In the Sunnydale High School library, Buffy Summers was pretty much happier than she'd been for the past month, aside from the currently preposterous circumstances. The Slayer was back after her summer sojourn in Los Angeles, and the reunions with her mother and the rest of the Scooby Gang had gone a lot better than the Slayer had hoped for. Everyone had done their best in patching things up with each other after Buffy's frantic running away from her home after sending Angel to hell. Now, it was another year at school with her friends, and things were looking like old times. The whole gang had even finished off another big bad of the week last night, their first of the season, and even if things hadn't gone exactly like she'd expected-
Outside, the ocean breeze shifted directions, with the wind swiftly changing into coming from inland towards the school. As an intense stench once more pervaded the entire building, Buffy gagged and she made a quick grab for the clothespin laying on the library table. Her eyes watering while she fastened this laundry line holder onto her nose in order to block out the horrible smell, Buffy glared at the young man sharing the table with herself and the other Scoobies, each and every one of them who could do so also sending their own dirty looks towards Xander Harris.
"I hate you," nasally hissed Buffy towards the sulking boy, who was refusing to meet anybody's eyes as he grumpily slid further down in his chair, arms sullenly crossed over his chest and head hunched down into his shoulders.
An abrupt wince crossed Xander's features at that moment when he was in the middle of trying to find a more comfortable position in his seat, causing him to snap back just as irritably past his own clothespin clamped onto his nose. "Hey, nobody seemed to mind me turning into Colossal Boy right in the middle of our fight last night! You guys were actually cheering when I shot up to three hundred feet tall and started stomping every demon in sight!"
"If that was indeed the only consequence of Ethan's Chaos magic again manifesting itself then, we'd be much more appreciative concerning you, Xander," growled Rupert Giles from behind the handkerchief soaked in cologne he'd clapped to his face a moment before.
"You can say that again, Giles," came a girl's muffled voice from under the towel being used as a sham tent on the other side of the library table, where a very unhappy Willow and Oz were huddled together as close as they could get to a steam humidifier and its eucalyptus-scented vapors that both of these young people were desperately inhaling.
Still stubbornly trying to persuade people firmly convinced otherwise that this whole disaster wasn't his fault, Xander protested, "Aw, Wils, you were the one who suggested we all hit the new Thai place that opened a week ago downtown!"
A redhead's very icy tone responded from somewhere beneath her covering cloth. "So what? Before we learned about the ceremony in the foothills outside town that was gonna raise every ghost in the whole county, you were already stuffing your face with a triple order of khao kha mu slathered with nam phrik! From personal experience, we both know the stuff goes right through you like a dropped brick! It took you long enough to figure out that no matter how yummy that dish is, you really need to stay close to a bathroom afterwards, with absolutely no jumping around like you did in our fight with those demon jerks!"
There was then a short pause in the library, as all there wincingly remembered a face nearly as big as a house turning pale in the city lights from Sunnydale. Until, a young man now possessing an huge body thirty stories high belonging to a member of the Legion of Super-Heroes next abruptly bolted further into the low hills around this supernatural-haunted town in a desperate search for some needed solitude while fumbling at the waistband of his Colossal Boy costume.
At the same time in a certain location upwind, every bit of heavy construction equipment owned by the city of Sunnydale was frantically working to finish getting rid of a brownish-colored, pyramidal hillock covering a good part of an acre to a depth of several feet, and still giving off a near-lethal stink. Rumbling backwards on its metal treads, the front-end loader having finished off its job of excavating the vast pit before itself now made room for the trio of bulldozers that advanced at the impatient wave of the figure standing well to the side.
Dressed as usual in his normal impeccable suit and the unusual accouterment of a gas mask, Richard Wilkins III glowered through this piece of protective equipment at yet another idiotic crisis in Sunnydale that only he could keep under wraps. Fortunately, the cover story of a sewer main rupture seemed to be working so far, but in the privacy of his disgusted thoughts, the century-old mayor thoroughly expressed his irritation in a pungent mental comment that seemed to cover every possible meaning for today's bizarre Hellmouth event:
*What a load of crap!*
Back in the library, while being spitefully ignored by his so-called friends, who were themselves trying to control their stomachs against the reek of a thousand overturned outhouses, Xander Harris painfully shifted in his chair, and he again regretted the utter necessity that had taken place last night. It might not have been the wisest thing to do, yanking out a mature scrub oak tree by its roots from out of the ground next to where he was squatting, and next using this fully-grown woody plant for something which nature had never truly intended for this tree. But then, it wasn't like there'd been around, on a handy receptacle half-buried in a hillside, an entire semitrailer load of Charmin toilet paper.