Welcome to Buffyness and Nightlurkers Presents: Fray, Issue #3 – “Chapter Three: Ready, Steady…”! In the previous installment, a big, fat, red demon named Urkonn was tasked with approaching Fray to let her know about her Chosen One destiny and yada yada. He’s awfully cordial about it all, but she’s in denial that there’s anything about her that could possibly be special and useful to Chosen One-related destinies. Urkonn gets frustrated.

Meanwhile, these things Fray calls “Lurks” are actually vampires. Once she learns that these Lurks tend to, you know, bite people and suck their blood, she gets more interested in fighting the battle against them. As is her destiny.

So next she’ll learn about what it means to be a Slayer! That’s how these stories tend to go, right? Let’s learn along with her, shall we (being a Slayer means punching bad guys really hard in the face).

Fray, Issue #3 [August, 2001]
Written by: Joss Whedon
“Chapter Three: Ready, Steady…”

We finally get to see that flashback that they’ve been hinting at for the last two issues. Fray is running with a guy named Harth. “Thieves!” yells a butcher outside of his store, shaking his fist comically. The two of them stole some meat. Eating fancy tonight!

“Mel… this is stupid. We’re gonna get celled…” Harth says nervously as Fray climbs up the side of the building from the roof of another building. Harth slips and starts falling toward the street, but Fray flips upside down from a pipe, hangs on by her legs, and grabs Harth’s ankle. He hangs onto her for dear life as she continues climbing up the pipes to the other roof. “No more stealing. That’s it,” he says. She admits that he’s lucky she has two hands, otherwise she would’ve chosen the meat over him! Ha!

Then suddenly Icarus the Big Scary Vampire shows up and then Fray wakes up from her dream! Of course we still don’t get to know what happened. That will be revealed in Issue #8 when, in a twist, we see Melaka bite him right in the jugular vein and rend his neck to disgusting shreds! Way to get killed by a girl, nerd.

Training time! Rise and shine! Urkonn’s gonna fuck your world up, make your muscles hurt so badly that you’re gonna wish you were never Chosen!

Fat chance. Fray is in charge here, and she’s leading Urkonn to Gunther so she can drop off her latest grab. Training can wait. The fish under the glass office will wait for no one. “You should not be concerning yourself with this.” Urkonn’s words fall on deaf ears as they both land on top of a speeding SkyBus. “Hey, just ‘cause I’m signing on to take out some Lurks doesn’t mean I’m quitting my day job.”

Urkonn laughs at her complete naivety. “Your significance. Your heritage. It should have surfaced in your dreams.” Fray claims it hasn’t, but she’s a dirty liar. Urkonn takes this opportunity to tell a long, boring history of slaying in the manner of a Slayer. “There was once a thing on this Earth called magic.”

BOOOO-O-O-O-ORRRING! Cut to the chase, Goat Face. Monsters and demons ruled the dimension. Eventually, mortal creatures evolved under the protection of mages and loranites (?) and the demons got annoyed with dealing with that, so for the most part they fucked off to some other dimension.

Some stayed behind. Some assimilated, some laid low and hid, some bred within the human population, some became actors in such famous films as Mallrats and that other movie with the Mallrats guy in it.

And some decided to continue being massive jerkoffs. It is unknown when vampires first appeared, but they were the biggest jerkoffs of the jerkoffs. Elders of several villages were like “fuck this” and decided to use magic to create a living, breathing weapon against these vampires.

The test is on Thursday, two study sessions will be held Wednesday at 1:30 and 3:00.

Fray has reached her Guntherly destination. With some hesitation, the very short bouncer lets Urkonn into the office as well. “I do not like this place,” Urkonn mutters. “There is something wrong here.”

Gunter turns on the light, revealing his office fish tank. Urkonn starts growling. “There’s my best girl, twelve hours late with my grab…” Gunther smiles widely. “And there’s the giant goat-monster making faces at me.”

Nothing gets past this guy! Anyway, it’s all good. Fray successfully stole the object from the museum and she wants a bag of sil, please.

Gunther snarls. She wants more money after how generous he just was with his three sil! Three sil! That’s one sil more than two! “New job, new deal,” Fray says matter-of-factly. “I don’t set the rates, Sushi-Boy… I just grab.”

Yeah, she grabs men by the pussy. Gunther gives her a paltry sum before she and Urkonn get the heck out of dodge. After they leave, Gunther immediately swims through a corridor to his dreadfully short bouncer. “Edo, contact our collector. Tell him we have his prize.”

“I simply don’t trust the fishman,” Urkonn grumbles. Lighten up, Francis. Gunther’s been good to Melaka, so he’s ok people. In fact, he’s been a little too good to her lately… I’m sure it’s nothing.

They find themselves in what I assume is an abandoned warehouse of sorts. “This place is safe?” Urkonn asks. “If it was safe it wouldn’t be empty,” Fray responds. “You said train, this is the place. At least till it falls down.”

Being a Slayer wasn’t going to be all cake and ice cream and frosting and presents and balloons and streamers and strippers. Ok, ok, some strippers.

Urkonn was thinking more like the basement of a Dave & Buster’s, but this is certainly close enough! Lesson One: Dexterity. As in, be all kinds of nimble and shit. “I throw things at you. You avoid them,” he tells her. It doesn’t work very well.

Lesson Two: History. That’s fun, right? No one ever got beaten up in history. “She fought, and died, and was succeeded by another, and another, throughout time. Always one. Always a woman. A warrior.” That is some stank-ass history, bruh. You mean none of these ladies had a say in it? At all? What if she wanted to sit on her ass all day and watch cartoons? Destiny Schmestiny.

Usually it’s the Watchers that will find these Slayers, but Urkonn ain’t a Watcher. “My reasons are my own,” he answers when asked why he sought her out. Fray finds that more than a little bit suspicious, but hey. There’s a whole lot happening all at once here! For one thing, when it comes to the Big Four thrash metal bands, Fray was never that fond of Slayer anyway.

So what about the last Slayer? Well, uh, here’s the funny thing, heh heh. No one knows what happened to her. The very last Slayer on record was from the 21st century, “hundreds of years ago”. She banished all these demons so hard that none of them were around anymore. Just some really efficient banishin’! Very fine work. It’s unclear if that particular Slayer survived. “But, the demons being gone, she was the last to be called.”

Urkonn the Jerkonn speculates that, because the line of succession continued for centuries without any of the potential Slayers being called, it may be why she has no memories or dreams of her heritage. And that guy who set himself on fire? He was supposed to be your Watcher! Isn’t that hysterical?! That guy was crazy! But he knew where to find you, and he knew you were the Chosen One, and he knew how to make a big, dramatic scene about it! “Maybe he was cold,” Urkonn suggests after Fray repeatedly, repeatedly, repeatedly tells him that the dude set himself on fucking fire. How’s anyone supposed to Watch anyone when they’re on fire?

And, like all monsters, they’re tattooed skinheads in leather jackets and denim.

These Watchers, the fanatics and fools who spent centuries believing that the demons would come back, they were right. So don’t be so quick to judge, m’lady. “The monsters did come back.” And lo’, speak of the devil! Here’s Icarus now, returning to his master Sgt. Vampire Jones. He’s off-panel, but he has scary shaky blue speech balloons oooooooo.

Icarus has the artifact that Fray stole from Gunther. “Is that from Melaka?” asks Sgt. Vampire Jones (who will be called this until his true identity is revealed). “There were problems,” responds Icarus. “The one I sent to watch her got hungry. Confronted her.”

Well, we all know how that ended. There’s also this other pesky detail: Gunther says that Fray was with some goat-headed dork. “Maybe a bodyguard. I’m not sure. But not human.”

“Things are moving faster than we expected,” says a rather impressed Lt. Col. Vampire Jones. “Make them move faster still.”

Meanwhile, Fray is trying to turn this slaying business into a money maker, wanting a couple sil per slay. Someone could cough that up, right? They return to her apartment where they find the milky-eyed one-armed little girl huddled in the corner bawling her eyes out. Her name is Loo, by the way, as in “Loo-k at my milky-eyed, one-armed self.” Apparently, a guy named Kettie Rawls was being very mean to her and threatened to tear off the rest of her stumpy arm. She got scared, and she was assured that she could always come to Fray’s house when she got scared.

Uhhhh, it’s too bad there’s a demon in the house right now that might be a little too much for Loo to handle at the moment, and–

Strangers are supposed to have the best candy.

Never mind, then.

“The girl is yours?” Urkonn asks while Loo runs to go find some candy elsewhere. No, Stumpy ain’t hers. The only family she has is her pig cop sister Erin. And… uh… she had a brother too. But he’s eight kinds of dead! He’s probably Hatch, the nerd in all those flashbacks where someone died! I’m starting to piece it all together, keep up.

Fray offers to bring Loo back to her parents who run the tav and invited Urkonn to come with. “Don’t worry, you’ll fit right in. Well, you might maybe out your hood up…”

Down in the stinky tav where all the stinky slumdogs hang out, Fray and Urkonn go over some more Slayer trivia. “Fire, sunlight, beheading, a wooden stake through the heart…”

“Not a lot of sunlight here in the Lowers. And good luck finding a piece of real wood. And fire and beheading pretty much kill anyone, am I wrong?”

NNNNRRRRGHH! Fray is ruining everything with logic and reason! She’s already tired of talking. Get her in front of some Lurks and she’ll hand their asses over on a silver bullet! Oh wait, that’s werewolves.

“Hey, Melly, got room for an old friend between those legs?” asks a big, fat bald man with one metal arm. He holds a frothy beer, and he’s got a big grin on his face. “If it isn’t Kettie Rawls,” Fray says before wrapping her legs around his neck and squeezing tight. Old friend, indeed. Urkonn tugs his hood farther down his face.

She throws him across the bar. “Mom, Melly’s fighting to avenge my honor!” Loo cries, hopping onto the bar. Urkonn is embarrassed, and rightfully so, even though Fray smiles profusely. “Urkonn, buddy, this is training!” He leaps back over to Rawls and pounds the fuck out of him while his own pals unsuccessfully try to stop her. “He doesn’t think I’m ready,” Fray thinks of Urkonn. “He doesn’t know me that well. Long as no one’s throwing girders…”

Loo’s mom revs up her own robot arm and punches Fray clear out of the building.

Or the rest of you, sister.

Fray hoists herself up, intending to return to the bar to finish the job no matter what the steel-armed owner thinks!

…but then she is approached by something even more demony than Urkonn.

“No. No God, please, I’m not ready… I’m not ready… for this…”

It’s Icarus and his giant belt buckle.

Final Thoughts

Icarus is small potatoes! He looks like you could pick him up and give him a swirlie. If this doesn’t happen in Issue #4 than I’ll seriously consider giving up on the Buffyverse comics altogether!

Or not. I’m all talk.