The Knights of Scooby
Chapter Five
by Lionheart
*-*-*-*-*
"So, Amy is a witch, huh?" Jesse asked as they were all once again gathering at their martial arts studio of the day.
"Yup. So she says. Her mother too from what I saw," Xander agreed, wincing as he recalled the ten minute lecture the blonde had given him about why he had to wait before he and Willow could be intimate, essentially repeating all she'd told Willow before, and causing the Xand-man to wonder if a man could actually die of embarrassment. How anyone could be so frank on such a topic would mystify him forever.
And she'd gone and told him in front of Jesse, too!
Although in a way it was lucky, as the terminally shy Willow never could have braced herself enough to convey that same information to her male friends, and it was something that they could agree, objectively, that they needed to know. Although now Amy seemed convinced that he and Willow were dating.
From her point of view it was obvious. I mean, if you go together to that section then what else could it mean?
Well, there was no way he was going to brave another such 'talk' with the girl about anything remotely related to romance ever, ever again! So she'd just have to go on laboring under that mistaken impression for a while.
"She did tell me that was what her mom was, that they were all witches, I mean, and then she had all sorts of things to say about spellbooks, and... eep!" the stream of comforting Willow-babble got cut off and the young girl flushed red as a rose, recalling her own 'private talk' with the girl.
The two guys looked at each other. Before, Willow had always been Willow, but lately she'd been acting more as a... well, as a girl.
It was disturbing, as she'd always been one of the guys before this.
"And we are waiting for her... why, again?" Jesse asked, steering clear of the uncomfortable subject of a possibly female seeming Willow.
Xander was glad of the evasion of the never-before-touchy subject of Willow and her odd behaviors. He shrugged. "Amy? She promised to meet us here with something that should help us learn martial arts. She didn't go into details."
"Here she comes," Willow observed, once again a shrinking violet as she stole glances at Xander out of the corners of her eyes.
Jesse observed this vital behavior nugget and resolved to tell Xander about it later. Apparently, their once genderless friend had decided to become female for a chance to crush on her oldest buddy.
Jesse silently placed a hand on his heart and turned his eyes heavenward for the troubles this would likely cause.
Amy Madison spilled out of her mother's car, which subsequently drove away, and rushed over to the trio of teens waiting before the studio, waving a set of bracelets identical to one that she now wore on her own wrist. "Hello guys! I only got my mom to agree to let me go to this as a good way to get limber and ready for cheer practice in school next year, and she insisted that I also sign up for a gymnastics course, to which you're all welcome to come, of course. But anyway, once I'd agreed to that she gave me these!"
"What are they?" Willow asked, looking down at the little woven cord bracelet in her hands that Amy had given her.
"Ape charms," the blonde girl answered, having finished giving similar ones to the two boys. "As in 'to ape another's actions' or in plain English to copy the movements of someone else. They're pretty useless in most circumstances, as you have to get at least two people doing the same motions at the same time in just about the same place, and even then they only work if one person is wearing the master version and others the student."
She held up her wrist and the bracelet thereon. "The ones we've got on are the student versions, so we get to copy the motions of whoever wears the master. Only when you want to, of course, otherwise we'd be walking into walls and falling down stairs and stuff like that."
"And... I find myself still waiting for the point," Jesse snarked.
Amy rolled her eyes, flouncing her shoulders. "Guys! This is a CLASS! Duh! We all get to stand around imitating the teacher, then he has to correct all of the mistakes we're making. The sooner you get over making mistakes, the better you get, the faster! My mom used these to help train her squad back when she was the Cheer Queen of Sunnydale High. They won awards."
After finding nothing he couldn't understand in the little cord, and that it all agreed with what she'd said, Xander nodded and put the little bracelet on. "It does what she says it should do. This will really help us on our katas, so long as we've got a teacher with us. Sparring would be different, as you'd throw a punch instead of a block when your enemy threw a punch - presuming you had a sparring partner wearing the master, of course. But we haven't gotten to that level yet, so this is pretty much exactly what we need right now."
The other two nodded, then followed him in putting on their bracelets.
"Well, it's not perfect," Amy admitted. "Ape charms will help you learn the routines, like how to punch or block or kick, etc, but they won't give you the instincts - like WHEN to block or kick or whatnot. Nor do they give judgment, the ability to spot holes in another's defenses, and so on. It's all just going to be the muscle memory, but that's what takes the longest to build anyway! So it's way chill that my mom loaned them to us!" She started to bounce inside.
"Oh, and don't break them," Amy instructed, pausing just on her way to go enter the building and sign up for class. "They are braided out of gorilla hair, and mom says that if one breaks I have to gather the hair and braid a replacement myself. Ick!"
Then, the young blonde skipped off into class, where she confronted the teacher about signing up, at the same time presenting him with a little ape pin, which she put in his jacket herself as a present.
The eyes of the tiny figurine started to glow, and the instructor lost all desire to remove the pin, in spite of the general avoidance of jewelry seen in most martial artists (as it wasn't practical to give your enemy holds).
They felt the teeniest little bit guilty about it, but resolved that they were paying to learn from him, and all it *should* do was accelerate the process. Xander whispered the same memorization spell that Mr. Mage Dude had used on him over himself and his friends, now including Amy, to help them be able to recall later what they merely copied now, and they went forward to have the most productive class that any of them could recall.
That would be repeated for all of their martial arts classes that day, Amy giving each of the instructors a little ape pin as she signed up. The teens felt so elated over what they'd learned, and how fast, with her help, that Willow had already agreed and was dragging Xander and Jesse along to join the girls in a gymnastics class before either of them could find the heart to disagree.
Then, once the boys had gotten there and seen the multitude of trim girls in leotards cavorting about the building, they decided to stay, going further into debt with Willow as she paid for their lessons there for them.
*-*-*-*-*
Xander plucked at the fabric of Jesse's shirt, using a handy cantrip to turn it red. "Well, my Merry Man, it looks like you finally have an outlaw name. You, my dear flunky, shall be Will Scarlet, to go with your new color of attire and your regrettable lack of upstanding morals with regard to tavern wenches."
"Ah, tavern wenches," Jesse sighed with a smile. "My great weakness."
"They are, too," Xander teased, also with a grin. "If Queen C catches you with one you had better bet you'll never be seeing the inside of her royal chambers. Torture chambers, maybe, but not the bedroom."
"Dude, has it not yet struck you as wrong that we are attending as many classes now as we do during a school year?" Jesse changed the subject.
"I look at those luscious babes during gymnastics and cannot agree with you that this is a bad thing," Xander quipped, smacking his lips.
"Okay, point conceded," His best bud agreed with a nodding twitch of his head.
They'd found one other problem that Amy's mother hadn't mentioned about those Ape charms, and that was that they didn't allow for any difference in the fitness of the bodies of the persons who were performing the actions. So, copying a teacher who was both faster and stronger left them very, very sore afterwards as their bodies weren't used to handling that sort of load. And what could happen if they'd started off studying yoga this way was too ugly to describe.
Xander found himself forced to dip into healing spells to prevent them from having to miss classes. So, faster development of muscle tissue and so on was a top priority.
Luckily, the book Xander had memorized on combining magic and martial arts by a Japanese sorcerer had spells for improving martial arts quickly, learning as if you were younger, more flexible and teachable, copying the movements and kata of a willing instructor in different ways than the Ape charm did (but only up to his level of competence), and internalizing those lessons more easily, getting more value for time and practice. And, most useful of all for their present situation, multiplying the speed at which your body could be conditioned, making it more fluid in accepting changes as demanded by the new requirements placed upon it.
However, that too was limited, chiefly by caloric intake. One had to have fuel for the body to use to build anything, and they were so far behind what they needed to be that they had a lot of catching up to do.
But a body could only process food into muscle so fast.
Once again Xander had to delve into slightly higher realms of magic, creating metabolism enhancing spells, based on the sprout cantrip, to help them build muscle and stuff more quickly, so their exercise could bear more fruit.
Of course, this meant that a high protein diet was necessary-ville for all of them, and they ate amounts they could hardly believe, two or three times what was once their usual helpings. Willow seemed embarrassed by it, but Amy went all sparkly and ranted over how she could have her cake and be thin, too.
Speaking of the girls, they came out of his uncle's house bearing serving plates to the picnic table set up there in the yard. Today was fried chicken, with the Willow-approved fruits and salads on the side... plus a generous tub of potato salad that even she would dip generously into.
Jesse, having cantriped his own clothes back to green, touched Amy's blouse and suddenly she was the one wearing red from head to toe. "Actually, I think I'll be Alan-A-Dale, minstrel and therefore babe magnet by definition. So since we have a scarcity of female Merry Person names, we'll loan one to Amy, and she can be Jill Scarlet - if she can ever learn to fire a bow without thwacking herself in the boobs with the string, of course."
Amy slapped at him at the reminder of that painful memory, but didn't manage to hit him as he dodged away clean.
"Fine!" She spat back, then smirked as she retorted with, "Then it's you boys who will be handling lunch preparation from now on, until we girls have caught up on our archery practice!"
The boys looked at each other, then prostrated themselves in weird bows. "Please, forgive us, Oh Mistress of Cooking Utensils!"
"No." Amy smugly replied, primly sitting herself down to the meal. They were, all of them, feeling quite starved, so objections ended while consumption of food began.
Apparently, Willow was far more desperate for a female friend than any of them had supposed. No sooner did Amy show any signs of accepting her than the lonely redhead glommed onto her and welcomed her into their group. And, with Willow so certain they needed her, who were Xander and Jesse to argue?
So, Amy had been welcomed into the Scooby Gang.
And had promptly proved why there are so few women archers mentioned in history, or why the word Amazon literally means "One Breast" by nearly taking off a nipple on her first attempt at archery.
No serious damage was done. But by all reports the pain was on a level with what women so delight in causing to men when they strike below the belt.
Jesse's offering to kiss it to make it better hadn't helped.
Amy had immediately, on recovering and glaring properly at Jess, launched a request for crossbows.
Unfortunately, there was a problem with that.
While the crossbow required less skill and strength than an actual bow, it had two great weaknesses: One was they were expensive, and there was no way the teens could afford one. Nor could Xander make one, as he was still a far cry from that, only just beginning to learn how to be a woodworker as yet.
The other, and potentially more damaging in the long run, was a pathetic rate of fire. It took so long to load and reload a crossbow that in many situations all you had was a one-shot weapon, and that was only if you'd already cocked and loaded it before the fight.
Which was not good enough, not NEARLY good enough for their purposes!
Accuracy being what it was they needed a heck of a lot more shots than that just to have a good chance of scoring one hit in a vamp's heart. Better still if they could drop two or three apiece before it became a fist fight.
According to Sun Tzu, an archer ought to be most effective at about forty yards, and they were already toying with the concept of using arrows to vex some vamps enough to charge, where they could be met with holy water and spears, or some other trap they were still working out the specifics of.
But the dang things moved fast enough that with a crossbow there wouldn't be enough time to reload before they were on you. While, on the other hand, the ability to stake two or three of them with the much more rapid bow had a great deal of appeal.
"YEOUCH!!" Willow, trying to show Amy the way to shoot, concentrated too much on the details, got mixed up, and proved that Amy was not the only girl to ever twang her breast in a bowstring.
*-*-*-*-*
Xander's first trip to the public library had been more or less derailed by a series of discoveries, including that Amy Madison was a witch, and the whole slew of events that added her to the Scooby Gang.
Now he was going back to get his first list of chores done, and, like a moose trying to pull a rabbit out of a hat, was certain, 'This time for sure!'
Never having had a library card before he applied for one. Amy had told him all of the papers he'd needed to bring, so that was over with quickly, then it was off to the stacks.
First on the agenda was a book or two on body language, as he'd originally intended. Second was a book or two on medicine. This wasn't a medical library by any means, nor did he have any expertise in that area, so he was forced to choose a couple of books more or less at random, hoping that he could make some sense of them. On a whim, he also grabbed some on natural medicine, hoping that would mesh well with the healing magic he already knew.
Sitting down at a table to page through them, he discovered both of the books on medicine he'd grabbed were utterly useless to him, all about how this machine or that drug could solve problems he didn't have (which was a good thing, as he didn't have access to the machines or drugs, either). But they did teach him, by bad example, a fair amount about what kind of books he was after in the medical department.
He needed something, in essence, much like the U.S. Army Survival Manual, only this time as pertaining to field surgery and medicine. Ok, there was already a section on first aid in the survival manual, even a beefy section if you wanted to look at it that way, but still he needed more.
Both of the herbal medicine books were far more useful to him, particularly in regards to discerning health problems that could color the aura, and that put him in a frame of mind willing to explore those topics a little more deeply.
One thing he did discover, while skimming through medical books to help him understand auras better, was that what mundane medical science was best at, magical healing is worst at, and vice versa. So he resolved to begin a more serious study of anatomy and mundane medicine as a whole, spending a couple of hours trying to select something before almost giving up, as he didn't know how to judge a good book on this topic from a bad one.
On his initial pass through he'd already decided that the herbal stuff seemed much more able to take on some things, while surgery was better for others - notably the trauma branch of medicine. But pouring a bunch of drugs into your body to hide symptoms without curing the root cause seemed a waste of time. So pharmacology, and those things that leaned heavily upon it, got neglected in his great book grab. He already knew spells that did that stuff better and didn't have side effects, nor could you overdose on them or get addicted to it.
Realizing he was getting sidetracked yet again, and resolving that if the library was proving this useful he'd have to visit more often, Xander redirected his efforts into finding out about the rest of the subjects on his 'want to investigate' list.
As he had suspected, they had copies of nearly every text used by the local high school, and those they didn't already have beaten, well worn copies of they were expecting a shipment of either before or early in the school year.
Now, once more color him brilliant, but he'd had enough of school already to know that most of that dreadful experience was teachers trying to cram a whole bunch of (what he'd felt was useless at the time) facts into your head via the route of rote memorization, and Mr. Mage Dude had accomplished more of that in one hour or less with him than all of his other teachers over a lifetime of ditching school combined. And at the very end of that hypnotism session had ordered him to recall all of it except for the mage himself.
Well, those spells that put him in that state and caused the whole experience had been used as part of that session. He'd remembered them, even the one that had partially woken him into a hypnotic state to begin with, as his ears worked even when asleep, and those memories were available to the mind if it truly wanted them, so that had just been rolled in as part of the session he was told by the mage to recall.
So, Xander was pretty confident of his ability to do the whole thing himself. Not TO himself, there seemed to be a definite teacher/student sort of angle to the entire thing and he didn't want to mess that up by exploring and perhaps cause all sorts of problems. The utterly passive nature of the guy in the role of memorizing stuff just seemed too much at odds with the idea of giving commands to memorize stuff to do any good trying to mix them.
However, now he had friends. Xander believed that he could do the role of Mr. Mage Dude for one of them, saying whole 'memorize this' and 'memorize that' thing. Then, once that person had memorized those same spells, have them turn around and do the same to him, this time adding more details and filling in some of those gaps Mr. Mage Dude had left in his knowledge base.
For example. Xander knew he needed a heck of a lot of math in order to do a credible attempt at some of those more nifty devices hinted at in the techno stuff he'd already memorized.
High School taught math.
He needed to know math, his school taught math, the library had the books on math they used to teach it, all the teachers would be asking was for him to memorize those books, and he had this really nifty scheme for memorizing a whole lot of books very quickly, completely and easily.
This seemed to be a match made in heaven!
But why stop there?
There was no reason to stop short of his goal. He could be memorizing their school textbooks, including several generations of math, then retesting and qualifying for AP and honor courses.
Not that he had any ambitions toward academic excellence, but he did need math and stuff at those levels and there was no reason to stint now when a few more books would save him so much grief and suffering later.
No, he would be doing this partly to get authority figures off his back about his poor grades, partly to please Willow, granting her some company at the top of the grade curve, but also to learn the stuff he needed to know in order to go exploring those nifty techno-magical theories that he'd already memorized, and that were just so much dead weight in his mind until he could gain the needed know-how to use them.
And there were other gaps he felt Mr. Mage Dude had left in his education. Things like both martial arts and magic were most excellent, however neither would give a guy a car and thus save him from bumming rides.
So, a few auto-repair texts and service manuals, a charm spell here or there to get something from the junkyard and time in a shop, and he could restore himself a set of wheels he didn't have to push with his feet.
As he'd suspected, but not dared hope, the library already had or could order about half of those books on martial arts he'd memorized. It'd save him tons of typing to check those out for when he took over the role and played Mr. Mage Dude for his friends.
He'd found a brand new copy of the U.S. Army Survival Manual in the army surplus store. Xander grabbed some books on programming languages so he could recreate those computer animations he'd seen for the rest of the Scoobies.
Now, there came an interesting conundrum there, in that he could not create those animations without having read the books, and he could read (well, not without months of effort) them well enough to learn those languages unless it was in one of those Mage Dude type sessions, and he couldn't actually do that on the receiving end until he'd already done a Mage Dude impersonation with one of his friends, first, who could then switch roles and lead him through learning the additional material.
However, since that technomancy stuff wasn't presently useful to him anyway, he figured it and those animations it depended on could wait a round or two until the group got around to including them for his friends.
What should probably not wait at all was that chart of the major and minor chakras. For Xander, it was an early warning system of things that went bump in the night. There were a whole lot of demons in town that were not vampires and didn't have to stay out of the sun. Some of them even blended in with the human population, looking just as normal as anyone else unless you had the aura sight granted by his third eye.
So, he grabbed a book on how to draw, and went searching for one on hypnotism.
He and Jesse had both read many science fiction books as well as comics. There was among those, one of the Stainless Steel Rat series, about how one time when Slippery Jim was infiltrating a world where he couldn't bring any of those spy gadgets he so liked, but he had used hypnotism to memorize the plans for them before going, then once he'd arrived he used another trance to let him draw those plans precisely.
That sounded good to Xander, as he had a chakra chart to be recreating, and while he was at it there were illustrations in those guides that he couldn't produce by typing. He might as well get to those as well.
End of Chapter Five
comments?
Chapter Five
by Lionheart
*-*-*-*-*
"So, Amy is a witch, huh?" Jesse asked as they were all once again gathering at their martial arts studio of the day.
"Yup. So she says. Her mother too from what I saw," Xander agreed, wincing as he recalled the ten minute lecture the blonde had given him about why he had to wait before he and Willow could be intimate, essentially repeating all she'd told Willow before, and causing the Xand-man to wonder if a man could actually die of embarrassment. How anyone could be so frank on such a topic would mystify him forever.
And she'd gone and told him in front of Jesse, too!
Although in a way it was lucky, as the terminally shy Willow never could have braced herself enough to convey that same information to her male friends, and it was something that they could agree, objectively, that they needed to know. Although now Amy seemed convinced that he and Willow were dating.
From her point of view it was obvious. I mean, if you go together to that section then what else could it mean?
Well, there was no way he was going to brave another such 'talk' with the girl about anything remotely related to romance ever, ever again! So she'd just have to go on laboring under that mistaken impression for a while.
"She did tell me that was what her mom was, that they were all witches, I mean, and then she had all sorts of things to say about spellbooks, and... eep!" the stream of comforting Willow-babble got cut off and the young girl flushed red as a rose, recalling her own 'private talk' with the girl.
The two guys looked at each other. Before, Willow had always been Willow, but lately she'd been acting more as a... well, as a girl.
It was disturbing, as she'd always been one of the guys before this.
"And we are waiting for her... why, again?" Jesse asked, steering clear of the uncomfortable subject of a possibly female seeming Willow.
Xander was glad of the evasion of the never-before-touchy subject of Willow and her odd behaviors. He shrugged. "Amy? She promised to meet us here with something that should help us learn martial arts. She didn't go into details."
"Here she comes," Willow observed, once again a shrinking violet as she stole glances at Xander out of the corners of her eyes.
Jesse observed this vital behavior nugget and resolved to tell Xander about it later. Apparently, their once genderless friend had decided to become female for a chance to crush on her oldest buddy.
Jesse silently placed a hand on his heart and turned his eyes heavenward for the troubles this would likely cause.
Amy Madison spilled out of her mother's car, which subsequently drove away, and rushed over to the trio of teens waiting before the studio, waving a set of bracelets identical to one that she now wore on her own wrist. "Hello guys! I only got my mom to agree to let me go to this as a good way to get limber and ready for cheer practice in school next year, and she insisted that I also sign up for a gymnastics course, to which you're all welcome to come, of course. But anyway, once I'd agreed to that she gave me these!"
"What are they?" Willow asked, looking down at the little woven cord bracelet in her hands that Amy had given her.
"Ape charms," the blonde girl answered, having finished giving similar ones to the two boys. "As in 'to ape another's actions' or in plain English to copy the movements of someone else. They're pretty useless in most circumstances, as you have to get at least two people doing the same motions at the same time in just about the same place, and even then they only work if one person is wearing the master version and others the student."
She held up her wrist and the bracelet thereon. "The ones we've got on are the student versions, so we get to copy the motions of whoever wears the master. Only when you want to, of course, otherwise we'd be walking into walls and falling down stairs and stuff like that."
"And... I find myself still waiting for the point," Jesse snarked.
Amy rolled her eyes, flouncing her shoulders. "Guys! This is a CLASS! Duh! We all get to stand around imitating the teacher, then he has to correct all of the mistakes we're making. The sooner you get over making mistakes, the better you get, the faster! My mom used these to help train her squad back when she was the Cheer Queen of Sunnydale High. They won awards."
After finding nothing he couldn't understand in the little cord, and that it all agreed with what she'd said, Xander nodded and put the little bracelet on. "It does what she says it should do. This will really help us on our katas, so long as we've got a teacher with us. Sparring would be different, as you'd throw a punch instead of a block when your enemy threw a punch - presuming you had a sparring partner wearing the master, of course. But we haven't gotten to that level yet, so this is pretty much exactly what we need right now."
The other two nodded, then followed him in putting on their bracelets.
"Well, it's not perfect," Amy admitted. "Ape charms will help you learn the routines, like how to punch or block or kick, etc, but they won't give you the instincts - like WHEN to block or kick or whatnot. Nor do they give judgment, the ability to spot holes in another's defenses, and so on. It's all just going to be the muscle memory, but that's what takes the longest to build anyway! So it's way chill that my mom loaned them to us!" She started to bounce inside.
"Oh, and don't break them," Amy instructed, pausing just on her way to go enter the building and sign up for class. "They are braided out of gorilla hair, and mom says that if one breaks I have to gather the hair and braid a replacement myself. Ick!"
Then, the young blonde skipped off into class, where she confronted the teacher about signing up, at the same time presenting him with a little ape pin, which she put in his jacket herself as a present.
The eyes of the tiny figurine started to glow, and the instructor lost all desire to remove the pin, in spite of the general avoidance of jewelry seen in most martial artists (as it wasn't practical to give your enemy holds).
They felt the teeniest little bit guilty about it, but resolved that they were paying to learn from him, and all it *should* do was accelerate the process. Xander whispered the same memorization spell that Mr. Mage Dude had used on him over himself and his friends, now including Amy, to help them be able to recall later what they merely copied now, and they went forward to have the most productive class that any of them could recall.
That would be repeated for all of their martial arts classes that day, Amy giving each of the instructors a little ape pin as she signed up. The teens felt so elated over what they'd learned, and how fast, with her help, that Willow had already agreed and was dragging Xander and Jesse along to join the girls in a gymnastics class before either of them could find the heart to disagree.
Then, once the boys had gotten there and seen the multitude of trim girls in leotards cavorting about the building, they decided to stay, going further into debt with Willow as she paid for their lessons there for them.
*-*-*-*-*
Xander plucked at the fabric of Jesse's shirt, using a handy cantrip to turn it red. "Well, my Merry Man, it looks like you finally have an outlaw name. You, my dear flunky, shall be Will Scarlet, to go with your new color of attire and your regrettable lack of upstanding morals with regard to tavern wenches."
"Ah, tavern wenches," Jesse sighed with a smile. "My great weakness."
"They are, too," Xander teased, also with a grin. "If Queen C catches you with one you had better bet you'll never be seeing the inside of her royal chambers. Torture chambers, maybe, but not the bedroom."
"Dude, has it not yet struck you as wrong that we are attending as many classes now as we do during a school year?" Jesse changed the subject.
"I look at those luscious babes during gymnastics and cannot agree with you that this is a bad thing," Xander quipped, smacking his lips.
"Okay, point conceded," His best bud agreed with a nodding twitch of his head.
They'd found one other problem that Amy's mother hadn't mentioned about those Ape charms, and that was that they didn't allow for any difference in the fitness of the bodies of the persons who were performing the actions. So, copying a teacher who was both faster and stronger left them very, very sore afterwards as their bodies weren't used to handling that sort of load. And what could happen if they'd started off studying yoga this way was too ugly to describe.
Xander found himself forced to dip into healing spells to prevent them from having to miss classes. So, faster development of muscle tissue and so on was a top priority.
Luckily, the book Xander had memorized on combining magic and martial arts by a Japanese sorcerer had spells for improving martial arts quickly, learning as if you were younger, more flexible and teachable, copying the movements and kata of a willing instructor in different ways than the Ape charm did (but only up to his level of competence), and internalizing those lessons more easily, getting more value for time and practice. And, most useful of all for their present situation, multiplying the speed at which your body could be conditioned, making it more fluid in accepting changes as demanded by the new requirements placed upon it.
However, that too was limited, chiefly by caloric intake. One had to have fuel for the body to use to build anything, and they were so far behind what they needed to be that they had a lot of catching up to do.
But a body could only process food into muscle so fast.
Once again Xander had to delve into slightly higher realms of magic, creating metabolism enhancing spells, based on the sprout cantrip, to help them build muscle and stuff more quickly, so their exercise could bear more fruit.
Of course, this meant that a high protein diet was necessary-ville for all of them, and they ate amounts they could hardly believe, two or three times what was once their usual helpings. Willow seemed embarrassed by it, but Amy went all sparkly and ranted over how she could have her cake and be thin, too.
Speaking of the girls, they came out of his uncle's house bearing serving plates to the picnic table set up there in the yard. Today was fried chicken, with the Willow-approved fruits and salads on the side... plus a generous tub of potato salad that even she would dip generously into.
Jesse, having cantriped his own clothes back to green, touched Amy's blouse and suddenly she was the one wearing red from head to toe. "Actually, I think I'll be Alan-A-Dale, minstrel and therefore babe magnet by definition. So since we have a scarcity of female Merry Person names, we'll loan one to Amy, and she can be Jill Scarlet - if she can ever learn to fire a bow without thwacking herself in the boobs with the string, of course."
Amy slapped at him at the reminder of that painful memory, but didn't manage to hit him as he dodged away clean.
"Fine!" She spat back, then smirked as she retorted with, "Then it's you boys who will be handling lunch preparation from now on, until we girls have caught up on our archery practice!"
The boys looked at each other, then prostrated themselves in weird bows. "Please, forgive us, Oh Mistress of Cooking Utensils!"
"No." Amy smugly replied, primly sitting herself down to the meal. They were, all of them, feeling quite starved, so objections ended while consumption of food began.
Apparently, Willow was far more desperate for a female friend than any of them had supposed. No sooner did Amy show any signs of accepting her than the lonely redhead glommed onto her and welcomed her into their group. And, with Willow so certain they needed her, who were Xander and Jesse to argue?
So, Amy had been welcomed into the Scooby Gang.
And had promptly proved why there are so few women archers mentioned in history, or why the word Amazon literally means "One Breast" by nearly taking off a nipple on her first attempt at archery.
No serious damage was done. But by all reports the pain was on a level with what women so delight in causing to men when they strike below the belt.
Jesse's offering to kiss it to make it better hadn't helped.
Amy had immediately, on recovering and glaring properly at Jess, launched a request for crossbows.
Unfortunately, there was a problem with that.
While the crossbow required less skill and strength than an actual bow, it had two great weaknesses: One was they were expensive, and there was no way the teens could afford one. Nor could Xander make one, as he was still a far cry from that, only just beginning to learn how to be a woodworker as yet.
The other, and potentially more damaging in the long run, was a pathetic rate of fire. It took so long to load and reload a crossbow that in many situations all you had was a one-shot weapon, and that was only if you'd already cocked and loaded it before the fight.
Which was not good enough, not NEARLY good enough for their purposes!
Accuracy being what it was they needed a heck of a lot more shots than that just to have a good chance of scoring one hit in a vamp's heart. Better still if they could drop two or three apiece before it became a fist fight.
According to Sun Tzu, an archer ought to be most effective at about forty yards, and they were already toying with the concept of using arrows to vex some vamps enough to charge, where they could be met with holy water and spears, or some other trap they were still working out the specifics of.
But the dang things moved fast enough that with a crossbow there wouldn't be enough time to reload before they were on you. While, on the other hand, the ability to stake two or three of them with the much more rapid bow had a great deal of appeal.
"YEOUCH!!" Willow, trying to show Amy the way to shoot, concentrated too much on the details, got mixed up, and proved that Amy was not the only girl to ever twang her breast in a bowstring.
*-*-*-*-*
Xander's first trip to the public library had been more or less derailed by a series of discoveries, including that Amy Madison was a witch, and the whole slew of events that added her to the Scooby Gang.
Now he was going back to get his first list of chores done, and, like a moose trying to pull a rabbit out of a hat, was certain, 'This time for sure!'
Never having had a library card before he applied for one. Amy had told him all of the papers he'd needed to bring, so that was over with quickly, then it was off to the stacks.
First on the agenda was a book or two on body language, as he'd originally intended. Second was a book or two on medicine. This wasn't a medical library by any means, nor did he have any expertise in that area, so he was forced to choose a couple of books more or less at random, hoping that he could make some sense of them. On a whim, he also grabbed some on natural medicine, hoping that would mesh well with the healing magic he already knew.
Sitting down at a table to page through them, he discovered both of the books on medicine he'd grabbed were utterly useless to him, all about how this machine or that drug could solve problems he didn't have (which was a good thing, as he didn't have access to the machines or drugs, either). But they did teach him, by bad example, a fair amount about what kind of books he was after in the medical department.
He needed something, in essence, much like the U.S. Army Survival Manual, only this time as pertaining to field surgery and medicine. Ok, there was already a section on first aid in the survival manual, even a beefy section if you wanted to look at it that way, but still he needed more.
Both of the herbal medicine books were far more useful to him, particularly in regards to discerning health problems that could color the aura, and that put him in a frame of mind willing to explore those topics a little more deeply.
One thing he did discover, while skimming through medical books to help him understand auras better, was that what mundane medical science was best at, magical healing is worst at, and vice versa. So he resolved to begin a more serious study of anatomy and mundane medicine as a whole, spending a couple of hours trying to select something before almost giving up, as he didn't know how to judge a good book on this topic from a bad one.
On his initial pass through he'd already decided that the herbal stuff seemed much more able to take on some things, while surgery was better for others - notably the trauma branch of medicine. But pouring a bunch of drugs into your body to hide symptoms without curing the root cause seemed a waste of time. So pharmacology, and those things that leaned heavily upon it, got neglected in his great book grab. He already knew spells that did that stuff better and didn't have side effects, nor could you overdose on them or get addicted to it.
Realizing he was getting sidetracked yet again, and resolving that if the library was proving this useful he'd have to visit more often, Xander redirected his efforts into finding out about the rest of the subjects on his 'want to investigate' list.
As he had suspected, they had copies of nearly every text used by the local high school, and those they didn't already have beaten, well worn copies of they were expecting a shipment of either before or early in the school year.
Now, once more color him brilliant, but he'd had enough of school already to know that most of that dreadful experience was teachers trying to cram a whole bunch of (what he'd felt was useless at the time) facts into your head via the route of rote memorization, and Mr. Mage Dude had accomplished more of that in one hour or less with him than all of his other teachers over a lifetime of ditching school combined. And at the very end of that hypnotism session had ordered him to recall all of it except for the mage himself.
Well, those spells that put him in that state and caused the whole experience had been used as part of that session. He'd remembered them, even the one that had partially woken him into a hypnotic state to begin with, as his ears worked even when asleep, and those memories were available to the mind if it truly wanted them, so that had just been rolled in as part of the session he was told by the mage to recall.
So, Xander was pretty confident of his ability to do the whole thing himself. Not TO himself, there seemed to be a definite teacher/student sort of angle to the entire thing and he didn't want to mess that up by exploring and perhaps cause all sorts of problems. The utterly passive nature of the guy in the role of memorizing stuff just seemed too much at odds with the idea of giving commands to memorize stuff to do any good trying to mix them.
However, now he had friends. Xander believed that he could do the role of Mr. Mage Dude for one of them, saying whole 'memorize this' and 'memorize that' thing. Then, once that person had memorized those same spells, have them turn around and do the same to him, this time adding more details and filling in some of those gaps Mr. Mage Dude had left in his knowledge base.
For example. Xander knew he needed a heck of a lot of math in order to do a credible attempt at some of those more nifty devices hinted at in the techno stuff he'd already memorized.
High School taught math.
He needed to know math, his school taught math, the library had the books on math they used to teach it, all the teachers would be asking was for him to memorize those books, and he had this really nifty scheme for memorizing a whole lot of books very quickly, completely and easily.
This seemed to be a match made in heaven!
But why stop there?
There was no reason to stop short of his goal. He could be memorizing their school textbooks, including several generations of math, then retesting and qualifying for AP and honor courses.
Not that he had any ambitions toward academic excellence, but he did need math and stuff at those levels and there was no reason to stint now when a few more books would save him so much grief and suffering later.
No, he would be doing this partly to get authority figures off his back about his poor grades, partly to please Willow, granting her some company at the top of the grade curve, but also to learn the stuff he needed to know in order to go exploring those nifty techno-magical theories that he'd already memorized, and that were just so much dead weight in his mind until he could gain the needed know-how to use them.
And there were other gaps he felt Mr. Mage Dude had left in his education. Things like both martial arts and magic were most excellent, however neither would give a guy a car and thus save him from bumming rides.
So, a few auto-repair texts and service manuals, a charm spell here or there to get something from the junkyard and time in a shop, and he could restore himself a set of wheels he didn't have to push with his feet.
As he'd suspected, but not dared hope, the library already had or could order about half of those books on martial arts he'd memorized. It'd save him tons of typing to check those out for when he took over the role and played Mr. Mage Dude for his friends.
He'd found a brand new copy of the U.S. Army Survival Manual in the army surplus store. Xander grabbed some books on programming languages so he could recreate those computer animations he'd seen for the rest of the Scoobies.
Now, there came an interesting conundrum there, in that he could not create those animations without having read the books, and he could read (well, not without months of effort) them well enough to learn those languages unless it was in one of those Mage Dude type sessions, and he couldn't actually do that on the receiving end until he'd already done a Mage Dude impersonation with one of his friends, first, who could then switch roles and lead him through learning the additional material.
However, since that technomancy stuff wasn't presently useful to him anyway, he figured it and those animations it depended on could wait a round or two until the group got around to including them for his friends.
What should probably not wait at all was that chart of the major and minor chakras. For Xander, it was an early warning system of things that went bump in the night. There were a whole lot of demons in town that were not vampires and didn't have to stay out of the sun. Some of them even blended in with the human population, looking just as normal as anyone else unless you had the aura sight granted by his third eye.
So, he grabbed a book on how to draw, and went searching for one on hypnotism.
He and Jesse had both read many science fiction books as well as comics. There was among those, one of the Stainless Steel Rat series, about how one time when Slippery Jim was infiltrating a world where he couldn't bring any of those spy gadgets he so liked, but he had used hypnotism to memorize the plans for them before going, then once he'd arrived he used another trance to let him draw those plans precisely.
That sounded good to Xander, as he had a chakra chart to be recreating, and while he was at it there were illustrations in those guides that he couldn't produce by typing. He might as well get to those as well.
End of Chapter Five
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