Granted, there are a few episodes that most of us would prefer to forget. Did we really need to watch a sixty-minute flashback to Sister Bernadette's halcyon days at the nunnery in "The Trouble with Anglicans"? Or watch our usually fierce Slayer baby-sit that obnoxious urchin in "Mother for a Day"? Oh well, I guess even the Anointed Champion of the Light can have an off day. Or two.
How much longer can the Vixen phenomenon thrive and flourish? From where I'm sitting, the sky's the limit. As of this writing, the first official Vixen novel, The Warslayer by Rosemary Edghill, is sitting atop the New York Times Bestseller List, while First Lady Tipper Gore just cited Vixen as "an outstanding role model for America's youth." Not bad for the bastard child of an English lord and a Japanese geisha!
Now you'll have to excuse me. It's nine o'clock and a brand new episode has just begun. On my TV screen a full moon is rising, the Duchess and her fiendish lackeys are plotting new devilment, and justice, in the form of a flame-haired female privateer, is riding into the dark and unholy night.
I may never go out on Fridays again.
* * *
GREG COX is the author of numerous books, including Vixen the Slayer: The Unauthorized Journeys. He has never missed a single episode.
CHAPTER ONE:
Leather and Steel
The troll was enormous: eight, maybe nine feet tall. Its skin was a mottled bluish-purple, covered with coarse black hair and warts the size of dinner plates. Its knuckles nearly brushed the ground when it walked, and its wrists were as big around as her thighs.
Vixen the Slayer bared her teeth in a feral smile, tossing her sword from hand to hand as she moved backward in a fighter's crouch. The monster had to be stopped here, and there was nobody who could do it but her. She was just lucky that something that big was also slow. . . .
The troll tottered forward another few steps, then wavered and fell flat on its face, exposing the two puppeteers who had been inside and the tangle of trailing air-hoses that led back to the rest of the crew.
"Cut," Megan said, sighing. "Rennie—"
"He tripped me!" Rennie said, pointing at his partner Roald, on whose shoulders he'd been sitting a few moments before.
"Maybe we should try it the other way around," Roald suggested snarkily. He was six feet three and outweighed Rennie by a good ten stone.
"It was nobody's fault," Megan said, putting on her "soothing mom" voice. "Vix, honey, we're going to have to go again. Everybody take ten!"
Vixen the Slayer, ninja-raised do-gooder and scourge of the Satanic legions that plagued the Elizabethan countryside, stretched and sighed, her hand on the small of her back. That knife-fighter's crouch looked great on camera, but it played hell with the vertebrae.
"Sure, Meg," she called back. "I'm going to be in my trailer, okay?"
Megan nodded, distracted, and Vixen—aka Gloria Emmeline McArdle—walked off. She knew from long experience that ten minutes was going to be at least forty-five, what with getting all the air-hoses and electrical cables untangled so that Truxton the Troll would be ready to go again. He was really just a nine-foot All-Purpose Creature Armature that could be dressed in any number of foam latex monster disguises; otherwise, he'd have been far too expensive for the budget of a syndicated TV series, even one filmed in The Wonder Down Under.
She walked past the camera and craft services until she got to her trailer. Closing the door behind her, she tossed her sword on the couch and sat down in front of the mirror. Vixen's masklike makeup and kohl-lined eyes stared back.
This time last year, she'd been plain Gloria "Glory" McArdle, ex-Olympian, red-headed teacher of girls' gymnastics and physical education at Ned Kelly High School in Melbourne, Australia. She'd been good enough to be on the Australian team that went to Seoul, and not good enough to medal and garner tempting offers from top coaches and sportswear manufacturers, and that was that. When her final growth spurt hit late that summer, taking her from five-five (pretty tall for a gymnast even at that) to six foot in her stocking feet and built like a Vargas pinup, it thoroughly put an end to any possibility of ever competing again.
She'd been wise enough not to go into coaching—better a clean break than being tormented with constant reminders of "might have been." She'd gotten her teaching certificate instead, and while she was relieved to find that she enjoyed teaching—molding and shaping impressionable little minds and bodies—as she settled into her new life, she found she was still hungry for . . . something.
Boredom is a dangerous taskmaster. Out of boredom Glory had gone to an open audition for a straight-to-cable series called Ninja Vampire Hunter. The ad had mentioned that gymnastics training was a plus, but Full Earth Productions had really just been looking for extras to stand around in the background while Doreen Liu, their Asian martial arts star, bounced off trampolines.