After Mayu had set up her tent inside the hideout and gone to sleep, Xander finally had time again to consider how he was going to do this. He did not want to try anything with chakra while on the ninja world, nor while he was near Mayu. However, he was also leery of traveling too far from his current location on the demon-plane.
One of the things he had learned during his time with Naamahalat was that this area of the hell plane was fairly stable and had familiar physical rules, but that this did not apply across the entire expanse. It applied here because this is where armies trained and generals tested them against each other; but beyond the desert were realms belonging to other demon lords, and in them the very laws of physics could be very different, not to mention the demons themselves.
According to the discussions he had overheard between Naamahalat and the most intelligent, by Xander's judgment anyway, of her lovers, Janithagdatra, there were some realms on this plane that regularly broke the minds of any human souls brought there, simply to look upon them. Her descriptions of them brought to mind the art of M. C. Escher, with which Xander was only vaguely familiar. For that matter, they had also spoken of demons that broke human minds to look upon.
Xander had yet to actually encounter another of the human souls supposedly present on this plane, but he was not particularly concerned about them. From what he had learned, one of the reasons Naamahalat had so readily identified him as a gift and as a sorcerer, was that the only way humans came to this particular hell was through contracts. Basically, selling your soul meant just that, and any soul here could be assumed to have been sold by themselves, and so were themselves responsible for whatever they experienced. At the very least, they were demon-summoners, not generally nice people, which is what was so confusing for him about Kushina.
But in all likelihood, her summoning attempt would never have reached this plane had he not been wearing so many cartouches; which also implied that several of those cartouches must have matched her summons in some way or another. After all, everything else he had learned implied that it was his own home world that the damned souls here came from, but just as clearly, this was not where those consigned to Hell, biblically speaking, came.
There was no gate to Hell here, no steady influx of damned souls. Human souls were a rare prize, and most were treated like trained pets, much as Xander had been. At least, that was the case in this relatively Earth-like portion of the plane.
He was not particularly worried about exploration, per se, since it should become obvious pretty quickly if he started to get outside the safe region, but by the same token, trying to get a considerable distance away to avoid disturbing Mayu's chakra senses meant, at the moment, needing to go in a known direction, since he only had the time of her sleeping to explore this without having to try to divide his attention, and traveling at high speed in an unknown direction precluded the attention needed to avoid crossing into dangerous territory.
Luckily, Xander thought he had a reasonable solution to both challenges. He had successfully made portals, both locally and across dimensions. He knew he would be blocked in making a portal to his home world, but hopefully other worlds and dimensions would not be blocked to him.
So he attempted to open a portal to the Moon of an Earth that had never developed sentient life. He spent a fair few minutes focusing on the various details of what he was searching for, but he was pretty confident that if worlds as different as the ninja world and the demon world could exist in the universe, then there was at least a good chance that this would work.
When the portal formed it was black as the night, and he was a bit nervous about passing through it, so instead of using his actual body, he used his power to pick up Tarou and toss him through, without being in that form.
Then he reached out to Tarou, to verify that he still existed, and slipped into that form. He was on the other side of the portal alright, and since Tarou was in physical form, he found himself in quite some pain as the air ripped itself from his lungs. A moment later he had produced a bubble of Earth-normal air at sea-level pressure around him, and his healing factor quickly took care of the damage and pain the explosive decompression had done to his lungs.
Looking around, he determined that the surroundings certainly looked barren enough to be the moon, though the light was oddly more blue than he had expected. As soon as he looked up and saw the deeply black sky with a blue sphere looming overhead, he understood why, and at the same time, confirmed that he was indeed on an Earth's moon.
Equally obvious from the complete darkness of the night half of the Earth, he was on the moon of an Earth that had no modern humans, and so he assumed that his portal had worked properly, and it in fact had no sentient life whatsoever.
He had felt an intense cold briefly, but when he had produced the air, it had been at a normal temperature, and maintaining it there was well within his abilities. His feet were a bit cold, but given that he was on a cold, dead world, that was no surprise, nor of great concern, given that his feet were wrapped in stone or a close equivalent.
Reassured that he was neither in danger, nor likely to be discovered, Xander dismissed the portal and proceeded to call up a mass of chakra. It hovered almost invisibly in front of him, and Xander considered it. He still did not know the various hand signs, nor were such likely to work for him unless he managed somehow to duplicate the 'chakra coils' these ninja had inside.
So the question was could he somehow, through his control of fluids, applied as a control of chakra, achieve the same effects?
As before when he simply summoned chakra it was nearly invisible, and did nothing. What if he applied his intent to it?
Pushing the chakra down into the moon-dust, Xander began playing with intent, trying to project to the chakra what he wanted it to do. The results were underwhelming, as the mass of chakra, once released from his tight control to allow it to do what it would, simply dissipated into the ground and air.
Summoning a new batch, Xander tried again and again, from focusing his intent, to visualizing a result, to willing it to work, and nothing stubbornly continued to happen. Remembering that Mayu had used a vocalization in addition to the hand-signs, Xander tried quoting her words, equally to no avail.
Giving up on interacting with the chakra directly, certain there was something he was missing, but tired of trying to find it, Xander turned to trying to produce the chakra as it was at the time of release of a technique.
This bore much better fruit, and Xander was quickly producing results, though at first they were pretty disappointing. For example, his attempt at the wall she had produced at first failed miserably. Of course, given that this chakra had somehow been released inside of her, to allow her to vomit forth great quantities of mud, Xander was not eager to directly duplicate it at any rate.
The more distant wall, produced by stomping the ground, on the other hand, worked perfectly, though the cloud of dust produced did not seem inclined to settle to the ground in any great hurry.
After a few more failed experiments Xander was able to combine his own power-based ability to produce mud with the chakra, imbued with intent at the time of its creation instead of afterward, and reproduce the appearing wall effect.
It took him quite a few more tries to produce the mud-clone, however. As it turned out, producing chakra imbued with the intent to produce a clone of him did not work, nor did trying to duplicate the chakra output of Mayu, which gave him a very startled clone of Mayu that he quickly dispersed.
The Mayu-clone did give away the basic problem, though. Somehow, while the chakra was still inside her, Mayu was imprinting herself into the chakra, so it had her shape already understood in it.
With that key in hand, Xander was able to produce clones of himself that seemed almost indistinguishable to a superficial examination. Use of his actual power was beyond them, however, and examining them with his power readily revealed that they were composed of a uniform mass of fluid, a very different signature from that of an actual human, where the fluids were arrayed in overlapping patterns, of which he could identify the circulatory, for it had the heart, and the heartbeat, the nervous system, for it was obvious as it tied in to the brain, and the respiratory, which though perhaps not technically part of the human body, had nonetheless a fluid present in it in a very characteristic pattern.
The chakra coils were also noticeable, though he lacked them, as did the demons he had encountered. Further, both himself, the ninja, and the demons had a number of other patterned systems of fluid, overlapping to various degrees, and a few much simpler ones. For example, he could readily identify the stomach, and the bladder, and the small sac of fluid associated with some of the demonesses' fangs, and on one, the barb on her tail.
That complexity that denoted a lifeform in his sort of fluid-sense was very notable in its absence here; the clones did not even have a chakra system, merely a pool of chakra.
Unfortunately for his purposes, while the clone-Xander appeared to know his intent, and could answer questions, he had no inkling of what it was thinking or seeing.
"Maybe that is cause you don't have chakra." Clone-Xander pointed out.
Xander giggled involuntarily, an odd sight to his clone as he was Tarou at the moment, his massive orange Thing form. "I have clones," he said, and then reached out and lifted his clone, using his power over fluids, "I find your lack of faith disturbing," he quoted, using his voice technique to duplicate his speech in a lower register.
His clone laughed. "Wrong body, dude," he said. Xander shook his head. "Wouldn't want that form anyway, I just had to say it. So you think it's because I don't have chakra, huh? But I don't want to have these chakra coil things, I don't know enough about them, and they might be permanent. I'm risking a lot as it is if I ever try to have kids. Chakra coils might make me a different species completely."
"Yeah," the clone said. "That'd be a bummer. But hey, I'm fluid, what if you just make part of me part of you?"
Xander stared at him for a minute, confused, then getting it, paused to consider. "Well, you don't have any coils . . . but you do have this chakra stuff . . ."
"I wonder if I can use it?" the clone commented curiously, and Xander dived to the side when the clone focused and thrust his hands forward, and the ground erupted in stone spears.
"Way cool!" the clone declared, and Xander stared at it.
"You almost skewered me!" he accused.
"Oh, come on, like it would have hurt you, stone-man. You're the freaking Thing!"
Frustrated and confused, Xander focused on the chakra in the clone, and dispersed it. The clone collapsed into mud, and Xander formed another self. This time, he made one his usual fluid way, just forming another body, modeled after one of the few fictional warriors Xander could think of that used ninja-style attacks, Ryu from the Street Fighter arcade games. Shoryuken and Hadouken might not be exactly chakra-based, but they were a lot closer than just a generic martial artist or historical ninja.
A bit more tentatively, Xander reached out to this piece of himself, and pumped it full of chakra, imprinted with a copy of his basic self, but also with the intent that it should use the fluid present instead of mud.
The Ryu-Xander grinned, and looked down, then up again. "Kick-ass, Xan-man," he crowed. "Let's see, if I'm you . . ." Ryu-Xander focused for a moment, then shook his head.
"Even if I'm you, apparently I'm also enough not-you that I don't have the fluid powers. At least, I can't change shape." He looked down at his hand, then grinned. "But . . ." He cupped his hands near his side. "I think somebody was thinking too hard when he made me," he said, and then grimaced. To Xander's amazement, blue light rapidly collected in between his hands, and when he thrust them forward with a loud shout of "Hadouken!" a blazing blue fireball shot forward.
"No way!" Xander said, then looked down at his own hands.
"It's not chakra," Ryu-Xander said. "You modeled this body after the guy from the video-games, and he uses ki."
"Yeah, but . . ." Xander stared at Ryu-Xander. "Do that again." He watched with his fluid senses as Ryu threw another Hadouken. "Yeah," he said, "I think you did use the power, but it was the body doing it and not you. Like when I built it, because I was thinking it should be able to produce ki, it used the power to produce it, instead of whatever really happens. I'm not seeing anything like chakra coils."
"Makes sense," Ryu responded. "Which means I probably could use chakra - and if you focused when you made a body on it being able to produce chakra innately through the power, then it could use chakra techniques without using up the chakra that is animating it."
"So if I am you, see if you can see through my eyes," Ryu requested, and turned to look up at the Earth hanging overhead.
Xander nodded and focused on Ryu. He was able to slide into that body, and see the Earth, and he was able to turn back and look at his Tarou body, standing still. A moment later his head turned back without his doing anything. "Apparently," he said, though he was not speaking, "we can both manipulate the body while you're in it. But I can't shift over to the Tarou form."
Xander shifted back, a bit uneasy about the odd feeling of his body moving without his control. "Yeah, well . . . that's neat and all, but it doesn't really help me that much."
Ryu-Xander shook his head. "You're overthinking it. You can build a body that can use whatever of the fluid-powers you give it as inherent bodily functions, including what appear to be ki attacks. The real question is, if you have a chakra mind in such a body, is there anything they can do to grab your attention when it is needed. I mean, I could be exploring the mountain for you, or make Tarou appear to be a real person while you're doing other things. We just can't replace everything."
Xander nodded slowly. "Yeah, maybe . . . but what could you do to get my attention?"
"I don't know, but I'd say that is what we need to experiment on."
Xander nodded again. "I'd leave you here to work on that, but without me here, I think the air'd go poof."
"I think if there was a chakra link between us, we could communicate using that. But there might be a simpler answer. Try reforming my body with the intent that I should be able to communicate telepathically with you."
"But I don't have telepathy," Xander protested.
"You didn't know you could produce ki, either," Ryu pointed out. "I'm sure if it works, it'll be communicating through your power somehow. Who cares how, if it works."
Xander nodded, and dispersed the chakra in Ryu, then a moment later, reformed Ryu, focusing his intent, and then fed him another burst of chakra.
"Whoa," Ryu said. "That was a rush."
"You remember our conversation?" Xander asked, surprised. He had not expected that.
"Yeah, I do," Ryu said. "I guess something lingered since you didn't form a new body from fresh liquid, just reformed this one. And I can feel the amount of chakra I have available increasing. Do I still have the ability to fire ki attacks?"
"Yep," Xander answered. "Not only that, but you should be able to access the TK portion of our powers. Now, try something else for me, see if you can create food; I'm pretty sure that is an ability I got stuck with that is not part of the power I was granted, so you might be able to use it."
Ryu nodded, and looking at his hand, held up a Twinky. Xander grinned at that, and held up his own. They both stuffed the entire thing in their mouth at once, though Xander was quick to notice that his larger form included a larger mouth, so his mouth was not filled by it.
Once he had swallowed, he continued. "That means you've got access to food and healing, both for yourself and others." He wondered if Ryu-Xander had experienced anything when he had dispersed the chakra, but did not want to ask.
"And since I'm producing chakra, I can perform chakra techniques as I learn them . . . including . . . Earth Release : Mud Clone!" Ryu looked at a second Ryu. "Interesting that it cloned this shape, and not yours."
Xander nodded. "Without producing chakra already imprinted, I don't think you'll be able to do what I did in cloning Mayu. You'll just be able to clone yourself."
"Ok, one more test," Ryu suggested. "Cut me, and let's see if this body has Wolverine-scale healing."
"It ought to," Xander said, "that kind of got stuck in same as the food summoning, but sure," and he gestured at Ryu, producing a small sand blade near him.
Ryu reached out nervously, and gritting his teeth, touched the blade. To both their surprise, instead of blood, the sand passed through his skin and came out moistened, but with no pain and no clear injury. "Right, still liquid," Ryu said, then concentrated. Xander was surprised when this bit of access to their power apparently worked fine, as Ryu shifted in his senses, and then promptly cut the tip of his finger off.
As they both watched, Ryu grimacing at the pain, the wound quickly healed over. "Yep, I've still got it," he said.
"And you were able to go solid. Can you go back to liquid or gas?" Xander asked.
Ryu looked startled, as if he had not even considered that he might not be able to do it, then shimmered, and vanished. Xander focused his fluid senses and confirmed that he could still readily detect the complex collection of fluids that was Ryu, who reappeared a moment later. "Apparently I can," he assented, "but I could not shapechange."
"Odd mix," Xander commented and Ryu frowned.
"It is, rather, but I guess that the transition between forms must be an innate ability drawn from, but separate from your power. Like . . ."
Xander interrupted him. "Right, after the first few times, it doesn't really take any concentration or willpower, I don't even really have to think about switching. I just want to, and I do."
"Yeah, so it's kind of a built in. But shapechanging you have to . . . well, kind of 'do' it, you have to think about it."
"Right. Let's head back. Then . . . I think we'll have to do a couple of tests to see if you can pass your memories to me, or store them somehow to be retrieved later. If we can do that, then we can make a child's body, and insert you in to one of the villages for training."
"I don't care for killing, but there are definitely some that need it," Ryu responded, and they both paused, thinking of their father, and of stories they had heard of human evil, both from their world, and from Naamahalat and her friends. "And frankly, learning chakra seems like it would rule. Ninja school sounds a lot more interesting than high school back home."
"As for storing memories . . . have you tried to remember anything from my perspective? I mean, I'm just a piece of you, right?"
Xander stared at Ryu for a minute before nodding and closing his eyes. He tried to think back and see if he could remember - and indeed, he found that he could remember firing a Hadouken. Just to verify, he fired off one himself. Being in scale with his massive orange hands, it put Ryu's earlier Hadouken to shame, and sent up a rooster-tail of dust as it sped across the lunar surface and impacted the ground a considerable distance away, sending up a massive plume of dust.
"You're right. Now, before I forget again, see if you can communicate to me telepathically."
Ryu nodded and closed his eyes. 'Can you hear this?'
Xander jerked, then tried to reply the same way, thinking the words, as if he was standing next to Ryu and talking to him, 'Yes, can you hear me?'
'I can.'
"That's excellent," Xander exclaimed. "Now I can really up the pace on everything. Come on, let's head back."
They passed through a portal that Xander opened, then he returned to his original body, and reaching out, reshaped and then charged Tarou and ninja-Xander, groaning as he did so and realized he now had two 'Ryu's'.
The Street-Fighter Ryu immediately recognized the issue, and grinned. "I'll be Akuma."
Xander looked puzzled for a moment, then grinned. "Going for the evil twin thing, eh?"
"Well, Akuma had the same training, but more powerful attacks. Sounds right to me!"
Ninja-Ryu frowned. "Xander reformed each of us before supplying chakra, we should have the same abilities."
"Yeah, but I've got more experience," the newly renamed Akuma boasted.
"Oh? Even though we have those same memories?" Ryu retorted.
"For crying out loud," Xander groused, "enough already. You'd think I was schizo or something." All three were grinning at each other. Tarou was moving around in the background, getting a feel for the body, making sure that it moved properly without needing Xander's active fluid powers.
Finally, Xander reached out to the phantom he had left in the mountain, and charged it. He did not have to bother with explaining what he wanted it to do, as of course it had his memories and knew what he would have told it already.
He almost did the same for the stuffed animal in Kushina's room, but remembered in time that ninjas, unlike the demons (or so he had assumed) were highly chakra sensitive, and would instantly home in on such a sudden appearance of chakra.
Glancing at Akuma, he considered him for a moment. "You're going to need to pay attention," he warned. "There is no cut-off on chakra production right now, so if you feel like it is getting to be too much for whatever reason, bleed some off, or do some techniques or something."
He repeated this telepathically to his mountain phantom, and they all nodded.
Given his new abilities, Xander briefly contemplated sending a clone to Naamahalat, but discarded the idea. Not only did he not know how she had reacted to his escape, he was not sure that any clone could survive the rigors they would put him through. Besides, he still had not succeeded in forgiving her, though he knew that she had every reason to assume he was a gift and enthrall him.
It was tempting nonetheless, given that he had gone from having sex multiple times a day to none at all, a less than comfortable transition for a teenage boy.
Returning his attention to the stuffed doll in Kushina's room, he repeated his pattern of using it as a reference to produce a new body, then using that body to slip out of the village.
He would get clones inserted into the village academies when he got the chance, but for now, he figured it would be enough to create pairs of clones, and have them swap places regularly, with one of them invisibly observing a training session or sessions, or classes, etc, in the village, and the other practicing what he had previously seen in the village. They could swap out occasionally, though the memory transfer thing might be enough for the external clone to train the techniques the internal clone was observing.
He made two clones, crafting them to look like a mix of some of the boys he had seen at Kushina's training, so if they were seen, they would not stand out, and gave them a chakra jump-start.
Once they were in place, he went gaseous and resumed flying over the landscape. This time, he had a more definite goal in mind. Instead of merely looking for any chakra-powered conflict, he was looking for a defensible place he could turn into a protected base on this world, giving him a safe place to go back and forth from.
It would also give him a chance to see if there was a way he could use his powers to create a permanent portal between the two realms, or better yet, something that could create such a portal on demand between two set locations, that could be protected so that only he or one of his clones could operate it.
He stopped suddenly, realizing this was exactly the sort of task he should be delegating now, while he focused on exploring his power, something his clones could not do for him. Finding an unoccupied clearing, he made a quick portal, stepped through and returned to his original body, then activated the just exited body as a clone, and sent both it and Akuma back through the portal to search out a good location.
Returning to the desolate moon, popping his sphere of air back into existence, Xander dove back into studying his power. Particularly, he started testing the limits of his fluid creating power. He had used it to create chakra, something he would have thought was more of an energy, whereas a fluid was implicitly matter, wasn't it? Gas and liquid were both states of matter that were both fluid, but he was pretty sure that chakra was not, yet apparently it still qualified as fluid.
So what else qualified as fluid?
Xander's first effort was to create energy, but nothing appeared to happen. Deciding that it might have been overly generic, Xander wondered what other sort of more specific energy he could try to create.
Remembering Akuma/Ryu's first attack, he summoned a ball of ki. This was more immediately visible than the unfocused chakra had been, but in the glowing blue light it gave off, Xander wondered if that was because he had already seen it as blue?
Xander tried to produce red ki, which had no effect. He tried red energy, but again, no effect. He tried to produce thermal energy, and here he was rewarded, though again it was nearly invisible. Only nearly though, and he could feel the heat wafting off, and when he moved his hand, he could see the shimmering effect as the heat distorted the light passing through the heated air.
For a moment he tried pushing the envelope, steadily driving up the amount of thermal energy. He had to stop pretty quickly, as it became too uncomfortable to continue.
He dispersed it and paused to consider what to try next. A moment later he realized he was missing the obvious. The most direct and obvious form of energy to a modern human would have to be either light or electricity. He was pretty confident that he could produce light by producing molten metal, which aside from mercury and maybe one or two other low-melting point metals had some pretty impressive glow to it.
Could he produce light directly? His first try at producing 'liquid light' gave him something that was actually more gooey, luminous in a way that reminded him of fireflies, or something glowing under a blacklight.
An attempt to produce pure white light, on the other hand, succeeded in producing a glowing orb of white above his hand, whose brightness he could control pretty directly, and which cast some pretty stark shadows.
Was this a consequence of 'e equals mc squared', an equation even he had heard of? Or was fluid really so expansive a term that it could cover this?
An attempt at producing an energetic plasma, at a bit of distance from himself, succeeding in producing the imagined orb of glowing gas, with occasional sparks of lightning visible within, looking much like the sort of lightning sphere toy common in mall novelty stores.
A few minutes of puzzling over what else to produce reminded him finally of a fluid he had heard of only from science fiction movies, especially Frankenstein, élan vital, something which he was quite certain had been thoroughly debunked. Could he produce it? He had already produced a number of other things, including the super-soldier serum, that were wholly fictional as far as he knew.
Xander considered it, then wondered if it was worth the risk. This was, after all, the topic of innumerable sci-fi movies wherein the mad scientist imbues something with the vital force only to be killed by it. Given that history, was he risking the same result?
Frankenstein's monster had been crippled in its ability to speak, and to move fluidly. Could he be precise enough to create something that was not in some way lacking? He was not skilled in medicine or the way the body was put together. Perhaps that test would wait.
Xander felt frustrated. He knew there were many more types of energy than he was coming up with, even just in his comics, but he certainly did not want to produce a sentient energy, like the Phoenix Force from Marvel comics, or the Power Cosmic only to discover that for it to exist, Galactus had to exist, and was created to allow it.
Stifled, he turned back to chakra. Sure, it was something he would be learning about over the next while anyway, but if a whole population was using it in constant battle and their world had not been destroyed, at least he did not have to worry about creating monsters or attracting the attention of angry gods or world-devourers.
After a brief spate of reproductions of some of the techniques Mayu had demonstrated for them, exploring what he had to impress on the chakra as he created, Xander moved on to what for him was the most obvious next step.
Just as he had applied the technique for making a mud clone and warped it into a working clone for his extra bodies, he figured most of these techniques could be warped into variants.
In particular, he had observed in the fight where he picked up Mayu a number of water based attacks and felt he had at least a chance of reproducing some of them.
He was about to try and do so, when another thought occurred to him. A moment later, he had duplicated the chakra Mayu had produced when she made a mud clone, and in return was granted a clone of Mayu.
"What is your name?" he asked, looking at her closely.
"Mayu," she said, with a slight bow.
"Do you remember me?" Xander questioned, watching her face closely.
She nodded. "You are a companion of my Lord Ryu."
That confirmed it, she actually had Mayu's memories, just as his personal mud-clone had his own. As much as he had tried to reproduce her chakra based on what his senses told him of it, there was absolutely no way he could have remembered that chakra's attributes in sufficient fine detail to reproduce her memories. Just to verify, he questioned her about her family and her home village, and found no holes, no gaps in her memory.
So somehow, when he had commanded his power to reproduce the chakra she had produced, it had done so to a precision greater than he could have managed with his memory. He had seen little hints of this before, hints that somehow there was more to his power than just what he himself could imagine. After all, producing an elixir of healing was all well and good, but the fact remained that Xander had absolutely no personal knowledge of the attributes of such a fluid. Yet he had been able to create it.
Yet there were other things, other times where that seemed to fail - he was not certain, but he did not think he would have been able to create chakra prior to first seeing it. It was hard to say, given that he had not actually made the attempt prior to observing the strange-eyed lady's use of it. One might argue that he could produce ki sight-unseen, but of course, he had seen the hadouken many times, even if it was only on a video screen. Could that make a difference? Was his ki even actually the same as what Ken or Ryu produced in the game?
He dispersed the clone, and ignoring the impossibility, reproduced the chakra released by the dead ninja who had produced the water dragon, even as he produced a large mass of water. Instantly the water took on the attributes of a dragon, and roared through the air looking for a target, before he dispersed it.
Well, that was rather interesting.
He wondered if Mayu would remember what her clone had seen, if when he had produced chakra matching hers at the moment of the technique, he had actually produced her chakra, binding the clone to her. It did not seem possible, yet at the same time . . . Xander was fairly sure that he could produce her blood on demand, or Naamahalat's, probably even the Duke's. Would she remember?
Xander's clumsy attempts at other water jutsu failed miserably. Only, it seemed, when he was reproducing the exact chakra output of a usage he had himself witnessed was he able to reliably reproduce a result. With no real understanding of chakra, he had no idea what changes to make, what to shift in it to make it stronger or weaker aside from changing the quantity of chakra, what to do to make more or fewer spears appear, or a wall of granite or marble or some other particular stone, nor, it seemed, could he simply reproduce the earth effects he had seen as water effects.
Yet he had been able to adapt a mud-clone to himself and to his fluid instead of mud. Did that mean that another, Mayu for example, could somehow use a mud-clone on his fluid instead of mud, and have it work?
Was that somehow inherent in the mud-clone technique, that it worked on the fluid it was pushed into, and not specifically mud?
Looking around at the disturbed landscape, Xander considered it. Now that he had a retainer . . . er, well, now that Ryu had a retainer, anyway, and wasn't that an odd fix to be in . . . he needed to provide proper lodgings.
Did he really want to house her permanently on the demon plane? Surely not; if she were ever encountered by the demons, they would not hesitate to capture and make a pet of her. He could build something here on this moon, but the slightest breech would produce a potentially lethal decompression. He glanced up at the blue light of the Earth hanging overhead. If his travel worked there was no life there--no, that was wrong, no sentient beings there, always assuming his power had understood that requirement of the portal--and he could build there.
But then he might interfere with future life developing on the world. It would be ideal if he could have a fortress in its own dimension, its own world, like a demi-plane from D&D, or a larger version of the space in a portable hole.
He could maybe make a home in such a place, with doorways to get to the demon-plane, and the ninja world, and eventually, to Sunnydale on his own Earth. That would take care of the defensible place that Akuma and his new unnamed clone were searching for, as well as . . . well, no, maybe he would still need that, to guard the doorway to his demi-plane.
So what was involved in creating such a plane? Could his powers do it directly, or could he use them to give himself such a power?
Xander tried to consider the possibilities, and whether he should risk giving himself such a power. Would there be any long term side-effects? Was it even possible any more, or had it ever been, to give himself a power with a time limit after which it would cease?
The potential benefits seemed worth it, but it made sense to Xander to see if he could accomplish it directly through his power first. He was not particularly sure how to go about this, aside from simply trying to make a portal to an existing demi-plane and taking it for his own.
He did not want to do that, since even an abandoned demi-plane might see the owners return at some point, or have external access points floating around that he did not know about.
So Xander decided to try something different. The first thing he did was to use a portal to step over to this solar system's Mars, to be further from any potential ill effects on developing life on Earth. After forming a sphere of air and looking the land over to be sure it was a dead world, Xander sat down, and slowly and painstakingly worked out on paper what he wanted to try. Trying at first to think of it as Willow might got him a lot of nowhere fast, but when he backed up and came at it by trying to mimic a comic book description of some entity's parallel world, he made considerable progress. After considerable pondering, and a bit of elixir to deal with the resulting headache, he carefully rewrote his ramblings to be more legible, then proceeded with his attempt.
First, he concentrated on what he wanted to happen, the forming of a demi-plane governed by the same basic physical laws as the universe he was in, but supporting the existence of magic, chakra, ki, and demonic and celestial energies, and permitting the existence of various other rule-breaking phenomena, wholly subject to the exertion of his will but self-sustaining otherwise, that would respond dynamically to the needs and desires of the inhabitants where doing so did not conflict with his will.
With these ideas in mind, Xander produced a small amount of fluid and pushed chakra into it, willing that the clone thus formed would hold that thought in mind. Then he proceeded to elaborate on his intentions for the primary entity in the demi-plane, supported by the plane itself, a house with enough self-will and understanding to respond to its inhabitants' needs and wants, forming new rooms from material supplied by the demi-plane or himself, and capable of sustaining portals that he formed, and controlling access to them, as well as generating unseen servants of the D&D variety for general maintenance, and pumped these ideas into a second formless clone.
Before continuing, Xander popped a portal to his demon-plane hideout and swapped bodies with Tarou, so that if his next attempt destroyed Mars, he would not have damaged his original body.
Ready to make the attempt, Xander, in quick succession, attempted to produce mass amounts of several varieties of energy. He was moving quickly, and did not waste time paying attention to which succeeded and which did not, just focusing on producing them with the intention that they should be subject to his will and that of the two clones. He quickly went through dimensional energy, gravitational energy, pure magic, elemental magic of earth, fire, air, and water, then void magic, the substance of his portals, a magical fluid capable of matter production and transformation, ki, life energy, chi, electricity, light, demonic energy, demonic magic, celestial energy, celestial magic, élan vital, kinetic energy, potential energy, water, sentience, sentient energy and polymorphic energy before conceding that he could think of nothing more, and then pumping it all full of chakra loaded with the intent for it to accomplish his will, and promptly fell unconscious.
When Xander finally revived an unknown time later, he was confused and disoriented, but not in nearly the pain he expected when he remembered where he had collapsed. He winced when he remembered where he had been, anticipating the pain of frozen flesh, the burning of lungs that had been too long without oxygen, the dry cracked feeling of soft tissue that had been leeched of all moisture. After all, he had collapsed on the surface of Mars, and without his will maintaining it, the sphere of temperate air around him would have quickly faded into the background thin, barely present atmosphere, leaving him exposed to the raw elements of Mars.
As Xander marveled at the absence of these pains, and slowly sat up, he felt sheets falling away. His eyes popped open in surprise, and he found himself in a bed, in a comfortable looking room. Beside the bed was a bedside table, and on it was a small breakfast tray with a bowl of what looked like Captain Crunch cereal, a spoon, and a tall glass of milk.
Xander grinned, and sliding his feet off the bed so he could sit on the side of it, he pulled the tray around, finding it was on a long and flexible arm, poured a bit of milk into the bowl, and actually ate a proper breakfast, for the first time in a long while.
Then he finally bothered to check his memories, and discovered that he had actually been carried along into the new demi-plane during its creation, and that apparently the two clones he had made had become incorporated with the various magics and sentient energies he had attempted to summon and ended up becoming the minds of the plane and the fortress or mansion or house or castle or whatever it was.
Beyond that, he could remember the activities of his other clones, and by what he remembered, judge that he had been out for about two and a half days. His child clones had already had a good day of observing training, and practicing in the fields, and one of them had apparently bothered to sit down and write out a letter to him and then memorize it to be sure he got it, advising him that he should supply them with a small number of additional clones to attach to outgoing caravans, to locate other hidden villages of ninja, and learn what could be gathered from them.
Akuma and the now-named Lewis (apparently he grew tired of being nameless, and took a name from Lewis and Clark, as he felt like they were on a similar trek) had noted several possible locations.
Tarou and Ryu had spent some time (Tarou being now in his original body, as he had discovered just before over-exerting himself that while his clones could not switch bodies on their own, he could move them himself) working with Mayu going over what had been collected from the dead ninja, and which supplies she needed.
As evidence that his clones could be creative on their own, the demi-plane informed him that it liked the idea, stolen from AD&D's Ravenloft and the Mists of Avalon, of using a demi-plane produced mist to accomplish larger scale connections between planes, an idea which startled Xander, and made him wonder what else he had overlooked. Mists, after all, were liquid suspended in a gas and so fluid twice over, yet he had not even thought of using them for travel, which would provide both concealment, intimidation, and possibly, as the demi-plane mind implied, instantaneous transport of large groups already in martial array, without bottlenecking.
Rising, Xander asked the house to guide him to a good spot to form a permanent connection with his demon-plane hideout. Immediately, a light appeared in front of him, and moving slowly ahead, guided him to a large central hall with sweeping grand stairs and a massive chandelier that made him wonder whose mind was actually coming up with all this, then down a hall into a corridor reminiscent of a stone dungeon. The walls transitioned from paneling to exposed brick and then worked stone, before finally reaching an almost natural looking cavern. The light drifted to a large opening on one side, and slowly flickered and swelled, until it finally resolved into a face.
"Hey, Xan-man. Here's the deal; the plane and I think if you use the plane to make a mist connection, we can actually extend through it, and push some of the demi-plane's rules out into the other side, so any attackers have to actually enter your realm to even get to us."
Xander frowned, considering this. It was very weird to have the plane and house seemingly more creative and intelligent than he was, but then, he had stuffed them full of all sorts of energies. Odd effects were probably to be expected, especially when he had apparently actually managed to strain himself for the first time, to actually push his own limits. He had not previously noticed any difficulty or strain in using his powers, except for the odd resistance of the ninjas' chakra, which had not really taken much to push past. Apparently creating a demi-plane and everything he had tried to get into it had actually finally demonstrated that he did have limits, somewhere.
He summoned a mist, just to see if he could. When it manifested without difficulty, he nodded. "Go for it," he said, and watched as the cavernous opening filled with a dark mist. Wanting to see it from the other side, he quickly formed a portal and stepped through it.
In the hideout, he watched as mist billowed up from the ground to one corner, and then a red light glowed in the darkness of the mist, before clean stonework spread from within the mist and engulfed the interior of his hollowed out hideout, concealing even the tiny openings he had left himself for exiting.
Swapping with Tarou to get back into his original body, Xander mentally explained what was going on to Tarou and Ryu.
"Alright, Mayu," Ryu said. "Time to pack up your tent and get a proper room."
He guided a nervous Mayu into and through the mist, and as advertised, they ended up in the dungeon area, where a light appeared to guide them to where they could find rooms.
Xander, meanwhile, reached out to the first of the locations found by Akuma and Lewis, and trying mist-travel for the first time himself, had a mist rise and engulf him, and as intended, when it receded on both planes, it left him in the location they had picked.
Examining it, Xander found that they were clearly thinking of his consideration of piracy, for he was on a sheltered beach with a small cove beyond, with beautiful deep water, and two encircling arms of coast with lines of rocks sealing him in. They were not completely continuous, but definitely did not look like something a ship could navigate.
A ghost ship, on the other hand, which could pass through the mists? That could be a different story. Xander looked around the cave, that actually engulfed the waters towards the rear of the cove, such that the beach continued directly into the cave on one side, while the other was rocky and appeared impassable on foot.
The cave continued for some distance beyond the water's end, and Xander liked the look of it. Aside from the impassable barrier rocks, which ensured he would not be bothered by ships seeking refuge, this would make a perfect pirate cove.
He had just returned to the house to locate a good spot to form a connection to the cove, with his senses at their full as he examined the mist he was using to make the trip, when darkness enveloped him. For the first time, Xander could actually feel the energies reaching out to draw him in, and felt like he could resist, if he wanted to.