Chapter Six
by Jared Ornstead
aka Lionheart
aka Skysaber
OoOoO
"HIYAH!"
A shard of rubble bounced across the dojo floor from the shattered bricks, although this time it was Willow who stood up and wiped the sweat from off her brow. "Wow. That felt pretty good." She looked across to Xander and Doc, who'd also pulverized their own stacks of bricks, and they all beamed at each other.
"I can hardly believe we've been here four months already," Doc shook his head.
"I can hardly believe how *good* we've gotten," Xander made some test punches in the air. "I could probably wipe the floor with Angel, now."
Doc snorted. "Good is a relative thing, Xander. I have no doubts you could wipe the floor with most things from your homeworld. But locally, we suck."
"We've got to appear *somewhere* on the pecking order, right?" Xander protested.
"Oh, absolutely." Doc smiled. "Why, I just heard last night Genma confide to Soun that we were on the verge of surpassing his daughter - by which he means the only daughter practicing martial arts, or in other words, Akane. And he took the opportunity to chide Soun, and encourage him to increase Akane's training. But her father made all the usual excuses."
"So we're as good as Akane?" Both Xander and Willow perked up at that news.
Doc shrugged. "It's possible. 'On the verge of' is another way of saying, 'hasn't yet, but will soon if things continue as they are'. So we have to be roughly in her ball park."
Xander clapped his hands and rubbed them to free them of brick dust. "So, as good as Akane. That's great! Where does that put us in relation to everyone else?"
Doc smirked at his enthusiasm, but produced graphs with pictures. "In our local environment, the A-List martial artists include Happosai and Cologne, some of the major menaces like Pantyhose, Herb and Saffron, or Ranma when he is fighting at his most serious. The B and C List players are more fluid, often changing places in those fields, and includes virtually all of the major fiancees and rivals. Ranma and Shampoo are B-List most of the time, although early on in the show Ranma started at C, and later slips that low when he isn't taking things seriously. Mousse is almost always C, while Ryoga is regularly a very high B. On the next level down D-List is reserved for annoyances rather than threats, and would include Genma and Soun, as well as most other players who don't see a lot of action other than to get shoved about. All three Kunos fall to that list most of the time. And below them all we have Akane on the E-List, where we have only just now qualified to join her. Although, Akane is a special case, as she was clearly an author's favorite, and has the special ability when she loses her temper of making a single hit at B-List level. She just can't maintain it or defend herself at that level, so only really uses it on opponents she doesn't have to defend against - like Ranma, who never once hits her, or those who don't dare hit her for risk of offending him. And obviously, we don't share that ability of hers. So congratulations! After all that hard work and effort, we now qualify as the worst martial artists in Nerima!"
Doc was grinning as he announced this, however. "But at least it's some consolation that, in a one on one fight, any one of the three of us would be a good match against a Terminator."
"That's it?" Willow protested. "It can't be that simple! Genma spars with Ranma all the time, and they are about equal to each other, most mornings anyway."
"Oh, it's loaded with special cases," Doc reassured. "You bring up a good one. Because of his experience training Ranma, Genma has obtained detailed and intimate knowledge of his son's abilities, and he placed special emphasis on knowing his son's weak points, buttons to press, and so on. So when facing Ranma alone, Genma fights at a full level higher than normal. Also, he has made a careful study of just where and how to catch his son off-guard, taking it easy or slacking, and so at his worst. So most often in those early morning sparring matches it is C vs C, or roughly equal on both sides. Team ups are another way to switch the balance, to where multiple lower-grade martial artists can sometimes challenge a higher one. Genma and Soun can regularly achieve a C working together. Fighting on a specially prepared battlefield is another way some players give themselves as much as a full grade of advantage, although that doesn't always work. But it is a favorite of Principal Kuno, and various one-time opponents. Not all of this works all of the time, and it is especially risky and dangerous to try against A-List opponents, but it does happen."
"So the three of us together..." Willow mused.
"Could easily enough beat up Akane, true. Even when the whole accumulated sports teams of Furinkan High couldn't. She beat you up once and you'd like to return the favor. That's very in-genre," Doc agreed. "The way the fight would probably go, she'd lose her temper and take down one of us with her one-shot attack, but with the benefit of a team-up of two martial artists on her level the other two could finish defeating her fairly easily after that. But I wouldn't go looking for revenge for the time she hospitalized you just yet, as anyone who attacks Akane also has to face Ranma."
"Oh, pooh." Willow pouted.
OoOoO
"I wish we could have gone to Toma's island, too," Willow sighed wistfully, walking along the sands. "A normal beach just isn't the same."
Kuno's boat had just departed that morning, and everyone who was anyone in Nerima had piled aboard, using just about every excuse imaginable. But there hadn't really been room for all the people who'd already crowded on. No space was left for three students whose only connection to the main action was they paid for martial arts lessons.
Those going on the trip didn't know the adventure that lay in store for them, but Doc knew, and he'd told his two companions once the boat had already departed.
Xander chucked a stone into the water, evidencing some frustration. "All we could have been was target practice for the real players fighting there."
The boy was plainly taking it hard that, after all that hard work and effort, they weren't at least a level or two higher on the local playing field. Being in a state where he could be casually swatted about by people lowly enough to themselves be counted mere annoyances to the real cast was putting the boy mentally right where he'd been back in Sunnydale.
And Xander didn't want to be the doughnut gopher anymore.
Doc smirked, knowing the boy would be astonished at just how much work went into being at the kind of level Ranma and the other major players were. Also, that Xander would be astounded at just how good he really was, something that would become clear once they got out of this universe to somewhere the prominent natives weren't insanely dangerous and skilled martial arts masters.
"Doc," Xander rounded on his mentor, sand flying up from his feet at the swift turn. "Tell me honestly. Do you think we're ever going to be on a level where we can get involved in the real action around here?"
"Honestly? I've put some thought into it, and really I'm quite happy to be on the level we are!" Doc confessed. "If we ever make D-List, I'd call my ambitions satisfied. And should a miracle happen and we make it to C-List, I couldn't ask for anything better!"
The utter calm and clear certainty that Doc used to confess he was satisfied to be a punching bag, and didn't aim higher than to be an annoyance to the major players, offended Xander. And that barely pinging on the local radar was more than he realistically hoped to achieve just rubbed the younger man wrong in all sorts of ways.
Xander wasn't thinking what Doc was, that all local C-List players had already devoted at least ten years of their lives to dedicated martial arts practice, and on observing his young friends, Doc didn't really think he'd convince them to sink that much time into it.
B-List involved all of the grief and work of getting to C-List in the first place, plus an extreme amount of dedication that frankly most young people don't have, and he'd never observed in his younger self. And most of the A-List players either had *extreme* racial advantages, or had sunk a couple of hundred years into getting where they were.
None of that seemed remotely achievable, given the material they had on hand. So Doc was happy to get what advantages they could get out of the situation.
A D-List fighter from a Ranma Universe would scare the vampires and supernatural crawlies of a Buffy universe in ways that the Slayer had never done since the foundation of the line. But, of course, the young don't have perspective to see things in that light. All Xander knew was that he was being told he would never match up in the company he really wanted to keep. And, having been the one picked on, he now desired power to escape that state.
It was all a perfectly normal set of desires. Young men are frequently anxious to prove themselves significant in one way or another. And, having started down this road, Xander really wanted to finish in something other than last place.
Doc, not having been a young man in a long time, nor been very social in just as long, had forgotten something of this desire of the young to prove themselves.
Nevertheless, he saw Xander's depression and thought he had just the remedy for it.
"Don't worry!" Doc encouraged. "I've got something that I think will excite both of you!"
He then turned to walk up to a beach front vacation property that neither teen had been aware their path had been wending toward. It had the usual staples, big TV and all of the right electronics for wasting time on, but Doc just breezed past all of that, taking them directly from the front door to the internal access door to the attached garage.
When he opened it up and stood aside to let the teens see, Doc gloated, "Behold, the new time vehicle!"
Both teenagers goggled at the sleek, candy apple red sports car within.
"A corvette body, engine and power train," Doc explained. "Every component built from the best materials money can buy, each vehicle is entirely hand-built, designed exclusively to the buyer's tastes..."
"WHAT? You're SELLING these things?" Willow shrieked in horror.
"No!" Doc laughed in delight. "I'm quoting the salesman who sold me the car that I used for the body. It was impressive when I heard it at the time, so I thought I'd share. The base car cost me over two hundred thousand dollars."
"Doc," Xander interrupted. "It's a nice car, but it doesn't look worth *that* much money!"
"You aren't seeing the most important feature," Doc told him, gladly entering the garage to show him, and patting the hood as he declared, "This car is fully amphibious! The normal versions they produce, called Pythons, can do in excess of sixty miles per hour on the water. On the street they do a quarter mile in twelve seconds, or zero to sixty in four point five seconds. And it can hold up to six people, two in the front and four in the back."
"Why an amphibious car?" Willow looked puzzled.
Doc simply smiled at her. "Because we are in Japan! Have you done any looking around for an isolated stretch of road you could get a vehicle up to eighty eight on? A road that was empty so much of the time that you could reliably appear out of a time warp and not have a good probability of dropping right into traffic and ending up wrecked? I have, and couldn't find any. My next thought was a plane, but air traffic control gets pretty strict about who can fly, where and when, and popping in without a flight plan already filed would be trouble. So the only thing left was either to leave the country to travel through time, or use the water. A hydrofoil could make the speeds we wanted, but a boat would have to be stored most of the time, and could be vulnerable to theft. So I picked an amphibious car! Add on a touch of rocket boost, and a speed of sixty on the water becomes ninety. Plenty for a time jump."
"When did you do all of this?" Xander asked, puzzled about the house and new car.
Doc grinned, delighting in revealing his genius. "When I first went to do my banking that bought our house in Nerima, I made sure to take extra long and be very boring about it, prolonging the experience by shopping around through multiple financial institutions and then insurance companies to find the best deal. It took me days, and the pace of action in Nerima is so fast almost none of the major players have anything like the normal amount of human patience. By the time I was done with the process, I could be fairly certain none of the spies that could have followed me would have stayed around that long. At that point I felt safe to go get the time vehicle, get it back to the USA and make a jump to the future."
"You WHAT?" Both teens cried out in shock.
"Part of me was trusting none of the people watching us would think I'd make a jump without you two," Doc admitted. "And I was right. I was hoping that in the future on this world they'd have the technology I needed to make an antigravity flying car. No such luck. But they did have these. This model won't be available for another twenty years. And because the whole thing was constructed to my exact specifications, and with me working in the shop at my insistence (mostly so I'd later know how to repair it), it could hold the time circuit, fusion plant and dimension sliding devices more unobtrusively than the DeLorean. So it is not only a time vehicle, it does not really stand out as one the way the original model did."
Doc stepped over and opened the driver's side door, showing what looked to be a normal, if luxury, car interior. "See? Every readout and control has already been built into the dash right at the factory, so there is nothing to stand out that this is a modified vehicle. Some parts from the old DeLorean, the flux capacitor and Sylia's fusion plant, I transferred over. Others I just built new, to have something more reliable than my original scavenged parts. Besides, leaving most of the modifications to the original DeLorean intact, it made that much more convincing a decoy when we were eventually followed to it, and it got destroyed."
Willow was shaking her head. "You just about stopped our hearts when we saw that car destroyed. Couldn't you tell us that you'd already replaced it?"
"Unfortunately, no." Doc shook his head. "There were people at that conflict who would not give up for anything so long as any chance for success remained, and others who were watching our reactions very closely. It helped our charade pass despite those suspicions that your reactions were both so very genuinely dismayed. If it didn't matter to you that the old car got destroyed, many people would have concluded that wasn't the real one. This way, everyone got convinced the treasure they were after got destroyed. And, since they are used to that occurring fairly regularly in this series, they just went on with their lives!"
Doc climbing into the driver's seat, smiling at both of them. "Once it became known that we had a genuine time vehicle, the only way we'd ever get enough peace and safety to use it was if everyone thought it had already been destroyed. And your genuine grief over the loss of that vehicle, even after the fight was over, helped reinforce the illusion that it was!"
Xander had cocked his head suspiciously at the Doc. "Hey, how come, if you took out the parts that made the DeLorean into a time machine, and it was in the future, you could bring it back here for those people to destroy it?"
"Tow hitch." Doc thumbed towards the back of the new car. "It took a little wrangling to get one, since the normal place for one is where the water jet is mounted, but we worked out something that functioned with an adapted trailer. I told them I wanted to haul my jet skies to the beach with me, and they took it unexamined. But instead I hooked up a trailer that let me haul the DeLorean back in time, so I could have it shipped back to the place we'd left it, in time for it to be destroyed. Then I hid this one here. This beach house is owned by a holding corporation, so it couldn't be traced to us."
"If it's only safe to use if no one knows we have it, doesn't that mean it isn't safe now?" Willow asked intently.
Doc gave her one of his wildest grins. "Everyone who knows we had a time machine and might be interested, *and* has enough handle on daily events to watch our comings and goings, just left this morning on a trip that took them to Toma's island."
"So why are we leaving now?" Xander asked, spreading his hands. "We only just got started!"
"Precisely!" Doc crowed. "The less we do in the here and now, the less chance we lose anything when we go back in time and change things. This not being our own home universe, we can't erase ourselves from existence. But there's no reason to take chances we'd lose all our training."
"Lose all our training? You mean we went through that for NOTHING?" Xander shrieked.
"Not necessarily," Doc soothed. "We've never really been more than anonymous students. One of the things we're going to change should get the Tendo Dojo running as a business again, like it was when Soun founded it. So there is a good chance that they will train several hundred people up to our current level, and we could slip right in and go unnoticed. One thing I've learned is that the time stream does not tend to erase events unless it has to. But all the same, if we should stay around and train up to a very high level, those kind of people stand out, and it would be hard for martial artists of any significant level to remain unchanged when we go and work surgery on the past."
"So why are we changing the past?" Xander demanded.
Doc paused and grew still, quietly contemplative, which was such a change from his usual explosive energy that it really struck the teens. "Because, I told you, I took a trip to the future of this world, and it doesn't end well for any of the people we know here in Nerima." Doc looked up at his friends, seeming almost vulnerable. "I made myself a promise to save my friends when I could. And, well, the people here, weird as they are, are my friends now. I can't just sit back and watch their lives fall apart when I know I can save them."
Willow's eyes softened towards the old man.
"Besides," Doc went on, reclaiming his usual energy. "This is our first real opportunity since we got here. Our one chance to find those Aging Mushrooms was by tracking Ryoga when he stumbled across them, and that happened only a couple of days ago. Now we have the location and can harvest our own. And today all the usual suspects who might have followed us to the time machine are off on that adventure to Toma's island. So this is the first time we've had both the means, and the privacy, to leave able to carry out our plans."
Doc popped out of the driver's seat and began to load things into the back, including a shrink-wrapped set of clothes, and changed the subject. "I had to rearrange the internal spaces on this vehicle anyway, when I was including the fusion plant and other specialty devices, so I took the opportunity to arrange a bit of extra storage. But this really isn't a cargo vehicle. If we need something for that, we can always hook up a trailer. But I don't have an amphibious one, so for now we can only take just what we can stuff in the car."
Xander's eye's had caught hold of the incongruous package of shrink-wrapped clothes. "What's that?"
"A mild affectation," Doc answered, hurrying around to put a suitcase full of cash into the car. "I told Ranma that I'd like to look into seeing if I could find some way to make his clothes hold a male charge, despite his being female half the time, and so he gave me a set to run tests on. These are they. I was hoping, when we find another universe like ours, that maybe we could use them as a Halloween costume someday. I was going to add it to the suitcase of old costumes I always keep in my trunk."
Xander shifted to his other foot. "Yeah, well Doc, I hate to be the one to tell you this, but Willow was in the trunk, remember? Besides, do you recall putting away my Iron Man costume? The suitcase was beside the car, not in the trunk."
"I know. I'm starting my collection over. Maybe someday we can use it."
"I've got a better idea," Xander stated. Then he shot Doc in the butt with his tranq pistol. "We'll use it now."
The teen then tossed both the pistol and Doc himself into the car, before taking the keys and sliding into the driver's seat. Looking up at his friend, he said, "C'mon, Willow!"
A concerned Willow scampered into the passenger seat. "Are you sure we should be doing this?"
"Listen," Xander turned the key to start the ignition, then hit the remote to open the garage door. "I just went though hell learning martial arts, and he tells me we've got to start over again? Or that we'll never be more than nobodies? Ain't gunna happen. Not even if we have to take the chance of risking a brief trip home."
Finding the dimensional coordinates for home on the in-dash computer console's menu, Xander locked them in and then sped off out the garage doors.
OoOoO
The dimensional sliding device deposited the vehicle near a gaping sinkhole that used to be Sunnydale, under a swirling purple sky with red orange ground.
"Dang!" Xander slapped the steering wheel. "This is the wrong place!"
"Doc was the one to program the computer," Willow shyly ventured. "He must have used the coordinates for his world as home instead of ours."
"Well, if I can just find the backup sliding device," Xander began rooting around the dash.
"AAAaaHHHH!" Willow's hair stood on end as a four-story tall goat legged demon reared up out of the ruins to look at them hungrily.
Xander's foot mashed down on the gas pedal, and he swung the steering wheel around to miss the wrecked cars littering the roads. "It's no use!" He shouted. "Doc must have it behind a hidden panel, like last time! I can't find the backup slider thingy!"
"Use the time machine!" Willow was already programming coordinates.
"Will it be alright? Doc said that was forbidden!"
"It's better than getting eaten!" she yelled back, as the goat-legged demon proved that, while it couldn't quite make zero to sixty in four point five, it wasn't far behind either.
"Alright! But I can't get it up to eighty eight dodging all these ruined cars!"
"The car's amphibious!" Willow reminded as another demon, a tentacled, multi-eyed thing also poked up out of the ruins to observe them.
Xander turned the wheel off the crowded coastal road, and soon the vehicle was racing down the beach towards, then onto the water. Willow had already found the control, and they switched modes, already igniting the hydrogen powered rockets Doc had added for extra speed and acceleration on the water.
A serrated, black fin at least fifteen feet tall split the water and began to head towards them.
Xander punched it and steered away. Soon lightning charges built up around them, and between one tick of time and the next, they were suddenly on a normal colored stretch of sea just outside of Sunnydale, California, on what appeared to be a perfectly ordinary night.
No demon or anything of the sort was behind them.
Breathing a deep sigh of relief, Xander killed the rockets and turned the car towards shore.
OoOoO
Ding! Ding!
"Welcome to Ethan's. May I help you?"
Willow stared around in some shock, recognizing no less than three different customers in the store at that time as Doc in various lame disguises. One was purchasing a costume of Gandalf the White. Figuring they all must be past versions of the man she was growing to know, she turned to face the chaos mage with a fake smile in place. "Yes, I was looking for some more of these."
She held up Ranma's silk Chinese shirt and pants.
Ethan fingered the fabric. "I don't recognize the character. Couldn't I interest you in a pirate instead? You might have more fun if more people are able to tell what you are at a glance."
"I'm sure." Willow's stress got the better of her and caused her to babble. "The character is a favorite of my boyfriend and I, and he's something of a chaos magnet," she didn't notice Ethan's eyes perk up at this mention, as she blathered on, "and once he fell into a cursed spring and now he turns into a girl..." realizing she'd begun to babble, Willow caught herself and contained it, concluding, "anyway, he wants to dress as boy side, and I'll go as girl."
"Interesting." Ethan was truly fascinated. It sounded fun. "Do you have any pictures of this character?"
Somewhat innocently, Willow reached into her purse, pulled out her wallet, and produced two snapshots of when Ranma had been dressed up for various things. One was of a fairly classic pose from the manga, where girl Ranma was standing on one foot posing with a huge sword in a fancy outfit. Another was of Ranma's male side that was also dressed up, this time for a fancy contest.
She had others, but these seemed appropriate.
"Interesting," Ethan accepted the images, noting these were photographs instead of the line drawings he'd half been expecting. Oh, yes. This could be so much fun! He didn't know where these came from, but the idea of dressing as real people had some appeal, and a chaos magnet to boot?
This could be the funnest costume he sold all year.
"Well, both these costumes seem much more interesting to wear than the simple one you have there. Yes, I think I have something in the back matching these. I'll go get it." Grabbing a couple of low-end costumes from off the racks that didn't look like they would sell anyway, the chaos mage dismissed himself to the back, where he used magic to transform those into matches for the clothes the person was wearing in the photographs.
"Yes, just where I'd left them," Ethan emerged with a big smile from the back carrying the two outfits he'd created, gave them to the girl along with her photos, and began to ring up the sale.
"We'll need three pigtails," Willow blurted before he was through. "Two black, one red."
Ethan calmly added those to the sale.
OoOoO
"What are you doing?" Xander came out of the rest stop bathroom where he'd changed into the boy-type Ranma costume, still affixing the false pigtail to the back of his hair.
Willow, wearing the fancy Ranko outfit, looked up from where she'd just changed the still-comatose Doc into Ranma's old shirt and pants, complete with store-bought pigtail. She herself had on the slippers, while Xander wore the boxers underneath his store-bought costume. "Well, he did invent the machine. I didn't want him to feel left out, and we weren't using those parts anyway."
Xander thought about it, then shrugged. "Alright. I guess that it couldn't hurt anything. How soon do you think..."
That was when the wave of chaos magic spreading across town hit them.
OoOoO
The town shook.
"What?" Ranko and Ranma blurted on seeing each other, only to get cut off as the concussive wave of an explosion ripped past, bending trees and causing the collapse of billboards.
Both martial artists were already in motion to a point where they could see.
There was a fifty foot combat robot neither recognized spraying missiles and gunfire at a much larger robot standing out to sea. A tank roared past, apparently fleeing from a guy who was completely on fire and trying to roast the fleeing vehicle.
The crack of a sonic boom, with accompanying shockwave, blew past their position with a streak of red, on its way to save a crowd of civilians from missile impacts, blown off course by a floating guy who was flinging about all sorts of metal just by waving his hands, doing battle with something neither teen could see.
"Was that?" Ranko asked, blinking away afterimages of red cape.
"Superman. Yeah." Ranma agreed.
After a second of observation, during which it became obvious that Superman was fully engaged in diverting missiles, beam weapons, and other things launched by the giant offshore robot from flattening the town, there were only about a dozen major sources of conflict.
Ranma being Ranma, even when he was Ranko, the two martial artists immediately began to head toward them.
It was a martial artist's duty to protect the innocent.
OoOoO
"Oooh! My head! I wonder what Akane cooked this time." Ranma sat up, only realizing after he did so he was in the back seat of a car he didn't recognize, instead of his usual room at the Tendo Dojo.
With his chi burning off whatever poison was in his system quickly, he soon began to think straighter. Only it didn't help, as he had no idea what he'd done to get to this place, or what was going on.
Deciding he needed more information, and suiting thought to action, Ranma was already in motion to a point where he could get a better view of the surrounding area, unknowingly echoing the actions of two other Ranmas from only moments ago.
There he saw the same big battle going on, and also decided to head in to help.
OoOoO
"DIE MUTANT!" The guy in heavy armor shouted, firing away full-auto with a gun whose bore was so big the individual bullets had to be about the size of soda cans.
"Mutant? Why, yes. I am," the floating guy replied, calmly, even negligently diverting the stream of shots harmless to either side of himself.
"I am a psyker of the Grey Knights!" The guy in heavy armor yelled. "In the Emperor's Name, I'll..."
The guy's helmet twisted backwards, and the self-described mutant calmly replied, "Shut up." Then he paused. "Hm. Amusing. You aren't as 'pure' as you might have thought, not with those implants running through your system. You might be interesting, after all."
The Grey Knight's helmet righted itself, twisting around straight again. But he made no move, and the mutant apparently lost interest in him. "Oh well, we'll leave him to heal himself with those 'psyker' powers of his. Now, you two interest me."
Ranma and Ranko, newly arrived, stared at each other, then darted away.
Luckily the Human Torch was returning to town and diverted Magneto's attention.
OoOoO
Some super-strong creature heaved half a town's block worth of concrete into the air, only for it to get gently replaced by Superman, returning from having dealt with the Warhammer Titan out to sea. Overturned tanks and wrecked buildings filled the landscape, but Flash had been speeding about, saving people all evening.
Ranma kicked The Terminator through a building, noting only that he'd done that nine times now, and that the guy seemed incapable of being knocked out.
He'd generally been trying to take it easy on non-martial artists, even when they were crazy nutcases bearing laser rifles. You'd have thought the guy would have gotten the message when Ranma had disarmed him and bent those laser rifles into a pretzel. But no, the guy kept coming. Of the dozen or so super-soldiers he'd personally taken care of this evening, this guy had the worst stubborn streak out of the lot. It was like he was facing someone with Ryoga's determination, but less than Akane's ability.
The only hard part about it was taking the guy down without hurting him too badly.
OoOoO
The Sorcerer Supreme and Gandalf met each other at the door to a certain costume shop, sized one another up, then smiled.
Gandalf nodded towards the door. "Well, shall we?"
OoOoO
"OOOOOOHH! Ouch!" Doc impacted the rock face of the wall on a building rooftop he'd been in mid-jump to as Ranma, before sliding painfully down the side.
All across town, the spell ended with similar results. People, mostly him in various guises, got caught in mid-motion, doing something they couldn't ordinarily manage, and found that out the hard way.
He was lucky the Superman-him hadn't been flying or lifting a heavy weight over his head at the time, and that the Flash-him had been running across the surface of a swimming pool when the spell cut, or that would have been the end of him.
Astonished to find himself back in this time, in this reality, nevertheless Doc still gathered his wits and tried to recall, "Let's see. I know all the places I used to hide the time machine on previous trips. But I can't seem to recall..."
"Doc!" Xander and Willow appeared, each having caught a hint of the red of his costume.
"You were warned." Whistler appeared at the end of the alley they were in to state.
His neck was snapped almost before Xander realized his fist was moving. As the body fell, he turned a stricken gaze to his mentor. "Tell me that was a Balance Demon, Doc."
"Oh, that was the one that threatened me, alright." Doc got painfully to his feet, feeling the fresh bruises on his face, as well as the fatigue and damage he'd picked up by spending two hours as Ranma, and participating in a large number of fights. "Knowing the kind of chaos it was possible to unleash by appearing in various costumes, I'd always taken some form of anesthetic before the spell hit, just as a precaution. Then, on my last trip here, that demon," he motioned to Whistler, "appeared to tell me not to time travel in this universe anymore. Then, as proof he had the ability to destroy me, undid all the medications keeping my previous selves asleep, unleashing all of this violence. He then claimed the PTB kept any of my selves from dying in that battle *this* time, but if I interfered again, they would not be so generous. Given how even the slightest change in that ongoing battle could so easily wind up with one copy of me dead, I complied, and went elsewhere."
Doc shook his head and stared at his two companions. "How did we end up here, anyway?"
Xander blushed. "That would be my fault, Doc. I guess I was so upset at what you said about none of us really having a chance to rise above C-List that I lost what good sense you've been trying to drill into me, and tried to go home to wear Ranma's clothes as a costume."
"Only the setting for 'home' is my dimension, not yours," Doc concluded, then leaned on his fellow travelers. "Well, I can't save I never did anything rash or foolish in my youth. But I hope you've learned your lesson from it."
"Yeah, Doc. I was stupid." Xander gazed around at the destruction as they limped together out of Sunnydale. "Dang! This scheme was almost Genma-level of stupid," he whispered to himself.
Doc smiled. "Put that way, that level of rash action without thinking is kind of typical of the universe we've just been spending time in. Perhaps the influence of that universe had something to do with your making that decision."
Doc sighed, raising his head to look around at the damage that short fight had caused, and knowing that multiple past copies of him were even now sneaking off in various directions, towards their own stashed time machines. It was a tangled mess, and he breathed a sigh of relief to have survived it another time. "At least you didn't nearly wipe yourself out of existence," he reassured the younger Xander.
"Yeah, about that, Doc. I've been doing some thinking," Xander announced. "And I don't think these PTB would have warned ya if they could have eliminated ya as easily as they'd like ya ta think, Doc. And they wouldn't have bothered saving your life when you were fighting yourself, either! If you were a threat, they'd just have let you kill yourself tonight. No, for some reason, the PTB wants you alive. I just... don't get what that reason is."
"Maybe they liked the way things turned out?" Willow ventured. "I mean, it sounds like they got everything they wanted. Maybe they could see that future, liked it, and since Doc was involved in getting events there they couldn't just lose him and trust that everything would turn out perfectly without him."
Both men looked at her.
"I don't know. It's just a guess!" she returned.
"No, Miss Rosenberg. I think you're right. No matter how many hands were played, if a gambler cleaned out the pot with a perfect hand, he wouldn't want to undo that and play over with a fresh deal. So, if one element that contributed to him getting that hand were to go missing, he would no longer be certain of victory. Still, they know the rules. We don't know what they can or cannot do. So let's get out of here."
OoOoO
Author's Notes:
Actually, in the movies they make it pretty plain that the characters never forget what they've been through, even when time has been altered so those experiences would no longer have been possible.
In the show, the past gets rewritten frequently, sometimes with major, sometimes with minor alterations. Marty actually spends most of his time shouting, screaming, fainting or otherwise emoting over stuff he would've known about if his memory had been updated to follow the new timeline, rather than very obviously knowing only what his past would be if history had not been changed.
No, there's no way to support that logically. But it's the way time travel in the series works. Perhaps it's something to do with the time machine, the flux capacitor sheltering them or something odd like that, but unless the time travelers wipe themselves out of existence, they do not get changed. They remember events that could no longer have happened under the new history, but do not recall things they would obviously know if they knew anything about their new lives.