“Ask Buffy about her bad zones,” Willow said to Giles.
Buffy was beaming.
“Zones? Oh, yes, the source of your academic peril.” Giles worked a ruler down under his cast and moved it about until it elicited a sigh of relief. It couldn’t come off too soon for him. “From your delighted expression am I to assume they have improved?”
“You are. Commando—I mean, Counselor Burzak caught me in the hall this morning,” Buffy said. “The two yellows and the red are now two greens and a blinking yellow.”
“A blinking yellow, you say?”
“Oh, that’s a good thing,” Buffy explained. “Or at least a better thing. I think.”
“I’m sure it is,” Giles said loyally.
“I even saw Snyder walking around without his clipboard and evil charts,” Buffy added.
“Very good, then,” Giles said, obviously not wanting the entire explanation.
Xander said, “I’m still confused about this Solitaire guy. Not a vampire. Just a demon with a really big chip on his shoulder?”
“That is the essential gist of it,” Giles said. “He perpetuated a false identity, a complete history, as it were, to at turns frighten and confound his opponents.”
“Which reminds me,” Buffy said. “The next time the Watcher journals don’t seem to make much sense, there’s probably a good reason. I almost learned the hard way.”
“Yes,” Giles conceded. “It would appear that in this instance, Angel’s instincts about the Day Walker being a myth were well-founded.”
“And Solitaire was not working with the ghouls?”
“No,” Giles said. “What made you think he was?”
“You know what they say,” Xander said. “Demons are a ghoul’s best friend.”
“Groan,” Buffy said.
“Speaking of false histories,” Giles said. “Willow, what did you finally decide to do about your dilemma? The term paper on the history of Sunnydale?”
“It was tearing me up,” Willow said. “Whether to be honest and tell everything I know or to, basically, he about everything. So, I . . . Well, I . . .”
“What?”
Oz grinned mysteriously and said, “She took the high road.”
“The high road?” Giles said. “I’m not sure I follow.”
Willow reached into her binder and removed a thick term paper. “This is what I wrote,” she said and handed it to Giles.
He flipped through it with growing signs of alarm. “I see . . . the Hellmouth, the Master, the Slayer, Spike and Drusilla . . . This is . . . everything! Willow, surely you haven’t given—!?”
With a wry smile, Willow withdrew another, much thinner paper from her binder and offered it to Giles.
He flipped through the pages, nodded and sighed. “Statistics, charts, population growth, industry and . . . and nothing supernatural.” He looked at her. “Much better, but how—”
Willow shrugged with an impish grin. “I had to edit for length.”