Eighty Eight Miles Per Hour
Chapter Two

by Jared Ornstead
aka Lionheart
aka Skysaber

OoOoO

"So. A DeLorean?" The younger Xander asked.

"I find a sense of irony to be surprisingly prevalent in the universe," Doc Brown replied as the two men were putting away the Iron Man costume alongside the Sylia Stingray one in a suitcase beside the time vehicle. "I needed a car with stainless steel construction for the flux dispersal, went looking, and what did I find? It was not a 57 Chevy. So, I took it as a good omen and went to work. Indeed, I was fortunate, as it matched what I recalled of my original calculations precisely. I didn't have to do the spatial equations over again."

Xander shifted a little from foot to foot as he thought about that, still chewing over favored options. "So, if the magic from other worlds doesn't work right in this one, why didn't you dress as the most powerful magician of our world?"

Doc Brown grimaced as he told his young friend. "I'm afraid that would be Willow. I could easily enough have stolen a set of her clothes and used that as a costume to dress as her, as my responsibilities among the group had been steadily reduced to where the only thing they would trust me to do was their laundry. However, she had gained an addiction to dark magic that never quite left her, and I could not dress as her without risk of acquiring the same. That was unacceptable, as on more than one occasion she attempted to destroy the Earth, and if I were to acquire that temptation as well, then all would be lost."

Xander felt like he'd just had a fundamental underpinning of his universe ripped out. "I'm stunned, except, you know, for saying this."

Doctor Brown turned around to face the younger man. "Be reassured, that may not happen to your Willow. On this planet I was hoping to avert that disaster by preventing her from wearing a ghost costume this Halloween. That event was one of two that established a link between her and necromancy and dark magic that influenced and corrupted her for the remainder of her life." The scientist gave that disturbing grin again as he clapped hands in what was meant to be a reassuring fashion on his young double's shoulders. "So, last night I shot Willow with a tranq dart while she was still in her room at her home!"

"WHAT?" The young Xander freaked out. "You SHOT Willow?"

"No, no, no. Only with a tranquilizer. She's fine!" The Doctor reassured. "Then I called up Buffy's mother, pretending to be Willow's father, and excused her for the evening. Never having spoken to Willow's real father, Joyce took my call at face value, and you and Buffy never suspected a thing."

The scientist paused, thinking about adding more about the boy's oldest friend, but shook his head. The young Xander was already distressed enough. He didn't need to know what the Willow of the future had become. So, therefore, he needed a distraction. Swiftly, the scientist changed the subject, answering the original question, "But the major reason why I don't condone the native style of magic for our world is that every practitioner of it became a demon when our world was sucked into Hell, with their power and skill directly proportionate to the type of demon they became."

Xander felt cold, and replied numbly. "Yeah. That would be a good reason not to do that."

"Indeed," the mad scientist agreed, slamming the trunk closed. "You should have seen Giles." The scientist shivered. "I was always told he was quite the sorcerer in his youth. I never believed it until I saw what he had become. Cordelia was one of the lucky ones, she'd died before this all came to pass."

Then Doc Brown was darting off, and, after a moment of horror, Xander followed. "Wait. Wait, Doc. We should be helping them!"

"We are, my young friend. We are!" The older Xander shot his double a disarming grin that, while just as mad as all the others, managed this time to be encouraging. "Why, just a few more things and we can really begin to make a difference! C'mon! Before we leave to acquire new costumes we've got to get that memory pattern from Tony Stark programmed into you! Otherwise it could take you as many as thirty years to learn all he knew!"

A somewhat confused Xander headed after the Doc up those stairs.

After they both were gone, a figure in a dark trenchcoat materialized in the basement garage and glanced about in distaste at the super-secret underground headquarters that never ought to have been there. But, with just a small adjustment, it would never be seen again, so it would not have an impact on the destined scenario.

Whistler really hated jobs like this one. But he was bound to his duty. Sliding down under the car on one of those rolling planks that he'd forgotten the name of, he clipped a couple of wires, stripped the ends, and cross-connected them. Then he emplaced a small bomb-like device on some kind of detonator.

Sometimes securing the Balance really sucked.

OoOoO

"So, I'm going to become Iron Man." Xander slapped his hands together and rubbed them in glee. "I can handle that."

Doc Brown smirked, adjusting the machine. "I do not doubt your enthusiasm." He gestured his young friend into the seat and affixed the headband. "Ready?"

Xander gave him a thumbs up. "Yep. Give it all ya got, Doc."

With a huge grin to encourage his friend, the white haired scientist hit the red button on the keyboard, before shaking his head at the now comatose youth. "He'll be out for hours, trying to assimilate that much data."

And Doc Brown knew, having already been through it. He went to serve himself another cup of cocoa, and while tipping back the beverage, spoke to the air, "I wonder what his reaction will be when he discovers only half the technology we need for a proper Iron Man suit Tony Stark invented, and the other half never existed here. The Marvel world abounds with geniuses with dozens of patents, after all. With the sort of technology they use there, that has to change what resources are available to members of the scientific community."

He shook his head. "I did warn him that I'd never met a scientist who could invent all of the technology he uses." The Doctor stopped, thinking that over with a considering look to his face. "Yet that fact alone argues that we would do well to dress as more scientists out of Iron Man's world, just to possess more pieces of the technology pie the natives there consider ordinary."

He jotted 'Reed Richards' and 'Doctor Doom' down on a piece of paper and shoved it in his lab coat pocket. He poured himself another cup, musing that at least Tony Stark had a business sense that might be useful, and experience building up a technology corporation using his own patents.

Hours later, the young man awoke.

"Alright!" Xander cheered, then bounded down to the lab, then halted on seeing what was available there. "None of these are the right tools!" he proclaimed, as though cheated.

"I know that." Doc Brown said from the door, smiling. "I've had the same download you do, and truly amazingly advanced science appears to be the rule on Tony Stark's homeworld. I don't even know what principles most of the tools he expects to use operate on. But they manipulate molecules as easily as we staple paper. Still, that should not be too surprising, considering how many powersuits and other fantastic devices exist on that world, and the wealth of machinery Tony Stark was able to fit inside something less bulky than one of our scuba suits. But still, the only way to resolve our problem is to learn more of that world's science. Come along! I am thinking the right costumes could teach us most of what we want to know. Which do you prefer to dress as, Mister Fantastic or Doctor Doom?"

Xander eagerly followed his mentor to the time machine.

OoOoO

"So, how many scientists have you collected so far?' Xander asked from the passenger seat as Doctor Brown pulled the DeLorean out of the hidden underground parking garage.

"Actually, this is a new thing for me. I've only recently discovered it," the older man replied. "At first my obsession was on getting 'real power' as quickly as possible, and went for the most powerful costumes I could find. That is why I tried so many superheroes and mystic warriors. My focus was on fighting vampires, not on learning technology. Contrary to what you might think, I had only a few dozen or so uses of plutonium. I have not had infinite time to discover what worked and what didn't. It was only after spending virtually all my fuel supply on disappointments that I discovered I could rely on technology."

"Yeah, about that. Didn't you already invent fusion once? I mean, there was that flying, time traveling train there at the end of the final movie." The kid watched the secret garage close.

The Doctor gave a loopy grin, pulling them out onto the open road. "I think you are forgetting something: The real Doctor Brown was at first trapped in the old west, even when most of his original time machine worked. With the tools and equipment he had, he couldn't even repair a broken chip, so buried the DeLorean in a mine for his future self to work on."

"So, how did that train get built?" the teen pressed.

"You really haven't watched that movie recently, have you?" The Doctor asked with mild amusement, speaking as he began to accelerate the car. "He was only able to construct that train when Marty left his hoverboard behind. He was able to cannibalize that futuristic device for parts to make a second time machine. Then, only once he got back to the future was he able to have it converted for flight and fusion. If you'll recall, his final line in that movie was in reply to Marty's question: So where to now? Back to the Future? And Doctor Brown shook his head and told him 'Already been there'. Only then did that train take off and fly away."

"So, how did you get it to go to the future in the first place?" the young teen tried not to watch or think too hard about what was happening as the car got up to sixty, even though he was finding it impossible not to.

"You don't think they ran a hoverboard off a simple D-cell do you?" The Doc grinned. "No, the batteries of that movie's future have advanced along with their fusion and other power systems, and the ones used to support flight can be overcharged to an amazing degree, if you don't mind sacrificing their longevity. It's all part of an emergency mechanism, to enable a powered landing, even if other systems fail. And, with that in mind, it wasn't too hard to stick a lightning rod hooked to that battery on top of a mountain known for being struck by lightning and wait for a storm. With a battery to hold that charge, the timing was quite simple. No repeat of that split second stunt we had to pull the first time with that clock tower."

"Oh," Xander couldn't think of anything else to say, caught between glee and dread as the speedometer crept up to eighty.

Glee because he couldn't believe he might actually be doing this, reliving a movie experience in person, and dread, because part of him feared he might actually be doing this, and from what he recalled of the movie, one screw-up could wipe him out of existence.

Lightning flashed around the car, and one second they were in the outskirts of Sunnydale, the next on a blasted road under a purple sky shot through with orange and red streamers with Doctor Brown barely having time to swerve to avoid the burned out hulk of a bus lying across the road in their way.

Then, with a flash, everything went dead and they hit the bus anyway.

Moments later one of the DeLorean's doors popped open. "What happened?" Xander demanded as he climbed out from the vehicle, holding his bruises. Then his face went slack, and he took three stumbling steps to look out over a sinkhole where Sunnydale used to be.

"This looks like my homeworld," Doctor Brown stepped up beside him, holding a gauze bandage to the side of his face where a cut had been opened by the collision. He'd had to crawl out the passenger side door as the driver's side one was flat up against the bus, and probably wouldn't open again without some time in a garage. He gagged, made a face and covered his nose. "Smells like it too."

"This is your homeworld?" Xander gestured to indicate the dead grass, mutant, evil things passing for vegetation, and bizarre sky. There was a rancid stench on the air that constantly changed from one equally foul combination of awful odors to another, and there was an oppressive heat that had both men instantly soaked with sweat.

Not to mention the complete absence of Sunnydale behind them.

"This looks like something out of Mad Max!" Xander cried, pointing to the wrecked and burned out vehicles nearby. Everything man-made that could be seen was broken.

"Shhh!" The Doc grabbed his young friend's mouth and drew him into cover inside the wreck of a gutted SUV, gesturing with his eyes for Xander to look skyward.

The young man did so, and stilled as he saw a major demon fly by.

It was hard to miss something roughly twenty stories tall.

When it was gone, Doc whispered, "We're lucky that was a big one. They only prey on other demons. Anything smaller would have been attracted by all your shouting. C'mon!" Doc dragged Xander back to their time vehicle, quickly crawling underneath while his friend stared around in shock.

"Just as I thought." Doctor Brown exclaimed, coming out from under the vehicle bearing a bomb-like object he'd pulled out from the car's internal workings. "An EMP device. All of our onboard computers are scrambled. The memory cores have dumped, their data lost!"

"So we're lost, just like in the Slider's show?" The young Xander asked in fear.

He was answered by another grin, before the older him began diving into his pockets in search of something. "Fortunately, I anticipated this reaction, and prevented its success by the simple expedient of writing down your universe's address on this slip of paper!" The Doctor took said slip out of his coat pocket and showed it off to Xander with a too-wide grin.

"Great!" Xander began bouncing on the balls of his feet. "So that means we can go right back home!"

"Unfortunately, no." Dr. Brown shook his head. "This is not the first time I have tangled with the so-called Powers That Be, and let me reassure you from the start: they are not benign or benevolent, whatever they want you to believe. It was their plan all along that our world descend into madness and become just another Hell, and they were somehow enabled to play with the strings of Fate and Destiny to not only allow it to happen, but make any other outcome virtually impossible. If they are interfering with us this early, then to go back now would only encourage them to eliminate our interference again, only to be more successful this time. Seeing as how they can come and go whenever and wherever they will, it would be beyond human ability to stop them from interfering in some fundamental way that could destroy all we attempt to accomplish. In fact, they have done exactly that to me before."

"Hold it, Doc. What are you saying?" Xander looked concerned. "That we're stuck out here? That we'll never be able to go home?"

Again that white-haired grin. "Of course not, my boy! We simply have to find some way of preventing their interference. I know not what that could be, but" the doctor brought a confident hand down on the hood of their car. "We have all the time in the universe to find it."

"But, Doc! We've gotta go back! What about my friends?"

"Your friends will never realize you've been gone," Doc stated proudly. "We can return to the precise moment we jumped between dimensions. It'll be like you never left. Besides, we were fortunate this time, as our enemies could have done so much worse than send us across a few dimensions."

"Worse? How could it be worse?" Xander objected.

"Simple. This incident proves they had access to our time machine long enough to make alterations. Think about what could have happened if, instead of activating our Slider device, they instead reprogrammed the time travel function to ignore the control panel and instead take us to that road the moment one of your parents or grandparents were crossing it. Our vehicle, going at 88 miles per hour, without any warning or time to dodge, appears and impacts one of your ancestors. Think about it."

Xander did, and didn't like that thought at all. A crash at that speed, and the kid hit being one of his parents or grandparents so they never grew up and had him. Yeah, that could have officially sucked.

Further thoughts were interrupted by pounding on the inside of their trunk (which, on a DeLorean, was actually under what was normally the hood of the car). Both men rushed over. They opened the lid to find a mass of purple inside.

"What is Catwoman doing in my trunk?" Doctor Brown asked.

"It's Willow!" Xander lunged forward to help his best friend climb free of the vehicle, having seen the person under the costume faster than the former Batman, whose reactions naturally went a bit the other way.

Doc shook himself out of it. "Come on! We've got to get the time vehicle under cover. Fortunately, I have a lab not far from here."

"But how did Willow get here?" Xander demanded, confused.

"That would by Doctor Stingray's doing." The Doc tapped the side of his head. "You know we recall something from our costumes. I have unusual clarity of her memories, both from having 'been' her for thirty years, rather than the usual two hours, and for the transfer of her scientific knowledge later. I don't remember everything, but I know she had a plan to take advantage of my having tranquilized young Willow here. It was her hope to perhaps get the advantage of two costumes herself by recording and transferring Catwoman's skills while both of them were possessed. But traffic held her up, and she only had barely enough time to make it to the recording station herself, leaving Willow in the trunk."

Willow, still being woozy from the powerful tranquilizing drugs, did not reply.

"But why didn't you remember that before?" Xander pled, helping Willow to the passenger seat while Doc put the car in neutral.

"Costume memories aren't real unless reinforced. Usually that takes time and study. I had no reason to remember that until I saw her. Now get over here and help me push!"

OoOoO

"So this is your secret workshop? I was expecting something more like a cave." Xander looked around the old church building filled with machine parts in confusion, trying to pretend he had not just been involved in three fights for his life on the way there, against the small demons that were the local wildlife, one of which he could swear had once been a rabbit.

"A common mistake," Doctor Brown reassured him. "But caves are the preferred dwellings of the local demons. You might as well try to hide a pizza by putting it in a frat house refrigerator as try to conceal yourself in a cave on this planet."

"Well, at least we're safe in here." Xander pushed Willow down into a seat on a threadbare couch and crashed down next to her.

"Only after a fashion," the Doc corrected, finding a cutting torch he needed. "Churches that remain on a world converted to Hell no longer afford absolute protection. Instead, compare it to an unpleasant sensation, like perhaps diving into very cold water. A demon can do it if he has a reason. But most prefer to avoid it until necessary. So we are safe, only until one of them senses us and feels hungry enough to come in. So do keep your voice down."

"Xander who is he? Where is this place? What's going on?" While overcoming her tranq dose Willow had been contemplating the purple-red ground in silent horror, and gone catatonic at spotting her first major demon. But now, among more reassuring surroundings had begun to feel safe, and burst out in babble.

"This, young lady, is what your world is going to be in the next twenty years." Doctor Brown answered.

Willow's eyes went to Xander, or the one her age who she recognized as Xander, anyway. He nodded, and said, "This guy is from the future."

"Oh," Willow answered in a very small voice.

Xander gave her a reassuring hug. "Don't worry, Willow. The demons aren't *that* bad. You'll do fine until we get you home."

"But I'm not a hero like Buffy." The girl in a Catwoman costume felt small and weak.

"Pshaw!" Doctor Brown could not constrain his scorn. "Buffy is not a hero. The most effective weapon any true hero has is their mind, and Buffy does all of her thinking with her genitals. Her whole focus was on bouncing from one romantic situation to another, most often with the demons themselves. As far as she was concerned, saving other people from demons came as an unwelcome interruption to her sex life."

"But, she's got that whole super-strength deal going." Willow objected, while the younger Xander stood slack-jawed as the older him's response.

The older Xander was shaking his head sadly. "Being strong or powerful does not make a person a hero. Bulls are both stronger and faster than humans, yet the reason we call them 'hamburger' and eat them daily is that we outthink them. Humans have advantages in critical thinking, tool use, strategy and tactics that make the bulls superior physical abilities useless. But most of all, heroism is a *choice*! So, by that definition, Buffy is not any sort of hero at all. She had power thrust upon her, and never stopped whining about how she wanted it to go away - never, not in thirty years, did she ever once stop trying to escape her responsibilities. No, she was never any sort of hero. In fact, she did us more harm than good. What we *ought* to have been doing all along is applying those same human smarts vs creature strengths to demon hunting. But we can't do that when Buffy is around, because whatever her value as a front-line fighter, she more than makes up for in her errors and general incompetence as a leader - and she INSISTS on being the leader! Even though in general her problem solving skills can be paraphrased as 'Hulk SMASH!'."

"No." Doctor Brown insisted. "What we ought to be doing is NOT following a musclebound idiot with delusions of grandeur, getting into glorified mud wrestling matches with demons as a diversion from regular boughts of teen angst, but using our innate human cunning to outwit them! Magic, strength, these are nothing but tools. Buffy does not use her tools wisely, and if we cannot outthink our foes, we cannot win at all. Believe me, I've been around enough, recording enough data to know. We started off young and desperate, got successful, got cocky, and after brushing up close against it a number of times, eventually the Big Bads were us, only we'd become too arrogant to know it. Willow was the first, but not the last of us, to try and end our world, and one of those attempts succeeded."

Willow was frozen speechless, and Xander felt compelled to apologize by saying, "This guy is sorta an older version of me. So he knows what he's talking about."

Willow felt faint.

Xander felt compelled to change the subject. "So, Doc, about those Powers That Be you mentioned, can you give us the lowdown on them?"

"Indeed I shall." The Doctor burst into motion, grabbing at charts amidst old piles of paper. "I trust you know what a bureaucracy is. But nevertheless, allow me to explain it: It is a system whereby the responsibility of government is spread out over a great number of people. This allows the workload to be divided as many times as necessary so that no one person is overloaded. Now, the Eastern religions have postulated a Celestial Bureaucracy, whereby Heaven is run by this same system. Do you follow me so far?"

"Yes, Doc." Xander managed, distracted as he noticed Willow's frightened nods.

"Good," the mad scientist unintentionally overrode whatever the younger kid had been about to say next. "Now as you are well aware a bureaucracy can be corrupted. The way they are supposed to work, minor functionaries will handle minor duties, and when some large issue arises in their bailiwick, they are to pass it on to those higher in authority. But it is ultimately up to those minor functionaries to be responsible and report things accurately. Until they choose to notify their superiors, those superiors remain ignorant of any issues."

The mad scientist leaned close to the younger pair. "So, I want you to think for a moment. In the real world when bureaucrats go bad they abuse their authority and embezzle money or other assets, correct? Well, should the same thing be possible in an organization that ran worlds, what do you think those corrupt minor functionaries could do?"

Xander felt a chill pass down his spine. "But, wouldn't they get caught?"

Doctor Brown was upright, pacing around the workshop now. "Indeed they would. But, as in the real world, they plan for that eventuality. Where a normal bureaucrat might funnel their gains into offshore accounts and escape to someplace that doesn't have extradition treaties, a bureaucrat in a spiritual organization might do something very similar."

The older man hauled out a set of large, color photographs depicting creatures out of nightmare. "And *this* is the result! My boy, our worlds are being stolen by members of whatever spiritual organization is supposed to run them. Minor functionaries have decided to usurp the ordinary Destiny of our worlds, and THIS," he shook the photos, "is their aim!"

Xander took hold of one of the pictures, conscious of a terrified-silent Willow checking them out with him as he looked at a nightmare made flesh. "What is this?"

When Doc Brown spoke it was slow and serious. "That, my boy, is one of the so-called Powers That Be. Normally a petty bureaucrat. However, instead of using anonymous Swiss bank accounts and running to an island somewhere, to escape the judgments that would surely fall upon them for having plundered this reality for all it was worth, they have joined the other side, transforming this world into Hell as their shelter from Divine Retribution, and using the power plundered from it to become Hellgods."

"Wait a minute. 'Powers That Be'? What kind of a name is that?" Willow blurted.

"It is one of the clues that alerted me to what was going on." Doc scowled. "A god or major power is not afraid to go by a recognizable name. So I did some looking in the Watcher archives and other sources, and found them to be a group of minor spiritual functionaries who are supposed to see to the smooth running of this planet, but as we know they are instead working to corrupt it."

"So, if they are minor bureaucrats, what's to stop us from going to their boss?" Xander asked.

"They are." The Doc answered. "Imagine, if you will, trying to get in contact with a business executive to complain about his secretary - but that secretary is the one who opens all his mail and screens all of his calls. Naturally, I don't understand the particulars, so I will speak in generalities. But I think we can trust that, as insiders to the organization that is supposed to be running this world, they know the system better than we, and know just exactly how to disable the normal alarms that should exist to stop this sort of thing from happening. The man who maintains your burglar alarm is the one best able to defeat it, after all. I have also verified that they have somehow cut us off from contacting anyone that would put a stop to their manipulations. So I use the secretary analogy. We can't phone for help because they are the ones handling the call."

"So what can we do about it?" Xander demanded, feeling helpless.

"Nothing at all, at least directly." Doc admitted. "You will never even meet one in person until they have already totally succeeded in their aims and ascended to Hellgod status, ruling over a broken world. But they do use servants of their own. If you meet anything that identifies itself as a Balance Demon, kill it if you can."

"You know, Balance doesn't sound so bad." Xander mentioned lightly.

The response from his older self was almost explosive.

"Bah! Balance has nothing to do with it. Look at your own life experience so far. You have been surrounded by demons and the forces of Hell all your life. Well, where are the angels and forces of Heaven? If Balance were the goal, Balance would require them to be just as prevalent, since their opposites are already present. You can't fill one side of the scale and put nothing on the other. Balance doesn't work that way. Some might argue that Heaven is always helping. I'd say that help has to be pretty significant if it is supposed to equal the direct and personal involvement of the Forces of Darkness in overwhelming numbers, but I have yet to see any of it. More to the point, for twenty years our group fought off at least annual attempts to transform our world into Hell. You've already faced one of those. Some were escaped by only the narrowest margins and at great personal sacrifice. I lost my eye to one of those. You would think, if Balance were being observed, there would be exactly as many attempts, just as capable of success, to turn our world into a form of Heaven. But there has not been even one, and with the mystic powerhouses on our side, we would have sensed it. No, Balance to these people was nothing more than a convenient excuse, a buzzword that people respect and they could hide their activities behind. It had no more substance to it than a politician's promise not to raise taxes. They do not seek after Balance. As I said before, their aim is to transform our worlds into Hell, and I have seen them do it."

Doctor Brown spread his arms, indicating the oddly colored world filled with demons and strange smells. "You're living in one now! This used to be just like your world. Look at it! Is this what either of you want for your future?"

"No, Doc," Xander could admit to being more than a little creeped out by this place. It was like a bad cartoon, and the wildlife had already tried to eat him.

Doctor Brown spun a wrench around in his fingers. "Now, I just need to perform some minor repairs, and we can use the vehicle to get out of here."

"So, back to the costume shop?" Xander hoped.

"Remember how I said that I had had run-ins with the Powers-That-Be before?" Doc Brown asked without looking up from the repairs he was making. "They alerted me that no more time travel in their domain would be tolerated, and proved they had the power to alter my past in such a way as to wipe me out of existence. Still, each set of Powers That Be rules over only a single world in the multiverse. I was able to escape mine by going to yours. Now I believe a minor alteration to the settings of our Slider device could take us to a world not too unlike this one, where hopefully Ethan Rayne is pulling his costume tricks again."

"Ok, Doc." Xander shrugged.

Willow had started rubbing her nose. "Anything to escape the smell," she agreed. And as she said it, Xander had to grimace and nod in agreement. So far the stench of Hell reeked in a whole new and entirely revolting way each minute, so there was no chance of ever getting used to it. The stench was almost worse than the threat of being eaten by a demon.

"Believe me, the food tastes worse than the smells," Doctor Brown reassured.

OoOoO

Xander was sitting in the passenger seat, holding Willow, still in her Catwoman costume, bridal-style in his lap to fit in the cramped space, when the back wall of their church was torn open by a two-story tall menace that looked like classic winged fiend.

"Punch it!" Xander screamed.

Doctor Brown didn't need to be told, having already put their vehicle into gear and rammed down the gas pedal, smashing through the thin boards he'd used for a garage door on the major hole in the side of the ruined church building.

The demon scattered apart the remainder of the church like it was made of child's blocks as it followed, shrieking in delight in the hunt, after them.

They careened around a corner, dodging an overturning milk truck overgrown with a weird fungus that blinked at them with eyestalks, before pulling onto a more clear section of road, the demon taking wing to follow along behind them.

Doc hit a control on the dashboard, and the familiar doughnut shaped ripple in space formed before their vehicle, like a drain on the pool of reality, and they drove forward into the vortex, escaping that world.

Xander and Willow both breathed sighs of relief as the smells were gone, and they appeared in an ordinary, not purple-orange, night, only to have the demon pop through the vortex behind them.

OoOoO

Author's Notes:

I would have been happy to have them drive away in something approaching peace and safety. But I realize our action-addicted people of today want some destruction and drama. So I hope you enjoyed that closing scene.