“I have an adorable secret to tell you. You're brave.”
That's what the wizened matronly mentor figure told her young charge before I woke up. Said young woman was holding a naked sword in a large hall in an old mansion, waiting for the villainess who had been waiting for the whole season's length to show up for a long-promised duel with our heroine.
Right now the big bad was monologing. And nobody was really listening to her. At any moment she was going to get pissed off and start striking out with her firey body, mostly at our heroine. Who was standing there with a dumb grin as her sphinx mentor told her that secret.
A little earlier our heroine had been watching a couple of her housemates get drunk with some absurd pump/straw contraption hidden in the hilt of a sword. There were a bunch of half-monsters and magical people living in an old mansion, you see. And there were Halloween party shenanigans going on when the omens finally came together and the big bad came out of her room down the hall with doom on her mind. She had a grudge against our heroine but I don't remember why.
There was another dangling plot hook that might have been a factor in this fight: a magician forgotten in his room, busily doing a bunch of Western hermetic tradition majgick to Immanentize The Estachion. Which is something only our heroine knew was his goal, without knowing the significance of that phrase (basically, “make the apocalypse happen”). I thought that was going to come to a head at some point but evidently we got this other hanging plot hook first.
Also she was not entirely a magical person; there had been some stuff earlier with her pointing guns at people and losing one to a grumpy, very floofy black and white cat. The guns were weird little folding things that were improbably compact and had safeties that could pick multiple modes. Probably some high tech or magical multi-weapon, I guess. But she didn't have one handy. I guess this is where the cat that grabbed her gun in its mouth, got its head stuck in a box, and vanished, was going to reappear at a climactic moment.
She'd been living in a sort of igloo made from flattened cardboard boxes, in the middle of a room. Probably a library, I want to say, though I'm not sure why.
The whole story (which felt like highlights from a whole season's worth of character-establishing meandering) had taken place mostly in a huge pile of an old mansion. Not quite Gormenghast levels of Giant Crumbling Gothic Pile, but it probably filled a significant chunk of a city block. Everyone felt like they were college age, there's a good chance it was a frat house – well, or white, given that it was mixed gender. Maybe it was at a Magical School taking place in House Fuck You I'm A Dragon, I dunno. (Motto: Efutue; sum draco.) I'm pretty sure I could turn this dream into a show pitch with a few week's work…
Anyway. “I have an adorable secret to tell you. You're brave,” said the sphinx lady to the young heroine. Freeze frame, cross-dissolve to a messy painting of the scene. Cliffhanger for the next episode full of Exciting Fight, because that's where I woke up.
I gotta pee.