XANDER HARRIS: THE IRON TAU'RI
By:"Gunsmith3000"
Started 5-19-08
Completed: ??
Disclaimers: Nothing belongs to me other than this insane idea I have that just won't let go. Iron Man belongs to Marvel, Stargate SG1 belongs to Paramount. Buffy belongs to Joss Whedon.
Summary: Xander goes as one of his favorite marvel comic characters, but gets more than he's bargained for.
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"For Whom The Bell Tolls"
(Part 1)
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Kendra, upon waking up, felt like she was wading through a very dense fog. When she opened her eyes, she noticed that she was in an unfamiliar room. It was full of bright, but soft lights. A sophisticated looking monitor stood by her bed, the flat glass display showed a digital readout of her vital signs. Despite the fatigue that still hung over her, she tried to move her legs and that was when she knew that something was wrong.
She could barely feel them, as if they were just dead weight.
Panic surged within her as she stared in horror at the sheets that covered her lower body. With trembling hands, she lifted the sheet to see if her legs were still there, and breathed a sigh of relief the moment she saw them. However, they were incased in a bulky, glass-like case that ended up to her waist with her lower body immersed in a bluish gel that covered them entirely.
She tried moving her legs once more, but still got no reaction. After a while of fruitless effort, she fell back down and fought off the tears that threatened to come from her eyes. She knew that her legs where there, her mind knew that her legs where, she could FEEL her legs there - so why couldn't she move them?
She was broken.
She was useless.
She didn't hold back this time as the tears fell now in torrents as her world diminished into one single word: useless.
She was barely aware that the door that led to the outer infirmary opened and two women entered. One of them gasped once they caught sight of the crying slayer. Janna rushed to her side and enveloped her in a motherly hug while the other followed soon after.
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Anna watched as the dark Jamaican Slayer folded into her younger cousin's arms. She felt torn between anger, helplessness, and sympathy. Taking a few steps towards the two, she reached out and automatically hugged them as well; a small part of her wondered where the young warrior that owned the facility had gone to at this hour.
As if in answer to her unspoken query, the young man in question entered the room, a tentative look on his face as he carried a transparent clipboard. Anna disengaged from her cousin as she noticed that he was wearing the skin-tight suit underneath the lab coat and guessed that he must have been out wearing the armor that the demons have begun calling "The Silver Paladin".
"Foiled Angelus again?" she asked, noting once more that suit he wore left little to the imagination.
"Nope, he's not moving tonight." Xander half-lied while he activated the glass clipboard, "I was doing some performance tests on the armor."
Anna went over to him and observed from his side; fascinated as the clipboard lit up and showed information similar to the monitor that sat beside the bedridden slayer.
Xander ticked off a few commands on the intelli-glass board and surfed through the medical readouts. Letting Anna see the progression from the time Kendra first went under the knife until the moment she started waking up.
"Interesting toy," she commented.
"Yep," Xander agreed. "It's of my own design. See the thick top and bottom edges?"
At her nod, he continued. "The touch-screen glass is made from solid transparent fiber-weave optic blocks. Both of the opaque edges serve as ports for light to pass through and thereby create a flat-sized holographic image. The top portion has the send and receive portal – sort of like a localized cell phone without the hang-ups – that connect to the Cray mainframe in this building and anything else in range that linked up with it. The bottom port housed the power supply and CPU, the power is good for twelve hours without recharging. The entire unit is drop proof, shock proof, scratch proof, and almost bulletproof. To top it off, it has eighty gigs worth of free memory."
"Impressive." Anna said, "You've kept track on her recovery with that thing as well? The monitor beside her bed simply showed the up-to-date live scans."
Xander locked the screen on the clipboard and stared at the older witch thoughtfully. "You have a medical background?"
The woman nodded. "I'm an accomplished medical doctor under my legal name: Anna Katrina Calendar. I come in from time to time with Janna and kept an eye on Kendra in regards to her treatment as it progressed. What you've done here is very radical, not to mention unheard of."
The two stopped talking as they both noticed that the other two of the room's occupants were now listening to them.
"Oh," Xander said as he blushed. "Sorry, I got a little carried away a little bit. My name is Xander Harris, by the way. The lovely lady beside you is Jenny Calendar, and the equally lovely lady beside me is her cousin, Anna Calendar."
Both witches in question beamed at him at the unexpected praise while Kendra nodded at each in turn while she composed herself. "My name is Kendra."
Xander nodded, unlocked the screen on his intelli-glass clipboard and moved closer to her. "All right," he began. "I know you have some questions, but first off, we already know you're a slayer."
When she paled, he continued. "You are perfectly safe here, only the three of us know you're in town other than your Watcher, who of course, doesn't know where you are."
"Where am I then? Am I a prisoner?" she asked in a calm voice.
"No, child, you are not." Anna said, "You are a patient at his facility. Due to the almost fatal injuries you suffered at the hands of a master vampire and his cronies, he brought you here to heal."
Kendra shook her head as she tried to remember the events that led her to this situation, unfortunately, it was all a blur except for feelings of intense pain.
"Is this why I cannot move my legs, sir?" she asked in a small voice that caused Janna to hug the young woman again.
"In a way," Xander said bluntly. "That is correct. You would have died soon afterwards without the proper medical help you would have gotten at the local hospital. Even if you did somehow survive with slayer healing alone, there was a possibility that you would be a paraplegic for the rest of your natural life."
"Den what has happened to my legs?" she said as they all took in the way her legs were incased in transparent plastic and gel.
"Well," he answered. "Since you were losing a lot of blood, I had to put you into stasis. Then, not knowing what else to do at the time, I performed a radical type of surgery to try to save your life. You see the skin-tight suit I am wearing?"
Kendra looked at him, curios at the sudden topic change. Then she blushed as she saw how much the suit he wore under the medical smock wasn't hiding. "Yes sir."
"Okay," Xander said, "This suit is made from programmable nano-mesh weaving. In other words, nano-machines – that means very, very, very, tiny and semi-intelligent machines – linked together to help regulate my body from certain things it cannot cope with. You understand?"
At seeing her nod, he went on to explain in more detail, that he used the same kind of technology and altered a few of the remaining nanites available in storage to help restructure her fractured spine and rib cage. He thought that the operation was a success.
However, when he later found out that Kendra was a slayer from Janna, he had to rush Kendra back into stasis because he knew that slayer healing would bring complications to the finished operation. Once he got her back into stasis, he had the witches come up with a way to place a temporary block on her slayer abilities until she had completely recovered. The contraption that encased her legs was just a precaution to make sure her lower body kept still until the post-surgery treatments were complete.
Both witches nodded solemnly at Xander's reasoning. Anna was still in awe at the young man before her, that someone that young was that skilled in surgery was something like out of a TV or movie. The fact he also used actual working nanites – supposedly the next big step in medicine – to complete said surgery, was unreal. During the time she visited the sedated slayer, she had noticed there was an extra set of readouts aside from the usual medical readings one would normally associate on a patient inside a hospital. Curious, she queried Jarvis on what they meant. After the impromptu lecture from Jarvis was over, she gawped like a fish out of water when she learned that the extra readings were information concerning the nanites' rate of progress. She stepped up her visits thereafter, not wanting to miss the technological miracle happening inside the unconscious girl's body.
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"Will I still be able to walk, sir?" Kendra asked, confused at the barrage of information about her surgery.
"Yes." Xander replied with confidence, "Your body has been responding well to the treatments. All that is left is physical therapy to help you regain your lower body motor-functions. There will be some residual pain at first since your nervous system will still be adapting to the repaired bone structure. When the ladies take off the spell dampening your slayer abilities, you'll be fine after a few days."
Xander's smile was infectious when he finished that Kendra brightened up and started smiling as well. Then the young man suddenly turned serious a few seconds later.
"But that's not the real problem." He said.
They stared at him and each wondered, "What now?"
"The process that kept you alive and well took about more than a week." He said, his eyes never breaking from Kendra's gaze. "A lot has happened in between. During that time while you were under stasis; from what I gathered from your Watcher when I attended the last Scooby meeting, he had declared you dead when he told us that the slayer essence had called another girl elsewhere."
For a dark skinned young woman, her pallor faded drastically as the blood drained from her face at the news. After a long, tense silence, she closed her eyes and fell back into the bed in a dead faint.
Xander winced at the pun his peanut gallery supplied. Dead faint, indeed.
Both Romany witches hit Xander at the back of his head in exasperation at how he handled it and made him drop the clipboard.
"Way to go, genius." They told him in 5.1 surround sound as they hit him with enough force to plant his face into the floor.
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Angelus was getting desperate. No matter what he did or where he went, that damned Silver Paladin would always show to stop him.
He didn't know how that was possible, but that tin-platted walking sardine can was always there at the right place and at the right time. Because of that, it rankled the literal hands-on vamp to no end that he was forced to use more minions than he would have liked. Unfortunately, once word got out about how The Silver Paladin kept making a fool out of him; most of the younger vampires in Sunnydale took him a little less seriously with each defeat. The fact that the rest of the demonic community were scared shitless of said armored being since he had appeared made matters worse. Not even those Terrakan assassins were of any help.
He didn't even want to remember the damned Saddie Hawkins incident. Bad enough that he was formerly cursed with Liam's soul, the ghost from that dance possessed him long enough for him to get a taste of that sickly feeling again.
His only hope now lay on the research material for an old demon bound inside the statue that he had recently acquired. He had spent too much time and effort doing the translations alone to stop now. He absentmindedly kept scratching the back of his head and neck while he continued working.
For some reason, it kept itching from time to time since his first encounter with the armored jackass when he tried to kill the gypsy bitch and her friend.
"Hmm," he said as he felt the back of his head. "I need to go shopping for a different gel brand, or maybe change my shampoo. I think one of them gave me allergies. Can an undead get allergies? Heck, I'll take a break for now."
"Style," he thought as he headed out, smoothing his hair and his leather jacket. "You can't be an undead scourge without style. And style, don't go well with dandruff."
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Jarvis recalibrated the nanites that he moved and sequestered inside Angelus' optic nerves via long range remote as the microscopic machines took a picture of the current page from the tome Angelus was translating and activated his own translation matrix. Then the A.I. started doing it from scratch, not wanting to rely on the work the master vampire was doing in case he was wrong. It would take a while, but the A.I. was confident it would be able to finish the translation before the vampire did.
Since Angelus was going out, he powered up the alcove where the Mark Zero lay and notified Xander to be on standby alert in case the undead scourge did anything foolish that required the attention of The Silver Paladin.
While Jarvis allocated Angelus's moving signature under automated tracking, the trusty system started an online background search on the entire Kalderash entourage that had just arrived at the Los Angeles International Airport as per Xander's request.
Once done, he downloaded all available files and compiled them into dossiers for Xander's perusal. He scanned the med bay and decided to give it to Xander later after his young creator got his face off the medical bay floor.
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Thor shook his head as the current ship he was on broke earth orbit and left for Asgardian space. He had come to Earth as per standard procedure to monitor the Tau'ri planet from time to time without the knowledge of the SGC to make sure Earth was progressing at a normal rate. So it was with great confusion for him and his crew to find an anomalous energy reading that should not even be there at Earth's current rate of technological development. Judging from the data scans they took of the elusive source, it was comparable to their own. Maybe even on par to Lantean in origin. But it was raw somehow, still unrefined.
Could it be that there are other races that are "keeping an eye out" for the Tau'ri? Thor couldn't say for sure as he and his brethren knew, that aside from the Ascended Ancients, they were the only ones with the technological level that had a chance of creating such an energy source. Curious, he ordered a discreet scan on the SGC and found that the humans had changed their base's operating system. Intrigued, he ordered a system copy from the parent company that created the software to deliver one to a post office box he had recently acquired solely for that purpose. Once the disc arrived, it would be a simple matter of beaming the data onboard when they came back in a few days.
That done, he turned his attention back to the puzzling data concerning the mysterious power source and sent ahead an inquiry back to their homeworld. He decided not to alert the SGC this time as it seemed that they were also unaware of this new mystery. The gray alien had an illogical hunch that whoever or whatever it was, was there to help.
So until proven otherwise, they will adopt a "wait-and-see" policy while they tried to get as much data as they could on this new wrinkle. And if it was indeed there to help the humans, maybe an alliance could be forged as well.
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TBC
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