Last time on Slaying Solomon:
Credit scene: Sam and Drew, smooching, wearing Lazertag gear. They break off, grin. "Happy Birthday, Drew!" Sam shoots left, over Drew's shoulder. Drew kneels and shoots to the right, past Sam. Lights flash, bells clang, fog bellows and they head off to catch more of their friends in the game.
Beer zombie appears out of the fog, growls "Slayer!" and attacks. Sam easily grounds him, and begins interrogating him. Drew, separated from Sam, runs into Gwen. Gwen beheads one of the BZs and hauls Drew out of LazerLand. "I have something for you." Shoves a book into his jacket and zips it up. "We know the Slayer doesn't trust us, but maybe she'll trust you. Get this translated, and then call me at this number." Shoves a slip of paper into his pocket. "Just don't let the Watcher see it."
The Sacred Grounds - Moira returns to work after her Irish vacation. BZs smash stuff and throw the SG cook through the front window. Moira curses in Irish Gaelic. Notes red eyes and green spots on the neck. She grabs a salt shaker and throws the salt at them. Snarls turn to screams as the zombies hold their faces and run out into the night.
Blaire - "I've got this new place, it's called Blaire's. It's a bar. We've got three whole customers, and one of them is even human!" (Proud of herself) "But then, these Zombies show up and start trashing the place. New guys. Always coming in. They think... 'Oh, Solomon, confluence of ley lines. Power-central. Let's go get some!" (abrupt shock) "I guess I wasn't supposed to tell you that..."
Old Salem Brew Pub. - Sam Sr. and buddies are going up the front steps. Sam stops them, tries to get her father to go home. Sam: "You shouldn't be here. They're selling booze to minors!" Sam Sr.: "Then why are you here?" Joshua smashes booze bottles and sets the bar on fire. "A little help, here Sam!" "Just go home, Dad. I've got things to do. It's like that show, 21-Jump Street, okay?" Sam Sr. leaves. Sam rushes in "Get away from my boyfriend!" flying side-kick to split open a table and stun two zombies. Drew wields supersoaker full of saltwater. Moira throws salt to melt zombies. Tori takes a chair to the head, is stunned, but then kicks the BZ in the nuts for that. Kevin is attacked by four BZs at once, and gets pounded on. Joshua swings on the chandelier to help scatter the zombies that are on Kevin. Sam and Tori head down to the basement to confront the Brewmaster. Once the last of the BZs are dealt with, Moira and Drew follow downstairs. Kevin and Joshua stay upstairs to control the fire.
Brewmaster shoots green beams of energy at Sam from his staff. She shakes it off and climbs up onto a copper beer-brewing vat, and then to the catwalks. A super-human jump, she barrels into the Brewmaster, breaks his staff, and then beheads him.
Final shot: Evil Beer pouring down the drain from all the taps on the beer vats. Camera pans up to a doorway in the back of the basement. Joshua: "It's locked." Kevin: "And warded. We'll need a disarming spell, or a key to open that." The group walks home through the charred mess of the bar.
Time in between:
After the reports come out that "PCP-laced beer" was distributed to college and high school students from the now-defunct Old Salem Brewpub (Closed indefinitely for renovation) an outcry is raised and the Solomon High chapters of M.A.D.D. and S.A.D.D come into being. Samantha Kessler is noted in the attendance roster of the opening meeting of SADD on March 18th, 1991. It was entered into the meeting notes that she raised the suggestion of forming a SADD Taskforce - teenagers armed with cameras who go into bars and order beer. If they are served without ID requested, then they take photos of the proprietors and send the pictures to the Solomon Gazette newspaper.
Meeting notes also mention that the motion was not seconded, and so tabled indefinitely, while plans were seconded and voted into action to have a bake sale on the first Tuesday in April, (April 2nd) and a committee was formed to make posters for the school's hallways with "Stay alive, don't drink and drive" and other pithy sayings. The meeting notes do not mention the funny looks and nervous laughter that followed Sam's suggestion. ("Who do you think you are - some kind of undercover superhero?" and "You've been hanging out with those comic-book nerds too much.") No further meeting notes of SADD show Samantha in attendance, although she did sign up her boyfriend, Drew Killian as a member as well. Drew was not in attendance at the first SADD meeting, as he was helping Erik with a "history project."
The other big events of the week are the try-outs for Spring sports. Sam goes to the Track team try-outs, and does well, but not too well. Right up until the hurdles, when she takes a tumble over the last hurdle, and apparently sprains her ankle, taking her out of the running for the team.
Tori puts in a very strong showing, and makes the varsity Field Hockey team.
Graham tries out for Rowing, and places in the JV 6-man boat.
Erik spends the week dodging the Crew coach, as he does not want to be a rower, no matter how much the coach wheedles.
Teaser:
The TV jingle for Kessler's Auto Body shop:
"If the Winter's salt and sand and snow
have rusted off your auto's glow
Take it where? You ought to know!
Kessler's Auto Body Shop!
Or if the Gremlins in your engine
start a-knocking and a-pinging
we'll fix it up and get it singing
Kessler's Auto Body Shop!
If some love your auto's needing
or the oil pan wants a feeding,
When you're crawling 'stead of speeding,
Take it where the price is fair -
Kessler's Auto Body Shop!"
This one, along with several other local ads, starts getting a lot of air-time over the local cable TV station. One is for Graham's Aunt Grace's store that advertises a sale on hats, another for a flower/gardening shop that features garden gnomes happily digging and planting flowers in a garden, a third for the Solomon Savings & Loan.
Monday at school: Sam is missing.
1st period Biology: the new Bio teacher (Mr. Cavanaugh, played by former-speechwriter and gameshow host Ben Stein) reads attendance and comes to the "K's" "Kessler... Kessler... Has anyone seen Samantha Kessler this morning? No? Well, we'll mark her 'tardy' and go on. Kittinger, Justine? - Here - etc."
Joshua, Tori, Graham and Erik are in this class. They're supposed to be studying cellular structures, but it is soon discovered that all the flywheels, and most of the lenses have been removed from the microscopes. The teacher glares at everyone (especially Joshua) and demands an explanation for why anyone would want to damage such valuable school property. Assistant Principal Teatart is notified and the entire class is told to report back to this room after school.
2nd period: Environmental Studies. Sam is still a no-show. Kevin is in this class. The lecture is about beavers and their amazing dam-building behaviors that form ponds and re-route streams.
3rd period: Joshua, Tori, Graham and Erik meet up again for Geometry. Sam still doesn't show up. Equilateral triangles are discussed in excruciating detail.
4th period: Joshua, Kevin and Erik are in U.S. History, still without Sam. The WWII Battle of Midway is discussed in excruciating detail.
Lunch time: Still no Sam. Tori decides, as the one of the Slayer Club least likely to get in trouble, that she will blow off the rest of the school day and go off-campus looking for Sam. Joshua gives her advice on the best way to leave school without being spotted.
5th period: American Literature. Joshua and Graham sit through a reading of Emily Dickenson's poetry and discussion of its literary merits.
6th period: Automotive Tech. If any class Sam would come to, this would be it. But she's not there. Joshua has to refit all the spark plugs in his engine by himself. Most of the equipment in the class pantry is missing, as well as some tools out of the students' tool kits. (All of the smallest-size wrenches, for example) The Auto Tech teacher is almost as angry as the Biology teacher was. This class also, is told to report back to this room after school to be yelled at by Assistant Professor Teatart.
This places Joshua in a jam, as he's got two detentions scheduled in two different places, at the same time!
7th Period: Phys Ed. The class everyone loves to hate, and the only one everyone is in (except Sam, and Tori who's skipping). They play two games of rugby, boys separate from the girls.
For the last half of the school day, Tori walks up to Sam's house, finds no one at home, and then goes down to Kessler's Auto Shop, where she spies Sam's father, very busy with a lotful of broken cars to deal with on his own. Tori doesn't bother him. Sam is also not at any of the usual cemeteries (although it is daytime, so not patrol-time anyway) nor on Praestor's Rock, nor at the Sacred Grounds.
Meanwhile... up on Solomon Heights, at the peak of the hill where Kevin's family's coven gather at the Sabbats, a shimmering "rain" falls through a six-foot tall space, and then stops, revealing a tall, thin Caucasian man with graying dark hair, dressed in a Japanese army uniform circa 1942. He sways on his feet, looks a bit greenish, and then falls behind a nearby shrub, retching up pretty much everything down to his socks. When he's finished clearing his alimentary tract, he gets up, wipes his mouth on a handkerchief, and surveys his surroundings, taking out a hand-held device that looks like a fancy, gold pocketwatch from the outside, but has many buttons, blinking lights, and a small view-screen on the inside. He mutters to himself, and then takes out another similar device that is disguised as a lacquered snuffbox, and refers to it, too. Then, he fiddles with some buttons on his belt, checks the pocket watch, fiddles with some more buttons, and his military uniform suddenly changes into a preppy outfit of dark green pants, a bright pink polo shirt, and a lighter green windbreaker, with docksides-style shoes. He tops it off with a neon-orange hunter's cap and tucks a long, silver-headed cane under one arm. Spotting the town across the valley, he takes a bearing from the position of the sun and his scanner, and heads down into Solomon.
The newcomer walks down Main Street, reading signs. (Similar camera angles/cuts to the first shots of Hartsdale, back in Session 1.1) He stops at the Sacred Grounds, puts one hand on the doorknob, and then stops, mutters something to himself, and continues down to the Solomon Savings and Loan Bank. After a few minutes, he comes out again, and proceeds around the corner to Milo Davidovich's Antique Shop. There, the camera lingers through the front window as the garishly-dressed newcomer haggles with Milo over some items he takes from his wallet. They are crisp, fairly new 1940's era Japanese yen notes. Finally, the two men come to an agreement. Milo counts out several fifty- and twenty-dollar bills, and hands them over in exchange for the older money. They shake hands, and the newcomer heads back to the Sacred Grounds, where he orders two sandwiches and a bowl of soup, and a pot of green tea. He surrounds himself with local and area newspapers (The Boston Globe, New York Times and Post, the Solomon Gazette) and reads and eats, and mutters to himself.
After School: The Bio class and the Auto Tech class are lectured by Teatart, as a group, and then individually, on the topic of personal responsibility and how wrong it is to steal. Joshua gets leaned on especially hard, as he has been known to filch small objects from time to time. They want to know where the lenses and tools are, and what he did with them... They've almost come to the conclusion that Joshua has them before he says anything at all. (Even though they have no hard evidence) Joshua holds his ground and maintains his innocence. No one else comes forward to claim responsibility, either. Teatart lets them go after a while, but he's still suspicious.
At the Sacred Grounds: Drew and Hartsdale compare notes and conclude that nobody has seen Sam since she walked Drew home after taking him with her on patrol late Friday night.
Kevin tries a locator spell with Sam's hairbrush and a bloody shirt. This takes a while, so while Kevin is chanting, Joshua, Tori and Graham go upstairs to get hot cocoa, and spot the newcomer sitting in the corner, surrounded by newspapers, with his hat on the table beside him. Tori is stunned by his blatant disregard for the laws of fashion, and walks over to tell him so.
He introduces himself as "Professor Christopher Astin" and turns on the smarmy charm. Tori doesn't fall for it, but offers him fashion advice as a public service.
Kevin's locator spell produces a glowing ball of white light, as usual, which hums and spins back and forth for a little while, before hurtling up through the ceiling. The group grabs their weapons and run after it, spotting it as it plunges into one of the bookshelves upstairs. Drew spots a small, camouflaged creature standing on the bookshelf nearby, which dives into the same spot in the shelves just after the glowing ball does.
The group figures out that the wall behind the books is one shared by the next-door hair salon, and so run outside (still fully armed) and question the ladies who are sitting under the dryers if they've seen a glowing ball of light. They haven't.
All these kids running back and forth with weaponry attract the attention of the Professor Astin. (But none of the locals think anything is strange at all.) He furtively checks his snuffbox, and runs upstairs himself, repeatedly scanning the books, seemingly in search of something. The Slayer Club confronts him, and asks what he is doing. He introduces himself again, and explains cryptically that he has experience with various kinds of radiation, and he saw similar patterns in an alleyway not far from here. The S.C. decides to take Astin down to the basement with them, and grill him for more information about this radiation, where he saw it, and what it means. Astin is alternately cryptic, evasive, and states the obvious. The S.C. gets fed up with him. Hartsdale, hovering on the edge of this discussion, notices another one of the camouflaged critters on his own book-shelf, right beside his treasured Codex Apocalyptica! He shouts "Shoot it!" Drew does so, but that just makes the gremlin mad. It turns bright red, jumps at Drew, and claws its way up his shirt. Graham hits it with the flat of his sword, which stuns it for a moment, allowing Drew to grab it off his shirt and throw it. Eric winds up and hits it with his sword, and it goes "splat!" against the wall and falls to the floor. But then it gets up again, and dives through the book-shelf, vanishing into a shimmery portal about two feet across. Astin scans the portal, and announces that it is the same radiation that he'd seen before, upstairs, and in the alley. The SC decide to try it, and one by one, go through into a shining, twisting tunnel of light. Joshua ties a rope to the pull-up bar on the basement wall, and takes the coil with him to mark their trail.
The portal leads to the gremlins' home, a pocket-dimension of clockwork and machinery. Astin thinks he has died and gone to heaven! There, the S.C. needs to thread the labyrinth of clockwork, avoid being ground up in the gears or split in two by swinging pendulums.
After some time of climbing through gears, avoiding swinging pendulums, etc. (Tori gets caught on one of the pendulums and tears the back of her blouse open, and Hartsdale almost falls into a gap in the works, but Joshua pulls him back) the group reaches a comparatively stable area, where all the gears seem either simply still, or worse, jammed. Sticking out from underneath one particularly nasty-looking clump of clockwork stuff is a familiar pair of legs, and a familiar voice calls for more wire, which a nearby gremlin obediently hands her. After a moment, some clanking, and a bit of muffled cursing, Sam crawls out from under the tangle, trailing a bit of string. Once she gets clear, she yanks the string. There's a huge grinding sound, and gears start to turn again. That part of the machine is up and running. The gremlins cheer loudly.
Sam: "Oh, hi guys! What are you doing here?" ... "Rescue me? What do you mean I missed a whole day of school? I've only been here... oh, damn. My watch stopped." (All of the group's watches have stopped, and Astin's time-machine isn't working, nor his holographic disguise, so he stands there in his Japanese army uniform again.)
The gremlins beg the group to help them fix their machine, so they can go home. The group agrees, and the gremlins take them to the center, where THE COMPUTER sits, tall and dark and very, very quiet. Sam, Joshua, Kevin and Drew fiddle with various parts of it, eventually bringing one section up on-line. It hums and spits out a cryptic print-out with three riddles. The group ponders them, and Tori figures out one answer is "Gold." That is input on a keyboard. The computer hums, and another section lights up. "Password accepted." The group ponders some more, and Erik figures out that the other two are a "camera" and "paradox." (pair'a docs) Two more center sections light up, and the Computer is working again. The gremlins are jubilant, and lead the group to a larger portal, where they can go home.
The group arrives on Solomon Heights, about 10 AM the following day. Hartsdale heads back to the Sacred Grounds, and takes Astin with him. "I want a word with you..." The students head back to school, but mostly sleep through their classes. Sam doesn't go back to school, but heads straight back home to deal with her father and work on cars.
More gnomes turn up in town, smashing the window of a Radio Shack where Laurie's Flower Emporium's ad is playing on the TVs in the windows. Another one removes the radiator cap on Asst. Principal Teatart's car, leaving it motionless in the middle of Main Street. A third rips off the battery-cables from Erik's brand-new Jeep. Luckily (or maybe it's that Swedish engineering) Tori's Volvo isn't touched (for now). Kevin asks Graham's Aunt Grace who made the ad for her store. She tells him about Mr. Nimbus, out at the local cable TV station. The whole group, including Astin, but not Hartsdale, piles into Tori's car and heads out to the edge of town where the cable company has its studios. Along the way, they are attacked by dive-bombing gnomes who leap out of the trees and leave large dents in Tori's hood.
At the Cable plant, Joshua breaks in to the ad agency next door and the group riffles through the files, not finding a whole lot. Then, they break in to the cable studio itself, finding a lot of offices and empty sound stages. One studio has Mabel Boraski playing the piano. She tells Drew and Joshua that Mr. Nimbus went upstairs, but should be down again soon. In the basement, Graham and Eric meet James Silver, the janitor, whose grandma had "the Sight." He knows something about fey creatures, and warns them that more than one gnome at a time is trouble. Up on the third floor, Tori, Kevin and Astin confront Mr. Nimbus (recognizable to the audience as Ethan Rayne) over a magical movie-camera. Astin fires a sleep-dart that hits Nimbus in the forehead. While he's out, the trio ties him up, blindfolds him, and gags him. Kevin and Astin look over the strange movie-camera with the pink-colored tiny-faceted lens, and Astin is smitten. He's never seen such a perfect machine before, and is practically drooling over it. The rest of the group converges on the room, and discuss what to do with Nimbus. They use one of Astin's own sleep-darts on him, to distract him from the camera. While he's out, Joshua goes through is pockets to see what other nifty devices he has. (Occasionally throughout the episode, Joshua has been picking Astin's pockets, and then returning the things he finds when asked to.) Now, he has a chance to see everything: the time travel device, the scanner, the hologram-projecting belt, etc. Drew and Erik are excited about these things, and want diagrams so they can build their own.
But, five seconds after Joshua removes the time travel device from Astin's person, it gives off a blinding flash of light (Astin had booby-trapped it) and both sleepers awaken. Tori is dazzled, and both Joshua and Erik see spots.
Nimbus struggles to get free, shouting mush-mouthed around the gag. The SC un-gags him, to try to interrogate him. Astin tries to intimidate him, using the holo-belt to give himself the horrific aspect of a jackal-headed man. It might be more effective if Nimbus wasn't still blindfolded...
Nimbus shouts "You won't get away with this!" Slips out of his bonds, takes off the blindfold, grabs the camera and disappears in a cloud of smoke. Joshua knows this trick, however, and finds the trap-door under the desk. He follows Nimbus, along with Drew, and everyone else heads for the stairs. Everyone chases Nimbus, who hops on his bicycle and pedals away. Joshua tries to throw a stick between the spokes, but it bounces off some kind of energy-shield. Astin uses his scanner to counteract the shield's frequency, and Joshua tries again. Nimbus goes over the handlebars, but rolls and comes up, and runs off into the woods. When the group tries to follow, they are attacked by gnomes, especially Tori, who drove the car out here. Then, Kevin talks the gnomes into attacking Nimbus instead, and uses his TK to yank the movie camera out of Nimbus's hands.
Mr. Nimbus disappears under a barrage of gnomes, and the group sees that the camera was damaged when he fell off the bike, in any case. The lens is cracked and the delicate inner workings are snarled. The magic movie camera will not make any advertisements come to life, ever again.
The End