VIXEN - The Legend of the Five Totems

Chapter 1 - The Vixen

If Mari McCabe were paying attention, she would be striking a pose that would accentuate the billowiness of her summer dress; instead, she is thinking of warmth. Detroit is a place of flux in March, with bitter windy days quickly becoming sunny and warm, only to slip back below freezing. In her home, off the Serengeti Plains, this was a time of comfortable weather, just under 30 degrees (what Americans would say is high eighties in their peculiar Fahrenheit measurements), with predictably brisk morning rains that leave everything fresh and green.

"Mari!" Todd shouts, pulling her out of her moment of distraction. "Come on, girl. Pull it together. You have the fan on you, let's make that print pop!"

"Sorry, Todd. My mind slipped away for a moment." Before the photographer can even give her any direction, she slips her head back into the shoot, giving the young professional a range of poses as his shutter clicks again and again. To her, modeling is a kind of dance, much like the movements of a jaguar in its habitat. Eyes open, she sees Todd behind his circular shutter but she is listening to the brush of the light summer cloth upon her dark skin, blown about by the fan beside her. "Is this more to your liking?" she coos more to the camera than the man wielding the tool.

"Yes! Yes, oh, yes, that is what we want," Todd says.

After another fifteen minutes, Todd stops snapping photos. "Oh, Mari, I knew that if anyone could make these prints shine, it would be you. Take a break, beautiful, while we set up the next shot."

Donning a heavy overcoat to cover her summer dress, Mari makes her way to the front of the ground-floor studio and emerges into the brightly-shining sun. There is heat today, but nothing like the warmth of her homeland. Again, the pedestrians seem to disappear as she drifts back to Zambesi and her family. It has been five long years in the USA, and lately she finds herself thinking about them more often than not. As she walks down the street, she gazes into the various windows, but doesn't see items for sale. She can only see her father's thin black moustache and hear his deep laughter.

"Get out of my way!" a man yells out as he pushes through the people on the street towards her. A quick glance identifies the automatic pistol in his hand. In her experience, nobody races down the street with a handgun unless they are in flight. Indeed, a short ways off behind him, a pair of security officers are in slow pursuit.

Mari slips a leg out behind her just as he passes her. He slips right into her step and careens awkwardly into an A-frame advertisement. With three quick steps, she is beside the man, and drives an elbow straight into his neck. As he reaches up to his throat, she kicks his gun back towards the uniformed men. Then, she is right back where she was before he started his approach. As she was channeling the speed of the cheetah, she expects the dozen or so people on the street would be none the wiser for how quickly and stealthily she took the man down.

The first of the uniformed men rushes past the gun and trains his own firearm on the man Mari took down. "Don't move," the guard says. A moment later, his partner comes behind with a pair of handcuffs. The second guard, stockier around the middle than the first, binds the perpetrator, who is still gasping for air, thanks to Mari's elbow jab.

"What just happened here?" the first security officer on the scene asks Mari. He is the older of the pair and has a thin goatee that matches his jet black hair.

"It was that hero, Vixen! She knocked this man to the ground and ran off."

"Vixen?" the thinner of the pair asks. "Really? Which way did she go?"

"Over there. Across the street and up on that building. Climbed up there like a squirrell."

"Too bad," the security guard says. "I'd have loved to see her. Well, her being here was bad luck for this guy."