"Giles!" Buffy shouted. "Stop!"

Giles slammed on the breaks, causing them all to nearly go flying.

Buffy jumped out of the car, and raced over, sweeping the Doctor (standing by the side of the road) into a great big hug.

"You made it out!" Buffy said.

The Doctor grinned. "Course I did. Fine and dandy. She just wanted a bit of a chat, is all." He suddenly looked far more serious. "Did you talk to Spike?"

Buffy grabbed him by the hand, and dragged him back to the car. "Much talkiness, much infoness. I'll tell you on the way. You know she's on her way to blow up a supervolcano, right?"

She yanked open the door to the car.

"No, she forgot to mention that," the Doctor said. "Although — she did seem pretty certain she'd found a way to destroy Seo for good. I assume that'd be it."

Giles took one look at the Doctor — and sighed. "Buffy," he said, warily, "you do realize that this car only seats five, right?"

"We'll scrunch. Dawn's pretty tiny." Buffy slid into the front, and shut the door — to make it clear that she wasn't the one scrunching.

A lot of scrunching and shouting and stuffing-Fritos-bags-into-the-trunk and squeezing-in later, and they were off, again. Everyone explained to the Doctor what had happened and what they'd found out, in great detail.

"Right," the Doctor said, taking it all in. "Well, it's a mantle plume. Not exactly the easiest thing to manipulate, but given that she's got access to an astonishing amount of higher dimensional mathematics that give her a power even my lot couldn't fully understand… she could probably find a way to pull it off." He tugged at his earlobe. "Shame we can't ask Seo. She's the one with an instinct with higher dimensional type things."

"Yes, but how do we stop the supervolcano?" Giles asked.

The Doctor blew a breath out of his cheeks. "Well, thing is, Yellowstone still has about 5,000 years more on it, before it erupts. So how to stop it all depends on how, precisely, she'll be causing it to explode 5,000 years early, in the first place."

Everyone looked at him, expectantly.

"And that's something I simply don't know," the Doctor admitted. "I could think of numerous ways to pull it off. The question is… which did she choose?" The Doctor scratched the back of his neck. "Go back in time and make the cycle happen a bit earlier? Fiddle with the core-mantle boundary to create a greater buildup of pressure over the last 5,000 years? Or is it something to do with the nuclear war? Drop some sort of bomb, here, and that'll do the trick — no temporal manipulation involved."

Willow tried to squirm, but got accidentally elbowed by Xander. He jerked out of the way, and elbowed Dawn. She shouted, in annoyance, kicking her feet.

"Okay, Fritos emergency!" Xander decided, handing Dawn the bag.

She took it, paused, then stopped kicking.

"And… crisis averted," said Xander.

"Course, she might not be blowing it up at all," the Doctor offered, still thinking. "Easiest way to destroy a glove wouldn't be with a supervolcano and all those nasty pyroclastic flows. Much better to use a sort of LIP — like the Snake River Plain. Course, those flood basalts were caused by a Yellowstone eruption, so…"

He trailed off, in thought.

"What's he saying?" Dawn asked, through a mouthful of Fritos.

Xander reached for another bag. "I'm pretty sure he's saying we need more Fritos."

Willow handed Xander another bag. "Buffy," Willow called, to the front. "Tell the Doctor about — you know — the other thing."

Buffy frowned, looking back at them. "Huh?" Then, remembering, "Oh, yeah! Right!" She pulled a slip of paper out of her pocket and handed it to the Doctor. "We found Drusilla."

The Doctor snatched the paper from her and unfolded it with eager fingers. "Oh! Oh, yes! Oh, that is brilliant!" He beamed at Buffy. "You, Elizabeth, are brilliant! You know that? Brilliantly, brilliantly brilliant!"

Buffy beamed, as if to say, I know. That's why I'm in the front and you guys are scrunching.

"Where is she?" Xander asked, opening the new bag of Fritos. "And… Dawn, can you please get your elbow out of my mouth?"

Dawn pouted, sulking. "I'm the injured person, here. I deserve space."

"No, you don't," said Buffy, reaching back and stealing the Fritos bag from Xander's hands. She popped a Frito into her mouth. "Well? Doctor? Where is she?"

The Doctor blinked. "Somewhere I haven't been in a long, long time." He whistled, impressed, as he shook his head. "One thing I can say… it's the one place that Angelus would never, ever be able to get her. Not in a hundred million years."

"So it's in space and stuff, right?" Dawn asked. Her eyes lit up. "Oh! Can we go into space?" She shoved a handful of Fritos into her mouth, and, through chews, said, "I wanna be all dangling and hair going nuts and flying around and stuff."

The Doctor grimaced. "Considering you're the seventh segment of a six segment Key… I think your going into space might be catastrophic." The Doctor grabbed his sonic screwdriver from Dawn's pocket, only elbowing three other people in the face as he did so. "Sorry, sorry, sorry! Right. Let's see…" He flashed the sonic in the air. "Ooh, would you look at that? Weak spot… right around Yellowstone. Seems someone's been trying to punch a hole through the universe, to create a link between Earth and Drusilla."

Buffy frowned. "Someone? You mean the Goddess, or…?"

The Doctor grinned, and winked.

"You mean Drusilla?" Buffy stared at him like he was crazy. "Drusilla is punching holes in the universe?"

"I thought Drusilla was just a normal human-type person," Xander said, stealing a handful of Fritos from Dawn. "Do normal human-type people generally punch holes in the universe?"

"Well… I did see it happen, once, with the mistress to the King of France," the Doctor admitted. He scrunched up his nose, thinking. Then shook his head. "But… nah! Not enough robots harvesting organs for it to be that."

Giles just pretended that this made complete sense, as he kept driving. "Fortunately for the sanity of us all, we're nearly there."

"Thank you, air!" Xander cried, as he practically fell out of the car. He took in deep lungfuls of it. "I thought I'd be squeezed to death in that doom-machine of yours, Giles."

"It's an automobile with extensive radiation shielding," Giles said, his face very serious. "And it's rather hard to obtain a vehicle like this one, not to mention hard to navigate across all those sections of road that were destroyed or flooded or eroded away — so I hope you're all happy that we got here, at all."

"Not to mention the difficulties of driving puncturable tires over all those igneous rocks," Willow put in, holding up one of the geology books she'd been flipping through on the way. "The igneous rocks can be really sharp, like glass — and that one time, when we lost the road and were wandering around for…!"

"Will, we get that you're smart and we're all very proud of you," said Xander, turning back to her. "But I think the question we're all most concerned about is — how many bags of Fritos do we have left?"

The Doctor ignored them all. He had jumped out of the car and was following the sonic screwdriver to some unknown spot. He then beamed, happily, and jumped up and down.

"Yes! Got it! Brilliant!"

Giles rushed over. "Doctor, how do we stop Yellowstone from exploding?"

"What? Oh. That. Right!" The Doctor bounced on his toes, hands clasped behind his back, thinking. "Well… seems to me… we can't."

Everyone stared at him.

"What?!" they all cried.

"Can't stop Yellowstone, I mean," the Doctor said, "since we don't know what she did to make it go off early. Course, if we had a time machine, could do all sorts. Change the mix of silica and water… relieve the pressure… get ourselves a banana daiquiri…"

Buffy crossed her arms, waiting for the part where he got serious.

"But, 'course, we don't need to stop Yellowstone," said the Doctor, with a cheeky grin. "All we really need to do is retrieve the resurrection gauntlet before she ever creates the explosion, in the first place."

Giles' eyes lit up. "Of course. Retrieve the gauntlet, and we can restore her soul." His joy faltered, for a second. "Assuming that we knew how to restore…"

"Oh, that's easy peasy! We don't have to do anything, to turn her into Seo," the Doctor insisted. "I've spoken with her, and I can assure you – your Goddess is getting more and more ensouled by the minute! All we need to do is keep her from stopping Seo taking over, before the transformation is complete."

Xander slouched. "I know you say that, but the Goddess could have just been messing with us," he pointed out. "So how do you know Miss Evil Hell Goddess is really getting better, and that this isn't all a trick?"

The Doctor took something out of his pocket. "Because she gave me this!"

It was a small, glowing orb, shining in his hands. He grinned at it, as he brought it up to his face.

"Isn't it brilliant? Haven't seen one of these in ages!" he cried.

Giles stepped over to him, squinting. "Is that… an orb of Thessulah?"

"Oh, yes!" the Doctor said. He walked over and dropped it into Willow's hands. "One great big soul-restoring engine, coming right up!" He paused, frowned. "No, wait a tic. That's not right. There were some psionics that went with it." He patted down each of his pockets, in turn, digging through them, until he found a piece of paper and a pen. Then he spun Xander around, leaned the paper on his back, and began writing. "Lessee… lessee…" He scribbled down characters in a complex alien script, peppered with Arabic numeral mathematics. "How did this go, again? Carry the two for the morphic field… add five…" He scratched something out. "No, no… Rassilon's constant. Has to be Rassilon's constant. Then… compensation for the orb." He finished up, and beamed. "Yep, that's it. Perfect."

He turned the paper over, and wrote out something that looked sort of like a spell.

"Wow, I didn't know you were all with the magicness," Buffy commented, looking at him, as he wrote it all down.

"I didn't know Xander was all with the tableness," said Willow.

Xander continued his role as a makeshift table. "What can I say? I must have been an Ikea store, in a former life."

The Doctor didn't stop writing. "Psionics, not magic," he said to Buffy. "Bit of universal manipulation. Small amount of neurochemistry. Bit hard to explain, really." He blew on the paper, to dry the ink. "Sides — last time I met Morgan La Fey, she seemed pretty sure I was Merlin. So I'd better be good at this."

He spun around and handed the paper to Willow.

"That's what we did, last time we gave Angel back his soul," the Doctor said. He winced. "Except I've cut out that bit about the moment of happiness. Nasty, that. Definitely didn't know that was in there. Need to have a chat with the Kalderash, next time I run into them."

For a second, everyone stared at him.

Giles actually took off his glasses and blinked, dumbfounded.

"What?" the Doctor asked.

"You… were there?" Giles cried. "You've known, this entire time, how to restore Angel's soul — and said nothing?!"

The Doctor sighed. "Yes, well, it's not Angel's soul I was worried about."

Buffy looked like she wanted to hit him.

Willow took the paper and the orb, looking them over, curiously. "Yeah, I think I could do this," she decided. Her eyes lit up. "Oh! And then we can do some kind of variation, to get the Goddess' soul back even faster!"

The Doctor shook his head. "Seo's soul wasn't whisked away into the ether, somewhere," he said. "Angelus burnt it to nothing. It's dead. Gone. All that remains is hiding inside that resurrection gauntlet."

"I thought the soul was eternal," said Xander.

"Nearly always," said the Doctor. He scratched the back of his neck. "Like I said… nasty way to go. Very nasty."

"But Seo's gonna come back when we steal the resurrection glove from Evil Hell Goddess lady," Dawn said, excitedly. "And then both her and Angel will be good!"

Buffy stepped in between Dawn and the others, facing her sister with a stern face. "Not 'we'," she said. "You're staying out of this."

Dawn glared at Buffy. "What? That's so not fair!"

"Dawn, you got cut up into little bits, last time you were kidnapped!" Buffy insisted, grabbing her by the hand and reminding her — visually. "I'm not risking anything else happening to you. You're going to stay out of trouble, and…"

"Actually, I think we may need her on this one," the Doctor cut in.

Dawn stuck her tongue out at Buffy.

Buffy spun on him. "Doctor…!"

"Seems to me that, of all of us, there's one person that we know, for a fact, the Goddess won't kill," the Doctor said. "Not when the Goddess is good, not when she's evil, not ever." He pointed at Dawn. "She needs you alive."

"Angel will kill her!" Buffy shouted.

Willow stepped forwards, eyes glowing, body full of bubbly excitement. "But… no! He won't!" She raised up the orb. "Because we're going to give him back his soul. Remember?"

Buffy hesitated.

Then, finally, sighed. And dropped Dawn's hand.

"Well, I guess, if I'm here to protect her…" Buffy started.

The Doctor grabbed her by the arm and yanked her away from her sister. "Ah. Actually, not so much. You're coming with me."

"What?" Buffy yanked her arm out of his grip. "But I can't! Angel…!"

The Doctor leaned over, so he was at her eye level. "Elizabeth," he said. "Let me explain something to you about the Goddess Glorificus. Right now, she's terrified, she's desperate, and she's being limited by a lower-dimensional body and some very intricate mental brainwashing that Seo instilled, a long time ago. But there's one thing Glorificus was known for, on my world: she loves traps."

"I don't…!"

"I struck a deal with her," the Doctor said. "No more WWIII, no more destroying both our lives, undo all the bad stuff and allow Seo to return — and I'll allow Drusilla to remain saved. But now that I've seen where Drusilla's been saved — I'm starting to think that all she really wanted me to do was restore Angel's soul to him before Angelus drove her mad."

"But Doctor, that isn't…!"

"Whatever she's done to Drusilla is allowing Glorificus to make herself a full Hell Goddess," the Doctor said. "And I know that because of the Slayers."

Buffy didn't follow this. "Huh?"

"The Slayers almost always die after their first battle," said the Doctor. "Since right around 1860 — before Seo was killed, but right smack when Drusilla was saved. So that's not the Goddess — that one's Drusilla."

Buffy had to admit, it was a good point.

"There's some way in which I think I'm being tricked, here," the Doctor said. "But I won't find out how, until I see what's actually happened to Drusilla."

"I'm still not leaving Dawn," Buffy insisted. "She needs me."

The Doctor shook his head. "We're the last people she needs. We are the two people that Glorificus knows best and can best manipulate. She's gunning for us, so we've always got a target on our backs. We know the Meyomelae Krvas won't kill Dawn, and the more soul-filled she gets, the more likely it is that she'll treat the others leniently. But you and I are needed elsewhere."

The Doctor buzzed his sonic screwdriver at the air, and it shimmered, before it turned into a swirling blue portal.

"Right there, in fact." The Doctor grinned, waggling his eyebrows at her. "So? Allons-y?"

Buffy sighed, pulling out a stake. "Is it safe?"

"You could say," said the Doctor, yanking the stake out of her hand and tossing it away, "that it's the very definition of safe."

He grinned, took her hand in his.

Together, they walked into the light.