BtVS by Whedon and Mutant Enemy. Marvel U by the parent company and its many artists/writers.

Rodney crossed the room to his front door. The motion detector he'd installed was blinking green. Spying on the girl across the hallway had proven to be a cushy job - not only could he do it from the safety of his living room, for the most part, he didn't even have to be particularly alert.

Peering through the peephole, he was rewarded by the sight of Remy leaning against Tara's door, probably trying to hear if anyone was moving about inside.

Rodney checked his watch. From the time that Tara had come home, an hour or so after her girlfriend had let herself into the dorm room, he expected they were still asleep or pretty much close to it, looking forward to a day free of classes.

Looking to the peephole again, Rodney saw only an empty hallway.

#

About fifteen minutes later, the motion detector went off again. When he checked, he still couldn't see anybody.

Hearing a faint scratching sound, he looked towards his doorframe. A thin piece of metal had been worked through from the other side to touch the bolt holding the top door hinge in place. As he watched, a second piece of metal emerged to touch the bottom one.

Before he could do anything else, the metal bits that ensured his door worked like a door and not a giant slab of wood glowed brightly and exploded with sharp, clear bangs.

His jaw dropping open, Rodney turned back towards the peephole. Alarm bells were going off in his head even as he did so, but he'd done it so often over the past month he couldn't really stop himself.

He was rewarded with the sight of Remy's metal-shod boot heading directly for the peephole - and, therefore, his face.

"Oh, shi-," Rodney said, his words broken off by the door falling on top of him.

He must have passed out for a second or two, because the next thing he knew he was on his back, staring into a pair of blood-red eyes as a pair of strong hands held him by his shirt.

Remy released Rodney, who scuttled back a few feet across the ground.

"You may be thinkin', why is Gambit here?" Remy leaned against the door which he had wedged pretty much back into place. "Well, let's jus' say I read somethin' that jogged my memory of how you led me astray th' other day. My sister, she not one to be able to be in two places at once. Not only dat, you have an awful habit of looking out that peephole."

Pausing for a moment, Remy pulled out his staff. Without appearing to look, he gave the motion detector a swift blow that sent pieces flying across the room.

Rodney whimpered.

"From the setup you have in here, it looks like you think you have an awful good reason to." Remy nodded his head towards the sleeping area at the back of the dorm. "This, and that little posterboard you have set up in your bedroom depicting the people close to Tara. Saw dat before I come in. For someone who spends his time spying on people, you have a bad habit of not closing your blinds. Me an' you? We're going to have words."

It had taken Remy a while to get the girls organized and dressed. Phone calls had to be made as well but, eventually, the three of them made it out the door.

Remy, Willow and Tara were cutting across Sunnydale U's Quad, toward the parking lot where Giles would be picking them up, when Willow looked up and immediately looked down again, blushing.

"There's someone naked, hanging from the flagpole," Willow muttered.

"Oh," Tara said, looking up. Her gaze was steady. "He's not naked, he's wearing that climbing gear. It's almost like-"

Willow, her eyes still focused firmly on the ground, hit her girlfriend in the arm to keep her from further comment. Wrapping her hand around Tara's arm, Willow hurried them away from the scene.

"Well," Remy said, a step or two behind, his voice light. "Even though it's the weekend, I'm sure someone will help him down eventually."

Ben smiled at the brown-haired woman who was ringing up the final purchases that he needed to finish summoning a Queller demon. He much preferred the pretty woman to the male shopkeeper, even though she seemed a bit too happy whenever she sold something.

The bell over the door to the Magic Box dinged and he looked over to see the group filing into the store. Recognizing the red-eyed man from the day before as well as the red-haired woman who sometimes visited Mrs. Summers in the hospital, Ben freaked out slightly, jamming his hands into the pockets of his jacket as if that would make him seem less conspicuous.

It seemed to work as the group bypassed him completely, chattering amongst themselves as they headed towards the back of the store.

Ben breathed a sigh of relief and collected his purchases, not noticing that his moment of panic had dislodged a torn piece of paper from his clothes to land on the floor.

He left the store in peace.

##

Noticing the conversation and the general lack of other people to sell things to, Anya left the counter to see what was going on.

"Hello. I do hope that, however handsome he may be, he," she said to Giles, indicating Remy. "Is going to be buying things with his own money and not another person we give things to simply because they're friends of the owner."

Giles sighed. "Well, yes, even though making money and running a business is important I'm afraid that saving the world will always be our number one priority. After all, it would be hard to run a business if no-one made the effort."

Remy chuckled darkly at the statement. After receiving several odd looks, he held out his hand to Anya in greeting. "My name is Remy, though I often go by 'Gambit.' You must be Anya, I've heard impressive things about how you run dis store. It seems like th' place would collapse without you. They're truly lucky to have someone around who sees the world like you can through your eyes."

Anya metaphorically melted into a pile of goo.

Willow nudged Tara. "See," Willow whispered. "He's charming when he talks to other people. I wonder why he's so awkward around you?"

"Hey, I'm his sister," Tara said. Still, she frowned, thinking that there was something more to it than that. Tara had the ability to read some things from auras and Remy's had flared brightly when he was introducing himself to Anya.

Tara decided she'd have to observe Remy more closely around other people, but she knew for certain the same thing hadn't happened when she'd met her brother for the first time...

##

"Oh, hey," Xander said as he walked into the store. "I hope nobody started without me."

Anya blinked, found she been hugging a shelf for support and began brushing imaginary dirt off her clothes, faintly embarrassed. "Yes, that would be my boyfriend, so please keep your very interesting self to yourself in the future, mister. Understood?"

Remy grinned and nodded appropriately.

Xander looked around and smiled. "Looks like the gang's all here, except for..." His smile faltered. "Well, Buffy."

Giles sighed. "We simply can't ask her to leave her mother's bedside. Better we leave her out of this for now. Besides, we have the binding spells and a magic store at our disposal. Why should anything go wrong?"

As Xander walked towards the rest of the group, something rustled under his feet. He bent over to pick it up.

"Oh," Anya said, rushing over. She vaguely remembered seeing something that color yellow sticking out of her last customer's jacket. "If that's important, maybe we could expect someone to come back for it. He'll be so grateful to have it back, he'll buy more stuff while he's here. Remind me again why we don't put a thirty-minute forget spell on people's wallets when they have them on the counter?"

"Because all it takes is one resistant but observant person and then," Xander said, handing the paper to Anya. "Uh, you might have the same thing happen to you next time you went shopping, but with someone dishonest enough to actually keep it."

One look at the paper made Anya's face turn a bright red. It was most of a page torn from the 'M' section of the yellow pages, the bottom half of which displayed a cheery sketch of the Magic Box complete with the slogan: 'Your One-Stop Spot to Shop for all your Occult Needs - Let Us Make It Easy!'

Ben had torn it out of the phonebook the day before without a second thought, simply because he was that kind of person.

"What kind of an asshole would do something like that?" Anya headed to the counter and started rifling around the supplies. "We pay good money for advertising!"

"Uh, honey. What are you doing? Are you going to summon some kind of Demon of Squelched Business Opportunities?"

"No," she said, pulling out a pair of scissors and tape. "I'm going to try and salvage this, maybe stick it somewhere eye-catching, like the cash register, or the front window, or copy those interesting 'Kick-Me' signs and put it on the back of Giles' coat."

"Ah, Anya," Giles called. "While you're over there, what the blazes did you do with the purple crystal I retrieved a few days ago? It's not in the 'To Be Sorted - Not For Sale Or Discard' box where I left it."

"Oh." Anya spun around and pointed to the glass display counter. After a few seconds, she walked over and grabbed the crystal herself, turning it over to reveal the 'not for sale' sticker on the bottom. "It wasn't being useful in there so I set it out where it'd be pretty and possibly make customers feel better about spending money."

Giles raised an eyebrow, then pulled his glasses off in order to clean them. "We're going to have to have another talk about what rights I reserve as owner of the store, the final disbursement and storage of 'found' artifacts being one of them."

##

There was a small research party, mainly to confirm that everything would work as advertised. The group sat around the table, books and supplies piled in front of them. Xander idly spun the crystal as he read, until Giles stopped him with an 'ahem,' took the crystal away and, after a bit, began idly spinning it himself.

Tara reported that, from what she could make of the compacted aura, there were no more than two entities trapped in the crystal.

Remy nodded. "Would make sense, after all, th' defending horde of monkey spiders matched up pretty well with Andrew's flying monkeys. In shape and number at least. So, we're looking for a single creature worth th' price of the elemental."

"Yeah." Xander tilted his head in thought. "From what you said, the guy was given something that aligned with parts of his personality he was repressing. Therefore, we should expect a leather-wearing alcoholic who wants to sleep with Buffy's mom."

Giles coughed. Willow buried her head in her hands.

"Oh, hey. That might actually go for my creature too." Xander raised his hand. "Everyone who thinks that Joyce is hot please raise their hands."

At least two more hands went up.

Remy smirked, deciding this was something he wanted to investigate for himself.

Anya took note of Remy's expression and kicked him from across the table.

##

Willow put a pair of earmuffs on the crystal and, using her laptop, pulled up an instructional video for Giles on the proper way to play a set of panpipes.

Tara took advantage of the lull in conversation to pull Remy deeper into the shelves. "So, really," she asked. "How'd it go with Andrew?"

Remy sighed. He wanted to be open with his sister, but there were some parts of himself he wanted to keep back. "Didn't think I was dat transparent. Yeah, wasn't as simple as I made it sound."

Tara felt slightly guilty about using aura-reading to pick up on Remy's emotions, but it wasn't as if she hadn't just shown off her skills to the group. "What happened?"

"Thought I had an edge, one dat would help with th' connection." Remy shook his head, then forced a smile onto his face. "Gambit, he was jus' like him once. All gangly and hard edges. Had acne an' braces to boot. Not th' best time, but I wouldn't trade it for th' world. It left me wi' the ability to understand people in dat situation, as well as a healthy desire for most things 'geek.'"

"Except..." Remy sighed. "You ever see th' point approaching where you know dat a dark side of your personality is going to take over an' you jus' let it? Because otherwise, you'd have to leave? There was dis man who killed one of my friends growing up, because I made a choice. Later on in life, I wound up recruiting him for a job that went sour. I should've known better, dat it would all end in tears, simply because he was th' right guy for it, but I called him in anyway."

"There was dis point in time where I had a place of safety and he intruded on it. He had amnesia, to where he didn't remember his name was 'Sabertooth.' We kept watch over him, because he was a murderer, but some of us thought he could be redeemed. I wanted him to suffer, because I had to live with th' memories of how he'd affected me. Of th' defenseless women and children he'd slaughtered. You know th' pictures I took when we visited the play victims at the hospital? I printed out a similar sheaf for Creed except, because he had been doing it for a lot longer, they were much, much worse."

"So I show them to this guy, confront him wi' his past and it's at a point where his blank mind has already given him a point of empathy for his victims. He breaks down right away and I keep pushin' and I keep pushin'. In the end, it seems dat all I did for his empathy was 'cure' him of it."

Tara frowned. "So, when you used a similar method on Andrew, in order to get him to make that first connection with the people he hurt-"

"C'est exact." Remy nodded. "I was tryin' to redeem myself. Not as effective as I hoped. Didn't handle myself as well as I wanted to. Th' boy still needs to be watched, but I know for certain I didn't make things worse."

##

They set up the summoning circle in the back room of the Magic Box, which had been renovated as a training area for Buffy. Giles sat cross-legged in the center of the adorned practice mat, with the crystal and the other implements surrounding him. Remy stood guard outside the circle, his staff held ready. Xander tried to lounge in a threatening manner.

Giles lit the candles in a clockwise fashion with a long-handled lighter. Holding the musical instrument at an angle where he could comfortably blow across the bamboo pipes, he began to play.

Adjusting his position so his legs were no longer crossed, the agreed upon signal for when the spell was about to take effect, Giles played the parchment's last line of notes. There was a sharp, shattering sound and a flash of light that filled the room. In the midst of the brighter light an almost electrical whirlwind of blue sparks leapt from the remains of the crystal and gained substance.

Giles scrambled to his feet and raised his head to meet the eyes of the monster that had appeared in the room.

He was a large creature, with red hair that dropped to his shoulders and slightly curved horns that reached several inches above his head. His face was greyish-green. His eyebrows and beard were bushy and unkept.

Giles started to address the monster, stammered slightly, and started over again in a firmer tone. "By the ancient compact of the Maddox crystal witches, I believe that, uh, I am your master and you will do as I say."

"That is the case, puny human," the creature rumbled. "Be warned that my personality is intact and I require massive volumes of meat, ale and mead in order to stay alert and sociable."

After taking note of the studded leather straps stretched across the rough fabric of the creature's shirt, Xander nudged Tara with his elbow. "Told ya it would be an alcoholic."

Curiosity got the better of Willow, so she leaned over. Sure enough, the 'Not For Sale' sticker was stuck to the seat of the creature's trousers.

Giles shrugged slightly. "So, in order that I may better issue you commands and, ahem, offer you hospitality, I request that you identify yourself."

"Tell them my name, Anyanka," the creature rumbled. "Unless the years have worn harder on your brain than your supple figure."

Everyone turned to look at Anya.

She sighed and glanced briefly at her toes. "He's Olaf. He's a troll. The hammer he's holding increases his power, although he's already pretty buff." Anya turned to look Xander in the eyes and moved her hand in a sweeping gesture. "He was human when I dated him. I turned him into a troll, like the ones he loved to fight, when the adrenaline rush of battle and ale sent him into the arms of a less attractive barmaid. He broke my heart, so I took away his pleasant complexion. Oh, that's also how I became a Vengeance Demon in the first place. D'Hoffryn liked my style."

"Yes!" Olaf roared. "It is a wonderful style too. As you can see, I've adjusted. I've even adapted to the taste of roasted babies with heaping mounds of carrots and oxen gravy."

"Understandably," Giles said as he began to polish his glasses. "That will be off the menu."

##

"Don't worry, Giles. It'll be great." Willow beamed. "He'll just be like a giant pet. And if he acts up and it doesn't work out I can send him away to Troll World - or, at least somewhere reasonably close to it. You know, a place where he'll have fun."

Olaf glared at her. "I don't like witches much, either."

"Oh." Willow put her hand to her mouth. "Because of the entire cage thing? I can see how that'd be a bummer. But, hey, at least you're only bound this time by metaphysical structures. We won't even have to physically lock you in at night."

Tara whispered to Remy. "I don't much like the idea of keeping someone intelligent who used to be human as a pet. Then again, Willow's kept one of her classmates in a rat cage for two years, so I can see why she'd be for it. Of course, Amy's not exactly herself..."

##

"Hey, Giles, I'm sorry." Xander patted the older man on the shoulder. "That entire thing I said about repression? If you've been wanting to be Anya's ex-boyfriend that badly, you should've said something sooner."