DECEMBER 18TH, 2002

Xander walked up, and kissed Willow on the cheek. She smiled.   "Hey, what was that for?"

He shrugged.

"That was for being interested in me, back in High School. It told me that I must have something going for me, if someone like you wanted someone like me. Raised my self-esteem when I needed it most."

She squeezed his hand.   "Thanks. But what brought this on?"

A whiny voice from the living room helped answer this.   "Xander? When Lex Luthor appeared in Swamp Thing 53, he talked like he was the Pre-Crisis Luthor, and the Byrne/Wolfman Superman hadn't come out yet. But when Swamp Thing went seeking revenge in issue 79, he attacked Lexcorp HQ, and that's definitely Post-Crisis. Now, do you suppose that the Pre-Crisis Lex used a temporal device to escape the effects of the Crisis Wave, and maybe this helped cause Zero Hour, which, BTW, could not have really killed..."   Xander began to cry, his head on the table. Willow stroked his hair.   "Its okay, baby. You escaped. To you, they're only refs. To Andrew, they're like air or something."

In the living room, the nightmare kept on.

"....but the Mirror Universe that appeared in the Mike Barr DC TOS comic books was so much more coherent than the one in the TNG Pro-Novel Dark Mirror, to say nothing of the overdone MU arc on DS9. I mean, it was just SOOO obvious that Smiley was rebuilding the Empire..."