Introduction
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| Flooded | All the Way |
Buffy comes in the front door of her house, and sets her keys on the table beside it. She calls out to see if anyone’s home. She gets a reply from Willow in the dining room, and walks in with a bucket of chicken under her arm. “I brought dinner. Deep fried chicken parts. Hope you’re…” She sees that Willow, Tara, Dawn and Giles are just finishing up their meal. “…hungry. You already ate.”
Giles tries to deny it, but quickly realizes that’s kind of pointless. They didn’t know when she’d be back. That’s okay with Buffy. “More for me.”
Tara says that she’d love some chicken, and Giles quickly agrees. Dawn asks for a drumstick.
“I’m a breast girl myself,” says Willow, and Tara smiles at her. “But then again, you knew that.”
Dawn asks how things went with Angel, but Buffy doesn’t want to talk about it. Giles senses Buffy’s reluctance, and switches the topic to what Buffy’s plans for the future are.
Buffy has given that some thought. “I figure if I hold off paying the plumber, I can pay the utility bill, and then I can wait to re-shingle the roof until we get the refund back—”
Giles interrupts her. He meant what she planned to do with her life.
That is something that Buffy hasn’t given much thought to. She dropped out of school after her mom died, and she had always figured she’d go back some day, but she missed the registration cutoff. “Busy being dead and all.”
Willow and Tara suggest that Buffy can audit some of their classes until registration for next semester.
“Audit. I—I guess could do that,” says Buffy. “Yeah, that sounds like a good plan. What do you think, Giles?”
“The Slayer always knows what she’s doing,” says Jonathan. “Sharp, decisive. Always with a plan. We’re never going to become the crime lords of Sunnydale with her always one step ahead of us.”
“Well, that’s why we’re throwing these tests at her, seeing which one of us can shake her up the most, maybe find a weakness or two.” Warren slides out from under the big black van in his driveway. “She’s ready.”
Jonathan asks him to run him through it.
Warren opens the doors in side of the van and starts pointing out the high resolution surveillance cameras, and giving way more technical detail than Jonathan was looking for.
“Yeah, yeah, fine,” says Jonathan. “Just tell me, are you sure with all this stuff that we’ll be able to watch Buffy without her noticing us?”
He and Warren start to walk around the van. Warren figures that Buffy will never know. He stops when he sees what Andrew has been up to. “What the hell is that?”
Andrew pulls the air brush back from the mural he’s been painting on the side of the van. “Death Star, dude. Wicked, huh?”
“Thermal exhaust port’s above the main port, numbnuts,” says Jonathan.
“For your information, I’m using the Empire’s revised designs from Return of the Jedi.”
“That’s a flawed design!” says Jonathan.
Warren doesn’t care which design it is. “The thing is, since we’re messing with the Slayer who could pummel the three of us into a sludgy substance, it might be a good idea for us to not draw attention to ourselves!” Jonathan nods agreement.
“I could paint over it if you want,” says Andrew.
“Yeah, well, do that!” says Warren. “Because this time tomorrow, the games begin, and the Slayer will never even know what hit her.”
“This is going to be great!” says Buffy as she enters Sociology class with Willow. She’s feeling a little weird about being back in school, but she thinks it’s a good weird. Willow is sure that Buffy will like the teacher, Mike.
“You call your teacher Mike?” asks Buffy. “Boy, school sure has changed since my day.”
Mike starts out the class by asking someone to define Social Construction of Reality. Nearly all the students put up their hands. Mike selects Rachel.
“A concept involving a couple of opposing theories,” says Rachel. “One stressing the externality and independence of social reality from individuals—”
Mike interrupts her, and asks another student for the other half of the theory. “That each individual participates fully in the construction of his or her own life.”
Mike asks for another student to expand on that, and the discussion moves back and forth between him and the students in the class. Buffy is quickly lost. Willow tells her the trick is to go with the flow.
“Flow-going would be a lot easier if your classmates weren’t such big brains,” says Buffy.
“Buffy, that’s ridiculous,” says Willow. “They are no smarter than you or me.” Mike calls on her next. “Because social phenomena don’t have unproblematic objective existences, they have to be interpreted and given meanings by those who encounter them.”
“Nicely put,” says Mike. “So, Ruby, does that mean there are countless realities?”
Willow sees the look Buffy’s giving her. “What?”
Buffy and Willow leave the class together. Buffy is having serious second thoughts about this auditing idea. Willow thinks she just needs to get back into it. Tara finds them and asks how it went. Willow tells her it went fine, but sociology is not a big fave.
“She didn’t like Mike?” asks Tara.
Buffy tells them she’s fine. She just needs to spend a little time reacclimating. She’s interrupted by a guy with the brim of his baseball cap pulled low over his eyes running into her. He knocks her purse to the floor. The guy doesn’t even slow down, and disappears down the hall.
“Hey! You can at least say ‘sorry,’ rude-o!” Willow calls after him.
Warren rounds the corner in the hall, and looks up at one of the school’s security cameras. He lifts the microphone in the collar of his sweatshirt toward his mouth. “Francis 7, this is Logan 5. I’m in position. Do you copy?”
Jonathan and Andrew are in the van. They have its monitors plugged in to the school’s security system. Jonathan tells Warren that they copy that, and they have him up on the monitor. Andrew waves at the monitor screen.
“Runner is tagged,” says Warren. “Inhibitor is on. Repeat, inhibitor is on. Initiate omega pulse sequence.”
A hatch opens in the roof of the van parked on the university campus. An antenna rises out of it, and swivels toward the building.
Willow departs for her next class, leaving Buffy to join Tara in her art appreciation class. They have twenty minutes to spare, so Tara hands Buffy a book on Renaissance art. “You’ll like it. It’s very mellow.”
Buffy opens the book and starts to look at one of the pictures. She hears a high pitched buzzing noise. When it stops Tara is mid sentence. “…didn’t think she liked my cooking until I realized that that was her yummy face. You know how her nose—”
Buffy interrupts to ask what the buzzing noise was, but Tara hadn’t noticed anything. Buffy asks what Tara was talking about.
“Willow,” says Tara. “Wow, you really got engrossed in that Renaissance book.”
“I guess, I… I must have spaced out.” Buffy hands the book back to Tara, and goes across the hall to get a drink from a water fountain.
“Oh, I do that sometimes,” says Tara. “Once Willow and I were watching Spongebob Squarepants—” Buffy hears the buzzing again, and suddenly Tara is at the other end of the hall, looking back at her. “Buffy, are you coming? We’re going to be late for class!”
“What the f—”
Warren opens the door of the van and climbs inside. “Is it working? Is it doing it?”
“Dude, it’s doing it,” says Jonathan.
“And it’s wicked cool!” says Andrew.
Buffy tries to catch Tara as she heads down the hall to her art appreciation class. The class door closes just before she gets to it. Buffy hears the buzzing sound.
The door opens again, and the hall fills with students coming out, including Tara. “Buffy, where have you been? You missed art class.”
“Missed?” asks Buffy. “Tara, something freaky is going on. It’s like I’m—” She hears the buzz, and sees the hands on a clock on the wall suddenly sweep through twenty minutes. “Look, there it— there! Did you see—” She looks around, but she’s alone in the hall. “Crap!”
Buffy runs out of the building. She sees Tara walking away on the other side of the courtyard, and tries calling out to her. Tara doesn’t seem to hear. Everyone starts moving past Buffy in fast motion again. People become just a blur as they whiz past her. Buffy tries moving across the courtyard but one of the rushing people brushes her, and she’s knocked off her feet. Someone else kicks her while she’s lying on the ground.
Buffy crawls under a concrete table in the middle of the courtyard for shelter. She can still hear the buzzing sound. It seems to be coming from something on her. She pulls off her sweater, and tracks the noise down to the small device Warren planted on her.
Warren’s device also contains a miniature camera, and the guys in the van see Buffy looking at it.
“Self-destruct. Self-destruct!” says Jonathan.
Andrew doesn’t know where that is. Warren reaches past him and pushes the big red “DESTRUCT” button on the console.
The little disk in Buffy’s hand vanishes in a tiny explosion, and the world around her slows down to its normal pace. She crawls out from under the table and looks around at the students walking through the courtyard.
A self satisfied Warren leans back in his chair and asks Jonathan and Andrew to score him.
“Right,” says Jonathan. “Fifty points for ingenuity, another thirty since it involved actual contact.”
“Very smooth, by the way,” says Andrew.
“On the freak-o-meter, I’d say she was at a six,” says Jonathan.
“Oh, come on. It’s an eight, easy,” says Warren.
Jonathan and Andrew lean closer to one another confer quietly. When they’re done Jonathan sits back. “We’ll split the diff. Call it a seven, which is good for one hundred and fourty, giving you a grand total of…”
“Two hundred and twenty,” says Andrew.
“Ha! Beat that!” says Warren.
Oh, I will!” says Andrew. “I will.”
“This is going to be great!” says Buffy as she walks onto the construction site with Xander. She’s wearing a hard hat, and has a tool belt slung around her hips. She’s looking forward to her first day on her new job. “Diving into the work force. Being the breadwinner. Building things with my hands.”
Xander tells Buffy she won’t be building, so much as toting. She isn’t in a union, so he had to call in a few favours to get that for her.
Buffy still thinks that’s better than her other option. Giles offered her a job at the Magic Box. “I mean, retail? Yeecchh. I’d rather be dead. Again.”
Xander asks if Giles has any ideas about what happened to her yesterday.
Buffy says he doesn’t, but he implied that it might be stress related. “I guess I could have been blacking out, but there was this thing on my sweater, you know? And then it just blew away or went poof. Maybe it was lint. Maybe it was evil lint.”
“Okay,” says Xander. “First tip of the day: when I introduce you to Tony, the foreman, you might want to leave out stuff about blacking out and evil lint.”
Xander takes Buffy over to meet Tony. Buffy holds out her hand. “Nice to meet you, Tony.” Tony just looks at her. She turns her attempt at a handshake into a wave at the other workers with him. “Guys.”
Tony looks at Xander. “You got to be kidding me! We’re a week behind, I got two men out on the D.L. Now you want us to baby-sit some little girl?”
“Uh, excuse me,” says Buffy, “but I—”
“Hang on, Gidget,” says Tony. “This stinks, Harris. What am I supposed to do with her?”
Xander tells Tony to give Buffy a chance. She’s a lot stronger than she looks. Tony just scoffs and turns back to the blueprints he was examining when Buffy and Xander walked up.
Xander tells Buffy not to mind Tony. “He may seem pig ignorant, rude, and a little hostile… Have fun!” He has to go supervise the sheet rock hangers upstairs. He tells Buffy he’ll be back to check on her later.
Tony starts handing out assignments. He tells Vince and Marco to haul some steel inside.
“Gee, I don’t know, Tone,” says Vince. “I don’t want to get in trouble with those affirmative action lawyers. You know what I’m saying? Why don’t you put, uh, little Britney here on hauling duty?”
“It’s Buffy.”
“Okay, Princess. You’re on it,” says Tony. “Try not to break a nail.”
Marco leads Buffy toward a stack of steel I-beams. He tells her not to worry about the others, and not to let them hassle her into doing something stupid and hurting herself. “These beams weigh quite a few hundred pounds.”
Buffy picks up the top beam and swings it effortlessly up onto her shoulder. “Which way?” Marco is struck speechless. He can only point. “Thanks.” Buffy starts to carry the beam away. Tony, Vince, and the other workers watching are equally amazed.
Buffy delivers another beam to a man working inside. “So, basically, I’m just trying to learn everything I can. You know? ’Cause I don’t want just a job. I want a career. You know? Something I can really grow into.” He tries to lift another beam up onto the end of a sawhorse. She lifts it for him. “Oh. I mean, I never thought I’d be working in construction, but, you know, when you think about it, it kind of makes sense—”
“Hey, we get paid by the hour,” he tells her. “You want to ruin it for the rest of us? Slow down.” He walks away from her.
Warren is watching the construction site through binoculars with Jonathan from the front of the van. He spots Buffy coming back outside.
Jonathan pokes his head through the beaded curtain separating the van cab from the back of the van. “You’re up,” he tells Andrew.
Andrew clears his throat, picks up a pan pipe, and starts to play it.
Buffy is getting herself a drink of water. She seems to hear something and looks around. She doesn’t see anything and turns back to the cooler. Someone comes up behind her, and she spins around suddenly. She nearly dumps the cup of water in her hand onto Tony.
“Jumpy,” says Tony. “What’s the matter? I scare you?”
Buffy grabs Tony and tosses him aside. There is a big green demon behind him. Tony hits the wall head first, and slumps to the floor.
The demon facing Buffy is joined by two more. Buffy sweeps the feet out from under one of the demons, and punches and kicks at the others. She jumps up and grabs an overhead bar. She swings forward and kicks one of the demons in the head. She gets a second on the backswing.
Buffy kicks out with both feet on her dismount and kicks two of the demons through a wall. The wall and the demons come down on the workers on the other side of it. Buffy spins face the demon still on its feet.
Buffy stomps on the blade of a shovel on the floor, and it pops up into her hands. She hits the demon in the face with it and knocks it off its feet. She drives the blade of the shovel into its chest. The demon dissolves into a green puddle, which quickly evaporates.
Vince crawls away from the demons extracting themselves from pieces of broken wall. “Oh, no! Oh! Please! Help me!”
“Hey!” shouts Buffy, and the demons turn back toward her. She kicks one away, and drives the head of the other between the studs of an unfinished piece of wall. She wraps some electrical conduit around its neck, and twists, snapping its neck. The demon dissolves.
Buffy kicks the surviving demon toward a large hydraulic scissors jack. She shoves its head into it, reaches in and rips loose a hydraulic hose. The jack collapses, and crushes the demon’s head.
Andrew has been watching through the binoculars from the van. “Oh, man. She took ’em out.” Warren asks if he can see, and Andrew hands him the binoculars. After a couple of seconds he asks for them back. Warren isn’t done, and they start wrestling for them.
Andrew gets knocked back against the steering wheel, and hits the horn. It plays the theme from Star Wars. Buffy hears it, and looks toward the van.
“Duck!” says Jonathan, and they all drop down below the level of the windows. Warren and Jonathan glare at Andrew.
“Hey, all you said was lose the mural.”
Buffy is still looking at the van when Xander arrives on the scene. He sees the guys digging themselves out from under the collapsed wall. “Oh, my god. Buffy, what…what happened? How… Aw, Buffy, I know these guys can be jerks, but was it necessary—”
“I didn’t do that,” says Buffy.
Tony is back on his feet, and holding a handkerchief against his bleeding head. “I’ll tell you what she did. I came over to tell your friend I was impressed with the job she was doing, liking the way she handles herself, and all of a sudden she goes berserk and attacks me.”
“Wha— I saved you from the de—” Buffy turns to Xander and lowers her voice. “The demons. They’re three big apey things.”
“No!” says Xander. “No, not here. Not at my job! That’s your job!”
“I can’t help where the forces of darkness attack me, Xander.”
Xander wants to know how they are going to explain this to the clients. “Should I just show him the demon bodies and say it’s all their fault?”
“You can’t,” says Buffy. “They melted. But, uh…uh… There are witnesses. Vince! Vince, you can tell them, right? How I jumped in and protected you from those…things.”
“Hey, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” says Vince. “All I know is you were losing it or something. It’s that time of the month, huh?”
“What? You were huddled in a corner. Crying. Like a baby!” says Buffy.
“Hey, hey! No way!” says Vince. “Me crying? You’re tripping sweety. Tripping.” Buffy storms off. “What’s her problem?”
Xander forces a smile at Tony, and follows after Buffy. She tells him that she didn’t imagine this, and he believes her. He thinks that this attack, and the thing at the school are related. Someone is messing with her. He thinks she should go see Giles, and get working on it right away.
“You’re firing me, aren’t you?” asks Buffy.
“Big time,” says Xander. “The whole melty thing ought to help narrow it down.” Buffy hands him her hard hat. “Uh, try sketching them. That always helps, and then maybe when I get off work, I’ll help you go through the mug shots.”
“This is going to be great,” says Buffy as she and Anya step down into the back section of the Magic Box. She doesn’t really sound like she means it though. “I’ve always been interested in, um, interested in retail.”
Buffy sees the stacks of books that Giles has collected on the table. “Uh, is this all research, or just some kind of stress test for the table?”
“I just want to be thorough,” says Giles. “This time anomaly and the…the demon attacks could be completely unrelated events, but if they’re not, you might be in some danger.”
“So, situation normal, then,” says Buffy.
Anya shows Buffy the binder which contains the forms that Buffy has to fill out for things like returns, special orders, or placing holds on things. Giles tells her that she has to fill out two hold slips for each item, and Anya starts to illustrate by telling Buffy a story about a sapphire someone purchased.
Warren is being bored to tears watching Buffy through the camera they have concealed in the Magic Box.
“Why is the Slayer here anyway?” asks Andrew. “She’s a student, she’s a construction worker, and now she’s some kind of…selling-stuff-person?”
“It’s like she’s completely without focus,” says Warren. “Should we check the other channels for free cable porn?”
Jonathan tells them he’s ready, and Warren and Andrew move to the back of the van and sit in front of him. Jonathan tells them to hold hands. Warren reaches his hand out toward Andrew.
Andrew snatches his hand away. “With each other?”
“Well, you know what homophobia really means about you, don’t you?” asks Warren. He picks up a large bone, covered in symbols, off the van floor and points it at Andrew.
“Stop touching my magic bone!” says Jonathan.
Warren puts the bone down and he and Andrew both start to giggle until Jonathan tells them to shut up. They have a little trouble getting themselves under control. Jonathan lights a piece of paper on fire, and Warren and Andrew link hands. Jonathan tells them the spell is in Latin, and not to laugh. He drops the burning paper in the bowl in front of him, and waves his magic bone over it.
“Opus orbit est,
Et ea in medio.
Tempus ad calcem intendit!”1
Smoke starts to billow from the burning paper, filling the back of the van with smoke. They all start coughing.
A woman walks past the van—with smoke billowing out its back door—and continues toward the Magic Box.
The bell over the Magic Box door rings, and Buffy turns to look at it. She sees the woman come into the shop.
“Buffy, a word in your ear,” says Giles, and she turns back to him. “While I was running the store, I found it useful to imagine myself back in the library.” He takes off his glasses and starts to clean them. “Um, you know, if you concentrate on service and not on making a sale, you’re more likely to have a satisfied customer.”
“Guess I’ll have to find my own style,” says Buffy.
“Yes. Uh, quite right. Yes.” Giles turns and walks toward the back of the shop.
Anya comes over to Buffy and tells her to go sell something to the woman who just came in. Buffy starts toward her, but she’s interrupted by a guy examining some scented candles. He wants to know which would create a more romantic mood.
Buffy picks up one of the candles, and sniffs it. “Ummm.” She looks at the base. “Lemon Seduction.” She picks up one of the other candles and sniffs it. “Eww!” She looks at its base. “Essence of Slug.” She hands him one of the lemon candles.
Buffy approaches the woman, and asks if she can help her. The woman says she’s looking for a mummy hand for a prosperity spell. She’s heard they have one.
“Uh, yeah, actually, I saw one downstairs,” says Buffy. “It’s kind of hairy, though. Maybe it was a daddy hand.” The woman just looks at her. “I’ll just get it.” Buffy heads for the door down to the basement.
Buffy searches the shelves in the Magic Box basement looking for the mummy hand. “‘Petrified hamster.’ Ew! ‘Eyeballs and honey.’ ‘Dagger of Lex.’” She turns around and sees what she’s looking for on top of a wooden crate beside a skull. “Hmm. Ancient mummy hand.”
Buffy reaches for the hand, and it twitches. Buffy pulls back her hand and the mummy hand leaps at her throat, and tries to strangle her. Buffy pulls it loose, throws it back on top of the crate, and stabs it with the Dagger of Lex.
Buffy shows the mummy hand, still impaled on the Dagger of Lex—which Buffy is going to include for no charge—to the woman.
“This hand is dead,” says the woman. “The power is gone. I’m not giving you money for this.”
“Oh, it’s just playing dead.” Buffy slaps the mummy hand. “Little scamp.”
The bell over the Magic Box door rings, and Buffy turns to look at it. She sees the woman come into the shop.
“Buffy, a word in your ear,” says Giles, and she turns back to him. “While I was running the store…”
“Huh? What? Huh?” asks Buffy.
“…I found it useful to imagine myself back in the library.” Giles takes off his glasses and starts to clean them. “Um, you know, if you concentrate on service and not on making a sale—”
“We did this just now,” says Buffy. “Giles, something is happening.”
Giles turns and walks toward the back of the shop. “Yes, Uh, quite right. Yes.”
“Ah, you did it,” says Warren. “Dude, she’s looping. What’d you do? Enchant the hand thing?”
“Uh, well, not exactly,” says Jonathan. “I made it so she had to satisfy a customer with a task that resists solving. Maybe I should have done more.”
“Like what?” asks Andrew.
“I don’t know. Like make her kind of itchy?”
Anya tells Buffy to go help the lady that just came in. Buffy tries to tell her what’s happening, but Anya just pats her on the shoulder. “Don’t be nervous. Do what I do. Just picture yourself naked.”
Buffy walks toward the woman. The guy looking at the candles starts to ask her for help, and Buffy hands him one of the lemon ones. She walks up to the woman who starts to tell her that she’s looking for a mummy hand. Buffy tries to tell her that she can’t get that for her.
“I called here twenty minutes ago and someone said you have one,” says the woman. “You have one, and I was told I could buy it. And I’m sorry, but I’m really going to have to hold you to that. I’m not leaving until I get a mummy hand.”
“Okay. I guess… I’ll have to get it for you.” Buffy turns toward the door down to the basement.
“Smart,” says Warren. “She’s figuring out the game: satisfy the customer. Well, she just might have beat you there, Stretch.” He slaps Jonathan on the shoulder. Jonathan thinks she still has a long way to go.
“I just hope she solves it faster than Data did on the ep of TNG where the Enterprise kept blowing up,” says Andrew.
“Or Mulder in that X-Files where the bank kept exploding,” says Warren.
“Scully wants me so bad,” says Andrew. Warren and Jonathan look askance at him.
Buffy cautiously approaches the mummy hand with the Dagger of Lex in one hand, and a pair of tongs in the other. The hand scampers back and forth, walking on its finger tips on top of the crate. It climbs up on top of the skull and raises two fingers threateningly toward her.
The woman looks disgusted by what’s in the bag Buffy has just handed her.
“Fingers sold separately,” says Buffy.
The bell over the Magic Box door rings, and Buffy sighs and starts to walk toward it. “Where you going?” asks Anya.
Buffy points at the woman who just came in. “Lady needs a mummy hand.”
“What? You haven’t even talked to her yet.”
“I could explain,” says Buffy, “but you would just forget it.”
“I’m worried about you,” says Anya. “Uh, retail is a fast-paced and exciting world. I mean, has this whole day just gone by too quickly for you?”
“No. No, I don’t think that’s exactly the problem.”
Giles starts to give her the advice about thinking of the store as the library again.
“Yes, and then I’m going to marry Bob Dole and raise penguins in Guam,” says Buffy.
“Yes. Uh, quite right. Yes,” says Giles.
Buffy sighs and heads toward the woman. She slaps one of the lemon candles into the hand of the guy as she passes him. “Mummy hand! Right?” she says to the woman. “You got it, lady.” She heads for the basement.
Buffy tries to pull the mummy hand off the woman’s throat.
The bell over the Magic Box door rings. Buffy ignores the guy at the candles, and the woman, and walks out the front door. She comes in the back. She can’t get out of the shop.
Buffy hides in the basement, watching the mummy hand snap the tongs at her. She hears the bell over the door ring.
Buffy rips the bell off the doorframe and smiles.
The bell over the door rings. Buffy tosses one of the slug candles to the guy. “You like slug, go with slug. She’s not going to sleep with you anyway.”
Warren and Andrew watch the woman complain about the dead mummy hand Buffy has handed her, supplying their own Monty Python inspired dialogue. “This mummy hand has ceased to be!” says Warren.
“It is an ex-mummy hand!” says Andrew.
The bell over the door rings. Giles starts to give Buffy his advice, while cleaning his glasses. She rips them out of his hand, drops them on the floor, and stomps on them.
The bell over the door rings. Buffy attacks the woman. “It’s you! You! You’re doing this!”
The bell over the door rings. Buffy throws a slug candle at the guy.
The bell over the door rings. Buffy cries. Giles and Anya stare at her, not knowing what has gotten into her.
The bell over the door rings.
“I know we promised you a mummy hand,” Buffy tells the woman. “It’s just… I can’t get it for you. Um, there’s something wrong with it. It’s defective.”
“Defective?” asks the woman. “Are you sure? I— there must be something you can do. I—”
“But there’s no way to get…” Buffy is struck with an inspiration. “…to get that hand, but I can special-order one. We can deliver it anywhere you want.”
“Really?” asks the woman.
Buffy hands the woman her receipt. “Thank you for shopping at the Magic Box.”
Jonathan, Andrew and Warren cheer Buffy’s victory.
“So, Warren had two-twenty,” says Andrew. “And I had that bonus for getting her fired.”
Jonathan thinks that the biggest component should be how long it took, and his took the longest, but Andrew points out that from Mr. Giles’ point of view Jonathan’s actually was the quickest.
“So what do we do?” asks Jonathan.
“Oh, it’s obvious,” says Warren. “I mean, it’s not over.”
Giles applauds, and congratulates Buffy on her first sale. Anya looks over the invoice. “You didn’t charge for delivery.”
“Oh. Well, your first day,” says Giles. “You know, these things happen.”
“Yeah, I’ll just take it out of your pay,” says Anya.
Giles looks like he wants to say something about that, but he doesn’t want to interfere with Anya’s running of the shop. “Yes. I’m sure Buffy would understand that.”
“Absolutely,” says Buffy. She takes off her “Hello! My name is Buffy. Ask me about curses!” name tag and slaps it down on the counter.
The bell over the door rings as Buffy leaves the shop.
“This is going to be great!” Buffy downs a shot of whiskey in one gulp, and shakes her head. “Bleaggh!”
Spike drains his shot too. They are both sitting on the lid of a coffin in the chamber under his crypt.
“Life is stupid,” says Buffy.
“I have a dim memory of that, yeah,” says Spike. “And I didn’t figure you were here cadging my whiskey ’cause life is all full of blood and peaches.”
“There’s this thing…” says Buffy. “Someone’s doing stuff to me, messing up my life. Except that it was kind of pre-messed already. You know, with school and jobs… Pretty bad even without the evil.”
“So, you, uh, just, what?” asks Spike. “You going to let this whoever play you till it figures out what kills you?”
“Giles is working on it.”
“Oh, good, ’cause Giles wields the mighty force of library books.
“You’d do better?” asks Buffy. She opens Spike’s flask and refills their glasses.
“Damn right,” says Spike. “I’d hit the demon world. Ask questions, throw punches, find out what’s in the air. Hmm? It’s fun, too.”
“It’s not my kind of fun.”
“Yeah, it is,” says Spike. “And your life’s going to get a lot less confusing when you figure that out.”
“You have had so too much drink at this point, I am cutting you off.” Buffy knocks back her shot. “Bleaggh! Whoo! Hah!” She empties the flask into her shot glass.
Spike drains his glass again too. “You’re not a schoolgirl. You’re not a shopgirl. You’re a creature of the darkness. Like me. Try on my world. See how good it feels.”
“Are there drinks in your world?”
Buffy and Spike enter a sleazy bar. Buffy is weaving a little on her feet, and tells Spike his motorcycle is loud. The bartender recognises Spike. He looks human, but when he speaks he reveals a forked snake-like tongue.
Spike tells the bartender he wants the usual, and to pour one for the lady too. The bartender starts to pour a couple of shots of Cuervo, but Buffy just takes the bottle away from him. Spike pays for the bottle, and tells Buffy that they are going into the back, where the real action is.
Buffy takes a swig from the bottle. “Bleaggh!” She follows Spike into the bar’s back room, where they find four demons playing cards around a table with a basket in the middle of it.
Spike leans close to Buffy so he can speak quietly. “These lowlifes know everything happens in this town.”
“Oh, good, these are the lowlifes,” says Buffy, much too loudly. The demons all turn to look at them. Spike asks what the game is.
“You know the game, Spike,” says a horned demon. “You in?”
The three eyed demon at the table doesn’t want to let Spike in. He kills their kind. Spike grabs him, and pulls him out of his chair. Buffy thinks that this is where the beating up demons for information is about to start, but Spike just pushes Three Eyes toward the door, and takes over his seat at the table.
“You’re going to play cards?” asks Buffy.
Spike tells the other three demons that he needs a little time with his lady, and pulls Buffy aside for a quiet talk. She wants to stick with the original plan, and looks back toward the demons. “Which one do I kill for information?”
“Listen, these guys talk while they play,” says Spike. “We’ll get more information out of their mouths than out of gaping holes in their corpses.”
Buffy isn’t happy about it, but she hangs her jacket on the back of a chair, and sits down with her bottle to watch. Spike rejoins the demons at the table. A demon whose skin hangs in loose folds tells them to ante up.
Each of the demons reaches down beside its chair, and lifts up a kitten which it places into the basket in the middle of the table.
“You play for kittens?” asks Buffy.
“So, who’s going to advance me a tiny tabby, get me started?” asks Spike. “Come on, someone’s got to stake me.”
“I’ll do it!” says Buffy. Spike glares at her. “What? You thought I was just going to let that lie there?” She takes another swig from the bottle. “Bleaggh!”
Warren drives the van through Sunnydale. Jonathan asks where they’re going.
“To final jeopardy,” says Warren. “Where Buffy’s the one in jeopardy.”
“We’re really supervillains now,” says Andrew. “Like…like Dr. No.”
“Yes. Yes,” says Warren. “Back when Bond was Connery and movies were decent.”
“Who remembers Connery?” asks Jonathan. “I mean, Roger Moore was smooth.”
“I like Timothy Dalton,” says Andrew. Warren slaps him on the back of his head. “Hey!”
“Don’t make me pull over,” says Warren. “Okay?”
Spike lays down a straight flush, and collects his winnings. The table is covered with kittens which he scoops up and drops into a basket. The horned demon thinks Spike is being awfully lucky today. Spike tells him it’s because he has his lucky charm with him.
“Bleaggh!” says Buffy as she takes another swig.
The demon with the loose skin thinks Spike is being a little too lucky. He think’s Spike is cheating.
“Me? Cheat?” asks Spike. He points at the spined demon at the end of the table. “He’s got x-ray vision.”
“I’m not using it,” says Spiny.
The loose skinned demon stands up. “We’re not the ones who are cheating.” Spike looks down at an Ace of Spades hanging out of a fold in its skin. “I—I had no idea that was there. I could’ve leaned on that days ago.”
The horned demon tells Spike to go before things get ugly. Loose skinned thinks that happened as soon as Buffy came in. “Her skin’s so tight, I don’t even know how you can look at it. Eww!”
Spike jumps to his feet, ready to do some damage. The horned demon tells him to leave his winnings and get out.
“Ah. So, it’s a setup, isn’t it?” asks Spike. “Squeeze a few quid out of the vamp. Well, I’ll tell you what you didn’t count on. Me and the bird.”
“Bleaggh!” says Buffy.
“You want a fight? You face the two of us.”
“What?” asks Buffy. “I’m not getting into a bar fight. I’ll beat ’em up for information, great, but not to defend your rights to gamble for kittens, which, by the way, is stupid currency.”
“They’re delicious!” says the horned demon.
Spike thinks that a big fight is just what Buffy needs, but she doesn’t. She’s done playing by other people’s rules. She picks up the basket with Spike’s winnings in it and dumps the kittens out. “Scamper! Be free, kittens.” The demons start chasing the escaping money. Buffy grabs her jacket and storms out.
Spike catches up with Buffy in the bar and asks what’s wrong with her.
“What’s wrong? You were going to help me.” Buffy struggles to put on her jacket. “You—you were going to beat heads and— and—and fix my life. But you’re completely lame. Tonight sucks! And…look at me! Look at— Look at stupid Buffy. Too dumb for college and…and…and freak Buffy. Too strong for construction work. And—and my job at the magic shop? I was bored to tears even before the hour that wouldn’t end. And the only person that I can even stand to be around is a neutered vampire who cheats at kitten poker.”
“Oh. You saw the cheating, did you?” asks Spike.
“Also…I think you’re drunk.” Buffy turns away and staggers out the door.
Warren, Jonathan and Andrew move into the back of the van, still arguing about which Bond was best. Jonathan still likes Roger Moore.
“Moonraker?” asks Warren. “The gondola turns into a hovercraft? It’s retarded. And besides, the guy had, like, no edge.”
Andrew still likes Dalton. “He was amazing in The Living Daylights.”
Warren thinks they are wasting time with this discussion. He turns to his console, and then swings back. “I mean, there’s a shot of, like, pigeons doing double takes when the gondola blasted by. Moonraker is inexcusable.”
Buffy stops, and Spike nearly runs into her. “That van,” she says.
“You want to steal a van, I’m with you, luv,” says Spike, “but we have got the motorcycle.”
“I’ve seen it before,” says Buffy. “At the construction site.” She starts to walk toward it.
“Connery is the only actor of the bunch,” says Warren.
“Timothy Dalton should get an Oscar and beat Sean Connery over the head with it!” says Andrew.
“Okay, that’s it.” Warren grabs Andrew in a headlock, and they start to wrestle. Jonathan tries to break them up, but he can’t.
Jonathan looks up at one of the monitors and gasps. “Look!” Andrew and Warren look up and see Buffy walking toward them.
“What do we do?” asks Andrew.
“Jonathan, grab your magic bone,” says Warren. He and Andrew start to giggle.
Buffy steps toward the van. A big red demon, with horns and naked except for a loin cloth steps out from behind the van. It looks a lot like the South Park Satan.
“Aargh! You have discovered me!” says the demon. “But do not try to defeat me, for I have been testing you, and I know your weaknesses. Ha ha!” It seems a little disturbed when the van takes off.
Buffy swings a punch at the demon’s head, but she misses completely, and spins right around. She kicks the demon in the chest. It staggers back, and Buffy falls on her ass.
Spike helps Buffy back to her feet, and she pushes him away.
“I am well struck!” says the demon. It sounds like it’s close to tears. “I call on the misty portal to my demon dimension, where I’ll lay my head and gently die.” It throws something down on the road in front of it, creating an explosion and a cloud of smoke. It turns and runs away, its escape hidden from Buffy and Spike by the smoke.
Buffy and Spike cough from the smoke. “He blew up,” says Buffy. “Did you see that?”
“Yeah, I saw,” says Spike. “He’s gone.”
“Got to love it,” says Buffy. “Makes you feel all powerful…strong.” She starts to look a little green. “Kinda sick.”
The demon runs up beside the van, which has stopped just around the corner. “She hurt me all over.”
Warren tells it to get in the back before someone sees him, but the demon won’t fit.
“Well, do that…thing,” says Andrew.
“Oh, right.” The demon grabs hold of it’s loin cloth. “Let the spell be ended.”
The demon shrinks, transforming back into Jonathan, who has to hold up the loin cloth to keep it from falling off. He staggers to the back of the van and climbs in. Warren wraps a zebra striped blanket around him. Jonathan is still moaning in pain. “Next time I do that spell, one of you guys has to look like the demon.”
Andrew is thrilled that Jonathan was so lucky to have been touched by the Slayer.
“Yeah, it was sexy, the way she touched me real hard with her fists,” says Jonathan. “I only looked big. I actually had the proportional strength of, uh…me.”
“Guys, think about this,” says Warren. “We took on the Slayer. We’ve got all kinds of stuff in the computer now— speed, strength, reaction time. We’re getting what we need to really become a threat to her. We tested her, faced her, and we survived. The Trio versus the Slayer. It’s not over.”
“Plus look what Warren and me discovered by accident before we drove away,” says Andrew.
“What?” asks Jonathan, and Warren and Andrew point him toward one of the monitors.
“Free cable porn!”
Buffy comes out of the bathroom. Giles hands her a glass of water, and asks if she’s feeling better.
“I think at one point I actually turned completely inside out. But, yeah. Better.” Buffy crosses the hall into her bedroom and sits on the floor at the end of her bed. Giles tells her that he hasn’t been able to find anything that matches this latest demon in his research.
“Uh, it’s okay. It—it wasn’t much of a fight,” says Buffy. “I got lucky. I’m really screwing up, Giles.”
“What?” Giles sits on the edge of Buffy’s bed. “Come on. You were being tested, sequentially, by some unknown demon. I don’t call that screwing up.”
“No, it completely is,” says Buffy. “I let the demon set the rules.”
“Go easy on yourself, will you? I mean, you don’t have to figure the whole thing out at once, you know, job and everything. You’re pushing yourself too hard.”
“The nice people at the phone company seem to think it’s not hard enough.”
“Well, maybe there’s something I can do about that.” Giles pulls a folded piece of paper out of his shirt pocket and gives it to her. “This is, um… I… It’s for you.”
Buffy unfolds the paper. “A cheque? This is—is too much. I—I can’t take it.”
Giles starts to reach for the cheque, and says he’ll tear it up, but Buffy snatches it away. “No! I was just being polite. I’m taking the money. This is…this is great. This is more than great. I don’t…really know how to say this…but it’s a little like having Mom back.”
“In this scenario, I am your mother?” asks Giles.
“Want to be my shiftless absentee father?”
“Is there some sort of, um…rakish uncle?”
“I’m just saying…thank you…so much.” Buffy gets up off the floor. “Uh…I’m going to show this to Dawn. She loves it when things get easy. I just…want to tell you…that, um…this… It makes me feel safe. Knowing you’re always going to be here.”
Giles smiles at Buffy as she leaves the room, but his smile fades when she’s gone, and he sighs.
| Who or What | Where | How |
|---|---|---|
| Demon 1 | Construction site | Shovel in the chest from Buffy |
| Demon 2 | Construction site | Neck broken Buffy |
| Demon 3 | Construction site | Head crushed by Buffy |