"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.