A Concordance and Guide to

Drunkard's Walk XIII

Latest Update: 19 November 2019


For your information and entertainment, we have compiled the following key to the various references, in-jokes and obscure comments in Drunkard's Walk XIII. As with the other Steps, we can't promise that it's comprehensive; it's all too easy to miss things. If you think you've spotted something that was left out or needs explanation, feel free to email either of us about it!

As usual, we have not included entries for most of the songs that Doug that employs in this story. Once again, this is because most of the appropriate citations are already included at the end of each chapter.

The format for this listing is simple. Entries are grouped by the chapter they appear in, in order of their appearance in the story. Each entry will start with the appropriate text from the story in italics, followed by a gloss, explanation, or, in some cases, a chatty little commentary by one or both of the authors. Where applicable, weblinks are provided for those interested in more information.

Of course, as future chapters are written, additional entries will be appended to this document.

Enjoy!

— Bob and Helen

A Note About Dates: Even a cursory search of the web will turn up several viewer-created timelines for the fifth season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. However, no two of them agree on the date for every episode, or even most episodes, and we have noted that at times these have conflicted even with canon information. So, dissatisfied with the earlier work in the field, we chose to spend several weeks studying the entire fifth season and came up with our own timeline. There was, surprisingly, a lot of data within the episodes themselves, both explicit and implicit, including one case of the date actually being visible on-screen. And then we correlated that with external information (such as the date the University of California system started its spring break in 2001). We still had to do a little guesswork here and there, but we're confident that we have created the most accurate timeline for the fifth season available anywhere. Of course, Doug's presence in Sunnydale throws it completely out of whack by New Year's Day, 2001.

Table of Contents

Prologue

Breathe Into Me And Make Me Real
A line from "Bring Me To Life" by Evanescence.

The chapter titling format for this story, as with many of the other Steps, will be lines from songs.

Svata Orosia, Czech Republic
The prologue is, in its entirety, a retelling of the flashback sequence seen at the start of the episode "No Place Like Home", only from the point of view of one of the other characters involved. This is something we will be doing throughout the story — when we need to present something that appeared on the air, instead of simply "replaying" it as it was broadcast, we will show it from a substantially different point of view, or present it by implication through a scene that takes place before or after it with the same characters.

Also, please note that unless otherwise indicated, any episode named in this concordance was broadcast during Buffy's fifth season.

Chapter One

I've Been Through The Desert On A Horse With No Name
The title line from the song "A Horse With No Name" by America.

Murray Head, "One Night In Bangkok", from Chess
Trivia point: Murray Head is Anthony Stewart "Giles" Head's brother, although the resemblance is not strong.

Well, if — as I've been intending — these logs and journals of mine do finally end up in the Warriors computer system as an archived account of my extradimensional exile, then you should know who I am already.
Bob says: This has always been the justification behind Doug's first-person narration from my earliest conceptions of the Walk. That, and it's a coping mechanism which helps him retain his sanity, at least until that point after DW2 when he figures out he probably can't go insane anymore. But by that time it was a habit.

and of those all but one had been other planets which were part of civilizations that had at least known of Earth.
The exception was Velgarth, in Drunkard's Walk I

the tether I had encountered decades before in a Japanese temple tended by a group of Norse goddesses. (No, really.)
During the events of Drunkard's Walk V.

the "Mode Select" switch
Bob says: This is a shout-out to a science fiction TV show — which one escapes me at the moment I'm writing this; it might be the original Star Trek — which had a prominently-marked "Mode Select" switch on a control panel, and which was used for just about every different function the character at that panel needed to perform. Here it just selects the cycle's flight mode. It's got a mollyguard (shield) on it because accidentally flipping the wheels horizontal while riding directly on a road is a bad thing.

I'd covered not quite a hundred kilometers before I spotted the road.
Assuming he wasn't going too much faster than Mach 1, that would have been anywhere from 4 to 4.5 minutes later.

a point-up Reuleaux triangle
Wikipedia of course has an article on what a Reuleaux triangle is, but if you don't want to click, think of a triangle whose sides are curved, bulging slightly outward.

California State Road 154
A very real highway, for you readers not in California.

Like the gas station I found half an hour later.
This is, by purest coincidence, the abandoned gas station which plays such a key role in the episodes "Spiral" and "The Weight of the World".

Sunnydale, California, population 35,000
The population of Sunnydale is visible on the "Welcome to" sign that we see several times during the show's run. In the earlier seasons it's much closer to 40,000; the count drops throughout the series. This particular number is about as close to a canon population as we can get for season five.

No, "manna" — not "mana". Two different things entirely.
"Manna" = food from heaven, provided to the Israelites in the desert.
"Mana" = Polynesian word for something's magical nature which has become commonly used as the term for the "fuel" or "energy" that powers magic.

The masthead claimed a circulation of well over a million
As is visible on a copy of the paper seen reasonably close up in the episode "Crush".

24-hour businesses, including a disproportionate population of pawn shops and "We Buy Gold and Jewelry!" outfits
We never actually see such things in the show, but given Sunnydale's (ahem) night life and its own form of economy, it seemed a reasonable deduction that they had to exist.

Sunnydale sat on the same patch of land as Santa Barbara back home.
This is almost but not quite canon. Although there is some small support for the idea that Sunnydale, CA is actually Sunnyvale, CA, there's more for the Santa Barbara idea. The telephone area codes are the same, a map of Santa Barbara County is used on-screen for "Sunnydale County" a couple of times, the various stock establishing shots of the town actually are of Santa Barbara, travel times to/from LA and San Francisco mentioned by various characters in both BTVS and Angel work only for Santa Barbara, and Joss Whedon has actually said that Sunnydale is "in the Santa Barbara area". There's a bit more, but all you need to know is that we found it convincing enough for our purposes. The only flaw was, at least as far as we could tell from Google Earth and other topographic maps, the desert which is canonically known to be within a short drive of Sunnydale doesn't exist outside of Santa Barbara. So we changed the geography of the Santa Barbara area to include it, and blamed the change on the presence of the Hellmouth.

right smack dab in the middle of the floor was a big bronze disk that looked almost like a hatch, about a meter and a half in diameter
Although this bronze seal — called the Seal of Danzalthar — is shown late in season six, we could not actually find any confirmation that it existed before the reconstruction of Sunnydale High. Given that the Master's minions in season one could freely travel back and forth between the surface and the buried church in which he was trapped, and that more than once it was suggested that he was physically stuck in the actual Hellmouth itself, it seems pretty likely that the seal was put in place when the school was rebuilt and wouldn't have been around in season five.

But frankly, it's too good and iconic an image not to use.

Corner of Revello and Angelucci Drives, Sunnydale, September 13, 2000, 6:51 PM
This scene takes place during and immediately after the final minutes of the episode "Buffy vs. Dracula".

First, he was taking her to a movie.
The films that Riley considers here were all playing in California in the middle of September 2000. We went and looked.

I merely spat out a particularly vile obscenity in Black Lectroid
Learned while he was in the world of Buckaroo Banzai during the events of Drunkard's Walk IV.

And needless to say, it bore no resemblance whatsoever to any Japanese commercial art with which I was familiar from Homeline.
Because the Japanese of Warriors' World are far more xenophobic than they are in our time line, and Osamu Tezuka did not choose to emulate Disney's style when creating his own.

Originally an off-the-shelf laptop from an early 21st-century Earth that wasn't too far behind Homeline techwise, it had been subjected to a weird substance the folks in that universe called "handwavium", among other names.
This timeline is known as Fenspace, and Doug's brief time there is documented in the prologue to Rob Kelk's story Legend Of Galactic Girls.

Besides, what did you do with all those billions anyway? Bought a fancy-schmancy circus from a corporate raider and gave it back to the guy who started it, just so you could be a clown on stage.
Yes, Doug spent 20+ years in the Kaleido*Star world.

No, there isn't going to be a Kaleido*Star Step. But Bob has been thinking of writing a Steplet there.

With its white stucco, bold wrought iron accents, and rather irregular and asymmetric structure, it struck my sense of whimsy; the large windows and broad patios that most of its apartments had didn't hurt, either.
Yes, this is the same apartment building that Xander rents a place in as of "The Replacement".

When I got there I was welcomed by the building manager, a woman by the name of Cathy Cohen, who seemed determined to both rent to and flirt with me.
This is the same woman who appears in the episode "The Replacement", showing an apartment to Xander and later closing the lease with him. The character is given no name; we've chosen to use the actress' name here.

Obscure reference, more trouble than it's worth to explain.
Eimi made a joke about the color-ranking system in the roleplaying game Paranoia, if you don't get it. In the game's dystopian computer-run Alpha Complex, security clearance and social status are represented by the colors of the spectrum. The lowest-status drones (called "infrareds") are forced to wear all black, while at the other end of the social spectrum, the all-powerful High Programmers are the only ones allowed to wear white (for ultraviolet).

That never worked when Hexe crashed at our shared flat
A reference to a little background from the original Warriors' World campaign. Although they generally got along like a pair of squabbling siblings, Doug and Hexe somehow ended up jointly renting a flat in London for use during trips to the city. They did not live there, and their joint ownership did not mean they lived together — it was just a convenient place to crash when one or the other of them chose to stay overnight in London. It had only one bed, and if both were in London at the same time, whoever got to the flat first that night got dibs on it; the other had to take the couch.

Then there's the fact that the Fidelius needs a wardstone a damned sight bigger than a breadbox to anchor it.
The requirement of a wardstone to anchor a Fidelius is completely fanon — JK Rowling never gave any indication in the Harry Potter books what was required to cast the spell other than a secret keeper — although it is clear by implication that whatever it is, it is a) unknown to the average wizard, and b) difficult, complicated, or both to cast. Requiring a wardstone makes it a non-trivial task to set one up — which is good for our story purposes.

a complete decompilation of the ritual handy for translation directly into the spellcasting system of one's choice
Now that Bob has begun writing Drunkard's Walk VIII (the Harry Potter Step), you will get to see just how Warriors' World has ended up approaching magic — which is just a little bit differently from most other worlds, at least as of the end of their twentieth century. This line is a bit of a hint.

"'My sources say no'," she declared.
Eimi is, of course, quoting one of the responses given by a Magic 8-Ball.

I've got the Nemesis staff
A gadget from the formerly-defunct MMORPG City of Heroes. Imagine a five-foot brass rod with a giant dreidl on its bottom end and a foot-and-a-half-wide toothed gear mounted on its top, all done up in a pseudo-Victorian steampunk style. It fires huge balls of force that can send even the biggest foes (short of giant monsters) flying. Oh, and it gives off purple sparks while in use.

If you're not gonna pay me for that book you burnt, bugger off.
It's documented somewhere, just not in the fifth season, that the book of Spike's that Dracula burnt was a first edition copy of Bram Stoker's Dracula, signed by the author. Such volumes in good condition go for anywhere from US$75,000 to US$200,000 as of early 2011, in case you're curious.

the local Circle K
For those who don't have them in their area, this is a chain of 24-hour convenience/dairy stores that are common mostly in the south and west of the United States, although they can also be found in six or seven other countries as well.

"I VISITED MEGATOKYO AND FREED THE BOOMERS AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS LOUSY T-SHIRT."
No, this isn't the same T-shirt Lisa gave Doug at the end of DW2, just the most recent copy of it that Doug has had made after the original started to wear out. He still has the original packed away as a keepsake.

Tonight, I am sending you, my faithful lieutenants, to strike at the Magic Box!
The aftermath of which is seen at the start of the second episode, "Real Me".

Miller & Starr is the definitive compilation
Miller Starr Regalia publishes a large variety of works about California real estate under the "Miller & Starr" name, including the books Giles was looking at in this scene, an annotated 12-volume encyclopedia of California real estate laws..

Now to be honest, the shop cannot actually be sold until much later in the probate process. But what we can do until then is set you up in a short-term lease contract with a buy option, which you can then convert to an outright purchase as soon as it's permissible.
The speed with which Giles purchased and moved into the Magic Box is nothing short of amazing, and borderline criminal by the laws of most states — particularly California. This is our best guess at what actually happened behind the scenes. Even so, as we note in the text, it's still terribly irregular by most legal standards.

B'henzh'al D'hoqq
Doc's real name is never given in the series; this is our creation, as part of exploring his background far more than the show ever did.

Gurnenthar's bloody giblets!
In case you're wondering who Gurnenthar is, well, we don't know. But among the winter holidays listed on the banner over the Magic Box's counter and cash register in the episode "Into The Woods" is "Gurnenthar's Ascendance".

The new Guardian
Christopher "Paradox" Angel, God of Moments. Again, see Drunkard's Walk V for more information.

that 'West Side Story' timeline
See West Side Loon.

I don't think I've seen more than two or three people of any ethnicity other than white here.
This is pretty much canon — the population of Sunnydale is visibly far more white than would be normal for a California town circa 1996-2002. Not exclusively so — one of the original Cordettes was black, for instance — but way, way out of proportion. At least one fanfic author out there buys into the "magical <ethnic>" cliche and claims this is because white people are stupid when it comes to sensing supernatural danger.

Paragon City HeroCom unit
Another doodad from City Of Heroes.

the Browning Ultrapower
A cybernetically-enhanced handgun from the game Shadowrun.

Coming soon: Chapter Two!


This page was created on March 31, 2011.
Last modified November 19, 2019.