At the New Millenium: Year 2000

Y2K had mysteriously never happened, and Xander had proof in his hands that something along those lines would probably never happen within the next 20 years or so.

Xander Harris stared at the rectangular piece of metal that sat in his hand. It fit comfortably in in his palm. It was a relatively small thing, literally the size of his hand.

And it was also the whole reason for Xander's current dilemma.

The rectangular slab was apparently something called an "I-Phone X". By the logo on the back, which displayed an apple with a chunk having been bitten off of it, he'd figured out that for some strange reason, it'd been made by a fruit company of all things.

.....It was also home to the Universe's most powerful program, the Master PC.

Having somehow gotten information on how to handle the piece of futuristic technology downloaded straight into his brain when the phone had appeared in his hand, the no-longer-high-school-aged-man sat down on his couch in shock.

It'd been years since he last saw it, and not a day went by where he didn't partially regret not ever doing much more with the mysterious, reality changing program.

A lot happened since the last time he'd held ultimate power at his fingertips.

The mayor had turned into an original demon and they'd blown up their old high school to get rid of him.

Angel (who'd never known that he'd been turned into a woman by Xander) had gone to LA to form her own investigative team, feeling left out that she wasn't exactly a major part of the gang's muscle because Xander had taken her place with his new powers.

Oz had been driven to cheat on Willow because of the werewolf inside of him, something he literally couldn't control.

They'd found out that the government had a branch researching vampires and the supernatural called "The Initiative", and then stopped a robot from ending the world.

Oz had left Willow so that he could go somewhere to learn to control the werewolf powers that had caused him to cheat on her and also kill Veronica, the werewolf girl that he'd cheated on her with.

Buffy had gone through Riley and Spike and was now single again.

The Scooby Gang (at least Buffy and Willow) were now in UC Sunnydale.

Willow had fallen in love with a girl that she'd met, who'd turned out to be a fellow witch.

Oz came back and found out that his girlfriend had moved on and become a lesbian. He'd freaked out and gone werewolf, somehow reigning in his supernatural urge to kill Tara and ended up running away back to Tibet, seeing that there was nothing left for him in Sunnydale.

As for Xander.....

The man in question was now holding his head in his hands, staring at the smartphone that started back at him from its place on the table in front of his couch.

The boy who'd become a hunter of the supernatural to avenge Jesse's **** and then later on became possessed by a Primal, a Soldier, and a walking fish monster, had become a working man who never went to college.

Xander wasn't stupid. Far from it, considering he'd been in the same classes that Willow had, regardless of how advanced they were. There was still one thing that'd separated the Rosenburg and the Harris, though.

Money.

She'd had the money to go to college. He didn't. Fighting the supernatural was a lot of things. Stress relieving, fun, a duty, a responsibility, dangerous, a job that gave you good feelings when you saved people and stopped the yearly apocalypses, etc.

One thing it didn't do, though, was make you money.

Xander knew that for a fact. As a man who supernatural strength and reflexes (as well as sexual prowess, but he'd never had the chance to test that one out since he'd given himself that power through the Master PC program), he'd bulldozed and destroyed bad guy lair after lair, stripping them of cash and any valuables, robbing vampires before he dusted them, etc.

He'd gone above and beyond in making sure that any victims that they'd been unable to save just looked like they'd packed up and left in a hurry, something never really looked too closely at in Sunnydale, and kept the world a safe place. If a few dollars went missing here and there, from places with owners that were already 6 feet under, well, nobody would care.

Even with ALL THAT, he still didn't have enough money to pay rent. So he'd gotten a job at a construction company as one of their, admittedly very strong, grunts. With it, he wasn't poor enough to live on the streets, but he didn't have enough money to join his friends at college either. He lived in a crappy apartment and nowadays very rarely saw his friends outside of their meetings.

Did he meet up with them sometimes? Yes.

Had they all drifted apart since he was a full-time worker and they were going to college? Also yes.

Now though, maybe he could change all of that.

Booting up the phone and opening up the Master PC app, he looked back at the last 2 additions he'd made when he was still a high schooler.

//
08 -Xander Harris's memory of the Master PC will be erased until a time comes that it appears in front of him again.

09 -The Master PC will return to Xander Harris in the form of a portable, indestructible piece of futuristic technology. No one will regard it as anything out of the ordinary. It will only appear to Xander Harris when he needs it, at a time when he would not possibly doom the world through his actions with it.
//

......Rule 8 had been a complete bust. He'd put it down just so that he wouldn't spend every day wondering what he'd missed while he didn't have the program, but it hadn't worked. He'd known exactly what he'd missed, and why he was feeling the way he felt.

Xander had given it some thought over the years, and had realized that the same rule that made it so that he'd remember the changes that the Master PC made to the universe, also made it so that he couldn't ever forget anything about the Master PC itself.

.....Well, at least he knew now that just because he typed in a new rule, didn't mean it'd go into effect. If an earlier rule conflicted with the newer one, it'd be the latter that wouldn't affect anything at all. He could edit previous rules, but if he didn't check to see whether or not there were contradictions with prior things he'd written, it was all a toss-up as to what exactly would happen.

That was a done deal and a now-known fact. The real question now, though, was why the Master PC had returned to him in the first place.

It hadn't come back in all the times he could've used it to save the world. It hadn't come back in all the times he'd wished it to come back so he could do something like make vampires and all other supernatural creatures harmless. It hadn't come back when he'd wanted to use it to try to bring someone back to life either.

Clearly, that meant that doing any of those things would've violated his last addition, rule 9, which was that it shouldn't appear in front of him until he both needed it and the thing he was going to do wouldn't lead to the world being destroyed.

So, what need had he had that was low-scale enough that he wouldn't destroy the world by fulfilling it?