"Wake up, he's coming out," Willow whispered, before reaching into the backseat and shaking Buffy's shoulder.
Buffy and Cordelia woke up and quickly separated, as sometime during the night one of them had fallen onto the other and they'd ended up snuggling.
Pretending that hadn't happened, they straightened their clothes and turned their attention to the front door of Sarah's house where she was kissing a tired but happy looking Xander Harris, as a car pulled into the drive.
"Your fee," Sarah said, handing Xander a wad of cash, extremely pleased with how things had gone.
"This one's on me," Xander disagreed, kissing the back of her hand while slipping the cash back into it. As he turned to leave, he found Sarah's parents standing behind him. Not missing a beat, he simply touched his brow, gave them a nod and stepped around them.
"I'm really trying not to jump to conclusions here," Joan said, as her husband, Craig, just stood there looking shocked.
Sarah racked her brain for an explanation that didn't involve vampires. "I was tired of being a virgin and I didn't want my first time to be with a pimply faced kid in some backseat," she said truthfully, if leaving out a rather large portion of the story.
"You hired a gigolo?!" Craig exclaimed after a moment of silence, as it became clear Sarah wasn't going to say anything more. Craig took a deep breath like he was about to yell, but paused as something occurred to him. "He gave the money back?"
"Yep," Sarah said smugly. She'd had quite a few insecurities about her looks before, but at the moment they meant nothing to her. Two of the top tier, most popular, most beautiful girls in school had paid a large sum of money on top of a threesome for his services, while she had gotten him all to herself and he'd decided that more than covered her debt!
"That's my girl!" Joan said, wrapping her daughter in a hug.
Craig bit his lips, conflicted about the whole situation, but found a response that would encourage his daughter and not get him in trouble with his wife, while demonstrating a bit of pride in her. "Fat and unattractive me ass," he said with a snort, showing what he thought of her earlier complaints about her looks as he entered the house.
"I knew it!" Cordelia exclaimed angrily. "He is a Gigolo!" They were too far away to catch more than a few words, but she'd heard enough.
"I… Yeah, it does looks that way," Buffy admitted with a sigh. She's been sure everything he'd done that night had been a con job to trick the vamp, including referring to the two girls in the alley as his meal ticket, but apparently he had been serious. He wasn't just saving a couple of girls, he was saving his clients!
The fledge wasn't even considered a factor in the three girls minds, since Xander had dealt with it almost as casually as Buffy would have, giving the impression that it was just an incidental interruption to the night's events and not the focus of them.
"Wait till I get my hands on him!" Cordelia growled out, climbing into the front seat and starting the car.
"Wait!" Willow exclaimed, not wanting to help Cordelia, but remembering how hurt Xander had been at the dance and not wanting to see him suffer through that again.
"What?!" Cordelia snapped out.
"He thinks you dumped him after he did all that stuff for you, not only dumped him, but humiliated him in front of everyone, that too of your own free will. Look at it from his point of view. If you want things to work out, you need to approach him while you're calm, preferably after you have Giles tell him about the spell," Willow explained.
Cordelia took a deep breath and sighed. "You're right, I can't get mad at him for what he doesn't know." Cordelia chuckled. "I don't think there's enough time in eternity for that."
Buffy placed a hand on Willow's shoulder and gave it a squeeze. She knew how hard it must have been for Willow to help Cordelia like that.
"Waffle house, my treat," Cordelia decided, feeling a little better.
0o0o0o0o0o0o0
"I found a copy!" Andrew told Jonathan excitedly as they met up at his place.
"Really? Where?" Jonathan asked.
"It was in a box of damaged books in the thrift shop," Andrew replied, pulling out a small leather book that had its leather cover lightly charred and stained with soot.
"Sure it's the right ones?" Jonathan asked, as he checked the interior and found that the pages were essentially undamaged.
"You can still feel the title on the spine, under all the ash," Andrew explained.
"This is so cool!" Jonathan said.
"Even better, I read a couple of pages," Andrew said.
"And?" Jonathan asked.
"It's not some stupid gesture and say the magic word book," Andrew said excitedly. "It's complicated, goes really in depth, and required actual thought."
Jonathan beamed and awkwardly exchanged high fives with Andrew. While the pair tended to argue about a lot of things, one of the things they had both agreed on was that if magic was real, it would take more than waving a gang sign and spouting a few random syllables to make it happen, it would take intelligence.
Andrew frowned. "Xander doesn't get the best grades and the jocks pick on him too. If he has magic and hunts vamps, why would he let all that happen?"
Jonathan froze. He'd never told Andrew about getting chained up by his teacher who'd turned into a giant insect. Xander had allowed himself to be captured to scope the place out and distract the creature until help arrived, so he was pretty sure of the answer, but was trying to figure out how to phrase it so Andrew would understand and not ask questions. "Did Peter Parker ever beat up Flash Thompson?" Jonathan said, calmly.
"No, that would… give away his secret identity," Andrew said in wonder. "He pretends to be your average student and class clown so no one suspects what he is!"
Jonathan considered that. "He's smarter than he lets on, but I think the clown part is all him, he's pretty funny."
"Definitely smarter than he lets on if he's reading that," Andrew said, gesturing to the book.
"Gotta be," Jonathan agreed.
0o0o0o0o0o0o0
Xander read the first page, then he read it again… then he retrieved a dictionary and read it a third time. "Talk about wordy," he said, shaking his head. "Pretty sure I could have explained all this in a third of the space they used," Xander mused.
Seeing an unused notebook nearby, he wrote out what he thought it should have said. Comparing the two he changed a few words on his summary to make it more accurate.
"Okay, half the space," he conceded, as he rewrote his version once more to make sure it explained things properly. "And mine is easier to understand," he said with a smirk.
Twenty minutes later…
Xander cursed aloud as he had to look up nearly half the words in a particular sentence and grumbled to himself as his 'translation' took up nearly half the page.
"Wish they had a 'for dummies' version," he said, as he re-read another sentence trying to puzzle out what the writer actually meant as opposed to what he had written, considering he had obscured it's meaning with unnecessary flowery phrases at one point and only revealed at the end of the paragraph that he believed the theory was incorrect and outlined why.
"If there's not a spell at the end of this book that allows you to resurrect the writer for the sole purpose of kicking him in the balls, I am going to be disappointed," Xander said.
0o0o0o0o0o0o0
"Am I interrupting anything?" Giles asked politely, as he entered Janna's classroom and saw she'd cleared a large space in the center of the room.
"Just preparing to renew my personal protections," Janna replied, surprised he'd sought her out and slightly hopeful that he might be there for personal reasons.
"Yes, the Hellmouth rather makes a mockery of those," Giles said. "Close proximity to the Hellmouth itself speeds up the natural erosion of such spells."
They stood in an awkward silence for a moment before Giles hit upon an idea of how to say what he felt without really saying it. "If you warded the room, since you spend the majority of your time here, it would extend the lifespan of your personal defenses by quite a bit."
"How long would a warded room this close to the Hellmouth actually last?" she wondered aloud.
"A week at best, possibly two on the outside," he admitted, "but I have some free time and would be willing to help."
Janna stilled as she realized what he was offering; helping another ward a personal space required a very… positive emotional connection. "I – I'd like that," she quickly said.
"What kind of warding would you like to use?" he asked.
Janna smirked, seized the opportunity to pick up where they'd left off and said, "Tantric." She froze as Giles turned back to the door and relaxed as he simply closed and locked it.
"I'm a bit out of practice," Giles admitted as he approached her. "I may not get it right on the first try."
Janna intertwined her fingers with his. "Well, we'll just have to practice then, won't we?"
0o0o0o0o0o0o0
"I can't believe Willy thought Xander had become a mercenary," Buffy said, shaking her head as she poured syrup on her waffles.
"I can't believe he actually became a gigolo," Willow said, meticulously cutting her blueberry pancakes in a perfect grid pattern.
"Still doesn't explain why he ran out of stakes," Cordelia pointed out, recalling Buffy harping on that point, as she cut off a bite sized section of pancake and ate it.
"Maybe he was… looking for clients and kept running into vamps?" Buffy guessed. "Dark alleys are where that sort of thing happens."
"I… That makes a disturbing amount of sense," Cordelia admitted. "It's one hell of an advertising gimmick too. He saves their life, they were looking for a quickie anyway…"
"It's unbelievably dangerous to do that," Buffy said before taking a huge bite of waffle.
"At least with Sarah he was in a safe place," Willow pointed out.
"Well no more back alleys for him," Buffy said firmly, "unless one of us is with him."
Cordelia and Willow both turned to stare at Buffy in shock, but she was too busy eating to notice.
"Once Giles has a talk with him and he gets back with Cordelia, she should be able to reign him in," Buffy continued.
Cordelia and Willow exchanged glances as they realized they'd both completely misunderstood what Buffy meant and then quickly turned their attention to their food as they realized both their minds had been in the exact same gutter.
"At least one mystery is solved," Buffy said, switching to her second plate. "Now we have to find out who cast the spell on Cordelia and possibly see if we can have the aura scrubbing done to us, just in case there are spells on us we didn't know about too."
"You think there could be?" Willow asked.
"No idea," Buffy replied, "but we never knew there were any on Cordelia, so anything's possible and better safe than sorry. Also getting our pores cleared of evil sounds like a good thing to do on a regular basis."
"Probably, but Giles did say the stuff to do it was a bit pricey," Willow reminded her. "We'll probably have to settle for once every couple of months."
"Unless he knows of a cheaper way," Cordelia replied. "He knew to do that thing with the crystals to cut costs, so he probably knows some other ways as well."
Willow nodded and moved her plate aside so she could pull Cordelia's plate in front of her, much to Cordelia's surprise.
"Hey!" Cordelia complained.
"Sorry, but this has been bugging me," Willow said, quickly cutting up the pancakes before returning the plate.
"Then why didn't you do it to hers?" Cordelia asked, gesturing to Buffy, who'd just eaten half a waffle in one bite. "Never mind," Cordelia continued, shaking her head. It wasn't important and she'd found Willow far less grating lately so she didn't feel the need to make a scene about it.
0o0o0o0o0o0o0
"This is genius," Jonathan said, as he practiced the first exercise, lighting a candle from across the room and then extinguishing it.
"That is so cool!" Andrew squee'd.
"Yeah," Jonathan said in wonder.
"My turn, my turn!" Andrew exclaimed.
"Are you sure you're ready?" Jonathan asked. "It says you have to be calm."
"I figure I'd wind up failing a couple of dozen times and that would calm me down enough to do it," Andrew replied cheerfully.
Jonathan opened his mouth to reply, closed it and considered that. "And then you'll get excited again, take another dozen casts, but eventually you'll get there," he agreed, "but I've got a better idea."
"Yeah?" Andrew asked.
"Think of it like rolling a natural twenty," Jonathan suggested. "It's not the rolling that's cool, it's getting the twenty."
Andrew considered that. "I think that will work… but only after I've rolled a few dozen times, because the first campaign you're in, every dice roll is exciting."
"Good point," Jonathan agreed. "Roll away!"
0o0o0o0o0o0o0
Xander double checked what he read and what he understood, before attempting the first exercise. The suggested exercise was lighting and extinguishing a candle, but he suspected he had little if any personal magic and Miss Calendar had cleaned him of Hellmouth crud, so he decided to go with something a lot less draining.
Theoretically, he should be able to duplicate any of the cantrips from Dungeons and Dragons, and possibly some of the weaker first tier spells as this was about altering reality and the less of a change you were creating in how things are the less mana it should take, so creating things that did not exist, even in small amounts like spice, should take up far more mana than spells like silent image of animate rope that simply manipulated things that already existed.
Xander looked out the window and spotted his neighbor's cat, the one who kept peeing on the trellis outside his bedroom window no matter how many times he shooed it away.
"Okay, just need a gesture and a few syllables," Xander said before grinning evilly as he figured out exactly what to use.
He calmed himself, breathing deeply as he focused on the orange cat and exactly what he wanted to happen to the furball. He stuck his finger in his mouth, coated it liberally with saliva before holding it parallel in front of his face and twisting it back and forth as he commanded the universe, "Wet willy!"
"RAAWWWRRR!"
Typed By – Sitheus Maximus