Part Eight: You Really Couldn’t Have Brought a Gourd?

Now was a very bad time to realise that I wasn’t actually as good under pressure as I’d always thought I was. The four nightmarish products of my psyche strained and struggled in front of me, and I felt panic rising up inside me once again, my courage ebbing with Spidey’s webbing. Then I suddenly realised – the spotlight! That must be the key, right? I whirled around to head towards it and yelled with shock to find someone standing right behind me. The petite, blonde bombshell had her hair back in a ponytail that was draped over a long, brown coat. In fact she was all in brown, a brown polo-neck sweater and brown pants underneath.

“Jumpy much?” she asked.

“Buffy!” I exclaimed. “Thank God you’re here, a Slayer is exactly what I need!”

She eyed the enraged shadow creatures, straining and wriggling underneath the webbing. “Yeah, it does look like you’re having some major demon drama. But I’m not feeling very killy right now – I don’t think I can help you like that.”

“Then why are you here?”

“To tell you it’s not the spotlight.”

“What?”

“The spotlight,” she repeated. “The spotlight isn’t the key.”

I sighed. “Dammit! Then what is? What is this? What’s going on? How can I bring this nightmare to an end?”

“You know,” said Buffy, “after my mom died I wasn’t feeling so hot, but Glory wasn’t about to let up because she was like, well, a god and everything, so I couldn’t really afford to take a timeout. And that’s when Giles took me…”

“… on a vision quest!” I exclaimed. “I knew that outfit looked familiar!”

“Yeah, a quick bit of hokey pokey and I was plugged straight into the source, the ancient wisdom of the slayers. Well, more like the primitive wisdom. I wasn’t super grateful at the time, but looking back now, it did help me get my slay on again and figure out how to defeat the biggest big bad we’d ever faced.”

“The wisdom of the ages,” I whispered. “That’s it! Connect to the source, tap into ancient wisdom! The answers I seek will be there for sure!”

“Yeah, either that or some native chick in the desert. But hey, beggars can’t be choosers, right?”

“Right.” I said. “So, have you got the gourd? I’m ready. Gourd me up! Come on. Let’s gourd.”

“Is that a Xander reference?” she asked with a grin.

I grinned back in reply.

“That was pretty funny. But sorry, no. No gourd.”

“Do we need Giles then?” I asked.

“No time for rituals,” she said, nodding back at the monstrous forms straining behind us. “They’re almost free.”

“Then how are we going to connect me to the ancient…”

I honestly didn’t see the punch coming – God, she’s so fast! – but her fist cracked me right in the temple and I crumpled to the ground. Multiple Buffies stood over me as the world spun around.

“Huh, you can take a punch better than I’d have guessed to look at you. We don’t need a gourd, we just need to knock you out of yours. Oh, and by the way, if anyone tells you that death is your gift, you might want to ask about their returns policy.”

The last thing I remembered seeing before Buffy knocked me completely out of my gourd was her fashionable yet practical footwear whistling at unnatural speed towards my face.