the story is excellent I plan to read the rerwrite next keep up the awesome writing!
Brad

First of all looks to be another fun story from this author. One part of it though is to me just ridiculous and it is not really the author's fault since Hollywood uses the idea all the time. The military or a corporation will seize a technology or keep it secret because it is too disruptive or dangerous. My challenge to the author or anyone else is to name one single real world example of that occurring. You can't. It has never occurred and there have been plenty of disruptive technologies and ideas that have destroyed entire industries.

So why does Hollywood keep using that device? It's cheap, it's easy and many people still seem to think the world is one big conspiracy. Of course I could have just said a lot of people are stupid.

You really need to work on your fight scenes. Right now they read more as summaries than actual battles.

Seems like a solid start.

Will we see some Iron Man movie 'verse in this fic?

There was some pretty cool tech in those two movies.

I commend you on nuking the time manipulation idea. Having that would instantly make Xander and his followers into gods, and detach them completely from the BTVS world. The only reason they would ever return would be to pick up new followers or to distribute extra rings of regeneration or starships they'd picked up. Anything much more than a 10-fold time factor distorts the BTVS world into insignificance. Up to about 10-fold, the BTVS steadily reduces in importance, removing all obstacles.

Okay, I can see that Giles' advice is a lot more sensible than my knee-jerk reaction assumed. However,

> Then what would happen when the source of the miracle drugs is suddenly cut when you someday die, and the pharmaceutical industry has been brought to ruin by your potions. Suddenly, the world would find itself vulnerable to diseases, with nobody to provide medicine. It would only take a single epidemic to destroy civilization as we know it.

is a total fucking ball of crap. For several good reasons. 1) there are bound to be medical conditions which healing potions can't cure. 2) with a generally healthier population and without hospitals to spread infections, healing potions would probably *eradicate* many infectious diseases *forever* and those would never come back. 3) 100 years of progress in human biology, medicine and economics would change the game completely. Genetic tests and AI alone would change the medical industry completely. And that progress would continue since there would always be conditions that are too expensive to cure using healing potions (eg, you need one healing potion every day to survive), one of which is old age. And of course, the allure of pure knowledge.

Yes Xander would utterly destroy the pharmaceutical industry and most of the biomedical industry. This is a GOOD THING. It would free up vast armies of trained personnel and treasure for a century, to work on OTHER areas of research.

You may want to consider the http://richardkulisz.blogspot.com/2007/05/social-implications-of-technology.html and the fact that healing potions are very, very cheap compared to traditional diagnostics, treatments and surgery. And cheap is good, expensive is evil.

Also, due to the way that public corporations work, once healing potions are released to the world on a global scale, cheaply, then the stocks of those corporations would plummet right through the floor and they would be immediately acquired in a hostile takeover. The new owners of those corporations wouldn't really care who had ruined them or why, they would be too busy dismantling them. And the old owners, though bearing a grudge, would probably not have the resources to pursue their grudge. And if they weren't totally ruined they would be too busy scrambling to recover.

So it's a game that with a little planning ahead of time, Xander could win decisively.

The same thing goes double for military takeovers of Xander since what nation would permit some other nation to subvert him? No, Xander's soldiers would immediately become private citizens or under a UN mandate.

Again, a little stockpiling and going for broke on a global basis would yield Xander the win.

And I want to note that *precisely* because of the massive inconvenience it would cause if Xander died, the entire world's medical industry would be focused on making him immortal. When you have a trillion dollar a year global industry depending on the continued survival of one man ....

Finally, in the long term Cordelia is far too greedy and vain to miss out on the opportunities afforded by healing potions. Especially if she starts making them herself.

Yes it figures that Giles the anti-progressive arch-conservative asshole would try to slam industrialism down in the name of not making waves and catching any "bad" attention. After all, he refuses to give Buffy modern compound bows which are many times more powerful, accurate AND smaller than the shite crap she's forced to resort to on the show.

And that's not even mentioning modern parallel limb bows which were invented recently. http://www.huntersfriend.com/parallel-limb-compound-bows/parallel-limbs-bow-help-topic.htm Because the truth is that there is NOTHING that hasn't been improved by modern engineering. Not bows, not arrows, not paper, and not even nails and screws.

But for the same reason that *of course* Giles is anti-progress and anti-industry, even in the face of massive human death and suffering, his opinion would be dismissed (rightly) as an old fuddy duddy by Willow. And Xander would have mentioned his idea to Willow BEFORE telling Giles.

In canon, Xander never takes his ideas to Giles first, unless he has no other options at which point he's just as likely to keep them to himself. So really you're stuck because round 2 is Willow coming in all excited at the idea of saving hundreds of thousands of lives, and dismissing Giles' opinions out of hand as anti-progress crap.

Your attempt at having an exclusive Giles + Xander anti-progress secret conspiracy: FAIL. Especially since EVEN IF Xander hadn't told Willow beforehand, he would immediately turn to her to commiserate after Giles turned him down. Or to "make it work". So really, that's 2.5 good reasons why your conspiracy idea is junk.

Oh and I will note here that Giles claiming that saving one person from dark magic is preferable to saving the lives of hundreds of thousands of people is IMMORAL bullshit. And also completely out of character for Giles. After all, Giles had no problem murdering Dawn if it was to save the multiverse. Except of course that he set himself up to fail by warning Buffy he would kill her. He should have just kept quiet and done the job. But Giles has never been too concerned with saving lives as opposed to maintaining the status quo.

--

I find the notion of Xander being a leader ridiculous. You have to do a LOT of Alternate Character Interpretation to get that. Xander is a follower through and through and has always been portrayed so in canon, very consistently. In order to make him a leader, you have to rewrite his canon history as a facade and him being a covert manipulator. Like Dogbertcarroll does. I will also note that in canon Xander attempts to be a *preacher* and not a leader. He preaches about the evils of demons and vampires to Buffy and Willow. And well, they ignore him. So he's really a wannabe-preacher but natural follower. And so any fics where he spontaneously becomes super-powered and a leader for no reason whatsoever are just blatant out of character crap.

Giles is a monk. Buffy's a (horrible) leader. Willow's a monk / follower / wannabe leader. And Xander's a follower / wannabe preacher. Cordelia and Anya are both leaders and reluctant followers. Spike's a natural follower who only takes leadership of followers in the name of his leader Drusilla. Angel's another bad leader. Wesley is a leader by the end. Faith is a wannabe leader but really a follower - she's just more desperate than Xander at the wannabe part because being a follower's never worked for her. Tara's a born submissive. Kennedy's a probably decent leader. Dawn is a leader. Joyce is a follower I think.

sweet

good addition mate, and good point from Giles to Xander.

maybe the books are not opening for Cordy because she has not yet decided which class to be in, it will be interesting tho which one she will choose.

looking forward to your next chapter mate and keep up the good work.

I would rethink the 'no time manipulation' at all change to the story and perhaps settle for Xander can only slow down time on realities that he has claimed. The gang spending real time to attack and subdue a dimension is fine, but if they have to spend every waking hour dealing with the after affects they might only hit a new dungeon once or twice every 6 months if not longer. Plus it could easily divide their forces in dangeorus ways, if they are gone for 'real time' and never sure how long they might be gone. Everyone leaving Sunnydale to go into the new dimension and leaving the Hellmouth totaly empty for that period of time is a bit risky, but so is leaving less than a full team behind or going into a new dimension with less than a full team.

I would personaly suggest keeping the time controlled 'home base' dimension, but leave newly explored ones out of Xanders control. I am also a bit confused, did a recent rewrite remove that home base dimension they had before? Cause I was pretty sure the issue of where to store things had already been resolved in a previous chapter. In the very least they had gotten a lot of money Giles was supposed to be trying to launder and could rent a house or something.

I suppose the author's notes are a bit confusing... although they only reflect the fact I've uploaded the fourth version of the chapter, the earlier ideas not coming right in the end.

Great chapter. Keep up the good work.

I like this story but I am a bit disapointed just like others of it's kind everyone and their uncle gets in on the action almost imediately. It would of been nice to see Xander do something for himself for once, not be pushed around by Cordelia, Buffy, Giles etc. Really limits Xanders ability to be an actual leader when he is still stuck in 'do what ever some one says' mode. Buffy is at her worst at this point in canon, she rushes off blindly into fights and does not respect anything Xander would say about how to be careful or avoid a fight.

I was very suprised that Angel didn't get invited into the group but I have my doubts at how long that will last. At least so far 'extra's like Waren, Tara, Amy, etc have not been forced into the group just yet. My suggest is keep the 'party' small, most fics of this type get bogged down with all the characters they add to the group and manage to do very little with any of them. Especialy when te author starts to visist other realities, it's hard to really interact with new characters if Xander already has a dozen or more people trailing behind him from the Buffy-verse itself.

*snorts* "Everyone and their uncle" ? Nice figure of speech, just might use it :)

However, I should point out that in the canon, Cordy is a member of the group.

A well written and entertaining update, thanks.

Correction, you can get over 10,000 potions per hour. Enough to supply the entire world.

http://richardkulisz.blogspot.com/2010/12/how-to-industrialize-harvesting-of.html

So tell us again, what's Xander going to do with this power?