The end result, which carried the working title "Slayer: The Adventures of Buffy Summers," picked up some 90 years in the future with the heroine frozen in time, literally turned to wood, and part of an art piece depicting a war between humans and demons.
"The idea was that at some point after the turn of the new millennium, a great battle took place between good and evil and for whatever reason, a powerful mystical force froze Buffy and the demons she was fighting for almost a century," says O'Sullivan. "When the story opens, a tour guide is explaining to a group of school kids -- a mixture of humans and demons -- that the world 90 years ago was a much different, less tolerant place."
Naturally, Buffy is released from the spell, and, after disposing of the demons she had been frozen with for nine decades, is forced to deal with the new inter-dimensional world order.
"It was a very Patton-after-the-war type script," says O'Sullivan. "Here you had Buffy, instantly transported to a new place in time, all her friends gone, the war she had fought since she was sixteen years old over...not knowing who to trust, not knowing how to deal with the fact that she's not supposed to be fighting the monsters she was brought forth to kill. Plus, now she has to wrap her head around concepts like vampires and demons having free will and coexisting with humans in everyday life. It was an interesting new dynamic and not just a rehash of roads already traveled."