Nancy Thompson looked down at herself in absolute horror, knowing what was occurring was something every high-school student prayed would never happen to them.

She was seated at her normal chair in her first-period senior class at her school, dressed only in her bra and panties, unlike her fully-clad friends and classmates also in their seats there, and with her teacher writing something on the blackboard, with his back to that young woman. In the next moment, her dream became even more terrifying, as reality altered itself.

Looking around wildly, Nancy now saw all of the other students slumped down in their chairs, every one of them obviously dead, with their throats cut and deep knife punctures and slashes to their bodies. Suddenly, an overpoweringly shrill screech stabbed into her ears, as the teacher finished off the last letter of "MR. KRUEGER" on the blackboard, to then slice a line directly under this name, as the man whirled around, to then grin manically at the frozen-in-fear girl.

Dressed in his brown fedora, striped sweater, loose trousers, and workman's boots, Freddy's repellently-scarred face worked in sadistic amusement, as he lifted his right hand in its glove, to point an index finger with a knife blade attached to it directly at Nancy, as the monster in control of her dreams now cackled, "Hiya, honey, I hope you studied! It's time for finals, and, yeah, I mean the very last thing you'll experience before you die! Now, just remember, I don't grade on the curve, I grade on the pain-"

Before Freddy could finish off his cruel mockery, he was interrupted, by something he plainly didn't expect, judging by the way his head abruptly snapped to the left, as both he and Nancy then gaped at what had just thrown open the classroom door, to momentarily stand there in the entranceway, beaming at the other pair inside the room.

A man, about a decade older than Nancy and wearing an eyepatch over his left eye, now strode into the classroom, looking at Freddy standing there frozen in shock, as the stranger brandished a piece of paper in his right hand, all while cheerfully saying, "Hey, teach, sorry I'm late, but don't worry! I got my tardy slip right here!" Stopping short as he stared in puzzlement at the two people gawking at him, the nearly-naked man, who was wearing only a single item of clothing, said with pure confusion, "What?"

Both Nancy and Freddy, for the first time ever by either, now did the exact same thing, as they together stared at the man's underwear. Unlike the ordinary white cotton or silk boxers normally worn by males throughout the country, this specific clothing currently being displayed by the man standing there in the classroom had been cut, stitched, and shaped from variously-colored fabrics to look exactly like a cartoon Great Dane's head.

A resigned sigh drew the pair's attention back up to the man's exasperated features, as he then told the disbelieving listeners, "Yeah, she did say I had to fit in the dream, but this is her just showing off a Wiccan sense of humor! Well, at least Wils didn't make Scooby-Doo a panting dog- OH, NO, YOU DON'T!" At those last yelled words, the man had dropped the slip of paper he'd been holding in his right hand, to then frantically grab the crotch of his doggy underwear, as he determinedly held this closed in his clenched fist.

That shout also broke Freddy free of his shocked daze at having an intruder in his private territory of teenagers' dreams. His burned face working in pure rage, the monster now snarled at the other male, "Whoever you are, you're gonna die! Take a look at these, and get ready to be flayed alive!" Freddy now threw up his hands, holding these palm-out at chest level, clenching his fingers in an attempt to terrify his next victim by the sound of his glove knives grinding together. What happened next was again something neither of the other two people in the classroom had expected.

A very bored look now passed over the face of the man still holding onto his underwear. Ignoring the fiend who'd just threatened him, the intruder instead looked up at the ceiling of the classroom, seemingly asking thin air, "Okay, can we get down to business now?" After an expectant pause, the man nodded, as if he'd received an answer nobody else had heard, then he brought his head down to stare at Freddy, all while letting go with his right hand to then put his fists on his hips, as the stranger in the Hanna-Barbera character boxers now sneered right into Freddy's seared features, "Oooooo, finger knives! I'm sooooo scared! Looks like you got the full set. Okay, I'll see your ten, and I'll raise you two."

At those mystifying concluding words, the man then put his right hand behind his back, and from out of nowhere, he pulled out a massive, double-bladed battleaxe, to now perform, with truly obvious skill, multiple spins and twirls of his weapon in the man's experienced grip. At last ending his showing off, the man held his axe ready, and looking at Freddy with a very cold eye, that evildoer's opponent now asserted his status with the simple words of, "Let's dance, puke-face."

Articulating a scream of utter rage over being treated with such contempt, Freddy then lunged towards the other man, his knives thrust ahead of himself to plunge into his adversary's chest. Except, in the next instant, the one-eyed man had lifted his axe into a guard position, allowing Freddy's weapons to skitter off the face of the right axe blade in a shower of sparks, and during the fraction of the moment when the child murderer was off balance, lurching past his enemy, the man with the axe used all of the power in his legs, hips, back, shoulders, and arms, to make a vicious sideways chop with his axe. Right through Freddy's forearms.

The severed hands flew through the air, both smacking against the blackboard and embedding themselves into this wall portion, as the tips of the finger knives stuck in there. Still quivering, the hands then vanished, not even leaving any puncture marks in the blackboard.

Freddy wasn't paying any attention to what had happened to his hands, since he'd shrieked in absolute agony and then stared with disbelief at where his arms now ended in closed stumps that weren't spraying out blood. He shook his arms, only to have even more incredulity appear on his seared features when nothing happened and his hands hadn't materialized back onto his body, as he'd just mentally commanded. Looking up at the other man who'd now stepped within a pace of himself, a dazed Freddy listened with amazement as his opponent said in a grim tone, "Does the word 'lockdown' mean anything to you, pizza-head? Once I got here and distracted you, Willow made sure you couldn't use any of your dream-powers!"

A look of true horror then appeared on the burned monster's features, as he stared at the axeman, who was now the one taunting Freddy Krueger. "Yeah, if you just tried to get out of here, you learned that wouldn't work, either. Now, it's time for YOU to go to Hell! If you thought getting burned alive was bad, then you really won't enjoy going through that again, for all eternity!" At those last words, the axe in the man's grip was jerked up for a downwards slice into Freddy's face.

Throwing up his hacked arms in front of his head in a vain attempt to protect himself, Freddy also stumbled blindly backwards, not seeing that his enemy's weapon had halted, to then curve back, down, and up in an immense vertical sweep, that put the rising axeblade exactly in its targeted point of that serial killer's body.

Freddy Krueger's crotch.

The monster's arms flew away from each other, as the burned man bawled in utter agony, to look down at the axe continuing its slicing upwards through himself, up through his stomach, chest, throat, still-screaming mouth, and finally the rest of his head, to cleave Freddy completely in two. As the man finished his axe swing, slowing and finally stopping his weapon, the double, bloodless pieces of what had once been a feared murderer now dropped with a faint thud to the classroom floor.

Breathing out a satisfied grunt, the man with an axe now looked kindly at a frozen Nancy, who hadn't moved a muscle in her seat through all the few seconds of the fight she'd just witnessed. His gentle tone was as caring as his gaze, as the man now soothingly said, "You all right, honey? Don't worry, it's all over-" Abruptly interrupting that statement was a shimmer of white light throughout the entire classroom, as the man's axe, the two pieces of Freddy's body, and the corpses of Nancy's classmates all vanished. The area now revealed itself as a perfectly ordinary high-school location, down to the faint smell of floor polish.

Looking off into the distance, the man cocked his head, and then he nodded in agreement, speaking into the air, "Okay, Wils, see you when I wake up, and I'm gonna pick one of the Muppet flicks on movie night next Friday when it's my turn, just to get back at you for this!" Seemingly glowering at nobody at all, the grumbling man pointed at his underwear, only then looking up in surprise at someone who was now near him.

Nancy had cautiously left her chair, to edge over where the man was standing there. Eyeing the man's absurd boxers, the young woman reached out to fearfully touch the other person's bare arm. Feeling warm flesh under her fingers, Nancy started to shake, as she began sobbing. In the next instant, she was embraced by strong arms, as the teenager kept on crying while her face was pressed up against an exposed male chest. Nancy didn't know how long she did this, until her tears decreased to simple sniffles, and the man who'd been hugging her now gently relaxed his clasp, and stepped away from her.

Blinking at the last of the moisture in her eyes, Nancy looked again at the patient features of the man waiting a few paces from her. Clearing his throat, her rescuer now introduced himself, all while holding out his hand, "Hello, I'm Xander Harris."

"Oh," replied a startled student, who managed to remember her manners enough to shake this…Xander's? hand, while also saying, "Uh, I'm Nancy-"

"Thompson, right," nodded Xander, who let go of his grip on Nancy's hand, somewhat to her disappointment that was mixed with her surprise at hearing her last name. "We managed to find out about you when we were figuring ways to take down that bastard. I swear to you, he's gone, permanently, before he got around to killing anyone else."

"What?" burst from Nancy's mouth, as she looked around with disbelief at the classroom that was empty except for themselves. "What about thethe others, that were here-"

"Alive, all of 'em. Let's see, uh, Tina, right? She was the only one attacked before you, and she's fine. That sick bastard, he put in your dream all those dead people, just to hurt you, before he started to actually get to work. That was really stupid, 'cause he made enough commotion in the spirit world to get Wils' attention."

A very bewildered Nancy now stared at her earnestly speaking savior. "Who's Wils?"

Xander sheepishly shrugged, as he answered, "Oh, sorry. Willow Rosenberg, my bestest bud. She's the number one witch in the whole world, and besides looking after the Slayers, she keeps an eye out for things like these. Once Wils learned about Freddy Krueger, who he was and what he was up to, she got really mad, and sent me to take him out."

"A witch? Andwhat are Slayers?"

This time, Xander looked more uncomfortable, as he paused, clearly trying to order his thoughts. "Um, excuse me, but that's kinda private. It doesn't have to do with anything here, okay? Besides, even if I told you, you'd just forget it when you woke up from this dream."

Nancy blinked, as she then looked around the classroom. "What, I'm still dreaming?"

"Oh, sure. Wils told me that it wouldn't be a good idea for either of us to be yanked back to real life right away. Waking up suddenly after what you've gone through would be a really big strain on your body. So, you get your own dream for about another half-hour, after which we start coming around, and leave here."

"Leave?" Nancy looked at Xander in confusion. "You mean, you'll go…away? I won't…see you again?"

Xander somberly answered his questioner, "Nancy, I came to help you, and I did the job. And now, I have to go back to my usual work, which is, um, kind of the same thing, helping other people who need me, and who're my family. So, yeah, I'll be leaving, and you'll be waking up too, safe and sound, and you probably won't remember me all that well. Which is okay, 'cause most people just don't want to deal with what they went through, those kinds of things that happened a couple of minutes ago. It's enough that we take care of the rest of everyone, and have 'em live in peace and happiness. You, especially, you got that? You deserve it, Nancy."

The young woman, who'd become an actual adult tonight, now simply looked at her rescuer, and she regretfully acknowledged inside herself that his explanation was absolutely accurate. Soon, whatever had happened would be over, and that also meant what she'd have liked to have continued, being in the presence of Xander Harris. A real hero. However…

Nancy Thompson again looked around the classroom, to thoughtfully ask, "I have my own dream for a half hour, right? Can I, um, change things to what I want?"

A relieved Xander replied, "Yeah, but only here, in this classroom. What, you want to fill it up with unicorns and puppies? Sure, go ahead."

Nancy casually glanced down at her very sexy teenage body, still clad in only her bra and panties, and then she gazed directly at Xander, a slow, sultry smile now appearing on her face, as she murmured, "That would've been nice when I was eight years old, but now that I'm a decade older, there's something else I want to do in my dream, a fantasy that I've had for the last couple of months."

Xander was becoming really nervous now. That look on Nancy's features, he'd seen it often on Anya's own face, particularly when she'd had a really profitable business period at the Magic Box, and those occasions had usually ended with him the next day carefully sitting down on the softest seat cushions he could find, and thinking longingly of ice packs applied to his nether regions.

Distracted by his memories, Xander had missed Nancy coming nearer, until she was now standing in front of him, with the small woman then reaching out with her hands to grab him by the sides of his bare ribs, and next Nancy effortlessly lifted Xander off his feet, turning to carry the man with his feet dangling a few inches off the floor. As she walked along, Nancy smirked into Xander's startled face, as he realized that he couldn't move at all. "My dream, my rules," chuckled Nancy.

Xander's right eye widened, which were the only muscles he could control the slightest, as Nancy then gently laid him on his back, on top of the teacher's desk. Stepping back a pace to admire the sight of the nearly-naked man lying before her, Nancy put her arms behind her back, to work busily away, as she commented, "See, I once wondered what it'd be like to do it with my boyfriend on my teacher's desk, but I could never work up the courage to actually try. But, hey, in a dream, all the rules don't really manner, do they?" At those last words, Nancy's bra came free, to be gaily tossed away into a classroom corner.

Xander's remaining eye continued to be the only part of his body that moved, as he now tracked Nancy stepping towards the desk, to then climb up onto it, and putting her right leg over his lower torso, as she now straddled his stomach. Looking over her shoulder, as her bare breasts swayed in response to the motions of her body, Nancy then brought her head back around, her smirk now totally evil, as she now reached down to pick up his unresisting hands, and brought them up towards her chest, as the young woman joyfully caroled, "Scooby-Doo, where are youuuuuuuu?"

In her bed, a sleeping girl now had a very dirty grin on her slumbering features, as her hands presently roamed all over the front of her body.