A/N: Though there is a Bela Vista in Bengo, it's actually on the coast. Since I didn't want to have to deal with an actual city for this story, I appropriated the name and shifted it inland. Sorry to anyone with any knowledge of actual Angolan geography!

A/N II: This chapter is ueber-short, and I know I haven't updated in a while, but apparently my profs aren't particularly understanding of my need to supply my readers with juicy someday-spuffy goodness. Who'm I kidding? They want all my tasty words for themselves. Greedy buggers. But anyway, I'm in paper crunch mode, so I'm just sticking up the last section I wrote that's complete. I have a short break next week, so I should be able to get up a chapter or two on both of my stories - and here's me, crossing my fingers. Anyway, please enjoy, and please, please review!


Xander spent almost a week trying to figure out how to get information without dealing with having alienated his sole source. Finally it was decided that, in an attempt to avoid all points of testiness, Willow would call Buffy.

Though the call was private, rather than the teleconference of the previous attempt, the African contingent of the Scooby Gang trickled slowly into the kitchen throughout the long conversation. By the time Willow hung up, a stack of scribbled-upon looseleaf paper in front of her, even Illyria had come to see what was going on.

"So, what's the what?" Xander turned the top page towards him, trying to decipher Willow's sketches and shorthand, but she smacked his hand away.

"First off, you made Giles cry."

"I what?" Xander's face dropped with shock and dismay, and even Spike couldn't resist a flinch.

"Joking, geeze. But he is pretty upset. Although, not so much with you." Willow shrugged.

"With who, then?" Angel asked.

"Himself, mostly. I dunno. Sounds like Buffy gave him a pretty thorough going over after we hung up."

"After Harris hung up, y'mean. God, but that was good." Spike's grin was huge.

"Yeah, yeah," Xander gave a little half-bow and snickered. "But not the point. Buff got any ideas about these demons of ours?"

Willow nodded and gestured Xander to the seat across from her with one hand, ordering her notes with the other. "Yeah. It actually looks like this ties in with Angel's little snafu in LA."

"Pretty big coincidence," Angel interjected.

"Not as big as you might think. Apparently what Xander said about the Slayer dreams being different around here got Buffy thinking, and she sicced some of the stodgier researchers on local geo-magical influences. It turns out - and I so can't believe I didn't look for this on my own - that there's a giant magical hotspot pretty near here, under Bela Vista."

"I've been there," Xander mulled, tapping his finger against his chin. He held up a hand to forestall the information session and left the room, returning in short order with a battered paperback atlas. He opened it to a large map of Bengo province and pointed out the city. "Seemed pretty normal. What's a magical hotspot?"

"Like a hellmouth, except it draws in magic instead of big bads."

"So what's this got to do with our out-of-state visitors?" Angel asked. "And what do they have to do with me?"

"Nothing to do with you directly. Us being here is happenstance. But we're here because Xander's here, and Xander's here because the Slayers are here, and the Slayers are here because the hotspot influences the magic that creates and binds them."

"What's that? His most magnificent Ponciness is not the center of the universe? Dear god!" Spike grasped at his chest in feigned shock, reducing Xander and Willow to giggles.

"Shut it, Spike," Angel growled. Spike just flipped him off and settled back against the wall behind Willow.

"Anyway," Willow emphasized, "Giles got in touch with the Devon Coven's seers and they gave him the heads up. Turns out that the Uvumi that had been sold to fight in the gladiator games or whatever were sold to..." She flipped the page she was looking at sideways, squinting as she tried to make out her writing. "Somebody. Whoever they were, they were subsidiary to the Wolf, Ram and Hart, and were all set up to come out of the portal when I closed it."

"Were they caught in the magical fall-out of your actions?" Illyria asked, also trying to decipher the cryptic notes.

"No, actually. Apparently, a bunch of the different kinds of demons that the Senior Partners were trying to sic on us are kinda renowned for feuding, so they were all being held in different pocket dimensions. There was a gatekeeper or," again she flipped through her notes, until she found a page that was mostly covered with a rough diagram of a ritual. "Here! Buffy described it to me, but she said she was getting some grunt to scan everything into an online archive for me, so I should be able to get a cleaner copy later. But anyway. These," she pointed out the five points of the star, "were where the wardens sat. The way the ritual works, four normal magic-users sit at the bottom points, and someone who's trained in opening portals sits at the top. The others' power gets funneled through him, and he can use all of them to control the portals."

"So what happened, then?" Xander asked, running his fingers over the symbols Willow had sketched at the edges of the pentacle.

"When I shut the portal, it knocked the four back-ups out. Because he wasn't actually using his own juice, though, whoever was in charge apparently stayed conscious. By the time the Senior Partners managed to find someone else to open up the dimension they were in, he'd gotten away. And it looks like he took an army with him."

"And suddenly I'm depressed," Spike muttered.

"So what you're saying is that, for some reason, this guy is bringing his army here? To take advantage of this magic hotspot or whatever?" Willow nodded at Angel, who shuddered. "Didn't we just do our apocalypse for the year?" He whined.

"Then those we fought in the caves were scouts for this army?" Illyria asked. She marked Bela Vista on the map with one finger, and sought out the town where Xander lived with another. He pointed out the location, and she followed the terrain markers until she found the location of the caves where they had fought the Uvumi.

"Bela Vista is too far away for this to be a practical vantage point," she remarked. "But since we only fought three, I think it would be safe to assume that more are similarly secreted elsewhere."

"It may be too far away far away for a scouting party," Xander mused, "but not for a standard perimeter. Wils, you get any numbers on that army?"

"Mm." She flipped over the page she was looking at. "I'm getting sixty Uvumi, forty Anansen, and, um... fifty Oni."

"And for those of us lacking a clue?"

"Hundred and fifty bad guys." She looked at him curiously.

"I can do the math, brainiac. What are the Nancies and the Knees like?"

Spike snorted, and Willow rolled her eyes. "The Anansen are from West Africa, so they're probably in your books. Buffy said they're some kind of spider demon. And the Oni are giant Japanese trolls."

"I'm guessin' they're not gonna be big on the idea of sitting down together and staging a nice moon-viewing party?" Spike asked.

"We're kinda short on soybeans and monkeys, so I'm guessing no."

"Huh-wha?" Xander did a double-take from where he was bringing in one of the larger demonologies he had stored in the living room.

"Oni are supposed to be scared away by soybeans and monkeys. And no, I don't know why." Willow shook her head. "Got anything?"

"Yeah. The index. Gimme a minute, will you?" Xander huffed, flipping through the weathered book.

Illyria and Angel turned their attention back to the map, while Willow started transcribing her notes into a more accessible format. After a few minutes, Xander left and brought in a second book. He flipped to the appropriate page and scanned quickly before standing and thumping it with his finger.

"Got it!" He crowed.

"What's the deal, then?" Spike sidled around to peer past Xander's shoulder.

"Big ugly spiders of evil, yadda yadda, arboreal?"

"Tree-dwelling," Willow clarified.

"Yeah. And they've got big nasty limb-grabbing claws."

"So how do we kill the buggers?"

"Looks like fire or beheading are the best bet; anything else, they take a lot of damage to put down."

He was sliding the book over the table to Willow when Illyria poked him in the shoulder. It was the first time she had instigated a conversation with him, and he jumped at the contact.

"Y'know, you wanna get my attention, I've got a name," he grumbled.

"I am unclear as to its nature. None of the others address you in a singular fashion."

Xander rocked on his heels for a minute, then grinned. "Fair enough. Just call me Xander, okay?"

"Okay." She seemed hesitant about using the term, but smiled slightly in response.

"So what inspired the pokage, then?"

"You spoke earlier about the possible dispatch of troops in the use of determining a perimeter."

Xander eyed her for a moment, and responded slowly. "Yes, I suppose I did."

"One hundred and fifty soldiers, split into groups of three, could easily establish a defensible perimeter around the target area with an approximate radius comparable to the distance between Bela Vista and the cave."

Xander turned his attention back to the map for a moment before getting back up to leave the room. He returned a minute later with a small metal toolbox. "Gotta love that carpentry gig," he chuckled, digging through it and coming up with a compass and a protractor.

"Look at you with the tools," Willow giggled. He doffed an imaginary cap at her before inscribing the circle Illyria had indicated on the map.

"So we're guessing that our bad guys are sitting pretty somewhere along this line."

"Equidistant?" Illyria asked.

"Easy enough to check," he answered, handing the protractor over to Willow. "You're math girl, you get to mark the posts. Give me fifty points spread out around the circle."

"I knew that not graduating from college was going to leave me with the crap jobs," Willow griped, but started jotting calculations on the edge of her paper.