Summoned to Tourney, Much?

BtVS / Tomorrow and Tomorrow crossover.

Chapter 1: Prologue

One girl, alone…

The slayer awoke to pain. Howling, disorienting pain. She screamed, not knowing or caring who heard her and how wimpy it may have made her look. Then she sucked in a hard breath and screamed again.

After the third scream, the memories started flooding back. She remembered waking up in the 23rd century to find a world not all that different from the one she had left. She remembered waking up in the 29th century, to find that she had been moved from a bunker on earth to a space station orbiting one of Neptune's moons. And she remembered waking up in the 31st millennium only to learn that there was still no hope of reviving –

"Angel!" she shouted, or as much as she could shout, with vocal chords hoarse not just from screaming but also from countless eons of disuse.

Despite being weak from the revivification process, Buffy hopped down from the cryo-preservation ark and dragged herself over to the identical piece of machinery next to hers. The black coffin-shaped object was a fusion of magic and technology. It had been Angel himself who had salvaged it and its twin from the ruins of the Wolfram and Hart building, after he had defeated the evil corporation which had for so long kept him on a leash. And it was Angel himself who was now locked inside the device, kept in suspended animation until such time as he could be brought back to life and cured of the magical blight which was eating away at his body.

"Please be careful, Miss Summers," a metallic voice echoed through the chamber. "You have been asleep for a long time."

Buffy turned to see a familiar sight moving to her aid: her servo-unit. She could tell right away that the robot had upgraded some of its parts, but it still retained the same basic shape it'd had when it had been given to her in 2873: a hemispherical central processing unit resting on top of an upright cylindrical body with wheels. She'd named it Arty, in tribute to a long-forgotten movie franchise.

"What's the date?" Buffy asked, her voice croaking.

"That is a difficult question to answer," said the servitor. "The way we measure time has changed greatly in the approximately 14.2 million sidereal years since you were last awakened…"

"THE DATE!" insisted Buffy.

"March 1st, approximately 14.2 million sidereal years since you were last awakened," said Arty.

Buffy paused, processing the figure that the robot had given her. It also struck her as odd that the robot had developed a sense of sarcasm, as its personality had been strictly mechanical during her last two forays back into the world of the living. But she was mainly still trying to process the ridiculously huge number that he – it – had just given her.

"Fourteen million…years?"

"That estimate will suffice for our present purposes, Miss Summers. But I am afraid that we have more pressing matters to attend to than your rather tenuous grasp of mathematics."

Buffy ignored the blatant insult, as more memories were starting to come back to her. She remembered now how Angel had won back his right to the Shon-shu prophecy by destroying Wolfram and Hart and their allies. He had been turned back into a human. But the forces of evil had managed to insert a poison pill into the deal: Angel was human, but he had inherited an inoperable cancer within his newly restored human body. No one in the 21st century had been able to cure the disease which was wasting him away, not even with the use of sorcery. The only hope for him had been to freeze him, until such time as the brute force of human technology could overcome the subtle magics threatening to take his life.

For Buffy, fate had been cruel in that, so soon after being reunited with Angel, she would lose him for good. Therefore, she had not hesitated. She had ordered herself frozen, too, only to be awakened when Angel had been cured and they could be together again. She could still see the tears running down Giles' cheeks as he shut the lid to her cryo-ark.

But the future had not yet held any answers for her. The treasure hunters who had revived her in 2241 had done so by accident; Buffy had dealt with them. But the doctors, once she made contact with that era's "proper authorities," had been just as perplexed by Angel's mysterious ailment as their Gen-Xer counterparts in the past. The only advice they had been able to give was to go deeper into the future, and wait out a cure.

So she had. And she had been awakened in 2871, just a few years shy of her 900th birthday. And that was when the bottom had fallen out of her plan.