The noblewoman's shrill scream pierced the night as a metal demon raced past her on the odd roads. This was exactly the worst thing that could happen, as it dragged the attention of every psuedo-monster in the area directly to her. One moment of common sense and terror overriding noblish protocol later, Lady Elizabeth Summers had hiked her skirts up past her ankles... very nearly exposing her calves!... and was running for dear life from the horde of monsters behind her.

Nearby, Spike was grinning wildly at the display. He'd had his doubts about Dru's little vision earlier... after all, Halloween had always been dead before, why would that change now?... but this was an opportunity far too good to pass up. The Slayer, truly helpless as she seemed?

His grin stretched even wider, revealing pointy fangs.

xxx

The hologram leading it had turned and homed in on the scream, barely taking the time to use paths that it could traverse in her haste to reach Buffy. Within a few moments, she was watching in horror as Buffy desperately did her best to outrun the children-turned-demons. She had to help, but what could she do? She was a ghost, and couldn't interact with the physical world.

And then, right in the middle of Willow's panic attack... Amalgam blurred forward, and was almost immediately in the fray, all fists and feet swinging... and in the blink of an eye, or so it seemed, the entire large group of psuedo-monsters had been knocked out and were slumped in various positions across the street. And Xander was walking back to them like absolutely nothing was wrong with that picture.

No... not Xander. He too had...

"Xander, You.. You became your costume! What was it... Experiment something... Amalgam?"

Amalgam cocked its head slightly to the side, expressing what it believed was confusion and a desire for her to continue speaking, even as it processed the new information. Many seconds of frantic Willow-babble later, it believed it had pieced the situation together much better with the new information. This was not a game. Nor was it a training scenario or virtual reality apparently. Given the information... it was entirely possible that the hologram... ghost... was correct, and its very existence was owed to an entirely human teenager's overactive imagination during the creation of a halloween costume. Intriguing.

Even so, there was the possibility that the ghost was incorrect, and this was a game with a touch of extra realism added. To err on the side of caution, it decided to keep the mission sets running at the current setting, but added a third objective. Identification and elimination of the unknown force causing the chaos on the streets of this small town.

xxx

After a snap decision by Willow to bring them all to Buffy's house, where a vampire dropped in on them... Amalgam decided not to kill it after it was loudly exclaimed that 'he's on our side!'. The ghost, Willow, had left to contact someone named Giles, who she believed could help, and left him and the Vampire, Angel, to guard Buffy and a girl named Cordelia, who had apparently, and mysteriously, not changed like everyone else had. As he checked the security of the upper floor, mindful of the fact that a window left open could lead to an assault from above, Buffy's piercing scream rang out, followed almost immediately by the sound of a door slamming open and a terrified noblewoman fleeing, screaming 'Vampire' at the top of her lungs.

Amalgam mentally debated cursing as it swiftly paced back down the stairs, to where Angel was stammering in slight shock.

"She... I... She walked in on me fighting one of the little monsters, and she freaked and ran!"

Amalgam gave the slightest frown as it paced swiftly out the back door, not pausing to continue conversation with the two following it. Its main objective was still the protection of Buffy Summers, and failure had never been an option.

xxx

At about the same time Amalgam punched out a pirate, enjoying it far more than he really had any reason to, Giles was causing severe damage to a certain chaos mage. After a few minutes of pain, Ethan was all to willing to allow the spell to be ended prematurely.

"The statue! Break the statue of Janus, and the spell will end!"

Giles dropped Ethan to the floor, where he lay still and breathing heavily. With a slight grunt at the weight of the thing he lifted it up over his head, and hurled it to the ground.

Elsewhere, a terrified noblewoman suddenly sprouted a deep glower and, no stakes at hand, made do with punching Spike in the nose with her full Slayer strength. There was an audible crunch of bone shattering as Spike slumped to the ground, moaning softly. Cordelia and Angel rushed up to Buffy, making absolutely sure that she was alright, and he took the opportunity provided by their distraction to crawl off and drop down a sewer main.

Xander, however, was occupied with staring at his now sharp and pointy fingernails. Slowly, one hand reached up towards his head and tugged at the 'wig'. It didn't come off. Carefull prodding of his eyes and teeth proved that he wasn't wearing any contacts or extentions either. The armory hidden in his coat weighed far too much to be plastic... and a tiny voice in his head was chiming 'objective complete'.

He turned and stepped into the darkness, walking slowly at first, then breaking out into a full run for his house. This was not good... very not good. He would... take a nap, and when he woke up this would all have been just a dream, and he would be back to normal.

xxx

But it wasn't a dream, and when he woke, it was to stare in the mirror at a face that wasn't his. He panicked, and would have screamed if he didn't have to worry about waking the other two occupants of the house from their alcohol-induced stupors. After a few minutes he managed to get his breathing back under control and flipped through everything he'd remembered thinking of when inventing this character. After another few minutes he finally remembered something useful. Shapeshifting. Thankful that it was a saturday and he wasn't expected anywhere until the afternoon, he pulled up a chair and sat in front of the mirror, wincing as he accidentally caught his excessively long hair on something.

Half an hour of weird faces and frustration later he was steamed. He had to make this work, it had to work! If the other Scoobies found out about this he wasn't sure what they'd do... well, actually he was pretty sure he knew exactly what they'd do. They'd do their best to try to get rid of his 'unnatural powers', likely beginning with some form of exorcism. Exactly what that exorcism could do was what worried him. Explaining just why an exorcism reacted badly to the demon or vampiric bits of what he had become would be difficult enough to explain, let alone what havoc everything else could cause. He grimaced again, then paused to recall the little voice in his head. What the hell... worth a shot. He focused on thinking to himself in words, as clearly as possible.

'Release limiters on shapeshifting.'

Suddenly, his entire body... squished, for lack of a better term. Muscles, bones, organs, all seemingly shifted to the general consistency of jelly. His face had seemed to melt, eyelids drooping over cheeks, and jaw drooping down to his chest. He lifted an arm and stared in fascination, eyes bugging out as though they were on stalks, as it rolled up into a spiral and then split into tentacles. He glanced at his other hand, which seemed to be forming itself into a spiny lobster claw, and groaned.

In the end, it took him over an hour to get his face and body right... not because it was difficult to change his shape, but because with the limiters removed it was simply far too easy, and he had to fight his body to keep it in one shape... it wasn't perfect, there were a few small deviations that he would probably have to do a lot of quick talking to explain away. The fact that his pupils were still slitted being the main one. Fortunately, his eyes were a darker shade of brown, so it would be difficult to tell from a distance. All the other variations were easily dismissed, and could easily be explained as carry-over from last night because he'd made his own costume out of bits and pieces, rather than buying a full costume... hell, from what he understood of magic, the laws governing it were so seemingly nonsensical that that may well be the exact reason that he'd kept all the mojo he'd thought up for his costume.

'New face completed. Save 'Xander Harris' for quick recall in later situations? Yes/No?'

Used to video games that would ask questions like that, he thought 'Yes' before he'd really thought about it, then blinked as it registered.

'Saving physical appearance and bio-map... Complete. Form two: Xander Harris added to Natural Form in Neural databanks.'

Xander just sat there staring at his reflection for several minutes before he cursed, loudly. Great. Now he had a computer living in his head too. He didn't remember anything like that...

Deep within his mind, behind multiple locked doors and barred gates, Amalgam expressed the slightest amusement to itself, and formulated a new objective, fitting its apparent new role as a symbiote.

'Remain undetected.'

xxx

Unsurprisingly, given the vast majority of infiltration and spy type games Amalgam had been sent to play... games that Xander had the memories of playing, and could access and review at any time due to his head-computer-thingy, as he termed it... he remained undetected for quite some time, easily explaining any minor mistakes away, and expressing a profound and very well feigned shock the day his eyes were discovered.

And if he spent a few nights experimenting with his little shapeshifting ability, and then a few unconfirmed rumors becan circulating around the vampire community that a perfect likeness of Alexander Anderson had bayoneted a nest of lower level vampires, or later when that guy in red had taken out a group of demons... well, none of it was ever connected to him. He thought of them as similar to sidequests, ways to work off stress as he did his best to hide behind the mask of the Zeppo.

Of course, all good things come to an end, and eventually it was discovered that the curse binding Liam's soul to Angel could be broken.

The hard way.

All sorts of chaos and murder had resulted from the return of Angelus, leading up to where they were now. Acathla had opened a portal to an Infernal dimension, and Buffy had gone to do her best to take out Angelus and close it. Xander had followed behind, fully intending to finish the job for her should she fail or choke. Giles had arrived as fast as he could, to tell Buffy what the key was to closing the portal.

Angel's blood.

Then her tears had come, and his resolve broke, even as he could tell that she fully intended to go through with it, no matter how much it hurt her. A few quick mental commands and he raised his arm, paralyzing them all where they stood. Only then did he leave his concealment in the shadows to look at the newly-ensouled Angel.

And drive a six-inch long knife into his side.

"You know Dead-boy... I came here with the sole intention of killing you if Buffy couldn't. But now? Now I just can't do it."

Xander savagely jerked the knife out and caught some of the undead's blood in his hand, smearing it over his forehead.

"You ever make Buffy cry again though... and I'll come back from hell to make you miserable. You can bet on it!"

Xander grinned widely, if emptily, as his face changed. His bared teeth grew obviously sharper, as did his fingernails, his eyes flashed and were yellow again, prominently displaying the slits, and his hair lengthened and turned white until, within two and a quarter seconds, he was once again a perfect match with the costume he'd worn on halloween. He reached within his coat and pulled out a massive nodachi, so long that it wasn't possible under the laws of physics to have been hidden there... hells, the thing was slightly longer than Xander was tall!

Then, fixed grin still on his face, even as his eyes gave the lie to it, he turned and charged through the portal, blade at a ready position for whatever he might find inside. The portal closed behind him.

And then the Paralysis wore off and the horrified screaming began.

xxx

A.N.

I actually spent several hours trying to figure out how to write this. First came the easy part, what to do with a horrendously overpowered Xander? Send him someplace where he can use that power... how about hell? But how to get him there? There were multiple false starts and I had to completely rewrite this chapter once before I managed to get it to approximate what I wanted. Not exactly perfect, but good enough to post.

And now that I've appeased you all with a new chapter of something, excuse me while I get back to gaming... Oblivion calls for me.