Europe. Some time long ago. The Dark Ages.

The alley is dark, the sun slowly going down on the horizon. The deformed creature yells at his pursuer in a thick accent, definitely European. “You’ll not have me, wench!”

But his pursuer is quicker. She leaps from her spot on the ground and soars through the air, calling him a leech in the process and plunging her wooden stake through the creature’s chest. It screams in protest, but the girl tells him he was a fool: he has walked right into the Slayer’s grasp. He doesn’t respond before he explodes into dust.

A voice from behind her gets her attention. There stands a tall man, with his face covered in shadows. He wears clothes that indicate someone of status, a baron or a lord perhaps. His light, almost auburn hair, shines in the moonlight and at this feet, crouched lowly with his hands together is another man, this one leering with an insane grin, dressed in the costume of a jester from some mad king’s court.

“Actually, that sort of fool is usually called bait.” The tall man says, calm and controlled. The jester chirps in quickly, his voice almost as crazy sounding as his deranged look. “Ashes, ashes, we all fall down,” he sings. His companion, the Baron, clearly his master, looks down with barely a hint of amusement. There’s a touch of annoyance in his voice. It seems his jester is more annoying than funny.

“Oh, and do forgive Amilyn,” he says, gesturing down at the clown. “He tends to drool before supper.”

The Slayer realises who it is she’s facing now, the name of the jester, Amilyn, giving the taller man away: “Lothos,” she whispers, unable to contain her horror. She nevertheless pushes her fear aside and charges forward. “Your time is ended, vampire!” she yells, not feeling half as confident as she sounds.

“You people will simply never learn,” Lothos quips, grabbing her as she tries to strike. “We can’t be stopped. This is our world now.” Then he callously breaks her neck.

Somewhere else, somewhere not where we were. A man hands a stake to a young woman before him. She shakes her head. “I can’t.”

“You know you must,” the bald, elderly preacher tells her. “She died and you are the next to  be called. Why do you think you were sent? As long as there have been vampires, there has been the Slayer. A Chosen One. One born to hunt the darkness. To stop the spread of evil. You are much more. One dies, the next is called, the next…”

California. 1996.

The movie house is full of teens, all making a noise or making out. No one in the packed movie theatre actively seems to be watching the film. There are apparently more important things to discuss.

A gaggle of four teenage girls, around about fifteen years old, sit in their seats. As usual, the conversations revolve around the four things in their lives that they consider important: school, boys, fashion and boys. And not necessarily in a particular order.

“Mr. Howard is so heinous. I got a C-Plus on the test and he tells me “you have no sense of history.”

Buffy Summers doesn’t like history. Why would someone be so interested in the past that they want to study it over their present? She can’t think of anything more sleep-inducing. One of her friends, Kimberley, cannot believe it: she had copied Buffy’s test. Jennifer, another friend sniggers. Buffy is not bothered. “Excuse me for not knowing about El Salvador. Like I’m ever going to Spain anyway.”

Then Buffy is pushed forward, some reprobate in the row behind throwing popcorn at the girls and causing Buffy’s head to jerk. Kimberley is not amused, turning to the two teenage boys behind them – who despite all the chaos, actually seem to be watching the film. “Would you guys just shut up please,” the older boy, complete with soul patch and short spiked hair, asks. Kimberley thinks the movie theatre’s standards are slipping. His friend complains that they paid good money to watch the movie, but his friend shakes his head: they didn’t exactly pay to get in.

Buffy turns, playful look on her face, with a twinge of bitchiness in her tone. “Everyone gets horribly killed except the blonde in the nightie, who finally kills the monster with a machete, but it’s not really dead. “

Kimberley doesn’t like the sound of that. Buffy still isn’t bothered.

Afterwards, the boys exit the theatre, the ending spoiled. Another group of boys, led by a boy named Jeffrey are hanging by a car, waiting for Jeffrey’s girl. As Buffy bounds over to him and falls into his arms, he grins and his friend Andy asks if he can borrow her for a while. Jeffrey tells him no. Buffy reacts to the exchange quickly, annoyed by the way she sounds like property. The conversation moves on though, without her raising her objections. The boys suggest they party and move on, with one of their number calling it a night.

On the way through the park, a shortcut home, Andy sees a kid named Grueller from school. He says hello and notices the kid’s grin. He then notices his teeth and his face deformed in a demonic scowl.

Then he realises he’ll never see anything ever again as the kid lunges at him.

At home, Hank Summers reminds his wife that they’re going to be late. Some business trip or something.  Buffy wasn’t paying much attention. As Joyce ensures her daughter has everything she needs, she gets in the car, and Hank, as usual, tells Buffy to have fun and to stay away from his Jag.

His precious Jag. “I know, the Jag,” Buffy repeats back as the front door closes and there’s nothing left now but her and the late-night movie. It’s some Dracula spoof or something. She dozes off while it’s playing, only waking hours later, when the news reports have come on, or perhaps they even interrupted the broadcast.

Half asleep and still dozing, Buffy hears the words of the reporter, even as she doesn’t understand them or take them in: “The sheriff was not available to comment, but police have issued a statement saying the situation is not out of hand. Tonight marks the fourth such disappearance in less than two weeks.”

Buffy in her daze, picks up the remote and turns the TV off. “What a perfect weekend to leave the kids alone in the house…” she says to herself as she rises to stretch. Her bed is calling.

The girl thinks twice about her intended. He wonders if she’s ever been intimate before, but she doesn’t hang around to tell him. She runs, afraid and alone, down a dark street. It’s Hong Kong, China, sometime in the 18th Century. As the girl heads down the next alley, she finds her way blocked by a cadre of vampires, their eyes glowing in the shadows. “Soon,” they promise the girl as they edge closer to her.

“Soon.”

Buffy startles awake. The dreams are getting really strange. Must have been the stupid movie she fell asleep watching. She checks the clock – it’s still the middle of the night. But, more unsettled than she would like to admit, Buffy Summers finds that sleep doesn’t come easy.

Elsewhere, a familiar creature is underground. Without the jester costume, Amilyn surveys the ground around him. He urges his master below him to sleep. “I have already begun building your new family,” he snarls in reverence. “Soon, we will be legion. This place is everything you promised, and when you rise, we’ll claim it as our own. Rubies will drip from your lips.”

He smiles as the Earth below him shifts, the dirt parting. Lothos is almost awake. “Soon,” Amilyn says, in hushed tones, as he kisses the hand of his lord.

The next day, Buffy and her friends are in a diner. They’re homework assignment has them discussing threats to the environment. Kimberley suggests “the homeless” is the true answer until Cassandra, the resident brain box, mentions the O-Zone layer.

“Right, got to get rid of that!” Buffy says. She means it as a joke, but isn’t exactly sure what the O-Zone actually is. She assumes it’s like a T-Zone… something to do with skin.

It turns out the environment thing is also the theme of the school dance, the committee of which obviously includes the girls. They’re discussing the students they wouldn’t invite if it were their choice, but a laugh from another booth gets their attention. Turning, the girls see two boys laughing at them from their seats. They seem rather obnoxious, messing about with the waitress. Jennifer thinks they’re drunk. The guy with the soul patch  asks Buffy her name. She tells him, and he chuckles. “Figures. This is Benny,” he says turning to his friend. “I’m Pike.”

Buffy stares at him with sarcasm etched across her eyes. “Pike isn’t a name. It’s a fish.” Pike looks at her, his face stunned that someone with a name like ‘Buffy’ has the nerve to jest at his. It’s only then, as Pike looks past Buffy, that he recognises the girls from the movie theatre the night before.

Benny, being an idiot, offers Buffy his hot dog, using it as a crude representation of his favourite piece of anatomy. Buffy stares and, using a knife she has for her sandwich, she slices the dog down to size. Pike laughs, but Kimberley looks at Buffy confused. She saw her friend pick up the knife and cut the dog – only Buffy wasn’t looking at any of it the whole time. It was like her body moved on instinct. Buffy doesn’t answer when she’s asked how she did it, and Jeffrey and his friends enter, ending the speculation on Kimberley’s part – the boys are more important.

As Pike leads a dejected Benny away, the conversation once again returns to the dance, almost as if it had never been interrupted.

Walking home drunk, Pike and Benny discuss the girls, but Pike is almost passing out. Benny leans over the side of the bridge they’re on, threatening to vomit. Pike is falling asleep against a tree, his eyes drooping before he’s asleep in seconds, the alcohol too much for his teenage system to take.

Benny sighs as he looks at Pike. Typical. He turns, thinking he’s going to hurl again, but this time a hand comes from the other side of the bridge and grabs Benny by the head. It grapples the boy and pulls him over the side of the bridge!

Suddenly, another man, older, comes from the shadows. He has a stake in his hand and he races for Benny. The vampire he knows as Amilyn is already too fast, his hands wrapped around the teenager, who hasn’t even had time to scream.

As Amilyn jumps back off the bridge, Benny as prey in his arms, the man can only helplessly curse himself for not being quick enough. He looks down at the unconscious Pike. Things are escalating.

The Watcher will need some help.

The next day, the girls walk out of school, eager to resume social activities. The dance is top priority. Cassandra asks if Tyler has asked Buffy to the gig. “Oh my God,” Buffy responds in an over dramatic way. “Where were you when I got over Tyler? He’s of the past. Tyler would have to crawl on his hands and knees to get me to go the dance with him. Which actually he’s supposed to later, so I said I’d wait.” Kimberley smiles. “Plus, y’know Jeffrey.” Buffy smiles. It’s nice to have options. Kimberley mentions their study plans for later, and walks away, leaving Buffy with her lollipop sitting on the Hemery front steps. “Call me!” she yells after her friends, one for each of them.

“Buffy Summers? I need to speak to you.”

She looks up and squints, the sun in her eyes slightly. There’s a bald man in a suit in front of her, little bit of an accent. Looks important.

“Hi,” she says and then instantly looks afraid. “You’re not from Macy’s are you? Because I meant to pay for that lipstick.”

If the man hears her, he doesn’t answer. “There isn’t much time. You must come with me. Your destiny awaits.”

Buffy turns and shrugs. “I don’t have a destiny. I’m destiny-free, really.”

He looks at her. “Yes, you have. You are the Chosen One. You alone can stop them.”

She looks at him now as she gets up. She doesn’t know why she’s still talking to this strange guy. “Who?” she asks, hoping the answer might end the weirdness.

And then he says it. It’s only two words, but Buffy has to think back slightly, just to make sure she’s heard right.

“The vampires.”

She looks at him, the pop hanging from her bottom lip. “Huh?”

He steps back slightly to get a better look at the small blonde girl. “My name is Merrick. I was sent to find you some time ago, but there were complications. You should have been taught. Prepared. Now, you must come with me to the cemetery while there’s still time.”

Buffy doesn’t move. “Let me get this straight. You’re, like, some kind of maniac, and I have to go to the cemetery with you ’cause I’m Chosen and there are vampires?”

There’s a slight look if relief on the man’s face. “Yes,” he responds.

Buffy looks at him again, still trying to work out who started this prank and where the cameras must be hiding. “Does Elvis talk to you?” she asks him with barely contained annoyance. “Does he tell you to do things? Do you see spots?” Merrick doesn’t answer.

“Just stay away from me, okay?” she asks, preparing to walk away, but then he says something that is scary – and she stops.

“Did you ever dream that you were someone else?”

“Everybody does,” the teenage girl justifies. Merrick loses none of his seriousness though. “In the past, a girl maybe? A Mahyar peasant? An Indian Princess. A prostitute in China.”

Buffy is stunned. She’s never mentioned her dreams to anyone.

“It’s you, Buffy,” Merrick explains, his stance and his face softening slightly. “Your dreams are merely your own self trying to remind you who you are and to warn you, perhaps, of the great evil rising here.” He asks if there’s a common thread and Buffy nods slowly.

“I’m always fighting…” she says, almost whispering to him. “Killing these… monsters… and, okay, this is weird. In all the dreams, I’m a different person, but the monsters, the vampires, all call me the same thing.”

“Slayer,” Merrick says.

Buffy stares at him. “God, it’s all true, isn’t it?”

Merrick looks at her with a small amount of sympathy. Buffy looks at him and then past him. “This is not my day,” she says to herself.

Elsewhere, Amilyn is smiling. He has Cassandra at his mercy, and, standing next to him, awake at last after centuries waiting and resting, is Lothos. The student tearfully asks him what he wants.

Lothos smiles at her. “Are we so strange? So alien to you? I’ve seen this culture, the greed, the waste. It’s heart-warming. The perfect place to spread my empire. What are we?  We are man, perfected. We exist to consume.”

Cassandra begs for her life, tells him that she’ll do anything, God, she’d even help him with more people.

Lothos swats her aside, her neck breaking as she slams into a tree. “I do wish you wouldn’t mention Him.”

Not long afterward, in the cemetery, Merrick asks Buffy why she has never told anyone about her dreams. Buffy asks him why she would: she doesn’t want people to think she’s nuts or crazy. Also, she can’t believe that she’s in a graveyard with a stranger hunting vampires rather than hanging with her friends.

There’s a fresh gravestone ahead of them. One Robert Berman. “He was killed three days ago. His body was found out by the canal. There was extensive tissue damage, tearing at his neck and shoulders. The coroner’s chalked it off to a dog attack.”

Buffy nods and then asks what she’s supposed to do. Merrick hands her a stake and a cross, which she goes to reject. “Just for protection, you won’t have to do anything,” Merrick tells her. “I just need you to watch.”

He then crouches down beside the new grave. “Now we just wait.”

“For what?”

“For Robert to wake up.”

Buffy still isn’t convinced. “Whatever. You got any gum?”

An hour later, they’re still sitting there. Time is marching. Buffy is bored. Then she hears the sound. It’s a low, deep and threatening sound, a growl almost. It’s mingled with the sounds of something moving through splintering wood. As Buffy watches with horror and shock, Merrick turns to her and declares, louder than she’d like, that she is now witnessing the dead becoming the undead. Robert’s hands reach through the dirt at the base of his tombstone.

Buffy expects him to be slow, but Robert isn’t. Buffy moves as Merrick tackles the vamp from behind, but Buffy finds her feet tangled. Looking down, she’s not happy to see a further set of dirty hands come from another grave, followed by another deformed vampire.

Buffy screams as it crawls up her body using her as leverage to rise from the ground. Buffy doesn’t scream this time, but she does notice Merrick drop his stake as Robert punches him away.

Without thinking, Buffy twirls, concerned. The cross Merrick gave her shines in the moonlight and she moves it around quickly, centering it on her vampire’s head, causing it to shriek, blister and smoke in that order.

Merrick is overwhelmed with the Robert vampire now approaching his neck for the kill. Buffy streams forward, ignoring her other target and picking up the stake that Merrick dropped. She thinks back to what the man was saying, everything he’s mentioned, and plunges the stake into Robert’s chest, allowing herself a brief grin of satisfaction, in the action and herself.

But the vampire doesn’t explode into dust, like Merrick had told her. Robert knocks her to one side. “Ooops, not the heart,” Buffy says to herself, annoyed slightly. She pulls the stake from Robert’s chest and he charges at her. As he knocks Buffy to the ground, they grapple for a moment before Buffy, not knowing whether by accident or design, is alone, covered in a layer of vampire ashes.

Some time later, outside her front door, Merrick makes sure she’s okay and tells her that she is to carry on as normal. Go to school, hang out with friends. “Don’t talk about any of this to anyone.”

She looks at him curiously. “This is important,” he explains off her look. “When the vampires find out who you are, you won’t be hunting them anymore.”

Buffy gets the hint. Merrick hands her a card with an address on it, tells her to meet him there after school the following day. Buffy tells him she has cheerleader practice, but he tells her to skip it.

As she walks into the dark house, her parents still gone, she stops before entering, looking into the dark and then turns back to Merrick.

“Merrick? They can’t come in right? Unless you invite them? Is that true.” There’s worry in her eyes, but at his answer, the worry turns into confidence.

“It’s true,” he tells her. He turns from her now, and walks away. “Now get some sleep,” he tells her as she closes the front door. “Slayer,” he acknowledges and continues on his way. There is still more work to do.