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The SETI Slayers | Fanfic
| Wrecked | Doublemeat Palace |
Buffy sweeps everything off a table in Willow’s room into a box: tarot cards, crystal ball, charms and other magical paraphernalia. Dawn—her left arm in a sling—is pulling magic books off a shelf and packing them into another box. Willow sits on her bed watching them.
Dawn notices that Buffy is even packing up the candles. “But they’re just candles!”
“Well, yeah, you know, to you and me they’re just candles,” says Buffy. “But to witches, they’re…like bongs. So, no candles, no charms, no—”
“Bird,” says Willow.
“No bird?” asks Buffy.
Willow points at a pewter bird on a table. “The peacock on the table. It has two crystals in it.”
Buffy picks up the bird and looks inside.
“Tara, she…she left them,” says Willow.
Buffy takes the crystals. “I’ll make sure she gets them.”
The cleanup moves into the living room. Buffy tells Dawn to get the fertility god off the shelf over the desk.
“Kokopelli? No! I love him!” says Dawn. “And he was Mom’s! Why do we have to get rid of so many things I like?”
“Dawn, I explained this to you. Willow has a problem. The next few weeks are going to be crazy hard on her as it is.” Buffy starts checking behind the cushions of the sofa for any small items that may have fallen back there. “Any reminder of what it is that she’s trying to stay away from, you know, could cause her to give in to temptation…” She finds Spike’s lighter, and remembers having sex with him. “…and that would be bad.” She drops the lighter into the box with the magic stuff.
Warren removes the diamond from its box, and drops into place in a star shaped enclosure on top of a contraption that looks like some sort of gun made from transparent plastic tubes filled with circuitry. He clamps the diamond in place, sits back, and tells Jonathan and Andrew that it’s done.
Jonathan looks at it dubiously. “Kinda clunky looking.”
“I pictured something cooler,” says Andrew. “More I.L.M., Less Ed Wood.”
Warren lifts the device out of its stand on the work bench. “You want to see cool? I’ll show you cool.” The gun is pointing in their direction, and Andrew and Jonathan look nervous. Warren turns away from them and points it at one of their swivel chairs. He pulls the trigger and an orange beam snakes out of the barrel of his new gun, and into the chair. It vanishes.
Andrew and Jonathan carefully approach where the chair had been. Andrew feels for it.
“Did it?” asks Jonathan. “Is it?”
“Yeah,” says Andrew.
Jonathan carefully sits down where the chair had been. He lifts his feet off the floor, and spins in the air. He giggles. “I’d call that a successful test!”
“Oh, that’s just half the test.” Warren flips a couple of switches on the gun and aims it toward the chair again.
Jonathan lifts his hands in an effort to protect himself, and cringes. “Hey, hey!”
Warren fires the gun, and the chair reappears under Jonathan.
Jonathan jumps to his feet. “You penis!”
Warren is unphased. “Oh, cheer up, Frodo, because thanks to my brains and our mystical gem, we got ourselves an invisibility ray.” He lifts the gun to point at the ceiling. “And I’d say that pretty much makes us unstoppable.”
Buffy calls up from the kitchen for Dawn to hurry up. Xander is going to be there soon to pick her up to take her to school, and she hasn’t even had breakfast yet. Willow is at the stove, making an omelette. She’s still dressed in her pyjamas. Buffy asks her how she’s doing.
Willow says that she’s doing okay. She still isn’t feeling up to returning to classes, but her shakes are pretty much gone. She’s planning to spend the day on her computer, trying to track down more information on the stolen diamond.
Dawn comes into the kitchen and pours herself a glass of juice. Willow tells Dawn her omelette is almost ready, but Dawn says she isn’t hungry.
“Dawn, you need to eat something,” says Buffy.
“Thanks for your concern.” Dawn slams down her juice glass and walks out of the kitchen.
“Okay, I deserve the wrath of Dawn, but why is she taking it out on you?” asks Willow.
“Because I let it happen,” says Buffy.
“Buffy, I was the one who—”
“Who was drowning,” says Buffy. “My best friend. I was too wrapped up in my own dumb life to even notice. Too—”
Buffy is interrupted by Spike bursting through the back door, covered by a smoking blanket. He tosses it to the floor, and stomps on it. He takes a couple of moments to compose himself. He rubs his hands through his hair and looks at Buffy. “Morning.”
Buffy wants to know what Spike is doing, and why he’s there. Spike says he was just out for a stroll. “Found myself in your neck of the woods.”
“Couldn’t find a less flammable time of day to take a stroll?” asks Buffy.
“Yeah, well, the fact is my lighter’s gone missing. Thought it might have dropped out of my pocket last time I was here.”
Buffy turns toward the sink full of dirty dishes. “Haven’t seen it.”
Willow says that she’s going back to her room to get dressed. She takes the frying pan off the stove and sets it on the counter beside the sink. Buffy really doesn’t want to be left alone with Spike, but can’t come up with a reasonable way to ask her to stay. Willow leaves the kitchen.
Buffy turns to look at Spike. “Lame.”
“What?” asks Spike.
“You. Making up excuses.”
“Oh, don’t flatter yourself, Luv. Bloody fond of that lighter.”
“Stop trying to see me…and stop calling me that.”
Spike slowly walks toward Buffy. “So, um…what should I call you, then? Pet? Sweetheart?” He reaches out his hand out and caresses her hair. “My…Little Goldilocks? You know, I love this hair. The way it bounces around when you—”
Buffy grabs the spatula out of the frying pan and tries to hit Spike with it. He grabs her arm with one hand. “Uh-uh, uh-uh. This flapjack’s not ready to be flipped.”
“What the hell is that supposed to…” Buffy stops as Spike caresses her thigh with his other hand. Buffy tries not to enjoy it. His hand moves up to her hip. ”Stop that,” she whispers.
“Good Godfrey Cambridge, Spike!” Buffy and Spike look toward the doorway into the dining room and see Xander. “You still trying to mack on Buffy?”
Buffy pushes Spike away and tries to hide her embarrassment.
“Wake up already,” says Xander. “Never going to happen. Only a complete loser would ever hook up with you, unless she’s a simpleton like Harmony, or a nut sack like Drusilla—”
“Hey!” says Buffy. “You really need to get Dawn off to school. Let’s go…go fetch her, okay? You can let yourself out, right Spike?”
Buffy and Xander move out into the dining room, and she calls out for Dawn. Dawn is already waiting near the front door for them. Buffy tells her to come straight home after school.
“Sure,” says Dawn. “Maybe we can find some time for you to get me into another car accident.”
Buffy gives Dawn a look, and opens the door.
There is a woman standing on the doorstep, who was about to knock. “Oh, good morning. You must be Dawn.” Buffy asks if she can help her. “I’m Doris Kroger from Social Services. We had an appointment.”
“Oh, for Wednesday,” says Buffy.
“This is Wednesday,” says Doris.
Buffy looks at Xander and he nods. “Right. Well, Dawn, you better…” Dawn just walks out past Doris without saying a word. “…and, Xander, you’ll drive safely.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Xander follows Dawn.
Doris watches them as they go. “A little bit on the tardy side, isn’t she?”
“Yeah, well, it’s been one of those mornings, you know,” says Buffy. Doris walks in the door, and turns toward the living room. “Hey, come on in.”
Doris looks around the living room. It’s still a bit of a mess from last night’s magical items clearance. The sofa cushions are in disarray, and there’s a box of stuff sitting on the coffee table.
Spike is sitting in one of the chairs. He still wants to talk with Buffy. Buffy tells him she can’t talk now, she has company, but he’s willing to wait.
“Um, Miss Summers,” says Doris. “If you and your boyfriend would like to—”
“He is not—” Buffy clears her throat. “Not my boyfriend. He’s, um, just a…” Spike looks like he wonders what she’s going to say he is. “Spike, this nice woman is, uh…from Social Services.”
Spike almost jumps to his feet. “Oh, right. Uh, hey, Buffy’s a great mom. She takes good care of her little sis. Like, um, when Dawn was hanging out too much in my crypt, Buffy put a right stop to it.”
“I’m sorry,” says Doris. “Did you say—”
“Crib.” says Buffy. “Crib. He said crib. You know kids today and their buggin’ street slang.” Buffy starts to herd Spike toward the back door, with a strong hint that there is something he has to go do.
Spike asks for his blanket, which is lying across the arm of the chair he was sitting in. Buffy throws it at him, and Spike walks back into the kitchen.
“He sleeps here?” asks Doris.
Buffy tries to dismiss the blanket as just being a security thing. “He has issues. No, just me and Dawn living here.”
Willow calls down from upstairs saying she isn’t feeling well, and is going to take a nap.
“O-okay, Will!” Buffy calls back. “That’s Willow. She, uh, she kind of lives here, too, actually.”
“Oh, so you live with another woman?”
Buffy gets more flustered. “Oh, oh, it’s not a gay thing, you know. I mean, well, she’s gay, but we don’t gay— not that there’s anything…oh, wrong with…”
Doris’s attention has wandered to the box of stuff on the table. She picks up a plastic baggie containing some dried herbs, and raises her eyebrows at Buffy.
“You know, I know what that looks like,” says Buffy. “But I—I swear it’s not what it looks like. It’s…magic weed.” Doris is not impressed. “It’s not mine.” Buffy takes the baggie and drops it back in the box.
Doris thinks she has seen enough, and starts back toward the front door. Buffy tries to convince her to stay, Doris has just caught her at kind of a bad time.
“It’s been a bad time now for a while, hasn’t it, Miss Summers?” asks Doris. “Your sister’s grades have fallen sharply in the last year due in large part to her frequent absences and lateness.”
“But there-there are good reasons.”
“I’m sure there are, but my interest is in Dawn’s welfare and the stability of her home life. Something I’m just not convinced that an unemployed young woman like yourself can provide.”
“I can. I—I do,” says Buffy.
“Well, we’ll just have to see about that then, won’t we? Oh, and I’m going to recommend immediate probation in my report.”
Buffy asks what that means.
“It means that I’ll be monitoring you very closely, Miss Summers. And if I don’t see that things are improving, well, I’ll be forced to recommend that you be stripped of your sister’s guardianship.”
“You can’t do that.”
“I do what is in Dawn’s best interest, as should you.” Doris opens the door. “Have a nice day.” She leaves.
Buffy closes the door, and leans against the frame.
“Didn’t go well, huh?” asks Spike. He had been waiting in the kitchen. Buffy asks why he won’t go. “I just thought you’d—”
“Get out of here!” says Buffy.
Spike slams his left hand against the door beside Buffy’s head, and leans in close. His right hand goes into her pants pocket. Buffy enjoys his touch. “Just getting what I came for, Luv.” Spike pulls his lighter out of her pocket, and turns and walks toward the back door. “So long Goldilocks.”
Buffy slams her bedroom door shut and leans against it, nearly in tears. She sits at her dresser and buries her face in her hands. She looks up at her reflection in her mirror, and looks at her hair.
Buffy starts rummaging through the drawers of her dresser and pulls out a large pair of scissors. She grabs a handful of hair, and chops it off. She keeps hacking at her hair, and dropping big clumps of it onto the floor.
The hair dresser in Mane Street looks at the ruins of Buffy’s hair dubiously, and asks what Buffy wants done with it. About half her hair is gone. It is now a ragged shoulder length mess.
“Just make me…different,” says Buffy.
Jonathan, Andrew and Warren leave their van in an alley, and walk around the corner toward the Venus Health Spa. Warren is carrying something covered by a blanket. The sign in the front window declares that it’s Bikini Wax Wednesday. Andrew is afraid that they’ll get caught. Jonathan isn’t worried about that. They’ll be invisible, and security has gotten lax.
“You should know. You’ve cased this joint enough.” Warren pulls their invisibility gun out from under the blanket, and lifts it up. “Okay, this is it. Remember…we’re professionals.”
Andrew spots Buffy coming out of the hair salon across the street and calls out a warning. Warren turns to look where he points, and hides the invisibility gun behind his back. Buffy is headed their way.
Andrew and Jonathan snatch the gun out of Warren’s hand and run back into the alley. Warren turns and chases after them. He finds them fighting over it.
“Give it!” says Jonathan
“I need to be invisible!” says Andrew.
“I need it more,” says Jonathan. “Buffy can’t see me!”
Warren tries to break Andrew and Jonathan’s wrestling match up, and pull the gun away from them. In the process the gun gets activated. The beam snakes out and hits Buffy. It knocks her off her feet as she vanishes. The beam continues to sweep around the street, making a tree, fire hydrant, traffic cone, and a dumpster vanish too before the gun shorts out.
“Oopsie,” says Andrew.
“What happened to Buffy?” asks Xander. “She’s gone.”
Anya points to the diagram sitting on the counter of the Magic Box. “She’s right here. Table four. I put her with your family.” Anya’s diagram has several numbered circles, with post-it notes with people’s names written on them arranged around the circles.
“Great,” says Xander. “Except we don’t hate Buffy.” Neither of them notices when the bell over the front door rings, as the door opens and closes on its own. “Let’s put her back at table one.”
“Well, where do I put D’Hoffryn?”
“We’re not inviting D’Hoffryn.”
“I have to,” says Anya. “He’s my ex-boss. You’re inviting your work buddies.”
“She’s got a point,” says Buffy.
Xander looks around, but doesn’t see her. “Hey, Buffy. Where…where are you?”
“At table four, apparently.”
Anya looks around herself. “Well, that remains to be seen…like you.”
Xander gets to his feet, and starts looking around in earnest. Buffy tells him not to bother. “I’m invisible girl.”
Xander starts to try to feel for Buffy, reaching out at chest level toward the sound of her voice. He makes contact.
“Uh, Xander?” says Buffy
Xander pulls his hands back quickly. “Sorry!” He turns and looks at Anya. “Her clothes are invisible…too.” He starts to ask how this happened, but suddenly gets an idea. “Wait a sec. Have you been feeling…ignored lately?”
“Yeah, ignored. I wish,” says Buffy. “No, this isn’t a Marcie deal. I don’t know what happened.” She tells them that it happened just after she got her hair cut at Mane Street.
Anya starts to ask about her new hair cut, and Buffy describes it as being just above her shoulders. Anya thinks it sounds adorable. She’s thinking of getting her hair cut before the wedding.
Xander pulls them back to the problem of no-show Buffy. “This is serious.”
Buffy agrees, but it fits with the disaster that her day has been so far. She picks a ball up off a table and tosses it in the air while she talks. Willow’s a wreck, Dawn’s mad at both of them, and the Social Services woman put her through a wringer. “Says she’s going to watch me.” Buffy picks up a second ball. The pattern painted on the balls makes them look like giant eyeballs floating in the air. Buffy giggles. “I’d like to see her try now. You know, there may be an upside to no-see me.”
Xander asks Buffy if she saw anyone. “Anything suspicious before you…cleared up?”
Buffy makes her “eyeballs” look at each other, and says she didn’t notice anything.
Anya is a little freaked out by Buffy’s eyeball routine, but she tries to ignore it. “Why would anyone make her invisible anyway?” she asks Xander. “I mean, Invisible Slayer’s got to be way more effective than the standard variety.”
Xander is more interested in finding out how this happened. “We get the how, then we got how to make her unseen sight seen again, right?”
Buffy has discarded the balls, and picked up a skull off a shelf. She works the jaw, and does her Sr. Wenses impression. “S’awright!”
Xander wishes that Buffy would stop fooling around, and focus on the problem. She says she will, but this is kind of fun too. Xander thinks he should go back to where this happened, and look for clues.
Buffy tells Xander that she thinks that’s a good idea. She has another idea of her own. “You know what? I’m just going to go for a walk.”
“A walk?” asks Xander.
“Yeah. Clear my head. You guys keep working on the whats and the hows.” The front door opens and Buffy giggles. “‘Clear my head!’”
Xander tries to call after her, but Buffy’s gone. Anya turns back to her seating diagram, and rearranges a couple of the post-it notes. She figures that it must be some sort of spell, but Xander doesn’t think it makes any sense. Anya was right before. An invisible Slayer is much more dangerous to her enemies than the normal Slayer.
“Maybe it’s a mistake,” says Anya.
“A magical mistake,” says Xander. “Who’d be messing with that kind of pow—” He and Anya exchange a look.
Willow has several non-magical reference volumes spread out on the dining room table around her iBook. She searches through them. The book she wants isn’t there. She sees it’s down at the far end of the table. She reaches her hand out toward it, and the book starts to rise off the table. She pulls her hand back, and the book drops back into place.
The front door opens and Xander comes in. “Willow, how’s it going?”
Willow tries not to look guilty, and says it’s going good. She’s learned some new stuff about the diamond that was stolen from the museum. There are rumours that it has some quasi-mystical quantum properties.
Xander sits down beside her. “Willow, we need to talk.”
“We are talking,” says Willow. “Well, I’m talking, and you’re looking at me funny.”
“Is there something you want to tell me?”
Willow looks even more guilty. “It was nothing. I—I—I didn’t slip.”
Xander tells her that nobody’s mad. They understand that relapse is part of recovery. “We just have to figure a way to fix it.”
“Fix what?” asks Willow.
“Fix Buffy.”
“Buffy’s broken?”
“Will, you know what I’m talking—” Xander sees that she really doesn’t. “You don’t know? Rhymes with… blinvisible?”
“What?”
“Buffy was in town, leaving the haircutting place when she suddenly just—”
“Buffy got her hair cut?”
“Yeah!” says Xander. “Adorable, apparently. I personally couldn’t tell since she’s all… blinvisible.”
“And you think I have something to do with this?”
“No. Not— Well, come on, Will. Some of the spells you’ve done have caused some weird stuff to happen to each of us at one time or another, and let’s not forget the recent forgetting.”
“Oh. I see. So, now when anything nasty happens, I get conveniently blamed for it?”
“No one’s blaming!” says Xander.
Willow stands up. “So I guess it wouldn’t matter if I just jump off the wagon completely, since you already think I’m already making pit stops!”
“Look, if you say you didn’t do it—” Willow heads toward the door. “Willow, where you going?”
Willow doesn’t look back on her way out the door. “For a walk.”
Warren examines the fried circuits of his invisibility ray gun. Andrew wants him to fix it fast. “We had so many plans. Naked women and all…well, all the naked women.”
Jonathan thinks they have a bigger problem then that. The Slayer is invisible now.
“He’s right,” says Andrew. “She could be anywhere. Even here. Right now. Watching, listening to every word we say.” They all look around nervously. “For all we know, she could be one of us!”
They all look at each other nervously, and then Jonathan and Warren both look at Andrew. He figures out how silly that last bit was.
“I wouldn’t sweat the Slayer too much,” says Warren.
“Says you,” says Jonathan. “In my book, an invisible Slayer means a whole world of trouble.”
A girl in a lavender rhinestone studded leather ball cap sits on a park bench reading a book. The cap lifts off her head and floats in front of her.
“I am the ghost of fashion victims past,” says Buffy. “Studded caps: not a good idea.”
The girl runs away.
“Hey, I’m doing you a favour!” Buffy tosses the cap into a trash can, and looks around the park for someone else. She sees a boy and girl jogging by, but figures they’d be too easy a target.
A Parking Enforcement Officer has his scooter parked behind an SUV on the street by the park, and has his ticket pad out. Buffy gets an idea.
The meter man is surprised when his scooter takes off on its own. “So long, copper!” Buffy shouts at him. He tries to chase his scooter down the street, but Buffy quickly outdistances him.
Buffy pulls over to the curb in front of the Sunnydale Department of Social Services. “Hello, Mrs. Kroger.”
Doris Kroger puts her coffee mug down on a coaster on the right side of her desk, and picks up a pen to make a notation in the folder in front of her. She reaches out for her mug again, but doesn’t feel it. She looks, and it’s gone. “What? Where’s my…”
Doris looks around, and sees her mug on top of the clipboard on the left side of her desk. She lets out a little laugh at a coworker who’s looking at her. “Losing my mind.” She takes another sip of coffee, and sets her mug down on the coaster again. She picks up the clipboard.
Doris reaches for her coffee again, and again it’s gone. “Okay! Who’s the…” She sees the coffee mug siting on top of her computer monitor. She starts to reach for it.
The coffee mug starts to dance. ”Kill, kill, kill.” whispers Buffy.
“What?” asks Doris.
“I didn’t say anything,” says her coworker.
“Not you, the mug. It’s—” Doris points at the top of her computer monitor, but there’s nothing there. The mug is back on its coaster. “But I, uh, I heard something.”
Doris pokes the mug with her finger.
”Kill, Doris. Kill everybody. You know you want to.” whispers Buffy.
Doris jumps to her feet. “Shut up! Shut up! Just shut up!” She looks around the office, and sees that everyone is staring at her now. She decides to go to the washroom.
As soon as Doris is gone Buffy starts rifling through the files on her desk. She finds Dawn’s file at the bottom and opens it up. She types the case number into Doris’s computer terminal.
Doris wipes her neck with damp paper towel as she walks back to her desk. Her supervisor intercepts her. He has a few minutes now to talk about that case file.
“What? Oh. Oh, yes. The, um, Summers file,” says Doris. “It’s, uh, it’s right over here. Uh…” She’s a little surprised to find that Dawn’s file is now at the top of her stack. She picks it up and hands it to her boss. “Uh, it’s a fifteen year old girl living under her older sister’s guardianship. The house is a complete—”
Her boss has been flipping through the pages in the file folder. “What is this? ‘All work and no play make Doris a dull girl.’”
“What?” asks Doris.
Her boss is still flipping pages. “‘All work and no play make Doris’— the pages are filled with it.” He looks around, and sees more pages with the same thing on them coming out of the printer.
“I—I didn’t do this!” says Doris. “I— It was the voice!”
“Excuse me?”
“There was a voice, before. It made my coffee dance. It told me to—”
“To…what?”
Doris decides that maybe it wouldn’t be a good idea to tell her boss what the voice told her. “Nothing.”
Her boss tells Doris to take the rest of the day off. She should go see her doctor. Doris is worried about her cases, but he says he’ll reassign them, and have someone else redo the Summers interview.
Buffy heads out of the office, whistling Going Through the Motions as she goes. Doris’s boss suggests that they go sit down somewhere.
Xander finds Willow in the alley beside the spa, spraying red paint onto the invisible dumpster. He asks her what she’s doing.
“Look, Xander, I figured out this was where Buffy disappeared from what you told me, so don’t start jumping to any conclusions.”
“No jumping.” Xander points to the ground. “Look. Feet firmly planted.”
Willow apologises. She’s feeling a little jumpy lately. Xander apologises too, and asks if she’s found anything.
Willow has. She points to some tire tracks on the pavement. “Something sped out of here pretty damn quick to make that kind of tread mark.”
“Those could have been made anytime,” says Xander.
Willow pulls a glass vial from her pocket and hands it to him. “Yeah, but this wasn’t.”
Xander looks at it. “What is it?”
Willow walks across the alley. “Paint that I scraped off the fire hydrant.”
Xander follows her. “What fire hydrant?” He kicks something he can’t see. “Ow!”
“That one,” says Willow. “Whatever hit this fire hydrant hit it after it was made invisible. And betcha-by-golly-wow, that something was the same something that shot out of that alley.”
Xander looks at the paint flecks in the vial. “Black paint? Buffy’s phantom van. We need to let Buff—” He nearly trips over something else he can’t see in the alley. “Whoa! There’s something there.” He points at the spot on the ground.
Willow bends down and spays some paint. It reveals a traffic pylon. She tells Xander to take it back to the Magic Box. It might give him and Anya a clue about what sort of spell was used. Xander asks what she’s going to do.
“Well, I got paint scrapings, and a tire mark,” says Willow. “I’m going to find this van that’s been stalking Buffy. By the way, where is Buffy?”
A woman on Spike’s TV screams. “Oh, my god, the blood! Look at all the blood!”
Spike’s stomach rumbles, and he rubs it. He gets up and goes to his fridge. He pulls out a jar of blood and takes a sip. The door of his crypt opens, and he looks toward it. He doesn’t see anything. Spike isn’t fooled. “Whatever beastie you are, I know you’re here, and I hurt beasties.”
Buffy brushes past him, and turns off the TV. Spike sighs. “A ghost, is it? Go and haunt the living, like a good spook.”
Buffy slowly circles around him, and rubs against him. Spike lashes out, but she catches his arm and throws him against the wall. She rips open his shirt.
Spike suddenly likes what this invisible beastie is doing, and he figures out who she is. “Buffy?”
“I told you: stop trying to see me.” Buffy throws Spike across his crypt.
Xander and Anya are reading books at the round table in the Magic Box, with the painted traffic cone on the table between them.
“Oh, I got it!” says Anya. Xander looks toward her hopefully. “We’ll put D’Hoffryn at your parents’ table and move your Uncle Rory to table five near the bar.”
Xander thinks that Anya should be concentrating on invisibility spells, not seating arrangements.
Anya hasn’t found anything about those yet. “At least nothing that would explain why things near Buffy become invisible.” She reaches for the cone. Her hand sinks into it. “Eww…Xander.”
“What happened?”
“An unpleasant tactile experience.” Anya holds up her hand. It’s covered in transparent pink slime. “Like putting my hand in pudding.”
Xander reaches for the cone himself. His hand sinks into it too. “Eww!”
“Like pudding, am I right?” asks Anya. “Rice or tapioca— lumpy like that.”
Xander thinks they have to find Buffy right away and tell her what happened. Anya doesn’t think Buffy is going to be too heartbroken over a pylon.
“Anya, whatever’s happening to the pylon will probably happen to her. If we don’t find Buffy— I mean, if we don’t figure out how this was done…”
“She’s pudding?”
“What do you mean, she’s going to fade away?” asks Jonathan.
Warren tells Jonathan that the radiation overdose Buffy got from the overloading invisibility gun will make her molecular structure break down. “Eventually, her molecular makeup will start losing its integrity, and then…pfft.”
“But wouldn’t that kill her?” asks Andrew.
Warren sits back away from the workbench. “Well, let me think… Yeah!”
Neither Andrew or Jonathan likes that idea. “We’re not killing anybody,” says Jonathan. “Especially not Buffy!”
“We’re villains!” says Warren. “When are you going to get that through your thick skulls?”
Jonathan didn’t get into this to kill anyone. He just wants to be a crime lord. So does Andrew. He pictures himself as the Lex Luthor type, and Lex doesn’t kill Superman.
Jonathan steps up and stands over Warren. “Listen, Warren: you get that ray working, and the first thing we’re going to do is find Buffy and re-visible her before it’s too late.”
Warren stands up and looks down at him. Jonathan looks a little nervous, but he doesn’t back down. “You got me?”
“Fine.” Warren sits back down at his workbench. “Whatever you guys say.”
Xander enters Spike’s crypt and calls out for him. He looks around and sees that the place is a mess. Half of Spike’s furniture is overturned, or broken. It looks like there’s been a big fight there.
Xander moves down to the lower level of the crypt, and finds Spike, apparently having sex with his bed. “Spike? What are you doing?” Spike is naked, and only half covered by a sheet.
Spike looks around in surprise. “What am I… What does it look like I’m doing, you nit? I’m exercising, aren’t I?” Spike starts doing pushups. Buffy lets out a bit of a squeal that’s masked by the squeak of the bedsprings, and Spike’s grunting.
Xander isn’t fooled for a moment. He thinks he knows what Spike was doing.
Spike stands up on the bed, and wraps the sheet around his waist. “A man shouldn’t use immortality as an excuse to let himself go. You got to keep fit for the killing.” He sits down on the edge of the bed.
Xander asks about the mess upstairs, but Spike deflects the question. He doesn’t think Xander’s there to criticize his housekeeping. Xander says he’s looking for Buffy.
“Haven’t seen her,” says Spike.
“Well, you wouldn’t,” says Xander. “Fact is, she’s come down with a slight case of invisibility.”
Buffy starts to tickle Spike, and nibble on his ears. Spike tries to retain his composure while he asks Xander how this happened. Xander doesn’t know, but tells Spike that he really needs to find Buffy. He gives Spike a strange look as Spike tries to push Buffy away from him.
Spike promises to have a look around. If he bumps into Buffy, he’ll tell her Xander’s looking for her.
“After your…exercises,” says Xander.
“Yeah, right.”
Xander starts to leave. He stops and looks back. “You know, kidding aside, Spike, you really should get a girlfriend.”
Spike sighs after Xander’s gone. “That was bloody stupid.” He gets up and tosses the sheet back onto the bed.
Buffy’s silhouette can be seen underneath the sheet. “What’s the matter? Ashamed to be seen with me? Come on. He had no idea I was here. This is perfect.”
“Perfect for you.” Spike pours himself a drink.
“Well, picture me confused,” says Buffy. “I thought this is what you wanted.”
Spike scoffs. “What I want— This vanishing act’s right liberating for you, isn’t it? Go anywhere you want, do anything you want. Or anyone.”
“What are you talking—”
“The only reason you’re here, is that you’re not here.”
“Right, of course. As usual, there’s something wrong with Buffy. She came back all wrong.” Buffy sits up on the bed, and the sheet falls down to her waist. “You know, I didn’t ask for this to happen to me.”
Even if she didn’t ask for it Spike thinks she’s enjoying it, he finishes off his drink.
“No. Maybe ’cause for the first time since… I’m free.” Buffy throws aside the sheet. “Free of rules and reports. Free of this life.”
“Free of life?” asks Spike. “Got another name for that: dead.”
“Why do you always have to— I thought we were having fun.” Buffy presses herself up against him.
Spike grabs Buffy’s shoulders and pushes her away. “Yeah, now! But sooner or later, your chums are going to work out a way to bring you back to living colour.” He lets go of her. “You need to go. Get dressed, if you can find your clothes, and push off, ’cause if I can’t have all of you, I’d rather—” Spike breaks off and looks down below his waist. “Hey! That’s cheating.”
Willow sits at a computer terminal in the Espresso Pump. She has papers from tire dealers and auto paint shops scattered around her on the table. She types a query into the DMV database she has broken into, and waits for the result. She takes a sip from a bottle of water.
The query is taking too long. She taps her fingers nervously as she watches the progress bar slowly move across the screen. She looks around to see if anyone is watching her, and reaches her hand out toward the screen. She pauses.
Willow drops her hand, and lets the query complete on its own. She starts copying the displayed addresses down on a pad of paper.
Buffy walks down the street kicking a crushed pop can ahead of her. She can’t believe that Spike threw her out. “Did I, like, fall into some backward dimension here?” she mutters to herself. “Is this bizarro world? And after he’s always going on and on about being the only one that understands me. Oh, he’s just so—”
A group of three kids is walking the other way. Buffy bumps into a couple of them as she walks between them.
“Hey, I’m walking here!” says Buffy. They look confused.
Buffy keeps walking and kicks the can again. “Insensitive. That’s what he is.”
Buffy enters through the back door of her house, and calls out for Willow and Dawn. She doesn’t get any answer, so she goes to the fridge to look for something to eat.
Dawn quietly opens the back door, and peeks around. The coast seems to be clear so she comes in and quietly closes the door behind her.
“There you are!” says Buffy.
Dawn starts, and looks around. “Buffy? Where are you?”
“I’m invisible. Check this out.” Buffy pulls a pizza box out of the fridge and floats it over toward the counter. “Whoo…whoo…unidentified flying pizza coming in for a landing!”
Dawn is not amused. She’s freaked. Buffy admits that her pizza gag wasn’t very funny, but she should get points for spontaneity. Dawn just wants her to stop.
Buffy apologises. “I didn’t mean to freak you out.”
“What would you think would happen?” asks Dawn. “You’re freakin’ invisible, Buffy.” Buffy tells Dawn that Xander and Anya are busy working on it, trying to mulder out what happened. Dawn thinks that Buffy should be working on that too. “Do you even care about— about who did this to you or—or if you’re going to be stuck this way? You’re making jokes and flying pizzas!”
“I don’t think that’s—”
“I can’t talk to you like this! I can’t see you! How can I talk to you if I can’t see you?” Dawn bumps into Buffy as she leaves the kitchen. She runs upstairs to her room.
Buffy calls after Dawn, but then she sees the light blinking on her answering machine. She goes to replay the message. “Buffy, it’s Xander. Where are you? Listen, we got a new problem here.”
“Tell her,” says Anya’s voice in the background.
“I’m trying to,” says Xander. “Anya and I think whatever made you invisible is slowly killing you.”
“Tell her about the pudding!” says Anya.
“Anya! Buff, if we don’t— if this isn’t reversed, you’re going to…well, dissolve—or fade—into nothing.”
Buffy is stunned. “Wow.”
Willow checks out the next address on her list. She sees the geek’s van parked in the driveway, partially covered by a tarp. She walks around to the back of the house.
Willow opens the cellar door, and walks down the stairs into the lair. She looks around and sees schematics for the invisibility ray gun on the whiteboard, and plans spread out on a drafting table. She’s in the right place. She looks around some more and finds the gun itself sitting on its stand on the workbench. She pulls the work light over so she can get a better look at it.
“Now!” yells Warren, and invisible hands grab Willow by the arms. A roll of duct tape floats in front of Willow, and invisible Warren pulls off a strip. “Congratulations. You’re our first hostage.” He puts the strip over Willow’s mouth.
Buffy calls up to Dawn on her way out the front door to tell her she’s going to look for Xander. She’s interrupted by the phone ringing. She runs back in to answer it. “Xander?”
“Don’t talk. Just listen, Slayer,” says the voice on the phone. “You don’t have a lot of time.”
“Who is this?” asks Buffy. “You sound familiar.”
Jonathan deepens his voice. “I’m nobody. No one you know. We’ve got your friend Willow, and if you don’t want anything nasty to happen to her, you better meet us…alone.”
“Where?” asks Buffy.
Buffy moves through the turnstile at the entrance to the video arcade. The doorman looks around, but shrugs when he doesn’t see anyone.
Willow is leaning against a pinball game at the back of the arcade. She’s apparently alone, and the invisibility ray gun is sitting on top of the pinball machine behind her. Warren whispers that she won’t get hurt if she doesn’t move.
Buffy sees Willow and pushes past some people playing games to get to her. She asks Willow if she’s okay, and asks where the bad guys are.
“All around you, Slayer, so don’t try anything,” says Warren.
Willow tells Buffy that he’s bluffing. She’s pretty sure that there’s just three of them.
“More than enough to cause some serious carnage, right, guys?” asks Warren. He doesn’t get any response. “Guys? Guys!”
A nearby video game is playing itself. “Kick! Use the kick!” says Jonathan.
“I tried that,” says Andrew. “He keeps blocking it with his drunken monkey fist!”
“Ooh, scary video carnage,” says Buffy.
Jonathan and Andrew lose another round of their game, and Warren lets them know that the Slayer is there. They apologise. They didn’t see her.
Warren thinks they should move to a less crowded area, “Like over there.”
“Where?” asks everyone.
“Over—” Warren picks up the invisibility gun, and grabs Willow’s elbow. “Follow me.” He drags Willow over between the ball pit and an air hockey game near the back door.
Buffy has figured out that these are the guys that did this to her. Jonathan tells her it was an accident. Buffy knows that voice. “Who’s that?”
Jonathan deepens his voice again. “Nobody you know.”
Willow tells Buffy that these are the guys from her mystery van, which doesn’t surprise Buffy at all. “So what annoying thing are you going to do to me now?”
“Save your life,” says Warren. “Make you visible.” Buffy doesn’t feel inclined to believe him, but Willow tells her that they told her everything about what happened, and that something’s happening to her. Buffy says she already knows that she’s fading away.
Warren aims the invisibility gun in Buffy’s general direction. “I can fix that. Pick up that air hockey mallet on the table.”
“What for?” asks Buffy.
“It’ll give me a target to aim at,” says Warren.
Buffy picks up one of the mallets off the air hockey table.
“Okay now. Hold still, and all your troubles will soon be gone.” Warren starts to power up the gun.
Willow looks down at the gun. “You’re on the wrong setting!”
“What?” asks Warren.
“The gun: it’s not set for reversing the particle ionization! It’ll accelerate her molecular dissolution! I saw the plans!”
Warren tells Willow to mind her own business, but Jonathan and Buffy want to know what Willow is talking about.
“Buffy, he’s trying to kill you!” says Willow. Warren hits her with the butt of the gun, and Willow falls to the floor.
“Willow!” shouts Buffy, and she throws the air hockey mallet in her hand at Warren’s head. It hits, and he drops the gun.
Buffy is done playing with these guys. She’s going to beat the snot out of them now.
“You’ll have to find me first,” says Warren. “And there’s three of us against just one of you.”
“Hey, you lied to us,” says Jonathan.
“Fight her yourself,” says Andrew.
Warren doesn’t think Buffy is going to care about that. “I go down, we all go down.”
“And I promise you’re all going down,” says Buffy.
Warren thinks that Buffy is being overly optimistic. “You’ll find that we are not so easy to—” Buffy bounces a second air hockey mallet off his head. “Ow! Get her!”
Willow sits up, and tries to track the sound of the invisible fight going on around her. She sees the invisibility gun lying on the floor under a pinball machine, and crawls toward it. Other people in the arcade have noticed the noise, and start looking around, trying to figure out what’s going on.
“Wait a minute, wait a minute! Who’s biting my leg?” asks Jonathan.
“Sorry,” says Andrew. “Where is she?”
“Here.” Buffy knocks Andrew flying, and he smashes the glass in the pinball machine he lands on. That’s enough to make the other people in the arcade start running for the exits.
Warren tells Jonathan they should split up to make it tougher to for Buffy to find them. “You go that way.”
“Which way?” asks Jonathan.
“That way. Over—”
Buffy throws Warren into the ball pit. “Just keep talking, boys.”
Willow gets the invisibility gun and flips the switches to the correct settings for making things visible again.
Buffy catches Jonathan. “Ow—ow, ow! Watch the chest hair!” he cries.
“I know that voice. You—you’re—”
Willow fires the gun toward the sound of Buffy’s voice, and she and Jonathan both appear.
Buffy has Jonathan by the lapels of his jacket and is holding him with his feet dangling a foot off the floor. She takes a quick look down, and sees herself before looking up again. “Jonathan?” She tosses him away, and he falls to the floor. “You have chest hair?”
Willow fires toward the ball pit, and Warren reappears.
“Warren?” asks Buffy.
Willow fires at the pinball machine, and Andrew appears on top of it.
Buffy looks at Andrew for a moment. “Who are you?”
“Andrew.” Buffy still looks confused. “I summoned the flying monkeys that attacked the high school. During the school play, you know?” Buffy looks over at Willow, but she’s drawing a blank too.
Jonathan gets to his feet, and helps Andrew down off the machine while Warren crawls out of the ball pit. They tell her Andrew is Tucker’s brother.
“Oh,” say Buffy and Willow.
Buffy looks at the three geeks. “So you three have what, banded together to be pains in my ass?”
“We’re your arch nemesises…ees,” says Warren. “You may have beaten us this time, Slayer, but next time… Um…” He looks around at Jonathan. “Uh, next time…”
“Maybe not!” Jonathan throws down a smoke bomb in front of them.
Buffy and Willow cough, and wave away smoke. They look over toward the back door.
“What do you mean, it’s locked?” asks Warren. “You were supposed to check it!”
“I forgot,” says Andrew.
Buffy holds out her hand toward them. “I give you my arch nemesises…ees.”
A security guard comes up behind Buffy and Willow, and asks what’s going on. They turn to look at him. “I got a bunch of scared kids saying this place is haunted,” says the guard.
Buffy and Willow look back toward the door, and see it swinging shut. The geeks got it open, and they’re gone.
“Oh my god, Buffy,” says Willow.
“I know. They’re gone. I guess we should chase them.”
That isn’t what Willow is Oh-my-goding. “No, your hair. It is adorable.”
Buffy and Willow step out onto the sidewalk in front of the arcade. Willow still has the invisibility gun. Buffy thinks it’s pretty neat that Willow tracked down the van. She asks how she did it.
“The hard way,” says Willow. “The spell-free way. The oh-my-god-my-head’s-going-to-fall-off, my-feet-are-killing-me way.” She sighs, and sits down on the curb. “I don’t know how I got through this day.”
Buffy sits beside Willow. “Well, the important thing is that you did. It’s a good first step.”
Willow asks how Buffy’s doing with the post invisibleness. Buffy says she’s okay. “I still have to do some damage control from my giddy-fest. Dawn was pretty freaked out. The whole ‘taking a vacation from me’ thing didn’t work out too well.”
“Tell me about it.”
“Except…when I got Xander’s message that I was…fading away…I actually got scared.”
“Well, yeah. Who wouldn’t?” asks Willow.
Buffy looks at Willow. “Me. I wouldn’t. Not too long ago I probably would’ve welcomed it. But I realized—I’m not saying that I’m doing back flips about my life, but—I didn’t, I don’t…want to die. That’s something, right?”
“It’s something,” says Willow. “So I guess we both made good first steps.”
“I guess.”
“Yay for us,” says Willow with a distinct lack of enthusiasm.
Buffy echos her feelings. “Yay.”