Buffy looks for cover

One minute, Buffy was enjoying the oddest dream. A dream in which she and Angel had set up housekeeping and her mother Joyce would come over so often with her little sister Dawn -- Dawn? she remembered thinking, I don't have a little sister named Dawn -- and Darla and Drusilla would occasionally drop by and share the latest gossip about Spike and all the other vampires and then Giles would drop by with his girlfriend Jenny Calendar and then suddenly Buffy was here. On stage. Naked. With everyone in the club looking at her.

"Where are my clothes?" she kept asking herself.

She looked around but she could not see them anywhere. "Please don't tell me that I threw them offstage to some member of the audience," she said to herself. "I really need to get dressed now. "

Wherever her clothes were, they were not on stage. Nor did they appear to be anywhere close to it. And yet she felt the urgent need to get off the stage now!

Then she spied the entrance to something that looked like a girls' dressing room. Perhaps she could find some clothes in there -- if not her own, then somebody else's. She quickly ran off stage and into the dressing room, doing her damnest to keep herself covered with the usual set of hand lingerie -- handbra and hand panties -- that women caught in an unexpected state of undress have traditionally worn for years.

"Pardon me," she said to the dressing room's sole occupant, a young blonde girl not much older than Buffy. She was only wearing a G-string, a garter and traditional stripper heels but she still seemed more dressed than Buffy. "Can you tell me where my clothes are?"

"How would I know?" asked the young blonde. "Maybe they're in your locker."

"Good," said Buffy. "Which locker is mine?"

"Again, how should I know?" asked the blonde. "I don't know you."

"Whatever," said Buffy.

No doubt she would have to start searching each locker, one by one. Good thing she had her Slayer strength.

She was just about to break the lock on the first locker she saw when she heard a thud behind her. She turned in time to see the stripper fall **** from a knockout blow that had been evidently delivered by a familiar figure wearing a white dress.

"Hello, Buffy," said the woman in question. "That's quite a performance you gave on stage just a few minutes ago. What a shame that it will be your last."