Gary Sitterson was busy in the control room preparing for the latest ritual for this year's sacrifice to the Ancient Ones, when a woman's very disapproving voice spoke from behind this bureaucrat.

"Well, that's just wrong!"

Totally taken by surprise since only he and Steve were working today (and Steve had left a minute ago to use the outside corridor bathroom), Gary spun around in his swivel chair and gaped at the unexpected intruder, a complete stranger. She was a short blonde about thirty years old in Gary's estimation, wearing a tasteful pants/blouse outfit, and this woman continued to glower at the viewscreen behind Gary instead of paying any attention to this astonished bureaucrat.

Following her gaze, Gary saw the woman was looking at one particular scene of the viewscreen currently set up to display the Cube Prison. Specifically, the cage holding the Sugarplum Fairy…who was now backed up to press herself against the rear part of the cage and holding herself in a posture of absolute terror?

Blinking, Gary stared at the other horrific occupants of the transparent cubes that were each and every one of them also currently cowering in fear! Moreover, those of these monsters who possessed actual facial features were staring in obvious dread right back at the monitors…directly at Gary in the control room. Which was impossible! The monitors weren't the kind which allowed two-way vision!

Gary took a break in his whirling thoughts to note yet another mystifying incongruity that he'd gotten wrong. Namely, those imprisoned creatures weren't looking at him. No, indeed, they were somehow seeing the strange woman still eyeing with extreme dislike the ballerina with the lamprey mouth taking up the entire front part of her head.

Gathering himself up, Gary managed to finally ask the woman, "Who are you?! And why are they acting like that?"

At last switching her gaze from the viewscreen to Gary, the stranger smiled cheerfully at him and responded with, "Oh, little old me? I'm their worst nightmare."

She finished that mind-boggling statement with an equally jaunty wave at the viewscreen monitors. Unable to stop himself, Gary then saw on the screens various panicky reactions by the assorted monsters there at this gesture, among them how the Buckner family jerkily tried to hide themselves behind each other.

Observing this exact absurd attempt by those zombie rednecks to avoid attracting even more of the stranger's awareness, Gary was firmly reminded of his duties. He had absolutely no idea what was going on, but that woman clearly needed to be taken in custody by the site's security forces and questioned closely regarding her extraordinary appearance here. Scooting back in his swivel chair, Gary discreetly reached under the desk for the alarm button located there to summon help, only to pause in this.

She wasn't actually doing anything right at this moment which would require Gary to call in Truman and the other guards. Besides, if that woman had genuine permission to be here, it wouldn't end well for Gary if he screwed up and made a complete fool of himself.

Keeping his fingers near the alarm button just in case, Gary said cautiously, "Ah, I wasn't aware we were going to have visitors today. Could you please tell me exactly who you are this time?"

Brightening up, the stranger responded, "Sure! I'll have to give you the Reader's Digest condensed version, though, okay?" Giving a baffled Gary a quick nod of her head, this woman continued, drawling out her first word in a definitive California accent.

"Waaaay long ago, all over the word things were pretty grim. Monsters such as vampires and other demons were everywhere and treating humans like they were crunchy fries good with ketchup. So, a bunch of magical guys had the real bright idea of sticking another demon's spirit inside a girl, giving her some major power-up for the whole fighting deal against the oogly-booglies. They called her the Slayer."

Gary saw the woman shrug ruefully while going on. "Of course, sooner or later, that girl lost and got killed by some vamp, except it didn't end there. The Slayer spirt moved onto another girl who had the potential of receiving this not-so-wonderful prezzy what with eventually getting bumped off in her own turn, and let's just say, it was rinse-and-repeat a humongous amount of times until yours truly came along."

The woman then gave Gary a mocking bow, saying, "Hi! I'm Buffy the Vampire Slayer! No jokes, please, we're getting to the good part."

Indeed, she smirked at a bureaucrat caught up in the bizarre story. "A while back, somebody calling themselves the First Evil — yeah, I know, ego much? — had a cunning plan. It involved murdering the Potentials worldwide, so when me and my friends came up with our own scheme to give those girls who got away from Firstie and showed up at my house the Slayer powers, things went kinda strange then. Really good strange, though."

This…Buffy…person bestowed a particularly evil grin upon Gary. "See, it's totes fun when the rules work in your favor. We didn't know it at the time, winning against the First Evil on the Hellmouth, but because it tried wiping out all of the Potentials, we maybe-accidentally magically turned all of them into Slayers by Willow's spell. C'mon, ask me how many that was, everywhere," Buffy coaxed Gary having a really hard time believing this.

Nonetheless, he warily inquired, "How many?"

"Oh, at last count," Buffy cherubically replied, "Two and a half million of 'em, all ages and nationalities. Better still, they weren't just newbie Slayers. They started right off with what I've got, the full Slayer package and all my hard-earned experience, to boot."

Gary incredulously regarded Buffy. There was no possible way the Organization could've overlooked that! Not such an immense amount of magic being used throughout the entire world! He began a spluttering protest, "Impossible! We keep absolute control of anyone who can—"

"Ah-hah," a very smug Buffy interrupted, holding up a warning finger. "That's next, okay?"

Watching with glee how the bureaucrat grumpily subsided to continue listening, Buffy resumed her story. "As you might imagine, the whole big secret of magic and the rest of what normal people thought of as just fairy-tale and horror stories, it came out pretty fast. I mean, when you have someone on tv interviewing an 80-year-old grandmother and a cute-as-dickens 8-year-old girl telling how they rescued together a family held hostage by a vampire nest, there's really no way to keep it quiet."

She rolled her eyes, clearly remembering some silly things. "There was a whole lot of dumb stuff then, like some interest groups wanting to declare vampires as endangered species and other groups calling them harmless refugees. It usually ended with them shouting at each other instead of actually doing anything. Meanwhile, there was also some stupid and nasty stuff, like dictators, drug lords, unscrupulous corporation CEO's, whatever, trying to use Slayers for their own evil purposes. Let's just say it regularly didn't end well for them. Finally, somebody asked a sensible question."

Buffy lifted an inquiring eyebrow at Gary, waiting for him to realize his cue. He eventually muttered, "What question?"

Nodding with approval, Buffy told him, "They wanted to know, 'What are the Slayers going to do when they run out of vampires and demons?' Honestly, we were getting a bit worried about that, too."

She shook her head with disbelief. "The answer came from the very last person we might've guessed about, although when Andrew admitted his reasons in the first place, we really should've expected this from him. Anyway, even though he hadn't been around then, Andrew eventually heard the story about Vamp Willow from another dimension. When he suggested the original Willow and her coven try to find out if it was possible for us to go there, Wils wasn't exactly thrilled at meeting her counterpart again. Thankfully, this corseted skank had already been dusted when we dropped in, so me and the other Slayers could concentrate on wiping out the rest of the fanged bunch. That was the start of good times for us, you know?"

Buffy finished off her last statement with a reminiscent smile, along with snickering, "Andrew, though, he's still sulking. See, a dimension, any dimension, has to have a certain amount of magic for us to visit. Not a speck of the mojo around, it's cut off from us forever. That really burned Andrew up, knowing he'd never be able to visit the Star Trek or Star Wars universes."

Gary barely registered that last sentence, instead staring at Buffy with growing trepidation. She gladly nodded back at him, "Yeah, figured it out now? We're here to clean things up, you and your awful cult especially."

She pointed past him at the viewscreen. Unable to prevent himself, Gary turned his head to see all the monitors change into different scenes than the former Cube Prison. He stared at various Organization locations worldwide presented to him, of which several he personally knew. They were completely different now from what Gary remembered, the merest change being that before, these Facilities in Buenos Aires, Stockholm, Berlin, Kyoto, Madrid, and Rangoon weren't filled with young women currently slaughtering with ease the supernatural monsters there desperately trying to fight back.

What he didn't see was any normal humans — the technical staff and security forces — around.

Turning back to find Buffy watching him with casual interest, Gary told her with utmost dismay in his tone, "Do you have any idea what you've just done?! We have to sacrifice our offerings to the Ancient Ones every year, or they'll destroy the world!"

The Slayer's formerly insouciant expression promptly turned into one of pure contempt. She snarled at a frantic Gary, "So, you were just fine with putting innocent people through all the tortures dreamed up by your bunch? In fact, you joked about the whole thing, making bets on who'd be the first to die!" spat Buffy, adding, "Nobody even bothered to look for help any way they could? Not on my watch! It ends here and now!"

"But the Ancient Ones—!" Gary began to wail.

Reaching into her pants pocket, Buffy pulled her hand out of there and tossed onto the control room floor several small objects. Gary looked at these lying there, only to feel his vision blur and his very consciousness start fading. When the discarded objects, each of them appearing as vague shapes carved out of dice-sized rocks, vanished into thin air, Gary's brain returned to normal, hearing at the same time Buffy's complacent question, "You mean those Ancient Ones?"

Gary gaped at the now-empty floor, his mouth working but unable to utter any words. Instead, he listened to Buffy explain, "We've got our own ultra-stuck-up Old One that we worked out a deal with. When we come across some Big Bad God with delusions of grandeur, we hit 'em with Illyria's spell that turns even the most potent evil divinities into her latest little minions. From what we've learned, your Ancient Ones are deservedly about to learn how things are really gonna suck for them now."

Buffy shook her shoulders and sent a last merciless glance towards a frozen Gary before eyeing the viewscreen again. As if in obedience to her, the monitors promptly altered once more to the Cube Prison.

Raising her voice, Buffy magically addressed the creatures there, "Fifteen minutes from now, this place is going to be entirely wiped off the map. You, too, naturally. Until then, you get to show the people here just what they've earned by acting far worse than you ever could. You might've been made or accidentally changed into monsters, but they worked at it. Have fun."

At those last words, the doors to the cube cages opened by themselves while alarms shrilled throughout the Facility. As one, the imprisoned supernatural beings surged out of their cages, searching for victims.

Speaking over the alarms, Buffy informed a paling Gary, "Oh, by the way, your escape tunnel's already been magically sealed shut. Guess you should've called in sick today, not that it would've actually helped."

Right after that, Buffy vanished in front of Gary, who could only utter a despairing whimper even when Steve rushed into the control room, shouting, "WHAT THE HELL'S GOING ON?!"

Heading back to college in their RV when a row of collapsed trees blocked any possible access to the isolated cabin they'd been about to spend a few days of vacation there, Curt, Dana, Holden, and Jules were as might be expected rather irritated about the whole fiasco, riding along in mutual grumpy silence.

Marty was also quiet throughout the trip back to his dorm, although he had other reasons for keeping his mouth shut. When they arrived and split up to go back to their college room, Marty made a beeline for his desk computer. Bringing up a word-processing program, Marty began hammering upon the keys the literary inspiration which had just been granted to him in a recent brainwave.

Writing a movie script about a high-school girl who was unexpectedly granted mystical superhuman powers to battle against vampires and other creatures of the night, Marty hit the film studio jackpot by actually having this made into a fairly well-received horror/comedy flick.

A couple of years later, Marty got just as lucky when his idea was additionally adapted into a television program on different networks which lasted for seven years and 144 episodes.

Though, in most peoples' opinion, the tv show was a lot better.