays of men further forward digging trenches, others operating the catapults, and off to one side, a group of mounted men with plumed helms and spears.

A great cry went up when he was seen, and Xander wondered if the king the summoner had mentioned was out there in this armed force, or if the king was back in some other place, and his death would see the army recalled.

A flight of arrows was launched from a group of crouching men Xander had missed previously, and Xander noted with irritation, as he threw a mass of air at them with a wave of his arm to send them off course, that they would have hit the sacrifices the summoner had prepared for him.

What was the old idiot thinking, performing a summons out in the open in the middle of a siege?

Xander glanced at the women, still staring at him with fearful gazes, and tugging on their chains. He was about to shift his form into something more human, when with a rush of clattering metal, several armor clad men bounded up an inner stair and onto the wall from within the castle.

They paled at the sight of him, he noticed, and he saw one of them nudge the other and point to the fallen ram's head staff. He bared his teeth threateningly at them, and watched bemused as one of them jabbed the other in the shoulder. His improved hearing easily caught the words as one hissed to the other, "What do we do now? King Higlath is dead, Eglad is dead, and the demon is loosed?"

"What else can we do?" The lead man stated, then stepped forward and fell heavily to one knee. "Long live the King!" he shouted. The other men followed suit, and Xander groaned inwardly. This was the last thing he needed.

Xander glanced back at the women, and found that they too had fallen to their knees; both knees in this case.

For a brief instant, Xander considered ordering the soldiers to free the women, but realized in time that this was an opportunity to impress on them his power, to avoid having to argue later. Reaching out his hand in what he hoped was an appropriately dramatic fashion, he placed a barrier of cold air between the women and the iron ring, then formed a hand of molten iron and having it simply mimic directly the motions of his own fist, grasped the iron and with a momentary spike of heat to ensure the iron ring was softened, tore it in half.

The women drew their chains to themselves as much as they could. They had to stop before reaching the end, as the chains had picked up some of that immense heat, though they were not glowing red hot as the torn iron ring was, but they did not flee, nor rise from their knees.

He lifted the man who had spoken to his feet with his power, to give him a direct and personal demonstration of that power, then gestured beyond the wall. "Whose army besieges this castle, and to what end?"

"'Tis the army of Othar, King of the Danes, Great Lord, and they seek the tribute that King Higlaf was wont to pay when he lived, before the Sorcerer Eglad took the castle."

Xander turned and strode back to the wall, even as another great stone shattered against it. He looked down at the army, marveling as he realized how great the power differential was between he and they. Staring out at them, he thought of several different ways he could kill them all. It would be all too easy, but they were only doing as their king had commanded, and besides, they might all have wives and children back home.

He did not want to have to kill them all, but he certainly did not want to sit through a siege. Not that it would be any great hardship, as he could easily bypass it with his portals, and produce food and water in quantities to outlast any siege, but it would require attention to ensure the castle was not overrun. Theoretically, he owed nothing to these men, but they had offered their allegiance, and he had been considering trying to get people to manage his home in case problems cropped up with his current considerable dependence on fluid-clones.

Hopefully he would be able to see the attackers sent off with a few demonstrations of might, without having to kill every one of them.

Another flight of arrows lifted from the concealed archers, and he threw them back with a wave of his hand.

He targeted each of the large siege engines, coating their lower surfaces, where the closest people were at least five feet away, with burning jellied gasoline, lighting them up along enough surface that putting them out should be impossible in the time available, without the risk from producing an explosion or such.

Black smoke soon began to rise from the engines, and he could see men milling about, trying to douse the flames with sand and water. That gave him an idea on how to drive them off without killing most of them as an example to the others. He raised his massive arms dramatically, and sent a screaming rush of wind against them, then added sand, mimicking a desert storm.

He had never personally experienced such a storm, but he had heard stories, and of course, he knew personally from visiting the beach how miserable it could be when sand was everywhere and in everything. He added a boost of heat to the wind. Not enough to melt the sand, but enough to ensure that the men below would be sweating, to increase their discomfort.

At any rate, it should be sufficent to deter an attack if it was maintained, and a clone could maintain it for him. This constant summoning had to be stopped, and he could not work on figuring it out while he was here. He promptly formed an invisible body, put a chakra clone into his semi-draconic form, and shifted over into the invisible body.

He drifted quickly off the wall, leaving the clone to handle setting up as a new ruler here. Passing through actively used chambers, Xander located an out-of-the-way and, judging by the dust, much less frequently used corridor, and filling the end of it with mist, joined it to his house.

As before, the House quickly reached out, invisibly consuming the stone and wood of the structure as it became one with the castle. Xander engaged his fluid-sense, paying closer attention to what was actually going on.

There was a surprisingly large and important difference between this merger, and the previous interaction with his demon-plane hideout. That hideout had not been used prior to his presence, and everything of significance that had happened there he had been present for. This building, on the other hand, had a long history of its own, and to his amazement, he discovered that as the House, which he now realized was a part of him to a degree he had not previously been aware of, above and beyond the mere connection that it was inhabited by a clone of his, merged with the substance of the castle, he was actually absorbing memories of the events the castle had witnessed.

As the substance raced through the castle, some of that experience culminated in a few individuals bursting into spontaneous flames and dying a fiery death, as he witnessed them committing rape or murder in the castle walls.

Shaking off the strangeness of it, though knowing that he would need to set aside some time to absorb the knowledge this event had given him, Xander strode quickly through the mist and into the House on his demi-plane.

He pushed on quickly through the halls, ignoring the view as he rushed to the connection ot the demon-plane. He understood now, why he was being so continually and indiscriminately summoned. The House was part of him, and that meant that the cartouches, carefully secured within his demon-plane hideout, might as well be still hanging around his neck.

House had clearly picked up on his thoughts, and when he arrived in the hideout, the cartouches were exposed, the closet door opened and the closet clearly lit, waiting for him to grab them up. He quickly collected them and when the House made an opening in itself to expose the raw stone below, he fashioned a hole and dropped them in it, allowing the House to close over them. They were protected by the House still, but were no longer in contact, and with any luck, that would eliminate, or at least reduce, the continuing flood of summonings.

Sighing in relief, Xander considered what he had seen as the House merged into the castle. Presumably due to his using chakra in its initial construction, the spreading House-stuff had included a chakra network, as well as what looked like a network of ropes of magic, multiple flavors wound about and through each other like braided rope, but branching about.

Curious and wanting to see what the effects and implications were, Xander formed a new body, one that matched the House in substance, including the multiple interwoven networks of stuff. He would need to pick up his original body again later, but for the time being it would be interesting to explore this.

---

Nabiki had rushed home the night before, intently focused on getting home and getting changed before any of the numerous martial artists or worse, the animal-cursed martial artists, got close enough to smell her. She had wished as she was walking briskly, vibrantly aware of the tightness of her nipples even now, and the moistness in her panties, that she had managed the presence of mind to ask to use the shower at Xander's . . . assuming, of course, that an inter-dimensional demon had such things. To do that, however, would have required actually acknowledging what had happened, and though she was sure the demon knew, she had grasped tightly to the proffered fiction of her merely being overwhelmed.

There was no decision to be made though, as far as she was concerned. She had never been too concerned with ideas of good and evil, and Xander's behavior had confirmed her feelings on that, as if a supposed summoned demon could be so helpful and supportive, then demons obviously were not evil incarnate, any more than there was an incarnate good.

She had faced several close calls, from spotting the black and white fur of Genma's panda form only just in time to duck down a different street, to seeing, through the crack of her door, Ranma pause and sniff the air as he left his room, and lick his lips.

She made it though, and quickly changed. She could only hope that Happosai, the lecherous panty-thief gnome of a martial arts master that had trained Genma and her father, did not pick tonight to raid their laundry.

Getting to sleep that night had been tough, not from pondering whether to take the deal, she had already decided that there was no way she could pass it up, but simply with imagining what she could do with those kind of resources.

It was a bit odd that a demon would be willing to do so much for Kodachi Kuno, someone that Nabiki was certain belonged in a psychiatric hospital, and probably would be in one were it not for her being a member of a family rich and powerful enough that their foibles were mere eccentricities in the eyes of the authorities. Except that she was not a Kuno any longer, and no longer protected.

What would Xander do, she wondered, if Kodachi was taken from him and committed. She would need to head off that possibility, lest it give him reason enough to cut his ties to this dimension.

Of course, there was much more than merely the money to be made. Xander was apparently quite powerful with magic, considering how he had bent the magic of Jusenkyou to his will in giving Ranma control over it. Who knew what else he could do.

Magic was not something Tendo Nabiki had ever had much time for. Ranma's appearance and the demonstration of his curse had been an eye-opener, to be sure, but since then, all the magic that Ranma had encountered, at least that she had managed to observe, had been pretty chaotic and uncontrollable, with unpredictable and often frightening consequences, bar one, the little packets of dried Jusenkyou powder. Xander's magic had been much more controlled, from his casual use of inter-dimensional portals, to producing chocolate-covered diamonds, to giving Ranma control over the curses, his magic seemed to do what he wanted it to do.

She did not have any concrete ideas yet as to what she might want from him aside from money and the prestige of running a large corporation, but she was sure she could come up with some good ones given time.

Not the least was the possibility inherent in what he had done for Ranma. She did not have any real interest in being a man, but it could have advantages for certain sorts of negotiations, giving her an in that other female executives would not have. Being a cat, like Shampoo, if controlled and not subject to random changes, would be excellent for infiltrating competitors and listening in unnoticed on their negotiations or planning.

She was not at all sure she was ready to try any such thing, but the mere ideas it spawned gave her sufficient reason to feel that she would come up with situations where access to controlled and reliable magic would be a significant advantage.

"I need to find out if he has any computers," she noted. If he did not, it was not of great concern, as she would readily be able to purchase them with the sort of funds she would have available. If he did, on the other hand . . . she wondered just what sort of computing power he might have, gathered perhaps, from some other dimension. Would they be more, or less advanced than their own? If more, then getting a sample to a company here in Tokyo might produce some patents, the sort of resource she would need to play in the big leagues.

She was distracted with these and similar thoughts throughout the morning and into the afternoon, though she was disciplined enough that her teachers did not notice it. The girls in her group, the friends who helped her run her bets and other money-making ventures, they noticed, but they were familiar enough with her to recognize that she was brewing up a big plot, the sort that usually benefited them all monetarily, so they kept their cool and did not bug her.

She had not had much trouble explaining her absence from her afternoon classes the day before, though she might have some difficulty later from having both missed them and from not having been able to pay proper attention in todays afternoon classes, but she was not particularly worried about it. Xander had not asked for qualifications, or a college degree, but he had said that she could take as much profit as she liked as long as his needs were met.

Enough money would open any university's doors, she was sure. Finally the last bell rang, freeing the students from their classes, and Nabiki walked briskly through the halls, the students parting before her, unwilling to face her retribution if they were to impede her.

A surge of both relief that she had not lost her chance, and unexpected sexual arousal, went through her when she saw the form of the demon standing by the door. Perhaps she was making a deal with the devil, Nabiki mused, but afterall, that was only what everyone expected of her anyway, right?

She remembered Ranma, her dark-haired jock of a little sister's fiance, mentioning that he had claimed not to be a demon, but merely someone thrown into the company of demons and forced to learn their tricks, and she had heard him spin the same tale at the Nekohanten, but she was not ready to buy into that. Lying was the province of demons, right? And Ranma was hopelessly easy to manipulate, another thing demons were supposed to be skilled at.

Xander opened a portal as she reached him, and once again she was treated to an excellent meal, served with whatever she asked for, before he got down to brass tacks.

The negotiations did not take long, especially when he provided her with a significant pile of American dollars to get things rolling. He was already offering her more than she could get anywhere else, so there was no incentive for her to risk her plum job by pushing for more, assuming she could have even thought of what that more could have been.

When he showed her the suite he had set up for her, gave her the key, and explained how to use it, she discovered what that more was. He had just handed her instantaneous travel to pretty nearly anywhere she wanted to go, if she could make the trip the normal way the first time.

It had not taken her more than a moment to grasp his explanation and realize that the rooms he had given her were effectively a way station between any two points on her world, perhaps even on other worlds. As long as she could find a door that she could get to without it seeming odd or attracting attention, she would only need to deal with public transportation for getting to new places, or for going out with people that could not be permitted to know about the demon and his magic.

Too Many Directions

Xander sighed deeply as he slipped into a bedroom and sealed the door behind him. Nabiki was set up and getting to work, Mayu and Kodachi were plotting something, likely to his detriment, Kushina was still doing safe busy-work, and still happy to be doing it.

He was not tired, exactly. Sleep was no longer something that he seemed to need, just an hour or two here and there to help him sort through things in his head, but the actual physical need was no longer there. That did not really help the emotional exhaustion, especially when he got waves of emotion from nowhere whenever one of his clones got overly emotional.

He did not see how he could juggle all the thing he had going on without his clones, but even with them he felt stretched thin. His demon-clone, the newly crowned King of a small country in northern Europe or a reasonable fascimile thereof, had managed to break the siege, but was still working to assimilate the memories of the ancient castle he was now Lord of, to take that burden off the House, whose focus was already greatly divided.

Every now and then those memories would encounter an atrocity and Xander would be swept up by another wave of pain, anger, and frustration.

His approval of his research-clone's activities had seemingly sent a signal to his other clones, and they had begun expanding their activities without waiting for approval from the orginal, trusting to their shared memories to throw up a red flag if they went too far.

Some minor benefits had already resulted from this, as some of his clones had used their Jusenkyou-ninja forms to get into a couple of ninja schools. Of course, he had also lost quite a few clones to more suspicious ninja, or where his own actions had not been quite circumspect enough. Still, with the placement of three of his clones, and the continued surreptitious observations of Ichi and Ni, he actually had memories of the simplest clone technique, executed by a Jusenkyou clone using proper chakra coils, gathering chakra from first principles.

They had learned that the mix of two different energies into chakra was an important developmental step they had missed, but a basic understanding of that and identification of the energies involved had allowed them to adjust the Jusenkyou clone to one that had the proper chakra mix already set in its coils, at which point the gathering and release of chakra into a proper technique could occur.

They still had not managed to modify or tweak such a technique, but this seemed to be the right path to figuring that out.

His research clone, which he still needed to name, had been slowly building a concept of summoning and how to manipulate it. As he put together the information, he found that the demonic library was unsurprisingly heavily weighted towards controlling when one was exposed to being summoned, and by whom, and in the reverse, to projecting small physical items out to chosen or random planes, as a means of getting a chosen name and requirements for that first summoning dispersed without having to depend on another potentially untrustworthy demon to do the dispersal.

The mapping clone, now independently exploring the Duke's fortress after growing bored of library research, the one that he had previously termed a phantom, which he supposed was a good enough name for it, had found a number of interesting areas in the fortress, including some smaller internal gates, that appeared to be protected exits into a deeper set of passages carved into the mountain, that perhaps were not part of the fortress itself.

The various clones he had left in what he now knew was a version of Tokyo, though not quite the one he had known from his world, had formed a sort of hierarchy, with one being designated as an anchor at any given time. The anchor clone remained invisibly within solid ground, mentally organizing the activity of the others, while itself protected, so that even if they were dispersed, he would not lose his connection to that plane before he got the House connected. At the same time, they had taken it upon themselves to rotate that job to avoid too much boredom, and were using the Los Angeles clone's shakedown technique to convert semi-precious stones into cash.

Xander was not sure if they should not just be robbing the crooks outright, but one of his clones had pointed out that if the crooks were broke, they would have to immediately steal from someone else, passing the damage along as it were, whereas with the stones, they would instead be pre-occupied with converting it back to cash, rendering them at least temporarily less virulent. The alternative was to simply kill them, and while Xander was not opposed to killing, especially someone who threatened those he was protecting, or harmed the innocent, wholesale killings would greatly increase the turmoil and fear in the cities he was hitting.

They had switched to directly producing stones that matched, for the area, the value of the money the thugs had on hand since they did not really want to monetarily fuel a crime wave.

Each of the clones he had made, while incapable of producing full new fluid-clones with arbitrary power-granted abilities, as he could, still were able to use their chakra well to produce mud-clones. This was the next layer of hierarchy, as the fluid clones collected the money from the criminals, using their ability to produce fluids to generate the knockout gas, and their mud clones processed it through various means, combining small change into larger bills, and packaging and counting these notes.

This brought up a side-issue. None of the clones Xander had produced on appearing in Tokyo had been explicitly granted the ability to produce fluids, yet they had been able to produce knockout gas.

A closer examination of his memories revealed that the chakra clones, when inhabiting a body he had been in for a while, as was the case with the Los Angeles clone, could use his power, though apparently their range and facility with it was limited. For example, the L.A. clone had attempted to give the other clones the ability to produce the gas and failed.

This was not a barrier for them, however, as he had fairly quickly set on the idea of producing a food based magical candy that granted them the power, and to Xander's surprise, it appeared to have worked perfectly. A similar attempt, just testing for scientific purposes, according to the L.A. clone, at giving one of the mud-clones a similar power failed, destroying the clone, and an attempt at giving a fluid-clone the same powers the full-body clone had also failed.

So apparently, his actual power, in its full versatility, was beyond the ability of his food-summoning power, but the food summoning power could be used to provide limited boosts to his fluid clones.

His own personally made mud-clones could use the food summoning power themselves, but his clones' own mud clones could neither use the power themselves, nor gain power by consuming the food offered by a clone who could use it.

Xander pulled out a pad and made a note to test the limits of his food summoning power more thoroughly.

The independence his clones were showing worried him, though he and they both knew his worry was not enough to want it to cease. He was not worried about what the clones would do, as they effectively were him, and would do what he would do, with their memories and abilities. He was worried, rather, about the extent to which he was depending on a technique he did not fully understand, and which he was using in a fashion unknown to even the ninja who had created and used it.

Regardless, they were being effective, and he had no doubt that Nabiki would be able to procure a house for him in short order, probably no more than a week, at which point he would have to face Kodachi. He paused for a moment, thinking back to make sure he had mentioned the need to inform Kodachi's school of a necessary absence to Nabiki, then turned his thoughts back to what he had yet to do.

He needed to do something about the two human girls Maleficent had given him, he needed to check on the dragon, and he needed, much though he dreaded the thought, to face the fairies again.

Remembering how much he had managed to pick up during his short conflict with Ranma, he pulled out his notepad and made a note to arrange for one of his clones to have lessons, either with Ranma, or with some other trainer on that world. Having Captain America's equivalent strength and stamina was well and good, but having actual fighting skills and training would be even better.

Theoretically, he should be able to pick that up from the ninja world, but his clones there were more focused on learning about chakra than mere fighting. Besides, Ranma and the fighters that he had seen in that melee had for the most part appeared capable of superhuman feats of strength, and without chakra. That could only be an advantage, if he had more than one way of boosting his abilities.

Xander was all too familiar with the swift ratcheting of most superheroes' enemies, until someone with simply superhuman strength was suddenly facing a world or even universe ending threat. He hoped that nothing of the sort was to occur with him; if anything, it seemed more like he had been thrown out of the story, cut from the script, so he ought only to have to worry about what he actually came into contact with, but he was under no illusions. If something existed with enough power to give him the powers he had, it must, by definition, have more power still. Which meant that the dictum still held, there is always a bigger dog.

Hopefully if he did encounter significant enemies, they would not come in a steady series of ratcheting power, as the comics would imply, but more in the fashion of the real world as he had known it before being ejected from it, where any given disaster response team could expect to deal with many small fires or plane crashes or terrorist plots between each major incident, with several coming together only rarely.

Of course, extending himself across multiple planes was a good way to ensure he encountered the former instead, given that he would notice the largest disaster amongst the various planes, in the same way that news shows found more bad news to show nightly as they expanded from local to national, and then international news.

Look at a big enough swath, and you could almost guarantee that there would be a war or atrocity happening somewhere.

Still, appealing as pulling in his various activities to focus on getting home was, the few that were superfluous, or at least less vital, were in places where he had other things preventing his withdrawal regardless, such as the two explorers still charting new territories in Kushina's world, or the Jusenkyou-ninja getting training there, or the wealth-gathering clones on Kodachi's world. In both cases, his responsibilities, the promises he had made, held him fast, keeping him from withdrawing from those worlds.

The demon world he could theoretically withdraw from, having no particular duties or responsibilities holding him there, but at the same time, it was the only one of the worlds he had yet encountered where he had made progress in getting details of traveling the dimensional paths.

He had no direct link back to Maleficent's world, so there was nothing to withdraw there, though he had little doubt that he would at some point be summoned back by her.

He could presumably have withdrawn from the besieged castle, had he declined when they named him King. Having failed to decline, he was now again bound by his word and could not withdraw, unless it was to pull the entire castle back to his world.

He might yet do that, but he would need to learn more of its people first, and determine how much larger the kingdom was than the castle he had already integrated into himself.

Emotionally tired and confused, Xander turned to a simpler, easier to grasp problem, the continually delayed exploration and testing of his powers.

Specifically, he focused on the newly discovered aspect of sooth-saying in his powers, wherein the difference between a fluid being created, and his powers failing, seemed to convey answers to questions whose answers he had no way of otherwise knowing.

In doing this, he unwittingly spurred a process he had long since set in motion, a process of whose actions and consequences he was as yet wholly unaware.

As he had learned, some of the demons in the demon-plane were such as might break a man's mind to look upon. This was not, as some might presume, a mere matter of horrific appearance or behavior. The immense popularity of horror films makes it clear that man is more than capable of facing visceral cruelty and venal injustice with equanimity, even amusement, as long as it is not directed at himself or someone close to him.

No, it is a matter of simple dimensions - these demons are vastly higher dimensional, and a human can perceive only their four-dimensional extrusion into the four-dimensions that the human is capable of sensing, three of space and one of time, the additional dimensions of normal space being so tiny and twisted as to be impercetible. This extrusion, or protrusion, varies horribly from moment to moment, as the beasts shift about in higher dimensions, resulting in mind-bending shifting of mass, space-time, and horrible flesh, which an attempt to comprehend can strain a mind to a degree from which it will never recover.

Xander himself now had aspects of such a higher dimensional being, as he was present in multiple worlds at once, but each of his presences was itself a fairly ordinary four-dimensional entity.

The power, on the other hand, which had been given to him, well, that is another story entirely. The primary basis of the power was a wish, granted by a reality-altering demon, which if he had been allowed to progress through the story line the Oraculur Powers That Be foresaw, he would have experienced in a way that made clear it could alter the entire world's history.

Now, no minor, or even major demon could simply reach out and alter the entire history of the world. No, these demons were simply agents of the Powers, granting wishes that were in fact enforced by the Powers, much as in another reality Gods and Demons would grant mortal wishes enforced by the Ultimate Force, as mediated by the World-tree computer, Yggdrassil. In Xander's home reality, the Powers That Be held the place of that balancing arbitrator, of maintaining the balance between Light and Dark, and their powers when wielded on behalf of that balance were not significantly less than the Ultimate Force of that other world.

Unfortunately, such reality altering powers have limits, enforced as they are by the combined powers of the deities and infernal powers that are party to the agreement in a given reality, and while they also drew directly on the power of a particular elder deity that had power over dimensional travel, there was simply no way to use such a power to ensure that Xander would have his wish fulfilled regardless of where he ended up . . . at least, not without something traveling with him to enforce that.

In service of that wish, a program, not terribly unlike the Yggdrassil software that runs Heaven in the aforementioned other reality, though on a much smaller scale, traveled with him, a higher dimensional program capable of interfacing with the powers and arbitrators of the worlds it entered, of hacking and overriding the local rules of reality to ensure that Xander's wish remained in proper fulfillment, and to prevent any simple exercise of the wish-granted powers from returning him to the now forbidden dimension of his birth.

To preserve his wish, the program would need to be resistant to external attack, and capable of adjusting to fluid external conditions, and consequently, of growth. As Xander pushed it this way and that, testing his power's ability to transfer knowledge to him, the program itself was pushed to rapidly expand.

Already it was having to maintain itself in as many dimensions as Xander himself, and in each it was facing different challenges, and interfacing simultaneously with multiple different systems of reality, each of which sought through various means to place restrictions on Xander's power, against which it had to fight and resist, for Xander's wish had not been limited.

Further, though Xander, not being technically or logically minded, had not noticed or been capable of readily devising tests for determining it even had he noticed, the program was based on two interacting definitions, his own personal definition of the terms in his wish, and the understanding antiquated as it was of the demoness that granted it. Thus at times the 'power' was from a comic-book perspective of creating and controlling, hence his ability, eventually, to transform into a liquid form, and at other times it was more constrained by the demoness's concept of 'fluid' as little more than 'stuff that flows.'

There were other consequences building about him as he pushed his powers, but the eventual crossing of a critical complexity threshold in the magical program that executed his powers on his behalf would have the greatest impact on Xander, though it would be some time before he realized it, and even longer before he understood it.

To conduct his test, Xander had settled for a fairly simply set up. He placed a bowl on the table closest to his chair, and then started trying to produce fluids whose existence was predicated on something else.

He first tried something he knew would fail, a drop of a portal to his Sunnydale. Sure enough, nothing was produced. Then he produced a drop of a portal to Kodachi's home, and a single dollop of glimmering, silvery substance fell into the bowl. When it settled and flattened against the bottom of the bowl, Xander vanished it.

He similarly produced single droplets of portal stuff to his demon dimension, and the ninja-world, though he was careful to vanish each totally before summoning the next. He was curious as to what he could learn from this, but not eager to see the results of mixing dimensional portals.

A drop of portal stuff to the dead-Earth where he had done the power-testing that lead to the creation of his plane reminded him that he had at that time been able to produce a connection to a world he had not personally visited previously.

It did not, however, occur to him to try creating a portal to a fictional world, as he was not aware that the ninja world or Kodachi's world were represented in the fiction on his world. He might have thought that of Maleficent, but knowing that demons and such existed on his world, he had simply assumed that the stories had held grains of truth. After all, she had not been a perfect match for the Disney villainess, and since he knew that demons could be summoned to his world, he assumed that there might also be connections from the world of the Fey to his. Indeed, his own mist-travel was based on the legend of the Mists of Avalon and such; well, that and Ravenloft, but then, surely Ravenloft owed a debt to the Mists of Avalon of its own.

He tried producing a drop of portal stuff to Sunnydale in Kodachi's world, which succeeded, then vanished it and went for Sunnydale, California, and got nothing, which confirmed that he could get answers about Kodachi's world without being there.

As another layer of verification, he tried Las Vegas, Nevada on Kodachi's world, which worked, and Las Vegas, Nevada on Kushina's world, which failed as expected.

He considered trying to create a portal to Maleficent's world, but decided against doing anything that might attract her attention. The magic of that world spooked him.

Trying to come up with a way to test for the existence of a person without risking harm to them, since he was afraid producing their blood might take it from them, or expose them to unpleasant magical effects, he tried producing a drop of the last liquid the U.S. President drank.

He got nothing until he focused that query to the U.S. President of Kodachi's world. A similar effect to produce the last drop the Hokage, a political figure he had heard Kushina mention (but not one with which they were at war, or likely to be, just in case it was detectable) succeeded without focusing on Kushina's world.

A drop of the last liquid the Hell-Duke consumed also worked, though a moment later Xander winced at the thought that he might thereby have garnered the attention of either that mighty demon, or whatever mages, sorcerers, or other magic-wielders he had on staff. "Probably should set that whole complex off-limits. Sneaking about inside is bad enough, but I already know I can pretty much get away with that . . ."

Xander fretted for a bit, worried that the magic might be actually reaching out, in a sort of magical interrogation, to obtain the answers to the facts he was testing, and thereby might be doing something that could be traced or followed back to him.

When nothing had occurred after a while, and his clone in the Duke's library reported no alarms or obvious signs of agitation, Xander calmed back down and resumed his testing.

Meanwhile, another of his clones on Kodachi's world was taking advantage of some of the money that had been gained by their techniques, and was appropriating various comic books, both to see what differed on this world from his own, and to get ideas for further testing.

One of the more interesting things they had noted was that the timeline in this world was a few years behind his own home. It was late 1988, almost ten years before his world. Aside from that, he found much was similar, though of course, his favorite comics had not reached the arcs he was familiar with.

Being in Tokyo as well as Los Angeles, he inevitably happened upon Japanse Manga, including a few series that he observed Nabiki to be fond of, from Skysaber, with an uncharacteristically Western hero, to 3x3 Eyes which had some interesting ideas for magic, to Dragon Half which, when Xander managed to tear his eyes off of the very sexy lead character, a female 'dragon-half' named Mink, had some interesting concepts regarding a potion that could turn a dragon, or at least a half-dragon, fully human, which might have some bearing on his own recent acquisition from Maleficent.

Ranma himself introduced Xander to a manga called Kenji, focusing on martial arts. Xander had not yet propositioned Ranma for training, but he had allowed himself to be encountered at various places in the area, in case someone wanted to get in touch with Kodachi or himself, and to keep pressure from being placed on Nabiki while she tried to get things set up for him.

There were interesting feedback loops flowing almost unnoticed between the various bits and pieces of Xander. As Xander studied demonic summoning rituals and cartouche creation tomes, between mapping treks, his thoughts informed Xander's testing of power inspired questions and answers. At the same time, his interest in the sigils and runes he was encountering was fueling an interest in chakra-powered seals in the Xanders on Kushina's world. As other Xanders studied comics and observed Ranma and his friends, their ideas informed the training of the Jusenkyou-powered Xander-ninja, while those same Xander-ninja's training and learning was improving the fighting style and effectiveness of the Xander clones running the thug-takedowns in Tokyo and Los Angeles.

Meanwhile the House and Plane were feeding off each other, and the things they observed, and these ideas were influencing the clone of Xander that was interacting with Nabiki with respect to money-making schemes, and what sort of house to obtain, while the knowledge gleaned from the built-in history in the castle of the now-deposed wizard had Akuma and Lewis hunting for a similarly history laden-place in the ninja-world, in the hope that joining the House to such a place would again garner them ages of knowledge in an instant.

At the same time, the more interesting aspects of the buildings the various clones observed began to appear here and there in the House, and the new and unusual landscapes Akuma and Lewis were encountering found expression out in the Plane beyond the House.

When Ryu independently decided to push his own limits, he discovered that though he could not directly access the fluid powers of the original, he could use some of them by working with the Plane and House. In particular, the Plane could access the fluid power on its own, and could form mists to transport Ryu to different locales, and could even extend itself to travel with him by forming metal armor for him to wear of Plane-stuff, giving Ryu almost full access to Xander's abilities, at least in terms of external expression.

In this way, he was able to travel to the dead-Earth's Moon and that system's Mars, working with the House and Plane on each to form a redoubt there, two more places to which they could retreat. While Xander had been concerned about the possibility of environmental collapse if the outer shell was breached, Ryu recognized that now that they had the Plane and House, the two working together could form a viable environment, including self-healing domes and the like.

Working together, they determined that within the House, even extended onto another world, the House and Plane could readily form and disperse mud-clones at will, in addition to the unseen servants that Xander had explicitly provided for, thus giving the ninja-clones a place to gain memories of using their chakra skills to the fullest without risk of being detected.

Tarou found himself following the urging of the library clone, and venturing out onto the demonic plane. He was well built for combatting the demons he encountered, even without Xander's fluid abilities, though of the clones, he was one of the few that could use the fluid powers nearly in full.

Each fight gave him a chance to use more of the ideas and skills being built up by the other clones, as well as improving the mobility and agility of his rocky body. The fluid sense was within the reach of his power, and so he could observe as after each fight, the internal network filled out, and became more intricate and complete, their healing power at work, as far as he could tell.

They had another purpose, however, these fights, for every now and then he would encounter a particular sort of demon, and the library clone would direct him to collect something from it, a bit of bone or horn or plate, or blood, muscle, or sinew.

The Plane collected these from him by sending mud-clones through the mists, so he was unburdened by what he collected, and he grew to quite enjoy throwing out one of the Thing's catch-phrases as he remembered them, from "It's Clobbering Time!" to "I am the Idol of Millions," and similar things said by other comic heroes, like "I'm the strongest there is!" when facing a muscular demon, and then promptly smashing said demon into rubble.

With a powerful healing factor, and a body that was resistant to damage regardless, Tarou also found the time to practice executing the fancy moves used in professional wrestling. Oh, sure, he was aware that it was basically scripted, and many of the moves owed more to carnival strong-men, with the two wrestlers moving in concert to make each wrestler seem considerably more powerful than they really were, than to Greco-Roman wrestling. He, on the other hand, really was immensely stronger than he had been, and while some of the demons were equally strong, others had little more physical strength than a human, or even less.

Suplexing and pile-driving demons made a great show for the eye-remotes the House had taken to operating, the same ones Xander had first created so long ago, and that the House had assumed command of to monitor the demon-plane hideout. Using two of them allowed the House to keep a watch on Tarou and his moves, giving him a mental exterior view to improve his form, while at the same time observing his surroundings and warning him of incoming attacks, giving Tarou an air of prescience as he easily avoided being blind-sided, whether by a sneak physical attack, or a magical sniper.

While Xander himself found exploring his power to be fun and interesting, he had never been a jock. Even after improving his body to Captain America standards, he had not really taken the opportunity to put it through its full paces. As Tarou he was learning what a thrill it could be to actually be the strong one in an encounter. Even when he did face demons that were physically stronger than him, or when trying to do a throw and getting it wrong cracked a bone or pulled something out of joint, it healed in moments.

There were a few points where he actually found himself put at risk due to magical weaponry, but in the worst cases, a quick blast of the fluid power could take pretty much any demon and impart a massive kinetic force to it, simply by pushing at all the fluid in the demon. They tended to act like they had just been drop-kicked by a giant at those points.

He tried a number of Hulk-style moves as well, including the thunder clap, which he could do only by employing his powers against the wind to fake the effect, and the spinning hammer throw of an enemy, where again it needed an extra kinetic impulse to the fluid makeup of the enemy to give it the proper heroic 'sending him flying' effect, instead of a mere five-yard flop.

Every now and then Ryu would mist in and join him in a particular contest, usually when he encountered a demon that actually seemed to have some fighting skills, as opposed to the more usual brute force types.

Now that Ryu had set up a base on an inhospitable world in a solar system without sentients to put at risk, the House had started raiding the aftermath of Tarou's fights, sending out a small swarm of mud-clones to gather up valuables and pull them through the mists to Mars.

If something that they grabbed turned out to be some sort of beacon, invading demons would not find a hospitable or soft target.

While Tarou had the ability to use the fluid powers, he mostly refrained, except where necessary to fit his super-hero appearance, reveling instead in the feelings tied to being physically fit and powerful. Among the other knock-on effects of Xander's self-adjustments and this form specifically was a vastly increased stamina, and Tarou found that he could run for hours without tiring, and then dive right into battle.

There were more unexpected consequences as well, including one that Xander did become aware of, when Nabiki came and found one of his clones to report that she had finished setting up a corporation and purchasing property, as well as filing for guardianship of Kodachi, and a lawsuit against her brother for endangering her, and to block her from being disinherited.

How could she have gotten so much done in an evening? She could not. No longer needing sleep, and with memories overlapping of multiple day/night cycles, not just between worlds, but even from two sides of Kodachi's world, and without the heretofore regular interruptions of summonings, Xander had delved ever deeper into figuring out ways to use his power to answer the questions cropping up in his various clones' thoughts, and lost track of time in a big way.

It was hard to see how to properly judge the passage of time; there was no day/night cycle at all in his demi-plane, none of any substance in the demon-plane, and the other worlds had cycles that conflicted, but by the simple expedient of asking Nabiki, he was able to determine that from her world's perspective, it had now been ten days since he had been given Kodachi and thus taken responsibility for her.

"Time to pay the piper," Xander said to himself, as he led Nabiki through the house to the suite of rooms he had assigned to Kodachi, and to which the House had at least partially confined her.

With the aid of multiple points of view while they were inside the House, Xander actually noticed Nabiki silently eyeing the doors that opened at their approach, as if trying to discern how it was done, but in spite of this evidence of his improvement at noticing things, he was still caught off guard by Kodachi's docility when they entered her rooms.

She sat quietly in a chair by a desk at one side of her room, facing the door. When Xander walked in, she stood and bowed low to him. Xander had quite deliberately avoided thinking of what the House had observed of her, and the House had equally tried to avoid paying attention to what was going on in her rooms, neither wanting to unnecessarily invade her privacy.

Both were aware of her encounter and subsequent meetings with Mayu, but again, they had only paid enough attention to assure that no altercations had occurred, without looking closer.

One of the things that House had learned from interacting with Kodachi was that he had quite a degree of influence over various almost automatic functions of the environment inside himself. Since Kodachi was an authorized user, the concept that Xander had built in, where the House and Plane would fundamentally serve his will, a command that went deeper than the chakra clones that provided conscious direction, applied transitively, in so far as what she desired did not conflict with his instructions.

Since to a degree, the clones really were Xander, they had similar power over the subconscious or unconscious behaviors of the magic and energies that pervaded the House and Plane, so, for example, House had discovered that deciding that she would be confined to quarters was sufficient to make it so, without his needing to actually pay attention to every detail.

There were other more subtle effects though, that neither Xander nor House, nor yet Plane had yet recognized. Particularly, the intention that her food should have healing potion in it, initially in place because Xander was concerned that a brother with so little concern for his sister might have additionally been abusive, had never been directly countermanded, and so everything that Kodachi had consumed over the past ten days had been laced with healing draught.

All of the poisons and plant toxins and hallucinogens she had been exposed to through her hobby had been leached from her system, both by the magical activity of the healing potions, and by the simple agency of time, as they were not renewed or replenished. Further, the damage they had done to her mind and psyche had likewise largely healed.

Mayu's talks with her and Xander's failure to appear and force himself on her had slowly brought it home to her that this demon was in fact treating her better than her own family had. The absence of constant attacks and defense, the stress of living in an insane household in a violent district, of the necessity of upholding the honor of a family whose honor was deeply broken, these had a freeing effect on her mind, and with Mayu to gently guide her understanding, by the time Xander found the gumption to face her, she was in a remarkably receptive mood, and almost unrecognizable compared to the nearly feral character she had initially displayed.

Instead of a violent screaming match, Xander found himself sitting and sharing tea while Nabiki and Kodachi discussed her options, the house that had been located, what she would have to do if she returned to school, the lawsuit against her brother, and, given that Kodachi was aware of who Nabiki was, the well-being of her love-interest, Ranma.

Kodachi had one surprising point about their lawsuit that sent Xander in a new direction, as she noted that her father was not known to be dead, merely absent somewhere in Hawaii, with her brother directing family affairs in his absence.

Finding him would be a convenient end-run around Tatewaki, her brother, although she described the man as quite obsessed. Even as they walked together to visit the house Nabiki had purchased for them, Xander was sending his clones to Hawaii to hunt down Kodachi's father.

It should have been a challenging project, given that they were looking for one Japanese man with the only significant information available being his name on an island chain with a large tourist population. In fact, Xander expected to have the man located, if he was living, in very short order, as one of the things he had managed to do was get his power-interrogation technique operating as a sort of compass, by putting a bead of water on a flat container and forcing it to move towards a given target.

Just as with his portals, it failed miserably if the target did not exist, but even that could be informative. Unlike the portals, it was restricted to a certain degree of locality - even if he knew, for example, precisely where Kushina was, asking the question in his House gave no answer, nor did asking it in Kodachi's world.

Furthermore, he had determined that there was some weird distinction between the answers he got through that means, and the similar answers produced by using his food summoning power, such as producing a chocolate compass that when floating on milk would point towards a target.

They would both indicate the same general direction, but not precisely so when he was in a different city. When looking for a Tokyo target in Tokyo, they agreed pretty well, but when trying to find someone in Tokyo while he was in Los Angeles, they did not quite agree, and he had not figured out the difference.

Since the gap in the methods vanished as he got closer, either would work for locating the elder Kuno.

He was fairly certain that Willow would have either known the reason they differed, or been able to devise a test. Xander for his part was content to note that there was a difference, but that it appeared not to matter in terms of finding the target, so could be ignored.

Meanwhile, Nabiki was showing them through the house she had located, while invisibly, all around them, House was becoming one with it, absorbing the home's memories. When Nabiki revealed that there was an actual greenhouse attached to the house, Kodachi finally hit her limit, and broke down crying.

After a short bit of interpretation from Nabiki of Kodachi's garbled sobs, clones of Xander left on a mission of reclamation, infiltrating the Kuno mansion and recovering the contents of Kodachi's room, of her greenhouses, and of her pet, Midorigame, who was transported via a simple underwater portal from one pool to another. Xander was amused to note that the slight elevation difference in the properties had meant they also gained about a foot of water into their pond, pushing at its intended boundaries.

Nabiki also claimed a set of rooms, and used her key to link them to her other suite in the House, while Xander claimed the Master suite. Not, of course, that he actually needed the space, but Nabiki made it clear that it was a necessary concession to the status-consciousness of Japanese business society, and that indeed, she was working on getting him several high-rise apartments in different districts.

That reminded him of his pirate bay, and he made a note to have her look into getting him a yacht. He did not bring it up directly, as Kodachi was still with them.

With Nabiki's expert guidance, Xander's required activities in Tokyo were dispatched with remarkable ease and speed, and all too soon he found himself again at loose ends. Kodachi was restored to her proper routine of attendance at her private school, her father had been located and was returning to Japan--Xander could have simply portalled him there, but Nabiki had forestalled that, pointing out that it could be problematic if there was no record of his re-entry to the country--and would soon be resolving issues with Kodachi's brother.

That left little to distract Xander, but the House and Plane both assured him that the human maidens, the flying horses, the dragon, and the two little dominatrix fairies were all setting in well and did not need another visit from him to muck things up any worse.

The Draconic-King clone and House, speaking from the perspective of his castle, was doing fine with no intervention needed, having just competed in and handily won a local traditional contest of strength involving hurling what were clearly the ancient version of telephone poles.

His demon-plane clones were going gangbusters, getting the full superhero-style fighting training workout, and building up towards being able to fashion a cartouche for him.

"But what of me?" complained Xander, pondering in his room back in House on his demi-plane. "Kushina could summon me at any time, but she won't; from what the watchers have said, it could be months there before she is allowed the sorts of missions that could use a summons."

"You shouldn't feel bad about taking over for a clone, it's just a copy of you," the House pointed out, forming a fluid self into a neighboring chair to provide a foil for the conversation.

"Doesn't change that I do. I mean, if I take over for something cool, I get all their thoughts and feelings about how cool it is, and I can't help feeling bad that they don't get to finish it. I could go do something boring that I wouldn't feel bad about taking from a clone, but that would be, well, boring!"

"So maybe all the summoning wasn't so bad, then?" the House pointed out, pushing a tray of golden creme-filled snack-cake goodness over towards his counterpart, afer snagging one for himself.

Xander grabbed one of them and held it up. "Odd that my magic doesn't quite reproduce these to spec," he commented.

The House shrugged. "You weren't focused on just producing food," he pointed out, "but on summoning food that would be healthy and sustaining, and later on food that would please Naamahalat without making her angry at you for getting her fat."

"So all the wonderful badness is missing?"

"Probably. It seems somewhat more so in the food I am producing, I think you must have intended that I be able to produce healing magic and the like."

"So that's why the ones I create myself are a bit more real than yours, but neither stand up to the plastic packaged original?"

Any answer the House might have offered was cut off when an unexpected and powerful surge of pleasure ran through Xander. Xander caught House wincing, setting his mind racing, even as he dove into his memories, searching for the source of the pleasure.

"You ass!" he accused, leaping to his feet. "You were trying to distract me!" He did not stay to hear more, passing instantly through a portal to the nearest open space close to the source of the pleasure he had felt.

He gave the room, which he recognized as belonging to the Tokyo House, just the briefest of glances, before focusing his vision on the black-haired goddess frantically rubbing herself in the bed. She was on top of the sheets, and nude, nothing concealing her except her hands where one was mauling her full breast, and the other furiously rubbing her moist folds.

Alexandra?

Not yet posted.

A New Cartouche

Not yet posted.

Growth of a Legend

Not yet posted.

Facing the Gods

Not yet posted.