from going through a certain door. Buffy makes it to the door on her second try. She opens the door, but instead of finding Dawn and the other two students, Buffy finds a deranged Spike. Once Buffy locks the dead people out on the other side of the door, she realizes Spike is frail and unwell. She asks him about a series of cuts on his chest, and he replies that he tried to "cut it out". Before their conversation can continue, Dawn calls Buffy again. In spite of Spike's mad rambling, he is able to tell Buffy that the dead students are not zombies or ghosts, but actually manifest spirits controlled by a talisman, raised to seek vengeance. Buffy tells Dawn to find a weapon because the spirits are corporeal, and then leaves Spike alone, seeing that he is in no shape to help her. Buffy then calls Xander and tells him to seek and destroy the talisman. Buffy follows Dawn's screams to another room in the basement, where she finds Dawn has made a weapon from a purse filled with bricks. Dawn throws the weapon to Buffy, who then fights the spirits off as Xander wrestles with one in the bathroom after locating the talisman. Xander breaks it and the spirits disappear. Back in the school proper, Buffy sends Dawn, Kit, and Carlos off to class with some words of advice. Wood is impressed that Buffy is able to convince Kit and Carlos, the only two students with school records as long as Buffy's, to socialize and to go to class. He offers her a job working as an outreach counselor at the school, and she gladly accepts. Spike huddles in the school basement and tells an apparition of Warren Mears that he has prepared a speech to give Buffy, but she will not understand what he has to say. As Warren paces around Spike, he morphs successively into Glory, Adam, Mayor Wilkins, Drusilla and the Master - the previous villains of the series in reverse order. They all speak to Spike about a plan "to go back to the beginning," and finally, the Master morphs into Buffy, telling Spike that it is not about right or wrong: it is about power. Meanwhile, Willow is studying with Giles in Westbury, England. She studies magic and meditation with a coven of Wiccans that Giles knows. She is learning control,