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[Buffy is still in the pit. Giles walks through the clearing, his nose in a book. He looks up when he hears a noise.]
Buffy: Giles, help me!
[Giles looks around nervously, trips, and falls in the pit.]
Giles: Ow! Bloody hell! Buffy, what are you doing here?
Buffy: Well, I was trying to get you to get me out of here.
Giles: A lot of good that's going to do us now.
[Angelus looks over the pit.]
Angelus: Hi, guys. What are you doing?
Buffy: What does it look like we're doing? We're stuck in a hole!
Angelus: Heh heh. I know. Too bad I didn't have time to put something truly nasty in the bottom. As it is, there are just fire ants.
Buffy: Fire ants???
Angelus: Just kidding.
[Xander walks up next to Angelus as Buffy and Giles look up.]
Xander: Hey, Dead Boy. What's up? [looks down] Oh cool! It worked! But what's G-Man doing down there?
Angelus: He tripped. [he helps Giles out of the pit]
Giles: Thanks ever so, Angelus.
Buffy: What about me? Get me outta here! This isn't funny! I hate you guys! I AM THE SLAYER! Get me out now!
Angelus: Now, Buffy. Is this any way to talk to the people you expect to help you out?
[Kelley and Spike suddenly appear.]
Kelley: Hi, guys. What's goin' on?
Spike: [looks down] Oh look. A Slayer trap.
Buffy: Spike! Help me out of here!
Spike: [smirks] Why would I do that?
Buffy: Because you love me?
Spike: So? I'm evil and you treat me like crap. Me and Kelley are going back to the cave now. Ready, Kelley? [grabs Kelley's arm and starts to run off]
Kelley: Wait a second! We just got here!
Spike: Well, I'm ready to go back now!
[Shelley runs toward the group.]
Shelley: Hey, Xander! Look what I found!
Xander: Wow! It's shiny.
Angelus: Hey, that's kinda neat. What is it?
Giles: My word. It's a…I believe it's a rare form of marine dwelling echinoderm.
Spike: Yeah, that's bloody wonderful. Let's GO, Kelley!
Shelley: C'mon guys! There are a whole lot more on the beach. We can have a scavenger hunt!
Angelus: [looks doubtful] But I'm supposed to be evil.
Shelley: Well…we can…play tag while we look at them! And you can act like you're going to eat us!
Angelus: Okay, I can live with that. [frowns] Or not.
[Everyone starts to leave.]
Buffy: [yelling] Why won't you help me? I swear, when I get outta here….
[Kelley snaps her fingers. Buffy disappears from the pit. A faint scream can be heard on the other side of the island as Buffy falls toward the earth.]
Kelley: Hehe, that was fun. [looks around] Did I do that? [smiles] Ok, NOW we can go back to the cave, Spike.
Spike: 'Bout bloody time!
Shelley: [screams as she runs off] Joss owns all the characterrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrs! We're just messing with themmmmmmmmmmm!
A/N: We are not Psychology majors. We do not pretend to be. We aren't even close…although our acting careers will eventually involve some psychological help, but that's beside the point. The psychological information you read towards the end of the chapter was just from Shelley's psychology notes from last semester. It's probably not accurate, but we don't care. This is our fic and it sounds good and impressive to us. So there. Oh yeah, please send mucho reviews as they make us very happy! Enjoy!
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"That's it! You're both just freaks!" Spike yelled.
From the couch, Buffy and Xander just looked at Spike and blinked.
"Could you stop pacing? We're trying to watch TV!" Buffy cried. "We want to make sure Gilligan doesn't get eaten by cannibals."
"Spike, you're making me dizzy," Xander interjected. "Sit down!"
"I'm a vampire for chrissakes! I should be able to handle this kind of thing!" Spike began to rant.
"Well, you appear to be doing just fine to me," Buffy responded.
"Yeah!" Xander said enthusiastically.
Spike snorted. "What do you know about it, Slayer?"
Xander chuckled dryly.
"Well, it's not like I haven't seen it before. Of course, I usually join in before anything happens, but I get the general idea.," Buffy agrued.
"You don't know what it's like to think you're able to do it and think it's going to happen, and all of a sudden it just…"
"Don't worry, Spike," Xander interrupted. "We can try again later."
"That's not the bloody point!" Spike exploded. "Do you know how embarrassing this is for me? You guys have NO problems, but me…"
"It's not that big of a deal really," Buffy said, trying to comfort him. "It wasn't as all-encompassing as we thought, but maybe we can find a way to work around it."
"Look at it from our perspective," Xander said thoughtfully. "At least now we don't have to let everybody in on the big secret."
Spike looked insulted. "What, am I a big embarrassment now? I don't see you two complaining. You seem to get a big kick out of it."
"Well, there was that one thing you did the other night." Xander stopped and chuckled. "That was really cool. There was such and art to the way you did it."
"You'd be surprised," Buffy offered.
"You don't understand. It makes me feel pathetic," Spike pouted.
Buffy looked at Xander, then back at Spike. "Don't worry. We're here for you. At least WE know you're not pathetic."
"Yeah, you're still the Big Bad," Xander replied.
Their conversation was stopped by the sound of Dawn giggling as she came down the stairs.
"I'm going to Janice's." She walked to the front door, stopped, and turned around. "Oh, and guys? That's great you're leading an alternative lifestyle and all, but when it comes to kinky sex, eww! Talk about it somewhere else!"
Spike looked at Buffy. Buffy looked at Xander. Xander looked at Spike.
"Dawnie, I can explain…" Buffy began.
Spike grabbed Buffy and sat in Xander's lap. He put his arm around Xander and kissed Buffy.
"Oh, c'mon, pet. She's old enough to handle it," Spike volunteered.
"Yeah, she knows all about Willow and Tara doing spells. Don't you, Dawn?" Xander smiled at the teenager evilly.
Dawn squealed and ran out the door as fast as possible.
All three erupted into laughter, and Buffy fell off the couch. Spike got off Xander. "That'll teach the Nibblet not to eavesdrop again."
Buffy held her sides in pain from all the laughter. "Oh my god! Dawn thought that me…" she gasped, "…and you…" she pointed at Spike, "…and Xander…" She collapsed into another fit of giggles, unable to speak anymore.
"Spike, that was wrong. Hilarious, but evil." Xander smiled. "Can we do that again?"
They all laughed at the thought.
After a few moments, they finally calmed down.
"Seriously," Buffy began. "We need to talk about this."
"Yeah," Xander replied. "Why is Spike's chip being so selective all of a sudden?"
"Hell if I know," Spike muttered. "I can hit the bloody whelp anytime I want to." He demonstrated by smacking Xander in the back of the head. Xander shot a glare towards the vampire and nursed the pain on the back of his head. "Why can't I rough up a couple of muggers?"
"Warrants investigation," Buffy said.
"Maybe it's psychosematic," Xander mused.
"What?" Buffy and Spike asked in unison.
"Psychosematic…bodily symptoms caused by mental or emotional disturbance," Xander replied, sounding like a dictionary.
"Have you been possessed again?" Buffy asked.
"No! Research boy incognito…remember?" Xander replied.
"Wow. You had a thought," Spike said. "Please, enlighten us."
"Well, I got to thinking," Xander paused, noticing the looks on Buffy and Spike's faces. "Not a word," he told them.
"Anyway, the Initiative was this big government program run by Maggie Walsh. But she wasn't in the Army. What did she do, ladies and gents? She was a professor of psychology. And Riley? A freaky psych grad student who wanted to put me and my other half in cages and study us."
Spike looked over at Buffy. "Other half?" he mouthed. Buffy put a finger to her lips and pointed to Xander, who was still explaining.
"So, Dr. Walsh gets her own collection of demons to study. Of course, she's going to mess with their brains. That's what psychologists do! She can't stick a chip into a sociopathic prisoner; they have constitutional rights, but vampires don't exist, so she can mess with them all she wants."
"Bloody pillocks," Spike grumbled.
"This chip zaps Spike every time he wants to hurt somebody. Lunge, ZAP, ouch! He doesn't bite that person. But how does the chip know he's going to hurt somebody? It's just a tiny piece of metal and a couple of wires. Your chip doesn't think or get smarter. It's not a supercomputer. I looked through the psychology book I stole from Giles, and a couple of others, and came up with something. Every time you do something, your brain gets an electrical impulse. Electricity spider webs through your brain. So, it's all in your head."
Buffy and Spike gaped at Xander; Buffy because she was amazed at the work he'd obviously put into this and Spike because he was pretty sure someone had said the last bit to him about a year ago. Xander, oblivious to the befuddled gazes of his friends, continued.
"I think the chip is placed somewhere along the pathway the electricity has to go to where you activate your violent tendencies. They probably buried your chip in your corpus collosum. It connects the two sides of your brain, and it's where the impulses cross over. You have an angry thought. You start to act on it. All that electricity starts to fire. It hits your chip, zings off all that metal and hello, pain. It's like walking around in a thunderstorm with a ten foot metal pole, only inside…and nobody's stupid enough to carry around a metal pole during a thunderstorm. After that, it's all conditioning. Sure your chip may have fried itself by now, as many times as you've tried to hit people." Xander stopped and thought a moment. "In fact, it probably has, but your brain has gotten used to feeling pain when this certain impulse fires, so you still do. Your brain's programmed itself to keep you from hurting people, just so Professor Walsh can write a dissertation on behavior modification through electric shock, and gradual conditioning of the brain. And voila, one Vamp Vampire Slayer, coming up."
Xander finished his explanation, and smiled at his audience expectantly. Wow, that sounded decently intelligent, he thought to himself, proudly.
They sat there in stunned silence. Where had that come from? After a few moments, Xander frowned.
"Hey, what's with the silence, people?" he asked, agitated. "Research boy, Incognito, remember. Did you think I was going to just slack off? This is nothing compared to all those Latin books in high school."
"You know Latin?" Spike asked in shock.
"Well, not really, but Giles kept handing the books to me. He didn't stop until I set that book on fire once."
Buffy was still gaping at him in total surprise. Maybe it's another consequence of the spell, she thought.
Xander's head whipped around. "No, it is not another consequence of the spell," he nearly shouted. "I CAN think. It just takes me a little longer sometimes."
Buffy frowned. "I know I didn't say that out loud." She looked over at Spike. "Did I say that out loud?"
Spike shook his head. "You didn't say anything about the spell."
"What are you talking about?" Xander asked. "I heard you."
"You heard what I was thinking," Buffy told him slowly.
Xander paled. "I need to sit down." He sat and put his head in his hands. "Why me? First Miss Edith. Now Buffy."
Buffy got up and grabbed his hand. "We need to see Giles." She pulled him to his feet and the three of them headed for the Magic Box.
"Ow, Buffy," Xander complained. "Leg! Leg! Watch the leg!"