BtVS by Whedon and Mutant Enemy. Star Wars by Lucas Films. Marvel/DC by the parent companies and their many artists/writers. Chain Letter One and Two by Christopher Pike is a spotlight story with Alison Parker, one of the viewpoint characters, narrating the books' events. It's part of the meme to have story recaps, so I went with one that pulls a neat trick I really like in the ending...

Written for Methos' "Tales from the Barman" over at Twisting the Hellmouth. The original story / set of stories, found at TtHFanfic dot org slash Story-11757 has over a hundred contributing authors. It's a varied setting, the main constants being that Xander Harris has opened a bar, called Nights, on the Cleveland Hellmouth. The bar is a weirdness magnet, with dimensional portals in the closet, and numerous characters walking in, telling their story over food and drink, then leaving a memento for the wall.

Here's my corner of it.


As Yoda and Andrew left the bar's main room, a brunette young woman walked in the front door. The wards tagged her as having limited experience with the supernatural, as well as that she'd been on the good side when things went down. Xander looked up, not expecting to recognize her. Oddly enough, he did.

"It's the weirdest weather out there, fourteen lightning strikes in the last five minutes and no rain," she said as she slid off her coat and hung it over an arm. "Didn't feel safe driving through it. I know it's early, but could I stay in here until it blows over?"

"Sure," Xander said, grinning. "Hey, Miranda, could you pour some of that wonderful soup? It's on the house for the star of 'Ophelia'."

A pan clanged merrily in the background.

"I wouldn't worry about the storm so much," Xander continued. "I have the odd feeling it's a lot less dangerous then it looks. Er, I'm sorry, I've seen some of the quality work you've done, but... I'm not so much with-"

"Alison Parker," she stated, her attention caught by the Wall and its many trophies. She was able to see one of Methos' old swords, most of the pictures, and many other items in detail, but when she tried to examine some of the stranger things, her eyes glazed over visibly - thanks to one of Willow's spells. She turned back to Xander, not realizing she'd missed anything.

"Pleased to meet you. I'm Xander Harris, chief bottle washer and apprentice Nerf Herder."

"They play here?"

##

Miranda, one of the extended group of Slayers and Nights' head chef, emerged from the kitchen. She was grinning from ear to ear as she presented the actress with a restaurant-quality bread bowl full of heavenly-smelling soup.

The bread bowl was replicated. The soup wasn't.

Having a bar on a dimensional nexus helped, a lot, but Xander didn't feel right about charging for the gifts that kept on giving. Like the Romulan ale or the Hydra head steaks.

Pretty much everything from the replicator was for strictly non-paying customers only. Having an eternally energetic chef was one of the main things that kept Nights in the black.

The actress was quickly swept up and seated at one of the nicer tables. After proper introductions were made, the Slayer went back to her cooking.

##

Xander took the time to admire Alison's odd collection of features, that, when taken as a whole, gave her a distinct beauty. He was familiar with her work because good Shakespeare remakes were required viewing in the Slayer House, just in case life turned into a Renaissance Faire.

Despite himself, he found his gaze being drawn to her left arm. He remembered seeing...

She followed his look, then stared at his face. She stared into his remaining eye and the eyepatch that covered the ruin of the other.

She opened her mouth, closed it, then simply pulled up the left sleeve of her blouse, revealing the scars on her arm.

"Glass panels, in my own house, when I was still in high school," she choked out. There was clearly more to the story.

Xander patted his eyepatch and grinned ruefully. "Fight in a wine cellar. My fourth year past graduation."

"I don't want to talk about it," she simply stated, then returned her interest to the delicious soup.

Somewhat disappointed, and slightly worried, Xander took the hint and returned to his post behind the bar. That was a good thing, because they shortly had company.

##

A somewhat battered Thor eased himself through the front door of Nights, this time making enough of an impression on the wards that Xander raised an eyebrow.

"You do realize," Xander asked, giving his most intense one-eyed stare. "That you're reading as both 100% deity and as 100% 'man gaining powers from super-science'? That's just... odd."

"It's just a plot by my half-brother Loki trying to gain control of my personal history and use it to drive a wedge between myself and my fellow heroes," Thor stated, an oddly resigned smile on his face. "Pay it no heed."

Either that, or you're a normal person being set up... Xander thought to himself, then made a mental note for Willow to increase the wards against deities messing with his head. It had gotten silly by this point.

"You sound like you're getting used to him," Xander said as he polished yet another glass.

"HA! The tales I could tell you," Thor said, then trailed off, his eyes taking in the wall behind the bar. "I guess you have an open mind... Well, let me tell you a tale from our youth, of how we faced the ice giants and saw the fire-born Surtur for the first time..."

Black gloves with the fingers cut out, thought Xander, as he poured the Norse god some honeyed mead. That's either for that warhammer, or some superhero thing... What's that weapon called again? Mjolnir, right. "Sorry to interrupt," Xander said, eying the hammer intently. "But my curiosity just got the better of me. Where's Cain?"

"Oh him? Don't tell him I know he joined that British team. I heard he was here looking for exercise and I felt a rematch was in order. Just so you know, the fight's still happening. I simply knocked him across the state. It should be another five minutes before he gets back here."

"Guess again," said Cain from his position at the door.

"Well, it's not that large a state," Thor said as he raised his hammer. The wards ejected them from the bar again.

A brilliant flash of lightning illuminated the bar as the heavy door swung shut.

By now Alison was convinced this was no ordinary bar.

##

Xander was still standing there, entranced by the sounds of the battle outside, when Andrew ran up, shouting: "Ooh! In Paradise X - an alternate future - Loki gets his father to turn Thor into a girl!"

"Andrew, what have I told you about importing comics from other dimensions?"

"... Call you, give you the list and name the day that I'd finish them by, so you could read them?"

"Exactly."

"I have it right here."

"... Thank you."

"Hey, Xander," the young man said, shifting nervously. "Getting Yoda to spend time with me, even though I've been annoying to you... Thanks."

"Welcome. You took over the position of 'guy who gets tied up for comic relief', once I'd grown out of it, so it's the least I can do. Just don't go Sith on us, okay?"

"Cool! Er, I won't."

"Good."

##

"Given me this, Andrew has," Yoda said, as he hobbled up on a brand new cane made of rosy-colored wood. "Ooh, and very useful it is, too." He twisted the cane one way and, ffffftt, the dartboard across the room sported a few new feathers. He twisted it another way and eight inches of stainless steel popped out.

"Fabricate replacement darts on Dagobah, I can. Served me well, my old cane has. Buried it with me I would have, but to leave a body behind is something I do not plan to do," Yoda said with a conspiratorial wink. Stretching, the Master Jedi carefully placed his decades-old walking stick on the polished surface of the bar. "Rare wood this is, from Genesia. Guard it well."

"Gimer wood is used as an aid in meditation and can sustain its owner in the absence of food," Andrew stated, apparently quoting from memory. "That's why I decided his new cane had to be made of enchanted apple wood. It offers health and the promise of choice."

"Well, that's very nice of you, Andrew," Xander stated as he gingerly picked the offered stick off the table. "Yoda, I will be sure to put this in a place of honor on the Wall, right above the... Enchanted? Exactly how long have you been planning this?"

"Umm, as soon as I woke up that time and heard Yoda had left before I'd come to I started planning and saving, most of my share of proceeds from the band has gone to pay for this... I just wanted to show Yoda how much respect he has in this world, just in case he ever happened to be here again... Yoda, hey-hows-about-you-rapping-for-my-band? You'd fit in."

"What?"

"What?"

"What?" asked Alison, who'd walked over to get a closer look.

"Or at least play the blissl?" Andrew wheedled, pointing at the flute hanging from Yoda's neck.

Xander sighed and turned to the stunned actress. "You ready to talk?"

She mutely nodded yes, so they segued back to her table, away from the weirdness.

##

"I'm going to tell this," Alison stated, with a pained expression on her face. "Roughly in the order it happened, which isn't at all what it was like to live through it... There was a cult in the San Bernadino Valley, where I used to live, that believed they could achieve immortality through human sacrifice. Among other things, they shoved a needle into a man's brain and left him to die in the desert. My friends and I were driving home one night from a concert when our car was drawn to him... I'm not sure, but later events sort of point to that something inside of his body was trying to work its way out..."

She narrated how, thanks to some very bad decisions, they'd hit the victim (alive, dead or undead) during the short time their headlights had been out. Swearing themselves to secrecy, they'd buried the man in the desert. Apparently, one of them - Neil – had quietly pocketed the guy's expensive ring. Considering he waited a few months before wearing it around his friends, none of them made the connection immediately.

"Senior year started well enough, as I had been cast as the lead actress in a play. One of the girls from the car was in a supporting role, another was on set design, so we'd hang together after school. That's when the first Chain Letter arrived. The envelope lacked a return address and its horrid purple color reminded me of rotting meat. The letter inside was from someone claiming to be The Observer - The Recorder - The Punisher - The Caretaker. Our names were in three columns - like this -"

Grabbing a bar napkin, she started to sketch it out.

##

While Alison's head was down, intent on her work, Dawn Summers popped out of the back room where she'd been studying. After having moved as fast as she could with an open laptop, Dawn set it on their table next to the meal's remains.

"Xander, I set a program up to report any live news feeds directly related to the bar. It looks like Cain's on TV..." Dawn trailed off, having finally noticed Andrew and the Jedi meditating. "Yoda's training Andrew? My turn!"

As Dawn ran away from Xander and Alison's table, the laptop began playing a short conversation.

-"Well, it looks like another random fight between superheroes out there."

-"Yes, James, I heard Juggernaut was operating out of London. Think this could be a result of international tensions?"

-"Maybe, Sally, but as you know, both 'heroes' claim to draw power from patron deities. It could be a turf war... Oh, wait. It looks like two members of the JLA have arrived. Can you make out what they're saying?"

-"No, but it seems this fight is almost over," the female newscaster said as Wonder Woman went after Cain with her lasso. "It seems like Batman has squared off against Thor. Think it's true that S.H.I.E.L.D. has provided him - not the rest of the JLA, but specifically him - with the weaknesses of most known superheroes?"

-"Not unless Thor's weakness is smoke grenades. Switching to infrared. Darn! That was a thermal smoke bomb, I can't see what's happening on this spectrum either!"

-"Goes to show that 'the Bat' is prepared for nearly anything. Well, it seems that Thor's hammer is arcing out of the smoke and up, up, up in the sky... Wait! What if it hits someone?"

-"Oh, good, there's the Batwing-" James said as the black aircraft fired something at the runaway warhammer. "Do you think that's Robin, or that it's being powered by remote control?"

-"I don't know, but the hammer's headed off in a new direction. Probably a precisely calculated geometric angle designed to carry it to somewhere safe."

-"Lost track of it. What would you say, a street in the low fifties?"

-"More like-"

At that point, one of the concealed windows in the bar exploded and the immense hammer thudded to the floor.

##

Startled, Alison and Xander leaped to their feet, only to slowly sit down again. The screen of the laptop quietly went black.

"Did he come through the window too?" Alison asked, pointing towards Yoda.

"No. The broom closet."

"Ah. Where was I?" After a moment's thought, she wrote down the first names of her friends, though she did decide to leave Detective Eric out of the story completely...

##

The list of names, reading Fran Kipp Brenda Neil Joan Tony Alison, was lined up next to the empty Column II and Column III.

"If we did our tasks, given to us through coded instructions in the Personals section, we were to advance our name one Column and pass it on to the next person. The Caretaker threatened us with suffering for failure and manslaughter charges - or worse - if we went to the police. Fran vandalized a mural she was proud of. Kipp refused to flunk Calculus and his brakes were cut. Brenda insulted our director and was kicked off the play. Neil faked a seizure in class, he'd been sick anyway but he was sensitive about it. Joan had a rebel image so, when she refused to dress as a clown, a jar of cockroaches was thrown through her bedroom window. Tony, my new boyfriend, refused to throw a race, but his drink was spiked with tranquilizer before he even got on the track. I wasn't about to flub my lines opening night, so the set collapsed on me. Then Column III started..."

She narrated how the demands were getting worse when her friends started disappearing. Neil was the only one to leave a body behind, except it wasn't his. He'd gone out to the desert to retrieve the corpse and return the ring he'd been wearing to its finger, then burned his home down around it to help confuse the identification. "We found out from his mother, who'd been away at the time, that Neil had a fatal brain tumor... A couple things she said didn't add up, so Tony went out and found the grave in the desert empty. He didn't have time to warn me before Neil showed up at my house, armed. I had my own gun and managed to stay ahead of Neil for a bit, but he'd jammed my front door and I gained these scars trying to escape..."

"The final climactic showdown happened with most of us tied up in a basement. Neil finally came to his senses and... We basically forgave him. He passed away a few weeks later in a cabin in the woods, mostly at peace, despite the tumor. His mom never found out he'd survived the fire. With Neil buried in the desert's old grave all seemed well but, behind the scenes, there'd been a cult member whispering lies into Neil's ear. She was the real Caretaker... Only not quite. After dumping the man in the desert where everything started, this woman, this... Jane... committed ritual suicide. Her very dead body walked out of the morgue that night..."

"There was a new Chain Letter, one without my name or Neil's, that had the others' names in Column III. If they did the tasks they'd be closing their names inside a Box, one that was mostly real and a trap for souls... The tasks amounted to mutilation and murder, so when two of us refused to play their parts, they died in accidents arranged by Undead Jane. She wasn't the only strange thing out there. An idealized version of Neil, one made up of all of the good in him and not exactly recognizable, met me at the cabin where he'd died. He gave me some good advice and I left in a better mood, not realizing I'd talked to an angel, or a ghost..."

"I'd somewhat broken up with Tony, so Undead Jane felt free to seduce and brainwash him until he was little more than a puppet. He was so heavily under her control that when they tracked me down in the desert where I was looking for answers he was going to kill me. I couldn't let her damn him so, during the struggle, after telling him what I was about to do, I pulled the trigger and shot myself in the chest..."

"Coming to his senses, Tony shot the walking corpse point blank in the forehead, only for some sort of dark parasite to writhe out of it and speed towards me. Angelic Neil arrived in time to squish what I guess was the 'real' Caretaker and had started to walk away when Tony recognized him. Asking for a miracle, Tony begged him to save my life. After thinking it over, Neil told him that Joan, whose Task had been to give Tony the gun that would kill me, had loaded the gun with blanks so her name wasn't actually in the Box. I was okay, just bleeding and in shock, but even a blank can kill a person if the gun is pressed to their forehead, like Tony had done to Jane... So I guess a miracle was granted, though it's all in how you look at it."

##

"Wow," Xander breathed, but Alison wasn't quite done yet. Out of her purse came a Ziploc bag, holding something wrapped in a paper towel. After it was unwrapped, she slid the mottled purple envelope over to Xander. A pale green letter could barely be seen inside.

"I've been carrying this around with me," she said, after another mouthful of water. "For a long time now, as a reminder, as a warning. I heard what you said about keeping objects on your Wall, guarding them, I want you to take it..."

In the background, Andrew and Dawn were arguing. The fight reached such a heated level that Yoda stood up and hobbled away from them, towards the front of the bar.

"Thanks for listening, I needed that... But now," Alison continued. "Any questions or comments? Except for Brenda... Left on her own, she was the only one of us to put their name into the Box. What happened afterwards... That I won't talk about."

Carefully, Yoda bent over the immense warhammer where it lay on the floor. It seemed to shrink at his touch.

Xander leaned back, considering what he knew about the world and what he could say that might help. "We can run tests on the letter. If there's anything left of this cult, we can track them down and help make sure they never hurt anyone again. Until then, I don't have an exact answer to give, but I know that God exists," he stated confidently, remembering a certain pair of prophets and what had followed in their wake. "So if you want the spiritual explanation, then your friend, Neil, may have wound up as an actual Angel. If you go the scientific route, then he, like a friend of mine named Daniel Jackson, may have Ascended... You know how Obi Wan and Yoda became one with the Force at the end of Star Wars? Nearly exactly like that."

Gripping it firmly, Yoda lifted the shrunken hammer to get a better look at the inscription. He read the words to himself in a breath barely above a whisper: "WHOSOEVER HOLDS THIS HAMMER, IF HE BE WORTHY, SHALL POSSESS THE POWER OF THOR."

"Speaking of which," Alison asked, gesturing in the Jedi's direction. "Exactly why is he-"

"Now that's a long story," Xander said, turning with an easy smile. "It all started when... OH, MY GOD! Yoda! Don't Touch-"

##

A bright bolt of lightning shot into the bar, through the crack in the window. It completely enveloped Yoda and Mjolnir.

The thunder was deafening.

When it cleared, a new Yoda was standing there.

He had grown seven inches and put on a few more pounds of pure muscle.

Newly clad in a winged helmet and body armor, the alien master held the warhammer like it had been made for him.

##

Xander jumped up from the table, abandoning the gaping actress, and ran towards the 'odd' drinks cabinet. The one-eyed bartender had no thoughts on his mind other than pouring himself a shot of something strong, because - even for Nights - this level of weirdness was practically overwhelming.

When Xander opened the cabinet's door, to stare at his own floating head, he screamed. The head screamed back for a second before it disappeared to be replaced by an image of Willow. "Me again," she said, quickly. "Portal!"

Xander rested his weight against the bar, his heart racing. "Seriously, would a doorbell inside there help?"

"Maybe a motion detecting light," she hazarded. "It's kind of dark in here. Anyway, I just wanted to thank you for giving us enough advice to help recharge our version of Xander. We managed to come up with a mobile anchor so he won't have existence failure again, no matter how many universes come between him and home."

"So," Xander said smiling. "He turned out to be you imaginary friend after all?"

The alternate Willow shook her head. "Nah, don't be silly. I was in that multiversal party with him. Turns out he's Jesse's imaginary friend. Our bestie wasn't about to tear himself away from his bar and our entire universe just for a we-saved-multiple-worlds party, but he dropped everything when he heard he could help a friend. Here, I'll put him on."

Xander stood slack-jawed as the image resolved into an older version of Jesse's face, what his and Willow's best friend might have looked like if he hadn't died and become a cloud of dust in the Bronze so many years before.

"So," Jesse said grinning. "Humongous thanks for helping us out. So, this is what things would look like if you'd opened the Cleveland bar instead of me. Can't see much of it from in here, but what I can see, I approve... Is someone seriously screaming about 'Yoda-Thor?'"

##

When the front door opened and the bar was suddenly full of superheroes trying to find out what the heck was going on, Xander asked Miranda to put Alison's letter in one of the pre-made protective circles for later sorting/cleansing and Dawn to call Buffy and Willow.

With the Chief Slayer riding herd, Willow and Xander were able to talk with the other dimension in relative peace. When the long overdue conversation had finally reached its end, the portal closed, leaving a group photo of the alternate team of Scoobies taken in Jesse's Nights to gently float from the cabinet to the floor of the bar.

His friends watching on, Xander very quietly pinned the print to the Wall.

He'd frame it later, but that was later...

It'd been a long day at Nights, and it wasn't even dusk yet.