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.