I should have seen it coming the moment I sat down. It was the perfect setup: I had finished all my work for my class the next morning, was halfway done my response paper for Friday, had gotten out of play rehearsal early (I knew most of my lines), and had just found a piece of fanfic feedback in my inbox. Worse, I had made the mistake of sitting down to celebrate with chocolate ice cream.

Nothing attracts creativity demons like chocolate. Especially when it's got dark chocolate chunks in it.

Which is why, a second later, a teal blur made a nosedive for the ice cream tub. I pulled it out of the way in time for Madison to land headfirst into a throw pillow. "I don't think so!"

I turned back to my desk to find that suddenly, my entire mob of creativity demons had reappeared out of thin air and were into everything.

Fortunately, I had discovered that with time and persistence, if you ignored an idea long enough, it would die. Which is why Olivia O'Connor, the potential Mary Sue, was no longer present. But she was about the only absence. They were all there - all of them. Giles was hanging out by my printer with Dr. Theodore Morris and Nicki Van Tyle, drinking and trading stories about mentoring impulsive people. Well, Giles and Theo were talking; Nicki was just downing jello shooters. (Where they got the alcohol, I don't know. I don't need to drink to act strange.) Faith had picked a fight with Demona, and the only reason there wasn't bloodshed was because Teal'c was holding Demona back. Barely. "Somebody get a zat gun!" I heard Jack O'Neill shout.

Mike Corbett and Kimberly Hart were making out in an open drawer (they were from my Mike/Kim fic) while "Special Case" Tommy was really trying to ignore them. Al Calavicci was at the mouse and had turned on the MP3 jukebox that came with the computer. Now he was fighting with Cordelia over what to play; just out of spite, he had picked Offspring's "Why Don't You Get a Job." When Xander laughed at the chorus, Anya kicked him.

On the high shelf, some more creativity demons were examining my action figures, including the Buffy and Angel ones I had up there. I could hear Buffy exclaim, "My hips are not that wide!"

Even my Gargoyles creativity demons were there too - both the Manhattan clan and the Denver/Laramie clan, all perched in various places around my room. Sarah Adams was there, sucking down caffeine, as was Callista Reynolds, and Drew Harrison, the character I'd once been tempted to kill off because he was really starting to bore me. He saw me looking and moved behind Goliath.

I decided to ignore them and go to bed; they'd get discouraged anyway. Then Michael Wiseman started to lift my table lamp, and I feared for my furniture. "All right, what do you want?"

A figure stepped out of the crowd. "Well, you know what I want."

I groaned. I should have seen her coming. She was in her mid-forties, with a silver-white streak in her dark brown hair and a resemblance to Rene Russo. My creativity demons had been silent for a while; it only made sense that Lydia Ross would be the one to break the silence.

"Oh, God, not you! Hell no! You go against all my principles!" For months, she had been heckling me to write her into the N&A universe. And the SG-1 universe. And the Buffyverse. In tandem. "You may not be in the age range, but you're screaming Mary Sue!"

"You've got one already," Al reminded me, pointing over to where Sarah Adams had finished downing caffeine and was now looking over my magazine. The Australian computer hacker shrugged and turned back to the magazine.

"She doesn't count! She's too frequently the comic relief."

"Oh, thanks very bloody much," Sarah muttered.

The song changed to "Saturday Night's Alright (For Fighting)." I heard Demona roar, and then the crackle of a zatnicatel going off.

"Besides, if I wrote you in, it would screw up the dynamics of the whole damn show," I informed Lydia.

"So what? It's not as if you're going to hook me up with Michael."

"I'd be in for a lynching if I did that!" I snapped. "Taylor didn't succeed, how could you?"

"Who's Taylor?" Lisa Wiseman asked. Michael put the lamp down and promptly tried to blend into the woodwork.

I ignored them, trying to pound reason into her. "I might have agreed if you hadn't demanded to be a 'retired' Slayer. And then you wanted to end up buying a house from Lisa Wiseman and become friends with her while still remaining attached to the project. Not to mention the loophole that you formerly worked in the SGC and were also dating Jack O'Neill."

"If you want to get technical about it," O'Neill pointed out, "we only got as far as making out in a storage closet."

"In the SGC. Without being caught. Yeah, right."

She smirked, crossing her arms. "What's wrong with that?"

I put my head in my hands. It never ceases to amaze me how impervious to logic my creativity demons are.

Beside me, the ice cream was slowly melting. I glared at Lydia and carried it out of my room and back to the hall kitchen to put it back in the freezer, ignoring Michael's pleas for a taste.

When the chocolate source was safely in the refrigerator an entire floor away, I returned in the hopes that my mob would have retreated somewhat. No such luck. They'd at least calmed down slightly; after having been killed several times by zatnicatel blasts, and after Macbeth complained that he was getting sick and tired of going down with her, Demona had reluctantly called a truce.

"I Am the Walrus" started playing. I silently cursed having downloaded Napster in the first place. "If you two are going to play DJ, pick another selection," I snapped. Al reached the mouse first, and Janis Joplin replaced the Beatles despite Cordelia's complaints.

They were about the only two who didn't turn on me then. Lydia had said her peace, and now that the potential Mary Sue had backed off, the rest swarmed in. "You're planning to finish 'Special Case' sometime this century, right?" Major Carter demanded.

"Are you kidding?" Faith shouted, shoving Carter away. "You've been sitting on my series! 'New Blood' was left hanging before Christmas!"

"Your series?" several Sunnydale residents squawked. Buffy forgot about her body image complex and glared at Faith.

Al, leaning on a speaker, cleared his throat before chomping down on his cigar. "Speaking of stories that were left hanging, Miss Mandi..."

"You give me a good, solid reason for Sam to be there, Al, we'll talk." I wrinkled my nose. "And put that damn cigar out! There's a reason I'm living on a non-smoking floor!"

He obliged as Cordelia got control of the mouse, and "I Wanna Be Sedated" erupted from my computer speakers.

"Oh, come on," Xander griped. "I mean, it's not like we're demanding this out of the blue here! You got feedback! More Bloodlines!"

Kim and Mike had stopped making out long enough for Kim to remind me, "Cynthia really wanted to see 'Vacation.'"

Kevin Keene suddenly popped up from the crowd, firing his Zapper in the air to get my attention. "Hey! How long have you left 'Vampire Killers' sitting on your hard drive?"

"You got so many questions about 'Not Again' you added that one to your FAQ!"

Just as I thought no more could appear, Jim West and Artemus Gordon (the movie versions, anyway) stepped out from behind my printer, with Cassie Chan and T.J. West (named for the purposes of the fic). "You know, people have been demanding our crossover since you considered the idea almost a year ago," Artemus pointed out.

"That e-mail you just got was for 'Special Case,' wasn't it?" Daniel Jackson asked.

O'Neill grinned. "The people have spoken."

"Yeah, well, unfortunately, those aren't the same people grading me," I sighed, scowling at the book lying on the floor beside my desk.

Macbeth's cry shut everyone else up. "Excuses!" His booming voice echoed so loudly that I was afraid he'd be heard out in the hall. "Still more excuses!"

As he spoke, he descended from the top of my dresser to the desk below, using my ruler as a ramp. "The same excuses you gave us the last time we appeared to you. No longer shall we stand it! This day is call'd the feast of Crispian: he that outlives this day, and comes safe home, will stand a' tiptoe when this day is named--"

I tuned him out and closed my eyes. Creativity demons pestering me was one thing; creativity demons acting out Henry V to stir them all against me was quite another.

Xander nudged Giles. "Who's Crispian?"

"Get on with it!" several voices shouted from nowhere. Macbeth stopped, scowling at the unseen Monty Python chorus.

"The point is, my lady, that you make the same excuses every time we play this game," he continued. "You had 15 credits; now you have 12. You had an incompetent literary magazine editor; now she has quit you. You had a large role in the play--"

"Now I have the lead in the play," I reminded him.

He had the grace to look discomfited before continuing. "You had episodes for TGS to write; now you have no such assignments pending at the moment."

Giles had sobered up enough to add a thing or two. "And you have frittered away quite a bit of time at those games on your infernal machine. How many times must one play Yahtzee in a day?"

Macbeth smirked. "We have been waiting too long, and you have been pushing us away too long. You're running out of excuses. Why continue to brush us off? All things be ready," he finished, slipping back into Shakespeare, "if our minds be so."

His speech was followed by a cacophony of shouts from my creativity demons. They were coming close to drowning out the MP3 player. "Knock it off!" I cried. "I think you're forgetting a few things. Number one, I'm only taking 12 credits - but 9 of them are English classes. I'm taking two classes with a professor who demands specific response papers for every class on top of our regular papers! The play opens in two weeks! I have one week to write 8 pages of a critical Seminar paper that I don't even know what it's going to be about as well as a five-page Shakespeare paper that I'm unclear on as well! I have to compile a casebook on Toni Morrison's Sula on top of that! Plus, the incompetent quit the literary magazine, but she left me in charge after she'd put us way over budget and had the Media Board thoroughly pissed off at us. I have so much to do, and so much writing to do, how can you expect me to write all your damn stories when you have no idea how certain difficult parts should go plausibly??"

There was a long silence.

Then Anya broke it. "Drop out of school?" she suggested sincerely. The others stared at her. "What?"

I was about to give up when an idea struck me: the ultimate creativity-killer. I picked up my current casebook, turned to a particularly incomprehensible criticism, and began to read. "Myth, as I use it in this context,implies a force in the universe that is untamed and untamable, but which subsists on paradox. Myth teaches us that sovereign gods and sovereign institutions are partial, partial in the sense that they are biased, but when they begin to penetrate their biases, they also begin to transform their fear of the other, of others, of other parts, in a larger complex of wholeness."

I stopped and looked around to see the effects my words were having. Many of the creativity demons looked ill. Some were staring into space, almost catatonic. Although that could just be Michael's photosensitivity syndrome kicking in. Encouraged, I skipped to another part: "Let us note, firstly, the fire-motif in the creation myth, secondly, the ground of war and catastrophe in which the food-bearing tree is rooted, thirdly, the constellation of the Arawaks in the 'sky of fiction; (if I may so put it). All these features are intuitively woven into the tapestry of Wide Sargasso Sea."

As one, every gargoyle alighted in my room launched into the air with shrieks of pain, gliding into nowhere. Callista conjured herself and Drew out of existence with a yelp. Sarah abandoned her caffeine and ran like hell. It was the first time I had ever seen Demona truly afraid.

"...his symbolic conquest of her, yet 'death', his Anglo-Saxon stoicism, is now all at once altered by her uncompromising madness and perception of his needs in hers."

Those who could run bolted for cover, screaming and leaping out of this reality. Dr. Morris, Nicki, and Giles staggered off, singing drinking songs. A blood-curdling shriek told me that Cordelia was high-tailing it out of there as fast as possible with heels.

"Carnival stone or death-in-life mask expressly mourns a hunger for the dance of life endangered in hunter or hunted, seen and perceived with such intensity by Antoinette alone in all the world, so to speak..."

Unable to take it any more, Lisa Wiseman passed out. Michael snapped out of his trance abruptly, gathering her into his arms and hurrying off. I wouldn't be surprised if he'd half hoped for that.

"...that she begins to redeem the solitary plague of madness in herself which - in Jean Rhys's ambiguous novel - is nothing but the magic of faith in the subsistence of fiery love to redeem the terrors of the dance when the dance is conscripted to feud and war." I stopped reading, seeing that I had won this battle. Even Lydia had made herself scarce.

Al was the last to go. True to form, he faded away like the hologram he was often seen as. I heard a cry of "I'm melting! I'm melting!" and then he was gone.

I sighed, smiled, and closed the book. Chocolate had spawned them, but criticism had quelled them.

"Wow," I commented to the empty air. "And I didn't even get to the bit about psychical alteration."