Ringworld is property of Larry Niven. All characters from the Buffyverse are Property of Joss Whedon. Everything else belongs to me.
Buffy threw her books to the floor and dove onto the bed in her smallish dorm room. She had returned to her room right after receiving her midterm test results. The results were terrible. She was basically failing most of her classes. It was unfair. She had saved the world several times over now she this close to flunking out of school.
"Why can't I get extra points for slaying?" She thought then smiled. "That would be cool."
After a moment she said to herself "Maybe the double meat palace has a management program." She wiped the tears from her face as she turned over on her back.
"What's wrong with me? I studied for days. I guess I'm just stupid." Buffy beat herself up. Then a thought occurred to her. She leapt off the bed and began searching through the magic books Willow kept in the room.
"There's got to be something here that can make me smarter." After thirty minutes of searching Buffy found what she was looking for.
The next day
The mystery of the bloodline had Willow stumped. She didn't like that. She came to the magic shop to think and to do research. That was now impossible. Somehow she had gotten talked into helping out behind the counter.
Buffy walked into the Magic Shop looking dejected. She took one of the magic books off of the shelf and began to go over it.
"You ever thought in a million years you would miss the school library?" Xander asked her.
"Someone put a spell on my Mom. Something to make her look like she's sick." Buffy replied.
"That's a new kind of nasty. Any suspects?
"Got the list narrowed down to just under infinity. "
Anya and Willow were arguing about something at the counter. Willow held up a badly wrapped package.
"Does this look right to you?" She asked Anya.
"Sure, if you wrapped it with your feet. " Anya replied smartly. "You know Buffy there used to be this French sorcerer back in sixteen-I-don't-know-what's named…"
"Cloutier?" Giles injected.
"So cute in his little knickers but he had this one spell demons just hated called "Tirer la Couture." Anya said.
Buffy attempted to translate. "Rotate many foodstuffs?"
"Pull the curtain back" Willow corrected.
"A spell to see spells. Well, a trance to see spells, but, you get the idea. Try that". Anya went back to wrapping the package correctly.
Willow got an idea. Something had fudged the bloodline spell she performed on Buffy the other night. This "Tirer la Couture" sounded like the perfect thing to find out what was going on.
That night Willow entered the trance and found her way over to the Summers home. She felt like a stalker as she peeked through the living room window. Buffy had obviously gone home and performed the trance herself. She was having some sort of argument with Dawn. That wasn't what she came for.
Sure enough, she could see that Buffy was under a spell, actually multiple spells. Buffy was a slayer so she was under the slayer spell all the time. Willow could see that as a constant blue glow. But there was a second spell at work that grew stronger the further away she was from Dawn. Willow watched Buffy for several minutes. The other spell would actually grow stronger the further away Dawn was.
"The key is energy… We had to make sure the slayer would protect it with her life." A voice came out of nowhere and spoke to Willow.
"Dawn?" Willow puzzled to herself. Willow watched. Every time Dawn walked away from Buffy the glow from the second spell grew stronger.
Willow put the pieces together. "Buffy's under a mystical compulsion to protect Dawn!" she thought.
This didn't help her solve the mystery of the bloodline. Willow trudged her way back home.
Willow watched the stars on her laptop. The ringed star was nearly two hundred and fifty light years from Earth. That meant she was seeing light that was at least two hundred and fifty years old. Why had the bloodline spell gone wrong now? She had performed the spell many times in the past with no strange effect. What had changed?
Her eye caught something funny in the way the nearby stars looked in the jpeg. Their spectrum was warped as if something huge and powerful was warping space nearby.
"A wormhole?" She thought. "Wait a minute. Wormholes warp space and time." Then it hit her. She was not looking into the past. Thanks to the distortion of space-time caused by the wormhole, she was looking into the future.