A/N As far as I know, no official name was ever given to the large bugs Stargate Command discovered were out of phase with us, in the episode Sight Unseen (not the Ree'tu, that's a different episode), so I'm giving them a name. I got it off a scifi name generator, so if you think it's hokey, blame the generator.

The next few months were fairly peaceful in Sunnydale. Thanksgiving and then Christmas and with them Cordelia and Xander's seventeenth birthdays, passed uneventfully. Corda accessed Cordelia's trust fund and used it to buy the Sunset Club from Ford and Alexander moved into it, just before Cordelia's father returned from his business trip. Then Buffy's birthday came in January. About a week after her birthday, a classmate, Daniel Osbourne, discovered he'd become a werewolf.

"Do you know anything about werewolves?" Giles asked Alexander and Corda.

"Not specifically, no. Wolves evolved after our people left. Shape shifters in general, yes. There are a number of alien races we've encountered that could shift their forms from one to another. The ability is natural with them. Werewolfism, from our reading of your Chronicles, is caused by a virus, transmitted in a bite, which suggests, it originates in the teeth. Perhaps, being injected like a needle. My scanner shows nothing of a daemona aspect to him. So the virus probably originated here on Earth, instead of in another dimension. I've offered Oz the use of the basement of the Club for his full moon nights. It'll give him a place to stretch out and relax. All though, why the transformation is tied to the moon cycle I don't understand. Unless it's something else and the moon is just a coincidence."

Then Buffy got sick with a bad flu that was going around and her mother took her to the hospital and Willow called Alexander for help.

"Curing a virus with the healing touch is a bad idea." He told them. "Our people learned that the hard way. It's why the plague was so devastating. No one built up an immune response, because every time they got sick, they'd just cure it. Eventually, people were just too sick to heal each other and people began to die. More then 90% of our galaxy wide population died. Unless it looks like Buffy is going to die from this flu, I'm not going to use the healing touch on her."

"I agree." Corda said. "Your body has a good chance of fighting it off, we need to let it."

"Okay, I get that. I'll feel icky for a couple of days and then I'll be fine."

"Some people are dying." Willow said. "Some kids here in the hospital have already died."

"I'm not sure it's the flu that's killing them." Buffy said. "One of the kids, Ryan, said he saw a monster. Last night, with that high fever I had, I saw something."

"But that was just the fever, Buffy." Willow protested.

"Not necessarily." Alexander said. "Children's eyes work differently then adults and people with fevers, their eyes can be flooded with all kinds of things that alter the visual range. They could see things that ordinarily would be outside their visual range."

"An invisible monster?" Willow asked.

"Not so much invisible, as out of phase, like the Araneidae." (Air*an*a*day)

"What are the Araneidae?"

"Large insects between two and four feet long. They're out of phase with us, so we can't see them. They're aware of us, but avoid us. They consume plant matter."

"There are giant bugs around us?!" Willow exclaimed.

"Yes, but like I said, they avoid us."

"So there could be a demon we can't see." Giles said. "Could your scanner find it?"

"Possibly, it can scan different phase frequencies. It would be a good time to test out the prototype pulse pistol."

"I'll run home and get it." Corda said. "This shouldn't take long."

"How did your people come to be aware of these bugs?" Giles asked Alexander.

"A new scanning system made them visible to our spectrum, temporarily. They were transparent, so they're not just out of phase visually, they're out of phase physically as well. We've never encountered them on any other world and have no idea how they evolved. But they were inoffensive, so we just let them be."

"Probably the best solution. Even inoffensive creatures can become hostile if threatened."

"True."

Corda returned with the pulse pistol and Alexander ordered the scanner to scan thru different phase frequencies. Then they saw it. It had a weird permanent type of grin on its face and thick fang like teeth that stuck out. Corda fired the pulse pistol at it and though it took two shots, was able to kill it. They dumped the remains in the furnace and called it a day.

Buffy went home the next day, feeling better. An experimental treatment a doctor at the hospital developed, cured the sick kids and they too were able to return home.