Opening scene


Wes is confronting a drawn sword blade, outraged by the idea that Cordy would toss in a Prothgarian broadsword with a third-century ceremonial Sancteus dagger.

While the gang work to reorganize the weapons cabinet, Fred questions Angel’s relationship and works on a project of her own.
Fred just doesn’t let go the questioning about Angel and Buffy so Cordy decides to demonstrate ‘why not’ by acting it out for her in the most melodramatic fashion. Wes jumps in to play Angel. They both put on a dramatic humorous play that summarizes the unfair relationship between Buffy and Angel.

Wes pulls Cordy close.
Wes : “Kiss me”
Cordy : “Bite me”

Wes bends Cordy back over his arm and pretends to sink his fangs into her neck.
We hear Angel off screen : “How about you both bite me.”
Fred jumps up :”You’re back.!”

Cordy and Wes see Angel watching them and quickly scurry apart, but Gunn only asks him how it went.
Angel says that Cordy and Wes pretty much summed it up and that he doesn’t want to talk about it.
Cordy says they are his friends and that it is not healthy to repress stuff like this ; he needs to share his pain , express those feeling of grief and longing or

Cordy : “the curiosity is gonna kill me!”
Angel : “Oh no, wouldn’t want that.”

So, instead of sharing his pain, he decides to go for some ice cream, invites only Fred leaving the rest of the group to never know what really happened.


Later, in the sewers,

Angel and Fred are walking along with Fred holding a big ice cream cone.
Angel is glad she’s having fun, they are tracking down a sewer-dwelling Durslar demon that they encountered at the ice cream shop.
Fred notices that the walls are all covered with crystals just as a dull roaring sounds. Angel concludes that they must be close to the demon’s lair and tells her to go back to the Hyperion.
Fred leaves though not without turning back several times asking if he is sure he doesn’t want her to stay with him. Angel watches her go with a big smile on his face – not noticing the demon coming up behind him.


INTRO

Back at the Hyperion, Wes is reminiscing about his days as a rogue demon hunter while the weapons inventory continues – prompting Gunn to beg Cordy to have a vision already.

They are bored and anxious for a job. Cordy bumps her shin against Fred’s contraption, getting Wes and Gunn running to her, thinking she has a vision.
When they are trying to make their minds up what exactly the object is that Fred is making, could be a weapon or a toaster, they are interrupted by an middle-aged couple, introducing themselves as Roger and his wife, Trish.
Wes leads them into his office and introduces the gang. The couple is looking for their missing daughter, she is supposed to be kidnapped by evil friends.
Wes asks if she was involved in any kind of demon worship, but Roger is offended by the very idea that his daughter might have somehow brought her fate on herself in any way.
Then the gang finds out that the couple already hired a detective who found their daughter for them, It’s concluded that their daughter is Fred and that the P.I. traced her to Angel Investigations.

Meanwhile Fred returned, but after seeing her parents at the office, she runs upstairs.

Wes assures the Burkles that Fred is doing fine, though out with one of their associates at the moment. The Burkles are oblivious to the supernatural so Cordy, Gunn and Wes go out of their way to lie about Fred’s disappearance and their work.
Angel walks into the lobby, unaware that they have company.
He walks into the office, carrying the Durslar’s severd head. Sees the couple.

Cordy :”Angel, you’re – alone. And – and you brought ….a prop! From your movie! (to parents) This is Angel. Angel – makes – monster movies. Angel, thes are Fred’s very NORMAL parents.”

Angel puts the head behind his back.
Angel : “Ah, - Fred has parents.”

Fred is up in her room, trying to wipe off the writing on the wall using a towel. Looks around the room and grabs the pieces of clothing lying on the nightstand and bed, before running away from the hotel.


Back in the office

Roger (Fred’s dad) : “Ah son, you-your prop is dripping.”
Angel looks down at the green blood dripping from the severed demon neck.
He laughs swings the demon head up by the hair, causing Roger and Trish to duck back.
Assures them it is fake, paper machee. He tosses the head back behind himself without looking into the lobby, where we hear a big crash of glass as it lands.
Roger asks again where Fred is and after a moment Angel realizes that he’s the one expected to answer.
He tells them she came back before he picked up the prop. So he supposes that she is in her room. The gang and Fred’s parents find her room empty and all start to worry as Fred fhas never left the hotel alone before. While the Burkles wait out in the lobby, Angel and crew convese about the possible reasons for Fred to run away from her parents and whether the Burkles are being completely honest. They join the Burkles again and everyone splits up to find her.


Caritas

Lorne, smoking a cigarette and wearing a bathrobe, makes his way through his bar to answer the banging on the door, complaining about being interrupted from watching “Judge Judy”.

The bar is still in a shambled state after the fight at the end of “that old gang of mine”.

We see Fred coming down the steps, Lorne says the bar is closed. But Fred isn’t that easy to get rid off. Instead of leaving , she takes a deep breath and launches into a song.
Lorne tells her to turn the sirens down a notch, because all that fear and panic is blowing out his fuses.
Fred tells him something awful has happened.

Lorne: “Oh really? – (sweeps a hand out to encompass his club) I wonder what that’s like.”
Noticing the destruction Fred asks him if there’s been another massacre.
Fred :”Why is it still like this?”

Lorne doesn’t want to answer her and he divert her by asking about her own problems instead.
She says she needs money, she doesn’t want to talk about it.
He knows what she’s running from and she doesn’t realize she’s strong enough to face it.

Angel is down in the sewers, looking for Fred.
Two glowing blue eyes peek around a recess behind Angel as he walks on.


Meanwhile the gang has arrived at the LA Public Library.
When Trish asks if Fred often comes here, Cordy just tells her that this was the first place she ever saw her.

Angel is still slowly walking along the sewer looking for Fred, telling her how there is nothing to be afraid of – just before he almost jumps out of his skin as his mobile starts to ring.
As Angel talks to Wes on the phone, comparing their lack of progress, we get a distorted shot of Angel as if seen from above.
Failure to find Fred sends everyone to pursue the place they should have started at, CARITAS;

The host has particularly harsh feeling towards Gunn, who waits outside, while Trish – noting the state of the club wants to know what kind of place this is.
Tension remains high in the bar as Lorne refuses to play along with attempts to keep the Burkles oblivious to demonic activity and expresses his distaste for being used all the time.

It dawns on Angel that Lorne is trying to distract him from the fact that he ‘does’ know where Fred is – a supposition Lorne instantly confirms when he starts rambling about the mystery of how they get the pimento into the olives.

Angel just looks at Lorne, and after a moment he capitulates, telling Angel that he doesn’t see any point in forcing a showdown when Fred has reasons for not wanting to see her parents.

Angel :”Please, tell me where Fred is – I know you’re not a slot machine.”
Lorne: ”Vending machine, you big palookas. Alright, but play this one delicately, bro. Because it’s gonna get messy.”


We see Fred in a bus station where she occupies herself before her family and friends show up. She is clutching a ticket in her hands as she is sitting on a bench next to an elderly homeless man.
We get a distorted picture of Fred sitting on the bench in the bus terminal as if seen from above.
Fred spots her parents entering the bus station. She jumps up attracting Trish’s notice.

Trish :”Fred?”

But Fred doesn’t want them to be here, because if they are, then this world that she returned to, that still has supernatural thing like demons and vampires in it, is really real and that means that Pylea was real as well – not just a storybook the way she had been pretending in order to cope with the things that happened to her there .But if all of it was real, then she’s been acting rather crazy – and she doesn’t want her parents to see her that way.

But her parents tell her that she’s their daughter and they love her no matter what.
They tell her that she is safe now that is everything is fine.
Suddenly a giant bug demon (hybrid between a spider and a coackroach) drops screeching from the ceiling.

Angel tells everyone to get out, while he handles this and we see him flying through the closed doors after them, coming to rest across the street at Gunn’s feet.
The bug follows Angel through the door. Angel turns to look up at it. He’s wearing his game face. Wes is worried that they left all their weapons back at the hotel, but Gunn thinks there might be something in the trunk after all.

As they run to the car, Roger wants to know what happened to Angel’s face.
Wes tells him Angel is a vampire with a soul and he will explain everything if they come out of this alive.
The bug is still stabbing and slicing at Angel with its pincers. Angel manages to duck most of them before getting swiped off his feet.

Gunn has found a compound sports bow and loosens an arrow. The bug shrieks and goes for the downed Angel again only to have Cordy and Wes attacking it with golf clubs. Gunn grabs a club of his own and joins the fray. The bug manages to knock a cloub out of someone’s hands and it slides across the ground to come to rest in front of Fred.

Angel is back up and slugging as well. The bug manages to send him flying against the wheel of one of the parked busses. As Angel gets back up, the bug stabs him in each shoulder with its pincers, pinning him against the bus.

Fred hits on the bug from behind with the golf club and it lets go of Angel to turn on Fred.
Angel pushes Fred out of the way, but the bug still scores on Fred’s arm – before getting hit over the head with a metal cylinder by Roger.

Roger :”That’s my daughter you damn cockroach!”

Angel jumps on the bugs back, pinning its forelegs against his body, immobilizing them. Roger helps Fred up, and leads her over to the side.
The bug breaks Angel’s grip and shakes him off then turns around and sends him flying through the air to impact with the sides of a parked bus.
The bug goes after Angel – only to get smashed by a bus barrelling by.
The bus stops and Trish gets out.


Hyperion

Cordy takes care of Fred and Trish asks if she has to do a lot of bandaging as she works on Fred’s arm, then it is Angel’s turn to get the first aid treatment from Cordy.

Roger is interested to know about the severed head, which now has some of the same crystals on it that Fred found so pretty down in the sewers.

Cordy tells him that it’s a Durslar beast that Angel and Fred tracked down into the sewers after it attacked them when they went out for ice cream.

Fred wonders about her place in the gang while her parents are just grateful to have their daughter back. They reveal how they were prepared to call the police, thinking Angel and friends kidnapped their daughter. She decides that she wants to go home with her parents because she doesn’t really belong with the rest of the group.

Fred stands in her room contemplating the writing on the wall. Angel comes by and asks her how she’s doing.
She starts to pack and tells the story of the writing on the wall, which in essence is her life story as of Pylea.
Fred sits down on the edge of ther bed and Angel sits down beside her.
Angel remains silent and Fred looks down at her hands.

This is telling Cordy how glad she is that Fred is coming home, when Roger comes over to show her the contraption Fred was working on earlier.

They are wondering what it is????
Wes: “or it makes toast.”

Trish sees Fred and Angel coming down the stairs.
Trish asks if she has everything packed and if she threw away the shirt with the bug guts on it.
Fred says she wants to keep that one as a souvenir.

Now that it’s time to say good bye, Fred doesn’t quite know what to say to everyone, so she settles for hugging Gunn, Wes and Cordy. She tanks Angel. He silently hands her the suitcase he carried down the steps for her and says good buy. Fred smiles at him, then turns to her parents, saying they’d better go before she’ll get “all runny.”

Sitting in the back of a cab, Roger tells Fred that her room is still exactly the same, except for the guy renting it – but his lease will be up next month. A bit off balance by this news Fred takes out the shirt, saying how she will miss them all. She sees that the bug juice as turned into pretty crystals. She orders the driver to turn around. NOW !


Hyperion

Everything is peaceful with the gang hanging out at the office. They talk about Fred and her parents. Cordy points out that at least now Fred will have a chance to a normal life.

Then we see a close up of something moving underneath the severed head.

The guys are still talking about Fred listing her good points, Wes saying he admired her intelligence, Angel saying he will miss her because she was just this nice, quiet kind of crazy and he found her soothing.

Cordy is going home saying she’s had enough of their moping, she’s gonna eat some comfort food and have a good cry.
Cordy enters the lobby and sees the bug entering the hotel.
She screams and runs back into the office just as the guys come running out.
Gunn doesn’t understand how the thing survived getting smashed by a bus, but Angel doesn’t think it’s the same one.

Angel rolls over the counter to engage the bug away and the others run for the weapons cabinet, just as the front doors open and Fred runs in. Her dad helps her drag her contraption into position. She stomps on it, and a battle ax sails through the air – splitting the severed head like an over ripe melon. Green fluid spatters the wall and a bunch of little mini cockroaches crawl free of it. The bug leaves off Angel and the gang, instead going to collect the fug filled bottom part of the head. The bug heads for the garden court, followed by the little ones.

Fred explains how she figured it out, realizing that the little crystals were from the bug demon and it wanted the head so it could retrieve its eggs from inside.

Fred is congratulated for her smart thinking and invention.
Angel : “nice going Fred.”
Fred: “aw, it was nothing. Just a stunning revelation of my true path in life, that’s all.”
Which is to stay at AI instead of going home and trying to pretend that he last five years didn’t happen.
She decides to stay with Angel and be part of the gang.


Hyperion daytime

Everybody including Fred’s parents are fixing up her room, painting over the writing covering all the walls.
Fred looks at a line drawing of two people on top of a horse for a moment, lifts her paint roller and paints over it.