Lord of Entertainment

Chapter 525: Completing Production

(3rd Person POV)

Five days on Pandora, and with the blue people lending their hands to the work, the crew had raised the sets they needed for the first run of scenes.

Filming was already underway. At the start, Chief Tsu'laran and the rest of the natives had stood about the set unsure of themselves, uncertain what a camera wanted from them or how to give it. But then something none of the crew had planned for began to happen — whenever one of them faltered, they could feel the Great Mother herself moving through them, steadying them, shaping the moment until the acting came easy. Arthur ran the whole of it without a snag.

At his side, Firfel watched the natives work. "They're natural in front of the camera. Eyana most of all — she's enjoying this far more than she lets on."

"It's all new to her, and to the rest of them," Arthur said. "Of course they're savoring every moment."

And it was true. For all that they wanted for nothing in their own world, there was still a plain joy in them at trying something they had never done before.

That joy came up against its first wall when Arthur put a strange request to one of the natives, a young man named Tsu'kan — that he lend his very body to the human lead, Ryan.

"Forgive my insolence," Tsu'kan said, shifting where he stood, "but it is my body you're asking for. I can't simply hand it over to another to wear."

"There's nothing to fear, Tsu'kan," Arthur assured him. "I give you my word, in my own name, that your body will come back to you whole and well."

Tsu'kan said nothing. Beside him, even the chief held his tongue and would not speak for it.

Arthur caught the shape of it then. His name meant little enough to Tsu'kan or to any of them. It was not his word they measured a promise by.

It was the Great Mother's.

'How could I have forgotten? In the other timeline it was in her name that I swore it — and only then did he agree.'

So Arthur gave his promise again, this time on the name of the Great Mother: that no harm would come to the young man's body. And sure enough, Tsu'kan bowed his head and consented.

With that settled, they set up the scene — Ryan slipping into Tsu'kan's body for the shot. Ryan still found the whole notion deeply strange, but he steeled himself and went along with it. Then the magic took hold, the techniques Arthur had prepared folding one of them into the other, and where Ryan had stood there was now only Tsu'kan's tall blue frame, with Ryan looking out from behind its eyes.

It was the oddest thing he had ever felt.

Ryan turned the great blue hands over in front of his face, working the long fingers. "Is this — is this really me now?"

Arthur and the rest of the cast watched him find his footing in the borrowed body, and it played out on camera better than any of them had hoped. From there the scenes came one after another, and the work found its rhythm.

The time slipped away from them. By the end of it, three months had passed in that world, and the whole of the film was finished at last.

It was time to go home.

Eyana threw her arms around Firfel. "I'll miss you, Firfel."

"And I'll miss you." Firfel held her close. "But don't fret over it — I'll come and visit you again, some other time."

Eyana bounced on her heels. "Truly? Oh, I'm so happy!"

The two of them were far from the only bonds that had grown deep over those months. Ryan and the others had come to stand shoulder to shoulder with the natives — Ryan closest of all with Tsu'kan, having lived inside the man's very skin and walked a stretch of his life. And then there was George, who could not stop his tears, having gone and lost his heart entirely to a native girl.

Even the reporters, dragged out here against their will, had fallen for the way the natives lived.

"I'm going to miss all of this," one of them said. "Out here I can just breathe — no editor over my shoulder, no next article grinding away at me."

"You said it," another agreed. "If I could, I'd stay and live here for good. But I can't, and I know it — this isn't my place, and there's still too much waiting for me back home."

"Same for me." A third looked out over the trees. "It's a sad thing to leave. But I'll hold onto the memories I made here."

The whole party was heavy with it. As for Arthur, he too paid his brief farewell to the Great Mother.

Before long they had boarded the ship and lifted away. Through the windows they could still make out the natives below — and, waving alongside them, the great dangerous beasts that had played their own part in the film — all of them seeing the crew off into the sky.

Five days later, in the home world, the Horn Kingdom had not stopped talking about it.

Three months on from the day Arthur and his team had vanished into the sky aboard that spaceship, bound for some far-off world, the kingdom still turned the story over. There were articles by the stack, and more of them still about the handful of reporters who had gone along for the voyage. The whole of the world was waiting on one thing — whether the ship would truly come back, and whether it had truly crossed all that distance to a distant planet at all. Whether such a thing was even possible.

And then the moment everyone had been waiting for arrived.

At Hellfire Airport, a shape appeared high in the distant sky, and word of it ran through the airport and the crowd of reporters below like a struck match. The spaceship came down, and the instant the doors opened and the crew began to file out, the press surged in around them.

"Back already?" one shouted over the crush. "Is it true — did you actually reach that distant world?"

"How long was the crossing? Days? Weeks?"

"Did any of your people come to harm out there?"

"What's the planet called? Is it a place a person could actually live?"

"Or is this the moment you finally admit the whole thing was staged for us?"

Arthur answered without a trace of heat. "I brought reporters along precisely so that everything our crew did would be set down and told. Naturally, they're bound to leave the film's secrets out of it — that's written into their agreements. So wait for their articles, or put your questions to them directly. As for the team and myself, we've had a long journey, and we'd like to rest."

At that, the media eased back and let Arthur and his people through.

And no sooner had they done so than they rounded on the reporters who had made the voyage, pressing them for whatever scraps of the story they could get.