Legalese:
Copyright © 1997 by D. Pierce. All rights reserved. This story may not be published, distributed by email, archived, or posted to any mailing list, discussion group, or web page without written permission from the author.

The characters Xena and Gabrielle, (owned by Renaissance Pictures/MCA) are used herein strictly for non-profit purposes of parody and satire. No infringement is intended.

Rating: PG-13
Non-explicit slash fiction. Romantic love, no sex scenes.
Depicts strong and disturbing nightmares about death and killing.

Hankie alert
I may look like a hard bitten cynical person who smokes a lot and runs a bar in Casablanca, but at heart, I'm a sentimentalist. It shows.

Background:
This story takes place during Xena's second season, between the episodes "Return of Callisto" and "Intimate Stranger." The recent events of "Remember Nothing" are also quite fresh in our heroes' minds. I have ignored some minor points of continuity.

The story is written as a screenplay, and it is quite long. Think of it as the script for a three hour special filmed on an infinite budget.

Special vocabulary in the stage directions:
1. A "wipe" is what I've called the effect of having a vertical bar pass across the screen, with the new scene replacing the old scene in its wake. I'm told it's horribly cliched. [g]
2. A "shock cut" (smash cut, hard cut, etc) is a cut that is dramatic or startling in its timing.
3. "Intercut" is cutting from viewpoint A to a brief view of viewpoint B, then back to A again.
4. "Off screen" is when the speaker is not currently visible but is present in the scene, as opposed to "voiceover" where the lines are not actually spoken aloud by anyone in the scene (they're a thought, memory, or some such).
5. "Grahms" is the music soundtrack. I've given titles and track numbers from the original Xena soundtrack when the CD had something close to what I had in mind. "Foley" is a sound effect.
6. There is never a number 6.
7. "Groping" (in parenthesis in dialogue) is my shorthand for "groping for one's next words," and has nothing to do with what our heroes like to do under the covers.

I've ignored or adapted lots of the conventions of real screenplays to make this more readable as a story and less visually confusing in an online format.

Credit where credit is due:
The writings of several talented friends, including Alt.tv.xena regulars Aisa, Miss, Joanna, and Renee, inspired me to try my claw at writing fanfic. Morgan Dhu very generously gave of her time in providing feedback on the work in progress, as did a few members of the Xena Campfire Girls email list.

I owe an obvious debt of inspiration to the published screenplays of Harlan Ellison; less obvious sources include Leni Riefenstahl, whose documentary films inspired my descriptions for most of the scenes involving the villains, and Della Grace, whose photographic artwork inspired one or two of the more steamy set pieces.

I used Strong's Condordance to get my bible references straight, and Evans's Dictionary of Mythology to do the same for my classical mythology. I also had recourse to my copies of the Elder Edda and the Epic of Gilgamesh. Finally, I borrowed certain bits from the cosmology and epistemology of Neil Gaiman's Sandman mythos.

(Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.)