She laughs, horrified and hysterical.

"Well. Fun. You - you want me on not that?"

"Yeah I want -" he seems to be having a little trouble enunciating or something - "I want you to keep investigating what's wrong with the city while we figure out if - if it's even a danger in Hell, it could be that it can't ...melt the world from there." He nods vigorously. 

"OK." It's - it's not OK, because she doesn't know what's causing it and doesn't know how she's going to fix it, but she needs to be able to fix it, needs to think of something else, needs to be better, think, think, think - 

Demon bar, OK, that was her next line of attack, maybe someone there knows something. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

"M'on it," she says, mechanically, and she wants to throw up or break down crying or ask why she has to be the detective right now, when detecting is not actually her forte really, when she's got to be the dumbest person here by a lot, but there isn't time to question orders, and so - "On it."

She runs out of the office.

He collapses, then, because there's not an immediate task that involves being on his feet. We can call it up and kill it. 

If it brings the Silmaril, yeah.

He reaches out, puts a hand on his shoulder. 

How're you -

More practice. C'mon.

She's heading for Willy's when she gets cornered by vampires. It's still day, this is stupid, she shouldn't have to deal with this. But she does.

There are seven of them. Maybe if she just beheads the ones that are in her way and then runs -

They rush her and pin her to the wall. She drops her sword and tries to get her stake out, but there are so many of them and she's so tired and she can't move and they're laughing and whispering to her about what they're going to do to her -

"Sorry about that," says a boy, from just down the street. He's younger than her, maybe seven or eight. She's seen him somewhere - she knows that voice - she knows something - what does she know -

There was a coma patient, maybe seven or eight -

She punches the vampire on her with strength she didn't know she had. She stakes one, picks up her sword and beheads two, runs -

Alex I need you to bounce a thing to Wishbone - tell him to meet me at the hospital, can you do that, I think I was right before and the source is at the hospital but I don't know how to fix it on my own and it's possible that he knows something about how to undo it -

Yeah, all right - told him, he's meeting you there -

Thanks - be careful -

Hospital. Coma patients. It's the same kid, if she checks her list she can figure out what his name is - she saw a photograph of him at some point, she thinks, maybe it was in a newspaper, she'd be so good at this if she could just remember everything in the universe - 

Wishbone meets her there and she gets him to a computer and she tells him that the coma patient is walking around outside apologizing for things, and it's not a lot to go on but it's the only thing they can do right now and maybe he can make sense of this for her. She drops him off at a computer and opens up a notepad app for him. She runs around the hospital putting out metaphorical and literal fires while he types. She notes that the babies are missing from the maternity ward, but that could be anything and there are so many things.

Wishbone types up his thoughts.

What you saw was very likely an astral projection of the boy's spirit. If he is the cause, then only way to end the manifestations is to wake him up. Since the boy's body is unresponsive, you'll have to find his spirit and resolve whatever intense internal conflict has caused the manifestations.

There's something else you should be aware of. If the Mayor no longer has the artifact that Tyelcormo is tracking, and it is in fact in hell, then the Mayor can only have given it to the demon Lurconis. He is a very powerful demon who can only be lured out of hell if one sacrifices some number of human infants to him.

- oh.

Oh shit.

She runs back to the maternity ward and asks the nurse on duty if she knows what happens to the missing babies. Yes, there were two men. Yes, they were very tall, yes, they took the babies -

Paging Alex. You guys didn't steal a bunch of babies to feed to demons at some point in the last twenty minutes, did you?

That does not get an answer.

She needs to find the boy's spirit. OK. The boy's spirit is wandering around apologizing for viscerally horrible things. Really, she's as likely to run into the spirit on the way to the sacrifice as anywhere else. More likely, even. She rips a map off the wall and asks Wishbone to point to the location. She gets one and circles it and stuffs the map into her jacket. She runs.

Fine - fine don't tell me - tell me if you're reading me - I can't tell if you guys are dead otherwise -

Not dead. The cause is what matters, don't get distracted.

That would be a lot more convincing if you were helping - 

- do they even want to find the cause, they're not helping and they could -

- did they come here just to get the stupid rock, did they know it would be here -

- the rock is already in the wrong hands, if the point is to keep demons from getting it and ascending or whatever then that happened a long time ago and hasn't caused anything more catastrophic and they're still trying to get it back, to the exclusion of finding the cause and saving people -

- they're her friends -

- they are, right -

She's running, she's running, she's running -

The world is getting less - real. Streets don't predictably lead to the next one, there are clouds of bats and locusts and crows blocking out the sun, there are big ravines in the road for no reason, that over there looks like a portal to Hell -

- ah. 

Yes, that'll work, if the parts of hell that are next to Sunnydale match up in any way at all, she can find Lurconis and get there first - she can get it herself -

Paging Alex, gonna get your stupid shiny rock for you, if you see an eight-year-old boy going around apologizing for things then lemme know about it when I get back - 

She charges for the portal.

Hell is louder than her world, or maybe this is what her world is like if you can hear it as well as Alex, if you can hear everyone everywhere screaming and crying and killing and dying. Among the other things she can hear familiar voices arguing the terms of a babies-for-Silmaril trade, even though there are a thousand people talking at once and even though Lurconis and Alex and Michael are unlikely to be speaking English. 

The ground is covered in crushed bodies, still-moving. Mostly of animals, some demons, none obviously human. Some of them try to grab at her ankles. Something acidic is dripping from the howling void above her. 

She can do this.

She has to do this.

She steps over the bodies and clutches her sword with both hands, looking for something to kill. There's gotta be a demon somewhere, right, all she has to do is find it and kill it and - maybe once she has the Silmaril she can use it to go home, that's probably an OK use of a Silmaril, right?

There's a snake in front of her. It's awful and black and coiled up and probably a thousand miles long. It's squirming around a brilliant gem, too far away for her to reach, but maybe if she swings her sword right she can cut through the awful knotted coils and just put her hand around it -

Hello, Karen.

She's swinging her sword.

You are older than the humans I like to eat, but I won't say no to a free meal. Your friends wanted me to pay for theirs.

She can hear them, over the howling. She'd been practically sure it would be a fakeout, they wouldn't really do it, they just had to make it look convincing and maybe they couldn't tell her because maybe the demon has mindreading too, but now she can hear them saying that he can have the first two babies before he hands it over -

Are they your friends? asks the awful writhing mass, though she can't see a mouth anywhere on it. Leaving you to fight this battle alone? Dropping everything for their precious Silmaril. Doesn't matter how many people die for it. Doesn't matter at all if you do.

She's charging for it. Her sword strikes bone and shatters like glass.

Did they ever care about you, Karen Teller? Do you think they care whether your world is destroyed? Did you think that they weren't demons, like the rest of us, that you wouldn't in the end be a pawn, discarded the moment you were no longer needed for their true aims?

The coils rush up around her and immobilize her. Her arms, her legs, her neck - she can't breathe - the stench is so bad that she's not sure she could even if there weren't a snake squeezing the life out of her -

She's not strong enough -

No, Karen. They won't care when you die here. 

She can't breathe - her neck is collapsing -

Do you think they hesitated? Do you think that any part of it wasn't an act? Do you think either of them cared about you for one single second? Do you think your sins could be wiped clean by a being like that? Do you think that anything good or holy would allow something like them to serve it? Would so much as tolerate you once your own hands were stained with the blood of those they've killed?

She can't move -

Do you think you'll like living here in hell, Karen Teller? We get excellent reception here. I could probably show you as they destroy your world, would that be interesting? Since you were such an important part of its demise -

She can't -

Please. Please God. Please, I can't do this, please -

Do you think your God can hear you here?

Please just - please - carry me - please I can't do it alone - I'll die if you want me to, I don't mind, it's OK - please, I don't even need to go home, I'll stay here forever even, just please let me stop it -

It's not your fault. Well, it's your fault for overestimating yourself, and your fault for trusting demons, and your fault for not killing them the moment they showed up on your doorstep, but this? No one could blame you for losing. You're so useless. Pathetic, really. No one blames an infant for its useless parasitism.

Please -

Her hand closes around something. A hilt. She swings blindly, cutting through flesh like a hot knife through butter. The coils fall off of her. She charges -

You'll never stop them, little girl. You'll never end it. No one will. It is inevitable.

She sees the head. She jumps. She swings - 

What -

The head falls. She falls with it. She hears Lurconis, in the other world, cut off mid-sentence. She falls against the coils and gets the wind knocked out of her again, then gets crushed by more falling pieces. She still has her other sword, the new sword, the nightmare sword, so she manages to squirm through the pieces of rotting meat and black blood, and they're getting in her mouth and her eyes and her lungs and her soul, she thinks, but she's moving towards the gem. There are other creatures reaching for it, now that Lurconis is dead, but she's the closest, she'll make it first.

Her hand closes around the stupid shiny rock, beautiful even here, mocking her with its stupid shiny rockitude.

"Please," she whimpers, and -

She slams into the ground. Portal back didn't open up at ground level. If she were a normal person she'd have broken her spine, but she's not, so she's just gulping air and choking on rotting flesh.

She needs to figure out - if they really just want to keep it from falling into the wrong hands then it'll be fine if she tells them it's safe now, at that point they'll help her find the cause and undo the effects on world. And if they don't, if they keep ignoring it even then, if they only care about the rock even when it's safe, then that'll mean -

She realizes she's not far from Zeke's crypt. They'll be reading her, they'll know, but they can't read Zeke. It'll take them several minutes to get here no matter how they're moving, so if she hands it off now -

She stands, with heroic effort. Every part of her is aching or broken or oozing some unknown fluid. But she runs, and she pounds on the door to Zeke's crypt.

He opens it.

"Karen what the fuck—?"

"Please - this is a super unfair thing to ask of you but I need a vampire - world's gonna end - I'll pay you back somehow I swear - "