Fray, Issue #2 – “Chapter Two: The Calling”

* Part 2 of 8 of the Fray limited series *

Welcome to Buffyness and Nightlurkers Presents: Fray, Issue #2 – “Chapter Two: The Calling”! In the previous installment, we meet Melaka Fray: a young woman from the slum of future-Manhatten who makes her money stealing trinkets and baubles from rich people and selling them to semi-friendly radiation-mutated mermaid-type creatures.

Meanwhile, there are murmurings among demons and other ungodly creatures that this young Fray woman is the Chosen One. Sound familiar? A man visits her particular slum and tells her this information before self-immolating, which was weird. And then the issue ends with Fray entering her apartment, and a giant horned demon awaits. He’s probably going to be rather cordial. That’s what I usually expect from a Joss Whedon demon.

It’s good so far! I just started, but I’m looking forward to the next… *checks count* … 232 Buffyverse comics? Holy shitfuck, dude. That’s going to take me years! Decades! Maybe I should read them without writing about them like a normal person.

Haha! Just cracked myself up.

Fray, Issue #2 [July, 2001]
Written by: Joss Whedon
“Chapter Two: The Calling”

“Don’t scream,” Fray thinks as she slowly glances behind her. The enormous demon looks quite snarly, like my ex-girlfriend! HAHAHA! I’ve never had one of those! “Don’t think. Think equals scream.”

She tries to slink away, but the demon grabs her by the leg and smashes her onto the top of her desk. Miraculously unhurt, she grabs her blast gun and jumps back up. “You’ll be wanting to back off about now,” she tells the beast, gun trained on him. The demon calls her a fool. He’s Urkonn! Urkonn of the D’Avvrus! “Bullets cannot harm me.”

Well, Urkonn of D’Avvrus, Melaka Fray doesn’t even know what a bullet is! She blasts him in the face with a burst of electricity. The beast goes down! Fray thinks this just bought her an hour, but Urkonn gets back up almost immediately and tackles her through the wall of the side of her high-rise. They plummet to the roof of a smaller building below. She maneuvers so that she lands on him when they crash, breaking her own fall. This is also fruitless to stop him.

“You are a fool!” he bellows, leaping at Fray again. “I am not trying to kill you!” Urkonn pins her down to the floor, looking like he’s about to kill her. But since he’s not trying to kill her, he doesn’t kill her!

“You attacked me,” she points out to him.

“You were fleeing. I tried to stop you.”

“By pushing me through a wall?”

“You hurt me. I got angry.”

He looks sad. She still looks skeptical of his motives.

“I was sent to train you,” Ukronn says. “To prepare you for the coming battle. You are the Chosen One, Melaka Fray. It is your destiny to lead humankind in the war against the vampires.”

Pffft. Hey, Joss Whedon, you one-trick pony, way to just make Future Buffy.

Fray looks nonplussed.

It’s like a chicken sandwich, except less tasty and more like a human who sucks your blood.

Elsewhere, a vampire named Icarus has just munched on a young woman’s neck. The three Lurks from Issue #1 approach him with good news! They have a necklace with the emerald pendants. I don’t know how they got this, but maybe Gunther is involved? At any rate, Icarus is pleased. “He’ll want this right away,” he says as he walks out of the large chamber through a corridor. The Lurks wish he stuck around for a celebration, but he’s been no fun anymore since he started answering to him. Whoever HE is. I don’t know yet. Probably David Boreanaz.

While this big, muscle-y Lurk talks shit about Icarus, Icarus pops back into the chamber like a magic trick, scowling. The Lurk starts gibbering and back-pedaling. But it doesn’t work. “Your little finger,” Icarus says to him. “Bite it off.”

Sir, yes sir! Let me just put some ketchup on this and CRUNCH. Delicious.

“You want me to fight Lurks,” Fray says to Urkonn. It wasn’t a question. Yes, she needs to fight what she calls “Lurks”. “It is your destiny,” Urkonn says, which is something that Fray is probably going to hear a lot from this point forward. “I don’t know who set you up to this, but tell them nice try. Go spin someone else.”

Nope! This Urkonn fellow is a straight-shooter. All integrity. He wouldn’t lie to nobody! Go out and start slaying, Slayer. It is your destiny and whatnot. Fray continues denying her destiny, but Urkonn knows that she knows. He knows she knows he knows she knows. She has dreams. He knows she has dreams. “In every dream you have great power. In every dream you fight them. The ones you call Lurks.”

Fray denies that she knows what he’s talking about, but she knows. I know she knows. I know he knows she knows, too. And he knows she knows he knows. Now that that’s settled, we can move on to brass tacks! Start slaying!

“Every Slayer is psychically linked to those that came before. It always has been thus.” He continues to convince her. She’s stubborn. “Then I guess I’m not your guy.”

He asks her where she thinks her strength and abilities come from. She says that she’s just “good at stuff”. He says she has skills beyong normal mortals. She says that she’s just “good at stuff”.

“How do you explain me?” Urkonn puts on his best scowly sneer, which isn’t as intimidating anymore now that we know he’s sort of a friendly kinda guy! “I am not of your reality. Is not my visage strange to you?”

Nope! She works for a guy who swims under a glass floor. Ain’t nothing surprises her anymore. “Take a look at the world, Horn-Boy. You’re not gonna convince me you’re special by playing the ugly card.

He’s starting to get frustrated.

Look on the bright side. She keeps a clean house.

I forget Melaka’s sister’s name. She’s copping around with her partner, flying in their fancy flying cop car. Her partner’s name is Broder, and he tells her to stop hounding her sister. She tells him to cork it.

Her name is Erin, that’s right. A much better name than Melaka. Through them I learn that Melaka is 19, and she’s doing all this stupid dangerous stuff partly because it pisses Erin off! That’s healthy.

“And knowing how much it rips you means she’s never gonna stop,” Broder tells her.

“She doesn’t stop, she’ll kill someone else. Maybe on purpose this time,” she replies, sighing. I’m looking forward to seeing who this broad killed. Probably David Boreanaz.

Down in Versi, that milky-eyed armless girl is trying to convince a couple of boys that Melaka Fray is The Man. She’s a hero and she could knock your head of with one dang punch! “My dad says she’s a pump on steroids, and she does whoring and stuff,” says a particularly dumpy, bowl-haired kid. “That’s ‘cause your dad tried to make with her and got stomped,” the girl retorts. Plus there was that time that Melaka stole medicine for her and didn’t make her mom pay nuthin’! Salt of the earth!

“No Slayer has ever turned her back on her duty.”

“I can’t believe you’re still talking!”

Are we talking side show-type freaks, or the James Franco and Seth Rogen-type freaks?

Urkonn is having problems here. Chosen One or no Chosen One, find some other gal. “If you don’t stand, they will overrun your world,” Urkonn warns.

Obviously, Fray doesn’t understand what the big deal is. Lurks are a bunch of annoying motherfuckers, not anything to even bother with. Huff and puff!

A beeping robot flies like a bullet through the giant hole in her apartment wall. She grabs it, calls it a carrier pigeon. “Means I got a job,” she tells Urkonn. Urkonn is amazed that there are no computers on Earth anymore, but Fray tells him that’s some hoity-toity Uppers business.

Another grab from Gunther! Time to skedaddle! “Our business is not finished,” Urkonn says rather patiently. Oh yes it is, scumbag! You better be out of here before she gets back, and she counted the beers in the fridge so don’t even think about it.

Before leaping out the building, Fray tells him that he hopes he has a backup plan, because she’s not getting involved in any of this Slayer stuff whatsoever. “We do,” Urkonn mutters of the backup plan, “It would not please you.”

Gunther’s newest job is a good reprieve from the last 40 hours of getting talked at by some Hell Jerk. She seems hesistant about her confidence. “Guy attacked me, then tells me I’m supposed to be fighting Lurks… not that I couldn’t… I haven’t met an ass I couldn’t kick… It’s just…”

Nope, we don’t get to hear the end of that thought. She at the museum where she needs to steal yet another trinket. She sprays the room with mist to find the locations of the security lasers, then approaches a little stone head encased in glass. Much to her surprise, an alarm gets tripped as she lifts the object off of it’s pedestal with string. Running to the exit as fast as she can, she finds a guard getting his neck chewed up by a big, buff, burly vampire! I mean, Lurk! Why am I capitalizing Lurk, anyway? Because I have respect for them, that’s why.

She has a sudden flashback of telling a guy named Harth to run. Her face is full of blood. The flashback is over in one panel. It’s a continuation of the single-panel flashback from Issue #1, where she is running with the guy. We’ll get more pieces of this scene to come, I’m sure.

The blood-faced Lurk tackles Fray to the floor, eyes looking hungry. “The pain is good,” she thinks. “The pain wakes me up.” She elbows him in the face, but, unphased, he gnashes his teeth into her arm. “Oh god… he was… sucking…” she thinks, horrified, before picking him up over her head and throwing him against a large glass obelisk. He’s all sharded up and incapacitated.

Feeling the thrill of BEING ALIVE, she returns to her apartment building where Urkonn still waits on the roof.