Sorry, You didn't win
Xander looked down at his paws and sighed. He'd died and started another loop, but he was still a Mau. The magical artifact used to change his species was apparently powerful enough for the effects to stretch past the loop it'd occurred in.
Thankfully he appeared to be back in Sunnydale and not stuck in Japan, though that fused loop had been fun. He was still new to the loops, having been tagged in by his older self (his older self had gone through thousands of loops) and given a box before vanishing.
The box had contained a New Looper's handbook, a pre-made subspace pocket, a number of weapons, several books, and other assorted valuables. All of which had gotten dumped straight into his new subspace pocket as it activated. This turned out to be a good thing because anything that hadn't been in his pocket when the loop reset would be gone forever. Xander had lost the handbook and a lightsaber five minutes after stashing everything else, as he had ignored the warnings about needing to be a skilled swordsmen before using said weapon. He had managed to slice himself clean in half while he had been fooling around with the lightsaber, his last thought before resetting had been how odd it felt to be falling in two opposite directions at the same time.
Thankfully he'd at least paged through the handbook so he wasn't totally in the dark. Still, he really wished he'd actually read it before going 'ohhh shiny' at the sight of the lightsaber and ending that loop in record time. His older self should have known how irresponsible he could be and how he would react and not have included a lightsaber.
'Oh well, Que Sera, Sera,' Xander thought to himself as he climbed the trellis outside his bedroom window and found, much to his surprise, that 'he' was still in bed.
The alarm went off and Xander rolled over in bed and hit the snooze button, not waking for even a second.
Xander the Mau entered through the open window and carefully picked his way through the minefield of dirty clothes to leap up on the nightstand. He then hit the alarm button with a paw, setting it off.
Xander hit the snooze button without waking.
This cycle repeated three more times before the black cat moved the alarm clock to the far edge before setting it off once more.
Xander's hand dropped down on the spot where the clock should have been and felt around blindly.
"Xander, wake up!" the cat ordered.
"Mrrppphh?" Xander mumbled.
"I'm not your mom, get up or I'll tell Buffy about that dream you had involving her, Joyce, and Harmony," the cat threatened.
"Ahh! I'm up!" Xander sat right up and looked around, his eyes wide "What the hell?!"
The cat shut off the alarm. "Do I have your attention now?" he asked.
Xander looked at the Mau and blinked a couple times before finally responding, "I'm still dreaming aren't I?"
"Pinch yourself," the Mau suggested.
"Ow!" Xander groaned once he'd pinched himself, "Ack! Not dreaming. If you're here to give me a magical locket that allows me to transform into Sailor Moon, I'll need to shave my legs first."
Xander the Mau laughed. "No, but we might want to pull that one on Buffy or Willow as a joke. I'm you from another timeline," he explained. "Time got reset and I'm guessing I had enough protective magic that instead of getting wiped or merging with you, I kinda just got dropped into the new timeline unchanged. And how do you know about the Sailor Senshi?"
"Merging with me?" Xander asked before adding, "Sailor moon is the name of a popular anime about ten years ago, and the Sailor Senshi were the main characters in it."
"We are the same person, just from different timelines," the cat explained. "Normally we'd just have merged as time reset itself."
Had a lot of experience with that?" Xander asked as he got up from his bed.
"Usagi rewound the clock a couple of times," The cat admitted, "but mostly I know it because I keep reliving Sunnydale and my life here. The whole Sailor Moon thing is what's called a fused loop where the normal time loop gets tangled with another."
"It's way too early for this," Xander complained as he picked up some relatively clean clothes off the floor. "Let me get a shower and then we'll talk."
One shower and two bowls of cereal later...
"OK, I'm awake enough to talk now," Xander said, dressed and ready for school.
"Just to recap, I'm you from another timeline who lived through a dozen or so lives and in the last one, I got tangled up in the Sailor Moon cast and turned into a pussy... err I mean a Mau," the cat explained.
"Ok, so you know what's coming up then?" Xander asked.
"Yep, but once we start making changes that'll change as well, and not all loops are the same, so I can be flat out wrong at times," the cat warned.
"Anything is better than nothing," Xander replied.
"OK, what's the last major event?" the cat asked.
"I got possessed by a hyena," Xander said with a sigh, still recalling how much that had sucked.
"Hyena possession," Xander-cat replied to his human self with a nod. "Angel's been revealed to be a vampire?"
"And Buffy's still into him!" Xander complained.
"Let it go," Xander-cat suggested. "Buffy is only interested in doomed relationships. I have yet to see a loop where her sex life doesn't come with a body count."
"Wait... what?" Xander asked.
"She liked him when she thought he was a decade older than her and into jailbait with enough baggage for a world cruise," the cat explained. "Unless you're willing to turn yourself into a tortured loser or a monster she will never give you the time of day."
"So in dozens of lives, you've never hooked up with her?"
"Sure I have, got turned into a werewolf and scarred willow, which turned myself into a brooding loser even though Willow wasn't turned into a werewolf and got laser surgery to remove the scar."
"So what happened?" Xander asked curiously.
"Willow met a witch in college named Tara, who convinced me I wasn't a monster and so I stopped brooding and managed to gain control over my beast. Being happy and well-adjusted repelled Buffy like holding up a cross to a vamp. She dumped me and started dating a vampire three days later."
"Ouch..." Xander said with a wince. "Was the sex at least good?"
"And kinky too," the cat agreed with a nod. "But back to the original question. The next major event is Joyce's boyfriend turning out to be a serial killer robot."
"You're kidding!" Xander exclaimed.
"I wish I was," the cat replied. "A genius made him during the fifties to take his place, so the robot has been marrying women and sticking bodies in the basement since."
"There must be hundreds down there," Xander said, shaking his head.
"Only four if I remember right," the cat replied.
"Only four?" Xander asked slightly confused. "Don't serial killers kill frequently? Not just once a decade?"
"All I know is he uses drugs on people and has four dead wives in the basement. Between that and thinking that slapping Buffy is the proper way to discipline her, we never looked any farther."
"So he might not have killed them?" Xander asked.
"Tissue samples show a buildup of toxic chemicals in the system," the cat explained. "He may not have intentionally killed them, but continually drugging them certainly contributed to their death."
"He probably just needs new programing," Xander said, recalling what little he knew about the fifties and the number of things it had gotten wrong in the way of side effects from common drugs, among other things.
"Buffy usually beats him to death with a frying pan," the cat replied. "I usually don't mess with what works."
"So what have you been doing while living the same life over and over?" Xander asked.
Making up for the holes in my education and learning what changes triggers what."
"How well did that work for you?" Xander asked.
"Like lead tits on the titanic," the cat admitted. "I swear the Hellmouth lives to fuck up our plans. I managed to learn quite a lot only to find that different loops have different rules. I cant even pass a history test with any degree of certainty."
"Mind if I take you to Giles, to verify some of this?" Xander asked.
Xander-cat thought about it for a moment before deciding, "I can hide in your backpack, but stop by McDonald's and get me a dozen breakfast burritos."
"That's a bit out of my price range," Xander admitted.
The cat turned his head like he was going to bite his shoulder but instead spit out a fifty dollar bill. "Make sure it has the right president on it. I'm pretty sure that'll cover breakfast."
"And then some," Xander agreed. "Where did you hide it?"
"Subspace pocket," Xander-cat replied, "it allows me to carry stuff through the time loops."
"Cool, anything interesting?"
"Tons, but we can discuss it later," the cat told him.
OoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOo
"Morning Xander," Giles said. "It's unusual to see you up and about this early, is something amiss?"
Xander unzipped his backpack and set it on the table, allowing a black tomcat with a golden moon symbol on its forehead to step out.
"Pass me the sausage McMuffins," the cat requested. "The smell has been driving me nuts for the last five minutes!"
"Just a tad," Xander answered Giles.
"A talking cat?" Giles asked as said cat started taking and unwrapping the food from a McDonald's bag with surprising dexterity, considering his lack of thumbs.
"I'm a Mau, Lunar not Egyptian," the cat said between bites of food.
"I've never heard of a Lunar Mau," Giles admitted while Xander sat down and started eating as well.
"That's because in this reality we are cartoon characters," the cat explained, before telling Giles everything he'd told Xander earlier about his situation.
"I find that rather hard to believe," Giles said bluntly.
"Really, Ripper?" the cat asked. "Well let me give you some further proof then." The black cat turned his head and when he turned it back he was holding a journal which he then dropped in front of himself and started paging through. "Oops, Ted comes later, we are dealing with a demon that was scanned into the internet named Moloch next."
"Scanned in?" Giles asked.
"You get a load of books from the Watchers that Willow scans into the computer and one of them turns out to be Moloch The Corrupter who was imprisoned in a book. He seduces and destroys people. He has two students build him a robot body and then tries to seduce Willow before Buffy destroys him. You can see why I'd get the two events mixed up."
"Erm, question," Giles said.
"Yes?" Xander-cat replied.
"Where did you get the tiny glasses?" Xander interrupted, pointing at the tiny glasses the cat was now wearing.
Xander-cat looked at him over the top of the glasses. "Magic."
"Magic?" Xander asked.
"Magic," Xander-cat agreed.
"Magic," Xander said with a nod.
"Which book?" Giles asked.
"No idea," Xander-cat replied. "I think it was a big leather one with vellum pages, you'll just have to search for it."
"I thought you knew the future," Giles said.
"I know a dozen futures," the cat replied easily, "but that doesn't mean I'm infallible or have a photographic memory."
"Point," Giles admitted.
"Almost forgot," the cat said. "You meet Jenny Calendar, or rather Janna Kalderash. She's a Gypsy sent by her family to ensure Angel's curse stays strong. Giles and her her hit it off until she's killed by a recently freed Angelus when Buffy breaks his curse by sleeping with him."
"I find that hard to believe," Giles said with a frown.
"And fairly nauseating," Xander added.
"It's verifiable," the cat replied, hopping off the table and stretching his legs.
"And easily done," Giles agreed. "If this does pan out it could change everything!"
"That's the plan," Xander-cat agreed. "I have a lot of plans for how this loop should go!"
The doors to the library opened, as Buffy and Willow arrived.
"Kitty!" Buffy squealed, as she rushed over to pet the black cat, who started purring and walked against her ankles. "Who's a pretty pussy, who's a pretty pussy?" Buffy cooed, knowing it would amuse her friends and embarrass Giles.
The cat stopped purring and looked directly upwards. "I'd say you, but truthfully you could use a trim down there."
OoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOo
Xander woke up and shut off the alarm, once again human. "That was a short loop. Note to self: Never tell Buffy she needs a trim down there."
Typing by Falkun (who once again is doing this at work instead of working)