Déjà Vu All Over Again…
Chapter 002 – Been There, Done That… Part II
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Xander, instead of going as a soldier, takes a different route. Now, he is trapped, stuck repeating the day over and over again. The day in question; Halloween, the same day the Ethan Rayne comes to Sunnydale. The path in question; Phil Conners, a certain weatherman. Now, watch as Xander tries to fix what has happened, using methods and meeting people good, bad, and funny.
Continuation of Chapter 11.
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Xander groaned as he returned to consciousness. 'What the hell happened last night? Last thing I remember is…is…' Xander muffled a yell as pain came over him, pain that came from phantom injuries, and the return of his memories. He remembered. For Halloween, he had decided to go as Phil Conners from the movie Groundhog Day after a stuffed animal (groundhog) had whacked him on the head after falling of the top shelf of Ethan's Costume Shoppe (along with a Phoenix stuffed animal, which had helped with the idea of a Time Loop via a Phoenix's power of rebirth.
However, it had seemed that Ethan hadn't been the harmless shopkeeper that they had thought. He had apparently enchanted the costumes to make it so when his spell activated, the people would become their costumes; kids with sticks taped to their hands would become Wolverine, girls in cat costumes would become the cat-girls that men worshiped with both heads, and kids with a parrot and eye patch would become a pirate (like Larry).
However, something had gone wrong with the spell. When Giles had gone to Ethan's to get him to break the curse, he had found the remains of Ethan's body by the door. Apparently, the spell's backfire had acted as a magical version of radiation poisoning. The Warlock's body looked like it had been left for several months to rot and decay, according to Willow between heaves, which had apparently gone with Giles even though he had wanted to stay.
However, that was nowhere near the worst of the night. The wave of energy had spread from the costume shop, building strength and power. The first of those changed had only been altered slightly. A child dressed in a demon mask becomes a mini-demon, limited in appearance and persona. However, the spell grew larger and larger, as is the nature of chaos.
Cells were altered. Matter had been broken down to a type of existence smaller than atoms before being reassembled. People had been shifted, changed, and become their costumes beyond even the quantum level. Their spirits, their auras, their very souls had ripped apart and remade, something thought impossible, even to the First Primordial. People of the world had disappeared forever, never to return, while people of other worlds, of other dimensions had been reborn.
The spell had grew and expanded while absorbing excess energy, of which there had been a large amount inside the town of Sunnydale. The spell had grew beyond Sunnydale's limits, far beyond what its original caster's intent was to reach. It had continued to grow and multiply in a snowball effect, building strength and speed, sending shock waves unparalleled before in history through the planet's ley lines.
In Chicago, the people at a neighborhood Halloween party, people who never encountered Ethan Rayne, changed into their costumes. A woman who had dressed as Selene from the Underworld series became a Death Dealer. A generic vampire costume consisting of plastic fangs, a cape, and white face makeup becomes Dracula from Bram Stoker's novel.
In Washington, District of Columbia, little girls who had dressed as princesses and either became helpless victims for the monsters or, if magical, had used their fey magic to escape to safety. Parents who as dressed as zombies fell dead before proceeding to rise, before proceeding to try and fail on eating those dressed as mummies.
The changes had thrown tears threw space and time, as the chaos magic infected reality beyond what was imagined possible. Parts of the world in which Halloween had past, had been rewritten with their Halloween Nights changed. The chaos had consumed the world, leaving nothing original behind.
Those dressed as clowns laugh at the chaos around them as they stretch, deform, expand and contract their bodies into any form they can imagine, while those dressed as werewolves shift under the sky, some of their will, and others against the numbers of transformed rapidly increase, the differences between identical costume changes increase, leaving individuals with both common, and unique traits.
Even Janus, the supposed God of Chaos hadn't been able to stop the flow, as the spell hadn't been fueled by the apparent chaos of the gods which is actually probability, but by chaos, the primordial state of existence from which the first gods appeared, the primal chaos that gave birth to the first god Gaia, the primal chaos which even the First Primordial, a being infinitely older than even the Christian God, was born from.
Once, a being was born from a mystical stone made of primal chaos, a being which brought chaos and destruction to its world's heavens. Now, when the bell tolled the eleventh hour of All Hollow's Eve, tolled of the most powerful hour in the world, the spell shook the new gods, the ones that call themselves The Powers That Be and the ancient demons known as Wolf, Ram, and Hart. They were barely able to make it into their respective realms, realms which would only grant them safety for a while.
DVAOA – DVAOA – DVAOA – DVAOA – DVAOA – DVAOA – DVAOA
Back in Ethan's Costume Shop, the being which had cast the spell, a tall robed being which appears to be humanoid but is something more laughed as the chaos consumed the world while darkness as dark as the void of space, as black as a Black Hole covered his body before receding, revealing the eldritch being gone. The bust of Janus glowed brightly before exploding into a burst of light and energy, consuming the room around it and shooting into the sky and deep into space, eradicating a portion of Neptune in the process, but it was too late for the power to be stopped by the magical object which had granted it life.
The sky and earth had parted, as the world had been covered in darkness and shadows unconceivable before the event. The Earth had shaken and the whole moon had become as red as blood. Several beings, several omnipotent beings merged with the First, eradicating miles around each point, ranging from half a acre to hundreds of miles, depending on their power.
He didn't remember that much of what happened after he had turned; all his knowledge of the evening had come from Giles, the surviving members of the Scooby Gang, and other general survivors. Apparently, Phil had realized that something new was going on, not only waking in a place that he had never seen before, but waking in a place that was dangerous and growing more and more dangerous every second. He had immediately hotwired a car before tearing out of town and hiding out in the desert. However, he ran into Dawn, who had dressed as Alice Abernathy, just one mile out of town, along with several others. Luckily for all of them, he had hotwired a Volkswagen Type II, also known as a minibus or microbus, the van usually driven around by hippies during the 70's, so there was enough room for all of them to make it to the entrance of a ravine wide enough to maneuver the van into.
They had watched the sky for hours as crimson and black clouds stormed with lightning colored all the colors of the rainbow, watched as winged beings with looks ranging from impossibly beautiful to maddening horrendous flew across the horizon, watched as the world was consumed in a terror not thought possible, as it was turned into the breeding grounds for unspeakable horrors beyond imagination. They waited watching, waiting for something to find them and kill them, but nothing did. They had waited until they fell asleep not from want, but from a need for their minds to shut down, to recuperate and try and find some semblance of order, of normality.
Xander had passed out about three in the afternoon of the First of November, a few hours after they had finally been able to get in contact with Giles via satellite phone, so they had a while to digest the info of what had happened. Apparently, Giles had figured out something was going on when the Hellmouth had started to open. It was only open a miniscule amount, so he had been able to shut it after about fifteen minutes, but by then the screams and roars had alerted him to trouble. He had been able to get out of the school just before something crushed the half of the school that contained the library. He had proceeded to gather up Princess Buffy, just before something ripped her in two, and Willow's ghost had been looking after Buffy, so while her ghostly self was ok, her body had been consumed by various entities.
When he opened his eyes, he expected himself to be seeing the gunmetal grey roof of the van, seeing the other members of their little survivalists, along with the smell of several unwashed people trapped within an enclosed space. However, he hadn't expected to see the roof of his bedroom in the Harris household.
"What…what the fuck just happened?"
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Hello all, it's Zoanzon here with the second chapter of Déjà Vu All Over Again…. Firstly, and most importantly, to the author known in this site known as Spaceman, I am sorry, but I took a lot of inspiration for this chapter from the first chapter of your story "Halloween World". I don't know if it is visible or not, but if it looks like plagiarism, it is NOT meant to meant to be. Just to make the crediting official, to all readers, I credit Spaceman with some of the ideas and starting/filler plot in this chapter. I hope you read his story; it's pretty good.
Spaceman, I do not believe that I will ever borrow ideas, but if I need to, I will ask first. If you don't allow it, I'll take a different path, but this part IS needed for the story to progress.
Now that that's out of the way, I hope you all like the story.