Ringworld is property of Larry Niven. All characters from the Buffyverse are Property of Joss Whedon. Everything else belongs to me.
The Ringworld was on fire.
The Buffy-Protector watched it burn from her observation center. Half a turn ago he Hellmouth-Protector attempted to filter out the killing rays of the sun by broadcasting an anti wave of ultraviolet light from the Ringworld. He believed this would make it safe for vampires to walk in the harsh light of day.
He was wrong.
Whether it was a bad implementation, bad mathematics or a poor understanding of quantum mechanics was irreverent. The Ringworld did not broadcast a stream of ultraviolet radiation as Spike wanted. It was broadcasting anti-matter.
The Buffy-Protector watched the Ringworld burn and was racked by fear for the lives of the children of Dawn. So far there were only three sections of the Ringworld that was burning. One was well over a million miles in the anti-spinward direction; one was so far away in the spin direction that its light took over five minutes to reach her.
The third was directly overhead. The sky above the Map-Of-Mars was well over fifteen thousand degrees.
"What did you do?" The Buffy-Protector screamed over a hastily rigged communication system. She knew that one day she would have to make contact with Spike. She never dreamed it was be under these conditions.
"I have ambitions you know. I don't want to spend the rest of eternity babysitting this new and improved Hellmouth. I want to get out and about. I want to stretch my legs a bit." He said.
"You're destroying your own food supply!"
"Really didn't see that coming. Any ideas on how to fix this?"
The Buffy-Protector cut the communications channel in rage. This was so typical of him. Spike makes a mess and everyone else had to clean it up.
The Buffy-Protector launched from her work station and scurried to one of the secondary laboratories. Dawn was inside of a crystal clear ship working with her husband to bring the babies aboard.
The aliens known as the Puppeteers were so paranoid that they would not travel in space unless it was inside of a indestructible ship. Dawn was storing her babies in a Puppeteer general products ship with a number four hull. It was a transparent sphere a thousand feet in diameter equipped with a stasis field that stopped time locally in case of an emergency. Her husband Acke noticed the Buffy-Protector. He nodded to her as she peered into she ship.
Of course "she" was a she as a matter of linguistics. Protectors were gender neutral. The Buffy-Protector would never have children.
Acke could never tell what was on the Buffy-Protector's mind. It could have been counting babies or calculating the number of footsteps from here to the third floor latrine. It's hard rigid face never betrayed any emotion. The Buffy-Protectors skin was too rigid for that. Suddenly, it just bounded away at full speed towards one of the upper level observation decks without so much as a goodbye.
"Well, that was weird and typical." Acke thought to himself as he placed little Xander in Dawn's arms. "Our lives are not like other people lives." He thought.
The Buffy-Protector had a bigger problem, one that nagged at her from the back of her mind. Namely, she shouldn't be here.
When she pulled the original Buffy through time, the operation went smoothly. She recalled convicting Dawn to leave frozen ova on Earth so that her descendants would be born and eventually make it to the Ringworld. She did not remember being a perfect quantum copy of Buffy. Whatever it was that she pulled through time was not her previous self.
The timeline had changed.
The Buffy-Protector had to be sure. In the upper observation deck was a quantum signature analyzer. Every object in the universe had a unique quantum signature. The Buffy-Protector had a series of quantum scans available made of her and Dawn when she first arrived on the ringworld. She was compare them to herself now. She reached the lab in record time and performed the comparison. There was no match between her current self and the scans that now originated with the Buffy-Copy.
The person she had pulled through time was not her previous self.
"Why am I still here? Changing the timeline should have negated by existence. What's keeping me anchored to this reality?" The Buffy-Protector thought.
She had an idea of what it was and it terrified her.
"I am always falling at seven hundred and seventy miles per second. I am Ouroboros, the snake that eats itself. The sun is at my feet and on my face. I am eternal. I am the road between this world and the next. "
The Buffy-Protector snapped out of her day dream. The voice she heard was not her own. It was the voice of the one that had summoned her through time and performed furious calculations at the quantum mechanical level to anchor her existence to this reality.
She had heard the voice of the Ringworld.
Outside, the air temperature spiked to over half a million degrees.