While traveling through Africa, Xander hears of a possible Slayer trapped in a town under attack by a paramilitary organization. As he investigates the area, an interested ghost investigates him. A ghost without a head, and with a Thompson submachine gun. Well, Xander has had worse problems.

Yes, it's Roland, the Headless Thompson Gunner, from Warren Zevon's song.

In the future, 200-1000 years from now, (assuming that Sunnydale still exists, and S6-7 never happened) somebody gets the bright idea to mount spindizzies on Sunnydale and the surrounding area and send it off into space. What weird adventures would the flying Hellmouth have?

This is a cross with James Blish's "Cities in Flight" stories. Sunnydale will never be as important as the city with "two names, twice", but it has inventive "people".

Assume that one of the two Slayer lines is represented, that there are some vampires and some other demons left, and that it has the sui...

Make a change to "The Pack"; have Xander possessed for some reason by the spirit of a mongoose, not the spirit of a hyena. Now, since the mongoose is according to legend a protector of man who hates snakes and other destructive predators, that episode would work a lot differently. (That mongooses have no natural enemies in North America would cause problems.) Try to incorporate some aspects of Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, from Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book.

Follow this up by changing the Graduation Day story. After all, in a town suffused by magic, with a major character still holding some of ...

The 2010 US political season inspired some of the most insane advertisements and campaign videos of all time. Some of these are demented enough to be fit subjects of a BtVS crossover story. And, the two maddest of the videos were Fred Davis' ads for Carly Fiorina in her campaign for US Senator against Barbara Boxer. I mean of course the "Demon Sheep" ad and the "Hot Air" ad.

So, my idea is to have Xander or Buffy investigating a problem on a California farm and eventually facing "Financial Conservative In Name Only" demon sheep. Or, a senator turned into a blimp; your choice.
...

In "I Robot, You Jane," the demon Moloch is scanned into the Net. Now, there are stories where other intelligent pieces of software roam the Net. I'm thinking of Donna Andrews' "Turing Hopper" series. The challenge is to have Turing notice Moloch's activity, realize how wrong it is, and try to fight back against the demon. And, how would a software entity that has trouble understanding the motivation of humans try to understand a demon? How would Turing understand the existence of demons?

Anyhow, this would be the software equivalent of Godzilla versus King Kong.

Either just after or just before The Mark of the Rani, Giles meets the Sixth Doctor and Peri in a London general store. Of course, the proprietor is Ronnie Corbett, and there is a very confused customer: Ronnie Barker. Now, everyone becomes confused.

On Halloween, suppose that Ethan Rayne's shop did not have a soldier costume, but had a bunch of politician's costumes. Xander might have picked the most recognizable of them; a black suit, a top hat, and a fake beard would make him into a passable Abraham Lincoln.

Now, suppose that when Ethan's spell strikes that he's turned into Abraham Lincoln. Not just Old Abe, but Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter, after the novel by Seth Grahame-Smith, published in 2010 and released in movie form in June 2012. How would he do in the 20th Century, in a town full of vampires? When the night is ov...

This is a tricky one; it's inspired by real people. TtH has changed its rules recently about using real people, but it would still be tricky. I'm putting it here because of one of the names involved.

On June 22, 23, and 24, 2010, Jacob Isner and Nicolas Mahut contended in a unique tennis match in the first round of Wimbledon. Isner finally won 6-4, 3-6, 6-7, 7-6, 70-68, after 11 hours of play. (Let's hope it's unique. They face each other in the first round of the 2011 Championships!) During the match, reporter Xan Brooks of the Guardian wrote an extraordinary blog about it: htt...

Thorne Smith was most known for his Topper stories, the body-switching story, Turnabout, and the movies made from them, but he wrote a few more books too. In one of them, "The Night Life of the Gods", an eccentric inventor, Hunter Hawk, develops a ring that can turn living beings to stone and back. He meets Megaera, a wood sprite who can turn statues into living flesh and back, and they fall in love. They also amuse themselves by turning the statues of Gods in the Metropolitan Museum of Art into the gods they were modeled upon, and the gods themselves have fun in New York.

At the en...

The gang used the "Orb of Dagon" to weaken Glory during the battle at the end of "The Gift". Instead, make a change and have the orb be the "Orb of Argon," or actually the "Eye of Argon". In fact, tell the story in the same way the original fantasy story by Jim Theis, "The Eye of Argon," tells it.

For the uninitiated, "The Eye of Argon" is considered to be the worst fantasy story ever written. A famous game at sf conventions is to see who can read the story aloud without laughing, crying, or falling on the floor the longest. The Wikipedia article is at http://en.wikipedia.org/wi...

In Charlie Stross' "Atrocity Archive" series, a secret British agency called "The Laundry," uses computers, surveillance systems, nuclear weapons, magic, and medusas to keep extradimensional entities and Cthulhoid monsters from invading the Earth. Assume now that Mo Howard interrupts a Buffy-vampire fight on one of her trips to England, post-Chosen. Meanwhile, Bob Howard has to work hard to keep Willow from hacking her way into "secrets man was not meant to know™." You can even have Angleton meeting Giles.

No sexual relationships, please. Imagine what Mo would do if Bob strayed.

The new Council of Watchers and Slayers will need plenty of legal support as its operatives get into trouble all over the world. There are also plenty of legal stories set all around the world. The challenge is to write stories where a watcher or slayer needs a lawyer in a hurry and has plenty of trouble explaining what really is going on, and feel free to choose the stuffiest lawyers around. These don't have to be TV lawyers either. Yes, you could use L. A. Law or Boston Legal, but you can also try George V. Higgins's Jerry Kennedy books, or Scott Turow's Presumed Innocent, or Rumpole of t...

A Radio Drama/Halloween tribute

On October 30th, 1938, a ‘meteor’ crashed into a farm in the small village of Grovers Mill, NJ, 5 miles away from Princeton. Professor Pierson of the Princeton Astronomy department came to measure the ‘meteor,’ which turned out to be a spaceship and the vanguard of an invading army of Martians. He made a miraculous escape from their heat rays and poison gas, while the other Martians devastated New Jersey, New York, and the rest of the world. Only the humblest things in the world, the bacteria, could defeat the Martians.

Orson Welles' ...

As Brainerd, MN police chief Marge Gunderson says near the end of the 1996 movie, Fargo, “And here ya are, and it's a beautiful day. Well, I just don't understand it.” A couple of months later, she and her husband become parents. Just imagine that thirteen or fourteen years later, their daughter becomes a Slayer. How do Marge and Norm deal with the situation?

They don't have to be still in Brainerd; I can imagine her taking a state post in the intervening period.

Joyce Summers is invited to a costume party on Halloween, and she chooses to go. Of course, she ends up at Ethan's costume shop, and Ethan persuades her to wear a costume taken from an old sci-fi series: a grey leather outfit with a particularly gaudy costume jewelry armband (and a red wig). Three hours later, Ethan's spell hits, and Joyce is now an amazing imitation of Clarissa Kinnison, the Red Lensman (from E. E. "Doc" Smith's books, _not_ the anime version).

What would a second-stage lensman do on the Hellmouth? How would she react to being without Kim, Kit, and the rest of the...