Angel was enjoying reading one of his old moldy books (well, not moldy) when he heard a piercing scream from outside and the screeching of tires on asphalt. He put his book down, noticed the sun was setting, and took off toward the disturbance. When he got there, he couldn't believe his vampire eyes.
A man and woman and their young son were trapped in a short tree by a car, an empty car. The car backed up and slammed into the tree, then repeated the action over and over. The last impact knocked the boy from the tree. Angel didn't hesitate. As the car swerved and accelerated toward the sobbing child, Angel leapt toward him and snatched him away just in time. Unable to stop, the automobile flew over the edge, hit another tree, and exploded.
As Angel comforted the crying boy, his parents climbed down and rushed to him.
"Oh my god, thank you!" the mother cried.
"Is he okay?" the father asked in a shuddering voice.
"He is." Angel responded, handing him over.
"What is happening?! Our own car attacked us!" the mother asked fearfully.
"I don't know, but we need to get you out of here and off the streets."
And once you're out of harm's way, I need to find Buffy. Angel thought.
Our heroes were hiding behind a hedge when Neil's personalities popped out of him.
Kneeling down quickly beside them, they looked from person to person (who hadn't noticed they had arrived yet, except Neil of course.)
"So, are we playing hide or seek, or what?" Athena asked stridently, which caused nearly everyone to bound through the hedge.
"Shhhh!" Buffy and the Scoobies whispered urgently at her.
"Sorrrrrryyyy. I'll be as quiet as a mouse. Got some cheese?" Athena replied.
Everyone else swatted at her, and Neil licked her nose. Faith giggled softly.
"So what exactly is occurring?" Diana asked gently.
"S-Somehow the machines have come to homicidal life. I have no idea why. I've been racking my brain for a possible culprit, with no success." Giles explained in a low voice.
"In other words, they're going postal and we're stumped." Buffy translated.
"So we've suddenly walked into Maximum Overdrive?" Athena commented quietly.
"That's exactly what I said!" Xander muttered.
"Please put your extreme geekiness into orbit." Cordelia softly hissed at him.
"Pretty much, hon." Neil said to Athena silently. Buffy frowned at this exchange.
"What about going back to the library?" Helen whispered.
"Out of the question, I'm afraid. A bulldozer came and had a little too much fun at the campus at the expense of the buildings."
"So, to your apartment then?" Lilith remarked inaudibly.
"Precisely."
As they crept along through the foliage, Willow paused and murmured to Buffy: "Isn't your house on this street, Buffy?"
"Oh god." Buffy whispered. "In all the chaos, I nearly forgot. I need to see if Mom and Dawn are okay!"
"No dice." Bellona suddenly said noiselessly. The others followed her gaze.
"Oh shit." Hera growled.
All up and down Buffy's shadowy street, a number of vehicles, headlights blazing, prowled. It would be impossible to travel to Buffy's house or to continue to Giles' home without being noticed.
And one of those vehicles was a Humvee armed with a .50 caliber machine gun.
From the other side of the street, Angel was surveying the same situation and pondering his next move.
"How the hell can we get past them all?" Neptune wondered.
"Well," Willow started, "Maybe I can cast a spe-. "
She was interrupted by Athena suddenly scrabbling away further down the bushes, crawling into the adjoining yard, and then running into the street in full view of the menacing vehicles. Everyone looked on in horror.
"What the fuck is she doing?!" Faith almost screamed.
"Athena, have you lost your damn mind?!" Helen hissed at her from their cover.
Everyone else was too astonished to speak or react.
Grinning, Athena shrieked at the various vehicles, which froze and twisted in her direction. The Humvee leveled its weapon at her.
"Ahhh, you wanna shoot little ol' me?" Athena taunted. She bent over and mooned them and patted her ass.
"Well, here's your target!"
Apparently they didn't like being mooned, as they almost growled and then proceeded to charge after her, the Humvee in the lead, opening up with its .50 caliber.
Laughing, Athena ran away and around the street corner, her pursuers in very hot pursuit.
"Come on! We gotta save her!" Faith yelled, getting up, only to be yanked down by Buffy.
"What the fuck you doing, B?!" Faith snarled in Buffy's face.
"If we all chase after her, we'll ruin what she was trying to do!" Buffy snapped at her. "Now, come on!"
"Go ahead, Faith, Neil and I will check on our rather reckless daughter." Diana said softly.
"Go on ahead, everyone, we'll meet you at Buffy's house." Neil said quietly. They all stared at them worriedly, and then nodded. Diana and Neil slipped from their hiding place and ran in Athena's last known direction.
The Scoobs, Faith, and Neil's other personalities moved quickly as possible to 1630 Revello Drive, and a question weighed on the Scoobies and Buffy's and Faith's minds.
Daughter?!
Angel was speechless at what he had just witnessed.
First, a gigantic Amazonian woman had sprinted from a yard across the road and mocked the deadly assortment of vehicles patrolling the lane until they had chased her around the corner, then another Amazonian woman and a red bearded man emerged from the plant cover and hurried in that insane woman's direction.
Then Buffy and her friends and another group of people he vaguely recognized ran across the back yard of the house whose yard that woman had come from.
Angel paused, and then headed after Buffy. He had a feeling those other three people could handle themselves, and he didn't want to distract them at a possibly crucial moment.
After making certain there were no other mechanized menaces about, Angel snuck after them carefully.
With the aggravated vehicles closing in on her, Athena turned to face them and then leapt atop the Humvee's roof, narrowly evading the constant stream of automatic fire. She reached down and yanked the machine gun from its housing as the Humvee veered wildly left and right trying to throw her off. Cackling gleefully, she sent a burst into each vehicle's engine block and watched as they blew up spectacularly, then somersaulted off the Humvee's top, landed behind it, and as it spun around and launched itself towards her, she gave it a full burst to its engine and it ignited, destroying it.
Smugly, she examined the wreckage resting the trigger end of the machine gun on the ground and commented:
"Well, somebody's gonna be pissed."
"That would be us." said two very familiar voices.
Meekly, she turned and gave Neil and Diana her best innocent expression.
"Don't." Neil began.
"Ever." Diana continued.
"Do that." Neil went on.
"Again." Diana finished.
Athena's only response was to stick her tongue out of the side of her mouth and give a disappointed whimper.
They each took one of her muscular arms and hauled her over to the nearest back yard.
Joyce Summers stood in her darkened kitchen, fretting about her eldest daughter when she heard a great deal of commotion and then shortly after a series of nearby explosions that shook the windows.
Peering out the window, she noticed that the vehicles outside had gone, and breathed a sign of relief.
And then nearly jumped out of her skin when her youngest screamed down at her:
"Mom! The phone told me to quit talking so damn much!"
"Dawn Summers! What did I tell you about swearing!?"
And then clamped her hand over her mouth, eyes shifting from side to side.
Dawn ran downstairs and squeaked out "Sorry, Mom."
Then they heard a noise at the back door.
Unlocking the back door with her key, Buffy walked inside to be almost brained by her sauce-pan wielding mother and sister, who fortuitously missed by a mile and fell flat to the floor.
"Don't you check who it is before you try to murder someone!?" Buffy almost screamed. "Jeez!"
"Sorry honey." Joyce apologized, and they embraced.
"I'm not. I would've hit you anyway." Dawn muttered under her breath.
Buffy turned to Dawn, arms outstretched, and Dawn said: "I'm not hugging you! You have sister cooties!"
Buffy scowled at her little sister, and turned back to her mother.
"You two alright aside from the sudden attack of psychosis?" Buffy asked, concerned.
"We're fine Buffy. What is going on? All the machines are going haywire!"
"Don't have the foggiest, and some good thick fog might be real good right about now. Ever wonder who made up the word fog? I mean, did they sit down one day and say-"
"Um, Buffy." Everyone standing outside the back door said uncomfortably.
"Oops! Sorry!" And she waved them in.
Everyone walked inside except Neil's personalities, (who manifest as vampires, of course.)
"Uh, Buffy." Helen said.
"Sorry again!" Buffy said discomfited, "I invite you in!"
They walked in, Zeus closing the door behind them, and Hera muttered "Airhead." to herself.
"So where was everyone when I was almost becoming killed!?" Buffy demanded in a low voice.
"Well, I jumped backwards in sheer terror." Xander explained.
"And I was cringing in the doorway, but in a good supportive way." Willow rambled.
"What!? I didn't want to get whacked with a cast-iron pan! I stepped back!" Cordelia growled.
"When Xander hopped backwards, he collided with me and knocked me to the floor." Faith elaborated. She gave Xander a suggestive wink. "I bet that gave you a naughty thrill."
"I plead the Fifth." Xander replied with a goofy ass grin.
"And when Cordelia stepped back, she stepped on my foot with her high heel, and I was hopping around on one foot all over the porch." Oz said.
"And when Oz started hopping around, he hopped on my bloody foot and I ended up falling over the bloody railing!" Giles grumbled, his tweed obviously rumpled.
"And when Faith and Xander fell back, Faith's head popped me in the groin, which sent me piling into everyone else, plus, you know, barrier. Anyone got an ice pack?" Ares moaned.
"Oh." Buffy said in a small voice. She opened the freezer, took out some ice, took some thick plastic wrap, made an ice pack, and handed it to Ares. He took it gratefully, lowered himself to the floor by the back door, and applied it.
"Ah, sweet relief." Ares sighed.
Buffy turned to her mother and sister, only to see them staring at Neil's male personalities, drooling.
"Not again!" Xander groaned. "I give up!"
He went to the fridge, opened the door, looked inside, and hauled out a pan of brownies. He uncovered them and started munching.
"Running for your life sure works up an appetite." Xander commented.
"Eating that crap will make your teeth fall out." Helen responded.
Xander shrugged, and Helen sighed in annoyance.
"Mom! I know they're pretty." She looked back at them. "Very very pretty…" she said in a dreamy voice, then snapped her head away. "But you've got to snap out of it!" she said, shaking her.
"Whu? Buffy, why are you shaking me?"
"Sorry, Mom. You were out of it for a second, hypnotized by perfect manliness."
"Oh. Who are these enormous people Buffy?"
"You and your mom need to get laid, B." Faith laughed.
Buffy rolled her eyes at her, and Faith shrugged, walked over to Xander and stole one of his brownies.
"You have no class." Cordelia snorted at Faith, wrinkling her nose. Faith's response was to eat the brownie as loudly as possible to annoy Cordelia even more.
Before Buffy could answer her mother's query, Willow tugged at her arm and said, "Aren't you going to snap Dawn out of it?"
"Nah. I like her better quiet. I need to snap a picture of her drooling, though. She'll never live it down. Where's the camera?" Buffy said gleefully.
"Buffy. Really." Joyce scolded.
"Fine. Ruin my fun."
She reached over and pinched Dawn's ear. Dawn yelped.
"OW! What the hell did you that for?" Dawn whined.
"Because I could." Buffy replied smoothly.
"Well, if you're all quite done, I believe we need to move on to more pressing matters. Plus, this kitchen is a little crowded." Giles said in his best annoyed voice, removing his eyeglasses quickly.
Everyone moved into the living room, Giles, Oz, and Ares hobbling along and Xander carrying the pan of brownies (and Faith walking behind him still stealing them).
Angel watched through the living room window of Buffy's house, waiting until she was alone so he could speak to her in private. He was hiding in the bushes to avoid being seen from the street. Angel was somewhat surprised to see everyone turn back and head into the kitchen.
There was a loud knock on the back door, and since Dawn was the last to exit the kitchen, she was the first to reach it and open it to see a red-bearded man and a gigantic woman standing there.
"Hi." Dawn said neutrally.
"Hi Dawn." The man said.
"Hey! How did you-"
The man and woman looked behind them and jumped aside just as another amazonian woman came running and jumping into the invitation barrier at breakneck speed and bounced off.
"BUFFY! MOM!" Dawn squealed.
Everyone came running (or hobbling) back in only to see Athena bounce off the barrier again and fall back into the back yard.
Smugly, Buffy said: "I invite you all in."
When Athena ran and bounced forward this time, she flew through the door and fell face-first to the floor. Buffy snickered.
"HFAFFDSGHGFDHDFD!!!" Athena shrieked from the floor (or something like that.) Neil and Diana walked in and shut the door.
Suddenly springing from the floor, Athena said loudly: "It's Joyce and little Dawn!" She swept them up in her powerful arms and skipped over to the refrigerator with her tongue hanging out of the side of her mouth and eyes closed and opened the door with her head and carefully studied the contents, eyes open.
"Cottage cheese, salad, tofu, and fruit!? What the hell is this crap!?" Athena complained. Faith cackled until her sides hurt.
"Put my mother and sister down! Well, my mother anyway." Buffy growled.
"Buffy! Who is this person?" Joyce squeaked.
"She's holding me too tight!" Dawn squealed breathlessly.
"Athena, put the nice people down." Neil's personalities chorused.
"Okay." Athena replied in a sing-song voice, and set Joyce and Dawn down and patted their heads. "Nice Joyce. Nice Dawn. Nice." She said as she patted.
"I think I feel a migraine coming on. Or perhaps a brain tumor. Yes, that would be splendid." Giles said dryly, holding his forehead.
"Gilesy's head hurts?" Athena asked in a goofy voice, spinning her tongue in a circle as she talked.
"Well," Giles said uncertainly, "It's really more of a rhetorical pain…"
Athena gasped overdramatically, stepped over to Giles, tucked him under her arm, and skipped through the doorway leading to the dining room, ducking in the doorway as she did so, humming all the while.
Everyone else looked at each other, shrugged, and then followed.