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.