Buffy dragged herself out of the last thicket of rose bushes, leaving behind shreds of her once frilly blouse as she did so. She was soaking wet from the sprinklers that had activated in the middle of her hunt through the dean's rose garden (rose garden, hah, it was more like the Rose Amazon in here), was stinging from several nasty thorn gashes on her arms and face. The knees and ankles of her best white pants were muddy. Her broken finger hurt like hell. And the 'demons' she was so sure she'd been successfully pursuing through the rows and bushes and quagmires of the garden turned out to be a bunch of frat boys out on a initiation prank.
"I'll prank you," Buffy had yelled at them, and proceeded to snatch up their clothes where they'd left them near a memorial statue of Mayor Wilkins and tossed them high up into the branches of a eucalyptus tree.
The three real demons could be anywhere by now. Buffy paused, looking about the campus commons. Maybe Willow had handled them. But the whole campus was eerily deserted. She checked her watch. Seemed like she'd been in the garden for hours, but it was only 10:45 pm. There should be at least a few people reeling around. She began to hurry up the path towards the dorms. She'd better try to find Willow.
As she neared the area where most of the student housing was, Buffy finally started passing by bunches of students. They were all heading in the same direction, and they all carried radios. The ones Buffy could hear were playing "Layla".
She spotted a familiar face from psychology class and grabbed the guy by the arm. "Hey what's going on?"
He winced at her, and Buffy loosened her grip. "There's this party happening up at the radio station over at the Communications building," the student said. "Free food, bad beer, demons, and a glitterball. Everyone's there."
"A glitterball?" Buffy said in disbelief.
He nodded and broke away, running to catch up with his pals.
Buffy frowned and ran to her dorm. The lights were on in just about every room, doors open everywhere, but the place was deserted except for a few students too inebriated to find their ways out of their rooms and one oblivious kid playing Doom on his Imac.
Willow wasn't in her room, but the radio was on, playing the last strains of "Layla".
"This is way weird," Buffy said through gritted teeth. "What's with the thing for all this old music all of a sudden?"
"Eric Clapton singing 'Layla'. That's a classic you musical illiterates," Giles said.
Buffy wheeled, then blinked in confusion when she found herself alone in the room.
"Am I going to have to be responsible for any shred of musical taste you'll ever retain from your college years?" Giles continued. "Or are you going to continue to massacre your eardrums night after night with rubbish? While we ponder this conundrum, you might as well listen to this one: 'Rough Boys', Pete Townshend, 1972. I pity you people for having to grow up in this era."
The music commenced. Buffy stared at the radio, her mouth open. That sounded like a demonic version of Giles, snarky and sarcastic and arrogant. Kind of like what, in her worst nightmare, she'd imagined a vampire Giles to --
"Oh no!" Buffy scrambled for the Orb of Thessulah that Willow kept in the back of her underwear drawer.
Lili plopped down in the chair next to Giles, a bottle of Lamphoraig scotch in her hand. She was drinking straight from the bottle. "What a mess out there," she exclaimed. "The station hasn't been rocking like this since the last earthquake."
"That's my scotch," Giles said.
"No, Willow just brought this back," Lili assured him. "Oh, she's got that other book you wanted.
He looked at her, then yanked the bottle out of her hands and took a drink. Lili grinned at him. Her hair, as usual, was falling in loose dark curls in her face. She was flushed and bouncing with exuberance. He had a sudden urge to plug into her to share some of that charge.
Before he could remember to be appalled at himself for the crassness of that thought, Lili had leaned forward, grabbed his shoulders, and they were doing the smoochie mambo.
"Euwww!" somebody exclaimed from the open door.
Giles recoiled from his co-dj as if their polarities had reversed. Visions of a horrified Buffy danced in his head.
But the young woman scowling at them from the doorway was a freckled redhead. "You guys ought to put a sign on the door," Copper grumbled at them. "'Breeders rutting' should do it. Goddess, talk about making my weekend start on a freak- out."
Lili offered her girlfriend the bottle of Lamphoraig and smiled. "We didn't expect you back. Forgive?"
Copper eyed the bottle suspiciously.
Giles took it out of Lili's hand and deliberately drank from it, then offered it to the other woman.
She shuddered. "I came back for my veggies," she said, ignoring Giles.
"Uhm, well..." Lili pulled the much-depleted ziploc bag from behind the soundboard. All that was left were a few broccoli flowerettes. Copper looked accusingly at Giles.
"I had nothing to do with the ingesting of your vegetables." Giles was flipping through his case of lps again. He pulled out a George Thorogood and the Destroyers LP and placed it on the turntable.
"So what's with the psycho line-up tonight?" Copper plunked herself down on the desk as George Thorogood started whining about his landlady woes.
Lili smiled up at her. "You were listening to us."
"Hey, G-Man! --" Xander began from the doorway.
Giles turned and threw a green water balloon at him. It exploded messily against the frame of the door. Xander yelped and ducked back out again.
"This is the broadcast booth, not bloody Grand Central Station," Giles growled at Lili's grin.
Oz poked his head tentatively inside. "Permission to enter?" he inquired diffidently.
Giles waved him on in. He scowled at Devon, who wheeled himself in on Oz's heels, and picked up a water balloon. "We never finished our interview, dude!" Devon protested.
"We finished it," Giles said, glaring.
Devon held up a bag of brownies.
Lili and Copper brightened.
"Where is all the food coming from?" Giles grumbled, as the women dove into the chocolate.
"We've reached critical mass," Oz explained. "The party has become a hootenanny. It's a self-sustaining entity now."
Bubbles bounced in. "'My boyfriend's back and you're gonna be in trouble'," she warbled. "I knew I smelled chocolate."
"Hey!" Lili smacked at her hands. "What's the magic word?"
"Uh, 'gimme'?" Bubbles guessed, looking genuinely perplexed. She snatched the bag out of Lili's hand and helped herself to a smooshed-up handful.
"Bubbles!" a deep baritone of a male voice bellowed from the doorway.
The blonde demon groupie paused in mid-chocolately gobble to glare. "You can go now!" she yelled back. Dark brown stains smeared her face.
A hulking figure stood in the broadcast booth's doorway, radiating dissatisfaction. He could only have been mistaken for human if one squinted very hard. "You and me had a date tonight," he snarled in a vaguely Bostonian accent. "I go looking for you and find you hanging out with these beaters." By the glare he leveled at Giles, he made it plain whom he was taking issue with.
"You don't own me," Bubbles scoffed. "I'll give myself to any hunk I like."
Wisps of steam, or perhaps smoke, started coming out of the other demon's gnarly ears. Giles studied him, interested in this display. The only aurally vapouring demons he was aware of didn't have anywhere near the body mass of this one. "I beg your pardon," he said. "But you wouldn't happen to be of the Krybylly race, would you?"
The demon boyfriend bent, grabbed up a crate of Dingoes' cds, and threw them at him.
Bubbles burned the hurtling crate out of midair with a whistling fireball. Fiery sapphire sparks flew every which way, trailing little curls of blue smoke. "Act your age, Freddy!" she yelled at him furiously. "Not your shoe size!"
The boyfriend's shoe size was obviously greatly in excess of his emotional age, but Giles wasn't about to quibble while the pages on the desk in front of him were still smoking. He put his LP case to a safe harbor under the desk, then beat out the smoldering papers with the bottom of the scotch bottle.
"You promised!" Freddy bellowed at his girlfriend.
Bubbles stuck her tongue out at him. "I got better fish to fry tonight, you boring old toad." To make her point, she threw her arms, sticky with chocolate, around Giles' neck and gave him a messy sparkly smooch. Alarmed by this display on several accounts, he attempted to fend her off, but she had the grip of a pro wrestler.
"I'm gonna pound you into smooshed-up stuff!" Freddy yelled at Giles. He then started to bawl, great rivers of smelly blue tears streaming down his nose.
Bubbles leaned over to pick up one of the green water balloons, but Giles thrust her away from them. "Have you no compassion?" he asked her. "The man is obviously very distraught over your treatment of him."
"Nope." She helped herself to more brownies. "I'm tired of little bitty baby boys!" she yelled at Freddy. "I'm only gonna put up with men from now on. She looked at Giles steamily, then crammed a brownie in her mouth.
Freddy slumped against the door frame and howled unhappily. Lili offered him a tissue, and he took it, promptly reducing it to a sodden mess.
Feeling as if he'd taken a wrong turn into some Twilight Zonish Romper Room for demons, Giles reached for the turntable, and discovered that the tape had peeled away from the microphone switch and that the mike was yet again on. "Sod it," he said in defeat. "Here's some Cream to top off the whiskey." He got 'Strange Brew' up to speed and turned back to his Lamphoraig.
Compared to the rest of the dark and silent campus, the Communications Building was lit up like a Christmas tree. A very drunk and rowdy Christmas tree, which by now was spilling light, loud amplified music, and rocking students out onto to the sidewalks all around it. Buffy finally gave up trying to get in through any of the doors, where obnoxious self-appointed bouncers kept shoving her out again for not being dressed 'G' enough (whatever the hell that meant). Not that she would have had an easy time getting through the crowds of students dancing hard to 'Strange Brew' in the hallways.
"This is worse than that 'band candy' thing," Buffy muttered to herself as she climbed up the stoney facade of the Communications Building. She broke a second story window with one whack of the heel of her hand and tumbled into a darkened office, knocking over stacks of papers that had been piled up inside beneath the window. "At least then it was only the old people stuck back in the '70s," she grumbled as she made her way to the door. The frosted glass window in the door blazed with light and shook with the beat of the music from beyond. Buffy took a deep breath and opened the door.
A demon jumped at her through the open doorway. Buffy instantly went into defensive mode, but it was too late. She was mobbed by a swarm of them. They surrounded her, pinning her arms to her sides, stepping on her toes, and spilling beer down the back of her shirt. The first one grabbed her and landed a big sloppy smooch on her lips.
"Euwww!" Buffy said and tried to hit him, but he was gone again, helping one of the other demons to fix strobe lights to the walls of the office. She turned to battle the rest of the mob, but discovered that the demons were actually the minority among the throngs of human students. Tie dye warred with leather which warred with jeans and spandex. Just about everyone wore fresh white t-shirts emblazoned with a fiery red 'KURS of the G-MAN' logo.
"Freaky much?" Buffy muttered to her self. Shoving revelers right and left, she fought her way out into the hallway, where the party was going full blast. The music segued over to "All Right Now" and she took advantage of the momentary lull in decibels to grab the nearest student and shake him until his teeth rattled. "Who's responsible for all this?" she yelled.
The boy looked at her with rabbity eyes. "The G-Man?" he whimpered and pointed up the hall.
"Oh yeah, as if." Buffy threw him to one side. Thinking of her Giles, in some demon's thrall and caught in the middle of this, alarmed her. She fought her way determinedly up the river of dancers.
"Buffy!" She turned and finally saw Willow hopping up and down on top of something and waving a book over her head. Buffy put some muscle into her progress and bullied her way through to the table Willow was perched on top of.
"What's going on?!" she yelled at her friend over the boom of the loudspeakers. Willow was wearing a 'G-Man' t- shirt. She didn't look overly alarmed about the situation, but she did push the book into Buffy's hands and point into the office, mouthing 'Giles'. Buffy raised her eyebrows, hoping for more detail, but Willow only shrugged and hopped down from the table to get herself a beer.
Buffy turned and elbowed her way into the radio station office. Xander and Anya were playing court here from the top of a desk laden with a cornucopia of junk food. Xander was dazedly munching on cheezy chips, and Anya was rocking to the music. The office dancers were a bizarre mix of artsy goths, retropunks, hippy wanna-bes, slumming students, and poorly disguised demons. Buffy was beginning to suspect that this was all some bad dream brought on by too much cheap beer and pepperoni pizza.
"Wake up wake up!" she incanted to herself, and pinched her own arm for good measure, but none of it obliged her by disappearing. "Damn it." She started shoving her way back towards a big red sign lit up to read 'On the Air'.
Buffy only managed to reach the door by dint of her Slayer strength and some strategically placed elbows, knees, and wedgies. She paused to glare up at the forbidding red 'On the Air', then grabbed the door handle and pushed.
The door barely budged. Buffy put more weight into it and it suddenly popped open, tumbling her inside.