Corrupting Power
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Quaranteam 2:16
🕑 Added 2023-10-20 07:16:25 +0000 UTCChapter Sixteen
December 21st, 2020
Los Angeles around Christmastime was an odd place to be. Normally, everyone went home for the holidays, and it left Los Angeles a mostly empty area, because the old adage was that nobody was originally from Los Angeles – everyone had come from somewhere else before they’d settled there. This time, however, people didn’t feel comfortable traveling yet, nor did they feel safe leaving their homes. That meant the streets were empty, as they normally would be, but for all different reasons.
Andy and the rest of Team Rook hadn’t been particularly looking forward to visiting Tinsel Town, but there were a lot of meetings that needed to be had, from the studio that was going to be adapting the first of the Druid Gunslinger books to a handful of people who wanted ‘general meetings.’ It was the latter Andy was least looking forward to, which was why they were later in the day.
The first stop of the day was over at Working Title Films, who would’ve much rather seen Andy and company in their London headquarters but had been willing to settle for a meeting in their Hollywood offices. They had a final shooting script candidate they wanted him to quickly read, and once that had passed his approval, they needed to set up the shooting schedule. The current plan was for 25 days of shooting in London at Pinewood Studios and then 14 nights of shooting on location in San Francisco. They really only needed Andy on set for the last week of the London shooting, when most of the scenes with Emily and Sarah, who were only in maybe 10-20% of the movie, were needed. With him showing up for the last week of London shooting, if they needed to do reshoots on any of the London sets, they could do so with him there. All of that seemed fine to not only him, but the whole family. Shooting would start in mid-March, with the first date they’d be needed in London, well after the time of their honeymoon wrapping up.
After Working Title, they needed to divide and conquer, with Sarah, Niko, Moira, Fiona and Aisling going to one set of meetings, and he, Alexis, Melody, Piper and Emily heading to a different set. Andy himself wasn’t actually needed for either set of meetings, but Emily was still doing her best to make it clear how bad a fuckup her moves with Mali had been, and so she’d asked Andy to tag along with her as she met with her agents to discuss potential new projects that were being floated her way.
He’d seen Creative Artists Agency before, but he’d never set foot inside of the building before now, and he was a little taken aback how obsequious everyone was. He thought he’d seen ass kissers before, but this was an entirely new level of rear view puckery. They had a dozen projects they wanted to run by her while she was in town, with the intent of getting her into at least two or three of them before the end of next year.
This was also a chance for Andy to see a side of Em he’d never really gotten a glimpse into before now – the shrewd businesswoman. After Daggerfall Academy, Em had made it a point to look at the points she was being offered on the back end as much as she was the project itself. As soon as they got into the room, they were already trying to get Emily back to work yesterday, but the miniature blond Brit stood her ground, refusing to start work on anything until she was back from her honeymoon after the wedding in January. The earliest she was willing to start shooting was late-April/early-May, so it didn’t conflict with her obligations with the Neon Stonehenge shoot, which was already set and on the books.
Emily listened to each of the pitches in turn, sometimes offering notes, sometimes shooting things down immediately and sometimes saying she’d like to circle back to it when more had been solidified, such as director or other cast members. A few times she was asked if she still wanted to hold to her ‘no nudity’ clause, and she reiterated that even though many of the fans of Daggerfall Academy had died, to those that hadn’t, she’d always be Dahlia Hairtrigger, and she had no desire to let those fans down unless it was somehow essential to the part or the story being told.
It was perhaps the only time when the agents seemed to even acknowledge Andy’s presence, shooting him a look as if to say, ‘Can you talk some sense into her?’ Andy had stood by his fiancée, stressing that Emily hadn’t said she’d never do nudity – only that none of the projects were compelling enough for her to feel comfortable pulling that trigger. If they really thought it was important for her to do something like that, they needed to find a project that had a justifiable reason to include it, and they hadn’t, so it would have to wait. He knew Sarah felt the same way and had given the same reasons to her agents.
Emily finished the meeting with the expectation that she would start filming in a fantasy series for Netflix in May, based on a series of spies in the British government who also happened to be telepaths. The series was called “Looky Loos” and was based off a comic that had run in 2000 AD, a very popular anthology comic that had been running in the UK for ages. The scripts weren’t quite there yet, but Em felt like with another round or two of revisions they could definitely get there, and her agreeing to star in the series was contingent on her getting scripts she liked. But it was enough that they could get it on the books and start moving forward towards getting new content developed. The plan was that she would be in London for three weeks of filming over six weeks, with one week on, one week off, allowing her time to come back (or for Andy to come out) and keep her from encountering withdrawal from his presence.
That, as it turned out, was always going to be the biggest challenge – scheduling. Back in the before times of last year, Andy had found out that Lesser Phil was polyamorous, and had, in fact, three partners, all of whom were now paired with him. But back then, in the wild and wooly time of 2019, polyamory had still been a lot less common, and Andy had been baffled by the fact that Lesser Phil had been dating multiple women at once, and that they all knew about each other. They hadn’t fought; they weren’t upset that Lesser Phil was splitting their time, as long as everyone knew about everyone else. It had been the longest one-on-one dinner conversation he’d ever had with someone. They’d started talking at around 7 pm and had closed down the Applebee’s they’d been at, getting kicked out at 2 am.
Lesser Phil had lots of wisdom to offer, both good and bad, about what it was like to have multiple partners and the two key pillars of surviving the experience were communication and scheduling – communicating about when changes were coming down the line, how people were feeling, what they were thinking and what they wanted; and scheduling, a roadmap of where people planned to spend their time, and the ability to respect that schedule, by hell or by highwater.
Phil and the other five members of his pod had a shared Google Calendar with everyone’s schedules in it, and each person got a bar, so they could make sure people were all getting ample time with their partners and that nobody was getting unfairly cut out. Feelings were easy to argue with; math was harder.
At the time, Andy had thought the whole thing had sounded endlessly complicated, but since the formation of Team Rook, he’d been adapting all that learning into things he could actively use, and a centralized calendar had been one of the first things he’d had Whitney put together for them. They could’ve used a Google Calendar, but it didn’t really support the sort of number of users they wanted, and the subgroups that they needed, or if they did, Andy hadn’t seen it. His location needed to be prioritized, and everyone else’s schedule had to be managed accordingly, set up so that he would be around to take care of any partner who was away from home at least once a week. It wasn’t that he thought of himself as more or less important than any of his partners – it was just that he needed to be accessible to everyone and couldn’t be away from his partners for too long.
After they left CAA, they headed over to the Andaz, where they had the Penthouse Suite on reservation, although they were going to be taking a few more meetings, but for these, it was people coming to them, rather than them going to people.
The sort of lounge area of the penthouse suite included a balcony that overlooked all of Los Angeles, and Andy felt like he was so far out of his element that someone would show up any minute now, ask him to finish cleaning and then get out of the way. He so didn’t belong here, he felt, although he was doing his best to tamp that down, because he needed to get used to the idea that he did belong here, because it was going to be more and more common place.
“Who’s our first meeting with?” Andy asked Niko, who had sort of been doubling as his secretary for the trip.
“Next Level Teleproductions Entertainment,” she said. “They want to pitch something to you, well, to all of us.”
Andy scowled, as Fiona moved over to hand him a drink – it looked like she’d mixed Coke, orange Fanta and some rum together – but he could only shrug. “Well, Whitney scheduled the meeting, so clearly these people have enough clout that they’re worth a bit of our time. Thanks, Fi.”
“I mixed it a little bit stronger than you normally do it, so if you refill the glass, go easy on the rum.”
“You think I need a stiff drink?”
“I looked up what else these people have done, and yes, you’re going to need it,” she said with a smirk, just as a knock sounded at the main door to the suite. Lexi and Melody went over, giving everyone a sort of cursory once over, just making sure nobody was carrying weapons. Andy couldn’t imagine why they would be but had been told that Hollyweird was a strange place where anything was possible, and whatever strangest story he’d heard about the place was probably only a tenth as weird as what had actually happened.
“Mister Rook!” a voice said from the doorway. “Alan Garabon, Next Level Teleproductions Entertainment! Thanks for agreeing to meet with us today. We don’t want to take up too much of your time, but we wanted to just give you a little pitch we’ve been thinking about since your appearance on 60 Minutes last month. We’ve brought a handful of things we want to show you, a mockup and maybe a quick little pre-viz concept trailer.”
Alan looked exactly like Andy had expected a Hollywood producer to look like – he was a pasty white man in his fifties wearing three different designer pieces of clothing and none of them matched. He clearly had a toupee of some kind on top of his head (either that or a wild Shar Pei had perched there instead) and his teeth were so blindingly white that Andy wished he was wearing his sunglasses. Accompanying him was a 20-something musclebound man in a button-up pink shirt that the top half of which was unbuttoned, and jean shorts that might’ve revealed if the man was circumsized or not. They were also accompanied by a rather buttoned up dark-haired woman in much more business-like attire. “This is my assistant and partner, Albert, and our producer, Jean.”
“I won’t do introductions for everyone here,” Andy said, “simply because we have a lot of these meetings, and so I’d rather you get to pitching, if that’s okay?”
“That’s absolutely fine,” the woman, Jean, said, placing her laptop down before pulling out a small projector, connecting it up. “What we want to do is tap into your bump in the collective consciousness and piggyback that into a reality show, where we have cameras following you around all the time, recording what you’re doing, what you’re saying. We’re really going to dial into the struggle that you have to get through your daily life, having to set the patterns of behavior for so many women, keeping all their demands in check while still placing your own above theirs as the head of the household should do.”
Andy sort of glanced around to his partners seated around him, watching them all trying very hard to not start giggling at any moment, as the presentation continued.
“We’re thinking sort of a ‘Keeping Up With The Kardashians’ sort of vibe, although maybe like an undercurrent of dealing with the demands of two Hollywood A-listers who are very outspoken, and how despite the fact that you fight all the time, you’re still able to work through it and remain a family. Here, let’s just play the trailer for you.”
The projector threw an image onto a wall, and the placeholder opening credits of this supposed show idea rolled before their eyes. The logo popped up first, “CASTLE ROOK,” but because there weren’t any I’s in the logo where they could swap out a chess piece, they’d over exaggerated the shape of it and replaced the A with rook chess piece with a much wider base than a top, which made the whole thing look a little strange. Then the logo disappeared and it cut to footage of Andy that seemed to be a combination of stuff from the 60 Minutes interview interspliced with him doing panels at a various genre conventions, as well as the moment he went up to accept his Hugo. Then it cut to a split screen, with Emily on the left and Sarah on the right, the two clearly getting equal billing, using footage of them from press junkets, television interviews and even a little bit from the 60 Minutes segment. Next came another split screen, this time Aisling on the left and Niko on the right, all the footage taken from 60 Minutes. That was followed by yet another split showing off Fiona on the left and Moira on the right, but in this case the footage of Fiona looked to be cribbed from various news stories and on-air reporting she’d done over the last few years before moving in with Andy, and almost of all of Moira’s footage seemed like it came from the singular story that Fiona had done, which had been pushed out as a segment on CNN years back. Then it cut to a wide screen shot, with a graphic that read, “And introducing Piper Rook…” as it played footage of Piper in training, at the previous Olympics and doing interviews after she’d won. Then as it faded to black, some sort of slogan popped up in the black. “Big Love Takes Even Bigger Patience.”
They left that projected on the wall for a moment, and Andy could slowly feel every set of his partners’ eyes turning to look at him, as if they expected him to be the one to speak first, to set the tone of how the rest of this meeting was going to go. He inhaled a deep breath, seeing the sort of eagerness that was on the faces of the people who’d come to meet them, and knew this meeting wasn’t going to go at all how they’d expected.
“Great, right?” Jean said. “Just think of how famous you’ll be overnight! You’ll be bigger than the Kardashians were! It’ll increase your book sales by so much, and between Emily, Sarah and Piper, one of them is practically guaranteed to be the next Taylor Swift! You can set the tone for the conversation everywhere you go! You could affect national discourse! You can influence the government’s way of thinking when it comes to the decisions they’re making regarding the Quaranteam program! You could be the face of the survivors when it comes to this horrible tragedy!”
There was something about the way that Jean ended every sentence by going up rather than down, like a normal sentence would, that just irked Andy to no end.
“Pardon my lack of tact here, folks, but what the hell are you all thinking?” Andy finally said. “Let’s start with your basic premise – that we fight all the time. We don’t. Have we had some disagreements? Sure, but certainly not the sort of ridiculous bullshit that people peddle as ‘reality television,’ where producers are pushing and pulling whatever they need to, in order to get their spike and their promo and their scenes. But you don’t strike me as the kind of people interested in doing a deep discussion discourse on the challenges of integrating several different personality types into one cohesive family unit, and I for one don’t have any interest in being constantly pushed, poked and prodded by some producer into artificial conflict just to make ‘good’ television,” he said, doing the air quotes to make it clear exactly how sarcastic he was being with them. “You’re asking us to open up our lives just to enable you to make a few dollars, and rather than approach us, talking to us about how you might be doing this differently than existing reality television, you seem to think we’re just going to leap at the chance to be on television, like we’re the Real-Life Housewives of Silicon Valley or something. I don’t want to speak for my partners, but speaking purely for myself, I don’t see anything in your pitch that makes me think you understand a single thing about who I or my partners are. I mean, you’re talking about having an influence on the way the government treats the whole Quaranteam project, but if you’d done even a little bit of homework with that team, you’d know that I’ve been made a civilian liaison for that project in an oversight capacity, meaning I’m going to influence that conversation a lot more than most people would ever get the chance to. I know that’s public information, because people were asking about it during the Q&A portion of my signing event in Seattle. I like telling stories, and writing fiction is one thing, but living it? That’s something entirely different. The idea of having you people following us around every moment of our daily lives? I don’t know what benefit you think you’d be bringing to us, but I just don’t see it. Ladies? Thoughts?”
“I have, like, less than zero fucking interest in being Kim Fucking Kardashian,” Sarah said. “I don’t need a makeup company. I don’t want my fucking ass to break the fucking internet or whatever. I want to live my life, I want to fucking enjoy my life and I don’t need you shoving a fucking camera in my face every morning to try and make me a household name. I’m super fucking happy with my life how it is, and the last fucking thing I want is your shit messing with my shit, just so you can make a fucking buck off my back.”
“This isn’t an opportunity I think any of us have any interest in pursuing this any further,” Emily said. “Your presentation displayed an extraordinary lack of understanding on who makes up this family and what kind of people they are like. I am uncertain if you even watched the 60 Minutes story, or simply saw some famous people that you thought you could exploit for personal gain, but I must inform you, we are not those people. We are not the sorts of souls who live to be adored by the masses. We are entertainers, but we do not live our entire lives on the stage. We are not meant to be in people’s homes all the time. And I personally am against you exploiting our lives for your amusement. No, madam, I am not interested in such an ‘opportunity,’ no matter how beneficial to my career you may think it would be.”
Piper chimed in as well. “Yeah, I think that just about wraps it up. Nearly everything I would’ve wanted to say was said best by these three already, but I just have to ask, what was it that made you think we would be approachable to the idea of letting cameras into our lives twenty-four seven, or that we were somehow this dysfunctional bunch of misfits who’d be happy to throw shit at one another once you turned the cameras on us, as if we thought it would make us more famous than most of us already are. I mean, Fi? Ash? Mo? Neeks? Any further thoughts?”
“Yeah, fuck that,” Aisling said.
“Well,” Jean said, turning off the projector. “Sorry to have troubled you then. We just wanted to expose you to an opportunity that we had available for you, but we’ll simply go and find another family to turn into billionaires.”
The three of them left the suite, and everyone had the common decency not to laugh until they were well out of ear shot, but as soon as the elevator started descending, the whole lot of them fell about the place in fits of giggles and snorts. “Who the hell scheduled that meeting for us?” Fiona asked the group.
“That would be my agents,” Sarah sighed. “They wanted to find some possible ideas for me and Em to do shit together, and I told them ‘No idea is a bad idea,’ and, well…” She gestured towards the elevator, and everyone started laughing again. “Sometimes, when I’m fucking wrong, I’m really fucking wrong.”
Nobody was particularly mad; they were just a little caught off-guard by how utterly mistaken some Hollywood people were about who they were and what they were like. The next meeting was far more positive, although a couple of times Emily had to stop the meeting to stress to the producer how the script seemed a little dehumanizing to the male characters, treating them more as eye candy and props than actual characters with feelings and depth, something Andy couldn’t help but be amused by, especially since he wasn’t particularly paying attention to the meeting conversation.
It was something Sarah had said to him earlier as well, that it was almost like Hollywood had inverted itself overnight, and where it used to be hard to find parts for women and, if they were available, they were often underwritten. Now that women held most of the positions of power, they wanted to see more stories featuring women, which was probably for the best anyway, because many of the male actors had died during the past year. Still, the insane speed for the total about face was unmistakable. And now finding parts with men in them were significantly less common.
Part of it, Andy found through some digging, was on suggestion from the White House, trying to show people that the new norm, with men being far rarer than they used to be, as ‘the way things are,’ and helping people adapt to it by showing it on television, in movies and in music. It was something he could understand and accept, but he also wondered if they were going to do stories dealing with the collective tragedy and trauma they’d all experienced, and yet, everyone seemed to be dancing around dealing with the deaths head on, especially in lieu of all the news coming out of New Zealand. In a few years, maybe, after some time had passed, maybe then people would be ready to deal with that sort of situation head on. Andy found himself wondering if he was going to have to start writing fiction to reflect the world post-disaster, or whether he could just carry on pretending like it never happened, a therapeutic security blanket for survivors, a reminder of how the world used to be. But hiding from problems had never been Andy’s strong suit. He decided he was going to have to adjust what he’d written in the start of the next Druid Gunslinger book to reflect the world as he saw it now, rather than how it had been before the plague had decimated the male population.
There were a few more meetings about this, that and the other thing, but nothing really needed Andy’s attention, because they were all for Emily or Sarah, although Piper also had a meeting with someone from Nike about an endorsement deal during someone else’s meeting. Andy found himself mostly bored and had pulled out his laptop over in the corner, settling down to get a little bit of work done, and before he knew it, there was just one final meeting for the day, although nobody seemed eager to tell him what it was about.
“Andy, we need you to come pay attention to this last meeting,” Ash said with a grin on her face, “and after that, we’ll head down to Skylight Books for the signing tonight.”
“I’m actually needed for this meeting?” Andy chuckled, saving the file before closing up his laptop. “Why the hell am I needed?”
“Because we need you to sign off on some casting decisions, Andy,” a familiar voice said as she entered the suite.
“Maya!” Andy laughed, seeing his partner walk in with a couple of studio execs in her wake. She’d clearly flown down to LA on her own to take a handful of meetings, but just hadn’t told Andy about it. “Couldn’t this have waited until I got back home?”
“It could, but I had to come down to meet with the folks over at Legendary Entertainment, to go through what I wanted, to settle the budget and the shooting schedule. We’re going to do 90% of it at StageOne Creative Space down in San Jose starting in June, so I’ll have a bit of a commute here and there, but I’ll still be local for almost the whole shoot,” his green-haired partner said to him. Maya had been the first person that Emily had recommended to Andy, and last month she’d asked his permission to adapt “Fatal Alliances,” one of his non-Gunslinger projects that, while it hadn’t sold bucketloads, had a loyal and faithful audience, something he’d gladly granted for her to make her directorial debut, having been an assistant director or a fight coordinator on several pictures. “We’ll need to go to Berlin to get a handful of external shots, but that’s like a week’s worth of shooting tops. And we wanted to bring by the two people who we wanted to cast for the leads over to see you, see if they’re okay for you.” The elevator dinged off in the distance.
“I’m sure they’ll be fine, Maya,” Andy started. “You know, we talked about it for a while but it’s still a shame we couldn’tHOLYFUCKINGSHIT you’re Ewan McGregor! And you’re Mary Elizabeth Winstead!” He suddenly glanced over at Maya, as the two movie stars began laughing. “They want to star in your movie of my fucking book?”
“Hello there!” Ewan said, giving his best Obi-Wan Kenobi voice as he offered his hand for Andy to shake. “I’m a big fan of your work. Little cross I wasn’t considered for Dale Sexton, honestly.”
“We shouldn’t be able to afford you,” Andy laughed, shaking the man’s hand immediately. “I’m guessing you two got paired up?”
Mary nodded. “We’d been dating for years, so when they asked Ewan if he had anyone that he wanted to get paired with first, I was the only name on his lips,” she said with a smug smile. “I had to practically twist his arm to get him to bring on some others.”
“Anybody famous I’d know?” Andy couldn’t help but ask.
Ewan waved his hand. “A gentleman really shouldn’t kiss and tell, but I’m sure word will come out eventually. So, back to the task at hands, you think you’d be okay if my love and I took on the leads in this film?”
“Okay?” Andy laughed. “I’d think I was far luckier than I had rights to be. Of course, you’re probably going to ask me to change the ending…”
“Fuck no!” Mary said. “That’s the best part of the book! The tragic ending, the two of them dying in each other’s arms, having taken down their respective bosses, having done the right thing for the wrong reasons, but being unable to stick around and clean up their own messes. Especially how you described that last shot, the two of them just slumping lifeless, arms wrapped around each other, covered in blood, the quiet of the snow drifting down onto their corpses… That was what sold me on it, and I told Summer, sorry, Maya, that I was only going to do it if she wasn’t going to tamper with the ending, because it was the perfect close for the story.” Maya professionally went by the name ‘Summer Steele’ so Andy had gotten used to people making that slip all the time.
“Maya love?” Andy said, glancing over at her.
“Yes, Andy?” Maya said, grinning at him, so proud how she’d been able to keep all this quiet until this very moment.
“Can you please get us all the paperwork, so we can sign this and get the deal locked in?”
“Somewhere you need to be?” Maya teased.
“Well, I’ve got a book signing in about an hour, and I figured since you were here…”
“Oh. Oh!” Maya said, laughing a touch awkwardly, as she opened her satchel bag to get the paperwork out.
“You’ve seen us on ‘Fargo’ then?” Ewan asked him as he moved to sign the paperwork.
“Oh, I’ve been a fan of yours since ‘Trainspotting,’ and yours since ‘Scott Pilgrim vs. the World,’ so I go way back,” Andy replied.
“Well, I hope we’ll see you on the set, in case we need to tweak lines,” Mary said to him.
“Absolutely!” Andy said. They all chatted for a little bit longer before Ewan and Mary excused themselves, along with the executives, leaving Maya with the rest of her family, Andy still chuckling at how odd his luck was.
“Just so you know,” Maya said, “if he’d have asked me to join them before you did, I’d have fucking done both of them in a heartbeat.”
“Who could blame you?” Ash said with a giggle.
Maya tapped Andy on his shoulder, a gesture he found odd, considering he was standing right next to her, but she had a wicked smile on her face.
“Yes?” Andy asked.
In her most playful voice ever, she asked him, “Nice shoes; wanna fuck?”
They were.
They did.
Comments
JC
God, I wish LA didn't have traffic around xmas!
JC
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Black Rabbit 07
Ducking loved this as always. Great chapter and I personally only considered it short because your writing is so fun to read that i basically zoom through it.
KernFlakes
Just a side questions not related to this chapter. Has Mali been talked about or introduced more since she was imprinted. Been going back and forth through that last few chapters, and haven't seen much or at all
