Fanon Fodder (12/14)
Hi! Fic! Yay!
I'm not done with chapter 13 yet, but I figured I ought to keep posting as I go, since that seemed to be the general desire of, well, everyone.
The title for this chapter comes from here (video at the link is not terribly work safe)
Previous chapters are located here.
And then the battle began.
Xander had been through a number of battles in his time as a Slayerette. But this . . . this was a battle unlike any other he'd seen. And not just because of the glowing, floating numbers that appeared over everyone's heads the moment the fight started.
Those were strange. On the one hand, they were extremely distracting, the way they counted down as people got hit, vanishing along with the combatant when they reached 0 (and just who, Xander wondered, had decided that Rogue's number should be in the thousands while his barely reached two digits?). On the other, they were helpful. With all the people on the field, it would have been impossible to tell who was on which team if it weren't for the fact that the ‘good' team's numbers were the color of flourescent light bulbs and the ‘evil' side's seemed to occasionally spit flames.
Or maybe that was the result of the red and black demon to Xander's right who kept launching fireballs from his bare hands.
That was another thing. Xander had never seen a battle with a larger variety of weapons and tactics. Guns, swords, crossbows, magic, and every now and then, Xander caught sight of what looked like thin, black lines ripping something apart--
There was the sound of something sizzling and a deep, earthshaking cry, and suddenly the battle field seemed a bit emptier.
Someone had taken out Monica.
Xander couldn't let himself feel that loss now, though. That much he knew from experience. Members of his team were vanishing left and right, sent back into the creative ether with bangs and whimpers, and there was nothing to do but keep fighting and try to send even more of the other team back with them.
There was no hope for a forfeit now. Everything was just too chaotic.
Still, there was something surreal, despite the boom of the artillery and the blood that filled the air. Maybe it was that a lot of those guns seemed to be larger than the tiny girls wielding them. Maybe it was that the blood ranged the entire color spectrum. Something lent the entire scene an almost cartoonish quality.
Maybe it was just that, unlike any other battle Xander had seen, there were never any bodies left behind when someone died.
He had to keep reminding himself that that didn't make it any less REAL.
"Honeysuckle!" Xander spun, striking at the T-1000, though he didn't really expect the thing to stay down. It had a higher floating hit point number than Rogue did. "Behind you!"
Honeysuckle spun in mid-air, barely dodging the flying monkey.
Come on, now. Who the hell picked a FLYING MONKEY for their champion?
Something blasted by very close to Xander's left cheek, and he spun again just in time to watch a blonde woman in a skimpy red dress - who WASN'T Glory, thank god - collapse in a heap. Another blonde, this one with short hair and wearing some kind of grey fatigues, raced by, a blaster in her hand.
"Watch yourself, you frakkin' dumbass," she shouted, even as she took aim at another enemy. "Frakking toasters,"
Xander thwacked at the T-1000 again with his axe.
"Stay. Down. Dammit!"
Then a mulleted hulk of a man - though not THE Hulk, Xander had spotted him early on pummeling a woman with a staff and a really bad hat - slammed past and ripped the T-1000's head off with his teeth. The two teenaged boys following him stopped and did some kind of modified high five thing.
"Go team Venture!"
"Oh, sure," Xander muttered. "Do it the easy way,"
"You're welcome," said Thor - who wasn't really Thor of course, Thor was on the other end of the field fighting Ares - before he roared and lunged after a dalek. The teenagers hooted and ran after him - straight into an on-coming black wire which sliced them in two. The vampire in the three piece suit with a monocle smirked, but the expression faded as the boys respawned . . . as slightly gooey pink naked things.
Really, could you blame Xander for not quite taking all of this seriously?
Then the T-1000's head melded itself back onto its body and the thing started to stand.
"Aw crap." Xander lifted his axe again, but a green power ranger leapt in front of him, striking a powerful marital arts pose.
"SPD Green!"
Was that a SIREN on the side of his head?
"Kill it!" Xander shouted. "Kill it! Kill it! Kill it!"
The power ranger straightened. "You know, I'm sure if we tried we could come up with a peaceful solution that would value each other's humanity and dignity and--"
The T-1000's eye started to glow.
"Kill it!"
"Orrrrr not." The power ranger fired some kind of blaster and then did a lot of jumping around and shouting.
In theory, this was a fight.
Then he pulled out a cellphone looking thing and held it up. "It's judgement time!"
Xander blinked. "You've got to be kidding me."
"You are charged with, uh, beating up on a defenseless one-eyed guy--"
"Hey!"
"--and generally being an evil robot thing! And you are found . . ." A red X flashed on the cellphone. "Guilty!"
Xander wasn't entirely certain what happened next, but it seemed to involve more shouting, an excessive amount of smoke, flashing lights, and sound effects, and then the T-1000 was gone.
Well, okay, it was turned into some kind of moving trading card thing that looked like it belonged in a Harry Potter movie.
"Okay," Xander lowered his axe. "Wow."
"No need to thank me, it's all in a day's work for . . ." The ranger struck another pose. "Space Patrol Delta!"
Then he flipped into the air to go fight something else.
Xander blinked. A lot.
Did he smell TOAST?
Then Gargamel's cat jumped at his face.
* * *
And so it went, each encounter getting more ridiculous than the last, until the green ranger seemed like a breath of fresh air.
Take, for instance, the giant cat thing named Pete who tried, in the midst of battle, to sell Xander a used car.
Or the talking eggplant that shot vegetables at him.
The people who picked bad guys as champions were on crack. And not the good kind.
Honeysuckle fluttered by, howling in rage, chasing Shredder. Artie, bounding and posing, seemed to be involved in some kind of combat with Cobra Commander that consisted solely of overemphasized words.
Not to mention the pink-haired teenaged girl who was swooping about the battlefield on rollerblades. . . .
Right. So EVERYONE who'd entered a champion in the multi-verse competition was on crack.
Xander was getting tired, and even the tiny bottles of potion that had been handed out by Link didn't seem to be helping.
It'd be all over soon.
At least, he hoped so.
He raised his axe, let out a hoarse yell, and swung at the person who seemed to be creeping up on his blind side.
Fortunately, Weiss ducked.
"Whoa! Whoa! Friend here!"
Xander lowered the axe. "Sorry. Battle, you know." He blinked at Weiss's number. "How the hell did you get triple digits?"
Weiss shrugged. "Mad spy skills. You look like you're running a bit low."
"I was low to begin with."
Weiss frowned for a minute, then reached out to grab a number from a passing telephone sanitizer. The man in question vanished in a puff of logic, and Weiss reached up to put the glowing number next to the ones floating above Xander's head. "We don't need him anyway. No telephones."
Xander blinked at his now triple digit hit point score. "That's . . . bizarre yet ingenious."
"When in doubt, go with the flow. Listen, have you seen Nadia anywhere?"
Xander shook his head.
"Damn. I think she might have gotten zombied. Again."
"Wait, what?"
"Long story. Watch the DVDs. I've got to find her."
"Yeah, I'll--" The world suddenly shifted around Xander and then he wasn't on the battlefield any more. "--help, okay, NOW what?"
"Alexander Lavelle Harris," Manny stepped out of a convenient shadow, clutching his clipboard like a security blanket. "Welcome to the Control Room."
Xander turned slowly in a circle. There wasn't much to the room, but that seemed to fit with the general theme of most of the places he'd been in the Masters of the Multi-verse challenge. Unlike, say, Second Banana Heaven or even Phantom Pains, though, the Control Room hadn't been imbued with details from hundreds of characters spending time within it. Manny himself seemed extraordinarily fleshed out against the dull gray of the walls, and as Xander looked closer, he noticed that the control panel buttons resembled low resolution images on an old computer monitor. It was all just so . . . half- assed.
Like the challenge itself, really.
The most interesting thing, by far, in the room was the megaphone with feet and a tongue that was announcing the events down on the playing field in a rapid fire tone usually reserved for auctioneers and race commentators.
This, it seemed, was the Announcer.
Only slightly less interesting was the fact that Thug One, and his compatriot, Thug Two, were also in attendance. And cracking their knuckles.
"What am I doing here, Manny? I'm supposed to be down on the field. Fighting. Like you guys have been trying to get me to do all along."
"Indeed." Manny stared sadly down at his clipboard. "You've done very well in this tournament. But I'm afraid we've chosen one more opponent for you, due to . . . ah . . . popular demand."
Xander sighed and straightened as much as he could. "Whatever. Bring on . . . whoever it is. Then can I get back to helping my team?"
"Heh," said Thug One, cracking his knuckles again.
"Heh heh," said Thug Two, rolling his neck.
Xander sort of hoped they were his enemy. He wouldn't mind braining them with his axe, if nothing else.
"We . . . ah. . . ." hedged Manny.
". . . andtherefereeismakingacalland, YES, itlooksliketeamSMGTEACOZYhasbeendisqualified!"
Xander spun to face the animated megaphone. "What?!"
"You left the field," said Thug One.
"Thas against the rules," said Thug Two.
"You BROUGHT me here! This is crap! I want to talk to whoever the hell you've got running this stupid thing, and I want to talk to them NOW."
"I am, actually, the second in command." Manny adjusted his glasses. "You may address your concerns to me."
"Like hell. Who's the first in command?"
"That would be telling." Manny set his clipboard to the side. "But we digress. Alexander Lavelle Harris, it behooves me to inform you of your final battle. You will be facing. . . ."
The sound of a door opening and closing came from somewhere behind Xander and he turned.
He blinked.
". . . Alexander Lavelle Harris," continued Manny.
"Hey," The other Xander grinned cockily, adjusting his grip on a very, very large gun. "How's it going."
Xander stared. "You've GOT to be kidding me."
To be continued in "Marty Stu"
Mad props go to the following people:
liz_marcs, bastardsnow, and jerib_78 who came up with the main gimmick of the chapter and generally cheered me the heck on down at WriterCon.
kimera who totally didn't blink too much when I said "What would Bridge say if he were facing a T-1000?", and in fact let me know what he just might say, which I stole word for word and put in the fic.
Everyone from fandomhigh who frequents the chat and put up with me saying things like "Gimme another bad guy. Okay, gimme another one. And another one. . . ."
Yay!
I'm not done with chapter 13 yet, but I figured I ought to keep posting as I go, since that seemed to be the general desire of, well, everyone.
The title for this chapter comes from here (video at the link is not terribly work safe)
Previous chapters are located here.
And then the battle began.
Xander had been through a number of battles in his time as a Slayerette. But this . . . this was a battle unlike any other he'd seen. And not just because of the glowing, floating numbers that appeared over everyone's heads the moment the fight started.
Those were strange. On the one hand, they were extremely distracting, the way they counted down as people got hit, vanishing along with the combatant when they reached 0 (and just who, Xander wondered, had decided that Rogue's number should be in the thousands while his barely reached two digits?). On the other, they were helpful. With all the people on the field, it would have been impossible to tell who was on which team if it weren't for the fact that the ‘good' team's numbers were the color of flourescent light bulbs and the ‘evil' side's seemed to occasionally spit flames.
Or maybe that was the result of the red and black demon to Xander's right who kept launching fireballs from his bare hands.
That was another thing. Xander had never seen a battle with a larger variety of weapons and tactics. Guns, swords, crossbows, magic, and every now and then, Xander caught sight of what looked like thin, black lines ripping something apart--
There was the sound of something sizzling and a deep, earthshaking cry, and suddenly the battle field seemed a bit emptier.
Someone had taken out Monica.
Xander couldn't let himself feel that loss now, though. That much he knew from experience. Members of his team were vanishing left and right, sent back into the creative ether with bangs and whimpers, and there was nothing to do but keep fighting and try to send even more of the other team back with them.
There was no hope for a forfeit now. Everything was just too chaotic.
Still, there was something surreal, despite the boom of the artillery and the blood that filled the air. Maybe it was that a lot of those guns seemed to be larger than the tiny girls wielding them. Maybe it was that the blood ranged the entire color spectrum. Something lent the entire scene an almost cartoonish quality.
Maybe it was just that, unlike any other battle Xander had seen, there were never any bodies left behind when someone died.
He had to keep reminding himself that that didn't make it any less REAL.
"Honeysuckle!" Xander spun, striking at the T-1000, though he didn't really expect the thing to stay down. It had a higher floating hit point number than Rogue did. "Behind you!"
Honeysuckle spun in mid-air, barely dodging the flying monkey.
Come on, now. Who the hell picked a FLYING MONKEY for their champion?
Something blasted by very close to Xander's left cheek, and he spun again just in time to watch a blonde woman in a skimpy red dress - who WASN'T Glory, thank god - collapse in a heap. Another blonde, this one with short hair and wearing some kind of grey fatigues, raced by, a blaster in her hand.
"Watch yourself, you frakkin' dumbass," she shouted, even as she took aim at another enemy. "Frakking toasters,"
Xander thwacked at the T-1000 again with his axe.
"Stay. Down. Dammit!"
Then a mulleted hulk of a man - though not THE Hulk, Xander had spotted him early on pummeling a woman with a staff and a really bad hat - slammed past and ripped the T-1000's head off with his teeth. The two teenaged boys following him stopped and did some kind of modified high five thing.
"Go team Venture!"
"Oh, sure," Xander muttered. "Do it the easy way,"
"You're welcome," said Thor - who wasn't really Thor of course, Thor was on the other end of the field fighting Ares - before he roared and lunged after a dalek. The teenagers hooted and ran after him - straight into an on-coming black wire which sliced them in two. The vampire in the three piece suit with a monocle smirked, but the expression faded as the boys respawned . . . as slightly gooey pink naked things.
Really, could you blame Xander for not quite taking all of this seriously?
Then the T-1000's head melded itself back onto its body and the thing started to stand.
"Aw crap." Xander lifted his axe again, but a green power ranger leapt in front of him, striking a powerful marital arts pose.
"SPD Green!"
Was that a SIREN on the side of his head?
"Kill it!" Xander shouted. "Kill it! Kill it! Kill it!"
The power ranger straightened. "You know, I'm sure if we tried we could come up with a peaceful solution that would value each other's humanity and dignity and--"
The T-1000's eye started to glow.
"Kill it!"
"Orrrrr not." The power ranger fired some kind of blaster and then did a lot of jumping around and shouting.
In theory, this was a fight.
Then he pulled out a cellphone looking thing and held it up. "It's judgement time!"
Xander blinked. "You've got to be kidding me."
"You are charged with, uh, beating up on a defenseless one-eyed guy--"
"Hey!"
"--and generally being an evil robot thing! And you are found . . ." A red X flashed on the cellphone. "Guilty!"
Xander wasn't entirely certain what happened next, but it seemed to involve more shouting, an excessive amount of smoke, flashing lights, and sound effects, and then the T-1000 was gone.
Well, okay, it was turned into some kind of moving trading card thing that looked like it belonged in a Harry Potter movie.
"Okay," Xander lowered his axe. "Wow."
"No need to thank me, it's all in a day's work for . . ." The ranger struck another pose. "Space Patrol Delta!"
Then he flipped into the air to go fight something else.
Xander blinked. A lot.
Did he smell TOAST?
Then Gargamel's cat jumped at his face.
* * *
And so it went, each encounter getting more ridiculous than the last, until the green ranger seemed like a breath of fresh air.
Take, for instance, the giant cat thing named Pete who tried, in the midst of battle, to sell Xander a used car.
Or the talking eggplant that shot vegetables at him.
The people who picked bad guys as champions were on crack. And not the good kind.
Honeysuckle fluttered by, howling in rage, chasing Shredder. Artie, bounding and posing, seemed to be involved in some kind of combat with Cobra Commander that consisted solely of overemphasized words.
Not to mention the pink-haired teenaged girl who was swooping about the battlefield on rollerblades. . . .
Right. So EVERYONE who'd entered a champion in the multi-verse competition was on crack.
Xander was getting tired, and even the tiny bottles of potion that had been handed out by Link didn't seem to be helping.
It'd be all over soon.
At least, he hoped so.
He raised his axe, let out a hoarse yell, and swung at the person who seemed to be creeping up on his blind side.
Fortunately, Weiss ducked.
"Whoa! Whoa! Friend here!"
Xander lowered the axe. "Sorry. Battle, you know." He blinked at Weiss's number. "How the hell did you get triple digits?"
Weiss shrugged. "Mad spy skills. You look like you're running a bit low."
"I was low to begin with."
Weiss frowned for a minute, then reached out to grab a number from a passing telephone sanitizer. The man in question vanished in a puff of logic, and Weiss reached up to put the glowing number next to the ones floating above Xander's head. "We don't need him anyway. No telephones."
Xander blinked at his now triple digit hit point score. "That's . . . bizarre yet ingenious."
"When in doubt, go with the flow. Listen, have you seen Nadia anywhere?"
Xander shook his head.
"Damn. I think she might have gotten zombied. Again."
"Wait, what?"
"Long story. Watch the DVDs. I've got to find her."
"Yeah, I'll--" The world suddenly shifted around Xander and then he wasn't on the battlefield any more. "--help, okay, NOW what?"
"Alexander Lavelle Harris," Manny stepped out of a convenient shadow, clutching his clipboard like a security blanket. "Welcome to the Control Room."
Xander turned slowly in a circle. There wasn't much to the room, but that seemed to fit with the general theme of most of the places he'd been in the Masters of the Multi-verse challenge. Unlike, say, Second Banana Heaven or even Phantom Pains, though, the Control Room hadn't been imbued with details from hundreds of characters spending time within it. Manny himself seemed extraordinarily fleshed out against the dull gray of the walls, and as Xander looked closer, he noticed that the control panel buttons resembled low resolution images on an old computer monitor. It was all just so . . . half- assed.
Like the challenge itself, really.
The most interesting thing, by far, in the room was the megaphone with feet and a tongue that was announcing the events down on the playing field in a rapid fire tone usually reserved for auctioneers and race commentators.
This, it seemed, was the Announcer.
Only slightly less interesting was the fact that Thug One, and his compatriot, Thug Two, were also in attendance. And cracking their knuckles.
"What am I doing here, Manny? I'm supposed to be down on the field. Fighting. Like you guys have been trying to get me to do all along."
"Indeed." Manny stared sadly down at his clipboard. "You've done very well in this tournament. But I'm afraid we've chosen one more opponent for you, due to . . . ah . . . popular demand."
Xander sighed and straightened as much as he could. "Whatever. Bring on . . . whoever it is. Then can I get back to helping my team?"
"Heh," said Thug One, cracking his knuckles again.
"Heh heh," said Thug Two, rolling his neck.
Xander sort of hoped they were his enemy. He wouldn't mind braining them with his axe, if nothing else.
"We . . . ah. . . ." hedged Manny.
". . . andtherefereeismakingacalland, YES, itlooksliketeamSMGTEACOZYhasbeendisqualified!"
Xander spun to face the animated megaphone. "What?!"
"You left the field," said Thug One.
"Thas against the rules," said Thug Two.
"You BROUGHT me here! This is crap! I want to talk to whoever the hell you've got running this stupid thing, and I want to talk to them NOW."
"I am, actually, the second in command." Manny adjusted his glasses. "You may address your concerns to me."
"Like hell. Who's the first in command?"
"That would be telling." Manny set his clipboard to the side. "But we digress. Alexander Lavelle Harris, it behooves me to inform you of your final battle. You will be facing. . . ."
The sound of a door opening and closing came from somewhere behind Xander and he turned.
He blinked.
". . . Alexander Lavelle Harris," continued Manny.
"Hey," The other Xander grinned cockily, adjusting his grip on a very, very large gun. "How's it going."
Xander stared. "You've GOT to be kidding me."
To be continued in "Marty Stu"
Mad props go to the following people:
liz_marcs, bastardsnow, and jerib_78 who came up with the main gimmick of the chapter and generally cheered me the heck on down at WriterCon.
kimera who totally didn't blink too much when I said "What would Bridge say if he were facing a T-1000?", and in fact let me know what he just might say, which I stole word for word and put in the fic.
Everyone from fandomhigh who frequents the chat and put up with me saying things like "Gimme another bad guy. Okay, gimme another one. And another one. . . ."
Yay!