GOTHICA DEE & JESSICA BEE COME TO SUNNYDALE

Chapter 2

Morning in Sunnydale.

"Buffy, time to get up!" Joyce Summers shouted upstairs for the second time in an attempt to awaken her very special, whether she was willing to recognize it or not, daughter. "What is wrong with that girl? Buffy!"

After quickly climbing the stairs, Joyce was more than a little perturbed that Buffy was still in bed with the comforter completely covering her blonde-haired head.

"Oh, Buffy," groaned Joyce, "I really don't have time for this. Come on, time to wake up!"

"No. Too tired to wake up," grumbled Buffy as a short-lived tug of war broke out between the Slayer and the mother. Joyce lost.

"What have you been eating to get so strong?" muttered Joyce as she, once again, did everything within her parental power to wake what she believed to be a lazy high school-aged daughter. "That's it, Buffy, no more sleeping in!"

Having jerked open the drapes in order to allow the brilliant sunlight to stream in, Joyce once again tugged on the thick comforter and, this time, succeeded in introducing Buffy Summers to a brand new day.

"Ah, Mom…!"

"No 'ah, Mom', young lady," insisted Joyce as she glanced at her wristwatch and groaned at the lateness of the morning hour. "I have got to get to the gallery, Buffy, and you have got to get to school."

"Mom?" puzzled the Slayer as she slowly realized that something wasn't quite right while swinging her legs over the side of the disheveled bed. "Uh…are you feeling all right?"

"Of course I am, Buffy, why would you even ask such a thing?" rhetorically asked Joyce as she was preparing to rapidly leave her daughter's bedroom.

"Uh, maybe because you haven't worked at the 'gallery' in at least a year," Buffy told her mother while slowly standing and folding her arms pensively across her chest. "And because school is out for the summer."

"Wh-what?" a suddenly befuddled Joyce stammered as she stared with knitted brow at her secretly special child. "Buffy…why would you say such a thing? You know I'm running the Sunnydale art gallery just as you are attending Sunnydale High. Why would you…?"

"Mom, listen to me, okay?" said a deadly-serious and deeply worried Buffy as she slowly stepped up to an increasingly confused Joyce in order to look deeply into her mother's glazed-over eyes in order to gradually realize a disturbing truth. "Mom…did anyone come here while I was out with…uh, while I was with Willow and our study group?"

"What kind of question is…?"

"Mom!"

Giving in to the stronger-than-normal charisma that existed within the Slayer, Joyce said, "Just a couple of girls…sisters, I believe. One was named Jessica and the other was, uh, Dee, I think it was. Why?"

"Did you invite them in?" Buffy asked as Joyce's questioning expression became much more bewildered as well as befuddled. "Mom! Did you invite them in?"

"Well, it was really a little late for visitors," replied Joyce a little nervously, "besides, you were with Willow and…what's this all about?"

"I've gotta go," suddenly said Buffy as she quickly pulled a pair of jeans over her pajama bottoms while leaving the T-shirt top as it was and, next, swiftly stepping into one of her many pairs of shoes. "Why, uh, why don't you call in sick today, Mom? You don't really need to go to the, uh, gallery today. Okay?"

"But, uh, I feel fine," protested Joyce, but far more weakly than expected. "I, uh, well…I do feel a little…foggy."

"Okay, then, you go lie down and, as soon as I get back," said Buffy even as she hurriedly descended the stairs in order to trot straight out their front door, "I'll, uh, make you some chicken soup or something. Gotta go!"

"But, wait, Buffy, I…," began Joyce only to have the rapidly, and loudly, closing door curtly cut her off. After which, mysteriously, she suddenly felt an overwhelming need to head for their so-soft sofa and take a long nap. "I'm…so confused…"

"Are you certain, Buffy?" asked a still sleepy casually dressed school librarian/Watcher having answered the frantic knocking upon his front door.

"Yes, Giles," Buffy said at first, then, "no…maybe. That's why I came to you and why we need to get Willow over here. I can't shake the sensation that vamps have hypnotized my mother for some God-awful reason. She was far too trusting and, and, and…too willing to listen, and, and…"

"Settle down, Buffy," said Giles as he adjusted his smallish round glasses resting upon his very English nose, whatever that means!, as he proceeded in the direction of his miniature kitchen. "Would you like some tea?"

"How about some coffee?" sighed Buffy as she plopped heavily onto the plush living room sofa. "Black!"

"Coffee, eh?" Giles muttered with more than a little British arrogance regarding such a difference between the English and the proverbial Colonies. "Perhaps I have some from last year when you asked for it. Should be sufficiently nasty for an American teen."

"Willow? It's Buffy," the Slayer said into Giles' phone after quickly calling Ms. Rosenberg and waking the industrious teen/indeterminate witch. "Giles and I need you at his house right away. I'll explain after you get here. 'Bye."

No sooner had she hung up after that very brief call than Giles stepped in with two cups and saucers: one containing hot Earl Grey tea, the traditional black kind, while the other contained an equally hot, more or less black, cup of thoroughly brewed coffee.

"Uh, here's your, uh, coffee," Giles said as he handed that cup and saucer to Buffy, who eyed both it and him very curiously. "What's the matter? Not, uh, 'black' enough?"

"How did you make the coffee and tea so quickly?" Buffy asked with a puzzled scowl. "I know you don't like instant anything, so…"

"What are you talking about, Buffy?" said Giles with a genuinely confused expression. "I've been in the kitchen for some ten or more minutes while you were out here on the phone with…"

"Ten minutes?" Buffy asked almost rhetorically while mentally calculating a far shorter passage of time since first arriving. "But…"

Just then another knock came from the front door and Giles quickly opened it to allow Willow step inside clutching her laptop case and apologetically saying, "Sorry it took so long, guys, but my mother made me eat breakfast and clean my room before…"

"How long?" Buffy quickly asked.

Though suddenly puzzled, Willow nonetheless answered, "I don't know…45 minutes or so."

Now even Giles' British countenance betrayed the irrevocable realization that something was most definitely not right.

"Vampires can't change time," Buffy finally said, shattering the uneasy silence hanging over the three, "so it must be something else. But…what?"

Though not one hundred percent certain of what had recently transpired, Willow knew enough to head for the nearest table in order to set up her computer using Giles' begrudgingly maintained dial-up while saying, "Whatever it is, it must make use of the Dark Arts to affect time in singularly disparate ways. I'll get on the internet and start Googling."

"And I'll go grab some at-home books on the subject," Giles said even as he downed the rest of his curiously no longer hot tea, "in order to look for whatever this is that way."

"Let's just hope that we somehow discover what's going on," warningly stated the Slayer as she finished the equally cold coffee, as if both had been left unattended for over an hour rather than mere minutes, "before the sun sets. For some reason…I get the feeling that whatever it is…will come for us then."

END OF CHAPTER 2