Patriot Smith, page 2
part #1 of Patriots Series
That part hadn’t been on accident. In fact, it had been his idea when he’d first come up with the idea for the character. The acting portion of it. Hal had actually developed the storyline for that particular show, of course. The man had mad skills that way. The red-head had also agreed with a symbolic slamming of the Black Masks, though they hadn’t shared the reasoning with anyone else there. Not openly.
Doing that sort of thing might be a little too stressful for the others.
Sebastian really didn’t think that anyone would shut them down for making that particular set of people the bad guys, if in a backhanded fashion. Really, if he was going to be daring about it, he’d come up with a way of making the terrorists the openly stated bad guys in something. People needed to be reminded who they were fighting and why. That could be a risk for their studio, which was the only thing that had stopped him so far. If they got pulled off the web for seeming too much like they were on one side or the other, then their reason for being there would dry up overnight. It meant moving carefully. Navigating the current political world gently. Like a small ship, on the open seas. Bobbing carefully between the crushing waves of hate and bigotry that had been foisted upon them all.
Still, they had some small wiggle room and so far no one had really gone after fictional programs too hard for anything like that. Commentary was more at risk, as far as he could tell. People that used to talk about what was going on in the world just weren’t allowed to speak any longer. They’d vanished from the web, more or less.
Karen finally let him go, relaxing her thin arms and stepping back. Her face was pretty enough really. She wasn’t a ten, of course. More like a nice eight, if her makeup was right. Maybe a pre-martial law seven, even without that kind of crutch. Not high enough level for real t.v. automatically but even that might not be true. Things like that were subjective, after all. She was the best-looking woman there and was interesting enough that she might have actually made it in acting, in the real world. If that had been an option any longer. Not that Hollywood had closed down. It was just that they’d felt the pressure of the lockdowns as well, so were putting out a lot less of their old style of material. Television was still going strong but movies had stopped being nearly as popular.
After the first few bombings that had killed audience members, people had stopped going to theaters nearly as often. Without that income source, the big blockbusters were too expensive to produce.
Her voice was a bit high pitched but that was down to size. He was nearly a foot taller than she was, making her about five-two or less, he thought. Currently Karen sounded a bit tense when she spoke. That would be about hitting him with an ax for two hours, no doubt. That she cared about that probably meant she was innately a decent person.
Still, she grinned at him, worked up or not. Acting was her life, after all.
“Yeah. I need to go and do some things. You know, Mr. Pickles isn’t going to voice himself.” That was for their puppet program. Sebastian just ran one of the cameras for that one, since they all shared the different tasks. The one caveat there, for the whole operation, was that he did most of the building and props, himself.
That and cared for the trees. In the spring and summer, he did most of the gardening as well. Sara did the greenhouse work though. At least parts of it. If the misting system needed repairs, he had to do it, of course. No one else there was particularly handy, as far as physical things went.
It sounded a bit uneven, thinking of it that way but someone had to do it. Most of the others, while good at something, tended to be a little bit lazy at times. They enjoyed life. Just not the parts of it that were needed in order to keep it all going under the new rules. So they had to be pushed into working.
Thankfully that particular task wasn’t his. Melissa did that part for them all.
That woman wasn’t a ten either, though she managed to play housewife roles, as well as the angry mother, pretty well. She actually had the age for it, which had her thinking that she was the one in charge, most of the time. At least that she should be. The only problem with that was her unfortunate lack of intelligence. Added to the fact that Mel was lazy as all get out, personally. Also, almost perpetually drunk. She did keep the others on task though, being an expert nagger, so it kind of worked out anyway.
That all added up to mean that she was probably nearly as cute as Karen. He simply didn’t like her as well, so had downgraded her in his head. It was a danger in life. One that he had to admit to, when it came up. Only inside his head, if no one asked him about it. Being honest didn’t mean he had to walk around saying everything he thought, constantly and without end.
At least that was his take on things. It was fair not to speak, after all.
A lot of his past was held in a similar fashion. There were things that he was never planning to bring up, if they could be avoided. Mainly due to the fact that he couldn’t speak about them honestly. He’d signed contracts to that end, after all. Papers that had mentioned going to prison for ten years for each infraction. Thankfully, no one asked him about things like that on a day to day basis. For that matter, no one had ever even asked him if he had a military or intelligence background at all, for some reason. Probably because he was an actor and they just didn’t think of him as anything else.
Looking around, taking in the world, he went back to what he’d been considering, about the others there.
Chloe and Vina were a bit lower on the pretty scale but the truth was that he would have dated any of them based on looks alone, if he were that shallow and was willing to put up with the headaches involved with drama prone actresses sulking at him for three months over the dinner table, if there was a breakup. Which there eventually would be, there. After all, he wasn’t going to keep dating a woman that slept around on him and given the issues of living as closely as they all did, that would, eventually, happen. In fact, it had for the others, almost constantly.
He smiled, since being nice was still a good thing to do in life. Then he gave Karen a single, firm, nod. A bob of the head that most men would understand instantly and that a lot of women might just miss the meaning of. It was basically him just letting her know that he got her point. Even that he agreed with it. Mr. Pickles truly wasn’t going to voice himself, after all.
It wasn’t that friendly seeming, since he wasn’t trying to screw her. She was sleeping with Marcus, after all. Dating. At least they had been the last time he’d checked on that kind of thing. It was possible that his information was too old to be useful on the matter. That they both managed to hook up with someone else at least once or twice a month was on them. The issue there was down to the fact that they didn’t have an open relationship, even if they lived like they did. It made for problems that ended up with the rest of them having to get involved in personal relationship issues.
Sebastian just wasn’t going to go there. After all, he told the truth all the time. Sure, that meant he had to admit that he wanted to sleep with Karen. Even out loud, if she asked about it. The tiny actress was nice enough and attractive. Marc wasn’t that great of a catch either, even if he was good looking and a decent actor. The problem, for Sebastian, personally, was that if they were at dinner and someone mentioned who was doing what with whom, or asked what anyone was getting up to, even casually, he was going to tell them the truth. At least if he knew what it was.
Outside of playing make believe on camera, he did that constantly. Well, unless he needed to lie to save a life. That excuse had never come up, interestingly enough. If it did, he had a plan for it. Lying his ass off. Anything else would have been far too hard to live with. Other than that…
Well, if you didn’t want problems, it was normally best to avoid them. There were topics that he didn’t bring up much, since he wasn’t allowed to go into them. That part could be handled openly though, with him simply not speaking when they came up. That was close to being a lie but he’d sworn an oath not to let some things out into the world at one point. More than once, really. Going against that just because he’d later come up with a new habit of only telling the truth wasn’t ethical. So, he just didn’t bring up certain points about himself, if he could help it.
Which probably meant he was boring. That was a thing he aspired to, as to his personal life. There was more than enough daily drama from simply living there already. The rest of the world wasn’t helping at the moment, of course. Not if the goal was to be as bland as possible, day to day. The press kept calling the attacks a second Civil War. It wasn’t that, by a long shot. Not yet at any rate. So far, they were just having a terror campaign of significant note. It was the Black Masks playing everyone like puppets, working them into a frenzy, to get what they wanted in the first place.
A clamp down on free speech and a police state.
That it was coming from the left, politically, was insane. Then, Sebastian and almost everyone he knew were also pretty far left and honestly, the terrorist fucknuts would have probably punched him in the face for being a Nazi if they ever met. What with his calling for non-violence and common sense, like he tried to do all the time. The difference there was that he didn’t think that killing people was ever really warranted. Not if they weren’t trying to kill you, first. You tried to save lives and change minds, if you were a good person.
The creeps that had started all the problems didn’t see it that way. They just wanted things to get as bad as possible, so that the common man, and woman, would come to their side and join up for their communist utopia. Except that, of course, if you were white, especially white and male, they kind of thought you were the devil and wanted you dead. Sebastian was fine that way, since his family was from Puerto Rico but that didn’t mean he couldn’t see prejudice for what it was. That so many managed not to get that point was baffling to him.
That meant he was kind of pissed off at the jerks that had messed everything up. Under the guise of saving the world. Fighting for their Marxist version of the perfect society. Worse, some of them probably actually meant well. They were just confused kids who didn’t get that life was about more than the ideology of the moment. That being a good person required people to accept everyone for what they were, right up to the point they tried to hurt others.
Instead of preaching about matters he couldn’t really impact that day, if in his head, since that wasn’t going to help anyone, he waited. Relaxing as he stood there, his face still covered with paint and wearing his costume. After a bit, Hal smiled, looking up from the video they’d gotten.
“This looks good. Real but also freaky as all hell. I gotta tell you, if I saw you coming for me like that, I’d have run, too.”
It was the point, even though the show, “Eleven” wasn’t really a horror movie. It was science fiction. A story about a genetically modified woman, Dee, who was being hunted by a psychopathic killer with psychic powers. That was Sebastian’s character, who was only known as “Paint”. At least as far as the program went. The folks at home. He knew that the name was going to be Brian Elohart. They’d scripted the ten episodes out before they’d started, so that they could go over the minutia and make sure that the plot actually worked consistently.
It was actually kind of interesting, since Dee had powers but didn’t know how to fight in particular. Paint, on the other hand, was kind of a badass. A trained killer and martial artist that could really pull out the stops physically, as well as having mental abilities of his own. Not that Sebastian was getting to show much of that, skill wise. That was down to the fact that they didn’t have some of the high-end tricks that they could have there. They needed a wirework harness, for instance. That was a particular look, as far as effects went but Hal figured it would actually allow Dee to seem like she wasn’t just a short and skinny girl who was about to have her behind handed to her, most of the time.
The idea, for the show, was that in the next season, the character would be gaining access to telekinetic powers and learn to kind of float in the air a bit. Paint wouldn’t, so it would give Dee a bit of an edge that way. At least in theory.
It could be done, though they needed to get some money together and do most of the work on it themselves. Which meant taking a load of preserves and fruit into town, to try and make a few dollars, the next day. People still had jobs, though a lot of those had gone away in recent months. The gas rationing hadn’t helped, either.
They had seven licensed drivers there and only three road worthy vehicles, so were doing all right that way. They also didn’t have to make daily store runs or anything either, taking a lot of food off of the twenty acres they lived on. They were also fully stocked up, having about a years’ worth of food for twelve people there already. Possibly closer to twice that, not even counting the next year’s fruit and garden harvests.
Most people that commuted to work had either gotten fuel exemptions or had simply lost their jobs. The idea, and it wasn’t wrong, was that the terrorists couldn’t get together and attack a city all at once if they didn’t have the fuel to reach the place. A nearly clever trick that cost in pain for the average person, even as it actually worked to stop the bad guys from doing what they had to start with.
Which had led to them actually just building bombs and blowing up government buildings instead. Working in smaller groups to terrorize innocent people, instead of going to riots and breaking a few windows. They did a lot with firebombs as well. Probably since they could spend fifty dollars on rags, glass bottles, gas and a bit of motor oil and create incredible havoc with the makeshift weapons, inside a city. Earlier in the summer, several states had been very nearly burned to the ground due to that kind of thing. Mainly large cities in dry areas.
Because that was going to make a better world happen.
Still, at the moment, he could smile. The scene had turned out pretty well and that was a good thing.
“Good. I need to get this goop off my face then. I’m on camera two for HLP.” Happy Little Puppets.
The show was actually decently adult, since they’d figured that puppets weren’t just for kids anymore. It was probably going to warp the tender and delicate minds of a generation if parents didn’t monitor what their five-year olds were watching but that was the risk they had to take, if they wanted a viewing audience. Even the children wanted more than a badly sung version of the alphabet now. It was nearly like people had standards or something as far as entertainment went.
Hal snorted a bit at the words.
“This schedule is killer, you know that, right? I’d be out of here already, except that, you know, I want to be famous. Did you catch the numbers from the last release?”
That had come the day before and the Coldwater, where he was staying at night, wasn’t hooked up to the net. Thinking back, he realized that the last thing to go up was probably “Marty’s Corner” which was the most political of their shows, actually handling news items. Not that it wasn’t fiction as well. The idea was kind of a rift off of South Park that way. They took what was in the news that week and had a show ready on Friday. With a bit of bad language and silliness added to the mix. It was a sit-com and live action. There was no way for them to animate things quickly enough, lacking anyone with that level of talent. As far as he knew, at any rate. Sebastian had a part in it but it was a fairly small one. A background character really.
“No? Did anyone watch it?”
That was always hit or miss, he knew. The show wasn’t bad at all but that didn’t mean people loved it yet.
The words got a soft laugh from the casually dressed man in front of him.
“Two million views. In less than twenty-four hours. That’s honest television levels of interaction.” Hal smiled, his red hair being a bit curly and out of control. The very top of his head was balding enough to show shiny skin through the mesh of soft looking amber, which wasn’t great for a man in his mid-twenties. By thirty he’d be hairless up there. He was the soulless kind of ginger, complete with ultra-pale skin but not a bad person, jokes aside.
Sebastian had to let the news sink in for a moment before speaking.
“Seriously? That’s… Incredible!” He meant it, even if what he did for Marty was mainly writing and sound. That, his bit part and props, which was really the important bit as far as he was concerned. They had three, maybe even five, good writers there.
Only one of them did props and practical special effects well. Even at that, he was cutting corners and taking risks when he could, so that things would look right. It wasn’t really professional in that way. Then, they didn’t have insurance, so no one was going to come knocking on their door to tell them they couldn’t do it anymore. Though if one of them got seriously hurt, it was going to really put a dent in their lives.
Pulling his blue t-shirt over his skinny middle, tugging it from the bottom, Hal smiled.
“I know! Not that one episode of a single show means anything but maybe we’ll get some growth? I wouldn’t mind having a few more viewers. Our work has been pretty good, I think.”
That was just true. It wasn’t perfect but their little studio was putting out three hours of new content a week and doing it on a level that seemed like it would fit on television. At least in Britain or Canada. Even if it was all up on the net, not on a network. Even better than that, they were planning four full seasons during the year. That meant they had sixteen shows coming out, annually. Yes, the staff and cast were kind of similar in each one but that was part of the charm. They were basically showing the world an old-school playhouse in a small town. Just jazzed up a bit with improved graphics and decent acting. Then they sent that off into the big times, directly. Getting millions of people to follow their work. Tens of millions.
Sebastian hoped it would work that way, at least.
