out) costume Xander could transform into and then gain powers from would be until finally I hit upon something that made me say: "Yeah, that would work pretty well".So enjoy. This will probably just be a single shot, but I might continue on with it after finals.
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There, everything was in place. The table was set, the food was ready, and the guests would arrive shortly. Giles got one day off a year, ONE, and he was going to make the best of it.
“Giles! Giles! Come quick, the town is in chaos!” The voice of Willow Rosenberg sounded outside.
Taking off his glasses, Giles very slowly let his face descend into his hand, saying, “Of course.” Getting up he moves out of his living room while shouting outside, “Do come in Willow and tell me what tonight’s disaster is.”
Of course, when Willow ran through the door, this caused Giles to take a step back and exclaim softly, “Oh dear.”
“GilescomequickeveryonehasturnedintotheirHalloweencostumesandI’maghostandBuffyisuselessandthewholetownisgoingnutsandXander…” Willow says in one long, panicked, incomprehensible utterance before furrowing her eyebrows and asking in a confused voice, “Hey, what’s that on your coffee table over there?”
Summoning the indignation that only a British librarian possesses Giles states, “I’m allowed to have hobbies!” before pausing, taking his glasses off again, pinching the bridge of his nose and saying, “And why are we having a discussion about what I do in my free time in the middle of a crisis? Please Willow, just tell me what happened. Slowly this time.”
Taking a deep breath, Willow starts over, “Okay, it all started when we went to this new costume shop that opened up in town to get these costumes for Halloween because Snyder told us that we had to take these little kids out trick-or-treating, and we were all like ‘Aw man!’ but Snyder…”
“Willow,” Giles quietly says in exasperation.
“Right, so anyway, I go as a ghost like I do every year, Buffy gets this 18th Century dress and Xander finds this big model suit of armour, kinda dorky and tacky but he said it made him feel like the hero for once. So we’re out with the kids, doing the whole candy-thing when suddenly everyone is their costumes! So now all the little kids are witches and demons and mummies and all that, Buffy is scared of her own shadow and Xander…” Willow pauses and then says, “No really, what IS that on your table?”
Clenching his fists in frustration for a moment Giles takes a deep breath to calm down before replying, “This is not the time, but if you really must know it’s a popular pass time amongst the younger Watchers, a way to relax, vent some frustrations at the realities of our jobs, and still keep our minds sharp. Now, back to this whole transformation thing. You mentioned a costume shop.”
Her eyes brightening up Willow continues, “Oh yeah! Well, you see, we met up with Cordelia and she hadn’t turned into a cat because she hadn’t gone to the costume shop. Plus after Xander changed he muttered something about ‘sorcery’ before stomping off in the general direction of the shop, so when we put two plus together.”
Sighing, Giles turns to his study before completing the turn to come back to Willow and asks, “Wait, you said something about Xander?”
“Oh yeah, he turned into some sort of… I don’t know, knight or something, he seemed ready for battle and would have started chopping into transformed little kids if I hadn’t told him to stop. He looked at me funny, considered what was happening, and muttered a few things in what sounded like Latin before leaving,” Willow then pauses, tilts her head and walks over to Giles coffee table, points at an open book and says, “He looks exactly like that.”
Blinking several times, Giles groans slightly before saying, “So what you’re telling me is that Xander, our Xander, is currently transformed into that. And he has all the powers of said form?”
“Probably, whatever they are. I mean, look, ghosty,” Willow says while waving her hand through Giles’ face.
“Stop,” Giles says annoyed before pausing, looking back down at the picture and saying, “Bloody hell.”
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The teleport had not gone well. He had expected a scattering of forces upon arrival, but this was just ridiculous. At first he had thought he had arrived back on the planet in the midst of a traitor controlled zone, surrounded by daemons, but before he could even draw his sword a strange spirit had called out to him in a language that he had not heard for millennia. Pausing, he realized that this could not be Terra, and that the daemons about him were not daemons at all, their spirits human trapped behind some strange form twisting sorcery.
Moving through the madness of the primitive community with casual ease and indifference, he blasted a few real daemons trying to prey upon the ensorcelled and just plain confused humans. He could feel the source of the sorcery from somewhere nearby, an enchantment dedicated to the ruinous powers of Chaos. Finding the sorcerer, making him reverse what he had done, and then burning him for playing with such corrupt powers topped the list of things he needed to do.
Just as he was reaching the point where the sorcerer was coming from, something caught his eye. Turning, he looked into the front window of a shop. Once he got over what he saw inside, he noticed something rather disconcerting. He was wearing is armour, but he did not see his face reflected back at him. Rather he saw a young adolescent face of significantly lighter skin tone than his own, with short brown hair.
Slicing open the door to the shop with the massive claws on his left gauntlet, he shouldered his way inside and gazed at the terrible wonders about him. He needed to know what was going on, fast, so he simply opened himself up and let the information flow directly into his mind.
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Sitting next to the broken body of Ethan Rayne, Giles idly wipes the sweat induced condensation off his glasses before asking, “What I really want to know is why you rented out that damned suit of armour.”
Coughing weakly, Ethan smiles and says, “Oh, and why does Ripper want to know about that old thing?”
“Just answer the question,” Giles replies coldly.
Laughing, Ethan answers, “Fine, fine. I got it fourth hand from some down on his luck twit back home and figured it would be a laugh to see what would come out of the tacky thing when I cast my spell.”
“Did you even know what it was?” Giles asks coldly.
“Not a bloody clue,” Ethan says with a snicker.
Getting back up, Giles savagely kicks Ethan in the ribs and says, “That’s for ruining my night,” kicks him again, “And that’s for summoning a GOD into the body of a friend of mine. Lord knows what that will do to him. Now tell me how to end the spell before I decide to repeat this process.”
Moaning from broken ribs, Ethan groans out, “Statue of Janus. Break it.”
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His discoveries had been… disconcerting at the least. At the very least the spell had thrown his consciousness back in time tens of thousands of years, worrying to say the least considering the power involved. Of course, the information he had discovered made him wonder if he was real at all. Shaking his head, he dismissed the possibility. This… place… seemed to suffer a closeness with the Immaterium and so perhaps his story had reverberated through time and space into the minds of those who created the books around him.
More troubling than his own existence was what would happen to the boy whose body he currently inhabited. Now that he knew the truth, he could feel the young man’s soul tucked off to the side, lost and confused as if in a dream. The touch of their souls would have unknown consequences for the young man, and considering the world he lived in, any knowledge or power he retained could have grave consequences.
He could feel the sorcerer controlling this foul enchantment weaken, so he presumed that someone from this world was taking care of the problem, so he had little time to finish his gift to the boy whose body he shared, and indeed to this entire world. The technology was primitive, but having already lived through a time like and aided in the technological advancement, he could make do. It was a simple thing really, a short database of some more poignant memories and how to use them. A training aid would only work for the soul of the man bound to him. He could feel the good in the man and knew he would put the tool to good use.
With a flash, the spell ended and the armour became moulded plastic once more and Xander was no longer a living god that walked the earth, but just a normal high school student who knew far too much about the darker aspects of the world around him. However, he clutched a small metal orb that appeared made out of the shredded remains of the shop’s computer. Confused by the strange memories that swirled in his head he stumbles outside and looks up at the sign on the shop.
“Games Workshop?” He reads, no more enlightened as to what had happened than before.
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The Emperor blinks once before he realizes that he is back to where he should be, having just teleported from the surface of Terra to the warship of his traitorous son.
The memories were vague, but he had forced himself to remember what he had learned that night, and the mistakes he would make in the coming minutes. Pausing, he mental checks himself and growls, “Horus is no son of mine.”
Sigh... if this site and the anime club I attend hadn't already made me renounce all faith in humanity, that would have done it. Which incidentally brings up another point. If you're doing a Buffyverse crossover, don't do SG-1 unless you know you can do it really fucking well, cause that's about as lazy as the Xander-costume plot device. We get it already, the Initiative was a branch of the NID. Yeesh.
