When Dizzy had been born, in the year 1996, the television series Buffy: The Vampire Slayer had not yet aired on television. The movie, which bore the same title, and which was directed by Fran Rubel Kuzui (who would later come on board as an executive producer of the show), had come out in 1992, to mixed and very ho-hum reviews. The writer of the film — a then-little-known scribe by the name of Joss Whedon — had written “this scary film about an empowered woman,” but the director had turned it into, in his words, “a pop culture comedy about what people think about vampires.” Whedon had been crushed. Later on, Gail Berman, of Fox, came to Whedon with an offer regarding Buffy: “Do you want to turn it into a show?” And Whedon jumped at the chance. The idea became “high school as a horror movie,” according to Whedon. “And so the metaphor became the central concept behind Buffy, and that's how I sold it.”

  Dizzy turned one year old on October 31, 1997, eight months after the debut of the series as a mid-season replacement for a cancelled show called Savannah, which was about three promiscuous girls in California (whom no one cared about, nor liked very much, hence their show’s cancellation). Dizzy was too young to enjoy the show, sadly. But when she turned fifteen, in 2011, she accompanied her father to FantazmagoriCon for the first time (FantazmagoriCon II, to be exact, the second annual throwdown-of-a-hoedown that was the now-famous con), and — since her father had been waiting until she was “the right age” to introduce her to the series, and she had thus never seen any of it — she was smacked in the face with the phenomenon of Scoobies, Potentials, and Whedonites galore. And she thus fell in love with Buffy, in the best way possible . . . the way that only a Fandom Virgin can fall in love with something that is cool and that takes their breath away with its awesomeness, and its newness, and its wow-factor. The way Star Trek sweeps some fans off their feet, or the way Firefly stuns a select group of others when they first lay eyes on its pilot episode. The way Babylon 5 mesmerizes its chosen congregation of worshippers, while Doctor Who dazzles its dedicated bunch of devotees. That happened to Dizzy with Buffy. And the effect never wore off.

  Buffy Summers became, then and forever — and continued to grow to be, even more so over the years, as the adult in Dizzy embraced the ideals of feminism — one of her personal heroes. She identified with Buffy, on an emotional level. Felt her pain. And Buffy, it seemed, felt her pain, too; together, they went through teenage-hood together, Dizzy and Buffy, growing and learning together. Dizzy forced herself to watch only one episode per week, the same as when the series had first aired . . . She wanted to see it the way its original audience had seen it. She bit her nails at all the cliffhangers. She grinned with a shared sense of mischief whenever Buffy snuck out to see Angel; feared Spike as a villain, and later fell in love with him as a scurrilous rascal, then as a serious contender for Buffy’s affections; then feared him as a lunatic and in the end, was awed by the depth of his sacrifice . . . And she cried — oh, how she cried! — at the end of the series finale. Tears of joy, tears of pain. And sadness that the adventure was over. Or was it? There was a continuation . . . in the comics . . . Hmm . . .

  She devoured all seven seasons, watched all of Angel too (and did so in the correct viewing order, side-by-side with Buffy); had several t-shirts, coffee mugs, and posters; had Buffy-themed notebooks for school and lab work; had all the soundtracks (and had memorized all the lyrics to the musical episode, and had the guitar and piano book for it). She designed a few desktop wallpapers and collected others; designed and downloaded custom Buffy-themed icon collections; doggedly collected all the comics and graphics novels; the trading cards; the shows on DVD, and had the digital copies of all the episodes purchased and downloaded via iTunes. She even had replicas made of the Sunnydale High cheerleading outfit that Buffy wore in the episode entitled “Witch” from the show’s first season, and of the dark, sensuous corset-and-leather-boots outfit that “Evil Willow” wore in the “alternate universe” episodes . . . both of which she was fond of wearing out in public on ordinary, everyday trips to the store, to school, and to under-twenty-one dance clubs (before the accident, that was). Hell, if you were going to own an expensive cosplay, she figured, you might as well get some damned everyday use out of it, right?

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  Buffy had also been there for Dizzy during her darkest days. It was to her inner “Slayer Strength” she turned when the accident took her mother and the use of her legs from her in her sixteenth year. It was to reruns of the Slayer’s exploits, and the pages of the Buffy comics, that Dizzy ventured when the thunderclouds of despair obscured the rays of the hopeful sun.

  And, also, to Iron Man, as well.

  Dizzy had discovered the Marvel superhero when she had been ten years old, in the year 2006, digging through a box in her father’s garage, looking for spare parts to use on her latest invention — an electromagnetic potato-launching rail gun she planned on using to get back at some neighborhood bullies (thankfully, their parents would later decide not to press charges of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon; they would however insist that Walter Weatherspark pay for the smashed windows, the damage to their vehicles, trash cans, and houses; the veterinary bill for the cat; and that Dizzy pick up all the contents of the twelve exploded garbage cans). The comics had been neatly packed away, all twelve dozen of them, in white plastic boxes in the garage’s attic space. Dizzy had been immediately enthralled by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s eccentric billionaire weapons designer, so similar in profession, demeanor, social status, and intellectual bent to her father Walter. And, in some ways, similar to her, as well. More than that, she had identified with Tony Stark . . . she had felt an intellectual connection to and identification with him that — even in her obsession with Buffy — she had never felt before. Tony Stark became a tutor, a mentor, and a friend. He was always there for her to teach her some new lesson, go on some new adventure with her, or to pitch to her some new and crazy idea for some fantastical invention or machine . . . whether it was the relatively simplistic concept of the “repulsor ray” — which she would, later on in her life (and with a little help from alien technology) develop into the concept of the Repulsivator — or the Extremis armor that literally lived inside his skin, it was always something fresh and new with Tony, always something inspiring.

  Tony Stark — much like her father — knew no boundaries in his pursuit of groundbreaking technological feats of sorcery and imagination, and for that, Dizzy admired him greatly. That, and his constant battle with his personal demons — and the fact that he didn’t always win that battle — made him seem much more human than, say, for instance, Superman, who wasn’t even human to begin with . . . much less identifiable on a human level. Or Batman, who, despite being human, was so preposterously self-righteous that he sometimes came off as more of a Gotham City fascist than a do-gooder in disguise. Or Captain America, whose banal patriotism and “aw shucks, ma’am” charm struck her as the faintest bit disingenuous. And, the fact that Tony was primarily analytical in his morality as well as in his approach to crimefighting, and was a master of science — the fact that he primarily used only his brain to beat the bad guys, and that it didn’t matter if his body ever failed him, the way her body had failed her (he had the suits, after all) — made him all the more dear to Dizzy’s heart. By the time the movie from Marvel Studios had come out in 2008, Dizzy had fallen deeply in love with Tony Stark — she would go on to become a huge Marvel fangirl, seeing every movie, every TV show, and collecting every new edition of every lead character’s comic book she could lay her hands on — every bit as deeply in love as she would fall with Buffy later on; a love that would persist long into her adulthood, coexisting side-by-side with her Buffy fandom, the two sometimes intermingling in dreams. It was in Tony Stark’s image that she would forge the Mark I of her Cybertronian Evangeliojaeger, in the year 2014, in what would one day become her laboratory at Mechanology.

  And now — now, in this most terrible moment . . . in this, her most desperate hour of need . . . in the fearsome heat of panic and horror, revulsion and pain — Dizzy dug down deep into the well of her soul, to the sacred place where the untouchable twin fires of these two fandoms burned inside of her like never-ceasing, incandescent stars of furious, resplendent hope, intellect, and romance; she touched them, and grasped them in her spirit’s hand. Closed her fist around them and let the light of them come into her eyes and sear them . . . and thought: I am Buffy. I am Iron Woman. I am the Iron Buffy. And like Rowdy Roddy Piper in John Carpenter’s They Live, I came here to do two frakkin’ things: Make pop culture references, and kick ass. And this isn’t Ready Player One, so duck and cover, you goat-headed frak!