She was walking along the road, through the Victorian countryside where they shot most of TITAoVtS' exteriors. It was the winter season, and everything was green. She could pick out the familiar landmarks up ahead—Camrado Oak, and Slayer Rock—but none of the usual production company equipment was here—sound trucks, equipment vans, trailers for cast and crew. She didn't even see the standing set, though she should certainly have reached the village and castle set by now. She knew she was late for something—why else would she be in costume if they weren't shooting today?
She looked down at herself, at all her gleaming black leather, buffed and shining and fresh from Wardrobe.
Thought I'd mucked this up, she thought in faint surprise. Then she realized she must be dreaming, that the water had worked after all. Well, she'd swallowed enough of it, even if she'd tried to sick it all up again. But why was she dressed like this for a dream? She looked back over her shoulder. Even her sword was here—her own sword, the one she'd given up for the magic one. And look how well THAT turned out. . . .
She stopped and looked around at the familiar landscape, then shrugged to herself and started walking again. Might as well get on to where she was supposed to be. If this was a dream, it was a lot more solid than dreams usually got. But it didn't really look like the sort of place that the Dreamer of Worlds would choose for a return engagement—or Erchane's Oracle either, for that matter.
But someone was waiting for Glory, all the same.
The woman was leaning against the tree the TITAoVtS crew had named Camrado Oak. She was wearing a chain-mail shirt, split for riding, that fell to her knees. The mesh was so fine it almost looked like heavy cloth, and over it she wore a leather belt and baldric that held a sword hanging from a scabbard on her back. Below the chain mail she wore high boots over tight leather trousers, both black. She was also wearing gloves, their stiff flared gauntlets reaching almost to her elbows, and so heavily studded with metal above the wrist that it was hard to see the leather beneath. The glove part must be flexible, though, because she was holding a large red apple in her hand, and as Glory approached, she bent to pull a knife from her boot and began to peel it.
There was something oddly familiar about the gesture. Startled, Glory looked up into the woman's tiger-yellow eyes.
She was looking at Vixen the Slayer.
Yes. No. Or was it Vixen as she might have been, if she'd been dressed for practicality and not for ratings? The outfit looked practical, anyhow. Easy to move in. The woman's hair was as long as Glory's own, braided snugly back and wrapped with soft leather. Glory saw it swing free as the woman straightened, still peeling the apple.
"Going to gawk all day?" Her voice was Vixen's too, the flat American drawl Glory had worked so hard to master. It was like looking into a distorting mirror of a different sort than the kind she'd faced in the Warmother's castle—one that made things better, not worse. With all her heart, Glory yearned to be the woman she saw.
"I . . . I . . . What are you doing here?" she stammered.
"Could ask you that. Ask yourself: what are you doing here?" Vixen said.
Glory set her jaw. If this was going to be another clever symbolic dream in a fancy hat, she might as well go along with it as far as she could, because bugger her if she was going back to the Oracle to spend the night a third time.
"I came to find out about the Dreamer of Worlds. What does she want? Did I pass her test? What happens now?"
Vixen went on peeling the apple in silence for a moment, removing its skin in the narrowest possible unbroken curl.
"The thing about gods, camrado, is that you can never be sure about them. They're always showing up and making pronouncements and wandering off again. Also, they lie. By the time she shows up again, your folk might not need her any more. Or she'll have forgotten you were supposed to be her last candidate. Or maybe the test's still going on. Some tests take a really long time, you know. God's Teeth! But you'll see."
"That's not very helpful," Glory said crossly.
"Sorry," Vixen said, not sounding very sorry at all. "I'm not good at questions. Solving problems, now . . . But seems to me you don't have many of those just now."
"But what am I supposed to do?" Glory wailed.
Vixen smiled, as though that was actually the question she'd been waiting for.
"Well there, camrado, I'd say you've got two choices. Whether you've passed the Dreamer's test or not, you've done pretty good in the hero line, and the Allimir are going to need one. Seems to me you could stick around and do some heroing. Or head on back to where you came from. Your choice."
But I already made my choice, Glory realized. Back at the spring—I could have come up anywhere. That was my chance. She remembered how hard she'd fought—not just to breathe, not just to get out, but to get back to the same place she'd fallen in—to Belegir, and Ivradan, and even Englor and Helevrin, bless their hearts. Back to the Allimir, and Erchanen, and the plains of Serenthodial. Once again magic had snuck up on her when she wasn't looking—but if she'd been truly homesick, she'd have been thinking of home while she was drowning, not Ivradan.
Glory smiled reluctantly. She'd been given a fair chance, even if a sneaky one.
"But they don't need me. They need you. I'm not you," she protested.
" 'Course you are," Vixen asserted inarguably. "If not you, who? God's teeth, gel, who d'you think you're looking at? Someone has to take the dream and make it real. What were you doing in front of those cameras all those months? Or up on Grey Arlinn? Knitting?"
Glory stared at her, slack-jawed. It can't be that easy. But it could. She knew it could. Just that easy—and that hard. Embrace an ideal, and be willing to die for it. Live the legend, because people needed dreams as much as bread. And don't look back.
"But you'd better get yourself a proper sword. None of that tawdry magic. I hate magic. And nothing that breaks." Vixen's amber gaze roved over Glory's showgirl costume at length, and her lip curled eloquently. "And cover yourself up. You'll die of sunstroke and give your troops heart-failure if you don't."
"I . . . all right. I will." Glory squared her shoulders.
"Good girl. Do us proud." The last of the apple peel dropped to the ground in an unbroken coil. Vixen took a step away from the tree. With one smooth gesture she tossed Glory the peeled fruit.
Glory caught it, neatly, in both hands. She looked down at it, and it seemed as if by looking away from Vixen, she'd unmade whatever dream-world Vixen existed in. Suddenly it was dark, and Glory was awake enough to know she'd been asleep, or . . . something.
Darkness. She smelled wet wool and wet rock and burning candle, and realized she'd been asleep for a long time.
There was something in her hand.
She squeezed it, her head still fuzzy with dreams, and smelled apples. Suddenly she was entirely awake, rolling onto her stomach to slide the shutter on the little lantern down to expose the candle. In the abrupt brightness, she could see what she held.
An apple.
A freshly peeled apple, its white flesh only now starting to darken with exposure to the air.
And there was only one place it could have come from.
Magic.
True magic, real magic, miracle enough to hang a lifetime on. She sat up in her bed, grinning to herself. No fear she was going to forget what she'd dreamed this time! She'd remember it for the rest of her life.
But she wouldn't tell. Not even Belegir. No one needed to know, as long as she knew.
"Do us proud."
"Damn right I will," Glory said aloud. She bit into the apple. She'd better get moving. She had a lot to do today, and all the days to follow.
There's always work in the land of Erchanen for Vixen the Slayer.
VIXEN THE SLAYER:
The Episode Guide
(Season One)
COMES A SLAYER (1)
SUMMARY:
Vixen arrives in England just in time to investigate a series of mysterious deaths at the Convent of
Sisters of the Holy Ghost, eventually exposing the Mother Superior as a fiendish (and very male) vampire in disguise. Along the way, she and Sister Bernadette join forces in what is to become one of the great partnerships in TV history.
COMMENTS:
Not bothering to waste time with an origin story, the series gets off to a rapid start, thrusting our heroine into mortal combat with the Undead even before the opening credits have run. Viewers are given only a few tantalizing hints as to Vixen's enigmatic past, some of which later prove to be extremely misleading. (The show's creators, the esteemed Slayer Staff, claim to have carefully worked out Vix's entire backstory in advance, but I have my doubts; how come Vix refers here to her years of martial arts training in "far-off Cathay" when later episodes clearly place her younger self in Japan, not China? And why is it she can read Latin here, but seems to mysteriously lose this ability in later episodes, presumably to give Sister Bernadette something useful to do?)
Still and all, a good beginning.
* * *
BEHOWL THE MOON (2)
SUMMARY:
Who is responsible for a ghastly series of full-moon murders? The struggling playwright? The haughty contessa? The sinister Italian physician? The kindly beggar woman? Vix reveals deductive acumen to rival her gymnastic skills as she exposes the homicidal lycanthrope among the guests at Queen Elizabeth's surprise birthday party.
COMMENTS:
Okay, the true identity of the concealed werewolf is so obvious that she might as well have a pentagram tattooed on her wrinkled forehead, but this is still a fun episode, with many creepy scenes of the snarling man-beast stalking its victims through the foggy streets of old London town. This episode also marks the first use of Full Earth's notorious All-Purpose Creature Armature. Here it stands in for the Wolf of Westminster in all its hirsute glory, but foam-rubber facelifts would later transform the APCA into such diverse (and economical) apparitions as the Grim Golem of Glastonbury and the demon Abraxodoceous.
Omens of Things to Come: Look carefully during the first funeral scene and you'll see that the service is being performed by none other than Father Diavolo himself, who would soon be seen again in far more incriminating circumstances.
Literary Alert! The title of this episode is lifted from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream: "now the hungry lion roars, now the wolf behowls the moon." (Who says fantasy isn't educational?)
* * *
TO HUNT THE HUNTER (3)
SUMMARY:
Lured to the secluded country estate of Lord Raptor, a celebrated big game hunter, Vix soon finds herself the quarry in the jaded aristocrat's latest blood sport. A gripping chase through foggy moors ensues, with Raptor's bloodhounds literally chomping at Vixen's leather-shod heels, but she eventually turns the tables on her relentless foe, so that she ultimately hunts the hunter of the hunter! (I think I've got that right.)
COMMENTS:
Just about every action-adventure series gets around to ripping off "The Most Dangerous Game" eventually, but it was a bit alarming that TITAoVtS was falling back on the old hunting-humans chestnut by only its third episode! Were the Slayer Staff running out of ideas already? Thankfully, this proved not to be the case, but one could be forgiven for fearing otherwise at this point.
On its own terms, "Hunter" is a briskly paced, action-filled episode that gave Glory plenty of opportunities to show off her Olympics-caliber gymnastics skill. Interestingly, this is also the first ep to feature no overtly supernatural elements, although Lord Raptor is given a line or two about devil worship, no doubt to provide the episode a fig leaf of diabolism.
As for Sister Bernadette, Anne-Marie Campbell barely appears in this episode, showing up only briefly in the very first and last scenes. Her low profile here lends credence to the longstanding rumor that the Slayer Staff were initially unsure whether Vixen needed a sidekick at all, and even considered killing the character off! (Hard to imagine now, I know.)
Anachronism Alert! A stuffed gorilla is displayed prominently in Raptor's trophy room, despite the fact that the African gorilla was completely unknown to Europeans of the era. Oh well, what's a few centuries of zoological science between friends?
* * *
WHAT LURKS IN THE LOCH? (4)
SUMMARY:
Vix takes the high road, and Sister Bernie takes the low road, but death—in the form of a notably gnawed-on corpse—gets to Scotland before either of them. The locals blame the legendary Loch Ness monster, of course, but Vixen soon pins the blame on a cannibalistic merman, recently escaped from a traveling carnival, who nearly makes a late-night snack of a skinnydipping Sister Bernadette before Vix feeds the greedy fish-man to the real Nessie.
COMMENT:
The Musgrave Range in central Australia doubled (with mixed results) for the Scottish Highlands this time around, but much of the episode was actually shot in a leaky five-hundred-gallon tank located in a dank, chilly warehouse in Melbourne. Neither Glory nor Anne-Marie required lessons in Method acting to produce realistic-looking goosebumps during the episode's many aquatic scenes. One shot in particular, in which Vix and Sister Bernie's flimsy rowboat is capsized by a submerged menace from below, required so many takes that both stars were virtually water-logged by the end of the fourteen-hour working day. Guest-star Colin Piscatore (playing the voracious gill-man) fared even worse, nearly drowning when the hydraulically operated Nessie model went haywire and refused to release Piscatore from its mechanical jaws after diving back beneath the surface of the mock Loch. "Bloody hell!" he is reported to have hollered after being extricated (and none too soon) from the malfunctioning monster. "This is the twenty-first century, for chrissakes! Where's the goddamn CGI?"
In the end, "What Lurks" ran two days over schedule and nearly $25,000 over budget, inspiring the beleaguered Slayer Staff to vow, "No more sea monsters—ever!"
Or at least for awhile. (See "Sigh of the Selkie.")
* * *
THE DUCHESS'S DELIGHTS (5)
SUMMARY:
When the aging Duke of Bleeksmore dies under mysterious circumstances, leaving his entire estate to his glamorous young wife, Vixen suspects foul play. At first, Vix suspects that the Duchess, who is seldom seen before sunset, is a vampire or succubus, but the truth proves far more alarming: Lilith Kane is the high priestess of a satanic coven who ultimate goal is nothing less than the total conquest of Europe! Already the Duchess has bribed, blackmailed, and seduced many prominent nobles into joining her cult, including trusted members of Queen Elizabeth's own court.
Our heroine almost ends up as a human sacrifice at a Black Mass, presided over by an unfrocked priest named Father Diavolo, before turning the tables on Lilith and her acolytes, and setting fire to Bleeksmore Manor with one of the Duchess's own monogrammed branding irons. Both Lilith and Diavolo perish in the resulting conflagration—or so we are led to believe.
COMMENTARY:
Enter the Duchess . . .
Every great hero needs a worthy foe, and, her apparent fiery death notwithstanding, Lilith Kane rapidly became Vixen's number one enemy. Irreverent, sardonic, and deliciously decadent, the Duchess is the antithesis of the Slayer's somber and crusading persona, yet their mutual antagonism is leavened by a grudging respect (and perhaps even an unspoken attraction) between them. Recognizing a good thing when they saw one, the Slayer Staff wasted no time bringing the Duchess back from the dead . . . again and again and again.
Romy Blackburn is clearly having a ball playing Lilith, chewing up the scenery, both dungeons and drawing rooms alike, and firing off one outrageously evil one-liner after another. Although her, umm, eye-catching costume is brazenly lifted from Emma Peel's "Queen of Sin" outfit from that old Avengers episode, Romy makes the Duchess a memorable character in her own right.
Previously glimpsed in "Behowl the Moon," Father Diavolo is revealed in this episode to be Lilith's most reliable henchman and sidekick. Like his unholy mistress, he can be counted on to die horribly at the end of every episode in w
hich he appears, yet he keeps coming back, forever at the side of the Duchess herself. In a perhaps overly candid moment, Anne-Marie Campbell once remarked that actor Dylan MacNee was "ideally" suited to play the sniveling, venal ex-priest, but let's hope that was just a bit of sidekick rivalry speaking. One hates to think that MacNee would ever willingly ally himself with the Dark Forces . . .
* * *
YO, HO, HO, AND A BOTTLE OF BLOOD (6)
SUMMARY:
Our heroine hits the high seas in search of a pair of curvaceous female pirates who have accidentally looted a priceless (and very dangerous) mystic artifact from a captured Spanish galleon. Unfortunately, an Undead privateer named Cap'n Cadaver is also after the Inquisition's spoils, putting him on a collision course with a certain seagoing Slayer.
COMMENTS:
Avast, ye maties! I confess, I'm a sucker for a good pirate story. Heck, I even wrote a young-adult pirate novel once (now woefully out-of-print), so I devoured this episode as readily as a buccaneer downs his daily ration of rum, despite a few glaring historical inaccuracies.
For instance: Mary Read and Anne Bonny, the distaff pirates Vix tracks down (and eventually joins force with), are genuine historical figures, but they actually plied their swashbuckling trade in the early eighteenth century, a bit after Vixen's time. Both women are said to have posed as men for much of their careers, which suggests that they probably weren't costumed nearly as provocatively (read: skimpily) as their TV reincarnations, who favor bare midriffs, tight trousers, and plenty of cleavage. Cap'n Cadaver, on the other hand, is strictly a product of the Slayer Staff's bloodthirsty imaginations.
If our favorite Slayer occasionally seems to resemble Geena Davis during the climatic sea battle, that may be because the producers frugally and shamelessly incorporated several minutes of footage from Cutthroat Island into the finished episode. Granted, they were probably safe in assuming that not many viewers (except us diehard pirate aficionados) had ever seen those shots before. . . .
The Warslayer Page 26