An Exciting Wait


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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