Ship of the Line: Forever After Earth

by Ephemeralen

YAHF. To get Willow to wear a more daring costume, Buffy and Xander agree to go in the same costume Willow does. Buffy picks a set of matching costumes that are something called FAE... When the spell wears off, Buffy, Xander, and Willow are left with new bodies, life-changing memories, and a city-sized starship. A mega-crossover.

13. Billy and Ted's Excellent Adventure

(AN: This chapter kicked my ass. It was supposed to be just a breather episode. Some lighthearted fun, the quiet before the storm. But man, somehow it turned into the longest chapter yet. So anyway, I was thinking about how to characterize Ford, and asked myself, what kind of mind comes up with such a convoluted Suicide By Evil Plot And Superhero Childhood Friend? My answer? anime-geek!Ford. It even fits with his magical girl joke. And finally, the names... I couldn't resist, so, shameless chapter title pun, here we go.)

---

Billy and Ted's Excellent Adventure

Billy Fordham opened his eyes. The first thing he noticed was the pain. It was gone. The lurking agony that had been his constant companion for nearly a year, was completely gone.

The second thing he noticed was that he wasn't groggy. His thoughts and memories were clear. Clearer than they'd ever been. Buffy's friend had told him he'd be unconscious for three weeks, but it felt like the 'birthing pod' had submerged him in its soothing liquid warmth only minutes ago.

He didn't doubt it had worked, though. The pain was gone.

Ford dragged his arms through the thick fluid he was immersed in, and pushed against the fleshy inner wall of the pod. At his touch, the pod began to shift and unfurl, while the fluid pulled down ahead of the forming gaps.

The weirdest part was the way his lungs seemed to suddenly inflate without any source, forcing him to breathe out a chest-worth of the fluid, and even weirder, doing that didn't trigger any unpleasant reflexes. He barely even registered it had happened until after it was over.

The fluid drained away, a shrinking bubble that somehow left his skin dry, and then it was gone, and the pod was laying open with Ford floating there. He remembered the way Buffy and her friends had walked around, even though they were weightless.

Ford took a step, and it was easy. He wanted to walk on the surface under his feet, and so he did. Sticking to the surface was as easy as the walking itself. It felt really strange, though, like his bones had weight but his skin and muscles and stuff didn't.

Pausing to feel the way the grass squished under his feet, Ford took stock of himself. He was naked, standing alone on a hill in that same meadow with the sort-of palm trees and the image overhead of the blue and green gas planet with the sparkling lavender rings. Strangely, he had an erection - and damn if he hadn't been nearly that well endowed before - that didn't feel like an erection. Ford wondered what the deal with that was.

He laughed a little as he discovered that the muscles down there, which before pretty much were only capable of Tense or Relax, were now dexterous enough to aim his member with remarkable precision. Although, pointing it straight down between his legs required a bit of strain, kind of like opening his hand as wide as he could did, while holding it straight up against his belly felt natural.

His skin was hairless now, and the little imperfections he was used to seeing were all gone. More than that, the muscle definition he'd lost as he got sicker was back and better than ever. He was... fit. Very fit. Fit enough that being naked and (seemingly) hard wasn't nearly as embarrassing as it might have been. Well, there being no one else around helped with that too.

"Three weeks," he reminded himself. "I wonder what I've missed."

Ford looked around, still not seeing anyone else, and laughed, doing a flying cartwheel just because he could. It was real. He'd survived. He was cured. No more suicide by slayer or going out in a blaze of villainous glory. He was going to live. He was going to be alright. Ford landed flat on his back on the squishy earlobe-like grass, still laughing with a sparkling of tears in his eyes.

Buffy. He owed Buffy so much for this.

---

"So, Samantha, how long are you in town for?" Ted asked.

Samantha Carter sipped her coffee. "Only one more day."

"Well if that isn't a shame," Ted said with a disarming smile. "Tell me this, how much of our humble little town have you had the fortune to see?"

Samantha glanced aside with heavy irony. "Some might say too much."

"That doesn't sound very good at all," Ted commiserated. "Well, that won't do, will it? Can't have you going off before you've seen what charm this town has to offer. What do you say you let me show you around a bit?"

There were other things Samantha could do with her afternoon, but their mission was more or less complete. They still had optional objectives they hadn't accomplished, but that just didn't seem worth worrying about right then.

"Sure," Samantha said. "Why not?"

---

Even though he hadn't been paying much attention to how long he'd been lying there, somehow Ford knew exactly how much time had passed. Only just over ten minutes. And then there was suddenly a pair of curious blue eyes inches away from his own.

"Gyaa!" Ford yelped in surprise, scrambling sideways.

"Eeep!" the startled girl yelped in turn, springing away like a scalded cat.

He recovered from his startlement and found himself looking at a naked girl crouching on the grass and scowling at him, with her short brown hair floating in a halo around her head. Remembering that he was also naked, Ford flinched and tried to cover himself from the younger girl's eyes with his hands and legs, pulling his knees to his chest.

The girl's expression changed to one of curiosity, spider-walking at him as though trying to figure out what he was hiding.

Taking a second look, Ford recognized her. She was the girl that had been in the pod before him. For a moment, he was distracted by how, when he looked at her, he knew she was called Dawn. The sight of her just brought that particular word to mind so unambiguously, Ford didn't know what to make of it.

Apparently this wasn't a fluke, because Dawn studied him for a moment and said, "Ford."

Dawn circled him, and there was something off about the way she moved, besides her still being on all fours. For a moment, Ford dismissed the fact that she was naked and watched her curiously. It was like she didn't realize she was naked anyway, or like she just didn't care. That was part of it, but not everything. Ford finally realized what it was. She looked like a girl, but she moved like a wild animal, with the grace and directness of instinct, paying no conscious attention to her own body while she focused on him.

"Uh, right," he said. "That's me. So, um, where is everyone?"

Dawn giggled, bracing her hands on his knees and nearly doing a handstand as she invaded his personal space. "You make funny sounds."

Ford blinked as he realized, no, Dawn hadn't spoken english, and yes, he'd understood it perfectly. He could speak it too, he realized. There was this whole other language in his head now.

"Hi, Dawn," Ford greeted in the new language. "You know where I can get some clothes?"

Dawn appeared to think about this for a moment, releasing his knees and drifting away weightlessly. "Nope!"

Ford stared, and then he laughed. "Okay, what about the others? Buffy? Xander? Willow? Where are they?"

"I can show you where Willow is!" Dawn announced, in the tones of someone who'd just figured something out for the first time.

Dawn suddenly fell to the grass, landing easily on her feet, upright and looking very pleased with herself. Studiously ignoring the way her weightless breasts bounced, Ford tried to figure out how to get up and follow Dawn without exposing himself to her. He failed to come up with anything in the moments before Dawn looked around and dashed off.

Giving his modesty up as a lost cause for the immediate time being, Ford unscrunched and sprinted after the oddly feral girl before she could get out of his sight. It was still weird how it felt to have his bones acting like they had weight while the rest of his body felt weightless, especially since he was aware that it was something he was doing rather than something that was just happening, but his sense of balance never seemed to get confused.

Shaking his head, Ford put that aside to just enjoy his new fitness and grace as he sprinted after Dawn. He wasn't even getting winded. Ford suddenly appreciated the change in his genitals. Running around naked with it hanging down and flopping about would have been distracting if not hazardous, but with it high and tight he could almost forget he wasn't wearing anything. Almost. The wind of his movement on the underside of his shaft made it impossible to forget completely.

"How big is this place?" Ford wondered, thinking back to the vast pearly elliptical shape that he'd seen on the way up.

Dawn turned around to answer, spinning all the way and simply floating backwards over the grass. Ford knew they were in a weightless environment, but that was still weird and cool to see.

"Willow makes places!" Dawn said brightly, as a huge tree with big green leaves loomed behind her.

Ford yelped, "Watch out!"

CRACK!

A branch caught Dawn in the back of the head, snapping her into a tumble. She slammed into a higher branch with a sickening thud and flopped upwards onto the trunk itself. With a surge of panic, Ford dove into the tree, swinging from branch to branch to make any ape proud, and finally reached Dawn just as she was sitting up.

"Owwwwwww," Dawn whined petulantly.

The tree itself was hard and woody, but with a smooth texture that reminded Ford of velvet. With a sigh of relief, he sat down next to Dawn and took a moment to reorient himself to the new direction for down.

"You're okay?" Ford checked.

Dawn looked at him as though only just remembering he was there, and blanched. "I meant to do that!"

Ford laughed. "Can I see your head?"

Dawn's face twisted in adorable confusion, before she brightened. "Yes! Because I can see your head. Seeing is with eyes, and eyes are in heads."

Ford facepalmed, and rephrased. "I mean, will you come over here and show me the back of your head?"

"Okay," Dawn agreed carelessly.

Dawn spider-walked right over and just about planted her scalp in his chest, which was not what he'd had in mind even though it did present the back of her head to him. However, the feel of Dawn's breath on his manhood jolted Ford into scrambling away in a backwards crabwalk.

"Gah! Uh, just... hold still for a moment," Ford pleaded as he swung around to her side.

Dawn huffed, but let him gently turn her head away. Ford frowned as he parted Dawn's hair. There was nothing. No bump. No swelling. No bruise. He recalled the impact with perfect clarity. It ought to have cracked her skull.

Ford sat back on his haunches. It would have cracked a human skull. But, neither of them were human. That hadn't really registered with Ford until now. Fae. He hadn't asked, because, well, he'd been willing to become a vampire and probably end up getting staked by Buffy to get away from the pain and impending humiliation of his brain cancer. He hadn't cared about the details when Buffy offered him an alternative. But now, he was curious.

Unfortunately, Dawn had taken advantage of his distraction. He blinked and found her on hands and knees, her face inches from his penis and alight with a completely unnerving delight.

"Wah!" Ford yelped, scrambling backwards and attempting to cover himself with his hands.

Dawn glowered stubbornly, bounding after him. She grabbed his arms and tried to pull them away from his crotch, but Ford pulled out of her grip and backed further up the tree.

"H-hey! Stop that! What do you think you're doing?" Ford demanded.

Dawn pouted at him as she made another grab. "Trying to get your penis into my vagina. Xander never lets me and nobody else has one, but you have one!"

"Wh-what?!" Ford sputtered. "No!"

"I wanna fuck!" Dawn whined as she struggled to overcome Ford's superior strength.

"You what wait what, get off!" Ford finally snapped angrily with a panicked shove.

To his surprise, Dawn flinched at his tone, jerking away like she'd been burned. She crouched just out of arm's reach, her eyes wide and shining. Ford glared, but before he could say anything, Dawn bolted. Or maybe stormed off.

"Hey wait!" Ford called.

He'd rather have let her go, but Dawn was his only guide to this place at the moment. Ford chased her down the tree, but when he reached the squishy grass she was nowhere to be found.

"Damn," Ford grumbled.

---

"I've been counting, and that's the tenth church we've passed," Samantha commented idly, finishing off the cookie Ted had given her.

"Quite a few of those in these parts," Ted told her. "And the best thing, with so many churches, each of them has its own little bit of personality. Why, around the corner there is a oldie with the most delightful little mural."

Just then, Samantha's phone rang. She fished it out of her pocket and saw Jack's number. Belatedly, she realized he was expecting her back at the hotel some minutes ago. Calling in her impromptu tour plans just hadn't seemed very important.

Samantha answered. "What's up, Sir?"

"You're late, Carter," Jack's voice said.

"Sorry, Sir," Samantha replied. "I decided to talk a walk around town. See the sights."

"I see," Jack said suspiciously. "And you didn't notify me, why?"

"Slipped my mind, Sir," Samantha reported.

"Must be some damn fine sights you've been seeing, then," Jack deadpanned.

"If you say so, Sir," Samantha agreed.

"Well," Jack grumbled, sounding a bit put off. "Have fun. Check in every half-hour."

"Yes Sir," Samantha agreed, and hung up.

Ted pulled a ziploc out of his coat pocket. "Another cookie?"

Samantha wasn't in the habit of eating so much in the way of sweets, but her carefully balanced diet just didn't seem worth worrying about at the moment. Ted's cookies were delicious.

---

Against all reason, Ford was feeling guilty. No matter how many times he told himself that Dawn had no right to be upset when she was the one who'd started grabbing for his personal parts clear out of the blue, the memory of her flinching away like that still made him wince inside. It wasn't like she didn't know any better. She'd flat out stated her intention in a way that made it clear she knew what she was doing. But still, Ford kind of felt like he'd kicked a puppy.

Returning once more to the base of the towering big-leafed tree, Ford looked around in defeat. Dawn was nowhere to be found.

"Arhh..."

Ford blinked, looking around for the source of the noise.

"Mm... mmmrgh... mm..."

The faint girlish grunts were coming from a hollow between two roots. Ford had missed it before, but it looked like there was a space that led under the trunk itself. Ford grumbled. Apparently the tree was hollow, and that's where Dawn had gone. Of course, and after he spent twenty minutes searching the surrounding hills.

"Rmmaah... Oooonh!"

Following the faint, unintelligible vocalizations, Ford dropped into the hole and ducked into the hollow under the treetrunk. "Dawn? Is that you? Can you please - grk!"

Dawn was there, and in an instant of panicked realization, the sounds she'd been making clicked into place in Ford's head just a moment too late to do any good.

The hollow was roughly conical, carpeted with grass and lit by a warm golden bioluminescence that was concentrated in a pale reddish tunnel at the highest point. In the center of the floor was... a giant boob. It didn't seem to have a nipple or anything, and it was really just a big half-sphere growing out of the ground, but it had the color and texture of fair skin, and the way it deformed under Dawn's simulated weight... Ford couldn't shake the impression that it was a humongous breast.

Of course, that was all secondary to the reason Ford had gone rigid, feeling like he was suddenly reliving every Accidental Pervert moment from every anime he'd ever seen. Dawn was sprawled flat on her back on the adiposal cushion, her spread legs towards Ford and glistening wetly. One of her hands was curled under her thigh to plunge her fingers into her dripping sex, while she rubbed her clit with her other hand.

Dawn's head lifted into view like a herald of doom breaching the horizon of her perky little breasts. She spotted him, standing frozen in the entrance to the hollow, and her eyes narrowed into a glare.

She huffed and violently turned onto her side, facing away from him. To Ford's astonishment, Dawn resumed fingering herself, only even more furiously than before. Her hands ravished her sex with angry abandon, shlicking and squelching lewdly as the wetness of her core splashed into the air.

Ford gaped at her. For the first time in his life, a facefault seemed like an appropriate response to the situation, but he wasn't sure how to actually pull one off. Dawn's reaction to him put him completely out of context, and his brain felt like it had crashed and needed a reboot.

It was like Dawn was trying to drown out Ford's presence with her self-pleasure. Even the timbre of her moans had become louder in a seemingly deliberate nyah-nyah-can't-hear-you way as she brought herself to orgasm, paused, then seemed to remember he was there and started up again. Ford was halfway disturbed and halfway turned on, and then he was disturbed all over again that he was turned on.

Swallowing heavily, for a moment Ford wondered it it would really be so wrong to go along with what Dawn wanted. His manhood was feeling very much like a real erection now, hard and throbbing, even though it hadn't actually gotten noticeably harder or bigger... the veins were standing out a little more. Glancing down, Ford was confused to see the head of his shaft glistening wetly. Had some of Dawn's splashes gotten on him? He hadn't felt any, and the wetness was too even for that anyway.

Ford groaned and pulled at his hair. "I can't deal with this!"

Dawn ignored him.

---

Eventually, Samantha and Ted meandered their way back into the middle of town. She caught sight of a public clock.

Samantha smiled apologetically. "Thank you for showing me around. It was nice. But I really should be getting back."

"You're sure you can't spare any more time?" Ted asked.

"Sorry," Samantha replied. "The others are waiting for me."

Ted shook his head. "Well, that's a shame, but we wouldn't want to worry your friends, now would we?"

"No," Samantha agreed, smiling at the man's affable manner.

"Then what do you say I walk you back to your hotel?" Ted offered.

"Sure," Samantha said. "Why not."

---

Ford had tried closing his eyes, but that just left him with the sounds, and in some ways that was actually worse. He was paralyzed by sheer awkwardness, and by Dawn's stubborn refusal to notice the inherent awkwardness of the situation.

"Dawn." Ford's voice came out strained and somewhat high-pitched. "Can you... would you... I just want..."

Dawn ignored him, once more arching and gasping. Her body spasmed in climax, producing jiggling ripples in the giant boob-cushion thing. For a moment, Dawn lay still.

"Dawn, I just want you to show me where Willow is!" Ford exclaimed into the brief silence.

Dawn's fingers plunged back into her sex.

"Agh! Stop that!" Ford cried in frustration.

Overcome by embarrassment and exasperation, Ford flung himself onto the younger girl and grabbed her wrists. She shrieked in outrage as he forced her hands away from her girl parts. Dawn glared at him and kicked him in the face.

Yelping in pain, Ford reeled, tumbling weightlessly into the ceiling of the little hollow. For a moment he was distracted by how his face didn't hurt, even though he'd felt that blow nearly crush his nose. Then a snarling Dawn pinned him to the velvety wood, clawing and biting at him like a rabid monkey.

Ford managed to plant his feet in her gut and kick her off of him. The younger girl sailed across the hollow and slammed into the squishy grass. Twisting like a cat, Dawn was back on her feet in an instant.

Dropping back to the grass himself, Ford paused, and looked down at himself. He didn't hurt anywhere, and there wasn't a scratch on him. Ford twisted around to search his skin for evidence of the brief but furious fight, and found nothing. He looked up at Dawn, who was also showing no signs of pain even though he'd kicked her in the gut really hard. It was like they really couldn't harm each other.

Fortunately, it seemed as though his impromptu self-examination had derailed Dawn's anger. She was watching him, head tilted to the side, with an expression of baffled amusement.

Ford sighed and looked at her pleadingly. "Will you please show me where Willow is, now?"

Dawn mimicked his sigh. "Okay."

Springing upwards, Dawn caught the fleshy lip of the softly glowing tunnel in the ceiling of the hollow, and swung herself into it. Ford hastened to follow as she vanished inside.

The cylindrical tunnel inside the tree stretched on far enough that Ford couldn't see the end, its walls oddly warm and spongy, glowing with that soft uniform golden light. Not that he was looking ahead more than he had too, since Dawn was ahead of him and her spread limbs as she pushed herself along gave him entirely too much of a view.

Ford glanced behind him and frowned. He was sure they'd now gone further than the height of the tree as seen from outside. How the hell? Oh, wait, the sky was like a hologram or something anyway, so maybe the top of the tree he'd seen was an illusion too, and the actual tree went on somewhere else.

Soon, they emerged from the tunnel, drifting up into a black star-filled void. Ford sucked in a breath as his feet landed on a ring of white surrounding the mouth of the tunnel. It looked like they were standing on a little platform floating in space, but when Ford poked a toe off the platform, he found an invisible surface.

A model planet hung in the air above him, as big as Buffy's whole house. Dawn swooped up to it, surprising Ford by arcing in mid-air, flying around the model planet like a girl-shaped moon.

Ford didn't recognize the planet. It was too green, and there weren't any large oceans. Large irregular areas were white, but a white that was all wrong for ice.

Dawn looped back around and landed on the model planet, presenting an amusing image. The planet's atmospheric haze only came up to her knees, so she looked like an impossible giant.

"Willow's not here!" Dawn yelled.

"Then where is she?" Ford prompted.

Dawn shrugged guilelessly, and leaped towards one of the other openings in the shell of stars. Ford pushed off, drifting over the model planet to follow her while wondering how she'd done that flying around thing.

This tunnel was much wider with a concave hexagonal shape and white sides. Under his feet, it felt like a softer version of the stuff tennis courts were paved with, but with a smooth texture like Vinyl. Dawn was running ahead of him, on the ceiling from his perspective, and he sprinted to keep up.

There was a radiance at the end of the six-sided passage that could have almost been daylight on an overcast day. As Ford reached the end, it opened up onto a wide open cityscape like an Escher painting mated with futuristic architecture.

Square columns that were also sidewalks. City blocks that had shiny storefronts on six sides of a cube instead of four sides of a square. The direction for down seemed to be more or less randomly chosen in any particular place.

Dawn was leaping from sidewalk to sidewalk. "Willow! Willow?"

Ford took a second look at the dizzyingly-arranged storefronts. They were open, with no glass or doors, with a wide variety. There were empty restaurants, stores of all kinds, including...

"Pants!" Ford cried in relief.

Launching himself across the open air, Ford twisted around and managed to land on the floor of the clothing store with surprising ease. He stepped inside and looked around, but had his hopes dashed almost immediately.

Small stacks of clothing were affixed to various surfaces with static cling, while the walls were lined with very detailed and anatomically correct grey mannequins of both sexes, showing off the various outfits. Said correctness was obvious since not one of the stylish outfits on display covered any of the important parts. (There was also a conspicuous lack of anything resembling a cash register or dressing rooms.)

Dawn bounced in after him, looked around, and beamed at him obliviously. "Clothes! You wanted clothes."

Ford felt like his face really ought to be half blue with wiggling lines of dismay over his head. He snorted at the mental image.

"Did you find Willow?" Ford asked.

"No!" Dawn informed him cheerfully.

Ford turned away from the anti-clothes that were mocking him. "Where next, then?"

Dawn tilted her head in thoughtful cuteness. "I don't know."

"Well, where else could Willow be?" Ford asked.

"Maybe this way!" Dawn proclaimed.

Once more, Dawn dashed off, leaving Ford scrambling to keep up.

---

Ted paused outside a converted storefront with a heavy door beside a grid of frosted glass. Samantha followed his lead.

"This here is my own humble little abode," Ted informed her. "So I suppose this is where we part ways, as you're leaving town."

Samantha nodded. "I guess it is. It was a pleasure to meet you, Ted."

Ted smiled disarmingly. "Well, then maybe there's no better time for you to come in. I can promise you a nice scone for the road..."

Samantha hesitated. She did need to get back to her team, but a few more minutes wouldn't hurt.

"Sure," she said. "Why not?"

"Why not, indeed," Ted agreed.

Ted unlocked the door and led Samantha into what looked like a slightly dusty machine shop. Something about the place niggled at her, an incongruity that drifted at the edge of her thoughts. It didn't seem worth worrying about, but Samantha was naturally curious, and prone to prodding a mental puzzle purely for its own sake.

Samantha came to a halt as Ted went around a dividing wall, the sounds of clinks and clanks emerging from his general direction.

Motivated by no more than idle curiosity, Samantha looked around and tried to piece together what was bothering her. The first thing she observed was the lack of computer equipment. This was strange for the home of a self-proclaimed guru like Ted. Also, it was small. No stairs were apparent, that might have led to a more comfortable living area. There was no place where Ted could have slept.

Peeking around the dividing wall, Samantha saw Ted reaching into a small fridge next to a sink, but there was nothing resembling a kitchen in the small space. The likely conclusion was that Ted had lied about living here, but that made no sense.

"Hm, Samantha, would you mind giving this a whiff?" Ted asked, holding up a small carton. "I'm sorry to say it might be a little over the hill, as it where."

Samantha moved to comply before her brain could catch up and label this a Very Suspicious Situation, and the scent that filled her nose definitely didn't belong to any food product.

The floor seemed to melt under her feet as the world around her went dark and blurry. Drugged. She was being drugged. Ted was a hostile. Procedure. She was compromised.

With her last seconds of consciousness, Major Carter slipped a hand into her pocket and hit the button on her cellphone that activated her emergency distress beacon.

---

Jack O'Neill swore as Carter's beacon went off. He knew he should have listened to his gut that something was off when he spoke to Carter earlier. After several attempts to call Carter failed to go through, he, Daniel, and Teal'c quickly armed up and set out.

"Alright," Jack said as they descended the stairs to street level. "The signal is only two blocks away, but we don't know what we're dealing with in this little sunny town of horror movie cliches, so we're going in quiet and fast. You see something coming at you, zat first and we'll sort it out later."

Teal'c inclined his head and Daniel nodded.

Two blocks away, the signal led them to an old abandoned machine shop. Teal'c broke down the back door, and the three of them swept in with zats at the ready. The shop was small, and it was immediately apparent that it was empty.

"There's no one here," Jack pointed out.

Daniel check his phone again. "I don't get it. We're right on top of the signal."

"Perhaps Major Carter dropped her cellular device," Teal'c suggested.

"Keep looking," Jack ordered. "I'm gonna report in and see about plan B."

---

"O'Neill," Teal'c interrupted a short while later.

Jack pulled his phone away from his ear and blinked. Teal'c had pulled up a rug, revealing a trap door set in the floor of the dusty shop.

"Stand by, Doc," Jack said. "Teal'c just found something. We're going in."

Hanging up, Jack signaled for Daniel to pull the door up while he and Teal'c stood opposite each other to cover whatever was underneath. Daniel hauled the door open, revealing a surprisingly well-lit space. Teal'c leaped to the bottom in one smooth movement, and Jack followed as quickly as he could.

"Freeze!"

Carter was there, propped up on a fifties-style sofa and obviously unconscious. A man in a plaid shirt and jeans was standing over her with a pair of scissors, about to start cutting her clothes. Jack did a quick sweep for other threats while Teal'c kept his zat trained on the man.

"Oh dear! Home invaders!" the man exclaimed, "You know what they say, a man's home is his castle, and it looks like this castle is under siege!"

"Step away from Major Carter and identify yourself," Jack demanded.

The man eyed their weapons, glancing between them, Carter, and his hands

"Of course. Of course," the man agreed easily. "You can call me Ted. Samantha here collapsed, you see.."

Ted moved without hesitation, pulling a golf club from behind the sofa and swinging at Teal'c. Teal'c ducked and Jack fired his zat. That's when things got... weird.

Ted stumbled as the blue arcs crackled over his body. He froze in place like a statue and started repeating, "a man's home is his castle," over and over, faster and faster and faster, until his voice wound down like a broken tape deck and smoke started pouring from his nose and ears.

Ted fell over and hit the floor with a dull clank.

Jack rushed to Carter's side and tried to rouse her. "Carter. Carter! Come on. Crap. She's alive but she's out cold."

Teal'c checked Ted's body, raising an eyebrow at the burned-plastic smell and sagging artificial features

Grabbing his phone, Jack called in a request for medical evacuation. After getting a promise that the Prometheus would be beaming them out in a matter of minutes, and that a crime scene team would be on its way, Jack hung up and stared at the self-proclaimed Ted.

"Creepy kidnapping robot with a fifties fixation. For cryin' out loud, this town is a horror movie cliche," Jack muttered. "What's next? The creature from the black lagoon?"

---

Xander was in something of a conundrum. Sprawled out in post-coital bliss on Willow's bed with an armful of his favorite person in the world, and on his other side, another armful of his favorite person in the world, Xander caressed the smooth skin of her... of their... of her... of...

"We need better pronouns," Xander complained. "I keep skipping back and forth in my head between Willow the collective and Willow the individuals."

Willow-para giggled as she continued a slow march of kisses across his pec, while Willow-icos snuggled deeper into his side and smiled up at him, pausing in her slow idle stroking of his wet erection.

"We could go back to speaking faelin," Willow-icos suggested. "Then you could just use the idea-of-person pronoun for the collective and the physical-presence pronoun for my bodies. Our bodies. My... Oh great now you've got me doing it."

Xander grinned at her. "Sorry."

"On the other hand, there might be a downside," Willow-para mused whimsically. "What if someday we want to write down what we talked about, in english? Something might get lost in translation you know?"

Xander smirked, and made a show of peering suspiciously at each of the four walls in Willow's room.

"What are you doing?" Willow-icos giggled.

"Looking for the fourth wall," Xander told her.

The two identical girls rolled their eyes and snickered into his chest. "Oh sure, make fun of me."

Xander grinned and dropped a kiss on the crown of two red-haired heads, clapping a hand on to each of their bare butts and stroking with his thumbs. The two Willows smiled at each other and relaxed in contentment, glad to be getting their always-needed Xander-time.

A while later, the slow simmer of lust that inevitably resulted from intimate snuggling with an attractive loved one boiled over in Willow-icos. She wormed her leg under Willow-para and pulled herself up to straddle Xander properly.

Xander obligingly aimed his manhood out for her, and Willow-icos sank down, enveloping him with a long moan. She pulled her knees in and sat up, riding him at an insistent pace while Willow-para scooched up and pushed her breasts into Xander's face. Xander playfully nosed around for a while, making Willow-para giggle, but soon made his way to a nipple and started suckling.

Willow-para straddled Xander's torso as he went to work on her breasts, and she felt Willow-icos' bouncing breasts slap against her upturned rear. Willow-icos reached over and picked up her dildo.

It was a replica of Xander's penis, in this case meaning it was actually made of Fae flesh, had a rudimentary and specialized utility cloud for replenishing its fluid content, and did everything the real deal did in response to stimulus. Willow-icos had actually found the design in the Eliezera's database, but it had to be tweaked to Xander's specs prior to being synthesized, since it couldn't morph on its own.

She was adapting a small app for Xander that would let him get sensory feedback from the autonomous organ through his Dreamlink. That part wasn't quite done yet, but in the mean time...

Willow-icos rubbed the dildo's head along her other self's folds before plunging it in. Willow-para moaned and bucked her hips as its warm girth filled her.

...it was still good for looking after herself. Taking turns was so for uncreative chumps.

---

SG-1 sat in their usual seats around the big table, with Doctor Weir at its head. Despite the incident with Ted the Robot, their orders to get the heck out of Sunnydale had stood firm, so all that was left was the debriefing and the report-writing.

And a healthy dose of paranoia about what the unnamed agency - though it was obviously the NID - might be doing in America's small town home of horror movie cliches. At least there hadn't been any zombies. Once was enough.

"I'm more upset that the zat blast destroyed any chance of taking a look at his programming, than anything else," Carter admitted, having recovered from her drugging.

"According to Doctor Frasier, the robot's cybernetic skin appears to have been made with a completely unique technology, and may lead to breakthroughs in tissue-grafting," Doctor Weir pointed out.

"Are we sure good ol'e Ted was actually built in the fifties?" Jack wondered.

"Yes, sir," Carter said. "Considering where he was built, I suspect magic was involved. Ted's artificial skin is inconceivably advanced for the time period, but well within the technological limits of what I would expect an Ancient to have knowledge of."

Life went on at Stargate Command.

---

Ford followed Dawn through another large white vinyl-textured passage and came out at the top of a grassy cliff overlooking a large landscape made up of stepped concentric circles.

"What's this place?" Ford wondered.

Dawn beamed at him. "Rape Garden!"

Ford had noticed by now that his memory seemed to have become pretty much infallible. So, he could replay the sounds over and over and, no, no matter how many times he did, he hadn't misheard. Dawn got impatient as he stood there frozen, and went off ahead.

"Rape Garden?" Ford choked out in a strangled tone as he lurched after her. "What's a Rape Garden for?"

Dawn shrugged cheerfully as she dove off the cliff. "I don't know! I've never been here before."

Following at a slower pace, Ford jogged down the cliff face. He pushed off and drifted the rest of the way down, landing on more squishy grass in a a cultivated landscape that did look somewhat garden-like at first glance, with large shady trees at regular intervals and colorful plants in various arrangements.

A second look, however, made Ford's jaw fall.

Immediately in front of him, there was an odd circular set of what'd he'd taken for colorful roots. A white central trunk divided into six thick stems about a foot off the ground, each a different pastel shade like a muted color wheel, arching out from the center, then dividing again into two and sticking vertically into the ground. Except, up close, it was something entirely more than a color wheel of branching arches.

They weren't branches at all. They were thighs. And at their apex was a very humanoid-shaped, very female-shaped rear end framing a prominent vulva. The primary stems weren't stems at all, but elongated torsos, each with a small flower bulb growing up from the small of its back. Once he saw it properly, the same corner of his brain that gave him Dawn's name when he first saw her twigged again. Glowgasm Go Round.

"It... it's... it's literally..." Ford concluded faintly. "It's literally a garden you can..."

And the name itself, combined with his proximity to the eromorph, seemed to open something in that same corner of his head. Ford mentally poked at it, and suddenly found himself... doing something like remembering but in a different direction or something: four nondescript boys each humping away at one of the six colors, competing at getting their flower bulb to glow the brightest. Occasionally one of the colors would flash, and the central trunk would tint towards that color.

"It's... a game?" Ford choked. "It's a game.. for kids? It's a game for kids that just gave me a psychic tutorial? What. The. Fuck."

Dazedly, he let Dawn drag him along by his wrist as she ran around without a care, occasionally remembering to call out for Willow.

They passed a row of something that looked like some kind of demented living seesaw. Only about an armspan long, instead of seats they had a very male-shaped phallus sticking up at either end. Leverage Trader.

Dawn ran right passed, before stopping abruptly and spinning around with wide eyes. "Ooh!"

Blinking out of his daze, Ford once more stared at the unsettling incongruity of Dawn acting like a carefree kid on a playground at the sight of a creepy public sex toy. She grabbed the handle at one end to steady it and felt up the phallus.

Dawn turned and beamed at him. "It has a penis!"

"Willow!" Ford squeaked. "I mean, we're looking for Willow! So, let's find Willow, and not do other things. Until after we find Willow."

Dawn hesitated, but reluctantly let go of the handle and the dildo and made a cute determined face, then she blinked, her eyes lighting up. "Right! And if she's here, she can play with me!"

That was a mental image he didn't need. Ford's cock felt flushed and sensitive, and he glanced down to find his glans glistening wetly again. Maybe that was normal for Fae. Pushing those thoughts away with a sigh, Ford hurried after Dawn.

There were more eromorphs, the bizarre sexually-themed plant-creature-toy-things.

They passed a circular flower bed, only it didn't have any flowers in it. It had boobs. Dozens of completely real-looking mounds of tan skin and hard pink nipples leaking milk. Lactibed.

They passed a circle of chairs that looked and felt like giant tongues, with hundreds of little wiggling massaging feelers growing from the seat and backrest. Comfy Licker.

Even weirder than usual, they came across a floating sphere twice Ford's height, made up of thousands of slippery black stress-balls that turned white and vibrated whenever they touched anything. That one was called, Vibrator Galaxy.

Three green-skinned male-shaped pelvi with bulging red erections hung from a tree-like arch on muscular stalks that looked like a ridiculously long torso with sixty-pack abs, like some kind of perverse swingset. An adjustable muscular platform grew from the roots of the arch under each of the three hanging lower-bodies. Apparently the pelvi would reflexively thrust in response to warmth and moisture on their erections. That tutorial-memory turned Ford on more than he wanted to admit. Eager Undulating Pussy Pounder.

And these were just the eromorphs directly in their path. Ford could see even more and varied perverted strangeness off to the sides.

Finally, the two of them came to a tall series of white arches, marking the boundary between the outermost tier and the next, and of course, the arches themselves seemed to be made entirely out of life-size carvings of naked people, tangled together in a vertical orgy of massive scale. Ford blushed when Dawn caught him taking a closer look, even though she was clearly oblivious to the fact that it was embarrassing in the first place.

Beyond the arches, there was a change in atmosphere. The light was more dappled, and the squishy grass was taller, brushing around his ankles. The trees were closer together, and the trees weren't just trees anymore either.

One tree trunk had a vagina as tall as he was, that it looked entirely possible to crawl through and come out of a matching giant vagina on the other side of the trunk. Another was ringed with dribbling breasts. Another tree had green and orange and brown penises instead of leaves.

Between the trees were even more varied and exotic eromorphs than the outer tier. And these ones didn't seem to have tutorials. The closest eromorph was called a, Groping Tangler, and it looked like an eight-foot tall pillar completely covered in shiny violet finger-wide tendrils.

"Okay," Ford said weakly. "On the one hand, at least this is less creepy than the playground theme. But on the other hand... this looks like something out of a tentacle hentai. Heh hehhh... it's a garden you can rape... and a garden that rapes you..."

Ford was about to suggest that maybe they should look for Willow somewhere else, when Dawn got too close to the Groping Tangler. She trailed a hand through the wiggling tendrils as she scampered passed, and was immediately snared.

Pulled to a stop, Dawn watched the slippery purple fingers wrap around her hand and wrist. With a giggle, she stuck her other hand forward and watched, fascinated, as it was also ensnared. It was obvious to Ford what was going to happen, and it was like watching a train wreck, helpless to stop it, helpless to look away. He shouted a warning, but it was futile.

"Huh?" Dawn glanced over at him. "Eeep!"

The violet tendrils yanked Dawn into their midst, curling around her limbs and head. Pulling her up, the Groping Tangler's innumerable slippery prehensile fingers swarmed over Dawn's body, forcing her to hug its central stalk. Her head, forearms, and legs from the knee down were covered over completely by the time it had her in position.

Dawn squirmed as the slick boneless digits slithered up her legs and down her back. For a moment, only her butt was visible, and then the violet tendrils poured into her vagina and the Groping Tangler subsumed her completely.

Ford stared at the vaguely Dawn-shaped mass of wriggling tendrils and muffled cries, trying to figure out how to save her while simultaneously trying to convince himself that seeing the Groping Tangler take her like that wasn't incredibly hot.

He was failing on both counts. Having an infallible memory made it a pain and half to lie to himself.

After standing there at a loss for barely two minutes, he heard a rapturous scream from the general vicinity of Dawn's head, and a few moments later, the wriggling tendrils slowed in their movement and relaxed.

As the tendrils came loose, a gently trembling Dawn became visible. She drifted limply from their grasp, and Ford seized his chance to pull her away. His hands slipped off her shoulders, so he had to resort to pulling her out by her hair. Every inch of her skin was wet and slippery, and her face was blank and stunned as she drifted weightlessly in Ford's hands.

"Dawn?" Ford gulped, worried.

Dawn blinked and vaulted onto her feet with a big grin. "I wanna go again! I wanna go again!"

And if that wasn't a sweatdrop moment, Ford didn't know what was.

---

Dawn had thrown herself into the clutches of the Groping Tangler twice more before Ford finally convinced her to get back on track. Like the first time, it seemed to reliably let her go once she had an orgasm, and there didn't seem to be any ill effects. Other than to Ford's sanity, anyway.

Ford didn't know what to think as a lube-covered Dawn ambled on, softly giggling to herself and looking thoroughly pleased. It was like the girl had no idea that she should be upset about having her virginity forcibly stolen by that thing, or about Ford having watched it happen for that matter. Ford just couldn't wrap his head around it. A logical corner of his mind made the connection that, for a species with invulnerable flesh, girls had to be born without a hymen, or they'd never be able to have sex at all. But still.

Okay, maybe he was looking at this the wrong way. Maybe, despite having an understanding of sex, Dawn simply had no concept of virginity. And if that was true, if virginity wasn't a thing to her, then she couldn't lose it, because she never had it. It was such a bizarre thought to get his head around, and it actually fitting Dawn's behavior didn't help.

"Hey, Dawn?" Ford asked, very very belatedly. "How old are you?"

Dawn swayed around to face him. "Twenty days."

Ford stopped in his tracks and gaped at her. He'd been expecting something weird, but that pretty much blew away any time-based standard of maturity he might have applied.

"Well, that explains a lot," Ford said faintly. "You really aren't human."

Dawn gave him a confused head-tilt.

Ford shook his head. "Nevermind. Come on. Let's keep looking for Willow, without, uh, getting sidetracked again."

Carefully avoiding the myriad amorous eromorphs along the way, Ford and Dawn made their way deeper into the Rape Garden...

...wait, why were they doing that, again?

Ford skirted warily around a mass of blue tentacles, shooting them an unnerved double-take when they swayed in his direction, revealing a pouty-lipped humanoid mouth at the end of each tentacle that opened on a toothless fleshy throat and waggling tongue. Servile Sucktacles. Ford caught up to Dawn and grabbed her wrist, which slipped out of his hand, but she stopped anyway.

"Um, Dawn, maybe we should look for Willow somewhere else," Ford suggested.

"But what if she's here?" Dawn asked guilelessly.

Ford sighed. "Do you think she is?"

"I don't know where she is," Dawn told him earnestly. "She could be anywhere!"

"Okay, then where does she spend the most - yiii!" Ford yelped as something smacked into his butt.

He grabbed at it, and his hand closed on something like a warm slippery stress-ball. That was vibrating. And wouldn't come off, even though it slid along his skin with little resistance.

Another one suddenly hit Dawn's shoulder with a wet smack, and then another hit Ford in the ribs. He whipped around and saw something that looked like the Vibrator Galaxy from the outer tier, except this one was a Vibrator Singularity. More of the vibrating balls were already shooting out, and Ford didn't have time to do anything more than throw his arms up in front of him before they were hitting like rain.

Dawn tried batting the clingy balls away, lunging at them as they flew at her, but this brought her closer to the central mass of the Vibrator Singularity, and the balls that were already stuck to her seemed to pull back into the floating sphere of vibrators, yanking Dawn with them.

"Waaah!" Dawn cried, flailing in surprise.

"Damnit!" Ford cursed.

He turned and dug his feet in, shivering at the sensation as the dozens of slick vibrating balls poured up his arms and over his chest, pooling on his back and butt. Ford yelped as the clingy little things didn't stop there and yanked him off his feet, dragging him backwards into the Vibrator Singularity.

Ford sank into the central mass, suddenly engulfed by powerful thrumming vibrations. The loose balls contracted towards the eromorph's victims, squeezing in around Ford's body. He jumped, yelping, when the pressing vibrators reached his more sensitive places. One slipped into his open mouth when he wasn't paying attention, and by the time he spat it out with a sputter, he was buried completely.

Being buried alive in warm, slippery, vibrating stress-balls was not Ford's idea of a good time, but the vibrations coursing through his body, and especially his increasingly tense erection, felt way better than they had any right to. It really didn't help that he was already a little pent up from the things he'd seen in this place.

Gritting his teeth, Ford ignored the welling pleasure in his loins and tried to punch through the crushing mass of vibrators. There was some give, as the little balls slid against his skin and each other, but it was very slow going. He wouldn't be able to swim out, but he might be able to dig himself out if he was careful not to slip backwards.

But it was hard to be careful when his body was trembling on the edge of orgasm. The pleasure coursing through his shaft drove his hips to jerk unbidden, thrusting his cock through the press of vibration. He couldn't take it anymore, he had to cum and damn the embarrassing circumstances.

His hips bucked and in mere seconds his climax slammed into him. Ford's body arched like a live wire as the unrelenting vibrations continued through his orgasm, spurring his pleasure to frightening intensities.

"Nnnngn!" Ford cried, his limbs finally going limp.

He really wanted to pant after that, but he couldn't actually breath with his face covered by the tightly packed vibrating balls. His lungs weren't burning even the littlest bit, though, so that was not his most pressing concern at the moment.

The implacable vibrations were already stoking him towards another orgasm. He could feel it slowly building. This wasn't like the Groping Tangler. It hadn't let him go once he climaxed. But it also wasn't stopping him from trying to dig himself out...

Ford slowly dragged his legs until he had some leverage, but by the time he managed it, he was squirming with need again, distracted by the urge to thrust into the surrounding pressure and hasten his onrushing orgasm. He clenched his jaw in frustration.

Suddenly, he felt warm skin and soft flesh press into his back, two little points of hard heat sinking into his skin. Dawn's breasts. The Vibrator Singularity was squeezing them together in the center of its mass. A shameless orgasmic moan bubbled up from Dawn's throat, audible even in the crush of vibration with her mouth right next to his ear.

It was unexpected, and it sent a shiver down Ford's spine, tripping him right over the edge. His body convulsed and his pulsing manhood spurted once more into the mass of vibrating orbs.

---

The last of the sun's glow was dipping below the horizon as Buffy strolled casually through the graveyard in her silvery tanktop and shorts, a length of pointy wood stuck to her left shin by no visible means. Kendra was a step ahead of her, stake in hand as she prowled.

"You're not allowed to talk to boys?" Buffy asked incredulously.

Kendra blushed slightly. "Dat is what ah said."

"Jeez, that is so totally irresponsible of your Watcher," Buffy opined.

Kendra blinked. "Irresponsible?"

"Well yeah," Buffy said. "I've seen the way you get all flustered around Xander. You totally shut down, 'cause you've been trying to wall off this part of you your Watcher didn't like."

"Mister Zambuto says dees feelings are a liability," Kendra responded stiffly.

Buffy held her gaze and nodded. "They are... if you try to convince yourself that they aren't there, or that they don't matter. Thanks to your Watcher, you have a weakness that an enemy might exploit. Seriously, it's almost like he was trying to sabotage you or something. Not allowed to talk to boys..." Buffy shook her head sadly.

Kendra looked stricken by the possibility, coming out of her prowl to stare questioningly.

"But hey, don't worry about it," Buffy said. "Giles is your Watcher, at least for now, and sometimes, yeah, he can be a bit... british... but he's not gonna have any stupid rules to turn you against yourself and make you weaker. You're allowed to talk to boys now."

"Even if dat's true," Kendra said hesitantly. "Ah don't know how to talk to boys."

A vampire jumped out from behind a crypt behind Buffy and snarled. Kendra tensed, but Buffy didn't even look back. The vampire pinned Buffy's arms to her sides and sank his fangs into her neck.

"I'll let you in on a little secret, Kendra," Buffy went on, seeming to ignore the vampire completely. "Talking to a boy is just like talking to anyone else."

Kendra was a bit distracted by the frustrated vampire that was chewing on Buffy's neck, and by Buffy's total lack of concern. Then he suddenly stiffened and turned to dust, revealing a floating length of polished oak (a superconducting rod down the center) with a sharpened point at both ends. It dropped and then curved around to stick to Buffy's leg again.

"It seems different," Buffy continued, "because you've got these feelings making you want something from our hypothetical boy, that you've been told you're not supposed to want, or not supposed to admit to wanting, or something like that. And sometimes you don't even know exactly what you want in the first place, just that you want something you're not supposed to ask for. So it's all confusing and nervewracking and stuff."

"Yes," Kendra said slowly.

"The what-you-want part is easy, though," Buffy told her. "You want sex, and you want to feel good about it afterwards."

Kendra blushed and stuttered something noncommittal.

"The first part of that is simple enough," Buffy said. "It's the second part that usually trips you up, and there's, like, two ways you can deal with it. You can try to satisfy all the social requirements you've been raised to believe make it okay to have sex, or you can ignore all that and decide in advance that you're going to feel good about satisfying your urge for its own sake."

"Ah see." Kendra was silent for a while. "But... if ah want a boy... ah still don't know wot to say."

Buffy smirked. "Well, if we're still talking about Xander..."

Kendra looked away. "Ah... he... ah..."

"You have the lusty feelings for Xander," Buffy said, nodding. "You know, there's no reason, no reason at all, not to follow those feelings to their conclusion. Xander is a wonderful lover, and I know for a fact that he'd be glad to do a favor for a friendly, if you want. And hey, bonus, Xander's Fae, so he can't get you pregnant."

Kendra was quite visibly red at this point, even through her dark complexion, but she seemed intrigued. "But... if ah offer myself to him... give myself to him..."

Buffy interrupted, "Don't think of it as giving yourself to him. You're not. Or at least, you shouldn't be. You're cooperating to create an experience that you both crave. If you also want to give yourself to him, like, that can mean a lot of things, but you don't do that just by having sex with him."

Kendra frowned thoughtfully. Buffy suddenly pointed off to the side, and Kendra snapped back to reality just in time to roll with the vampire's lunge. She flipped up into a ready stance and struck out.

After a short flurry of blows and blocks, Kendra finally drove her stake home, and the vampire dusted. Kendra winced, rolling her shoulder.

"You know," Buffy said, eyeing Kendra's minor injury. "I figure this isn't gonna be a secret much longer, so there's no bad in telling you about it now. We can make other people into Fae. If you wanted, you could be Fae just like me, and you'd never have to worry about a vamp getting the better of you again."

Kendra blinked and looked at Buffy with narrowed eyes. "Was de spell dat changed you not a dangerous dark magick?"

"So I'm told," Buffy agreed, "but I wasn't talking about the chaos spell. We have anon-magical way to upgrade a human's body into a Fae body, the way it's supposedto be done, and the way it was done in the universe Fae come from."

Kendra blinked again. "How does dat work?"

---

A trembling hand erupted triumphantly from a tightly-packed mass of vibrating spheres, followed shortly by Ford's head. He gasped for air, which apparently he didn't actually need, but it felt good going down anyway.

With a heave, Dawn's head broke the surface, and Ford wrapped his other arm more tightly around her slippery chest so he wouldn't lose his grip. Dawn was no help at all, moaning and trembling, oblivious to Ford's efforts. Ford focused on the nearest treetrunk and tried to fall towards it.

He and Dawn slipped free of the Vibrator Singularity and crashed into the spongy, slightly lumpy surface of the tree's tongue-like surface.

"Oof," Ford grunted.

Holding a weightless insensate Dawn to his chest with one arm, Ford took a deep shuddering breath as the echo of the pervasive thrumming faded from his flesh, and waited for his body to stop twitching. Thirteen orgasms in a row, before he'd managed to dig them out.

Dawn finally rolled her head around to look at him and giggled. "I feel buzzy."

Suddenly realizing he was about two inches away from penetrating the questionably-mature girl he was holding, Ford fought down the impulse to just slide her down that last little bit and get it over with, and carefully moved her aside so he could get up. It took him a couple of disorienting moments to get his bearings. He still wasn't used to down being a matter of opinion.

Dawn twisted onto her feet, irrepressible as ever, and pointed deeper into the Rape Garden. "Let's go that way!"

"Is that really where you think Willow is?" Ford asked flatly

Dawn hesitated. "Willow could be that way..."

"Come on," Ford said. "Let's get out of here and look somewhere else."

Dawn pouted. "But I want to see what's there."

Ford rubbed his forehead. He was tempted to just turn back and leave Dawn to her own devices. It wasn't like he'd be that much worse off wandering at random. Dawn clearly had more enthusiasm than knowledge about finding her way around. By the same token, though, maybe he shouldn't leave her alone.

"I'm going to regret this," Ford muttered. "Fine! Lead the way."

Nodding energetically, Dawn jumped back to the ground, and Ford followed after.

The two of them edged around a ring of tall stalks that each seemed to be made up of dozens of shiny black hands, sticking out from branching elbows. In the center of the ring, a white ball that looked like a literal sponge sat atop a slender black stem on a ring of shiny black breasts. Handy Ejaculator.

One of the stalks bent over, its shiny hands making a grab for Dawn, but Ford pulled her out of the way just in time. Dawn took the near miss and last-minute rescue in stride.

Reaching the next boundary, Ford looked up at the white arches made out of life-size figures. Comparing it to the previous boundary, he couldn't help but notice that here the depicted orgy was... kinkier.

Beyond the boundary, the tall squishy grass gave way to a floor of tangled fleshy strands, mottled blue green brown and uneven, and not quite comparable to anything Ford knew. The simulated sunlight was reduced to a twilight, and the trees looked more like giant glowing mushrooms with sexually suggestive growths than trees.

Dawn looked ahead with wide eyes. "Ooh. Pretty."

"That... is debatable," Ford muttered.

As they went through the orgy-arch, Ford was at least glad that Dawn was staying close rather than running around like a caffeinated puppy, even if she was looking all around more than watching where she was going.

The first eromorph they encountered was called a, Gelatomb. This one looked like little more than a ten-foot cube had been cut out of the ground and replaced with green jello.

After that they came across the, Thirsting Sucktacles, which were a lighter blue than their servile counterparts. The lighter shade was due to its flesh being translucent, Ford saw, and these mouthed tentacles seemed to be centered around a deflated fluid sac.

Avoiding those, Ford came within inches of stepping on an inconspicuous lure trailing out of a wide fleshy funnel that was sunk into the ground behind them. From the sticky lure, a slender tentacle stretched back down into the mouth of the funnel, which looked very slippery. Constrictor Burrow.

Heart thundering at the unexpected close call, Ford flinched away, pushing Dawn towards safer ground. He took a deep breath to calm down.

After making their way around a deceptively innocuous-looking hemispherical offwhite mound covered in little round pores that produced long wet tendrils resembling beads on a string, the white arch of the next boundary came into view in the distance.

Unfortunately, between them and the arches was a refreshingly straightforward cluster of green tentacles that ended in a penis with an orange head. Dawn stopped and stared intently at the, Bukkake Harmony.

"Dawn, no!" Ford tried, but she was already running eagerly.

Ford leaped over a fungal root and dove through the air to get in front of Dawn, but she happened to zig and Ford overshot, sliding to a stop far too close to another eromorph.

It looked kind of like a red sunflower, if you replaced the petals with little tongues, and replaced the center of the flower with a gaping wet clitless vagina that pulsed open and closed Prehensile green vines snaked forward from the thick stem, snaring his thighs and coiling down his legs. Ford was not reassured by the eromorph's name. Voracious Cumdrinker.

"Damn it," Ford complained.

The pulsing orifice homed in on Ford's cock, sucking his length into the bell of the flower. Ford yelped and groaned as the rapidly pumping eromorph milked his penis, slapping wetly against his pelvis with each stroke. Ford had to admit that it did feel really good, but it was going to force him to cum very quickly, and somehow Ford didn't think it was going to stop when it did.

A muffled cry of pleasure made Ford glance over his shoulder.

It was like a scene right out of a hentai. Dawn was suspended in a swarm of phallic tentacles, her head thrown back in rapture as she was vigorously triple-penetrated.

That suddenly wasn't important, though, because Ford had just felt something wet and warm prod him behind his testicles. He looked down and saw that the Voracious Cumdrinker had extended a thick prehensile limb up between his bound legs from its base, that ended in an anal-bead-shaped phallus.

Ford's eyes bugged out. "Oh fuck no! No way! Not cool! N - eeeaaaaaah!"

---

Daniel Osbourne, better known as Oz, studied himself in his bathroom mirror with a frown.

Ever since halloween, he hadn't been able to shake the feeling that his body was all wrong. He was fair-skinned and lean, a compact fitness on a petite frame, and that much felt right at least, but...

Oz picked up the stoppered vial of metal shavings he'd been carrying around for weeks. Getting exactly the right alloys had been easy, thanks to the internet. It was spooky enough that he even knew what the correct alloys were, but if he drank the vial, he wasn't sure what would happen or even what he wanted to happen. He was procrastinating something fierce, he knew.

The doorbell rang, pulling Oz from his thoughts.

Shaking his head, Oz grabbed a towel and quickly dried his dyed-black hair. He grabbed his clean clothes and dressed in a t-shirt and jeans, finishing just as the doorbell rang again.

Oz went to answer the door, and was pleasantly surprised to find Willow waiting on his doorstep. Oz allowed himself a moment to let his eyes wander, raising an eyebrow partly in appreciation and partly in curiosity. Willow was wearing a dark green hoodie, unzipped just enough to show the edges of her breasts, and it at leastlooked like it was the only thing she was wearing.

"Hi Oz," Willow greeted with a perky little wave. "Can I come in?"

"Uh, yeah," Oz said, stepping aside to let her in and closing the door behind her. "So what's up?"

"Well, your mom's gone on a photography gig, right?" Willow asked. "I thought you might like some company. Maybe even my company? Specifically?"

"I wouldn't turn it down," Oz remarked with a slight smile.

Willow smiled brightly, making Oz feel a pang at her cuteness. "You're not busy or anything?"

Oz shook his head and regarded Willow's bare legs. "Aren't your feet cold?"

Willow glanced down and chuckled nervously. "About that..."

"Willow, are you okay?" Oz asked.

"Huh?" Willow blinked. "Oh. Yeah! Yeah. I kinda, um, don't get cold anymore. Not since halloween."

Oz stared in surprise. "Halloween, huh? Hey, did you happen to see people turning into their costumes?"

"Yeah," Willow confirmed without hesitation. "That's what happened. There was this guy, Ethan, and he enchanted all the costumes in his shop with chaos magic."

That's where Oz had bought the mistcloak for his costume, and if it was true it would actually explain why he remember being Vin Venture for several hours. "Magic?"

"I know it's hard to believe," Willow began, twiddling her thumbs.

Oz stopped her by clasping her hands. "Actually it explains a lot. I've been wondering what happened ever since that night. You know, it's weird, remembering a fantasy character's life, like it was real. I thought I might be kinda crazy."

Willow shook her head, clasping his hands and moving in close. "It happened to a bunch of people. Me and Buffy and Xander, it changed us in a pretty big way... hey, who did you dress up as?"

Oz stepped back and scratched his head. "I just saw the mistcloak and thought it looked cool, y'know, but I remember being Vin Venture."

"Ohhh, Mistborn!" Willow bounced. "I loved that anime, and hey I just realized I don't have to wait for the fourth season to be regionalized because I'm all with the multilingual goodness - wait, you were Vin? Can you still do allomancy?"

Oz had to smile. Enthusiastic Willow was just so cute! He really wanted to kiss her just then, but to his surprise he didn't want to avoid talking about his halloween experience.

"I sorta haven't gotten around to checking," Oz admitted as he took a seat on the nearby sofa.

Willow surprised him by sliding onto his lap, her lower back against the armrest and her bare legs draped over him. "I bet you can... or wait, during the spell was it Vin in your body or did you change into her body?"

"Um, I changed," he admitted distractedly.

Oz was somewhat nonplussed by Willow's forwardness. He'd caught a glimpse down her sweatshirt as she sat down, and a glimpse up her sweatshirt as she'd settled on his lap. She wasn't wearing anything under the green hoodie, and Oz was wondering why.

"Oh," Willow said. "And you changed back, obviously, so I don't know... but um, that's actually something I wanted to talk to you about."

Oz looked at her questioningly.

"Where to start..." Willow sighed. "Well, my costume turned me into a person named Eelesia Rin. Her kind call themselves Fae, and she lived in a distant future where the line between technology and biology had long-since vanished. The way people lived in that world, it's nothing like the way people live today, because Fae don't get hurt or sick or tired. And it opened my eyes, really opened my eyes to the fact that there's nothing special about the way people live in today's world... I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me start over."

"Alright," Oz agreed.

"Okay, so, I'm not sure why, but when me and Buffy and Xander changed back after the spell ended, we didn't actually change back," Willow told him. "I don't just remember being Eelesia. I still have her body, and the only reason I look like me again is because Fae can choose the way they look. I'm Fae now, for real, so it's because of that I can... wait, let me start again."

Oz smiled at her. "You're very cute when you babble."

Willow grinned bashfully. "I have a point, I promise."

Oz nodded. "I figured."

Willow was quiet for a while. "So the thing is, we like each other. We've got the sexy-wants for each other, and we seem to get along, which is totally of the good. If we were both normal teenagers we could be a couple and that would be that."

Oz looked at her curiously. It was true that he wanted to be Willow's boyfriend, and she'd mostly been less than subtle about returning his interest. It sounded like she was backpeddling because she'd been changed by halloween and didn't know if he'd be okay with her differences.

"We could be a couple," Oz pointed out. "So you're a Fae. It's completely possible that I'm a mistborn."

Strangely, Willow winced. "If we do, though, there is going to be some big time culture shock, Oz. Eelesia's life has majorly changed what a relationship means to me, and there are some serious and irreconcilable differences between my lifestyle and your idea of couplehood. I like you, Oz, and it would be nice to have you in my life, but you deserve to know what you're getting yourself into."

"Alright," Oz said.

"Um... do you know what polyamory is?" Willow asked.

Oz's first thought was that it was what it was called when someone married more than one person, but no, that was polygamy. He shook his head.

"It's the idea that people can have more than one genuine and sincere romantic relationship at a time, because being intimate with someone doesn't automatically mean you own their sexuality," Willow explained. "It's the idea that intimate exclusivity creates more problems than it solves, and should be rejected on principle."

Oh. So he'd been close. "Huh. So, you're..."

"I'm not polyamorous," Willow told him, "but I am... well, there isn't a word for it. Fae don't categorize relationships in at all the same way. But exclusivity isn't even a consideration."

Oz leaned away from her to get a better look at her face. "You mean, if I want to date you, I'll have to share you?"

"I wouldn't put it that way," Willow said with a cute little frown, "but would you be okay with that?"

Oz considered. Was he okay with sharing Willow? At first blush he didn't like the idea, but he felt like he might be able to accept it, depending on the circumstances. He really hadn't seen this coming, so he'd never even thought about it before.

"I don't know," Oz told her. "Y'know, this totally blows away my image of you."

"Oh." Willow fiddled with the hem of her sweatshirt. "Sorry. Do you want me to go?"

Oz slowly shook his head. "No. I'm just not sure how I feel about it. Who'd I be sharing you with anyway?"

"With my other friends, which right now just means Xander and Buffy. And you really shouldn't call it sharing," Willow complained. "It sets the wrong precedent."

Oz raised an eyebrow at her including Buffy, but let it pass with a mental shrug. "What do you call it?"

"I don't have a word for it," Willow said. "I just... have sex with all my friends. It's normal for Fae. It's so normal that not having sex with my friends would be like going to some wacky alternate reality where everybody uses sign language because you're supposed to let only your closest lover hear your voice, or something."

Oz stared. He hadn't been expecting that. Although, the voice analogy would almost make sense if he wasn't having such a hard time imagining that sex could ever be that much of a non-event to her... Okay, so this is what she meant by culture shock. Understatement.

"I think I get it," Oz told her.

"You do?" Willow asked, looking so hopeful that Oz had another cute-pang.

"Yeah," Oz said thoughtfully. "Asking you to be my girlfriend, y'know, in the couple way... It's the same way I would feel if you asked me to play only for you and never let anyone else hear my music."

Willow smiled at him. "I'm not sure that's quite the same, but its at least as good as my voice analogy. I bet your urge to play music is stronger than your urge to talk with out-loud words."

"Sucker bet," Oz commented with a slight smirk.

Willow twisted forward and hugged him. "Does that mean you still want me?"

Oz considered. "It's all kinda weird, y'know? But kinda fascinating too. And I think I want you more than I want you all to myself."

"Nifty," Willow said happily.

Maybe once he saw her with someone else, or once he just didn't have her beaming at him from his lap, he'd change his mind. But looking into Willow's eyes, he did want to be with her more than he wanted to be with her on his terms.

Oz closed the gap between their lips, and then his brain shut down, because Willow was a very very good kisser.

A good while later, Oz finally came up for air. He shared a smile with Willow, who didn't seem out of breath at all.

Willow grabbed the zipper on her hoodie and pulled it down until the front was completely open, exposing her gorgeous bare breasts. Oz let out a soft breath of appreciation, but as Willow slid off his lap, her curvaceous feminine form exposed to his eyes, he was hit by a sudden and intense envy.

Oz stopped her as she unbuttoned his jeans. "Wait, Willow."

"What is it?" Willow asked.

Oz pushed her hands away from his pants and clasped them in his own. "I... I think I need some time to... absorb. A couple days to get used to the idea, y'know? Find the right frame of mind."

"Oh," Willow replied sheepishly, putting her chin on his knee. "Are you sure?"

Oz nodded. "See you at school?"

Willow stood up and pulled him to his feet. "See you at school."

Her sweatshirt was still wide open, giving him an unimpeded full frontal. He had to admit, if she hadn't chosen to wear that at random, she had him pegged. He didn't think he could imagine a more attractive sight than her standing there in nothing but the unzipped dark green sweatshirt. He spared a moment to take it in, even if desire for her body was fighting with envy for space in his head.

He really needed some time to himself to sort out how he felt.

Oz closed in and kissed her again. Her lips were warm and soft, her tongue teasing and nimble. Her body pressed against him invitingly as he held her in his arms. He lingered at Willow's lips for a long moment, until finally they parted.

Zipping up her hoodie, Willow went to the door and gave him a little parting wave. And then she was gone.

Oz ran a hand through his hair.

After a few minutes of just staring after Willow at nothing in particular, Oz turned and pulled out the vial of metal shavings. First thing's first. No more putting it off. Oz uncapped the vile and downed the contents.

Oz took a shaking breath, reaching... and a gentle burning warmth lit up in his stomach. The world around him sharpened to many times its previous clarity as power flooded his limbs and every piece of metal in a hundred yards of him was mentally highlighted in ghostly blue threads stretching back to his body.

Oz started to grin, but it faltered almost immediately. It suddenly felt like ants were crawling over every inch of him and inside him too. He flinched, but it was over in seconds.

His clothes felt like they'd been resized or recut or something, but when he looked down his eyes went wide in shock. Oz very calmly strode straight to the nearest mirror and looked at his reflection.

Vin.

For the first heartbeat, Oz felt nothing but elation, but after a couple of seconds that elation was warring with dismay. He checked under his clothes to be sure, and yes, he was... she was completely transformed.

Oz stared for quite a while, paralyzed between two opposing gut reactions to having a girl's body again.

Belatedly, Oz extinguished his metals. The feeling of ants crawling through his flesh came again, and this time Oz saw it happen as his face rippled, returning him to his male form in just under two seconds.

Oz quirked an eyebrow. "Huh."

---

Meanwhile, after Willow-para had gone to visit Oz, Willow-icos had beamed back up to the Eliezera to do some more landscaping for Venus. As she arrived and her Dreamlink latency dropped to microseconds, she delved into the Giaa's systems. Her mind flashed down logic and sensory paths, checking on various things.

Including Ford's birthing pod.

"Oh hey, Ford's awake," Willow noted. "Now where'd he go?"

Mentally tracing the remembered paths through the Giaa - perfect memory was soawesome - Willow quickly located the newly reborn young man. She blinked. Well there he was, and Dawn as well.

"Oh... dear," Willow winced.

Those were third-tier eromorphs, and it didn't look like either of them were going to figure out the puzzle any time soon. How in Sol had Ford and Dawn ended up in the Rape Garden of all places?

Willow overrode the Voracious Cumdrinker and the Bukkake Harmony, triggering their victory conditions, and beamed the two of them back to the meadow once the eromorphs released them.

Flying down the tree-passage, Willow bounced off the adiposal cushion in the hollow of the tree and landed on her feet.

Out on the grass, she found Ford curled up on his side next to a spread-eagle Dawn who was flat on her back with a loopy smile on her face.

"Hi guys," Willow greeted. "And welcome back to the land of the living, Ford."

Ford teetered up into a sitting position without unscrunching, and glared at Willow. "What the hell do you even have a place like that for?!"

---

Ford was sulking.

It was partly his own fault. He should have run away like his chastity depended on it the moment he heard the words, Rape Garden. Unfortunately, he'd followed Dawn like an idiot, which of course meant that nothing less than a stupid flower had ass-raped him and made him like it.

That wasn't why he was sulking, though. It was his stupid infallible memory, making it impossible to convince himself it had been a horrible experience. The fact was he'd never felt pleasure like that before. Hell, he didn't even know pleasure that intense was possible.

Ford burned with humiliation.

This was still better than the cancer, though. Much, much, much better than that.

Jolted out of his sulk by the truth of that thought, Ford stood up, drifted weightlessly to the nearest tree, and promptly started beating his head against it. He was invulnerable now, right? That was part of the deal. He could smash his head into hard surfaces as much as he wanted.

"You want to talk about it?" Willow asked, perching on a root of the small tree.

Naked Willow. A much more interesting sight when his head wasn't in splitting agony, which it wasn't and would never be again. Naked Willow, who'd chosen to construct a Rape Garden in the first place, and who'd left him to stumble into it. Naked Willow, who was sitting there smirking at him when this was All Her Fault.

His burning humiliation erupted into outright anger, and he lunged at Willow.

Willow squeaked in surprise as Ford collided with her, bearing her down to the grass. He overpowered her, pinning her face-down with her arms behind her back, weighing her down because Fae simulated gravity individually and he could weigh as much as he wanted.

They'd see how she liked being raped up the ass! Ford aimed his wet cock and rammed it into her tighter hole. Willow jerked in his grip, yelping as he forced his way through her pucker and deep inside.

Willow writhed and whimpered as Ford's hips smacked her butt. Growling, he violated her ass mercilessly, moving his body as fast and as hard as he could until he finally hilted himself in her backdoor and filled her with his cum.

His breath hissed through his teeth, his body unmoving on top of Willow. Slowly, a cold pit started to form in his gut as he realized what he'd let himself do, but before he could panic properly...

"Feel better now?"

...Willow looked at him over her shoulder, and gave him a small sad smile.

Ford wrenched himself away from her. "I'm... I'm sorry."

Willow flowed gracefully to her feet. "It's alright, Ford. In fact, out of all the people in the world right at this moment, I'm probably the best choice you could have done that to."

"Really," Ford mumbled weakly.

Willow tapped her chin thoughtfully. "Well, Dawn probably wouldn't have minded, but she probably wouldn't have understood either."

Ford recalled his last sight of Dawn in the Rape Garden, his tone going wry at the surrealness of the conversation. "I'd think she's had enough already..."

Willow giggled. "She was caught in the Bukkake Harmony. That one only stops if you make all three penetrating tentacles cum at the same time. Yours would only have let you go if you ejaculated more than a set amount within a ten minute period. How the frilly heck did you two end up so far in, anyway?"

"We were looking for you," Ford said quietly. "Dawn kept leading the way, even when she didn't know where she was going. I... you're okay? For real? I don't know why I let myself do that..."

"I'm fine," Willow assured him. "I don't think it's actually physically possible to hurt me with a penis."

Ford blinked. "Really."

Willow nodded and patted him on the shoulder. "Really. You should work on your impulse control, though. It could be really bad if you cracked like that around a human, or even someone like you who's recently upgraded."

Ford winced, grunting in agreement. "I still don't get why you even have a Rape Garden."

Willow shrugged. "It just didn't seem like a big deal. Hey, at least you didn't stumble into the Predator Valley."

"Predator Valley?" Ford choked.

Willow nodded. "Well, I figured since Buffy's a slayer, if she ever has to spend a long time up here, she'd need an outlet." Willow chuckled weakly. "It's a good thing you didn't end up there. I stocked it with only the most vicious and powerful hunters, 'cause most of the catalog would be way too easy for a slayer... So, at least you didn't spend your first day as a Fae stuck in something's stomach!"

Ford could almost feel the sweatdrop.

"I mean, you couldn't actually get hurt, but getting chewed up and swallowed is still the kinda fun that's not," Willow went on, then added conscientiously, "for most people, anyway."

"Um," Ford said.

"So..." Willow began after a short silence. "Wanna go say hi to Buffy? I can beam you down whenever you want."

"Um," Ford said again, though in a different tone. "Can I stay here for a while? I'm... not feeling very good about myself right now."

Willow nodded understandingly. "Sure. And oh! Let me show you how to use the Dreamlink, so you can message me when you're ready."

"The Dreamlink?" Ford asked.

"Yeah, it's like an internet connection built into your brain," Willow explained. "It should feel kind of like remembering, but separate, like from a different direction..."

---

"Dad! I'm going out!" Cordelia called. "I'll be back in three weeks!"

"Have fun, sweetheart!" her dad replied.

Cordelia rolled her eyes and hauled her suitcase out to her car. The luggage was just for show, but that didn't make it any easier to lift. Thankfully, she didn't have to. Xander was waiting for her, dressed in that crazy torso-baring outfit that she'd never admit looked awesome on him.

"That's it?" Xander deadpanned as he took the suitcase and put it in the trunk. "Wow."

"Shut up, at least my dad's sober," Cordelia snapped.

"At least my dad has an excuse," Xander shot back.

Cordelia slid into the drivers seat and started the engine. Xander vaulted into the passenger seat.

"Maybe I should drive?" Xander suggested. "I'm the one who knows where we're going."

"It's out in the middle of nowhere," Cordelia refuted. "There's like, only one road."

They pulled out of the driveway and drove off into the evening.

"So what'd you come up with for a cover story? How are you getting out of school for three weeks?" Xander asked, his curiosity getting the better of him.

Cordelia smiled smugly, and began relating a convoluted tale of half-truths, manipulation, bribery, and blackmail. Xander was impressed despite himself.

It took about twenty minutes on a two-lane desert road to get to the cave Xander had picked out in advance. There was a birthing pod ready and waiting, along with a folding table and a tarp for Cordelia's car.

She pulled inside the cave and put it in park, staring for a moment as her car's headlights illuminated the birthing pod.

"Creepy," Cordelia opined as she shut off the engine.

"Changing your mind?" Xander inquired.

Cordelia sniffed. "Not a chance."

---

(AN: Huh. You know, I think this chapter was the first time I've ever done a fourth-wall joke, in like, ever. Also, writing Oz is hard. Writing gender-confused mistborn Oz is harder. What have I got myself into... So I looked around, but I couldn't find anything on Oz's parents, so I decided to have his dad a casualty of Sunnydale and his mom a traveling photographer.)

(Mistborn belongs to Brandon Sanderson and in real life it is an american fantasy novel, not an anime. Even if it would be totally awesome as an anime. Several of the eromorphs were inspired by the works of Marjorie Baldwin Greene, check her out.)