Sometimes, the smallest of changes bring forth the greatest differences in history.
And while Andrew Wells was unaware of it, he had just caused one such difference.
On the normal timeline, the Sunnydale native had spent the night role playing with some friends. However, this time around, he had been volunteered by the principal Snyder to join the "volunteer" safety program. It had just been a mater of timing, really, should he have passed through the main hallway thirty seconds later, he wouldn't have crashed onto the janitor, nor had kicked said janitor's bucket directly onto principal Snyder's new shoes and thus wouldn't have compelled the principal to add an extra name to the list.
But such is life.
Being unable to partake on the night's campaign, he had decided, in his relative wisdom, to bring his favorite character to the real world.
After all, if he could not go role playing, then role playing would go to him, to him and to his party of dwarf/halfling/whatever. And fate was already feeling sorry for the psychological scarring those poor kids were about to suffer.
For tonight the Arch Mage Raderosh would walk the streets of Sunnydale, he proclaimed on the door of Ethan's shop, scaring some of the nearby pedestrians, before hurrying up towards his home, he still needed to finish the preparations and 'time was of the essence'.
Hell came onto Sunnydale as scheduled. Perhaps not hell, perhaps it wasn't even close to what some of the tamer hell dimensions could offer, but the amount of chaos that Ethan Rayne's spell brought onto the small town was no small potato.
After all, while not known by all, it almost brought upon an Armageddon. Not an unusual feature in Sunnydale, to the point some of the locals were proposing a plural for of the word, but it had been an unexpected event.
It almost brought back the old fight between chaos and order as the main attraction.
Or at least it would have, if Janus wouldn't have had plans for the power he had earned that very night.
After all if that conflict returned to the spotlight, well, his hard earned holidays and those of the other manifestations of chaos would be over.
The rest of the gang wouldn't take it very well, if at all.
The Costumes the British chaos mage had handled were quick to possess their unwary wearers, becoming them all an offering to Janus. A power, amplified by the presence of the Hellmouth and the large number of mystical artifacts that it seemed to attract.
It was quite beautiful, not to mention breathtaking, even if Janus was the only one to fully witness the event.
That was how Raderosh walked that night Sunnydale and how an old and quite bored chaos god begun his plan to 'spice things up'.
It all began to unfold as it was supposed to as the soldier found himself in a strange place that had just gone to the dogs.
Willow Rosenberg was half a mile away from Alexander Harris. Oh yes, she'd eventually met with the medievalized version of Buffy Ann Summers, and somehow helped her to relative safety, at least for a while. but that's a different story.
Now, due to Janus meddling, she would not met up with the possessed form of her childhood friend, but the possessed form of Andrew would.
And so Janus placed the metaphysical popcorn in his equally metaphysical microwave oven. The good part was coming up, and he wasn't going to miss it.
The soldier tried to keep on top of the situation, after all he had been trained for, well definitely not for something like this, but he was willing to try; too many lives were at stake, including his own.
True, he was cut off from the rest of his unit, and was equipped only with his M-16, a combat knife and perhaps four extra clips for his rifle, he wasn't sure how he had been cut off or why he had been so under equiped, but he was willing to leave that for latter.
Life and dead situation tended to take the priority and he had to keep the rest of the civilians alive, no matter the cost, probably find a good defensible place to weather the night and hope the guys caught up with him sooner or latter.
Hopefully sooner.
Luckily, in spite of many of the creatures' immunity to ammunition, they failed to remain dead, it seemed that both the pain that it inflicted to them and the sound his trusted M-16 caused was more than enough to at least dissuade them, for a time at least.
Not an ideal situation, but at least they remained alive.
But then it appeared.
It was a monstrosity, even amongst monsters. It was a construct of flesh with no skin that, taller than a man and as wide as a car, what was worse it simply seemed to absorb the bullets, no matter were he aimed.
It didn't changed things for the soldier, he keep shooting at it to no avail, all while trying to circle it not only to avoid getting onto the thing's powerful arms, but in the faint hope of finding a weak spot.
He knew it was hopeless, and that he was as good as dead, but the longer he distracted it, the longer the civies had to get out of there.
It was then when Raderosh made his move.
The old, some would say half senile, mage wasn't too sure what was going on and therefore he had kept from intervening, at least directly, after all the ranger? Seemed to have things under control.
Oh yes, he had helped dissuade the demi-humans and all those strange little creatures with some secondary magics, like imprinting irrational fear into their harts and minds and the such, the moment he noticed the ranger's weapon seemed to have little effect on the more magical of attackers.
But the thing that was closing in wasn't going to be taken down by such a cheap trick, and he knew it.
At least if it was what Raderosh thought it was.
It had being designed to be very resilient to magic and was incapable of fear and pretty much any other emotion, and that was the problem.
The best way to deal with such creatures was to simply banish them, however normal banishments wouldn't work on it.
Of course, he knew of a spell that should do the trick, but spellcasting in a mystical nexus wasn't a good idea, at least if you don't know much about it. Not to mention that said spell was still in its 'beta' stage
But it wasn't as if they had a whole lot of options, if he didn't act the thing would kill the ranger and then pretty much anyone who came onto its range, he couldn't allow that (he was, after all, within the creature's range)
If you have one option, you have one choice, regardless of the risks.
Perhaps it was the Hellmouth that twisted the spell that way, such phenomena did have some type of effect in banishment magic due to its dimensional reach, or perhaps it was the spell itself, but there had been another force at play that night, a very powerfully one that had just receive a massive offering, Janus.
Undoubtedly he was responsible, the true question was whatever his responsibility was direct or indirect. A rather normal issue when dealing with entities of chaos, as they tend to insist it is far better to cause, at least, a twenty-stage chain reaction rather than forcing change in the key event.
Go figure.
So, exactly how Raderosh's Multipurpose Banishment Spell (patent pending) had behaved so erratically, was beyond the old mage, though he did make a mental note to review the spell at the first oportunity.
What he did know was that one moment everything went bright and by the time he was able to see again, the blackened spot in the lawn of some unlucky Sunnydale resident remained where both the ranger and the construct had been standing a few moments before.
Ripper was beyond pissed off, he was more than tempted to twist Ethan's neck in an unnatural angle. But he had to make sure that he had told him the truth first.
The good for nothing chaos mage had always been a pain in the ass, but this, this exceeded his usual level of stupidity.
This time, however, Ethan was going to pay for his antics, in full.
Though it would have to wait just a little longer, undoing the disaster his 'old mate' had caused had the priority.
In a way he had been disappointed, the British chaos mage had broken in too soon. Not that it really surprised him, Ethan had always lacked a bit of a backbone, but it was still a disappointment.
Still, there was nothing stopping him from demonstrating his uh… discomfort with Rayne's career of choice once the spell and Janus statue were properly dealt with.
He carefully lifted the statue before he threw it towards the floor with all his strength. As expected, Janus' bust fragmented into so many pieces and the spell was no more.
Now was the turn to do the same to his old mate, it wasn't that he condoned violence, no, he had changed considerably since his Eyghon days.
It was the fact that Ethan Rayne was far too dangerous to be left to his own devices.
Regretfully, instead of finding the battered form of his old colleague, he only found a small note.
A promise, a warning, or just a taste of the chaos mage odd sense of humor, just the words 'be seeing you' etched on a piece of paper. Almost immediately the note met what should have been Ethan's fate.
He was getting too old for this, and he was in need of a very strong drink.
He was in a forest, it was dark, not that far from sunrise he estimated by the moon's position and it was cold, cold enough to watch his breath condensate in front of him.
The last thing Xander remembered was the bright light.
Xander… no that was…
His free hand went instinctively towards his head, as he reacted toward the acute pain there. It hurt, and it didn't help his confusion in the least. He almost lost his footing, as he felt the two sets of memories, personalities, and experiences fight for dominance.
Perhaps he was Xander Harris; perhaps he was… what was the other name? Why things had to be so… complicated?
What he was sure of was that he was not in Sunnydale; the stars were not right enough, even if he wasn't too sure how he knew that, and the weather, well…. His army fatigues weren't suited for it, at least not by themselves.
It was cold, and it wasn't the California 'cold' he as used to. This felt more like snow cold.
Yes... those were safe thoughts, no doubt, no problem, just as long as he kept his mind to those safe… but for some reason it stopped working and he felt the pain return in force. It was too strange and too surreal, even by his standards.
Of course, it stopped mattering the moment the FREAK broke onto the same clearing. Shoulder length red hair, wearing a tight fitting shirt, a leather skirt and high-heeled boots. She looked out of place in the forest., then again she wasn't there by choice.
The man made (actually Millennium made, but that is just being nitpicky) abomination had not felt the human, she was a more preoccupied with the thing that had been sent after her. It had teared through her colleagues and their ghouls with a remarkable ease.
And now it was closing onto her, she knew she couldn't beat it, not then and definitely not now. It had been then when she saw the human, a human alone in the forest, in the middle of the night and in her path.
She wasn't one to look at gift horses in the mouth, after all, a hostage was a hostage.
The moment Xander saw her, he knew. He might have not know it was a FREAK or that it was even a vampire. But he knew an enemy when he saw one and with that realization the pain in his mind was gone.
And lost no time to begin firing at the her.
She moved fast, faster than humanly possible, in spite of the hailstorm of bullets tearing through her flesh.
By the time the Vamp had reached Xander's position, he had time to fire less than ten rounds to little more effect than infuriating the woman, thing, whatever.
With remarkable ease she backhanded the still firing rifle out of his hands and without giving him time to react, her hands found their place on his shoulders as her bared fangs approached his neck.
Time seemed to slow down; it was certainly running out for the teen. But before the fangs could reach his neck, his left hand had freed the combat knife from its sheath and in a swift movement he had slashed the creature's belly diagonally.
That probably saved his neck, but on the other hand it really angered her. With lightning speed she withdrew both arms from his shoulder and used them to deliver a couple of devastating open palm strike on Xander's chest and finished up with a roundhouse kick against his right shoulder, which send him sprawling to the ground.
Xander was in a world of hurt by then, he was sure he had at least a few cracked ribs and his shoulder was killing him, probably broken.
From his position on the ground, he saw the vampiress moving slowly towards him, almost as if gloating about her superiority.
His body ached and a burning pain flared up on his chest each time he breathed, he was going to loose and die, or worse, if he didn't thought something and fast.
Shakily he reincorporated himself, he was in bad shape and his life expectancy was dropping faster than Wall Street brokers on the black Friday, but he still had some fight in him.
"Come on, human, you know you cannot win; you are almost dead on your feet. So why make it more of a problem for me? No harm will come to you, that I promise"
A part of him had been tempted, he was in no shape to kill her, she was stronger and faster than he and to make things worse his body was killing him.
He wasn't going to win this one.
Then again, he didn't needed to kill her, just delay her.
When she busted onto the clearing she hadn't been charging towards him, not to mention that her clothes weren't ideally suited for the outdoors.
She wasn't there by choice, that meant she was being hunt, that they had her on the run.
There were hunters in the forest, and he was sure they had herd the gunshots.
So, it was a matter of holding out till her pursuers showed up, hopefully soon.
Of course, the implicit issue was if he really wanted to meet what had the vampiress running for her unlife.
He could be very well jumping from the pan to the fire, but the only other option was giving in to her, and/or dieing and that was simply not happening.
Without any heroic or smart mouthed remarks he threw his knife against the Vampiress with what strength he could muster.
The knife found its mark in the FREAK's left eye, making her scream more from the shock than the pain, but it id make her stagger backwards.
That was his mark, he began moving towards the rifle as fast as he could, disregarding the pain it caused him, he had a ver small window of opportunity and he wasn't going to waste it.
It felt like an eternity, but couldn't have been more than fifteen seconds, if it was that much, but he had his weapon. Of course, it hadn't been cheap and he was going to pay for it for quite a few days, that's it if he managed to survive.
Bottom line, he had the rifle, but she was already moving towards him, his bloodied knife in her right hand and an insane gleam on her eyes; though this time she was moving within human standards.
Apparently she had been worst off than he'd thought, perhaps he did stand a chance after all.
The first time around, he had just targeted the center of mass, where a soldier is taught to shoot at, with no effect. She had to be either a demon or a vamp and with the whole gonna-bite-your-neck act, she had to be a vamp.
But this time he wasn't going to make the same mistake.
He shouldered the gun and began firing, proving that he was ambidextrous or that desperation is the greatest of teachers, as most of his round found their mark on her right shoulder.
It was a close call, but the force of the bullets made the freak drop the knife and not only stop her charge, but made her stagger backwards.
Then, with a deafening 'click', he ran out of ammo.
The vampiress grinned predatorily and after picking up the knife with her good hand, she resumed the charge.
She was to close to him to give him the time to reload the gun and was faster than he was; fleeing was not an option.
Xander went for dodging while trying to reload the rifle. Hoping against hope to buy time, baiting and sidestepping her, at least as long as his body could manage, hopefully long enough to reload.
To his credit, the theory was good and it worked, once, then the vampiress spun around too close to him not giving him time to react and seized the moment stabbing him in the gut.
The pain was rather unique; it was very different from the burning sensation in his chest when he tried to breath or the numbing pain in his shoulder.
This one was acute, sharp, far worse than anything he had felt. He doubled in pain, his eyes widened and he mouthed a silent scream.
Then, she twisted the blade.
The pain was almost too much, he nearly blacked out from it, and, what was worse, he had dropped the gun.
His last hope was now lying on the grass, just out of reach, that was it, he was going to die.
His body was still trembling from the pain and he was forced to spit a mouthful of his own blood and bile.
"Aw… I think I broke the little man"
His left hand, now free, went for the things throat. Rage feed his intentions and blocked the pain, allowing his hand to find a grip around the vamp's neck and while he tried to straighten himself up he tried to sink his thumb into her trachea.
"You are not broken enough, eh, boy?" she almost sounded amused by his actions, then a vicious smile filled her face, "Don't worry, we'll fix that soon enough" she said winking her good eye.
He felt pain again, as the knife leave his gut, not as much as before but enough to make his right hand cover the wound out of reflex and in a vain effort to slow the bleeding.
The woman then raised the knife to her mouth and licked the blood on the edge before she raised it above her head, ready to stab him once again.
Time seemed to stop, again...
Xander stood mesmerized by the blade's reflection of the pale moon glow on its edge, certain that that was it, game over.
Then, there was a loud discharge and next thing he knew he had been thrown backwards as the woman in from of him was nearly torn in two before it collapsed onto dust.
Without the vamp holding him any more, Xanderlanded rather unceremoniously onto his back, half dazed, withhis hand still tightly clutched onto the wound.
He could see the bloodstain now, his hand was already drenched in the deep red, and the dark stain on the costume was growing by the moment.
Suddenly he felt very cold and very scared.
He wasn't unfamiliar with death, actually ever since Buffy had arrived to Sunnydale, he had been far more acquainted with it than he would have wanted to, but...
Somehow he managed keep the panic at bay, trying to keep his mind from those thoughts, trying to keep himself concious, alive, even if it was an uphill battle.
That was when he saw his savior.
Out of the foliage apeared awoman, a rather petite strawberry blond wearing strange and tight fitting blue clothes, a uniform, his mind had temptatively added.
The girl seemed to carry slung on her back a, well he wasn't sure exactly what type of weapon it was but it would have been more in place on a jeep or maybe even a tank.
Sure, something wasn't right and if he wouldn't have been holding his guts with his hand he'd probably had figured it out too.
"About time…" he half muttered
"Oh, Uhh…" she seemed to stop a few feet from him, frozen? Her mouth agape… uh… she had red eyes? He hadn't lost all that much blood to…
Whatever had frozen her in place, the woman seemed to have fought it off and gave the few steps separating them before crouching by his side.
Seras knelt by the boy, the smell of blood was almost too much, it had almost overwhelmed her before, and with reason, the boy was very messed up but she was determined to keep it in check.
The wound was a bad one, She knew for sure, and well beyond her medkit ability to handle.
Somehow the boy was still conscious, gritting his teeth and eying her suspiciously.
"It… it's ok… everything will be fine" she said placing a hand on his shoulder
The boy merely shook his head and gave her a sad smile.
She knew he was beyond help, and so did he. It was her fault, if only master would have chase after that FREAK…
It was her fault…
Perhaps it is, policewoman, but he isn't as beyond help as you seem to think.
"Master?"
From Xander's perspective the things just took another turn for the bizarre as the woman begun talking to the air. Or perhaps he was hallucinating, while he wasn't sure blood loss could cause that he was rather new to this deathbed thing.
"But… but…. I…yes, master"
She turned to him; there was a sad look on those very not so human red eyes of hers,
"I can save you… but" were those fangs she had? "but there is a price"
"…Vampire? No… can't be, no ridges, no yellow eyes…"
"Gack!" she seemed to choke on his words "you-you think I am one of those" she almost seemed to shudder "...things?"
Heh, yes, do you believe that draculina here is one of those pitiful demonic knocks offs? Was that a voice in his mind? Man he was really messed up, wasn't he?
But, she had asked, why would she? Vamps just took… right? But she had also saved him from that…
A part of him, a big one, was appalled by the suggestion but another part, equally big, the part of him that feared death and that was painfully aware of how close he was to death, knew it was the only way to survive… and her reaction to the Aurelians…
…She had been offended, almost…
…Cold…
…So cold…
"W-why should I believe you?"
"I-I don't know," she said, there was something on her face sadness? Regret? "it is your choice, yours alone"
For a full minute, both sides of his psyche battled for dominance, as his pulse slowed and the cold become more and more intense and unconsciousness seemed to feel more and more like an alluring, comfortable blanket…
He looked up at the girl before him and sighted. He had made his choice.
In the end his fear of death won out.