Summary: One of Xander's extended relations come for a visit. Unfortunately.
Crossover: D&D
Disclaimer: Hell yeah I don't own this!
Feedback: Please.
Pre-fic Comments
Tried writing this in MS Word. It kept bitching at me every single sentence, it kept using fancy characters...
Xander stood, arms akimbo, in the middle of the plot-less clearing in the middle of the Happy Rest cemetery. It was about thirty meters in diameter. His ancestor had scorched a huge triangle into the grass that reached to the tips of the clearing.
"I'm not going to," Xander shouted. "You can't make me!"
The small points of light in the lich's eye sockets burned all the fiercer. "Care to make a bet on that!"
The lich looked around to make sure that Willow was still getting some candles from her house, and then levelled both arms at Xander. A beam of purple energy shot from the desiccated bones at Xander's head, then disappeared.
"What... what the hell?," Xander asked.
"A small attitude adjustment," the lich said firmly. "Now. Stand over there."
"Why?," Xander asked as he stood at a point of the triangle.
"We only have three casters, so we can only have three points," the lich explained absently. "Oh, good, here comes your friend with the candles."
"Here you go," Willow said, handing the box of candles and a box of matches to the lich. "What do we do with them?"
The lich put a candle at each point of the triangle, lighting each as he put it down. He let it drip upside down, then put the base of the candle on the solidifying wax. "Sit at your points, Xander, Willow."
"You know, the whole graveyard thing doesn't really do anything for me," Xander said nervously.
"There's a lot of energy here," the lich said absently. "No souls holding that energy back, either. Vampires have no energy of their own, you see, since when they rise, the demon leaves the necromantic energy behind, since it causes decay in animated tissue."
"Oh, cool," Willow said. "What do we do now?"
"Stare at the flame," the lich said in a monotonic voice. "Look at it. Feed your emotions into it. Empty your mind. Stare at the flame."
The two teenagers obediently did so, then the undead lich took control of their minds.
Giles spat his tea across the desk as he felt a huge discharge of energy. Luckily, he had not been working on anything and the only casualty was the finish. He put the cup down on the desk hurriedly, then ran out of the library, in search of his car.
Something big was going down. That wasn't a good thing, in Sunnydale.
The Mayor looked out the window of his limousine across the Happy Rest cemetery. A huge triangular tower had emerged, seemingly from the ground. It was made of black iron, rising high into the sky.
The chauffer opened the door for him, and he got out, walking through the entrance of the cemetery. Darn it, whoever had erected it had used all that lovely energy that he had had lying around for his Ascension. He walked to about ten meters away from the Gate to the wall surrounding the tower, then stopped.
"I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to ask you to destroy this," he said politely. "You're violating quite a few zoning regulations, I'm afraid. And living in a graveyard can't be hygienic at all."
"I can't do that," a sepulchral voice said. The Mayor swore internally for once as a lich in flowing robes walked out onto a balcony above the Gate. "You see, I have things I must do, and I need my Tower to accomplish them."
The Mayor continued to swear internally. He did /not/ need a Lich around this close to his ascension. "Maybe we could come to some agreement?"
A hollow laugh emerged from the dead thing leaning on the balustrade above him. "You have nothing I want or need. Leave. Now."
The sound of another car pulling up outside the cemetery did not improve the Mayor's mental state any. Granted, the tower could be seen from all of Sunnydale, but he had hoped to sort this mess out before someone actually came to investigate. With any luck, it would be the police, and he could gag them.
"Ripper!," the lich said, voice managing to sound joyful. "Come in, Ripper."
"I am no longer... that man," Giles said, as he walked past the Mayor. "Where is Xander and Willow?"
The lich shrugged. "The girl wanted to look at my library, and Xander wanted to explore."
The doors opened, and Giles walked through. The Mayor was about to follow, when he noticed the gargoyles perched on the corners of the tower. He wasn't fool enough to try to take on a high-level mage like a lich /and/ a troop of gargoyles at once.
The heavy Gate shut itself with a final clang as the two doors met in the middle. The lich disappeared from the balcony in an obvious dismissal.
The Mayor went back to his limousine, inwardly fuming but outwardly smiling.