"Imposter?" Xander asked, surprised to see the pair and wondering how they'd gotten there.
"What exactly do you think we are doing?" Dawn asked curiously.
"Don't make me say it, desu!" Suiseiseki moaned out, pulling her bonnet down over her face, looking completely out of place in her Victorian era green dress in the middle of the desert.
"Forget that, why did you yell 'imposter?" Xander asked as he let Dawn's hands go and propped himself up, Dawn sliding down to sit in his lap.
"Because you're pretending to be Father," Souseiseki offered, not sounding all that certain. She was the younger of the twins and dressed in a royal blue Victorian outfit that was a more masculine form of her sister's green dress, the bottom half having been hemmed to look like baggy pantaloons.
"I'm in no way pretending to be Rozen," Xander assured them.
Suiseiseki peeked out from under her bonnet and relaxed as she saw how they were sitting. "B-but you feel like him and Suiseiseki remembers being her… kinda," the shy brunette doll said.
"That wasn't us, that was someone else messing with things," Dawn told them, "and when Buffy finds him she is going to have words with his kneecaps."
"How do you talk with someone's kneecaps?" Souseiseki asked, tilting her head in a way Xander found adorable.
"Buffy meant she was going to break his kneecaps for turning me into a doll," Dawn explained.
"You were really a human… Suiseiskei wasn't just dreaming it, desu?" Suiseiskei asked in wonder.
"Yep and we're working on fixing that," Dawn said firmly.
"You can't have our Rosa Mystica!" Suiseiseki exclaimed, manifesting her gardening can while her sister manifested a large pair of golden shears nearly half her size.
"I'm not a Rozen Maiden, they wouldn't work for me, and I don't need them!" Dawn quickly exclaimed, climbing to her feet so she could defend Xander if they attacked.
"Dawn was human already," Xander said, "so her soul is already well on its way to turning her human once more, we're just speeding things up and your Rosa Mystica wouldn't help with that." He climbed to his feet and removed his ski mask. "Man, it is hot out here."
"Oh," Suiseiskei said, tilting her can to pour water into the sand. "Suiseiskei is glad to hear that, Suiseiskei hates having to fight, desu."
"You fight with Hinaichigo and Master all the time," Souseiseki pointed out, resting her shears on her shoulder.
"They're twerps and they need to know that," her sister said firmly as a pool of water began to form in front of them from the never ending stream of water she was pouring out, "Suiseiskei means she doesn't want to have to hurt anyone, desu."
"What are you doing?" Dawn asked.
"Suiseiskei is going to make an oasis," Suiseiskei replied, "so we have some shade."
"Can you do that?" Dawn asked, pulling up her mask.
She shrugged. "Deserts have oasis' so Suiseiskei doesn't see why not, desu."
"How can you make Dawn human?" Souseiseki asked politely as the two stepped around the rapidly growing pool of water to join them.
"I'm going to mine The Dreamlands for powerful components that can guide Dawn's soul back to how it was before she was enspelled," Xander explained.
"Suiseiskei doesn't suppose that would work for us?" Suiseiskei asked hopefully.
"No… or rather not to the same extent," Xander said with a frown as he considered it. "Dawn was human before, so this will just guide the energies in the appropriate direction and she'll resist the influence of the source of the materials, while The Maidens would find it shaping them as they grew."
"Flowers can still reach a full and healthy growth on a trellis," she argued eagerly.
"But the path they'd take would be completely different than the one they'd take from allowing them to grow naturally," Xander said with a frown, thinking that his opinion wasn't completely correct.
"Not completely," Dawn said. "Flowers rise up and turn to follow the sun naturally, a trellis helps them grow higher faster, but they develop mainly the same."
"I suppose a loose enough framework, something that could barely be called a trellis, could… assist without influencing their growth too much," Xander conceded.
"Really?!" Suiseiskei asked excitedly.
"Sure," Xander agreed, "a well carved petal to add to your Rosa Mystica would help speed up your evolution without influencing you too much."
"You can really do that?" Souseiseki asked softly.
"The spell that turned Dawn into Suiseiskei for the night, turned me into Father," Xander explained. "I turned back into myself when the spell was broken, but I still remember what to do. Carving a simple petal is a lot easier than creating a Rosa Mystica."
Suiseiskei stopped pouring water, having created a large pool and getsured while humming something under her breath causing palm trees to sprout around them and grass to grow up around the pool. "There we go, shade, desu!" she said smugly.
"That's pretty amazing," Dawn said, "I almost regret not having a watering can now."
"What do you have?" she asked curiously.
"Gardening trowel," Dawn replied, manifesting her tool. "I can alter how the soul is sitting so it fits better."
"That's amazing," Suiseiskei said with a smile as she looked it over. "You'll be able to help a lot of people with that, desu!"
"Halt, villains!" a young teen yelled as he charged out of nowhere and tripped in the sand, tumbling down a dune, his feet tangling in his wooden sword, the pot he was wearing on his head falling over his face.
"Jun, you were supposed to wait for us!" a doll with long blonde hair in two pigtails dressed in a red dress and bonnet chided him as she too leapt out of nowhere and helped him to his feet.
"Wait for Hina!" a small blonde doll dressed in a pink dress exclaimed landing in the sand face first as she fell out of thin air.
"Master!" Souseiseki called out, her shears vanishing as she rushed over to help the dark haired teen to his feet.
"Sand! I hate sand!" the teen said as he spit sand out of his mouth and adjusted his cooking pot helmet before adjusting his glasses and searching for his wooden sword.
"Jun, you have to be more careful," Shinku lectured him, looking relieved that he was okay and trying to cover it up. She adjusted her bonnet and looked around. "What is going on here?" she demanded.
"Nothing much," Xander said with a shrug, deciding to overwhelm them with information to make them stop and think rather than just jump into the fight they seemed to be looking for. "Me and Dawn are planning to search through that sandstorm over there to locate the fading shade of my ex girlfriend who was an Incan princess and use the power of her sacrifice to fill one of Dawn's chakra points to reduce the amount of time needed before she becomes human again."
"Don't forget us!" Suiseiskei chided him.
"Oh, and I'm also going to use it to create a pair of petals for the sisters to add to their Rosa Mystica to speed up their own development," Xander added cheerfully.
"Hinaichigo is confused," the youngest doll complained.
"You aren't the only one," Jun said, resting his bokken on his shoulder.
"I think… we need more of an explanation to understand your explanation," Shinku offered.
"Oh," Xander said, pretending to be surprised. "Well, just recently me and Dawn went trick or treating for halloween and an evil mage cast a spell turning us into our costumes. Dawn went as the beautiful and charming Suiseiskei while I dressed as a doll maker by the name of Rozen."
Suiseiskei beamed at her description, making Dawn giggle as Jun possessively stepped closer to the green clad doll.
"You became Father?" Hinaichigo asked, wide eyed.
"For the night," Xander agreed. "Thankfully Rozen was kind enough to guard my friends until the spell was broken and we were returned to normal."
"Mostly," Dawn interjected.
"Mostly," Xander agreed, taking Dawn's hand. "Fortunately Dawn wasn't turned into a simple doll, but a Rozen Maiden, which meant she would eventually become human again. Since she was human to start with she should evolve rapidly, becoming human in just a couple of decades, but she doesn't want to wait that long-"
"And that's when you decided to hunt down all the girls' Rosa Mystica!" Jun accused, pointing at them with his bokken, the sun glinting off his glasses like an anime hero.
"Nope," Xander said calmly and waited for the teen to calm down.
"Are you going to continue?" Dawn asked after a few seconds of silence.
"I figured I'd let people get their ridiculous accusations out of the way first," Xander told her.
"It's not ridiculous," Jun complained, "we had to fight a fake maiden just a few months ago!"
"And while that sucks, it has nothing to do with us or what we're doing here," Xander said. "We are mining The Dreamland for what we need to restore Dawn, not chasing down Rosa Mystica which wouldn't be of any use."
"Oh," Jun said, lowering his bokken to the sand and leaning on it. "Why wouldn't they be useful?"
"Dawn's not actually one of Rozen's creations, so collecting the girls' Rosa Mystica would just cause her to break down, as you've already seen," Xander explained. "Anyway, if I collect the right energies and shape them the right way, I can cause Dawn's soul to blossom back into womanhood right now, instead of a decade or two, as it would if left alone."
Dawn sighed as the girls blushed and giggled, with Jun looking heavily embarrassed. "Did you have to describe it that way?" she asked, rolling her eyes.
"Would that work for us?" Shinku asked eagerly.
"Not and become you," Xander said with a frown. "Dawn's growth has already been accomplished, so this will just restore it… for the most part. The best I can do for you is to give you a petal of the energy to add to your Rosa Mystica as a loose guide to assist your growth. You want to become more you, not someone else," he explained, having a hard time finding the right words, as no human language was really designed for this discussion. He blinked as he realized they had all been speaking Japanese before shrugging it off as unimportant.
"I thought they had to gather all the Rosa Mystica," Jun said with a frown.
"That was only one path to becoming The Alice," Shinku said, "one we have agreed not to travel."
"Natural growth is another path, it just takes longer," Xander said. "Anyway, we have no interest in harming any of you, we are here to help Dawn."
"He's a very forceful contractor," Shinku complimented Dawn. "You should try and be more like him," she told Jun who frowned at her words and mumbled something under his breath about mouthy dolls, only to start dancing around on one foot when she smacked him in the shin with her cane.
"Hina thinks what you are looking for might be here," the smallest doll suggested shyly. "An oasis in the desert seems like the place where things would be."
"Suiseiskei created this oasis," the green clad doll said smugly, "it was just sand before, the only thing around here is that sandstorm."
"Oh," she said, embarrassed.
"It was a good guess," Xander encouraged her, not wanting to hurt her feelings. "I know if I'd seen an oasis out here it's the first place I would have looked."
"It was a decent guess… for a twerp," Suiseiskei encouraged her, in her own unique way.
"It's been nice meeting you all, but we have to get going, we have people waiting for us," Dawn said, not wanting to get drawn into their antics because it would add at least an hour to their mission and her mom was probably chewing her fingernails while she waited.
"We're coming with you," Shinku announced, causing the others to stop their petty bickering.
"We are?" Jun asked.
"They need to get things done quickly and it'll go much faster with us all working together," she said firmly.
Dawn and Xander exchanged glances and shrugged.
Jun looked over at the massive tornado of sand. "Sand is going to get everywhere," he muttered. "Everyone is going to need a ride in the washing machine after this."
Dawn met Xander's gaze. "Don't even think it! I'm hand wash only," she told him firmly.
Beta by: Mist of Shadows/Rainbows
