Between a Rock and a Hard, Metallic Place

“What in the Hell are you doing?!” Xander Harris shouts at me, pointing towards teh way Willow the undead drow priestess just fled. “T- that’s Willow you did that to there!!”

You have just got to be kidding me! Doesn’t the guy remember what’s going on here tonight with Rayne?!

“X-man say it with me: cursed costume!” I say slowly, resisting the urge to reach over and try to shake a bit of sense into the man. “Right now until we get that damn thing OFF of her for all intents and purposes that was a drow ghost and you just do NOT want to have one of them . . .”

“What’s a drow and why would that be dangerous?” Buffy asks from the side. “I only got Willow to buy that because it looked so much more revealing than that dull ghost outfit she always wore each Halloween. Showed off her figure a whole hella lot bettter than the sheet. Any ol’ day!”

Sigh. I guess one can’t expect everyone out there to know about AD&D’s more evil monster characters. Had not known about them myself until Shinji Akari suggested I should try a hobby of some type to round myself out more.

Hey, roleplaying is a hobby and it DID give me a means to a better life!

Some say that those who play roleplaying games are nothing more than nerds in need of a LIFE! While maybe there might be some kind of truth to it that some out there get too engrossed into fantasy and fiction games to be healthy, one must remember . . .what I was before?

You may recall that I was kind of lacking in social skills and such back in the anime, right? Kind of robotic in my speak patterns. Monotone? Difficulty with living life and all that?

And very much unwilling to attempt to interact with other human beings because of walls placed around me and all that nonsense Gendo Akari did with...

Ah, never mind. To much info right now for my taste to needlessly dump on you right now. Just say that roleplaying opened up for me doors that had been closed to me otherwise. I mean after all, online roleplaying means one can act like someone totally different without risking your associates thinking you’re some kind of freak. Can try all sorts of things you don’t dare do, usually. Anonymous.

Still, you’d think that with all the comic books and such that Xander is into that he’d at least be into . . .well, know about AD&D Drow and such. There WERE a lot of comic books (ala Forgotten Realms) which had SOME featured in them.

“Drow are elves that turned to evil a long time ago in Dungeons and Dragons,” Lilith explains, seeing that it is her turn to ‘explain to the clueless heroes’ game. “Use poisons. Black magic’s. Consort with demons and undead monsters. Even worshiped a demon named Loth...”

“At least until Gary Gygax went and promoted that spider b*tch to an evil goddess after the First Edition,” I mutter to myself.

Never particularly cared for that. God only knows what a bloody foe she’d been when I pitted my character against her before the online DM went with the Second Edition nonsense and all that!!

“Bottom line . . .living drow elves are bad enough,” Lilith says. “Ran in enough games with Auntie Inquirer to know how bad an undead one of an ordinary, non magic using one is. You do NOT want to know what something like a vampiric or liched one can do. Ghost clerics are even WORSE!”

“Bad juju?” Xander blinks, trying to get feel here for the situation at hand. “Sorta like demonic Santa’s helpers and all that?”

“Oh yeah, nasty bunch Drow elves are and just touching an ordinary one in the game could be lethal,” I add, nodding empathically. “You don’t want to know what a Drow cleric one can do and I don’t want to know what they can do in REAL Life, real or a chaos costume facsimile or whatever Willow is right now, thank you!”

Buffy

“O-kay! So we better go and go and get Willow back to normal before she does something REALLY nasty to us,” I mutter, nodding. “Got it. Right.”

I actually came back from teh dead to deal with this kinda shit?! I mean I was kind of all amnesia like (didn’t recall events after things with this freaky Halloween with Ethan and all) and then I go and finally remember just why I came back and all that. Wanted to keep Willow from going all Dark Side and stuff like that!

I mean I didn’t need her to get all addicted to magic by going down that path I saw her go on the TV show these winged girls watched...

They actually made a TV show of my life here in Sunnydale, in some other timelines/ realities. Whatever! Cool.

Ah, anyway, you can DO stuff like that when you’re dead and in the Afterlife. The good one, anyway!

Yeah. Anyway, I didn’t want to see Darth Willow come about and so came back willingly. Kind of better on you than getting RIPPED out from Heaven unwillingly and all that, anyway.

But I go and forget about the fact that Willow got two costumes from Ethan’s. Or at least I kinda figured that that when Willow turned only into only a ghost wearing that . . .drow costume, we’d have no problems.

Got to figure that I had to be wrong. We never have it easy in Sunnyvale, even when we have the added benefit of people (albeit from a parralel universe, kinda like that bearded Spock . . .no, that Spock was from the evil Mirror universe from Star Trek...bad example).

Anyway, we have people here with a lot of power who are on OUR side. Have knowledge about what’s actually going on and...We still are behind the eight ball here in trouble.

Willows gone Dark Side after all. Early. And all do to some freaky game costume that...I guess we shouldn’t have touched after all.

Hey! Had a thought here. Just as we found Willow’s body and all that and Sailor Moon (who for some odd reason looks like Sailor Pluto but dressed like Sailor Moon. . . .what’s with that exactly?!)

Yeah, I read Sailor Moon. Stories. Sue me!

As the final detour it taken care of (cough... Willow’s body and de- possession...cough) before

“Uh guys . . .I thought that Willow was supposed to . . .I don’t know . . . Change back into a human being after you make with that magic sparkly Senshi stuff, right?” Xander snarks, pointing to the unconscious form of a now living woman who calls herself Willow. “She still kind of looks all Drow like and that? Something didn‘t work quiet right, you know.”

“You think?!” Setsune snarked, looking rather put upon. “She was double costumed there and I was able to retun her to the land of the living AND return her from being an evil possessed entity, I’ll have you know!

“I just cannot as of YET return her to human by breaking the second Chaos cursed costume without risking a Matrix fracture,” the Senshi of the Moon (formerly known as Sailor Pluto). “Risk turning her into either a homicidal maniac that way at best . . .or a mass of shapeless, very dead protoplasm at worst.”

The Sailor of the Moon could cure (with some difficulty) the madness brought about by Matrix fracture (that mystical link between the physical world and the mystical realm) with some difficulty. It would be a bit harder to fix a dead body without the use of her mother’s super magical item, the Silver Crystal.

That was something she’d left behind at home, it should be added.

Something that she wish could have been otherwise, given everything that had been going on recently. From the sounds in the background of actual explosions and general mayhem about town? Might be VERY useful in culling the violence tonight.

They’d maybe should have gone to Ethan Rayne’s place straight away to take care of the source of this mess, but the thought of leaving Willow’s unprotected body to the mercy of the monsters running about wasn’t tolerable to a lot of them.

The thought that Willow the ghostly Drow popping up to make their lives more difficult or ambushing them made others not like the idea of leaving Willow’s body behind impalpable as well, it should be added.

All around, leaving Willow’s body behind wasn’t in the playbook. But now?

“Or she’ll return to normal after we go and smash that magical statue that Rayne used to unleash this chaos upon Sunnydale and . . .” Reika mugs, glad to get down to business finally.

THUD THUD THUD THUD! “. . .and tell me that isn’t what I think it is?” Reika Ayanami Quatermain, former First Child and Pilot of Eva Unit 00 whispered hoarsely, turning even paler in shock. “Terminator ARMOR?!” Rei blinked, staring as a life-sized version of the bulky contraption she’d only seen on the table top game known as Warhammer 40K pulled up to the corner of the block at one end of street. It has all sorts of latinish writing on it, but what was REALLY worrisome is a very familiar . . .eye of Horus on the metalwork.

And at the other end a combat armor only seen in the Iron Man comic book series comes into view: Iron Monger armor.

Both are known by various members of the adventuring party to be . . .not what you call “good guys”.

Good or bad, by the looks of it these two metallic menaces don't like each other...

What the adventurers all do know is this. They’re in trouble. Both iron monstrosities seem, by their stance, to be ready to “throw down”. And from what Rei and the rest know . . .being between these two Titans is NOT a good idea at all!

1. “What in the Hells are you waiting for?!” a booming voice shouts over a loudspeaker. “Move out of the FRETHING WAY!!”

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