Chapter 5: Concourse – Pt. 1

A/N: For disclaimers, warnings etc see Chapter 1

IN ADDITION, the author would like to point out that, as a rule, he is willing, even eager, to receive corrections and advice regarding his use and abuse of canon.

However, in the following situation, where the author is only acting as a conduit, relaying excerpts of the presentations as given at the Seventh Annual Meeting of the Xander L. Harris Doppelganger Society as faithfully as possible, the author does not take responsibility for any errors in fact, canon or interpretation made by the presenters. Any person wishing to dispute the information and conclusions of, for example, XLH Harvey P., should contact that person directly.

No, the author is not in a position to forward correspondence.

Thank you,
Litmouse.

Chapter 5: Concourse – Pt. 1

"Hey Mom," Rory said "why are they locking up the auditorium?"

"They're having a secret meeting."

"But there's a bunch of the women still in the dining room."

"Yes. All of them, actually. The secret meeting is for boys only."

"Really."

"But if one was nosy…"

"Inquisitive."

"And happened to know a person with access to all the weird little keys…"

"Such as the manager."

"Such a person might be able to sneak into the old projection box in the back and spy…"

"Observe…."

"…on what the boys get up to. Just don't blame me if they get naked and dance around in a circle beating bongos…"

"Ew. Well, now that I have image in my head whatever they do it can only be an improvement. Give me the key."

"Ha. There is no key. The locks broken, has been since 1844."

"They had a projection booth in 1844?"

"Well, 1944, whatever. Go, spy, my pretty, spy!"

Rory turned and was just starting down the half-hidden corridor when she was surprised to see Jess skulking into the Inn.

"Jess? What are you doing here?"

"Luke sent me to see if you had any leftover doughnuts."

"Oh. Well, think there some boxes in the back I don't know…."

"Rory… I'm joking. I don't know. I just suddenly had this desire to come see you. Babette said she didn't know where you were, but that you certainly weren't at the Inn so thought I'd come see if you wanted to do something…"

"Actually, I was about to go spy on the secret meeting."

"The astronomers? That sounds boring."

"What astronomers?"

"Luke said your mother had booked some scientist types who were interested in Xena so I figured astronomers. But if they're archaeologists we should definitely listen in 'cause that could be pretty funny."

"I'm pretty sure they're not archaeologists."

"C'mon, let's get out of here. Go to Hartford, hit a couple bookstores and a movie or something…."

"Welll…..Okay," and with one last look at the dusty corridor Rory allowed Jess to lead her out of the inn.

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Giles shifted in his chair and fought the soporific influence of the substantial breakfast… He was still too young, he insisted to himself, to start falling asleep in public. Nevertheless he realized he had just woolgathered through most of the opening statement. He polished his glasses, straightened his shoulders and prepared to listen. After all, although the others had mostly come for the fun of it, he fully intended to shut these idiots down if he determined that they posed any kind of threat, whether intentional or inadvertent.

It was time for the Old Business.

XLH Geoffrey T. was reprimanded but not expelled, on the grounds that, while the XLHDS frowned on Faith-poaching, investigation in this case had determined that in this instance the Faith had not only made the first move but was seriously hot. They would leave any discipline of the Faith in question to the ladies.

XLH Ramon Q. and F. Maria Q. were expelled in absentia on the grounds that describing their demon scamming exploits on a blog was really, really stupid.

"Many demons," XLH Joseph B. reminded the group, "are quite computer literate, in fact the true extent to which demons have contributed to a number of popular software packages, while long suspected, is only now coming to light in knowledgeable circles."

"That's true," XLH Anthony Bells whispered, "did you know…."

"Not now, And…thony," hissed XLH Bill R.

There was a moment of silence for XLH. Mark O.

"Sex with demons," Joseph B. noted, "is not vital, and is often fatal. Just lie about it like everybody else. Seriously."

There was a moment of silence for XLH. Giorgio M.

"Remember, gentlemen, your Faith. Not really a slayer."

Moment of Silence for F. Jeanne l.

"Again I remind you. Your Faith, not really a slayer. Don't forget that. And don't let her forget it either. "

"Gentlemen," Joseph B. said, "In light of the importance of this meeting the committee felt that a common understanding of our history would be beneficial and we would like to thank XLH Harvey P. for volunteering to take on this vital task with his usual diligence. Harvey…"

XLH Harvey P. was a sandy-haired man in his early-to-mid thirties with, Giles thought, a certain primness of manner that, despite the shirt and eye patch, was about as far from Xanderness as it was possible to get.

He limped onto the stage, pushing a wheeled podium into place on the right side of the stage, locked the wheels and nodded and the lights dimmed. Behind him Joesph B. reached up and pulled down a whitescreen. Harvey nodded again and an upside down picture of a uniformed policeman appeared to a small wave of laughter. After a moments fumbling the slide was pulled out of the projector and reset right side up.

Once you get past the idea of Xander in police uniform, Giles thought, the young man in the picture did bear a striking resemblance to a pre-scarred Xander.

"How many of you gentlemen recognize this man?" Harvey P. asked and about three fourths of the room raised their hands.

"This is of course Walter "Walt" Peckham, may he rest in peace, who, if not technically the first member of the Society must be considered our true, if not necessarily illustrious, forebear. At the time of this picture he was a beat cop in Tacoma, Washington, which like any port city has a substantial demonic population. He was a practicing if not particularly devout Catholic and accepted the existence of demons as part of Scripture. Walt worked the docks and the hard streets of Seattle's blue collar cousin and, to the usual extent, he knew the score. He knew to look the other way when a death was attributed to gangs on PCP, if strange things scuttled into the shadows, he knew better than to follow. He had a steady if unspectacular career." Harvey nodded again and the picture changed, showing the same man a few years older, in the standard issue cheap dark suit of the plain clothes cop, still looking remarkably Xander like, if a bit on the serious side.

"At the age of thirty, Walt made detective. He had been married five years and had two children. At age thirty-two, Walt's life became a country song. His wife left him for a Seattle acupuncturist, he learned one of his children wasn't actually his.

Shortly thereafter he lost his temper when arresting a suspect of Chinese heritage and beat the man severely and was suspended from the force. Advised to get out of town until the publicity died down he took a vacation to Hawaii accompanied by a younger, female member of the Tacoma PD. In Hawaii he was involved in an auto accident, his companion was killed and he was arrested for DUI. Due to injuries received in the accident he lost his left eye, had substantial scarring on his torso and his right knee was crushed. You gentlemen may make what you will of the fact that Walt Peckham had a bad right leg and walked with a cane before the Man Himself received that particular injury…"

"After two months of physical rehabilitation and running out of money, he returned to Tacoma. Due to his injuries he was unable to return to active duty, his request for disability was denied, officially because of the DUI, unofficially because the officer who died was quite popular. Walt sued. Between legal fees and the divorce settlement he lost his house. He found himself living in a flophouse with a hotplate, working the night shift at a 7-11 to make ends meet. Walt's life, to put it plainly, sucked. I think it was fair to assume, and Walt never denied it, that there was at least an element of suicide in his choice of bars to drown his sorrows in that particular fateful night…."

"It was just luck, and a tendency to get behind on the laundry that led to him wearing one of the shirts he'd picked up on his doomed vacation. As he told the story, he bellied up to the bar and demanded a drink from the startled bartender without paying much attention to the other clientele. He was aware of the two men sidling up behind him, but as a long time cop he wasn't too worried about getting bothered by a couple barflies. It was only after double-taking on the fact that they did not appear in the mirror behind the bar that he understood the trouble he was in. A little belligerent with alcohol and not much caring, he'd turned to face his fate and the two vampires took in the eye patch and the shirt and suddenly stepped back, one said,

"Holy shit, it's Harris," and continued backing away. The other stayed his ground, asking,

"Watchya doin' here alone, the slayer let you off your leash for a night?"

"Now," Harvey said, "this part of the story has been told both ways, one is that Walt, in his troubles, had clung to his religion, others say it was the pure sarcasm of the disaffected, in either case what happened next made history. Walt waved his hand in the general direction of the gold cross he wore on a thin chain around his neck… or rather where it had been until he'd hocked it two days before… and he said,

"My Faith is always with me," and saw the second vampire glance quickly around and then back away in turn as the bar slowly emptied but for a small table in the back where a few vamps remained, poised near the rear door, talking among themselves and glancing over at Walt. He overheard a few phrases, he heard, "Sunnydale," and "Xander Harris" and "Slayer's Pet," and, what at the time he thought was "Fluffy, the Red bitch." He heard "hellmouth" and "Scooby." He had another drink out of sheer hubris, and when the bartender nervously refused payment he knew he was on to something. He left that bar not only alive and filled with the adrenaline rush of surviving a close call, but filled also, for the first time in a long time, with curiosity, a new interest in life..."

"Walt," Harvey continued, "may not have been Columbo, but he was a competent detective. He started, of course, online. And quickly found the character "Xander Harris, demon fighter" as part of a fairly new role-playing game….. "

XLH Anthony B. beamed, sat up straighter, looked over at his companions. Then slowly sank back down and sat hunched in his chair. Timothy patted his knee in sympathy, whispered,

"Well, I think it's cool."

"Walt," Harvey continued, "found it hard to believe that vampires were afraid of a character in a game, and made the logical jump that there must be some reality behind the fiction. He consulted the experts." Harvey nodded and the slide changed to a picture of Walt Peckham, with eyepatch, cane and Hawaiian shirt, holding a stake and posing with four rather nerdish young men, one of which was clearly Harvey P.

"This," Harvey said, indicating the picture, "was the true first meeting of the XLHDS. It took place in Bellevue which is just east of Seattle, and we called ourselves the Xander Harris Four, we'd met online because at the time, the way the game was set up there could only be one Xander playing at a time, and we were trying to set up a rotation and found we had a lot in common. There was just something about the character that appealed to us all, and it brought us together and we started our own semi-serious Xander-based web-site …. Peckham contacted us, asked if he could meet with us. We said sure. It's not like we had a whole lot going on at the time. Walt told us it was all real. We thought he was crazy. But he was doing what in our hearts we all wanted to do… he was becoming Xander Harris. He was a loser turning himself into a hero."

Unable to resist the urge, Giles glanced over at the XLH Al J. who was covering his face in his hands so that only bits of the bright red showed through as a grinning XLH Bill R. whispered in his ear.

Harvey continued, "I'll spare you the details, but we began to search in earnest for the truth behind the game. We didn't know it then, of course, but this was a time of great upheaval in the supernatural world. Buffy the Godkiller, with the help of the Scooby Gang, had gone down into hell, slain a Demon King, and freed the First Slayer who had been imprisoned there and returned her to the earth's surface. The First Slayer then traveled throughout the world, activating potential slayers and releasing what the vampires and demons referred to as a 'plague of slayers' on the world. The First Slayer then returned to her long awaited bed of bones in a magically concealed African cave."

Despite himself, Giles grinned as heard the sotto voce yet still indignant "Hey," from XLH Bill R. and a snicker from XLH Al. J.

"Buffy and the Scoobies then used an experimental bomb they had stolen from a secret US testing site to destroy the mouth of hell, the explosion taking out the town of Sunnydale in the process, leaving Buffy, the Scoobies and the activated potential slayers free to roam the world. No vampire, no demon was safe. Any little girl in any alley in the world could suddenly turn from an easy meal into sudden death…

"Worse, Faith, the half-mad Dark Slayer, had begun her rampage around North America, the bars and clubs, the secret caves, all the places demons and vampires had thought of as safe havens were no longer secure. Faith traveled at the speed of Harley Davidson and at random, by the time word of the latest decimated demon enclave spread she was gone and might be anywhere. It was said she could be paid off, but usually only after taking a couple heads, and even then, if the wrong word was said, if the offered payment was insufficient, if she was just in a bad mood, then there was no quarter given, only slaughter. While master vampires and the leaders of demon clans feared drawing Godkiller Buffy's ire, the average vamp-in-a-bar trembled at the sound of V-twin and a glimpse of black leather…

"Demons and vampires may seem fearsome creatures to us but they had lived a long time with little or no opposition other than the not uncommon internecine battles, a lone Slayer and the occasional torch bearing mob, with those growing fewer and fewer as the bright shiny technology flooded the world and reduced the remaining believers to the very fringes of society…. Suddenly their world was full of new and hidden dangers and it took them some time to adjust..."

"It was known that Buffy had retired to Rome, that the Red Witch had joined the Watcher in England, but the fourth Scooby, the One Who Sees had disappeared. We know now, of course, that he was in Africa and perhaps the demons on that dark continent knew as well, but elsewhere the rumors flew, he was dead, he'd been turned, the more optimistic demons said. But more often it was said he acted as a stalking horse, some said he scouted out new hellmouths and demon communities and informed Buffy or the Witch and they would make a secret raid, others said he had developed his own mystic powers, some even drew the obvious and correct conclusion that he was recruiting new slayers, but offered no proof. Still others said he acted as Faith's advance guard, spying out lucrative targets for her to attack. He was seen here, there, he was everywhere. He was nowhere…."

Harvey paused and took a drink, sighed theatrically and nodded and a new slide appeared, one of original Xander Harris Four, in full regalia, eye patch and bright shirt, grinning widely and brandishing a stake.

"For us it was still a game. We thought we had stumbled into some hardcore Society for Creative Anachronism types, just with a supernatural bent. We thought Walt Peckham was a harmless lunatic who brought a little fun and focus into our cubicled lives. Until," Harvey pointed at the slide, "Until my friend Brian Langford went to go see Walt at that funky bar he'd told us about and was never seen again." Harvey paused to let it sink in, his face working just bit.

Giles watched and wondered if this was an oft-told tale adn the fighting-back-tears a bit of drama, or if it was the first time and the sudden emotion genuine…. He decided he couldn't really tell.

"We know what happened to Brian, because the next time Walt went into the bar the bartender told him about it, laughing about how some fool had come into the bar pretending to be him, Xander Harris, and had been drained and thrown in the Sound for his troubles. And then ----- whatever we may say about Walt Peckham now, how he lost the way--- what Walt Peckham did then was a very courageous thing. He asked the bartender who the vamp was that drained Brian. And that night he came back to the bar and found the vamp and staked him. And he stood there in a crowded bar full of demons and vamps and told them that just because he had tolerated their existence didn't mean they had free rein. He told them if they ever pulled anything like that again he would have Faith and a couple new Slayers on them so fast you wouldn't be able to see the demon heads for all the vampire dust. He spoke to them as if it didn't even occur to him that they would dare attack him. And he turned and marched out of that bar untouched, and he understood fully for the first time that he had truly fooled them. That they weren't tolerating him as sort of a joke, as he had sometimes thought in paranoid moments. They really believed him. They feared him. And nothing was ever the same after that..."

"The next day he came up to Bellevue, picked us up, myself, Ed. G. and Derrin M., and he took us to that bar and made a vamp show us her game face and introduced us to a couple demons and then took us to the mall to buy clean underwear and fresh pants. I'll be honest, we wanted to quit after that. We were timid little geeks playing a game and we wanted nothing to do with the real thing."

"But Walt wouldn't let us. He had decided he was going to get more out this than free drinks. He needed us to help him locate other demon bars. And he needed us to keep track of Xander sightings, because he was terrified of one thing; having the same thing happen to him that happened to Brian. He was terrified he would go into bar that the real Xander had just left, or some other pretender. He was sure that because there were so many sightings reported that some of them had to either be real or of some other one-eyed guy who made the same discovery he had. And he was right, of course. Robert Y. who is with us today was one, and two or three others we eventually located…. " he looked out into the crowd, spotted a waving hand, "Ah, of course, also Jaime who is also still with us. …. Sorry, I didn't see you earlier, Jaime, good to see you..."

"Walt developed a regular route up and down the west coast, stop in at a bar, hit them up for protection money, move on…. He determined around five hundred bucks was what he could take without much resistance. As he learned more and more about the demonic world he found other targets as well. Demon-run businesses that wanted to keep a low profile, vampires who had moved out of the crypts an into apartments and condos and worked from home on computers or over the phone to pay the bills and avoid the daylight. He learned that demons had other things to trade beside cash… precious metals of course but also mystic influence over events, insight into the future. Stock tips. Racing tips. It was growing business. Ed, Derrin and I quit our jobs and began working full time at XLH Inc. Ed put on the eyepatch and the shirt and went on the road, moving inland. Derrin and I tracked sightings, monitored demonic chatrooms. We managed the money, we played the market, bet on the horses...

"And we did something else. We studied the life of Xander Lavelle Harris. But I'll return to that later….. "

"As I said, it was a growing business. We needed help in the office. Walt wanted more Xanders on the road. We mapped off territories. A city like LA or Chicago, New York could support two or three Xanders, Dallas or Kansas City could keep one Xander busy, maybe two. A roving Xander could handle two or three smaller cities and the towns in between. We began to recruit. Derrin and I cruised the gamerooms, Walt used his police contacts and contacted con men recently released from prison, we invited promising prospects to Seattle for evaluation and considered ourselves lucky to find one in twenty acceptable. But you don't simply hire a man for a job like that, no man goes into a demon bar with nothing but an eyepatch and line of bullshit for a salary. We sold franchises. One of the first to our own Joseph B. who covered the twin cities, Minneapolis/St. Paul, and upstate Minnesota. To be sure, we fronted the money for some of Walt's recruits, but every man was working for himself, the greatest incentive there is.

"We had the west coast covered, even down into Mexico. We had the big mid-western cities and at least one Xander in every southern state. It was just a damn shame we couldn't go public and sell shares on Wallstreet, we would all have been rich beyond our wildest fancies based on the income expense ratio alone. And then, as it often does just when things are going well, disaster struck.

"Xander Lavelle Harris came back from Africa."

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Lorelai Gilmore stood at the window and looked out at the women seated in a half-circle on the grass by the lake, watching an enormous woman with biceps like a linebacker invite other women to come forward and be hit by a stick.

"I don't see the appeal, I really don't," she said.

"I don't know," Michel said beside her, "I have often felt the desire to hit certain women with a stick. If they are willing to line up for the privilege, so much the better. Of course, my genteel upbringing makes actually taking such an action unthinkable. But I certainly see the appeal."

"Yes, but what about the women being hit? What's in it for them?"

"That I cannot tell you."

"Oh, oh, she's having trouble with that one. Someone is making teacher look bad in front of the class. This could get ugly…. Oh, now, she just let her do that. That's no fun."

And then the women began to rise and break off into pairs. They took up various en garde positions and began to spar.

"Oh, look," Lorelai said, "now they're going to bang their sticks together. We should call Taylor, we should have them back next year and bang their sticks together in front of the gazebo, we could call it The Annual Stars Hollow Women Banging Sticks Festival. I bet it would draw a crowd."

"Speaking of Monsieur Taylor, he has called three times to remind you to attend tonight's emergency town meeting regarding your guests."

"Or what, they'll come marching out here with torches? Maybe I should invite the women with sticks to come to the meeting with me. I bet that would be fun. Put a message up on the bulletin board inviting all the guests of the Independence Inn to attend a quaint New England town meeting."

"You must be joking."

"No, Michel, I'm not joking, what makes you think I'm joking?"

"Your lips are moving."

"Go. Make a big sign. With directions. Go. Now."

"I am going. I will make the sign. But they will not come."

"We'll see. What could be more exciting than a quaint New England town meeting?"

"I do not have time to answer that question," Michel said. "Life is too short to answer that question."

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