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soldtoarmeniansI'm not a trend-defying rebel; I just haven't had tiiiiiiime. Though in fact I waver between 'who needs background on Xander Harris; you'll just be babbling while people roll their eyes at you' and 'well, that's fandom-centric of you; some people wouldn't know Joss Whedon from Rob Thomas. Either Rob Thomas.'
Xander in canon
Xander grew up in Sunnydale, California, a town where all kinds of mysterious deaths occur, students disappear all the time (as of their prom, Xander's senior class had the lowest mortality rate in Sunnydale High School's history), and the 99% of the population who aren't evil, dead, or aware but keeping their heads down, writes it off as accidents, gangs, or anything that doesn't require them to accept that their town's built on a portal to hell and besieged by vampires, demons, and any supernatural nasty that happens to get within sniffing distance, because they're attracted to the evil vibes of said Hellmouth.
Xander was among the unaware, as was Willow, who's been his BFF since they were weetiny. (How weetiny is a matter of speculation, since various episodes have implied anywhere from 'infants together' to 'met in kindergarten' but it's never been directly stated.) So was their friend Jesse, the third in their trio of kinda-dorky kids who weren't exactly in with the in crowd.
Halfway through their sophomore year, though, when Xander was sixteen, Buffy Summers transferred to Sunnydale from L.A., Xander and later Willow accidentally stumbled into finding out she was the Chosen One, slayer of vampires, Jesse got himself vamped and then dusted by being jostled onto the end of a stake Xander was holding, andJesse was never mentioned because WTF, Joss, WTF nothing was ever the same again.
Willow and Xander, along with Buffy's Watcher, Giles (and eventually various others: Cordelia, Oz, Anya, Tara, and arguably Dawn) became what was eventually referred to even in canon as her Scooby Gang - her backup team of researchers, doughnut-runners, fighters if they absolutely had to be, and anything else a Slayer might have to call on in a pinch. At times they even had to do their best to substitute for her, like after their Junior year when Buffy, distraught at having to kill Angel, disappeared over the summer.
Sunnydale graduation in canon
On the show, Sunnydale's mayor, Richard Wilkins, who had secretly been controlling the town in some fashion for over a hundred years, planned to use Sunnydale High's 1999 graduation ceremony to ascend to a demonic form, chowing down on the assembled kids in his brand new giant snake form as soon as he did. Faith (insert a zillion years of BtVS canon in here, but in short she's a second Slayer because at the end of sophomore year Buffy died, and even though Xander gave her CPR and brought her back, this started a collateral line of Slayers, since each new one is called when the previous one dies) had gone over to his side.
Buffy accidentally put Faith in a coma as the result of a hand-to-hand fight, then used the Mayor's anger at this to lead him on a chase through the empty school building while Xander and the other students fought an army of vampires outside. Buffy and Giles blew up the school while the snake was still stuck inside, a number of students died due to either vampire or snake damage, but at the end of the day, there was still a graduating class that moved on to any number of other places, while Willow and Buffy went to UC Sunnydale, and Xander became a townie with a string of small and mostly-humiliating jobs, until he finally figured out that he was pretty damn good at carpentry and construction work, and made a success of that.
FH Xander and the graduation that wasn't
Fandom High's Xander, however, never got as far as seeing the giant snake. A few (handwavily vague) days before graduation, Buffy (who probably had a little more advance notice of what exactly the Mayor would turn into than canon Buffy did) decided that the possible loss of students from fighting the demon themselves would be too great. She went to the Watchers' Council (who she'd previously told to take a flying leap, due to their treatment of both Giles and herself) asking for help.
In exchange for Buffy coming back at least somewhat under their control, the Council arranged to pull all of the Sunnydale High students out of town, and send them off to different schools -- some in other dimensions -- to avoid any sort of vengeance by the Mayor or his minions. They were plucked straight out of the end of their current year and shunted forward in time to the beginning of the school year for wherever they'd been sent, which could only help with the Mayor's people not being able to locate them.
Xander ended up at Fandom High. Willow went to Hogwarts (yes, that'd be one of the extradimensional ones), where she's not so much re-taking a senior year as getting extra magical education. Buffy (along with her mom, since she was one of the few monster-aware parents around) was at first sent to Pine Valley, because sometimes I think I'm funny, then when the Council realized that the Mayor-Snake was still wandering around terrorizing the town of Sunnydale, she was recalled there, where, since there's no open high school, Giles has been more or less acting as tutor as well as Watcher. (And landlord. Not that I've ever mentioned where Joyce was this year, but up until Buffy actually killed the snake, the day of FH Graduation this year, her mom was still in Pine Valley.) Various other students who actually died in canon (Harmony, Larry) survived, in FH!Xander's timeline, and were sent to still other schools.
Yeeeeah, it's a wee bit farfetched. Shh. Have a twinkie.
So What's With This My Willow, Your Buffy, Dear God You Jossverse Characters Give Me A Headache
...Yeah, sorry about that. All of the Buffy/Angelverse characters in Fandom (including the recently-departed but still playing via Fh Alumni Angel) come from different a) timelines and b) times. Xander, Willow, Buffy, and Cordy are arguably the most AU, as Giles and Dawn are post-series and Jenny is resurrected in Fandom after having died permanently on the show.
There were also a number of Sunnydale people who came and left during the last year; the only one Xander really references is the previous Buffy, as she interacted with him enough that he would.
Xander knows a version of all of these people except Dawn (because she's inserted into everyone's memories at a point in his future, though she's letting him think she's just Buffy's sister in an alternate timeline where Buffy always had a sister) but none of them are actually 'his' Buffy/Willow/Giles etc.
He writes home to 'his' Willow (or technically to a version of Hogwarts that is not the same version that Hermione, Cedric, Draco et al come from, and they have their own similar AU issues which I ain't touchin' yo.) most often. Occasionally he also writes to 'his' Buffy, in Sunnydale, and a couple of times to his version of Larry, a football player who he accidentally encouraged to come out to him back in Junior year, and who has mistakenly thought Xander was gay ever since. (* Yes, I'll get to that.)
'His' versions of the characters get tags with just their names, since to Xander, they are Buffy, Willow, et al. Otherwillow =![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
willbedone; otherbuffy = 1ordinarygirl (and the previous Buffy gets tagged as buffythefirst), etc. Dawn, however, gets tagged as Dawn because... he doesn't know any other Dawn.
A lot of the other characters are doing something similar, so it can be either really amusing if you've got a head for AU's and figuring out who knows who, or... really confusing.
Um, so I watched that show? And Xander's not--
He thanks you for noticing. Xander: *rolls eyes at female BFFs* OOC-ly, many people in the fandom sigh at sexuality in the Buffyverse, where gay is fabulous, but people - Willow specifically, but others more generally - seem to have the phrase "Gay Now" inserted into their dictionaries in place of the word 'bisexual' or a picture of the Kinsey Scale.
ICly both FH Buffy and FH Willow don't quite get the concept that just because he has a boyfriend, that doesn't mean he's not or was never attracted to girls. For Willow that's a bigger deal than for Buffy, since Buffy doesn't even know Xander, let alone have had a crush on him for most of her childhood and early teenage years. Xander, conversely, is a little sensitive about it for two reasons, one legit, one which he seriously needs to get over.
The legit one is that it's just not true, and it's frustrating to have people not ...get...you, especially your friends. (His Willow... doesn't entirely get it either, but she hasn't pushed it. Partially because there's no point in stepping onwillbedone's potential lines for the sake of an NPC who can just conveniently keep her mouth shut.) The other one that he doesn't entirely admit is that even though he's accepted that he likes guys as well as girls, he's still kinda hung up on the word and all the potentially negative stuff it would carry with it back home where boykissy is not a ticket-selling event, and it's very likely his family would be...unimpressed.
Er, that's not what I meant.
Not that I'm sure anybody even cares about this one, but ... have we noticed I have some OCD issues when it comes to providing information?
Without inserting a long explanation of slash/subtext and/or argument about fluid sexuality here, the short answer is, no, he wasn't, not concretely, but he could've been. It's been stated (possibly apocryphally, granted) that the decision that one of the Scoobies would goGay Now in that direction was known early on, but not which one, and Nick Brendon played Xander up through Season Three with a specific eye to the fact that it could very well be him.
Whether or not that particular story's true, Xander's been referred to as the 'little black dress' of BtVS m/m fanfic, which isn't entirely accurate, but it's a good indicator that a lot of people have seen the potential for the character to be attracted to or admit an attraction to guys, under the right circumstances. I chose to throw things at him (and take advantage of random events I hadn't even planned) to create those circumstances, over months and months and months. (And months and months and months...)
Shortest answer ever: I like boykissy.
Interacting With Xander
It's... really, really easy? He's laid-back as all hell, he's happy to talk to you. (Though he's not bouncy and conversation-seeking; usually people have to approach him, if he doesn't know them well.) He's got a small group of people he's pretty close with, and a larger group (which we like to call Everybody But Angel) that he's friendly enough towards but not necessarily comfortable sharing his deepest secrets with. That's... pretty close to the way it works in Buffy canon too, as well as being admittedly a reflection of my own personality, and my inability to handle a million interactions at once, coming through.
Telling Xander about his future
There's a number of characters who are a) from further into Buffyverse chronology that Xander is, or b) have precognitive abilities or c) have been told something about the future of the Buffyverse by a or b. Xander's future is, considering the AU that got him here, going to be a little different, but this stuff could still affect him.
Short answer? I don't actually mind. Xander has a Thing about prophesies/possible futures not being written in stone. He did his final project in Ms. Calendar's class on it. Some things are meant to happen, some things can be avoided, some things can be fixed.
There are only two things I'm really, really trying to keep from him, and that's the loss of his eye in season 7, and Buffy's death/resurrection at the end of season 5/beginning of season 6. The second one is only because if Buffy doesn't die/get brought back, the circumstances that cause the eye thing won't happen.
I'm not saying anybody needs to do a huge exposition-dump on him of future information (in fact please don't; that'd be stretching credulity and he'd probably be able to put too many things together), just that I don't mind if he finds out anything that might come up. Including what Dawn is, though he doesn't have to know that. I plan on keeping him here long enough in the summer that he'll have missed the spell that makes everyone in his universe believe she was always there - so the only coinflip is does he go home and think "WTF, wrong universe, I know about Dawn but she shouldn't be here" until they all find out the truth, or does he know it in advance and just keep his mouth shut because he knows he needs to.
The only thing I ask is if you're going to see something about Xander's future (like Nadia has), talk to me about it (which she did), because your character's powers might well be infallible, but canon buffyverse future |= the future I have planned out for Xander. Granted this would be standard practice anytime you're planning on 'knowing/finding out' anything about another character.
Flotsam and Jetsam
Xander got hugely better grades here; some of that's due to bad rp-ing by moi, in that it's hard to make him the kind of slacker who got the grades he did in Sunnydale, and part of it's due to the way FH classes are graded - the things students actually get points for are the things he would do. Eh; he took fewer classes at a time than he'd have to in a regular school, and the subjects and teachers actually interested him. Plus it gives Willow a chance to bug him about going to college, which gives him a reason to leave at the end of the summer.
Jeremiah, the Wee Purple Froggie, was not purple to begin with. He's just a plain old wee Fandom Island frog, which Xander picked up from the bunch that had been infesting the space under Journalism Prof. Spider Jerusalem's desk, for a scavenger hunt in Ted 'Theodore' Logan's Music 101 class. The froggie grew on him and he asked permission to keep it; the purple came when Xander neglected to mention before going home for Thanksgiving Vacation that he'd be bringing something alive that wasn't him through the portal. Native Fandom fauna reacted with Buffyverse dimension magic that hadn't been calibrated for it, and yo, purple frog. He's relatively smart for a frog, but he has no special powers or anything, and...speaks Frog. He did sing in English when the island was taken over by the Once More With Fandom spell, but that was the spell, not him.
Xander's middle name's LaVelle, spelling not actually pinned down since he only said it aloud on the show, and only the once. He doesn't publicize that, but anybody who was here at the beginning of second semester could reasonably know because his name was printed out in full on the housing list. *shakes fist at Alpha-5 OMG*
Yeah, that was seriously random. Anything else? Ask away.
tl;dr
...Yes.
Xander in canon
Xander grew up in Sunnydale, California, a town where all kinds of mysterious deaths occur, students disappear all the time (as of their prom, Xander's senior class had the lowest mortality rate in Sunnydale High School's history), and the 99% of the population who aren't evil, dead, or aware but keeping their heads down, writes it off as accidents, gangs, or anything that doesn't require them to accept that their town's built on a portal to hell and besieged by vampires, demons, and any supernatural nasty that happens to get within sniffing distance, because they're attracted to the evil vibes of said Hellmouth.
Xander was among the unaware, as was Willow, who's been his BFF since they were weetiny. (How weetiny is a matter of speculation, since various episodes have implied anywhere from 'infants together' to 'met in kindergarten' but it's never been directly stated.) So was their friend Jesse, the third in their trio of kinda-dorky kids who weren't exactly in with the in crowd.
Halfway through their sophomore year, though, when Xander was sixteen, Buffy Summers transferred to Sunnydale from L.A., Xander and later Willow accidentally stumbled into finding out she was the Chosen One, slayer of vampires, Jesse got himself vamped and then dusted by being jostled onto the end of a stake Xander was holding, and
Willow and Xander, along with Buffy's Watcher, Giles (and eventually various others: Cordelia, Oz, Anya, Tara, and arguably Dawn) became what was eventually referred to even in canon as her Scooby Gang - her backup team of researchers, doughnut-runners, fighters if they absolutely had to be, and anything else a Slayer might have to call on in a pinch. At times they even had to do their best to substitute for her, like after their Junior year when Buffy, distraught at having to kill Angel, disappeared over the summer.
Sunnydale graduation in canon
On the show, Sunnydale's mayor, Richard Wilkins, who had secretly been controlling the town in some fashion for over a hundred years, planned to use Sunnydale High's 1999 graduation ceremony to ascend to a demonic form, chowing down on the assembled kids in his brand new giant snake form as soon as he did. Faith (insert a zillion years of BtVS canon in here, but in short she's a second Slayer because at the end of sophomore year Buffy died, and even though Xander gave her CPR and brought her back, this started a collateral line of Slayers, since each new one is called when the previous one dies) had gone over to his side.
Buffy accidentally put Faith in a coma as the result of a hand-to-hand fight, then used the Mayor's anger at this to lead him on a chase through the empty school building while Xander and the other students fought an army of vampires outside. Buffy and Giles blew up the school while the snake was still stuck inside, a number of students died due to either vampire or snake damage, but at the end of the day, there was still a graduating class that moved on to any number of other places, while Willow and Buffy went to UC Sunnydale, and Xander became a townie with a string of small and mostly-humiliating jobs, until he finally figured out that he was pretty damn good at carpentry and construction work, and made a success of that.
FH Xander and the graduation that wasn't
Fandom High's Xander, however, never got as far as seeing the giant snake. A few (handwavily vague) days before graduation, Buffy (who probably had a little more advance notice of what exactly the Mayor would turn into than canon Buffy did) decided that the possible loss of students from fighting the demon themselves would be too great. She went to the Watchers' Council (who she'd previously told to take a flying leap, due to their treatment of both Giles and herself) asking for help.
In exchange for Buffy coming back at least somewhat under their control, the Council arranged to pull all of the Sunnydale High students out of town, and send them off to different schools -- some in other dimensions -- to avoid any sort of vengeance by the Mayor or his minions. They were plucked straight out of the end of their current year and shunted forward in time to the beginning of the school year for wherever they'd been sent, which could only help with the Mayor's people not being able to locate them.
Xander ended up at Fandom High. Willow went to Hogwarts (yes, that'd be one of the extradimensional ones), where she's not so much re-taking a senior year as getting extra magical education. Buffy (along with her mom, since she was one of the few monster-aware parents around) was at first sent to Pine Valley, because sometimes I think I'm funny, then when the Council realized that the Mayor-Snake was still wandering around terrorizing the town of Sunnydale, she was recalled there, where, since there's no open high school, Giles has been more or less acting as tutor as well as Watcher. (And landlord. Not that I've ever mentioned where Joyce was this year, but up until Buffy actually killed the snake, the day of FH Graduation this year, her mom was still in Pine Valley.) Various other students who actually died in canon (Harmony, Larry) survived, in FH!Xander's timeline, and were sent to still other schools.
Yeeeeah, it's a wee bit farfetched. Shh. Have a twinkie.
So What's With This My Willow, Your Buffy, Dear God You Jossverse Characters Give Me A Headache
...Yeah, sorry about that. All of the Buffy/Angelverse characters in Fandom (including the recently-departed but still playing via Fh Alumni Angel) come from different a) timelines and b) times. Xander, Willow, Buffy, and Cordy are arguably the most AU, as Giles and Dawn are post-series and Jenny is resurrected in Fandom after having died permanently on the show.
There were also a number of Sunnydale people who came and left during the last year; the only one Xander really references is the previous Buffy, as she interacted with him enough that he would.
Xander knows a version of all of these people except Dawn (because she's inserted into everyone's memories at a point in his future, though she's letting him think she's just Buffy's sister in an alternate timeline where Buffy always had a sister) but none of them are actually 'his' Buffy/Willow/Giles etc.
He writes home to 'his' Willow (or technically to a version of Hogwarts that is not the same version that Hermione, Cedric, Draco et al come from, and they have their own similar AU issues which I ain't touchin' yo.) most often. Occasionally he also writes to 'his' Buffy, in Sunnydale, and a couple of times to his version of Larry, a football player who he accidentally encouraged to come out to him back in Junior year, and who has mistakenly thought Xander was gay ever since. (* Yes, I'll get to that.)
'His' versions of the characters get tags with just their names, since to Xander, they are Buffy, Willow, et al. Otherwillow =
willbedone; otherbuffy = 1ordinarygirl (and the previous Buffy gets tagged as buffythefirst), etc. Dawn, however, gets tagged as Dawn because... he doesn't know any other Dawn.A lot of the other characters are doing something similar, so it can be either really amusing if you've got a head for AU's and figuring out who knows who, or... really confusing.
Um, so I watched that show? And Xander's not--
He thanks you for noticing. Xander: *rolls eyes at female BFFs* OOC-ly, many people in the fandom sigh at sexuality in the Buffyverse, where gay is fabulous, but people - Willow specifically, but others more generally - seem to have the phrase "Gay Now" inserted into their dictionaries in place of the word 'bisexual' or a picture of the Kinsey Scale.
ICly both FH Buffy and FH Willow don't quite get the concept that just because he has a boyfriend, that doesn't mean he's not or was never attracted to girls. For Willow that's a bigger deal than for Buffy, since Buffy doesn't even know Xander, let alone have had a crush on him for most of her childhood and early teenage years. Xander, conversely, is a little sensitive about it for two reasons, one legit, one which he seriously needs to get over.
The legit one is that it's just not true, and it's frustrating to have people not ...get...you, especially your friends. (His Willow... doesn't entirely get it either, but she hasn't pushed it. Partially because there's no point in stepping on
willbedone's potential lines for the sake of an NPC who can just conveniently keep her mouth shut.) The other one that he doesn't entirely admit is that even though he's accepted that he likes guys as well as girls, he's still kinda hung up on the word and all the potentially negative stuff it would carry with it back home where boykissy is not a ticket-selling event, and it's very likely his family would be...unimpressed.Er, that's not what I meant.
Not that I'm sure anybody even cares about this one, but ... have we noticed I have some OCD issues when it comes to providing information?
Without inserting a long explanation of slash/subtext and/or argument about fluid sexuality here, the short answer is, no, he wasn't, not concretely, but he could've been. It's been stated (possibly apocryphally, granted) that the decision that one of the Scoobies would go
Whether or not that particular story's true, Xander's been referred to as the 'little black dress' of BtVS m/m fanfic, which isn't entirely accurate, but it's a good indicator that a lot of people have seen the potential for the character to be attracted to or admit an attraction to guys, under the right circumstances. I chose to throw things at him (and take advantage of random events I hadn't even planned) to create those circumstances, over months and months and months. (And months and months and months...)
Shortest answer ever: I like boykissy.
Interacting With Xander
It's... really, really easy? He's laid-back as all hell, he's happy to talk to you. (Though he's not bouncy and conversation-seeking; usually people have to approach him, if he doesn't know them well.) He's got a small group of people he's pretty close with, and a larger group (which we like to call Everybody But Angel) that he's friendly enough towards but not necessarily comfortable sharing his deepest secrets with. That's... pretty close to the way it works in Buffy canon too, as well as being admittedly a reflection of my own personality, and my inability to handle a million interactions at once, coming through.
Telling Xander about his future
There's a number of characters who are a) from further into Buffyverse chronology that Xander is, or b) have precognitive abilities or c) have been told something about the future of the Buffyverse by a or b. Xander's future is, considering the AU that got him here, going to be a little different, but this stuff could still affect him.
Short answer? I don't actually mind. Xander has a Thing about prophesies/possible futures not being written in stone. He did his final project in Ms. Calendar's class on it. Some things are meant to happen, some things can be avoided, some things can be fixed.
There are only two things I'm really, really trying to keep from him, and that's the loss of his eye in season 7, and Buffy's death/resurrection at the end of season 5/beginning of season 6. The second one is only because if Buffy doesn't die/get brought back, the circumstances that cause the eye thing won't happen.
I'm not saying anybody needs to do a huge exposition-dump on him of future information (in fact please don't; that'd be stretching credulity and he'd probably be able to put too many things together), just that I don't mind if he finds out anything that might come up. Including what Dawn is, though he doesn't have to know that. I plan on keeping him here long enough in the summer that he'll have missed the spell that makes everyone in his universe believe she was always there - so the only coinflip is does he go home and think "WTF, wrong universe, I know about Dawn but she shouldn't be here" until they all find out the truth, or does he know it in advance and just keep his mouth shut because he knows he needs to.
The only thing I ask is if you're going to see something about Xander's future (like Nadia has), talk to me about it (which she did), because your character's powers might well be infallible, but canon buffyverse future |= the future I have planned out for Xander. Granted this would be standard practice anytime you're planning on 'knowing/finding out' anything about another character.
Flotsam and Jetsam
Xander got hugely better grades here; some of that's due to bad rp-ing by moi, in that it's hard to make him the kind of slacker who got the grades he did in Sunnydale, and part of it's due to the way FH classes are graded - the things students actually get points for are the things he would do. Eh; he took fewer classes at a time than he'd have to in a regular school, and the subjects and teachers actually interested him. Plus it gives Willow a chance to bug him about going to college, which gives him a reason to leave at the end of the summer.
Jeremiah, the Wee Purple Froggie, was not purple to begin with. He's just a plain old wee Fandom Island frog, which Xander picked up from the bunch that had been infesting the space under Journalism Prof. Spider Jerusalem's desk, for a scavenger hunt in Ted 'Theodore' Logan's Music 101 class. The froggie grew on him and he asked permission to keep it; the purple came when Xander neglected to mention before going home for Thanksgiving Vacation that he'd be bringing something alive that wasn't him through the portal. Native Fandom fauna reacted with Buffyverse dimension magic that hadn't been calibrated for it, and yo, purple frog. He's relatively smart for a frog, but he has no special powers or anything, and...speaks Frog. He did sing in English when the island was taken over by the Once More With Fandom spell, but that was the spell, not him.
Xander's middle name's LaVelle, spelling not actually pinned down since he only said it aloud on the show, and only the once. He doesn't publicize that, but anybody who was here at the beginning of second semester could reasonably know because his name was printed out in full on the housing list. *shakes fist at Alpha-5 OMG*
Yeah, that was seriously random. Anything else? Ask away.
tl;dr
...Yes.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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Date: 2006-05-30 04:07 am (UTC)[SOBS, I tell you.]
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Date: 2006-05-30 04:38 am (UTC)[wait.]
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Date: 2006-05-30 12:05 pm (UTC)[Doesn't give a crap about your yellow crayon speech this time]
[so there]
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Date: 2006-05-30 05:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-30 04:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-30 11:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-30 05:26 pm (UTC)*recites entire 75-page senior thesis on Walt Whitman to entertain it on the drive*
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Date: 2006-05-30 05:38 pm (UTC)[Sniffs.]
[Feels left out.]
[Does cha-cha. The sombrero commands.]
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Date: 2006-05-30 06:31 pm (UTC)Though, oddly,