A bullet is being loaded into the barrel of a pistol. A voice yells out in the distance: “This is stupid!”

Xander Harris tells Dawn Summers that he can’t hear her. He’s ignoring her. He’s quite excited about what he’s about to do. Dawn is standing well clear of him, a short distance away. She still thinks all of this is stupid.

Xander tells an approaching Buffy that if this works, it will mean more to him than his birth. He readies his gun. Buffy always forgets that he carries it. She doesn’t like them, she reminds him. They keep killing her friends.

He quickly changes the subject. He tells her to get ready, and she says she already is. He insists she squat. She does so, noting that it feels better, and Xander raises the gun. “On your mark. Get set. Go!”

He fires the gun in a path, straight out ahead of him. Buffy hasn’t moved. Xander looks horrified at her: “What’re you doing?” he asks, soundly angrily disappointed. She looks back at him and smiles: “Giving it a head start.”

“You’re not even sure you’re that…” Xander says, as Buffy disappears, racing after the bullet at superhuman speed. She catches up to it and gets so close to it’s movement that she can see that Xander wrote something on the bullet! Goonies Never Say Die, she reads. Nerd.

“…fast.” Xander has just finished his sentence. Buffy is beaming, proud as punch, hand on hips. She doesn’t think bugs in her teeth is very fun, but she caught the bullet. Not only that, she got ahead of it enough to read his note. She thinks it’s ‘neat’. Xander says no, and motions for her to follow.

Minutes later, Buffy is standing in a clearing, holding a steam train above her head! “Now, that is neat,” Xander declares, taking photos on his cell. Buffy asks if one hand, or two, looks better for his photos. Dawn wonders where the heck he got a train! Xander promises to put it back: he got it from their next stop.

At the bottom of the cliffside, below the monastery on the peaks of the mountain, Xander explains his concept: this is a very tall building. Or at least, that’s what Buffy is supposed to be imagining. Can she leap it, in a single bound? She says she should be able, so he jumps into her arms. “You’ve got me, who’s got you?” The last word turns into a shriek, as Buffy, effortlessly and without straining, jumps into the air, towards the monastery towering above. She lands with a thump outside the porch – on her own. She catches Xander as he falls into her arms. Faster than a speeding bullet, stronger than a locomotive, can leap tall buildings in a single bound. He’s three for three so far.

Inside the monastery, Dawn is concerned about Buffy’s new powers. She knows their lifestyle – powers don’t just magically come out of nowhere and they’ve always taught her that magic has consequences. They’re treating it like a joke, she says. Even Andrew would be taking this more seriously. Willow asks after Andrew, thinking that this is where he should be. She’s not overly concerned about Buffy’s new powers: she seems to think it’ll be okay, but she doesn’t know the source. She calls Satsu to ask after Andrew. She hasn’t seen him. No one seems to have seen Faith or Giles either. She needs to talk to Buffy. She gently tells Dawn that perhaps there is a little jealousy over Buffy and Xander’s close friendship, but Dawn remains adamant: there will be consequences. “You don’t get the good without getting the curse,” she insists.

In the forest again, Xander is quizzing Buffy on possible super powers she may have: heat vision? X-Ray vision? Telepathy? Teleportation? He asks about phasing. Once he’s explained what it is to Buffy, she doesn’t see the appeal. His list is rather extensive.

Willow is casting a spell: she knows that her three, seemingly missing, friends are not among the dead.

Seven miles north, the General tells his companions, Amy Madison and Warren Mears, that they can’t be seen. They’re approaching the Slayers. Amy is, naturally, concerned about Buffy’s new powers. Warren wonders if she can phase. The General is more concerned about Willow, but Amy knows she’s occupied: she has no clue what has happened yet. At that exact moment, Willow’s spell reveals everything to her.

She races to Buffy and Xander outside. They have a problem. Giles, Andrew and Faith are missing. After the battle, they were here. And now they’re gone. She thinks they were teleported. They were taken outside of her magic barrier. Buffy wants them found.

Amy knows that not only is Willow onto them, but also knows how they got in. It won’t be long until they’re upon them.

Inside, Willow is conducting a spell. Translated to English, it asks for Willow to be taken to the Slayer that needs her the most. Buffy thought that was her, but Willow, searching for Faith, tells her to be serious: she has them. Faith doesn’t. With that, she shimmers out of sight.

Amy feels her former friend’s departure. The General is happy: without the witch involved, this may actually work.

Malaysia. Willow appears in a dark room, wreckage everywhere. The smell hits her straight away: blood, with the bodies to match.

In Tibet, Buffy returns from speeding around to all of Giles’ safehouses around the world: he’s not in any of them. Dawn is stunned at the levity she uses when talking about her speed. Buffy has no idea where else to look; they’ll have to wait for Willow.

Florida. A storage container in a dock yard somewhere. Willow teleports in. The smell hits her again. More dead bodies. She calls out to Andrew, begging for this to be a joke. She opens more boxes and finds more of the same. She knows, just looking at the corpses, that wherever her friends are, they are royally screwed.

In Twilight’s base, Giles, Faith and Andrew are slowly coming around. Giles and Faith have no idea where they are, but a quick look around and Andrew identifies the place immediately. There’s a large device attached to the wall that he recognises. Faith doesn’t need any quick nerd lectures and threatens him, even bopping him on the nose, but he tells her the truth: it’s a device from a comic book. Warren took the specs from the comic and has built the machine. It’s supposedly a big death trap – it was Warren’s ultimate plan to kill the Slayer years before.

They’re in Twilight’s headquarters and, now that he’s inside, he can see that it’s all built on Warren and the Trio’s original make-believe base. Down to the smallest detail. Giles wonders why the three of them are here, wherever they are, and where the others could be.

Louisiana, marsh country. Willow teleports in. She finds a woman on the floor, dying from the same injuries she’s seen on all the corpses. She’s still alive. As Willow tends to her, the woman says her name is Cori – she knows Willow. Cori is a Slayer. A mob of people did this. Humans. Cori says they tried, but in the end, they failed. Willow looks around. Cori’s fellow Slayer squad are dead. Just like all the other bodies she’s seen today. As Cori slips away, she begs Willow not to tell Buffy that they failed her.

Buffy finally gets some sort of vision power: telescopic. Unfortunately, it’s showing her an older couple in Greece who are spending time together. She now wishes she could turn it off. She looks in the opposite direction, into the forest.

Within seconds, she’s hovering over the General, Warren and Amy. As Xander and Dawn race to Buffy’s side, they want to know why Amy and company are here: don’t they normally want to kill them? They tell the Scoobies that Twilight has kicked them out and they feel used. And, if the Scoobies help them, Amy says reluctantly, they will help them with Twilight. Buffy smiles.

Willow teleports back to Tibet, but away from the others. She feels sick to her stomach, but she needs to find Buffy. Her friend appears in front of her in seconds, having sensed her presence. Willow tells her that her powers are growing. She tells Buffy that her powers are coming from the bodies she found: they were all Slayers! Whenever a Slayer somewhere around the world is killed, the power is returning to Buffy.

She conjures up an image for Buffy to see: in the last forty-eight hours, dozens, maybe more, have been killed around the world: and that is where Buffy’s extra power is coming from!

In their cell, Andrew has bypassed Warren’s codes, since he never changed them. Faith reminds Giles that Riley said there were four bad guys: Amy, Warren, the General and…

The door Andrew unlocks opens. Twilight strides in, leather coat billowing behind him. He introduces himself formally to his guests. He has a calm and charming voice, the gravelly distortion hiding his identity gone, the mask all that remains. He asks them all one question: “Who wants to hear a really cool master plan?”