Lord of Entertainment

Chapter 526: Blockbuster Release

(3rd Person POV)

Only a few hours after the ship touched down at Hellfire Airport, the reporters who had made the voyage released their documentary footage of the distant planet.

It went out across the whole nation, and people tuned in by the thousands — as much to drink in the sight of another world as to judge for themselves whether a word of what Arthur and Hellfire claimed was real. It ran barely an hour, cut together from every reporter's own vantage on that far planet, and it was enough. Long before it ended, the disbelief had curdled into something closer to wonder, and not a soul watching could hold back from feeling the strange beauty of the place.

In one tavern, the documentary had the whole room lit up and loud.

The owner, a feline demon, shook his head slowly behind the bar. "Unbelievable. Hellfire turns the world on its head one invention after another — and now they've got a vessel that sails all the way to distant stars." He set down the glass he'd been drying. "I always took it for a dream, the thought of setting foot on another world. Now I can't shake the urge to borrow that ship of theirs and go and see it for myself."

"I'm right there with you, boss." A half-drunk patron gestured loosely at the screen. "Those trees, those creatures — that sky. Just looking at it, the whole place feels so clean. So new."

"It does," said another, further down the bar. "This world of ours is choked and paved over — an urban jungle, nothing but stone. Barely a tree left in the whole city. Well — save for that giant one they've got standing at the center of Hellfire HQ. Though I'll be honest, I've always wondered if the thing's even real. It's far too big, too tall to be."

A succubus by the window gave a low laugh. "Mm — those great tall trees out on that other world look far more interesting to me."

"If I had a ship of my own," someone else put in, "I'd go and live out there the rest of my days."

Around the room, the talk turned warm with longing for the world they'd watched on the screen.

Then somebody cut across it. "You know what I can't wait for? The film they shot out there. If they went to that much trouble over a movie, it's got to be good."

"You're not wrong about that."

And they weren't alone in it. Across everyone who'd seen the documentary, the same hunger took hold — a want to see the movie itself. It had been filmed on another world, after all.

Not everyone was so easily won over. A stretch of the press flatly refused to swallow the documentary. Hellfire had simply bought off the reporters who tagged along, they argued, and the footage was a trick — the sort of thing a company like Hellfire could fake without breaking a sweat.

[Scientists Demand Hellfire Stop Lying — "This is a blatant stunt to sell his upcoming film! Marketing theater, and a deception played on the whole world!"]

The headlines came one after another, each of them chipping at the documentary, and the doubt bled outward until a great many ordinary people had begun to think along the same lines.

It grew loud enough, in the end, that Queen Mary Nightstar of the Horn Kingdom herself summoned the reporters to be questioned on live television. She brought in a mage of no small power for it — one whose spell could sort a lie from the truth on the spot — and the people watched, breath held, as the Queen put her questions to the reporters one by one.

The reporters did not waver.

"What I saw on that planet, and what I felt there — it's the truth," the first said. "We recorded our own lives out there, the whole of it save the set. Every word I'm telling you is true."

"That's right." The second lifted his chin. "And Hellfire never paid us so much as a copper. We're honest working folk, nothing more."

"That footage," the third added, "is beyond anything the finest effects house or the highest illusion spell could counterfeit."

They gave their answers, and to each one the mage laid his spell — and each time it showed the same: they spoke the truth. And it went out live, not to the Horn Kingdom alone, but across the whole of the world.

After that broadcast, the doubt drained out of most of them. Not all, of course — there were those who insisted it had to be some deeper fake still. And so the days rolled on with the argument running through them. But by the end of it, when the heat had gone out, what they were truly arguing over was the movie.

The cast and crew found themselves pulled onto every famous talk show going, questioned and prodded, and Ryan — the lead — took the worst of the crowding. He gave them the same answer every time, and would not be moved off it.

"Just wait for the film. That's all I ask. Whether you take our journey to another world as true or not — it doesn't matter in the slightest. We set out to make something to entertain people. That's the whole of it."

And it was true, every word. It was that answer, more than anything, that finally landed with the scientists — the dawning sense that they'd spent all this breath railing against a movie, of all things, and had no business taking it half so seriously.

Two weeks on, the world had let the matter settle. The clamor over the ship and the far-off world had quieted, sinking back into the run of ordinary days.

Then the trailer for Avatar dropped, and it all came roaring back to life.

One look at the sights it promised, and the crowds lost their heads over it.

"I knew Hellfire wouldn't let us down — it looks incredible!"

"Who cares whether they really flew off to another world or not? I'm watching this either way!"

More and more of them were pulled in by the film itself, until the squabble over spaceships and distant worlds had all but drowned beneath the simpler question of when they could get a seat.

And when Avatar finally opened wide across the world, the people packed the halls to bursting — and from the very first frame, the film had them.

It opened on the world itself: mountains hanging in empty air, a forest that woke into soft blue light as night came down over it. The theaters went dead silent.

"That's the place from the documentary," a dwarf breathed, gripping his armrest. "It's real. It's actually real."

"Shh — look at the trees—"

Then the hero — Ryan's part — woke for the first time inside one of the tall blue bodies. He hauled himself up on legs suddenly too long for him, cracked his skull on a beam, and bolted off in a run he plainly couldn't stop. The whole hall broke out laughing.

"He runs like my husband coming home from the tavern," a demon woman cackled, and half her row lost it with her.

But it was the flight that took the roof off. When the hero swung up onto the back of one of the great winged beasts and it flung itself off the cliff — when the forest dropped away and the two of them went tearing through the floating peaks — the whole theater sucked in its breath as one.

"He's flying — he's actually flying—!"

A child was up on his seat, arms flung wide, leaning into every turn the beast made on the screen. No one told him to sit down.

"I think I'm going to be sick," a young woman laughed, white-knuckled on the armrest. "I'm going to be sick and I don't want it to stop—"

A clan woman had taught him all of it — the forest, the hunt, the beasts — and somewhere in the middle of it teacher and pupil turned into something more. The hall went quiet in a wholly different way, sleeves pressed to eyes.

"There it is," an old elf murmured thickly, leaning forward. "There it is."

Then the machines came. The invaders wanted what lay buried under the natives' most sacred ground, and they meant to have it whatever the cost. When the great tree at the heart of the forest came down in fire, the whole hall flinched as one. A child somewhere began to cry, and it wasn't only the child.

"No— no, not the tree—"

"Cowards," a broad-shouldered man spat. "I know that kind. Dress robbery up as progress and sleep like babes."

And then the hero chose. He turned his back on his own kind, threw in with the people who'd taken him in, and called the clans and the wild beasts of the world alike to war. The sky filled — riders wheeling on their winged mounts, and below them the great beasts of the deep forest breaking loose upon the machines in a living flood. The theaters couldn't hold still. People were on their feet.

"Get them — GET them!"

"Here they come — here they come!"

When one of the towering war-machines went down beneath a charging mountain of beasts, hall after hall clear across the world erupted at once.

It ended hard-won, and not without its cost — the hero leaving the last of his old self behind for good and crossing fully into the blue body, waking this time to stay. The lights came up on rooms full of red eyes and wrung-out, happy faces, and on applause that simply would not stop. Some people only sat there, not ready to leave that world behind yet.

"...that's it? It's already over?"

"I'm coming back tomorrow. First showing."

And under all of it, from the first floating peak to the last frame, the same quiet certainty had settled into them: no effects house, no illusion spell in all their world, could ever have faked sights like these. Which meant the thing they'd half refused to believe — that it had truly been shot on another world — was, at last, taking root for good.

And running under all of it, from the floating peaks to the last frame, the same thought had been settling into them, quiet and certain: no craft in their world, no effects house and no illusion spell, could ever have counterfeited sights like these. Which meant the thing they'd half refused to believe — that it had truly been shot on another world — was, at last, taking root for good.