I'm really liking the idea of Dawn's keyness playing a big role in this. I was having a difficult time working her into my concept, and she's actually a requested element. Having her be essential to the plot is a really big plus for me. And I had forgotten about The First trying to isolate Dawn from Buffy. Good point. (Sheesh, there were so many dropped plot lines from Season 7.

Recently, when reading Stephen King's "On Writing" he wrote about plotting as 'unearthing an artifact', saying that it feels like the story is there and the writer's job is to recognize that there's something hidden and to carefully excavate it.

Sometimes it feels like Joss left a lot of artifacts scattered around.