The Knights of Scooby
Chapter Three
by Lionheart
*-*-*-*-*
It was an unusually thoughty Xander that meditated in his room, trying hard to ignore the overnight changes to his home or the fact that his junk was all packed in plastic buckets in the garage, waiting for him to retrieve them so he could spread it around his room once again.
No, he did his best to ignore all of this, as thoughts swirled all around in his mind and he subconsciously sought for order among all of the new ideas that had been so recently and forcefully shoved inside his brain.
So far he hadn't given himself an opportunity to try processing it all, and this was his first real attempt to sort it all out.
"To govern the world you must govern yourself."
Well, Xander wasn't particularly interested in governing anyone, but he had to admit the appeal of staying alive, and now that he had an appreciation of the dangers of Sunnydale, he had a great deal of appreciation for the art of winning battles, and both Sun Tzu and Musashi were emphatic that principles of fighting were the same regardless of if you had small scale engagements or huge conflicts with large armies.
"If he attains the virtue of strategy, one man can beat ten men."
Well, since an average vamp was four or five times stronger than an average man, that seemed to be an excellent starting point as far as qualities to have for anyone wanting to keep his blood inside his neck where it belonged.
So it looked like he was going to be walking the path of the warrior, whether he wanted to rule anyone or not. At least both Bruce Lee and Musashi agreed that "Men must polish their particular Way."
It was odd to the young man how so many old fogies and movie stars agreed on so much, in spite of never having met (that he could tell).
Xander continued to sit, meditating, pondering on the books now sealed inside his head in an attempt to sort meaning out of all of those memorized words, to make those books and what they taught part of him, rather than just a bunch of phrases that hung out in the back of his head.
A passage from the Book of Five Rings was moving him now: It is said the warrior's is the twofold Way of pen and sword, and he should have a taste for both Ways. Even if a man has no natural ability he can be a warrior by sticking assiduously to both divisions of the Way.
Xander would normally say that he was allergic to words like assiduously, and they caused him to break out in hives. But the alternative seemed clearly to be coming down with a bad case of fangs, so he could learn to live with having hives, and did not interrupt as those words went on, almost like Musashi was speaking to him directly:
"This is the way for men who want to learn my strategy:
1 Do not think dishonestly.
2 The Way is in training.
3 Become acquainted with every art.
4 Know the Ways of all professions.
5 Distinguish between gain and loss in worldly matters.
6 Develop intuitive judgment and understanding for everything.
7 Perceive those things which cannot be seen.
8 Pay attention even to trifles.
9 Do nothing which is of no use."
Random quotes spun around inside him, very much as if speaking to him. "It will seem difficult at first, but everything is difficult at first."
Xander knew he was changing, changing drastically even. He couldn't tell right now if he wanted to be changed, or if he'd even like the sort of person he seemed almost doomed by this knowledge to become. But, on the other hand, he knew the sort of person he was, and he couldn't say much for his former self's ability to carry on a campaign of destruction against the things that hunted the night.
Holding them off wasn't enough. Staying safe wasn't enough. Xander knew his ultimate goal, he'd known it from the moment they'd seen those... things eat that jogger.
The goal was victory. Victory at all costs. Victory in spite of all terror, for without victory there was no survival. It was the human race against an evil so great words could not encompass it, creatures so repulsive and horrible there could be no coexistence, monsters whose insatiable lust for murder and bloodshed was never surpassed in all the dark and lamentable catalog of human crimes.
The world would not be safe so long as one vampire remained in it.
If even one remained it could restart the entire bloody mess of them just as a match struck to gasoline could ignite a blazing inferno. You could not put out only a part of any fire and expect that to be the end of it. It was either all or nothing, a choice between safety or being consumed in the flames.
You don't save a boat from sinking by patching only a part of the hole. You either stop the leak or lose the ship, there are no halfway measures.
It was to be a war of extermination, and he would fight it on all fronts, on the land, the sea and even up in space if he had to, regardless of whether he was the only one fighting or not.
There were some things just too evil to be allowed to exist, and vampires were, so far, the only entry on that list as far as he was concerned.
Well, and Vice-Principal Snyder in a bikini, but hopefully that great evil could be averted, so that it never came to pass.
He shuddered, having seen the vile man on a trip to his new school alongside of Willow, who had wanted to pick up her book list early. Sadly, for his former self image, he had picked up his at the same time, and already had the books he would need for next year.
He was even... shudder... planning on studying them, before school actually started no less!
He could feel vital slacker points draining away from out of his grasp as he made that admission inside of himself. He checked himself over for traces of red hair or a tendency to babble before he left the house to visit his friends.
It was about time he told Willow that he was ready for those typing lessons. If he was going to be spending all of his much reduced free time thinking over their words for a while, he might as well be typing them that his friends could read them too.
That way they could at least talk the subjects over.
More words followed him out of the door, as if dogging his footsteps: You must appreciate this. The essence of this book is that you must train day and night in order to make quick decisions. In strategy it is necessary to treat training as part of normal life with your spirit unchanging.
Ok, but if the funky old guys who wrote those books got him to wear silk pajamas out in public, it was going to be time to shoot himself.
*-*-*-*-*
Tony Harris and his wife had a plan.
They each thought it was their own plan, and each one imagined the other was wholly ignorant of the sudden fit of genius that had seized ahold of the one who had The Plan.
The plan had come to them just after a shrieking match between the drunken pair about their abysmal finances.
It was simple, really. The couple had no love for each other; No, none at all worth speaking of. However, as they were reminded by a traveling salesman who had stopped by their door, there was such a thing called insurance.
Life insurance, particularly.
Some naive company had decided to make inroads into the California market by peddling life insurance door to door in Sunnydale, of all places. There were even gang violence and animal violence clauses available, for those that wanted them. No doubt the company planned on signing on a few thousand contracts at steeply inflated prices, then leaning hard on the local PD to cut down on crime rates and wild animal populations so they could rake in profits.
It'd never happen, of course.
But, for a time this golden opportunity was offered, and each of the elder Harrises were determined to grab it while it lasted. Toward this end, they'd both had day spa trips including full makeovers, cut back on their drinking, and done everything in their powers to cover up the evidence of their utterly wasted lives so they could pass off on the insurance company's inspections.
Mr. Harris had even spoken to one of his old buddies, who'd employed him off and on for years, firing him whenever his drinking got too bad, to alter his books to show continuous employment over that time, invoking a technicality to get all of the 'off' periods described as sabbaticals, but not emphasized in any of the papers, so there was a good chance of some bored clerk reading those thinking that he'd been steadily employed for a decent amount of time.
The pair were, between them, doing a fair job of impersonating a respectable couple. There was no way that it could last. They'd never keep it up even a second week, but it only had to last until all of the papers got signed.
Then each one planned to dupe the other into going to one of the rough areas of town, kicking them out of the car and hoping the gangs on PCP got them. Afterwards, each hoped to live out their lives on those juicy checks.
They'd even had a brilliant idea, and somehow gotten a lawyer to create a full trust, complete with tax shelters, to keep all of the money themselves and not have any lost to inheritance laws, while the debts died with the debtors, each one thinking they'd be the one to enjoy all that newly sheltered wealth.
Of course their son, Alexander LaVelle Harris, got included in all of that paperwork just to make everything seem legit.
In their rush to obtain the insurance, neither drunk paused to think about why their spouse was being so unusually helpful in all of this preparation.
*-*-*-*-*
"Wax on, wax off, Daniel-san!" Xander joked to his two best friends in the whole wide world as they adopted a training technique from the Karate Kid movie to practice blocks while polishing cars.
There really were blocking techniques that you could practice like that, and it earned them a supply of 'fun money' by doing it for Xander's Uncle Rory.
Despite their classes, they still had a great deal more time than money, so it seemed an equitable deal to the teens. And it even served as double-duty, as they got in extra practice time for their martial arts, in addition to getting some pocket change.
"Okay, enough with the Master Miyagi stuff," Jesse laughed as they came to the end of their stint. "I note, by the blessed clock spirit, that we have come to the end of our car-polishing today. Tis time, I think, to play Robin Hood and picture the divine image of Cordelia in tights!"
"Please, picture the Wicked Witch of the West in tights? I am trying not to lose my breakfast," Xander returned in good humor, as they went over to their short range improvised archery practice area, also set up on his uncle's lot, in an area sheltered by a good, tall fence.
Xander had, previous to this, already taken some wood and, using the instructions from the US Army Survival Manual, shaved it down into three acceptable but not elegant bows, and with those, and some arrows, they practiced their archery.
The bows were weak, too weak to hunt small game with and certainly no good for hurting vamps. However, Jesse liked to laugh that the three neophyte archers who used them were even weaker.
But that would change as they got stronger.
"Maid Marion?" Xander passed Willow her bow, which she accepted with a fierce blush he hadn't noticed before.
Truthfully, she was picturing HIM in tights! And the image wasn't doing any good for her composure.
"Oh no!" Jesse objected when he tried to hand him the Robin Hood hat with his bow. "No giving to the poor for me! If I were to steal from the rich I'd keep it all myself. Besides, you won the toss when we started this. You get to be Robin Hood. I'll just stay a Merry Man. Less camera time and more time for smooching in the bushes with the lusty tavern wenches while you get to pine over prissy noble ladies."
"Fine," Xander rammed the feathered green cap on with a smile. "But you forget, it's the noble ladies who come with wealthy dowries."
"Dowries which I shall, unfortunately, feel obligated to steal," Jesse sniffed as he melodramatically placed a hand to his heart as if in great suffering.
Then he sobered up, standing tall. "What's up, Xand-Man? You *never* let me win these battles of wits with you before. Why are you so off your game? Is it..?"
Face serious, Xander drew back a nocked arrow and let loose at the straw target, hitting one of the outermost concentric circles. Then he nodded. "Yah. I know. Ever since that day Mr. Mage Dude downloaded several libraries worth of serious dudes talking about combat and death into my head. And worse since we confirmed the existence of bloodsucking dental rejects."
"Well," Jesse took on a comforting tone as he, too, pulled back a string and let his arrow fly, slightly more true than Xander's, but both of them were so bad it was probably luck. "If we have to fight to protect ourselves I *do* prefer to do it from the safety of a church, and just stake them at range. So this is cool."
Willow had listened to this, before ducking out to collect the lunches she'd prepared, grabbing them from Uncle Rory's fridge, coming back with the bean sprout sandwiches and fruit smoothies she'd made, and the boys eagerly put aside their bows to consume them.
By agreement, each of them had a say in how to defend themselves against things that went bite in the night - beyond merely not going out at night, if at all possible, that is, and while it was Xander's idea that got them all attending martial arts classes, it was Willow's that they all started eating decent food.
To everyone's surprise, Xander did NOT spontaneously dissolve into a puddle of slacker molecules and industrial yellow dye (from the Twinkie supply in his bloodstream) upon tasting his first bean sprout.
The old Xander wanted to cry and rave about the unfairness of it all, and he had done so to and for the amusement of his friends. But the new Xander could almost feel Mr. Samurai Dude glowering over his shoulder at the mere thought of processed snack cakes squeezed out in lots of thousands by industrial chemical apparatus and growling something about 'EAT nothing which is of no use!'
So, the first round had gone to the ghost of Musashi and now Xander ate more healthy food, at least until he could think of an argument on which to base a comeback for the crusade of the beloved eternal snack logs.
Of course, due to the fact that nearly everything in the world was a health food in comparison to the wonder that was Twinkies, Xander was still able to gorge himself on typical American favorites like hamburger and pizza, and even Willow had to laughingly agree that he was eating better.
And Xander was not the only one who was changing. Admittedly, all of them were a bit put off their normal routines by having to scramble each day to fight back the terror that was knowing that things straight out of B-grade horror films were cruising main street in the wee hours, but every day it seemed Willow got slightly odder to his perceptions. Stuttering around him for one, which her usual familiarity had often diminished.
Even looking at her aura confused Xander.
Just being able to see them didn't automatically tell him what all of the colors, pulses, veins and marbling all meant. In fact, he found it confusing as anything. There were colors in Willow's aura he couldn't see in anyone else. She had patterns that sortuv matched some of his, and all three of them were veined with what he guessed were tiny bits of each other's energies since they looked kind of similar in ways. He guessed, if that were the case, that it was due to their long friendship.
What's more, much of what he saw was in a near-constant state of flux, shifting and moving about in patterns he couldn't begin to describe, much less understand. And some things, he knew from having read the theory, you never saw until you looked for.
However, to his shock and amazement, there were spells clearly visible to his sight in effect upon his precious Willow, and they did not bear the look of anything benign, but it wasn't wholly dark either, which confused him. Most of what he saw could clearly be interpreted as a constraint or compulsion type of magic, and that thought chilled him to his bone marrow.
But most of the non-magical stuff he saw he had no clue what it meant.
Throckmorton's Annotated Codex of Magical Thought didn't have much to say about aura reading, other than some of the general uses of the skill and the theory behind how it worked, nothing so practical as instructions on how to interpret what he saw.
On the other hand, that codex did hold 64 of those minor 'proof of concept' magical spells, along with very detailed and precise instructions on how to handle them. This was important, or so it told, because those spells were instructional much more than they were practical.
While just about anyone would dearly love to throw fireballs to begin roasting vampires straight away, and some approaches to magic did exactly that, the spells in Throckmorton's Codex were all selected to teach a student about how magic functioned, and the more one used them the better his control of other spells was going to be, supposedly getting more effect for equal power and all of that.
Until, of course, you outgrew them. There was only so much understanding they could impart, after all. Then you were supposed to, if you were following Throckmorton's ideas for magical instruction that is, get the student to use his dry and pompous theories to construct the next levels of instructional spells on his own, using those as his base.
The other two spell books had not gone along with that concept (no surprise there), and presented a useful catalog of spells prepared for their utility, all ready to use right away.
Though the young man had no way of knowing it, Throckmorton was as far from being a chaos mage as it was possible to get and still remain human. Even the oldest, most hidebound members of the Watcher's Council found his book a trifle tedious, and most in the magic business used it as a reference only, if they could tolerate it at all. But the gypsy, pressed for both time and materials, had used it as his primer because it was, for anyone who could stand it, a very comprehensive work, and unsurpassed on theory, and also what he had happened to have on hand.
Xander suspected that Mr. Mage Dude had never actually read that whole Codex himself. Some of those pages in it, the ones with the tables and other useful reference information, were obviously stained and well worn, while the bulk of those tedious pages were still lily white, fresh and new. Well, as new as a very old book got, anyway.
For a second, as he ate sandwiches with his friends, the young man wondered why he was thinking about this now. But the fact of the matter was that he had been spending his days resolving the mess made in his mind by absorbing so much so suddenly, and he'd given most of his focus to the other stuff, so now the somewhat neglected magic was starting to catch up.
While he'd been practicing martial arts during his days, and figuring out what he felt about Sun Tzu and the others during down times, he'd been practically dreaming Throckmorton's Codex at nights. He'd read it, effectively, about twenty times now, and each time it started to make more sense to him.
Throckmorton was a pompous windbag, but having his theories resound through his head at night, all night, until they made sense, Xander had come to conclude that the man was also a genius. It didn't save him from being drier than an Egyptian mummy, he could have said the same thing using a third as many words, easily, but his theories did have alot of merit so far. They were solid and stood up well, better the more he thought about them.
One class of Throckmorton's theories had been on the instruction of a young user of magic, and his ideal framework was as dry and tedious as the rest of his work, so Xander had no doubt it had flown about as well as a lead balloon. He advocated concentrating hard on theory until the pupil started to sprout spells spontaneously through his sheer knowledge springing forth into practical application, but even Throckmorton admitted that was too late to apply to a full grown mage and unreasonable to expect from a young student.
Still, it was his ideal theory that one keep a pupil using the lowest levels of magic until they had mastered them thoroughly, and only then allowing them to progress to higher and more complex spells, preferably by causing the students to construct the next stages of the study spells themselves out of theory and the basic models.
It sounded like a heck of a lot of work, but Xander already had those theories heaped up in piles around the inside of his head, so that aspect was covered, and he could already sense the improvement from having used that cosmetic illusion over three hundred times by now. It was something he could do with next to no effort now, as familiar as scratching his nose, matching a near limitless number of skin tones, both natural and those altered in death.
So, rather than just jump in to the cool stuff presented in those other two spellbooks, Xander had decided as he woke up that morning to give the methods detailed in the Codex a try, at least for a little while, a trial period while he decided whether he really needed the more advanced magic yet.
Thus, the reason they were having bean sprouts on their sandwiches today. Xander had gotten Willow to grab a bag of mung beans, which were the beans that bean sprouts sprouted from, and sprouted enough for their lunch himself. It had been an educational experience, and he resolved to try more of it on different kinds of seeds.
It really did become easier the more he used it, and that minor illusion he'd been using to hide the insertion marks of the pencils he'd been pounding into Sunnydale's corpse supply daily, well... he'd long since learned everything that minor illusion had to teach, and it was time to design another one. The instructions in the codex were pretty clear, so he didn't think it would be difficult to make it. The next sample version up ought to be pretty simple still, and he already knew all of the needed theories.
Picking up a peach pit from a fruit that he'd just eaten, Xander focused his magic for the sprout spell and watched as the hard nugget cracked open to shoot forth a green stem with a leaf on the end, and some tiny, threadlike roots out the other.
"You should put that in the ground," Willow told him, just as Xander was about to cast the seed aside.
Shrugging, he selected a spot and did so. Then, lunch completed, they went back to practicing their archery.
*-*-*-*-*
Xander had been planning to use the wilt cantrip on all of the dandelions in his parents' yard, but when he got home he found there weren't any. His parents had called in a yard service that was grooming and landscaping everything in sight.
Strolling up casually, he was about to break off a twig from a yet-to-be planted tree when one of the laborers stopped him, saying, "That's a three hundred dollar tree, kid. You break it, you buy it."
Admitting softly to himself that he didn't have that kind of money, the teen was inside before he realized that this was his house, so thereby by default that was already his tree anyway.
That was when it struck him. Just as he was about to bemoan the lack of funds making his plans for the evening moot, he realized what that guy said.
Going over to look out his window, Xander confirmed what he'd thought he remembered. That tree that the yardworker guy had said cost three hundred dollars was scarcely taller than Xander himself was. It couldn't be that old, nor was it all that impressive as far as girth.
It was just a tree, and mostly a stick at that. You could probably carve a broom out of it, but that was it. It was hard to believe that puny thing was worth that much money, and he suddenly had to wonder how long it would take for that little peach sprout he'd stuck in Rory's yard to grow that tall. It couldn't be long, just a couple of years, right?
So how long would it be before he could grow one that tall magically?
He'd be practicing spells all that evening.
*-*-*-*-*
If there was one thing drunken reprobates, welfare moms and general useless layabouts generally had in common, it was a skill at spinning yarns, sob stories, and other tall tales in their never-ending search for cash handouts or escape from blame. This skill at lying had served Xander's parents well before, those times Child Protective Services had come calling.
So it was that Mr. Anthony Harris and his wife returned from their medical exams all flush and happy, papers all signed and filed, with a check written to that lovely little insurance company already in the eager agent's hands.
They would wait for him to cash it (they had saved up just enough to cover it, and a guy who owed Tony a favor who worked at the bank would rush that through while the rest of their newly accumulated bills got delayed), and then it was party time!
Mr. Harris was so happy he'd even go in to work the next morning, partly to keep up the useful fiction of being employed for so long, and partly because the old buddy who had once again rehired him had his own insurance policy covering workers and their families, but mostly because he wanted the paycheck to keep him in booze until all of that insurance paperwork had gone through and he could become an extremely wealthy man.
End of Chapter Three
Comments?
Chapter Three
by Lionheart
*-*-*-*-*
It was an unusually thoughty Xander that meditated in his room, trying hard to ignore the overnight changes to his home or the fact that his junk was all packed in plastic buckets in the garage, waiting for him to retrieve them so he could spread it around his room once again.
No, he did his best to ignore all of this, as thoughts swirled all around in his mind and he subconsciously sought for order among all of the new ideas that had been so recently and forcefully shoved inside his brain.
So far he hadn't given himself an opportunity to try processing it all, and this was his first real attempt to sort it all out.
"To govern the world you must govern yourself."
Well, Xander wasn't particularly interested in governing anyone, but he had to admit the appeal of staying alive, and now that he had an appreciation of the dangers of Sunnydale, he had a great deal of appreciation for the art of winning battles, and both Sun Tzu and Musashi were emphatic that principles of fighting were the same regardless of if you had small scale engagements or huge conflicts with large armies.
"If he attains the virtue of strategy, one man can beat ten men."
Well, since an average vamp was four or five times stronger than an average man, that seemed to be an excellent starting point as far as qualities to have for anyone wanting to keep his blood inside his neck where it belonged.
So it looked like he was going to be walking the path of the warrior, whether he wanted to rule anyone or not. At least both Bruce Lee and Musashi agreed that "Men must polish their particular Way."
It was odd to the young man how so many old fogies and movie stars agreed on so much, in spite of never having met (that he could tell).
Xander continued to sit, meditating, pondering on the books now sealed inside his head in an attempt to sort meaning out of all of those memorized words, to make those books and what they taught part of him, rather than just a bunch of phrases that hung out in the back of his head.
A passage from the Book of Five Rings was moving him now: It is said the warrior's is the twofold Way of pen and sword, and he should have a taste for both Ways. Even if a man has no natural ability he can be a warrior by sticking assiduously to both divisions of the Way.
Xander would normally say that he was allergic to words like assiduously, and they caused him to break out in hives. But the alternative seemed clearly to be coming down with a bad case of fangs, so he could learn to live with having hives, and did not interrupt as those words went on, almost like Musashi was speaking to him directly:
"This is the way for men who want to learn my strategy:
1 Do not think dishonestly.
2 The Way is in training.
3 Become acquainted with every art.
4 Know the Ways of all professions.
5 Distinguish between gain and loss in worldly matters.
6 Develop intuitive judgment and understanding for everything.
7 Perceive those things which cannot be seen.
8 Pay attention even to trifles.
9 Do nothing which is of no use."
Random quotes spun around inside him, very much as if speaking to him. "It will seem difficult at first, but everything is difficult at first."
Xander knew he was changing, changing drastically even. He couldn't tell right now if he wanted to be changed, or if he'd even like the sort of person he seemed almost doomed by this knowledge to become. But, on the other hand, he knew the sort of person he was, and he couldn't say much for his former self's ability to carry on a campaign of destruction against the things that hunted the night.
Holding them off wasn't enough. Staying safe wasn't enough. Xander knew his ultimate goal, he'd known it from the moment they'd seen those... things eat that jogger.
The goal was victory. Victory at all costs. Victory in spite of all terror, for without victory there was no survival. It was the human race against an evil so great words could not encompass it, creatures so repulsive and horrible there could be no coexistence, monsters whose insatiable lust for murder and bloodshed was never surpassed in all the dark and lamentable catalog of human crimes.
The world would not be safe so long as one vampire remained in it.
If even one remained it could restart the entire bloody mess of them just as a match struck to gasoline could ignite a blazing inferno. You could not put out only a part of any fire and expect that to be the end of it. It was either all or nothing, a choice between safety or being consumed in the flames.
You don't save a boat from sinking by patching only a part of the hole. You either stop the leak or lose the ship, there are no halfway measures.
It was to be a war of extermination, and he would fight it on all fronts, on the land, the sea and even up in space if he had to, regardless of whether he was the only one fighting or not.
There were some things just too evil to be allowed to exist, and vampires were, so far, the only entry on that list as far as he was concerned.
Well, and Vice-Principal Snyder in a bikini, but hopefully that great evil could be averted, so that it never came to pass.
He shuddered, having seen the vile man on a trip to his new school alongside of Willow, who had wanted to pick up her book list early. Sadly, for his former self image, he had picked up his at the same time, and already had the books he would need for next year.
He was even... shudder... planning on studying them, before school actually started no less!
He could feel vital slacker points draining away from out of his grasp as he made that admission inside of himself. He checked himself over for traces of red hair or a tendency to babble before he left the house to visit his friends.
It was about time he told Willow that he was ready for those typing lessons. If he was going to be spending all of his much reduced free time thinking over their words for a while, he might as well be typing them that his friends could read them too.
That way they could at least talk the subjects over.
More words followed him out of the door, as if dogging his footsteps: You must appreciate this. The essence of this book is that you must train day and night in order to make quick decisions. In strategy it is necessary to treat training as part of normal life with your spirit unchanging.
Ok, but if the funky old guys who wrote those books got him to wear silk pajamas out in public, it was going to be time to shoot himself.
*-*-*-*-*
Tony Harris and his wife had a plan.
They each thought it was their own plan, and each one imagined the other was wholly ignorant of the sudden fit of genius that had seized ahold of the one who had The Plan.
The plan had come to them just after a shrieking match between the drunken pair about their abysmal finances.
It was simple, really. The couple had no love for each other; No, none at all worth speaking of. However, as they were reminded by a traveling salesman who had stopped by their door, there was such a thing called insurance.
Life insurance, particularly.
Some naive company had decided to make inroads into the California market by peddling life insurance door to door in Sunnydale, of all places. There were even gang violence and animal violence clauses available, for those that wanted them. No doubt the company planned on signing on a few thousand contracts at steeply inflated prices, then leaning hard on the local PD to cut down on crime rates and wild animal populations so they could rake in profits.
It'd never happen, of course.
But, for a time this golden opportunity was offered, and each of the elder Harrises were determined to grab it while it lasted. Toward this end, they'd both had day spa trips including full makeovers, cut back on their drinking, and done everything in their powers to cover up the evidence of their utterly wasted lives so they could pass off on the insurance company's inspections.
Mr. Harris had even spoken to one of his old buddies, who'd employed him off and on for years, firing him whenever his drinking got too bad, to alter his books to show continuous employment over that time, invoking a technicality to get all of the 'off' periods described as sabbaticals, but not emphasized in any of the papers, so there was a good chance of some bored clerk reading those thinking that he'd been steadily employed for a decent amount of time.
The pair were, between them, doing a fair job of impersonating a respectable couple. There was no way that it could last. They'd never keep it up even a second week, but it only had to last until all of the papers got signed.
Then each one planned to dupe the other into going to one of the rough areas of town, kicking them out of the car and hoping the gangs on PCP got them. Afterwards, each hoped to live out their lives on those juicy checks.
They'd even had a brilliant idea, and somehow gotten a lawyer to create a full trust, complete with tax shelters, to keep all of the money themselves and not have any lost to inheritance laws, while the debts died with the debtors, each one thinking they'd be the one to enjoy all that newly sheltered wealth.
Of course their son, Alexander LaVelle Harris, got included in all of that paperwork just to make everything seem legit.
In their rush to obtain the insurance, neither drunk paused to think about why their spouse was being so unusually helpful in all of this preparation.
*-*-*-*-*
"Wax on, wax off, Daniel-san!" Xander joked to his two best friends in the whole wide world as they adopted a training technique from the Karate Kid movie to practice blocks while polishing cars.
There really were blocking techniques that you could practice like that, and it earned them a supply of 'fun money' by doing it for Xander's Uncle Rory.
Despite their classes, they still had a great deal more time than money, so it seemed an equitable deal to the teens. And it even served as double-duty, as they got in extra practice time for their martial arts, in addition to getting some pocket change.
"Okay, enough with the Master Miyagi stuff," Jesse laughed as they came to the end of their stint. "I note, by the blessed clock spirit, that we have come to the end of our car-polishing today. Tis time, I think, to play Robin Hood and picture the divine image of Cordelia in tights!"
"Please, picture the Wicked Witch of the West in tights? I am trying not to lose my breakfast," Xander returned in good humor, as they went over to their short range improvised archery practice area, also set up on his uncle's lot, in an area sheltered by a good, tall fence.
Xander had, previous to this, already taken some wood and, using the instructions from the US Army Survival Manual, shaved it down into three acceptable but not elegant bows, and with those, and some arrows, they practiced their archery.
The bows were weak, too weak to hunt small game with and certainly no good for hurting vamps. However, Jesse liked to laugh that the three neophyte archers who used them were even weaker.
But that would change as they got stronger.
"Maid Marion?" Xander passed Willow her bow, which she accepted with a fierce blush he hadn't noticed before.
Truthfully, she was picturing HIM in tights! And the image wasn't doing any good for her composure.
"Oh no!" Jesse objected when he tried to hand him the Robin Hood hat with his bow. "No giving to the poor for me! If I were to steal from the rich I'd keep it all myself. Besides, you won the toss when we started this. You get to be Robin Hood. I'll just stay a Merry Man. Less camera time and more time for smooching in the bushes with the lusty tavern wenches while you get to pine over prissy noble ladies."
"Fine," Xander rammed the feathered green cap on with a smile. "But you forget, it's the noble ladies who come with wealthy dowries."
"Dowries which I shall, unfortunately, feel obligated to steal," Jesse sniffed as he melodramatically placed a hand to his heart as if in great suffering.
Then he sobered up, standing tall. "What's up, Xand-Man? You *never* let me win these battles of wits with you before. Why are you so off your game? Is it..?"
Face serious, Xander drew back a nocked arrow and let loose at the straw target, hitting one of the outermost concentric circles. Then he nodded. "Yah. I know. Ever since that day Mr. Mage Dude downloaded several libraries worth of serious dudes talking about combat and death into my head. And worse since we confirmed the existence of bloodsucking dental rejects."
"Well," Jesse took on a comforting tone as he, too, pulled back a string and let his arrow fly, slightly more true than Xander's, but both of them were so bad it was probably luck. "If we have to fight to protect ourselves I *do* prefer to do it from the safety of a church, and just stake them at range. So this is cool."
Willow had listened to this, before ducking out to collect the lunches she'd prepared, grabbing them from Uncle Rory's fridge, coming back with the bean sprout sandwiches and fruit smoothies she'd made, and the boys eagerly put aside their bows to consume them.
By agreement, each of them had a say in how to defend themselves against things that went bite in the night - beyond merely not going out at night, if at all possible, that is, and while it was Xander's idea that got them all attending martial arts classes, it was Willow's that they all started eating decent food.
To everyone's surprise, Xander did NOT spontaneously dissolve into a puddle of slacker molecules and industrial yellow dye (from the Twinkie supply in his bloodstream) upon tasting his first bean sprout.
The old Xander wanted to cry and rave about the unfairness of it all, and he had done so to and for the amusement of his friends. But the new Xander could almost feel Mr. Samurai Dude glowering over his shoulder at the mere thought of processed snack cakes squeezed out in lots of thousands by industrial chemical apparatus and growling something about 'EAT nothing which is of no use!'
So, the first round had gone to the ghost of Musashi and now Xander ate more healthy food, at least until he could think of an argument on which to base a comeback for the crusade of the beloved eternal snack logs.
Of course, due to the fact that nearly everything in the world was a health food in comparison to the wonder that was Twinkies, Xander was still able to gorge himself on typical American favorites like hamburger and pizza, and even Willow had to laughingly agree that he was eating better.
And Xander was not the only one who was changing. Admittedly, all of them were a bit put off their normal routines by having to scramble each day to fight back the terror that was knowing that things straight out of B-grade horror films were cruising main street in the wee hours, but every day it seemed Willow got slightly odder to his perceptions. Stuttering around him for one, which her usual familiarity had often diminished.
Even looking at her aura confused Xander.
Just being able to see them didn't automatically tell him what all of the colors, pulses, veins and marbling all meant. In fact, he found it confusing as anything. There were colors in Willow's aura he couldn't see in anyone else. She had patterns that sortuv matched some of his, and all three of them were veined with what he guessed were tiny bits of each other's energies since they looked kind of similar in ways. He guessed, if that were the case, that it was due to their long friendship.
What's more, much of what he saw was in a near-constant state of flux, shifting and moving about in patterns he couldn't begin to describe, much less understand. And some things, he knew from having read the theory, you never saw until you looked for.
However, to his shock and amazement, there were spells clearly visible to his sight in effect upon his precious Willow, and they did not bear the look of anything benign, but it wasn't wholly dark either, which confused him. Most of what he saw could clearly be interpreted as a constraint or compulsion type of magic, and that thought chilled him to his bone marrow.
But most of the non-magical stuff he saw he had no clue what it meant.
Throckmorton's Annotated Codex of Magical Thought didn't have much to say about aura reading, other than some of the general uses of the skill and the theory behind how it worked, nothing so practical as instructions on how to interpret what he saw.
On the other hand, that codex did hold 64 of those minor 'proof of concept' magical spells, along with very detailed and precise instructions on how to handle them. This was important, or so it told, because those spells were instructional much more than they were practical.
While just about anyone would dearly love to throw fireballs to begin roasting vampires straight away, and some approaches to magic did exactly that, the spells in Throckmorton's Codex were all selected to teach a student about how magic functioned, and the more one used them the better his control of other spells was going to be, supposedly getting more effect for equal power and all of that.
Until, of course, you outgrew them. There was only so much understanding they could impart, after all. Then you were supposed to, if you were following Throckmorton's ideas for magical instruction that is, get the student to use his dry and pompous theories to construct the next levels of instructional spells on his own, using those as his base.
The other two spell books had not gone along with that concept (no surprise there), and presented a useful catalog of spells prepared for their utility, all ready to use right away.
Though the young man had no way of knowing it, Throckmorton was as far from being a chaos mage as it was possible to get and still remain human. Even the oldest, most hidebound members of the Watcher's Council found his book a trifle tedious, and most in the magic business used it as a reference only, if they could tolerate it at all. But the gypsy, pressed for both time and materials, had used it as his primer because it was, for anyone who could stand it, a very comprehensive work, and unsurpassed on theory, and also what he had happened to have on hand.
Xander suspected that Mr. Mage Dude had never actually read that whole Codex himself. Some of those pages in it, the ones with the tables and other useful reference information, were obviously stained and well worn, while the bulk of those tedious pages were still lily white, fresh and new. Well, as new as a very old book got, anyway.
For a second, as he ate sandwiches with his friends, the young man wondered why he was thinking about this now. But the fact of the matter was that he had been spending his days resolving the mess made in his mind by absorbing so much so suddenly, and he'd given most of his focus to the other stuff, so now the somewhat neglected magic was starting to catch up.
While he'd been practicing martial arts during his days, and figuring out what he felt about Sun Tzu and the others during down times, he'd been practically dreaming Throckmorton's Codex at nights. He'd read it, effectively, about twenty times now, and each time it started to make more sense to him.
Throckmorton was a pompous windbag, but having his theories resound through his head at night, all night, until they made sense, Xander had come to conclude that the man was also a genius. It didn't save him from being drier than an Egyptian mummy, he could have said the same thing using a third as many words, easily, but his theories did have alot of merit so far. They were solid and stood up well, better the more he thought about them.
One class of Throckmorton's theories had been on the instruction of a young user of magic, and his ideal framework was as dry and tedious as the rest of his work, so Xander had no doubt it had flown about as well as a lead balloon. He advocated concentrating hard on theory until the pupil started to sprout spells spontaneously through his sheer knowledge springing forth into practical application, but even Throckmorton admitted that was too late to apply to a full grown mage and unreasonable to expect from a young student.
Still, it was his ideal theory that one keep a pupil using the lowest levels of magic until they had mastered them thoroughly, and only then allowing them to progress to higher and more complex spells, preferably by causing the students to construct the next stages of the study spells themselves out of theory and the basic models.
It sounded like a heck of a lot of work, but Xander already had those theories heaped up in piles around the inside of his head, so that aspect was covered, and he could already sense the improvement from having used that cosmetic illusion over three hundred times by now. It was something he could do with next to no effort now, as familiar as scratching his nose, matching a near limitless number of skin tones, both natural and those altered in death.
So, rather than just jump in to the cool stuff presented in those other two spellbooks, Xander had decided as he woke up that morning to give the methods detailed in the Codex a try, at least for a little while, a trial period while he decided whether he really needed the more advanced magic yet.
Thus, the reason they were having bean sprouts on their sandwiches today. Xander had gotten Willow to grab a bag of mung beans, which were the beans that bean sprouts sprouted from, and sprouted enough for their lunch himself. It had been an educational experience, and he resolved to try more of it on different kinds of seeds.
It really did become easier the more he used it, and that minor illusion he'd been using to hide the insertion marks of the pencils he'd been pounding into Sunnydale's corpse supply daily, well... he'd long since learned everything that minor illusion had to teach, and it was time to design another one. The instructions in the codex were pretty clear, so he didn't think it would be difficult to make it. The next sample version up ought to be pretty simple still, and he already knew all of the needed theories.
Picking up a peach pit from a fruit that he'd just eaten, Xander focused his magic for the sprout spell and watched as the hard nugget cracked open to shoot forth a green stem with a leaf on the end, and some tiny, threadlike roots out the other.
"You should put that in the ground," Willow told him, just as Xander was about to cast the seed aside.
Shrugging, he selected a spot and did so. Then, lunch completed, they went back to practicing their archery.
*-*-*-*-*
Xander had been planning to use the wilt cantrip on all of the dandelions in his parents' yard, but when he got home he found there weren't any. His parents had called in a yard service that was grooming and landscaping everything in sight.
Strolling up casually, he was about to break off a twig from a yet-to-be planted tree when one of the laborers stopped him, saying, "That's a three hundred dollar tree, kid. You break it, you buy it."
Admitting softly to himself that he didn't have that kind of money, the teen was inside before he realized that this was his house, so thereby by default that was already his tree anyway.
That was when it struck him. Just as he was about to bemoan the lack of funds making his plans for the evening moot, he realized what that guy said.
Going over to look out his window, Xander confirmed what he'd thought he remembered. That tree that the yardworker guy had said cost three hundred dollars was scarcely taller than Xander himself was. It couldn't be that old, nor was it all that impressive as far as girth.
It was just a tree, and mostly a stick at that. You could probably carve a broom out of it, but that was it. It was hard to believe that puny thing was worth that much money, and he suddenly had to wonder how long it would take for that little peach sprout he'd stuck in Rory's yard to grow that tall. It couldn't be long, just a couple of years, right?
So how long would it be before he could grow one that tall magically?
He'd be practicing spells all that evening.
*-*-*-*-*
If there was one thing drunken reprobates, welfare moms and general useless layabouts generally had in common, it was a skill at spinning yarns, sob stories, and other tall tales in their never-ending search for cash handouts or escape from blame. This skill at lying had served Xander's parents well before, those times Child Protective Services had come calling.
So it was that Mr. Anthony Harris and his wife returned from their medical exams all flush and happy, papers all signed and filed, with a check written to that lovely little insurance company already in the eager agent's hands.
They would wait for him to cash it (they had saved up just enough to cover it, and a guy who owed Tony a favor who worked at the bank would rush that through while the rest of their newly accumulated bills got delayed), and then it was party time!
Mr. Harris was so happy he'd even go in to work the next morning, partly to keep up the useful fiction of being employed for so long, and partly because the old buddy who had once again rehired him had his own insurance policy covering workers and their families, but mostly because he wanted the paycheck to keep him in booze until all of that insurance paperwork had gone through and he could become an extremely wealthy man.
End of Chapter Three
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