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Estee 44384 desperate attention whore postings DAW Level: "Playboy Centerfold" 10-25-07, 11:45 AM (EST) "The Mole: Season #5: Prologue: Twelve Strangers..." LAST EDITED ON 10-26-07 AT 08:50 AM (EST) ----------------------------------------------------------------- minus four months ----------------------------------------------------------------- Jacob Cohen has a saying. Jacob has a lot of sayings: he considers pulling out or creating the right one at the needed time to be a good portion of his job. There are a few ways in which Jacob envies the various Christian preachers (not the least of which is for having majority and the comforts that come with it), but high on the list is their seeming ability to, when pressured for an answer to one of life's many questions, just point to a passage and verse, followed by telling the petitioner to meditate on it for a while. Jews tend to want wisdom on the spot, delivered by voice, and it helps if it sounds like some immediate thought went into it. Jacob feels that any good rabbi is at least one part improvisational actor to three parts politician, but that's not something he generally tells people. This particular saying is one he mostly gives to the teens in his charge, and he's never been sure they pay all that much attention to it. (Not paying attention to what adults say is the hallmark of the breed.) But he happens to like this one, thinks it's at least halfway clever. His most current wording for it is 'An impulse is either God or Satan whispering in your ear. The problem is that you never figure out which one until long after you've acted on it.' He finds occasion to use that one fairly often with the teens -- maybe a little too much. It's a caution to analyze those random thoughts, because you can never be sure of what they'll lead to. So here's Jacob in sunny San Diego, out for a drive, because there are days when you need some time away from your congregation and after dealing with them for a while, it frequently feels like that day should be Saturday. In this case, it's a Monday, and Jacob just needs some alone time after a hard week. Esther understands, although the younger children sometimes have trouble comprehending why Daddy likes to take long drives by himself. In part, it's because he needs to remember that he has a self, separate from spouse and offspring and especially community. A rabbi is part of the family, part of everyone's family, and therefore part of just about every fight. Jacob needs time to remember who Jacob is outside of the job, and that usually means a good two-hour stretch wheeling through the streets and across the highways, trying to go somewhere just a little bit new each time. Besides, it's California: there are far worse places to continually explore, not to mention poorer climates to do it in. And no matter what anyone says, it beats Florida. (Mosquitoes are not one of God's creatures.) Jacob believes in Satan, but he sees him as one of God's direct agents: the tester, the one challenging you, putting you in situations to see how (and if) you get out of them, and when that party placed him in the position of potentially getting a posting in Miami straight of rabbinical college, Jacob ran three thousand miles in the other direction. He's not particularly fond of the 'don't scratch' test, thank you much, and San Diego is just about all he could ever ask for. In fact, the city would be just about perfect if it wasn't for all the Jews. It's a joke, but it's not one he'd tell his congregation. No senses of humor, some of them. Watch Jacob, driving well outside his usual territory (mostly so no one in his flock can spot him and approach with a problem: it's a day off, after all). Jacob doesn't particularly look like anyone's stereotype for a rabbi, at least when he's out of uniform and that's all most people ever think of. What most people notice about Jacob is his hair: it's completely silver-gray, and started going that way when he was thirteen. He was an ash blonde up until then, and spent a lot of time asking God exactly what the plan was when he had to deal with old man's hair just when the girls were A. starting to look interesting and B. probably wouldn't be interested. And then he met Esther, who happens to find such things sexy -- well, God works in mysterious ways. Mysterious enough to saddle him with a fairly prominent chin, curved eyebrows (also silver-gray), a nose that he personally thinks is a little too large but Esther likes that too, and eyes that need glasses thicker than his index finger to come up to snuff, which is why he wears industrial-strength contacts. Not handsome, but -- interesting. He'll give himself that, although Jacob generally thinks he looks like an intermediary stage on one of those makeover shows: just a few millimeters to go in all departments. Average height, average build (except for stronger-than-average legs), nothing that would really stand out to anyone except the hair. It's helped him, really, and not just romantically: many congregations like their rabbis to start at about fifty: at least he had a head start in the looks department. Coming up on forty now, coming up fast, and he knows Esther is watching him to make sure he doesn't do anything classically stupid for a mid-life crisis. She'll tolerate a semi-new car if it came to that, he thinks. Anything beyond is just begging for trouble, and even the car is begging for a wreck, with one girl just starting her license training, which so far seems to consist of first locating the turn signal and then never giving it another thought. Jacob drives well, and he drives fast: he can cover a mile in forty-nine seconds on most major roads without a thought, no problem, quicker if you want it, and it's never occurred to him that this is where his daughter is picking up the dubious speed habits from, which seem a lot less acceptable when he's not the one doing it. He drives on the shoulder sometimes when he's in a major delay and getting close to his off-ramp, knows the banking of those ramps well enough to try and pass on them -- a model of driving efficiency, is Jacob, and a good reason for Esther to always keep one hand on the oh-my-God-we're-going-to-die handle. This drive isn't to anyplace new, though. Today, it's giving him what he will always call the Murph, currently looming large in his sights. He just wants a look at the stadium and the lightest touch of shopping. It's not quite time for Opening Day, not just yet, but it's coming soon enough and Jacob has to think about tickets as birthday presents and raffle giveaways, plus there's always that faint hope of the playoffs, at least unless the Rockies show up again. Nothing wrong with going by early and checking out the dates available on the package plans, right? Nothing wrong at all, and it gives him yet another excuse for getting out of the house. There seem to be a lot of people thinking along those lines this morning. There's a lot of cars going this way -- too many, really. Maybe it's tourists wanting to see what the last ticket office in America looks like before it closes down and the team goes Internet all the way. And then he gets into the parking lot, and there's way too many cars. Plus the occasional tent, a few grills set up to feed the occupants of those tents, and the more-than-occasional television reporter wandering around interviewing whoever might look good on camera. Which, given that this is San Diego, is just about everyone. Too few people for a sporting event, too many for a private party, and a weird place to do it all anyway, not to mention the wrong time... Jacob's curious -- of course he is -- so he approaches one of the reporters (who looks affronted to have someone making first contact that isn't her) and asks what's going on. Was there a major signing that he doesn't know about, and now everyone wants tickets? Did the Padres actually get someone? (More likely the Chargers.) Reality show audition, she reluctantly tells him, and Jacob remembers that he never got to read the Sunday paper because he was too busy turning the Goldman's will into something other than a precisely documented revenge. Too few people for the singing contest, he decides aloud: it's hardly as if every last space is filled, the tents are really in the minority, plus his ears aren't bleeding yet. No, she tells him (and the offense is barely concealed now), and then she tells him what it is for and walks away before he can further infringe on the aura of her makeup. He stands in place for a while, blinking. He knows what she said and she really has no reason to lie, but -- that one? Dead and buried, and few things are as terminal as a show which the network sentences to death. This one's been moldering in the grave for some time now, and he never expected to see a hand thrust out of the dirt. Not quite in his immediate field, that image, and he smiles for a moment at the image of a dirt-encrusted newspaper television section emerging next to a headstone. But -- well, she said it, didn't she? It just about has to be real. Jacob watches the line, counts up the number of people in it just because -- -- and then the impulse comes. Afterwards, he won't be able to say why he acted on it. Sure, it's his day off, Monday the rabbi went for a drive and no one was expecting him back for hours, he could call if he was going to be late and always does. It's a beautiful day -- it so frequently is here -- and while there's more driving he could do, he remembers the show, he always enjoyed it, hated that it went off the air, and surely they'll never consider him, he doesn't have the looks or the demographics or anything, really, he has no reason to get in the line -- but he does. And he stays there for a few hours until they call him in, he talks to some people, drops a few homemade sayings along the way. They give him paperwork to fill out, and he does. They talk to him again. They point cameras in his direction and have whispered conversations just out of comprehension range. Ten weeks later, Jacob Cohen will receive a phone call, and he'll act like a character in a movie, standing stock-still staring at the receiver, wondering what on Earth he's done to himself, not to mention why. (Esther eventually decides this is his midlife crisis, and it probably could have been a lot worse.) After that, arrangements: finding a substitute to fill in for a few weeks, making sure he won't be missed too badly with just the minor handicap of not being able to tell hardly anyone why he's leaving in the first place. But in time, he'll have occasion to remember his own words, the ones he never said to himself, and he'll spend a lot of time wondering just who was whispering in his ear that day... ----------------------------------------------------------------- minus six months ----------------------------------------------------------------- Verni Wren's time has a gaping hole in it. Another gaping hole, if you want to be accurate about it, the fifth one in the last year, and this one didn't even bother giving two weeks' notice before dropping her into the abyss. The digger in question walked out of her office about two minutes ago, all once-in-a-lifetime-opportunity speeches without a single apology, which is still an improvement over this year's #3, who basically told her he was too good for this, he'd always been too good for this, and he was just hanging around until someone else realized it, so Verni could choke on it. Verni has a lot of experience with that sort of thing; it's a good year for the schedule when she loses only two people, a great year for the rest of the country's airwaves when she has to scramble seven times or more. Here's Verni, looking at the schedule on her ancient computer monitor, so old that it glows a lambent green with no other colors at all, the station won't upgrade because there are things more important than spending money and most of those center around the station's owners keeping every penny of it. She's deleting the name 'Richard Cross' (his real name: don't ask about his chosen handle, which she barely managed to get sanitized to Sioux Falls standards) from the four to eight p.m. slot across all five weekdays, which means she needs someone new for Drive Time right now, and that's probably going to wind up with an intern handling the grid and the switchboard and the lines again, probably all three at once unless Verni gives herself yet another unpaid extra shift and takes over one or more of those positions, which she does quite frequently to the rousing sounds of absolutely no applause whatsoever. Verni works for KSUX (Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and high on her list of impossible dreams is convincing the stupid owners to get the call letters changed, she's heard every possible joke), and unless you live in the immediate broadcast area, which is about forty miles under ideal conditions, you've probably never heard of it. With one exception: if you work in the radio industry, particularly the satellite segment or the really big media market stations, you've not only heard of it, but you keep an eye on it at all times. KSUX is rated #1 in its area for practically every time slot, and that's really an impressive feat when you realize they lose on-the-air personalities every three months or so. The station is famed for know-nothing management that won't spend so much as a dime on talent, gets instantly offended by anything that crosses their airwaves up to and including the time check signal (too high-pitched), and regularly tries to milk their cash cow completely dry. (Know-nothing may be a little unfair here: they do know how to spend money -- on themselves.) And in spite of this, the station stays on the air and maintains its first-place ranking, and this is because it has Verni Wren, who knows how to put people in their place, or at least in their ideal timeslot. KSUX is a minor legend across the radio industry and a passed-along secret for the communications campuses in America: if you think you're good, really good, then send them an application. Talent goes into KSUX and talent comes back out doing triple the speed it entered at, heading for fame, fortune, glory, and the drug scandal of its choice. What Verni really has is a reputation. Not with her own management, naturally: they think just about anyone could do this job (and do it better than Verni, of course, something they remind her of every time they reject her request for a pay raise, the only thing keeping them from doing everything themselves is that it would mean having to actually get up before noon), but at those college campuses, which discretely call her attention to promising talents who might need just a little seasoning in a media market where it's all too easy to get the locals lined up in front of the main building, pitchforks and flaming torches semi-optional. When Verni first came to the station fresh out of college, she did on-the-air work for a while, struggling to live on chicken stock (not even soup: just stock), ramen noodles, and the occasional lamb shank while waiting for someone to Notice her. Verni never got Noticed. What she did get was promoted to management, mostly because no one else would stay for more than a few months and after half a year there, she actually had the most seniority. And what Verni promptly did was demonstrate a talent for picking out people who would get Noticed. Name the top one hundred radio personalities in the nation to have emerged in the last two decades: thirty percent or more made an early stop at KSUX, and maybe two percent will admit it because who wants to talk about once having had to host from a dunk booth at the town street fair? Verni, though... Verni never made it out. Oh, she tried for a while, tried to get out as a talent, tried to escape as management. But she's never had an application that wasn't rejected, isn't sure she's had one that was read for the last couple of years, and her bosses will threaten to fire her if they discover she's planning on leaving, because Verni isn't the least bit important to the running of the station. She tries anyway, even though she knows she's going to fail, knows she's stuck right where she is, and even knows why. Verni is stuck in Sioux Falls because that's where the rest of the industry wants her. Why hire her for your own station when she's out there in the northern middle of nowhere, scouting out the talent, refining it, getting it down to a fine polish, releasing it to your media market where it promptly brings your ratings up by thirty percent in the first book period -- and you're not the one paying her for it? Verni is radio's greatest birddog, beating the bushes of a thousand campuses to drive future hall-of-famers out of the brush, and no one will ever promote her to any kind of major-league level because they're afraid the pipeline might dry up. Verni realized this a long time ago and still she sends out applications, one for pretty much every job that opens up all over the country, and sometimes she thinks about just quitting, moving out of town and never having to listen to another minor league sports update or D-league debate or three-hour Isiah Thomas hatefest (KSUX does three hours of sports talk a night and used to be in the Continental Basketball Association: South Dakotans have long memories), but she doesn't know if she could get another job. Everyone wants to take advantage of the pipeline she's constructed, and yet no one can see the benefits of rerouting it to flow through their own stations. Verni has been told where her position on the totem pole is: bottom support. Move her, and the whole thing might collapse. So here's Verni, walking through the halls at KSUX (which have needed painting for about a quarter-century now), and she's thinking about how that bright kid who comes in after school to operate the ancient boards on a workstudy program might be good for a trial, sure it's a little risky putting a high school junior on but she's just got that spark, and how Verni needs to upgrade the phone lines, force money out of the skinflints somehow because my god, they're operating on goddamn dial-up here, the fossils don't see the need for a good Internet connection and she had to sneak the station's website up herself (and built it on her own) three years before they even understood what an Internet was. She's wondering if she can afford to cover her home heating costs this winter: oil is skyrocketing again, natural gas and electricity aren't that far behind, and she just doesn't have time to go out and chop wood for her little house and sleep by the tiny fireplace, not when she's been working all these extra hours. And Verni's thinking about Conner, he does the morning shift or will for at least another two days, she thinks someone's about to hire him out from under her and she'd better be ready for that one, his small desk is a little too clean lately (and she should have dropped by Kyle's, she really should have and gotten some warning, but there's just too much to do), she has to talk to the advertisers about the latest rate hike which the bosses refuse to justify beyond their sudden desire for their very own island, then she's got to work out a sponsorship with the local sports teams with absolutely no money to do it with, and sometime after that she has to get someone out to look at the broadcast equipment, which will probably be her, after hours, for no money. Verni looks at the clock. It's off by a lot. Of course it's off. It's an ancient schoolhouse style, sticks straight out from the wall and regularly brains the taller interns, a dirty circle showing hours and minutes with a frozen second hand and no date, which makes her glance at her cheap-but-serviceable watch to see what time it really is, which gives her the date and she realizes it's her forty-fifth birthday, she's the only one who knows it, her hours haven't let her make friends outside the station who would celebrate with her, no one at the station stays long enough to celebrate more than once with her, she hasn't had a date in three years, and her bosses would probably use the occasion to complain about how Woman Of A Certain Age just lose their edge and deny her another raise. She stops in the middle of the hallway, the total time consumed in every single last passage of this hallway hitting her all at once, this cruddy space with the chipped paint, the dirty molding and the buzzing lights, months of her life, months she'll never have back burnt away just in walking down this stupid hallway. Months. She can probably put three years down to unpaid overtime, she's been yelled at by her bosses because first place just isn't good enough for literal weeks, she has given over half her life to this place and what it's given the world is a hundred launched careers that win major awards all over the place and practically never mention anything about their first job in the acceptance speeches, much less her by name, and what it's given Verni is that much less time on the clock, the clock that's gone off by three hours and fourteen minutes from when she got up on the stool and reset it yesterday. And at that moment, Verni crosses the line, one-way only, no turning back from her, going from I Am Getting Too Old For This Crap to officially being Too Old For This Crap. She doesn't just walk out right then and there, does Verni. She's a practical woman in her way: you don't survive under the pristine incompetence that is the station's ownership without having some ability to slow down and plan out your next step. So Verni resumes her trip down the hallway, does her job and the thousands of other jobs that fall within her jurisdiction but never appear on her paycheck, but she starts sending out new kinds of applications, going for everything she can think of. It'll be four and a half months before she hears from one of them, and on that day, she will drive up to the mansion all her hard work has paid for, ask for her accumulated vacation time, and get fired two minutes after finishing the sentence. Her response will be to come back the next day and nail her resignation notice to the gates on a posterboard sign four feet high. For three days after that, every phone call will be the ownership screaming at her to get back to work, come back this instant and maybe they'll limit the pay cut to forty percent, and it'll be another four before they sully their hands with any attempt to fill in for Verni's many occupations. And once they do, the advertisers start to leave, the sponsorships fall apart, and the people who own the station eventually decide their first and only resort is to sue Verni because it's obviously all her fault for running the place in such a way that one new hire wouldn't do her job at triple the competency for half the pay, but the case gets laughed out of court three days before she has to leave. Verni Wren is getting out, and she'll do whatever she has to if it means she escapes. ----------------------------------------------------------------- minus three months ----------------------------------------------------------------- David Kellerman is sitting between two books. One of those books is his (at least for now: he's always seen it as a temporary possession, he's only holding it for a little while as such things are measured), and he reads it -- well, not every day, although he'd like to. He has other things to read now and again, some of which are print, several being composed of electrons, and more than a few purest bureaucracy. But he reads through it cover to cover at least three times a year, because he feels it's something he should do. There are notes in that book, made by generations of Kellermans, notes on births and deaths and crop rotations, because a century-plus back, it was the only thing handy for writing in. He cherishes every one of those little jots, runs his finger over them when he reads the book, feels the connection to those who came before and the simpler life they led. No easier, certainly, harder than his in the labor -- but in so many ways, it was a better world to be in. The other book was purchased over the Internet four months ago. He's read it exactly once, and he only finished it this morning. He has never read a book so slowly in his life. The pain kept slowing him down. He touches the cover. He feels nothing. Nothing at all. Just a dull numbness at the end of his fingertips. His dog looks up at him with what he thinks are worried eyes: she doesn't know why her master is so upset. Or at least that's the way he's seeing it now. He loves this dog (and some of the students in his charge would swear it's the only thing he does love), and part of that may be because this dog is so wrong for him. David knows that if anyone pictured him with a dog, it would be a German Shepard for starters, possibly a Rottweiler, and maybe, just maybe a beagle, with the most remote outside chance of a Chow. He is not the man to own a tiny white puff of a Bichon, he should not have gotten a female, and he certainly should not have named it Fluff. But he did, and this nine-pound bundle of fur and nerves comprises a great deal of his life, the only other part of himself that he'll allow the people in Coventry to see. He's allowed a few other people glimpses at what might lie underneath the image of the perfect assistant principal: the dictator, the autocrat, the man who believes in discipline for the sake of discipline. But he's never met any of them. They don't even know what he looks like, although he suspects many of them hold a mental image close to the truth: a medium-sized gray wall wearing a tie. Fluff jumps up to his lap, and he gently strokes her fur. It's normally a way to stop thinking, let the world flow over him and wash any troubles away. But today, he's thinking about that fur. What went into it. What made it. If this is true, then this cannot be true. If the other is false, then this has to be true... He looks at the older book, then touches it again. There's still a little warmth there, but he was pressing it close to his chest just a little while ago. Back to the new book. Still nothing. David is not a man who's comfortable with doubt: he knows the things he knows, feels the truth of them beyond any possibility for question. David lives by The Rules, and he enforces them on those in his charge to the best of his ability and -- this is crucial, it's very nearly the core of David -- the needs of the moment. He knows that there are situations where the dictates of society, the school, the world just don't apply: times when you throw away the regulations and do whatever has to be done. And he has, more often than anyone suspects (especially since those who weren't personally involved would normally start that number at zero), he's gone past what was supposed to be done and gone with what had to be, even if no one ever saw it -- and he's always careful about that: it's bad for his image. But those are human rules, and humans are imperfect. There are rules beyond those -- and David has never broken a single one of them. Reading the new book was not breaking a rule. He's starting to wonder if thinking about it is. And he can't stop thinking. He knows what did this to him, and he's stopped kidding himself about being able to stop any time he likes. Any time you expose yourself to a new place, let part of yourself out into that environment, you're taking a chance of having some of that site seep back. It did, and it's not as much of a foreign element as he wishes it to be (these days, with increasing desperation). He can't stop and he hasn't. But... An old book. A new book. He can't reconcile them. Fluff feels her master's emotions, the ones that aren't visibly coming out even in the privacy of this warm living room, presses tightly against his flat stomach. David strokes her, thinks too much, tries to stop, fails again. He needs some other kind of release, a way out of the trap he's placed himself in, something that might bring together the abruptly divided sides of a soul that had once held in a single impenetrable piece. David did something a few weeks ago, something that no one in town would ever believe, something he has no intention of telling them. He hasn't told anyone outside his real community, either, never given so much as the smallest hint to the other. It's a strange thing to do, he would be the first to admit that if he was capable of admitting it at all, but -- it worked once, didn't it? Maybe it could work for him. And if it's meant to be -- it will be. So it goes, from this life to the next. So he waits, and when the word comes, it will be 'Yes' and he still won't tell anyone, but now it's because doing so is against the newest set of rules. And he'll prepare for whatever might await him on the other side of this, he'll plan and do everything he can think of to brace himself for what could come -- but until the day he leaves, there will still be times when he finds himself sitting between two books, unable to bring them into physical or mental contact. David Kellerman is waiting for something, and he's not entirely sure what it is... ----------------------------------------------------------------- minus six weeks ----------------------------------------------------------------- And here we have Patricia Veeck, town tramp (honorably retired), who's on the phone. She isn't saying much, not really. Most of what does come out is along the lines of 'Okay' and 'When?' with the occasional 'All right...' thrown in. There isn't much that needs to be said. She can just listen, because listening frequently tells her all she needs to know. Lately, Patricia's been listening to her body, and what it's been telling her is that she's going to die. This annoys her. Oh, Patricia's alive right now -- very much alive, she thinks, and certainly more alive than some of those around her, who seem to feel that getting their first Social Security checks gave them the right and duty to descend into premature fossilhood. Patricia believes you're as old as you feel inside, which has locked her in at a very puckish twenty-three for over four decades now. Patricia's entire existence has been about getting the absolute most out of whatever years she wound up with, which is part of how she wound up with the reputation for being the town tramp. It's one thing to lose your virginity at sixteen (voluntary, honestly wasn't all that much fun, thank you very much, but there was enough there to let her know it could be an absolute romp if she found someone willing to devote more than eighty seconds of fumbling attention to the process), but when the boys start to gossip about it, you're supposed to deny it, or put your head down and scurry away. Patricia's generation featured a group of girls who never wanted to be one of those types, and when Patricia just basically shrugged and said sure, whatever, and if any of you do the same with him, you might want to provide a map, she officially became the town tramp on an actual intercourse count of -- and this is that part that annoyed her at the time -- one. Girls all around her up in the teens and twenties plus everyone knew Deborah Cornwallis was closing in on the half-century mark, but she's the one who admitted it because it wasn't a big deal to her and so she got to be the local slut forevermore. Why would eighty seconds be such a big deal to anyone, Patricia wanted to know at the time. How could that have any real effect on her life? After all, she'd forced him to use the rubber, practically at gunpoint... So that might be the first thing you need to know about Patricia: that she's the town tramp (again, honorably retired, but you can still see the lines in her face and body, still catch the instinctive twinkle in the eyes), center of every scandal, but the second thing would be that she left when she was twenty-four, after that thing happened with her first husband, the one that made her more than just the target of every drunken request, the event that gave the gossip hounds something a little more real to chew on forevermore, the bit that made the whispers become so much more dark. Patricia's not and never was stupid, just independent and determined and not really concerned with what anyone else thinks, ever. But raising two children as a single mother was harder back then than it is now, and doing it when no one in town had any interest in hiring you -- sometimes you just have to start over. So Patricia left, and had a life away from the muttering. But in time, her parents died (one after the other, within two weeks), and with absolutely no other resort, they left her the house. Thirty-two years after Patricia left, she came back, and found that the muttering had never really stopped -- but now it just amused her, and with her children grown and gone, she didn't care if they kept talking. It was funny, really, and the listening kept her alert. Besides, now some of the gossip was actually true -- even if they don't know it. Patricia thinks she's doing pretty well, thank you. She doesn't have to worry about money: she turned out to be pretty good at investing once she finally got to the point where she had something to invest, and her children (five in the end, and now so many grandchildren, with the first great-grandchild on the way) would provide if anything ever happened beyond the reach of that stock portfolio. She got into the idea of working out to keep your health and figure a few decades before the rest of her generation pushed the surgery panic button, she had to, and she looks maybe twenty years younger than her real age on a good day, feels twice that negative number inside -- -- but she's going to die. Oh, it's nothing immediate, she thinks. It's just the general wear and tear: sometimes her knees ache, her shoulders get sore, and she's keeping a very close eye on her hands. But every year, everything gets just a little bit harder to do. Entropy increases and won't stop. It wouldn't surprise her if she made eighty or more, and she does her best to help that cause out: watches her diet, does puzzles to keep her mind sharp, jogs, hits the gym, has regular checkups. She's on about one percent of the medications most of her generational non-kin are taking: a quick aspirin for when she gets really sore, and that's pretty much it. But no matter how hard she fights back, no matter how young her soul is (unlike some of her classmates, who were sixty at sixteen and only got older from there), her body will eventually give out on her. Something will go and refuse to heal -- maybe a lot of somethings -- and that will be the end of Patricia, whose position on the afterlife is that any deity which would not only give the world the people in her hometown, but give them a majority, is probably not a deity that's going to look upon her with a lot of favor. She's done a lot of things, has Patricia, just about all of them were fun, and nothing, but nothing is a sin in this part of her world like fun and the active seeking of it, let alone actually having any. Born fifty years too early, that's her crime, and she's going to miss out on all the truly great stuff. She sees the potential in everything, feels either doom or transcendence coming on the wind, and Patricia has more than enough hope in the species to place her bets on the later. But every year, she gets a little more frustrated as science doesn't advance, as people don't take those next intuitive leaps, as tomorrow comes very much like yesterday and with no interest in being anything else. Patricia wants the future and she wants it now. They promised her rocket ships, didn't they? People living on the moon, aliens walking among us, flying cars and floating cities -- they promised her magic, and she's seen a little of it -- but so very little against what was once foretold as a near-certainty. She has so little time left, and no one seems to be in any hurry to bring about dreams... But then, Patricia was always one to go out and do things for herself. And she can't invent (well, not on that scale), and she can't singlehandedly get things moving (not with everything arranged against it), but she can live, and she always has, will for as long as possible, because it's the core of everything she has. That, and she enjoys how much it annoys people. Patricia puts the phone back down, and she smiles to herself, a small, secret smile. She's good at those: it was a lot of who she was for many years. And she thinks about time spent away from this house, where she really only spends two months a year, the best two months Montana can offer, most of the rest back at what she really thinks of as home in sweet St. Louis, the remainder traveling to see children and grandchildren and (soon) great-grandchildren. She's going a lot farther than that now, a greater distance than she's gone for a long time. And then she thinks about something a distant relative once said, and the smile gets a little bigger. 'Do anything you can get away with,' said that worthy, long-since deceased and more worth listening to with every passing year. 'The worst they can do is pass a rule against it the next day...' Words to live by, she believes, and she always has lived by them, more than most people suspect, more than they would ever want to believe, lived by them enough to produce gossip for a thousand bluehaired generations. It's time to take them out for one more spin. Patricia Veeck is going to die, knows it for a fact, has no way to stop it -- but it won't happen just yet. -----------------------------------------------------------------   Alert Edit | Reply | Reply With Quote | Top

Subject     Author     Message Date     ID    RE: The Mole: Season #5: Prologue... kingfish 10-25-07 1  RE: The Mole: Season #5: Prologue... Colonel Zoidberg 10-25-07 2    RE: The Mole: Season #5: Prologue... geg6 10-25-07 3    RE: The Mole: Season #5: Prologue... Estee 10-26-07 6  Twelve Strangers...: Part II Estee 10-25-07 4  Twelve Strangers...: Conclusion. Estee 10-26-07 5    RE: Twelve Strangers...: Conclusio... vince3 10-26-07 7        RE: Twelve Strangers...: Conclusio... Estee 10-26-07 8    RE: Twelve Strangers...: Conclusio... Belle Book 02-13-09 16  RE: The Mole: Season #5: Prologue... Jims02 10-27-07 9    RE: The Mole: Season #5: Prologue... kingfish 10-28-07 10        RE: The Mole: Season #5: Prologue... vince3 10-28-07 11            RE: The Mole: Season #5: Prologue... Colonel Zoidberg 10-29-07 12                RE: The Mole: Season #5: Prologue... AyaK 11-01-07 13                    RE: The Mole: Season #5: Prologue... Colonel Zoidberg 11-02-07 14                    RE: The Mole: Season #5: Prologue... geg6 11-02-07 15                RE: The Mole: Season #5: Prologue... Belle Book 03-17-10 17                    RE: The Mole: Season #5: Prologue... Colonel Zoidberg 03-20-10 18                        RE: The Mole: Season #5: Prologue... Belle Book 03-20-10 19

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kingfish 12060 desperate attention whore postings DAW Level: "Playboy Centerfold" 10-25-07, 01:21 PM (EST) 1. "RE: The Mole: Season #5: Prologue: Twelve Strangers..." Jacob's story, so well done..Lambent green, Verni's life and escape, David, Wonderful Patricia... This is gonna be good.   Remove | Alert Edit | Reply | Reply With Quote | Top

Colonel Zoidberg 3370 desperate attention whore postings DAW Level: "Car Show Celebrity" 10-25-07, 02:44 PM (EST) 2. "RE: The Mole: Season #5: Prologue: Twelve Strangers..." So, just to be clear...if Connie Lastings-Adams was related to John and John Quincy... ...is Patricia related to Bill?   Remove | Alert Edit | Reply | Reply With Quote | Top

geg6 14941 desperate attention whore postings DAW Level: "Playboy Centerfold" 10-25-07, 03:13 PM (EST) 3. "RE: The Mole: Season #5: Prologue: Twelve Strangers..." >...is Patricia related to Bill? Possibly. But something about her makes me feel like she's my soulmate. Or long lost twin. I *heart* Patricia already. "I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever, in religion, in philosophy, in politics, or in anything else, where I was capable of thinking for myself. Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent. If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all." - Thomas Jefferson   Remove | Alert Edit | Reply | Reply With Quote | Top

Estee 44384 desperate attention whore postings DAW Level: "Playboy Centerfold" 10-26-07, 01:48 PM (EST) 6. "RE: The Mole: Season #5: Prologue: Twelve Strangers..." ...is Patricia related to Bill? Yep. I'm not exactly giving away the show by confirming that they're on the same family tree. (It's not exactly a common name, is it?)   Remove | Alert Edit | Reply | Reply With Quote | Top

Estee 44384 desperate attention whore postings DAW Level: "Playboy Centerfold" 10-25-07, 05:08 PM (EST) 4. "Twelve Strangers...: Part II" LAST EDITED ON 10-26-07 AT 09:19 AM (EST) ----------------------------------------------------------------- minus two weeks ----------------------------------------------------------------- Mark Nemecek is thinking about extinction. This probably isn't the best subject to be pondering when you're about to drive a car into the side of an airplane at a hundred and twenty miles per hour, but Mark can't help himself. His thoughts come whenever they want to, although they generally know better than to distract him at an important moment, such as when he's got the car up to about an even hundred and the engine's starting to make an interesting whining noise. He considers these little things while he still has time for them and there's some of it available right now, with the makeup being applied that will make him look just a little bit like the star of the movie, at least from a good distance using something considerably less than a high-definition lens. Take a moment to look at Mark, before he vanishes under a light layer of cheap prosthetics. He's well-muscled, with the sort of build favored by those who know they'll need strength to throw burning pieces of wreckage off their bodies, but who also need the speed to keep that from happening in the first place. Strength without all that much bulk, which comes in handy when the prosthetics are applied to something other than his face. Bald by choice (because it makes things so much easier for the wig team, plus you can't get glue in your hair when you don't have any), and definitely handsome -- classic features, the sort of face that guarantees he gets some shots as background material on the days when he's not being set on fire. Mark could tell you a few stories about movie sets and the instant (temporary) relationships that spring up between the stunt crew and the actors, especially when someone on the stunt crew looks like Mark -- but if you're going to partake, you have to realize the stratification of Hollywood society first: they'll happily sleep with you and even pass your name around to people they believe might also enjoy the experience, but they're sure not going to be seen with you. No one in the higher tiers has any interest in letting the photogs catch them in public with a crash test dummy, and that's the position Mark occupies in the town's organizational chart. He's never had a problem with that part. Mark likes being a stuntman. Sure, he's handsome enough ('is he ever', sigh a number of his former meet-and-greets), but he's not quite right for the acting gigs. Can he act? Sure. But he's not going to get many parts, because while he's certainly good-looking, he's not the right kind of attractive. Mark is Not What Hollywood Is Looking For This Year, and he wasn't Last Year, and he sure isn't going to be Next Year, but he's pinning a lot of hopes on Three Years From Now because Mark isn't sure how long he's got left. Mark loves his job. Absolutely adores it. There's nothing like sitting in a theater, listening to the gasps as the explosion sends hungry tendrils of flame towards the sky, feeling the group recoil as every last bit of imagination takes control from reality, knowing the audience, just for a second, believed every bit of what they just saw -- and he was the man at the center of that illusion. Mark watched a lot of movies growing up, and it didn't take long to realize that he was just as interested in the How as the Who, Where, and Why. He's trained for this, and after only five years on the job, he's already one of the tops in his field, both for planning and on-site execution. He's becoming a well-known name among the people who would have any cause to know it, and he's pretty sure there's still at least twelve of those. But Mark is, at the age of twenty-five, in danger of becoming a dinosaur. Because Mark shows up and Mark helps design the stunt, Mark helps rig things up for the stunt, and then Mark gets in there and does the stunt in as many takes as needed, one being the ideal -- -- but Mark does all of it in person. And 'in person' costs money. Every year, more studios think about programming their way through. Design the car in the computer, put the plane in another computer, fake an actor with pixels and then ram them together with code. There's situations where that's the practical solution: no one wants to fight an outer space battle with wires and tennis shoes unless they absolutely have to. Besides, a lot of time, real is cheaper than virtual, easier to do, and the turnaround time's a lot quicker -- -- except that every year, the programming gets less expensive, the stuff in the system gets closer to looking like the stuff in reality, and you can have it at a million angles and a trillion speeds, rotate, rewind, change the color shading on the flames, stop and do it all over again, just for the cost of some geeks sitting by themselves in a low-light room somewhere, working it all out in their heads instead of going out and living it. Not that Mark hates the geeks, mind you -- at least, he tries not to. He's got a few in his own crew, working out metal deformation possibilities from impact angles, and he knows they help keep him alive. But their kith and kin are using memory sticks as spears, herding him, one step at a time, right into Allosaurus Alley, and once he gets all the way into it, he and his entire profession are never coming out. Born too damn late, that's Mark's problem. Put him fifty, sixty years ago, and he would have been a stunt god. (The fact that fifty, sixty years ago, he would never been hired as anything other than a waterboy frequently escapes Mark.) They were working on a real cutting edge back then, going in with nothing but padding, wires, guts, and a few hand-scribbled calculations stained with sweat. The kind of edge that slices your fingers and leaves blood if you're not careful, or just takes your whole damn head off. Not that Mark has any objections to breathing and he likes his safety margin, thank you very much, especially since Mark has someone to come home to, a little Foley artist he met on a shoot a few months back (and how much luck did it take to get one of those out of her comfortable junk-filled studio?), and that means getting his skull removed just isn't an option right now. But Mark needs a few options, because he's convinced his entire profession is going to completely stop existing in ten to fifteen years. He's a walking relic, twenty-five years old and a living museum-quality symbol of the past, he's just one of the few who know it. Once the code gets cheap enough, they won't need him any more. He's got to have something ready before then, and it hurts like hell to think that. He dreamt of being a stuntman his whole life, and he showed up just in time to be a footnote in the closing credits. But that's okay, because Mark's flexible. One dream goes down the tube, you get another. Right now, he's got one where he proposes to the little Foley artist in about eight months -- they've only been together for four, but Mark's got a lot of confidence in this one and he thinks he can see the best part coming -- and that means he'd better have some job security that'll stretch out beyond the death of his whole field. So he's got a few hopes placed on Three Years From Now, but he's got even more set up for Starting Two Weeks From Today. Mark's about to try something new. If you want him to be frank about it (and Mark can talk a lot when the adrenaline rush goes up), he was a little surprised to get in. He figured he'd be not quite the right type again: for Mark, getting filmed that many times normally means someone's going to stick him at a fake bar, hand him a fake beer, and tell him to take a fake drink when the red light goes on -- but do it subtly, because the big man doesn't want anything to detract from his whining episode in the foreground. But he's in, all right, and that means he's got to get his part on this shoot wrapped up as soon as possible so he can get out of here, because if all else fails, he's rushing off to can't-tell-anyone-where on schedule with the rest of the team carrying on without him. He'd rather not put them through that. But fact is, even minimal makeup takes too damn long, and Mark wants to get out of this on one take, start preparing for the next, and then start getting ready for the rest of his life. But he wants to do this one impressive. If you're gonna be a dinosaur, might as well lay down some damn big footprints, right? So Mark Nemecek will hurry things along today, although he'll still double-check the safety precautions because he is, after all, about to drive a car at a hundred and twenty miles per hour into the side of an airplane. And afterwards, he'll decide that if nothing else, he's leaving one hell of an impression in the fossil record. Evolve or die. He hasn't realized there's times you wind up doing both. ----------------------------------------------------------------- minus five weeks ----------------------------------------------------------------- Watch Charity Bonadventure as she goes to get her mail: Lord knows everyone else is. She's been on this campus for going-on-two-years now, and she'd like to think someone would have gotten used to her. But no, it's the same old story: there's always a number who pause, stare, and whisper, with that amount generally working out to majority. They say lots of things about Charity at this medical school, and most of the ones from the student body aren't exactly what you'd call complimentary. Her teachers think she's got a lot of skill, her student advisor can actually be bothered to remember her name most days (although to be fair, Charity's a little hard to forget), and her classmates call her Charity Bizarre behind her back and think she doesn't know. Never to her face, though. They have egos the size of coalescing planets, most of these medical students, they're developing the god complex before they've got the grades to even go avatar with and it's just a question of which one the world is revolving around this week -- but they still don't have the courage to get in front of Charity and say the dark words on the visible record. Still, the rumors do their damage where they can, and Charity loses roommates on a regular basis, four so far (although a lot of that comes without help): can't get a single, can't keep someone in a double, and frankly, she's relieved when they go. Charity has a talent for drawing party girls out of the pool, the people who honestly disturb her when she thinks about their future in the medical field: eat, drink, and get blotto, for in two hours we operate. Charity thinks most of her classmates are drawing their role models from medical dramas, and she wishes she could remind them that the writers can get their heroes out of anything: the hospital board won't. Getting mail is always something of an adventure for Charity, as it is for everyone on campus. Tampering with the mail may be a federal offense, but the students who handle it once it gets to the dorms seem to regard it as something else -- say, a major challenge. After all, they're not really mail handlers: they're doctors in training. They're just dropping by the cramped little sorting room so they can justify a Student Employee check on absolutely no effort whatsoever, which is still something more than the amount which seems to go into the mailroom. There are two things Charity dreads finding in her mailbox, and the first is a yellow card. If you get one of those, it means the package or envelope was too large to fit in the little four-by-six slot, and you have to pick your item up from the back room. If they can find it. If they can even be bothered to look. Back in her freshman medical year, Charity spent forty minutes waiting while a bored future forensics major scouted for a thick envelope that wasn't right under his nose, but that's because it was right next to his feet: being used to pad out one leg of an uneven desk. (Charity actually got just a little bit mad about that one, which isn't something she does often, and it got her better service for the two months before the entire staff changed over again.) A yellow card means your item has been bent, folded, spindled, mutilated, and if you got the wrong people on shift, there's a good chance it was autopsied: look for the signature Y-shaped incision across the top. Charity has infrequent contact with home and hearth, and knowing that any care package which arrives has a good chance to show up with one kidney missing and a suspiciously-absent liver lobe does not do much for her worried mood. The other thing Charity doesn't want to see in her mailbox is anything connected to a bill. When Charity first started drawing up the plans for getting through medical school, the average new doctor was graduating with over a hundred thousand dollars in debt hanging over their heads. Of course, that was a while back, and it's gone up since. Gone up a lot: Charity suspects the medical profession powers the legal one in several ways, and the first is by giving freshly-graduated lawyers a means to pay off their debt through collecting on defaulted medical student loans. Charity does her best to live on the cheap, but there's certain expenses she can't control and those tend to be double or triple what everyone else is paying. And there just isn't much time to work: between classes and study and actually wanting to be a good doctor (she's studying to be a pediatrician and when you're going to be treating kids, the last thing you ever want to do is screw up), she just doesn't have many hours left for making money instead of spending it. Oh, she tries -- Charity is a Student Employee too: she works in the library, putting out and shelving the tidal flow of periodicals, which incidentally allows her to study the latest articles right off the cart during earning hours. (And old issues of Maledicta in the stacks during slow moments. She doesn't know why they even get it, but she reads every one.) But the Student Employee Rate isn't exactly high, and Charity gets fifteen hours a week of it, minus taxes. It doesn't even cover one good meal, which is a task shared by the student cafeteria plan. Charity wants to be a doctor, and she won't be stopped in her relentless chase of that dream. But her dream comes with bills, thousands of dollars for every course she takes plus a few hundred more for every textbook and some of those are approaching four digits, oh, and then you need the instruments, can't forget those, every student with their own kit which must be purchased from this pre-approved list with the pre-approved kickbacks attached. Plus you have to live on campus, at least she does because home is a few hundred miles away and there goes some more money, and then there's the fact that she has to eat food which hasn't previously seen the inside of a plastics factory sometime. Then you get into replacing worn-out clothing, her car has to keep running somehow (or at least stay in a condition where it can be regularly pushed), she needs to see a movie once a month or so to keep the school from completely driving her around the bend, and she'd date a lot more than she does if she thought there was any chance of getting some free meals out of it, which is to say, she'd date. (Charity hasn't had a date since the moment she stepped onto this newest campus, because egos which think they control the world have somehow decided they're not up to handling her.) Every dream has a price, and as Charity currently figures it, hers could conceivably ring in at about a quarter-million after adding in all abruptly-increased interest rates over the payback schedule. It makes her feel more than a little stupid for having rejected that offer a couple of months ago, but -- well, two hundred dollars for the one hour would have been nice, but one wrong move and she could have killed the man. Somehow, she suspects her parents wouldn't approve. So Charity applies to every grant program she can find, and she looks for summer work and all kinds of means to make money -- the more, the better: no hours too ridiculous, no job too silly, except maybe for that proposition she turned down during the winter. (She knows every scam: stuff your own envelopes, sell knives from your dorm room, all you have to do is take off your blouse once and we promise we'll black out your face, really we will... A medical student's best friend is coffee, but a sensible one's second-best is Snopes.) But it means she dreads those yellow cards all the more, because they so often connect to an oversized rejection letter, or 'just a few more forms' that eventually turn into a rejection letter, and she really doesn't want to think about the amount she's spent on stamps since she started this crusade. And she's just a little pale right now, because she's just now spotted a yellow card through the dirty inner surface of her mailbox's window glass, and the last seven in a row have meant nothing good. She has to wait for someone to move before she can unlock the box, and she hears a little mutter of 'Freak...' behind her back as that annoyed party (plastic surgeon to be) moves away, but Charity can't even be bothered to shrug it off. (Personally, Charity thinks she looks perfectly normal, as long as you're regarding her from a fair distance and she's not standing next to anything in particular. This may be very nearly the most important thing to know about Charity.) Right now, she's holding three items: one credit card application (she has four cards so far, never uses any of them beyond purchases she can completely pay for the next month: they're her insurance in case that beaten-up rustbucket in the student parking lot responds to the impact from a fallen leaf by finally exploding), one credit card bill to go with it ($24.96: a couple of small memory sticks and a battery charger for her notetaking system), and that yellow card. Which means a sigh, followed by a twist-and-weave into the crowded mailroom, where a bored future podiatrist regards her request for her own mail with all the attention normally given to a prospective toe wart that just revealed itself as a licked-on fruit snack. Charity eventually has to resort to slightly narrowed eyes and a touch of foot-tapping to get her package in less than twenty minutes, which was sent overnight mail over a week ago, delivered right on time and not worthy of enough attention to warrant a yellow card until something else could be found which was equally suitable for a footrest. Charity accepts the battered-but-somehow-intact package with resignation, not even really looking at the return address until she gets outside -- and then she takes off at top speed, which gets a lot of people out of her way in an extreme hurry because Charity moving at her maximum rate is not something anyone wants to chance being in the path of. Up to her dorm room she pounds, virtually dives through and locks the door behind her, rips open the box... The phone call is frantic on her end, but quickly toned down by the other party: yes, there was still time to respond, things happen with the mail. We were getting a little worried when you didn't respond to your answering machine messages, but it's over now. You're in. Charity's roommate has the great misfortune to walk into the tiny dorm room (two beds, two desks, two creaky wardrobes, one middle aisle, and a shared bathroom with the double on the other side) twelve seconds after the hang-up and thus gets to be on the wrong side of Charity's perfectly understandable question about not having gotten her messages, which leads to a fairly loud argument when it turns out said roomie has been hitting the Delete All button on the machine after checking for her own messages because it's just too much trouble to get rid of them one by one and if Charity wants her messages so badly, she can either pay for voice mail or get to the machine first. The aftermath of this argument will eventually cost Charity the fifth roommate of her college career, but that's okay: the semester was going to be up in a little while anyway, and Charity has other things to think about now. Lots of them. Charity Bonadventure, in pursuit of something that might let her afford her oldest dream, has found what just might be a way through -- but she's completely forgotten to ask what the price of this new one might be... ----------------------------------------------------------------- minus eight months ----------------------------------------------------------------- Christopher Winokur is getting ready to change some people's minds. He's checking himself out in the mirror right now, and he likes what he sees. Of course he does. Christopher (and it's always the full name, no shortening, you want all the space on the marquee you can get) always likes what he sees in the mirror, and just part of that is based on looks. He feels he has the classic package on his side: tall and dark and handsome and if that isn't enough for the ladies (or the gentlemen -- quite straight, thank you, but he can play to anyone if it suits his needs), he's Greek. Check out that rich, full, dark hair -- it's all his! Those bright teeth? Also his: completely paid for. And the tuxedo sits across his body in a way most people have to buy, and he did. Top dollar all the way, that's Christopher, although there were days when he had to scramble for the bottom pennies to keep it up. But that hasn't happened for a while now. Christopher is Gainfully Employed, which is something his mother certainly would have never believe of him, not with all this hypnotism foolishness. Mesmerize people and get them to do tricks -- sure, that's fine to order out of the back of a magazine for a dollar-a-seat show in the garage, but what kind of profession is that for a grown man to be following? The obvious answer to this is 'a particularly fitting one', because Christopher's always been a born manipulator -- or at least, that's how he fancies himself. Christopher smiles and women fall at his feet (a few women, some of whom had several drinks first, but it counts). Christopher winks and people bend over backwards to give him chances (with the help of a connection here, a bribe there). Christopher snaps his fingers and people just forget he owes them money (well, that one might work, at least in theory, but even at his most broke, he never actually tried it. Hypnosis isn't always as quick a process as the stage makes it look, and it's just about impossible to put a truly uncooperative person under). Christopher is currently working his act in the Red Rock Casino & Resort, where there's never a shortage of people who are very willing to be put under. He gets a lot of mileage out of the classics, starting with 'you are a chicken' and going through 'you've just won an Oscar: give your acceptance speech'. (Christopher got into a lot of trouble with that one about four career stops ago, when the man he made give the speech started off by thanking his first bondage coach and moved on from there.) But he also likes to try out the occasional Vegas specialty: you've just won a jackpot, you're a showgirl, you're in the World Series Of Poker! He gets cute when the parents bring the kids and racier for the late-night crowd (although never quite so racy as that bondage speech), and he's always very careful about bringing people out of it before they go and not leaving any long-standing commands, because it's a sue-happy world for the hypnotist and there's a lot of people who'll go out to the casino floor, lose everything, and then claim the entertainment secretly added a 'play until you're penniless' command to the one about leapfrog. This is a convenient excuse for a desperate man, but it's also completely wrong: Christopher would never try anything like that on stage, at least partially because he knows that damnable woman in charge of casino security (one of those people who's impossible to put under) doesn't particularly like him for some reason or another and would be thrilled to see him fired. Admittedly, Christopher does use his talents now and again to get a little extra cash. Making people give him money is a pleasure of his... ...what? Hypnosis used to make a victim turn over their wallet (or purse, or money clip), walk out, and forget the whole thing? You've got Christopher all wrong! He provides a service. Christopher helps people stop smoking: he can point to at least a dozen beneficiaries of his talent, although a little nicotine gum doesn't hurt. He's made it possible for people to get past addictions of all sorts, unearth distant traumas -- why, there was even one time, when he was working the circuit up in Toronto, when the police made it known they were looking for a hypnotist to help a child witness get past the fear of what she'd seen! (He didn't get the job, but he showed up and stood in line with everyone else.) Christopher isn't a bad person, not really. He could tell himself that every day if he had to. He can look at himself in the mirror, smile, and find absolutely no fault in that reflection, physical or spiritual. Christopher just does what he has to in order to live in the lifestyle to which he is very happy to become accustomed to. And if some of what he does just happened to hypothetically involve using that talent -- well, he's got the talent, doesn't he? That's what pays the bills. Besides, you really can't put anyone under who doesn't want to go, so if Christopher ever had used little tricks for, shall we say, purposes which people might question in some fashion, then his first argument would be that anyone who went along with him wanted to be fooled. At least, that would be his response if anyone had ever accused him of illegal and immoral acts. Which they haven't. Because he doesn't. Really. Well, there was that one time in Branton, but that was just a misunderstanding. You could say this about Christopher without having him argue with you, though; he likes having power. Most magic comes from knowing one extra fact, a fellow performer once told him, and Christopher happens to agree with that. He knows how to push the buttons that make the human system move: there's a definite advantage there. Sure, it takes some time to get into the control room and people have to pretty much hand him the keys -- but you can feel the energy once you've got your hands on the controls. Christopher is one of the relatively few people who can get that door open, and he very much likes having knowledge that others don't -- although he has to be careful about which switches he flips. (For example, you can ask people some fascinating questions when they're on stage, but you have to be ready to stop whatever comes out. 'Never ask who someone loves the most' is a first and vital lesson for the performing hypnotist: Christopher's heard too many stories about mistresses revealed in front of the wives.) And he's happy with what he does: he wouldn't argue with that either. He's at a decent establishment, earning a good salary, his sidelines (legitimate, honest!) are paying off, and he has sex regularly without a single dose of commitment sneaking in. What more could a man ask for? Actually... ...there is one thing... ...it's a minor detail, really, but -- -- well, Christopher just isn't that well-known. There, he thought it (and that reflection in the mirror is showing just a bit of a grimace). It's not exactly the sort of profession that brings glory, is it? In fact, if you want to get to the heart of this particular matter, he's nowhere near the top tier. He can see the top tier from where he is, and he's welcome to go buy a ticket to their acts any time he likes. (He does get in free for the ones at the Red Rock, for the very little that's worth.) Christopher is never going to be on the Tonight Show (and it was his dream as a kid to meet Johnny Carson -- that, and make him squawk like a chicken), never going to attend any of the truly good parties unless he gets an exceptionally vulnerable guard and two to five minutes alone with him, minimum. Christopher isn't a celebrity of any stripe. He's just a performing act. And sure, he's tried to take that act to some higher places, gone for it in front of Piers and Hasslehoff and the female-of-the-season twice and got tossed back both times with the same complaint: takes too long to set up, people have seen it before, come back when you get some puppets. Christopher does realize that at best he's a novelty act, but those have caught on before, haven't they? After all, look at the guy who won after Christopher was rejected the second time. Purest freak-of-the-week status, or at least felt-of-the-day. All he personally needs is a break, one stinking break, and -- well, Leno isn't Carson, but who is, really? It doesn't even matter what kind of break it is. He's handsome (and now the mirror reflection is perfect again) and charismatic (he is, isn't he?) and Greek, don't forget Greek. Surely, someone, somewhere, is willing to take a chance on that. And it doesn't even have to be a direct showcase for his talents. It just has to be something that he can show up on and mention what he does for a living. If he's good, the rest will come... So Christopher keeps his ears open, and he talks to people now and again, and in three months, someone will happen to mention that there's another reality show audition coming to town. This won't intrigue him as much as you might think, but mostly because it's just another show: Christopher applies for just about everything, from island living to traveling around the world with his glamorous assistant (who hates his guts, but he doesn't know that just yet) through singing when he knows he can't, but his joking attempt to hypnotize them into believing he can might get some airtime (and didn't). When the audition comes, he'll show up, go through what's rapidly becoming the routine, and then get back to the Red Rock in time to forget about it. Given that reaction, Christopher Winokur will be very surprised when he gets the phone call, the package, and the slap in the face from his glamorous assistant all in the same day after he reacts to the first two by instantly-planned spontaneously kissing the third. But he's very quick to convince himself he deserved two-thirds of it... ----------------------------------------------------------------- minus fourteen weeks ----------------------------------------------------------------- Erin Hamilton hates you. Erin hates a lot of things, starting with the fact that her name is Erin Hamilton. She's convinced this sounds Irish, like she's supposed to have red hair, green eyes, a freckled complexion, and walk swinging a milk bucket from each hand. In fact, Erin has black hair (well, it used to be), brown eyes, chocolate skin (60% cocoa) and walks swinging a fist at the end of each arm. Erin hates her mother for having given birth to her and adding a life to a world that can't take any more of it (and being white), her father for assisting and not being some drunken bastard like everyone else's father because at least then she could have gotten away with more stuff (plus being black), both her parents for the damn name -- plus they were encouraging her talent instead of seeing it as a sign of rebellion and holing up in their precious bedroom while screaming at her to knock off the damn noise -- no, Erin's parents did her the grand indignity of being proud of her, and Christ, she hates that. Which reminds her: she hates Christ for being a man. Among other reasons. If you want to understand Erin (and nearly everyone will forgive you if you decide not to make the effort), you should probably start by examining her quest for the right kind of hate. She began with rap because there was certainly a lot of hate there, but then she discovered that most of it was directed towards women and as much as Erin happens to hate females, she occasionally has to reluctantly admit that she is one and Erin's just not that thrilled about working on music which is talking about how much it wants her to shut up and stay out of a real man's life, plus the beats are just too damn slow. After that, she went to the gothic scene because they seemed to have a serious hate on for most of the modern world, but she quickly decided it was mostly about sitting around in coffeehouses drinking overpriced foam and moaning about how no one really appreciated the inherent darkness of the world while not doing anything about it. Erin's more into the proactive sort of hate, so she quickly slid along the rail until she found something called gothic-punk, which ultimately turned out to be close to the same thing but with the occasional break for punching someone's face in, plus every so often you had to stop and pretend you were a vampire. Still not quite what she was looking for -- but it did lead her down the trail to pure punk, which hates everyone and everything, potentially including itself, because pure punk is about the complete destruction of all acceptable conventions and as soon as punk starts looking like an acceptable convention, it has to start killing itself from the inside out. This was the sort of attitude Erin could get behind, so she immediately threw herself into the trappings of it: ragged clothing, hair dye, piercings, the works -- although she hates the fact that her skin won't really show off a decent tattoo, which brings us back to the whole parent-hating thing again, but Erin will always get there eventually and it usually isn't that long a wait. You should probably know this about Erin, too: she's very much a part of the punk scene around Tempe (and Phoenix, and Scottsdale, and any other point she can reach). In fact, she's so much a part of it that she's been thrown out of selected portions, often multiple times. Erin has a lot of talent as a percussionist -- in fact, when it comes to hitting anything with a quick rhythm, Erin's a natural. And talent brings a few benefits, not the least of which is that people will at least make a token effort to put up with you -- which is why it says something else about Erin that, in the fuming kettle of rancid green steam plumes that is the Arizona punk scene, she's been tossed from six bands in three years, and one of those was a triple-bounce on the way out that ended with her waist-deep in the nearest recyclables bin (legs out), but Erin maintains that anyone would have taken a swing at the lead singer in that situation. And besides, the rep from that got her into the next (rival) group, didn't it? -- at least for all of eight weeks, which isn't Erin's personal record, but it's not too far off. If you can actually get Erin to stop directly hating the world and everything in it long enough to channel some of that anger into her performance, you might see what she keeps getting brought into new groups that convince themselves sure, everyone else failed, but they can make this work. When Erin's in the mood, she can unleash patterns, rhythms, and licks that bring down any house in the Southwest: her presence on a demo album just about guarantees that anyone who actually listens to it will get all the way through -- but then, she's generally gone by the time that anyone comes calling and the rest of the time, she's the reason they leave. Most studio executives don't take all that well to being called soulless tools of the system by someone who looks like -- well, we have to be fair about this. If you cleaned her up with a high-pressure stream, got her hair color back to a single shade that didn't look like it was giving off a measurable rads-per-hour aura, took out a few of the piercings, forced her into something that was at least forty percent intact fabric, then wiped the snarl off her -- and now we're into impossible territory. We have to go back to being fair, and the fair assessment is that Erin likes to make herself look like a rat. Not a pet rat, nothing that would sit in your hand and twitch its nose at you, but the sort of urban legend sewer monstrosity that enjoys climbing out of your toilet and nipping at your genitals when you're in the middle of a particularly vulnerable moment. At some point, every single one of her bands has reached the distinctly non-punk musical question of 'How do we solve a problem like Erin?' and the answer always turns out to be the nearest door. The punk aspect of the Southwest considers her to be the musical equivalent of Dennis Rodman: she does only one thing but she does it on a world-class level, you could definitely score a few wins while she's part of the team -- but if you can't find a way to keep her under control, she's going to drag you down with her. And so far, absolutely no one has found the key to holding her in some sort of music-producing stasis -- but it's probably a mark of her talent that there are people willing to keep trying. That and classic punk stubbornness, which Erin could teach people a few things about, given that she's pretty much the foremost expert on anything she's heard about for five minutes, which is surprisingly not her limit. Erin has a working brain and Erin is perfectly able to listen to what you're saying while she's screaming at you in a generally-successful attempt to keep you from finishing. In fact, Erin had some pretty impressive grades all through school, mostly because she hated her teachers, knew they wanted to fail her, and decided to give them no excuse to do so other than their own bigotry. Erin's in the middle of something right now: to wit, she's busy hating a camera. Earlier in the day, she hated the intelligence test that she absolutely blew through without so much as a backwards glance, then she hated the screening group which took five minutes to wave her through, and now she's despising the woman operating the lens which is currently capturing her in all her ratty glory. Openly. Erin is not one to be on the receiving end of something without making some suggestions about how it could be improved, and she thinks the woman would do well to shoot her from a different angle -- say, from standing in the middle of the hotel pool, with the live wires running into the water. She doesn't like the way the camera operator is looking at her, which is with a very small, slightly resigned smile which says she's seen worse than this and frankly, it's just amusing her -- which is bringing Erin to new heights of incandescence, because the last thing she wants anyone to see her as is amusing. What Erin would like (if that's the right term) very much is to do some hating on a larger scale. She hates the world, sure -- but how much of the world really knows it? She's never been more than a few hundred miles from home, since among her major talents is the ability to get tossed off the band just before the tour really starts, possibly in an attempt to avoid international incidents. Erin also believes people feel she's stupid because universal rage is seen as an idiot's position and Erin sees it as the only sensible conclusion to a world that was just giving you the same attitude all along: it's just a question of whether or not you choose to recognize it. But there are things Erin -- well -- 'doesn't hate' might not be the right word. It might be more fair to say that she has a tiny amount of something that might, under an electron microscope, vaguely resemble an indifferent fondness, and she brings that to anything which puts stupidity into her semi-direct sight. Erin hates stupid people, but watching them be stupid helps justify her various hatreds (not that she needs any justification) and as such, Erin is a big fan of reality television, which she would never admit to anyone in the punk crowds because it's just not something they'd ever approve of -- not that she cares, of course. But for access to stupid people, you just can't beat some show with a casting director looking for the dumb, the unintelligent, the outright obtuse (Erin can use obtuse in a sentence. Properly), and her absolute favorites of the idiot pack, the willfully ignorant. And a reality show that claims to be looking for smart people, when everyone knows they're going to wind up with a bunch of complete morons anyway? How could there possibly be anything better than that? So when the open call came to Scottsdale (because just about every open call comes to Scottsdale), Erin decided to get in line as a way of killing an afternoon (being between bands at the time) and taking out a few dreams with it. Erin spent a lot of time creating disruptions by verbally picking out the people who clearly weren't going to make it. This actually shortened the line a bit, which got her through the door -- and as long as she was there, she decided to see how stupid the rest of the process was, which in her current instantaneously-expert opinion starts with 'beyond belief' and actually moves up from there. Two months from now, Erin Hamilton will be in for a very, very big shock. She hates being shocked. -----------------------------------------------------------------   Remove | Alert Edit | Reply | Reply With Quote | Top

Estee 44384 desperate attention whore postings DAW Level: "Playboy Centerfold" 10-26-07, 01:47 PM (EST) 5. "Twelve Strangers...: Conclusion." LAST EDITED ON 10-26-07 AT 04:34 PM (EST) ----------------------------------------------------------------- minus three days ----------------------------------------------------------------- Sadr Devaltev divides his life by airplanes. Are you watching Sadr? Then you've currently got plenty of company, and all of you are looking at a slim young man (late twenties, looks a minimum four to eight years under that -- actually, the narrow nose and chin can make it look like he's still waiting for late adolescence to fill things out) with dark skin, darker eyes, and really dark hair which he wears long at the back, so that what sticks out from under the snap-back close of the baseball cap gives the impression of a mildly restrained mullet. (Which is a total illusion: he just likes his hair a little long at the back. There are limits to the amount of redneck he's picked up, and that goes past them.) Sadr can't step into an airport without being watched, and he's going to be spending a lot of time under the virtual microscope today. Most people arrive at the airport two hours early to make sure they have time to get through all the security precautions: Sadr can and has pushed that up to six, because he always figures there's a good chance he's going to spend an hour or three in a soundproofed back room, nude and shivering and watching as his driver's license gets cut into tiny pieces before it's declared never to have existed in the first place. It's not so much that Sadr is paranoid, mind you: it's never paranoia when someone might actually be out to get you, if only to meet quota. Currently, Sadr is making his way to the ticket counter to check on his flight (and to make sure he can still fly at all) and he's definitely got people's attention, some of whom are trying to discretely whisper into shoulder-mounted pickups and not doing that good a job of concealing their actions, possibly on purpose. There are times when Sadr could blame the Braves cap, but he's just about on home territory today, which is -- well, actually, it's something that doesn't seem to matter any more. Here's what most people no longer care to know about Sadr: he's fifth-generation American -- the story of why his ancestors decided to come over that early is a long and convoluted one which involves no less than three wars -- a major Braves nut who on any given day can cite ten reasons why Turner owning the team was the best thing that could have happened to it followed by twenty about why it was the worst, and he works as a computer animator. Nothing major, not just yet: his personal ideal would be to get into Pixar and put his talents to some major projects, but so far, he hasn't managed to work his way west, and he thinks part of that is due to the airplanes. (Sadr can blame the airplanes for a lot, although he realizes some of it may just be coincidence and a little bit of the rest is just a succession of really bad days.) What Sadr generally works on is advertising, developing little mascots and cuddly characters who pop up every five minutes during the holidays to brainwash your children (and yes, he'd say 'brainwash' here) into demanding The Toy Of The Year -- you know: the one that was underproduced, undershipped, overpromoted, and wound up on eBay selling at twelve times the original retail, which was in no way his fault. You don't know Sadr, not personally, but if you're a parent with a child between the ages of three and seven, you're very familiar with his work and you've very likely hated him for it, although he would like to point out that he's not exactly the uber-genius who originally decided to plan a three-month campaign around a two-week supply of product. (Besides, he still thinks the little red furball was some of his best work.) But in the end, he won't particularly mind, because Sadr has gotten very used to being hated, and at least you have something approaching a reason. You may be wondering how an Arabic family (Iraqi originally, thanks for asking), wound up in the Deep South five minutes after getting off the boat, and while Sadr knows the story, he doesn't want to bore you with the details. Suffice it to say that Sadr grew up a good Southern boy, the kind of kid who regularly blew out the knees on his jeans sliding into second (a little too small and thin for anything but the bench, but stealing bases as a pinch runner was his whole life), brought home frogs and crickets and ladybugs from the creek, a kid who believed the sun rose and set with the fortunes of the Falcons, which meant the sun set a lot more than it rose. To look at Sadr as a young adult would have been to see the All-American College Student, full of dreams that had recently been unleashed on a larger scale by a studio a continent away. He's personally insisted on the day he saw his first videogame that it was possible to build a whole movie -- no, a whole world -- out of this stuff, and now he was just about ready to go out and join the process. Sure, there's always a bit of disconnect involved at the moment he opens his mouth -- it's the classic 'What is that accent doing coming out of that face?' problem -- but you would have been in the presence of Generation Next: here's a vision, now let's go out and make it real. And then the airplanes came. Understand, Sadr was used to a little bit of prejudice, took it as part of the background noise and didn't think about it most of the time. Grow up in the South, not white, not black -- well, that just means you're getting it from all sides, sometimes subtle, sometimes overt, but you learn to expect it and you dodge the blows of all sorts when they come. But after the airplanes... ...there was that note on the door. Sadr remembers that note, but he couldn't tell you what it said because it was on fire at the time. (He suspects a chemistry student who lived nearby, never could prove it.) The exact wording probably doesn't matter, because the essence of the message would have been 'This is the starting gun to a very long race: keep up, leave the track, or die.' Sadr saw a few more notes like that before he graduated, some of which were not on fire, and they made it very clear what his life was going to be from now on. It didn't matter where he'd grown up or what he might personally believe or how many lineups he could name without so much as a moment for thought, as long as his skin wasn't right and his eyes were too dark and his skinny rear insisted on staying in a country that was ready to blame him for everything that had just happened plus whatever came next. And what came next... Years now, and things haven't completely receded, have they? He can go into the airport in his light jeans, T-shirt (black with a dark blue sine curve swooping up to the right shoulder -- he made it himself), and old Braves cap, casually approach the ticket counter with his Pumas making that little slapping noise on the floor, and what people see approaching isn't a guy with a slightly quirky sense of humor, quite a lot of knowledge about how pixels interact (and too much class to bore you with it), and an accent to shame the magnolias into blooming brighter. People don't see a local approaching. They see... ...well, they don't see him, do they? Of course, Sadr could get out of the South (and those job applications would have taken him far away if they'd been accepted), but he doesn't think it would make things any easier. Besides, he's been here his whole life and while he could leave, he really could, any time he likes -- well, he still has family here, he wants to have a reason before he pulls up stakes (and Pixar would have been a reason and a half), and sometimes part of his soul whispers that if nothing else, it's better to have what he knows, isn't it? At least there's no surprises here, nothing he can't see coming now at least for potential, best to live in a place where any pain would at least have the comfort of being familiar... Sadr knows what kind of thoughts those are, and he doesn't listen to them -- at least, he's pretty sure he doesn't. But he's never figured out how to stop them from coming. He smiles at the woman behind the ticket counter, notices the little shiver, wishes he could sigh out loud without having the people who are even now whispering even more urgently into their microphones take it as code. And he fingers the brim of his baseball cap (worn forwards, and even this can be taken as a secret signal), waits to see if he'll be allowed to go and join the group he was already brought into, wonders how things will go if he ever even gets there, thinks about what the cameras might pick up against how what the editing will ultimately display. Here he is, with another airplane about to enter his life (possibly several of them), and the last ones defined how people would see him seemingly forever after, something he had no part of, screamed in agony at, mourned over, didn't understand, bleed through -- and then somehow took the blame for. This particular airplane... He'll play videogames on the flight if they're available, he'll watch whatever programs are around, he'll listen to music and he'll chat about life and baseball and the proper way to barbecue a rack of beef ribs with his seatmate if he's just lucky enough to draw someone who'll talk to him. If he makes it onto the flight at all. Sadr Devaltev waits at the counter (which is taking too long to process his ticket) and notices the men in the dark suits approaching out of the corner of his eye (not that they're really trying to conceal anything now), and wonders how much longer he has to be an American... ----------------------------------------------------------------- minus five days ----------------------------------------------------------------- Felicia Anderson is putting a lot of effort into destroying the universe. All right -- she's not actually destroying it. What she's doing is threatening to destroy it, which is pretty much Felicia's stock-in-trade this year, not to mention her delight because you never get as much pleasure on the job as when you're carrying out a terrorist plot against all of Creation. Of course, Felicia never gets to actually destroy the universe, because that would put her out of a job, or at least out of this job. (There's always another universe.) But when it comes to placing everything this is in serious jeopardy, people know to call Felicia, because she can make you believe it -- as long as you're eight or less, with the occasional option to bring it up to fifteen. Right now, Felicia has to get this threat in plus three more that aren't entirely like it for the actual plan (although they all end with the same goal) before five, and then she's got to go home and finish packing. But being the Evil Empress comes first, and Felicia loves being the Evil Empress. Let's face it: evil is pretty much where all the good stuff is at. Good gets to sit around and wait for something to happen before it can respond, but evil -- oh, evil gets the action moving, evil drives the plot, nothing happens until evil says so because if you want to get right down to it, good is pretty bloody boring. So whenever possible, Felicia goes out for evil -- the more evil, the better. In fact, she's kind of disappointed that she's only threatening to destroy the one universe, especially since they established the other one six episodes back. Do you know Felicia? Not on sight and not by voice, especially since she has so many of them. Felicia's that cuddly bear in the fast food commercial, sure, but she's also the uncaring teacher in that Halloween special, and there's the whole universe-destroying thing -- this is Season #2 being recorded right now -- plus she's filled in as the Menace Of The Week for the one with the hyperactive stick-thin teens, and oh yes, she's spent thirty-six months chasing a group of twerps all over a fictional planet. Plus on the days when she's turning Japanese (she really thinks so), she's a gun moll of the desert, an assortment of high-school students (two of whom use magic), three giant robot pilots, and one time-traveling crusader with a chip on her shoulder. And then there's the videogames... Well, basically, in order to have missed Felicia, you would have had to turn your television off and leave it off for the last nine years. But you very likely have no idea who she is. The number of people who pause on the credits to catch the name is very small, and most of those turn up at conventions somewhere, sometime, and then they're very surprised to see what goes with all the voices. Felicia's never met someone who was actually expecting her as her, which she admittedly likes a lot. Surprising people is part of the game, although it's not as steady a level of fun as being evil. Here's Felicia, speaking into the microphone two, sometimes three times, but never less than two because she doesn't mind giving people a choice of readings to work with. The heroes are somewhere else today: Felicia's doing lines to be looped in later. Voice actresses get some accommodations that the live ones don't, and one of those is that when you give your bosses-of-the-moment notice that you're going to need to dump everything for a while, they'll make sure you're there in spirit and digital recording, even if they're not-so-secretly annoyed that you're not telling them why. And Felicia's heard some guesses as to why, most of which are actually in the right category, although everyone's missed the exact destination. Frankly, she thinks people are putting a little too much focus around summer being so close now, and there's just no way she could stand to be locked in a house for three months: they should know that about her. Felicia likes to keep moving, especially if someone's expecting her to stay still, focused, on the set path -- well, you know. Or maybe you don't. In fact, it's almost guaranteed that you don't, which is part of why you'd be so surprised when you met Felicia. What Felicia loves about voice work is that she's free to be just about anybody, or at least the parade of 'anybody' possibilities that come around each year in the casting calls. If she was to become a pure live actress (and God forbid! No, really -- please, start forbidding it immediately), she would be so much more limited in her roles. Felicia can play any age, any point of origin, any profession, and any number of legs. Permanently limit her to her own body? No, thank you: the benefit to being a creation of pure sound is letting others paint any pictures they like on top of you. A happy voice actress is Felicia, and so she plans on remaining for a long time because one of the other major benefits to the field is that she can keep working until she slumps over on the soundboard. Of course, that doesn't mean Felicia's completely against going live-and-in-person. No, she's willing to show up and be in front of a camera for something other than the making-of-the-series DVD feature. It's just that she's very happy where she is, and it would have to be the right opportunity, something where she could just sink her teeth into the role, get all the gristle out and do some real tooth-gnashing, because while voice work involves subtle shades and tones (and Felicia will do those on request, and well), she really, really likes to go over the top. After all, why stop at one universe? So when she heard about the show coming back -- that was pretty much the 'why not?' light going off above her head, wasn't it? She's a rarity in that she's one of the few who came along in the last seasons, but Felicia loves to watch celebrities, generally from a distance. (Major personalities occasionally wind up in nearby booths, or right with her for group sessions. They generally have no immediate idea what to do with her either.) No celebrity she, Felicia will be the first to admit that. She's got her fans, but she'll never get on a nightly star news program unless absolutely everyone else in the industry drops dead, and frankly, she's comfortable with it. Having a private life is a luxury: she figured that out very early -- -- so why is she doing this? Well -- not to expand her acting horizons (because she's happy where she is, really) and certainly not for celebrity (because Felicia knows that comes but rarely from this sort of thing, and she doesn't really want it anyway -- she's not even entirely sure she wants to them to identify which Felicia Anderson she is), and the travel will be nice, but it's not as if it's primary... Mostly, Felicia decided to try for this because it would be fun. (Felicia does a lot of things because they're fun, but we'll have to talk about that later.) Because she wouldn't be what people were expecting. And maybe because Felicia does so love being evil, just a little bit of darkness into the microphone, enough to make it credible for the right mindset, and who knows? Maybe she can play evil to a new kind of audience with just the tiniest bit of overlap to the old one, and while she won't get to destroy any universes this time, she'll certainly be in a position to do something more than threaten... But that's all a maybe at this point, isn't it? For now, let's just keep an eye on at Felicia Anderson as her evil plans are thwarted once again -- but don't worry, because the Evil Empress always seems to get away unscathed every time. You can never fully stop the evil, or what are you going to do when the next episode comes around? It's fun to be evil, isn't it? At least, it's fun to pretend... ----------------------------------------------------------------- minus two days ----------------------------------------------------------------- George Zubro measures his progress in inches. There isn't much else to measure right now. He's been stuck in this hotel since yesterday -- the plane touched down (second one: Chicago to New York, New York to here), someone met him at the gate and shuffled him off to the room, which he's long-since finished learning to hate. George is firmly into 'loathe' at the moment. He's a mobile man, the sort of guy who goes out and runs five miles every day in any kind of weather and not because he needs to, because other people need to and George has to be an example. If he can run five miles, then you can push yourself upright and walk ten feet, a few inches at a time, just don't give up, keep pushing, and give him absolutely everything you've got until it all adds up to the ten feet George is asking for, and then maybe, maybe he'll let you die because after you finish one of George's ten-foot strolls, you'll really want to. He won't let you, of course. But he will dangle the possibility in front of you, because if wishing for death (even his) is what keeps you going, then that's what you're going to get, at least in the fantasy department. If you hate George more than you hate your own body, then you're going to make your body work in order to get back at George. It's a theory, it's a sound one, and even George is amazed how often it works out. He's a gentle man, George is, even if he doesn't always sound it when he's on the job: he'll yell at you if he has to, cajole, lie... oh, can George ever lie. Mostly George lies about numbers. He forgets how to count several times a week. Give me ten, George will insist, and when you finish giving him ten, George has somehow managed to see it as, at best, seven. If you gave him a lot of whining about it, five isn't out of the question, but you've got to do something extraordinary to knock it down to three. What George does (aside from having no idea what the sequence is between zero and ten) is put bodies back together, often in spite of their owners. Physical therapy is the game, and George isn't even close to being the name when it comes to his hometown. If you want to be the name, you work on batters who've blown out a wrist tendon, or football players whose multiple years of hits have placed their elbows two inches above their knees. George works for the charity care programs, which means he gets paid (and frequently doesn't get paid) by Medicare, grants, donations, and whatever else forgot to actually sign off on the paperwork this week. Not that this makes George a living saint: he's got his flaws, and he's demonstrating one right now as he paces his tiny hotel room, walking it off heel-to-toe over and over again, back and forth, across and repeat, try out the broken diagonal for variety. The television stations suck, there's no radio, he can't order movies up to his room, he's not allowed to leave the room -- oh what fun it is to be a contestant on a reality show, even one that was supposed to be dead and gone. Sure, he made it. To wit, he made it into this Petri dish of a hotel room, and he's starting to wonder if anyone's going to let him out, ever. George doesn't take waiting very well. It's not the first time he's been waiting in this general category. George was actually on the secondary tier for the third season years back (this was when they still told you that there were tiers and they were considering whether to move you up or down), waiting to see if anyone would make him primary. He went through the whole process back then, too: sent in the tape (because this was so far back, a tape was mandatory), filled out the forms, as much rigmarole as a man could possibly ask for, made it all the way to second tier with a chance to move up and make the cast -- and then what happened? The host left, the network decided they wanted to revise a few small details like dumping regular people in favor of D-list celebrities, and George fell from secondary all the way back into the real world, where he stayed for that season and the next one, feeling vaguely disgusted the whole time. George's first instinct when the series vanished was along the lines of 'Good riddance', because he can forgive people who've done him wrong, but it would be nice if they apologized first, and George never got a word of sorry from anyone. And then the cat came back, the very next day... Okay, so it took a bit longer than that, and this is the part of the process George still can't believe: that it came back at all. The original production company gone, both hosts out and not wanting anything to do with the thing ever again, the show canceled once, canceled twice, and brought back once again? It's been a long, long time, and he doesn't know what made the network think this was the moment when the alarm to wake the dead was supposed to go off. But while George is horrible at waiting, he's pretty good at memory, and as soon as he got the word, he marched into the nearest open call (carrying a burnt DVD this time around) and announced that since he'd made it to the second tier the last time, he expected to start there now. Not that he wouldn't understand if he didn't make it, but they at least owed him the honor of a headstart... George was kind of making a presumption there on top of his amusing little scene, that there would be someone around who'd remember him and consider putting him closer to the front of the line, and in fact no one knew him: a few people came back to the crew, or so he overheard on the ride in, but not one of them was from the original casting department. Ultimately fine by him: he made it anyway, right? And two models in a row... well, someone had to be fired for that one. Back and forth, back and forth... So much fun to be on television. George doesn't like the tiny shower in the bathroom, the limited channel selection on the hotel's tiny television (and how cheap is this hotel? Very, very cheap... and he's the only contestant in it, they told him that. Someone probably lucked out and drew the five-star, but it wasn't George), any of the food -- George is just full of dislike, but we can really put most of that down to his waiting issues. (It should probably be clear that none of this comes from just being in a new place. George isn't an ugly American, although he's definitely American and -- well, he'll be the first to admit this: he is ugly. We'll get to the details later.) He's always happy to go out and meet new people, but right now, he can't go anywhere, he can't do anything, all he can do is walk around this tiny room which has no books in it, a man can't get another newspaper for hours, and did he mention that the television stations sucked? George very much wants out of here because he just isn't himself unless he's moving a little more than he is now, and the shower curtain rod is too weak to take a pull-up. (He tried. He managed to smooth out most of the bend.) Still, he'll wait. Maybe he's just about at the point of holding his breath a couple of hundred times just because it's something that'll kill a few more seconds, but he's got no choice but to wait and George is pretty good at no-choice, especially when he's inflicting it on other people, which is generally when he's holding their ankles down and demanding one more sit-up, which he will then lose track of until the point when it reaches three. George waited for years to get to this point, and if the final step to reach the next stage means not being able to take more than six and a very abrupt half in this one -- well, George will find something to do. Make the bed again, maybe. Flip the mattress. Maybe he'll rework the showerhead to deliver more than a thimbleful of water every two hours. Anything to keep busy. George Zubro is being very patient right now, and even though he's no good at it, he figures he can make it last for a couple of days. Then the action should begin. Action, he likes. ----------------------------------------------------------------- minus thirty minutes ----------------------------------------------------------------- And just-about-finally we have Mihoshi Iwaaki, peering down the potentially-infinite length of a flashlight's beam, watching a drop of water fall through it -- it's very damp down here: she's been dodging splashes for the last hour -- before playing the light across both upper branches of the T. She can go left here, or she can go right, or she can go home, but that last is never going to be an option. Getting lost won't be an issue, either: Mihoshi has a very good memory. But she does want to make sure this takes as little time as possible, because the sooner she reaches her destination, the more of a chance she'll have to dry off. Roused early this morning, was Mihoshi, forced out of her plush bed on the first day her internal clock had really adjusted and taken down to the city streets just as the sun was starting to consider whether it wanted to peek over the edge of the world. Brought to an old building -- pre-war, had to be -- led into the basement, and told that to get the game started, she'd have to find her way to it. And then they'd locked her in. It hadn't taken long to locate the flashlight, which she hadn't really needed in the dimly-lit room -- so she had to figure she'd need it shortly, which meant finding a way to get somewhere dark. Mihoshi's not bad at seeing patterns (there's a lot of things Mihoshi's good at seeing, most of which come from other people's mistakes), and after a while, she realized that some of the bricks in the wall were discolored, and that color pattern made a shape, and if you pressed down right in the middle of it -- well, that's how she got into this damp brick-and-metal tunnel, just large enough for a couple of people to go down side-by-side and the camera carrier on the other side was a pretty good confirmation for the total lack of coincidence. She's meant to go through this, so -- off she goes, passing ancient burnt-out bulbs in little metal cages along the way. If we were looking for a word to describe Mihoshi -- actually, Mihoshi would appreciate it if we'd ask her for that word, because she's got a very good vocabulary (in four different languages!), even if she doesn't like to trot it out that much. We might be able to call Mihoshi focused, and that certainly applies. She's a great multitasker, but when the time calls for it, she can give all of her attention to whatever she has to do at the moment, whatever that might be -- which surprised the living hell out of her future spouse (six months after she gets back, and it's a very nice ring), who thought it was originally just an indulgence for a momentary curiosity about geek-cute and didn't realize all the implications of Mihoshi's personality until about ten seconds after they got into the bedroom. Looks-wise -- well, Mihoshi's one of those people where viewers will start, almost as if mandated by law, with mentally taking the glasses off, and then maybe if you got the hair a little more organized, plus you could do a little something with her clothes, and showing a little more leg wouldn't hurt, plus how about some heels? (To really understand how Mihoshi's appearance comes across, add the dramatic music from a bad made-for-cable romance as a strong hand reaches for the bridge of those utterly-unfashionable hornrims.) Oh, and if asked, she'll generally describe herself as 'passable.' But if you've gotten that far with Mihoshi, you're probably picturing her as working in front of a computer all day (and you'd be right: she's a fact-checker for a number of magazines, working at home in Corpus Christi), and that might mean you're having a little bit of trouble placing her in a tunnel complex somewhere beneath this city because honestly, what is she doing here? Because Mihoshi is geek-cute, certainly, but half of that is geek and Mihoshi, who watches every science fiction and fantasy program there is just because it comes from those genres, who not only attends all sorts of conventions but wears costumes (it's called cosplay, and one of the things it demonstrates is that Mihoshi is very talented with makeup when she wants to be, not to mention having a fast hand with a sewing needle), who actually, God help her, collects convention badges, and does any of that seem to indicate the sort of personality who'd be doing this? It should. Just because Mihoshi has an active fantasy life (again, consult her future spouse for some very shocked details) doesn't mean she isn't willing to try and bring some of it into reality. Go through enough stories and you're just about guaranteed to want a chance at living your own. Mihoshi can live a very vicarious second life (or Second Life) in a sometimes-minimized window during her work hours, but that doesn't keep her from getting out there and doing something real every now and again. And besides, Mihoshi's smart. She knows she's smart, she's known it for years and years and there are times when that can become a problem for her, but -- stupid people don't get on this show. Not the original version, anyway. Well, not more than one or two... ...or maybe two or... ...anyway, the point is that this is the show which would hold out more than the tiniest possible chance to the true geek, cute or not, and given that this is television, cute wasn't exactly going to hurt her odds. And so we have Mihoshi making her way through the tunnel system (which she's very curious about: what is this thing doing here? It's far too extensive to have been built by the show just for this moment, not to mention too old...) in search of some unknown destination, counting her steps, keeping very close track of every twist and turn, and already ignoring her camera operator's presence like an expert, although the part of her that plays simulations a little too much keeps wondering when they'll go for the overhead shot. Follow Mihoshi through the corroded blue-gray of the tunnels (this isn't standard brick), listening to the drips and occasionally wiping off her glasses when she misses the timing on one, left and left and then backtracking to try the right, avoiding the puddles because she hates getting her feet wet. Mihoshi's burning a lot of vacation days to be here, but the truth of the matter is that she gets what her employers consider to be an eight-hour day accomplished in about three and then the rest of the time is her own. She could catch up easily if she really had to, and frankly she was prepared to quit over this if they didn't let her go, but -- enough advance warning, and if she wouldn't tell them why she needed it right then, her right and her privilege. Mihoshi is used to not telling people things: no one needs to know about those five paid hours of leisure time, among other little details, some of which might be considered more important than others. But that doesn't matter just yet. Right now, we're traveling with Mihoshi, and she's getting very close to the door -- -- there it is. The first and only door she's seen, and it's got to be the right one because there's something on it that no one has seen in years, not in this context. A green thumbprint, bright green, practically fluorescing under her flashlight's beam. It's unlocked. She opens it and steps through, finding -- -- another door, four feet away: she's standing in what feels like the smallest possible segment of fully-wood hallway. There's a tiny table present, pitted Formica, round top. The new door is locked. The first door swings shut behind her. A voice speaks out of nowhere, makes her jump a little, although she quickly traces the source to a tiny grid under the table's rim. Put your flashlight down, it instructs her, and turn it off. She does so -- and then all the lights go out. Mihoshi Iwaaki stands in the dark, waits for eleven more people to find their doors (seven are there already, but she doesn't know that, she just naturally assumes she got there first), step into their little rooms -- and then, at some point, there will be a click, all the locked doors will open -- -- and after that -- -- 'after that' is very soon now... ----------------------------------------------------------------- minus five seconds ----------------------------------------------------------------- And then there is the host. The host is waiting. Five. Four. Three. Two. One... ----------------------------------------------------------------- ...but one among them is a saboteur, a traitor... Jacob Golden, 39, rabbi, San Diego, California Verni Wren, 45, programming coordinator, Sioux Falls, South Dakota David Kellerman, 52, assistant principal, Coventry, Vermont Patricia Veeck, 68, grandmother, Fort Shaw, Montana Mark Nemecek, 25, stuntman, Los Angeles, California Charity Bonadventure, 24, medical student, Scranton, Pennsylvania Christopher Winokur, 42, hypnotist, Las Vegas, Nevada Erin Hamilton, 21, percussionist, Tempe, Arizona Sadr Devaltev, 28, computer animator, Summerville, South Carolina Felicia Anderson, 27, voice actress, Manhattan, New York George Zubro, 42, physical therapist, Chicago, Illinois Mihoshi Iwaaki, 27, fact checker, Corpus Christi, Texas . . . . . . . . . . . (End of prologue)   Remove | Alert Edit | Reply | Reply With Quote | Top

vince3 15726 desperate attention whore postings DAW Level: "Playboy Centerfold" 10-26-07, 04:24 PM (EST) 7. "RE: Twelve Strangers...: Conclusion." Mark's giving me double vision........   Remove | Alert Edit | Reply | Reply With Quote | Top

Estee 44384 desperate attention whore postings DAW Level: "Playboy Centerfold" 10-26-07, 04:36 PM (EST) 8. "RE: Twelve Strangers...: Conclusion." My bad: I was reordering the cast list to fit the sequence they were introduced in and didn't notice he'd had a post-paste non-cutted. Fixed. Mark also suffered from a case of non-closed HTML in the middle of his section, so clearly he's gonna be trouble.   Remove | Alert Edit | Reply | Reply With Quote | Top

Belle Book 1925 desperate attention whore postings DAW Level: "Herbal Healing Drugs Endorser" 02-13-09, 09:17 PM (EST) 16. "RE: Twelve Strangers...: Conclusion." I think I know who our host is ... a certain contestant from Estee's Survivor fanfic. Anyway, I've finally checked the prologue out and I like it so far. Right now as far as the Mole goes, I have my eye on Felicia and maybe Christopher. Felicia seems to like playing the evil characters, so being the Mole would be perfect for her. On the other hand, that might make her too obvious. Same goes for Christopher -- a hypnotist should be good at mind games and trickery, but he too might be too obvious a suspect. I sympathize most with Verni and Sadr and I like Christy and Mihoshi. Belle Book   Remove | Alert Edit | Reply | Reply With Quote | Top

Jims02 6971 desperate attention whore postings DAW Level: "Playboy Centerfold" 10-27-07, 12:33 PM (EST) 9. "RE: The Mole: Season #5: Prologue: Twelve Strangers..." Good start. We've got quite a variety of character, right here. You're a good reality TV caster, Estee. What I like about this Mole format is that it's much more realistic than most mystery fiction. Most mysteries have several people involved that have legitimate motive for committing the murder, which is completely unrealistic. In this case, we have 12 people who each could very well be the Mole. I wonder who the host is going to be?   Remove | Alert Edit | Reply | Reply With Quote | Top

kingfish 12060 desperate attention whore postings DAW Level: "Playboy Centerfold" 10-28-07, 04:15 PM (EST) 10. "RE: The Mole: Season #5: Prologue: Twelve Strangers..." LAST EDITED ON 10-28-07 AT 04:19 PM (EST) AND, who will the host pick as his off-screen cuddle-mole? BTW, I'm beginning to doubt my Moley pick. (Twist - RTVW peeps introduced as surprise replacements...? Hey, we gotta have twists to sneer at, don't we?)   Remove | Alert Edit | Reply | Reply With Quote | Top

vince3 15726 desperate attention whore postings DAW Level: "Playboy Centerfold" 10-28-07, 11:39 PM (EST) 11. "RE: The Mole: Season #5: Prologue: Twelve Strangers..." If the setup from the end of S:SI holds true, it won't be a he hosting....... although you might think so if you saw the name and don't make the connection........   Remove | Alert Edit | Reply | Reply With Quote | Top

Colonel Zoidberg 3370 desperate attention whore postings DAW Level: "Car Show Celebrity" 10-29-07, 03:11 PM (EST) 12. "RE: The Mole: Season #5: Prologue: Twelve Strangers..." Indeed. Although we're fairly sure it isn't Ahmad, and I just don't see Anderson coming back. (The story is that he intensely disliked hosting the show.) If the host is who we think it is, the first exemption challenge should be to see how far the players can kick a certain other past castaway...   Remove | Alert Edit | Reply | Reply With Quote | Top

AyaK 8129 desperate attention whore postings DAW Level: "Playboy Centerfold" 11-01-07, 07:49 PM (EST) 13. "RE: The Mole: Season #5: Prologue: Twelve Strangers..." I saw an interview with AC in which he said that he LOVED hosting The Mole.   Remove | Alert Edit | Reply | Reply With Quote | Top

Colonel Zoidberg 3370 desperate attention whore postings DAW Level: "Car Show Celebrity" 11-02-07, 08:36 AM (EST) 14. "RE: The Mole: Season #5: Prologue: Twelve Strangers..." I heard somewhere that he hated it...maybe he did actually love it and I'm thinking of something different. I do know that he moved onto CNN...so being seen by an audience of 10 million on ABC was worse than being seen by a fraction of that audience on CNN. I will also say this - Anderson was a far better fit for The Mole than Ahmad Rashad ever was. It takes a certain personality to host it. Come on, Alex Cole! The other AC!   Remove | Alert Edit | Reply | Reply With Quote | Top

geg6 14941 desperate attention whore postings DAW Level: "Playboy Centerfold" 11-02-07, 02:25 PM (EST) 15. "RE: The Mole: Season #5: Prologue: Twelve Strangers..." We must have seen the same one. I knew I remembered him saying that at some point. Do you remember when that was? I've been wracking my brain. "How does it become a man to behave toward this American government to-day? I answer that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it." - Henry David Thoreau   Remove | Alert Edit | Reply | Reply With Quote | Top

Belle Book 1925 desperate attention whore postings DAW Level: "Herbal Healing Drugs Endorser" 03-17-10, 07:48 PM (EST) 17. "RE: The Mole: Season #5: Prologue: Twelve Strangers..." Who were you thinking of when you thought that the first exemption challenge should be to see how far the players can kick a certain other past castaway? Connie the Witch? If so, I'd join the show in a heartbeat!   Remove | Alert Edit | Reply | Reply With Quote | Top

Colonel Zoidberg 3370 desperate attention whore postings DAW Level: "Car Show Celebrity" 03-20-10, 11:32 AM (EST) 18. "RE: The Mole: Season #5: Prologue: Twelve Strangers..." Who else? Although there are maybe a couple others who should at least warrant a kick or two...   Remove | Alert Edit | Reply | Reply With Quote | Top

Belle Book 1925 desperate attention whore postings DAW Level: "Herbal Healing Drugs Endorser" 03-20-10, 07:43 PM (EST) 19. "RE: The Mole: Season #5: Prologue: Twelve Strangers..." I thought so! I'd definitely kick Connie all the way to hell! And I'd probably give Desmond and even Angela a good kick each -- although not quite as far as hell.   Remove | Alert Edit | Reply | Reply With Quote | Top

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