Chapter 240: 240. Epiphany

The air conditioning in Cutting Room 1 had been running on high since six in the morning, keeping the room at a steady sixty-four degrees to prevent the processing towers in the machine bay from overheating. It smelled of ozone, dry foam acoustic baffling, and the burnt dregs of dark-roast coffee that had baked to a black crust at the bottom of the glass pot by the door.

Daniel sat in the heavy leather captain’s chair behind the center console. He had an unbuttoned green flannel shirt over a faded black crewneck, his boots propped on the lower steel crossbar of the desk, a ceramic mug of lukewarm water resting on his knee.

At the main console sat Benny.

Flanking him at the secondary workstations were Maya and Greg, his assistant editors, both wearing closed-back headphones, staring at cascading bins of high-bitrate media and timecode scratchpads.

On the sixty-five-inch OLED reference monitor mounted dead-center on the front wall, Reel 4 of Beauty and the Beast was frozen on frame sixteen of the library reveal.

“Let’s see the transition again from the reverse angle,” Daniel said, his eyes fixed on the display. “Roll it back two seconds before she steps past the doorframe.”

Benny didn’t say anything. His left hand dropped onto the aluminum jog wheel, spinning it counter-clockwise. The timeline on the lower monitor scrubbed back, the digital audio popping in short, rhythmic bursts through the near-field monitors, before he tapped the spacebar to roll at twenty-four frames per second.

On screen, Anne Hathaway stepped across the threshold of the castle library.

The stage lighting from the San Fernando Valley lot looked clean on the reference monitor. The amber key light picked up the rough weave of her blue linen provincial apron, catching the fine loose strands of hair around her temples. As the camera crane pushed forward, Dan Stevens turned from the high wooden shelving.

The creature composite on the screen was version twenty-two, delivered from the digital vendor in Culver City late yesterday afternoon.

Daniel leaned his elbows on his knees, narrowing his eyes at the screen.

Over the months of post-production, the pipeline had been stripped down and rebuilt twice. The digital asset for the Beast wasn’t floating like a video game model anymore. Because Dan had worn the forty-pound counterweighted vest and the modified boots on set, his center of gravity was already low and heavy. The digital artists had mapped his exact facial capture—the slight twitch of his left nostril, the hesitation in the corner of his lower lip, the slow, defensive blink—straight onto the skeletal mesh of the creature.

“Look at the fur where the rim light hits the left horn,” Benny muttered, freezing the playhead with his thumb. “See that line along the jawbone? Last week it looked like wet cardboard. They finally baked in the ambient occlusion from the mahogany shelf behind him. The light actually bleeds through the outer coat now.”

“It’s better,” Daniel said, studying the frame. “What about the snout?”

“Took four percent off the specular highlight, just like you told them on Tuesday,” Benny said, turning his head slightly to peer over his glasses at Daniel. “He doesn’t look like a seal coming out of the water anymore. He looks dry. Like he’s been sleeping on cold stone for ten years.”

“Maya, what’s track six look like?” Daniel asked.

Maya pulled her left headphone off her ear, tapping her trackpad. “Menken’s live string pass from London. We dropped the forty cellos in this morning. The level sits right under Anne’s breath when she looks up at the second gallery.”

“Play it from the archway,” Daniel said.

Benny hit the spacebar.

The room filled with the deep, resonant acoustic weight of Abbey Road’s live room. Forty cellos laid down a slow, four-note progression that hung in the air, fragile and tentative, matching the exact beat where Dan’s fur-covered hand slid the heavy leather-bound volume across the dark oak table toward Anne.

There were no flashy cuts. No rapid-fire edits trying to manufacture energy where none belonged. Just two actors holding a frame, backed by real timber and live woodwinds.

When the last cello note died into the quiet room tone of the stage, Benny let the sequence roll for another three seconds before tapping the spacebar to stop.

The cutting room went dead quiet.

Benny leaned back in his high-backed task chair, rubbing his bloodshot eyes beneath his glasses. He looked over his shoulder at Daniel with that dry, satisfied look he only had when a sequence was finally locked.

“That’s the scene, Dan,” Benny said quietly. “If you touch that cut again, I’m locking the door and changing the server passwords.”

Daniel let out a quiet chuckle, stretching his neck until the vertebrae popped. “Print it, Benny. Drop the cut into the master reel and let the sound team have the turnover.”

“Greg, export the proxy for the mix stage,” Benny instructed his assistant without looking away from the timeline. “Maya, clean up the bin and back up the project cache to the LTO drive. I’m going to take ten minutes to walk outside before my corneas dry out and fall onto the keyboard.”

“Take twenty, Benny,” Daniel said, standing up from his armchair. “You’ve been in this basement since seven.”

“Seven yesterday, Dan,” Benny grunted, though there was a faint smirk on his face as he grabbed his cardigan from the back of the chair. “Some of us don’t have movie-star genetics. Go drink your coffee.”

—

Daniel walked out of the post-production building into the bright, dry heat of the Burbank afternoon.

The transition from the cold, light-controlled basement to the seventy-eight-degree California sun felt like stepping into another country. The air smelled of hot asphalt, dry pine, and the sweet exhaust from the studio shuttle vans humming along the perimeter road.

Daniel walked past the editorial bungalows, heading toward the production offices on the north lot. He pulled his tablet from his leather shoulder bag, walking slowly along the shaded brick sidewalk beneath the pepper trees.

He unlocked the screen and opened the weekly studio financial dispatch.

Tucked below the theatrical advance tracking for Beauty and the Beast was a dense, fifty-page quarterly performance audit sent over by Rowan at Miller Interactive down in Culver City.

Daniel tapped the audit open, his thumb scrolling past the infrastructure maintenance logs down to the player metrics.

It had been four months since Minecraft Version 1.0 officially pushed to global servers.

The initial launch frenzy—the four-million-player queue spikes, the Twitch servers bending under thirty-hour marathons, the immediate flood of twenty-five-dollar retail purchases—had long since settled into a massive, terrifyingly stable global baseline. The game wasn’t just a sudden hit that spiked for two weeks and faded into the background. It had quietly entrenched itself as a permanent fixture of global digital culture.

Over thirty million active monthly accounts were logging in across North America, Europe, and Asia. The Forge launcher was processing hundreds of thousands of concurrent player connections at any given hour of the day.

Daniel scrolled down to the third section of the audit: The Community Design Initiative – 120-Day Royalties & Creator Retention.

When the 1.0 master build had gone live four months back, Daniel had insisted on hardcoding the names of the ten community art winners directly into the game’s vanilla tooltips, while attaching a direct micro-percentage of every themed aesthetic bundle and decorative texture pack sold through The Forge straight to their accounts.

At the time, the business department had treated it like a nice public relations gesture—a smart marketing write-off to build goodwill with modders.

Daniel looked at the quarterly payout column on the spreadsheet.

The numbers were staggering.

The sixteen-year-old high school kid from Toledo, Ohio—the one who had drawn the twelve Renaissance oil painting canvases on a beat-up family laptop—had cleared over two hundred and forty thousand dollars in direct automated royalty deposits over the last four months.

The digital artist from Manchester who designed the glazed terracotta floor tiles had earned nearly three hundred thousand dollars.

The kid from Germany who coded the copper armor trims had quit his weekend grocery job, bought a dedicated workstation, and hired a tax accountant before his nineteenth birthday.

Attached to the bottom of the audit was a forwarded note from Rowan:

Dan,

The legal team had to set up automated LLC management templates for half these kids because their local banks in Ohio and Lancashire didn’t know how to handle sixty-thousand-dollar monthly ACH deposits from a game launcher. None of them have agents. None of them went to design academies. Two of them just paid off their parents’ thirty-year mortgages with digital pixel art. The community retention on these packs is forty percent higher than our in-house assets because players know the money actually goes to real people who play the game.

Best four hundred grand in prize money we ever spent.

— Rowan

Daniel stopped walking, standing in the shade of a large magnolia tree near the edge of the lawn, staring down at the numbers on the screen.

Two hundred and forty thousand dollars. To a kid in Ohio whose dad worked in an auto plant.

No agent at CAA skimming ten percent off the top. No packaging fees. No development hell where three junior studio executives spent nine months giving contradictory notes on a two-page treatment. The kid just had real talent, the work was put directly in front of the audience without gatekeepers, and the merit of the work did the rest.

Daniel looked up from the tablet, staring across the manicured lawns of the Burbank lot toward the tall white soundstages.

The film industry was choking itself to death on its own pedigree.

Every week, agency packaging heads tried to attach the same four trust-fund writers to historical adaptations, or pushed some director whose father was a network president into eighty-million-dollar studio features. If you were a working-class kid with a camera in Glasgow, or a young woman with a finished script living in a two-bedroom apartment in Queens, you didn’t even exist to this town.

You paid fifty dollars to submit your script to an online competition where an overworked, underpaid intern skimmed the first five pages while eating lunch. You paid eighty dollars to submit a short film to a regional festival where the jury was made up of the festival director’s personal friends. And if you didn’t have fifty thousand dollars of personal debt to survive five years of unpaid assistant work in Los Angeles, you simply aged out and got a real job.

The talent didn’t dry up. The pipe was just blocked by people who owned the valves.

Daniel turned off the tablet screen, slipped it back into his leather bag, and changed his heading.

Instead of going back to the editorial suites, he cut straight across the grass toward the executive bungalow.

—

The front door to Tom’s bungalow was unlocked.

Daniel pushed it open, stepping into the cool, wood-paneled foyer. From the back corner office, the distinct, rhythmic thump of a rubber stress ball hitting the wall echoed down the hallway, accompanied by Tom’s gravelly voice muttering creative obscenities under his breath.

Daniel walked in without knocking.

Tom was sitting behind his wide mahogany desk with his shirt sleeves rolled up to his hairy forearms, his tie pulled loose, throwing a blue rubber ball against the plaster wall beside his window, catching it, and throwing it again. On his desk sat a half-eaten pastrami sandwich wrapped in butcher paper, a legal pad covered in angry red ink, and a stack of trade magazines with headlines about slumping theatrical admissions for legacy studio releases.

“If you’re here to tell me Menken wants three more French horns, Dan, I’m throwing this chair through the window,” Tom said without looking up, catching the blue ball with a solid slap of his palm.

“Menken’s fine, Tom,” Daniel said, walking over and pulling out the wooden armchair across from the desk, sitting down with an easy, unhurried posture. “Benny locked the library sequence ten minutes ago.”

Tom lowered the ball, squinting over his reading glasses. “Then why are you pacing around my lot? You have three pregnant women sitting in a fortress in Bel Air. If I were you, I’d be home building cribs or hiding in the pool house.”

“I was looking at the quarterly numbers Rowan sent over from Culver City,” Daniel said.

Tom let out a heavy, long-suffering sigh, tossing the stress ball into an empty metal wastebasket where it clattered against the tin. “The Minecraft numbers? Dan, we’ve had that conversation every month since the summer. The game is an absolute titan. It generates more monthly cash than three cable networks combined. What about it?”

“The ten kids from the art contest,” Daniel said.

Tom rubbed the bridge of his nose, pulling his glasses off. “The ones who won the tournament? What did they do now? Did one of them get arrested?”

“The kid from Ohio who drew the paintings cleared two hundred and forty grand in royalties over the last four months,” Daniel said, his tone steady, matter-of-fact. “The girl from Manchester made three hundred. None of them had agents, Tom. None of them had managers. None of them had ever met a studio executive.”

Tom picked up half of his pastrami sandwich, took a bite, chewed slowly, and swallowed. “Yeah. It’s a great story. It makes the studio look like philanthropists while the launcher prints cash. Good business.”

“It’s not just good business for a video game, Tom,” Daniel said, leaning forward, resting his forearms on the mahogany blotter. “It’s the blueprint. We’re doing it for film.”

Tom stopped chewing.

He lowered the sandwich back to the paper. His dark eyes narrowed, studying Daniel’s face. He had known Daniel long enough to recognize that exact look—the calm, absolute certainty that came before an entire department had to mobilize.

“Daniel,” Tom said slowly, pointing his pen at him. “What are you talking about?”

“We’re running a tournament for film,” Daniel said. “Global. Open entry.”

Tom just stared at Daniel for five full seconds, while the second hand on the antique wall clock behind his desk clicked five times in the silence.

Then, Tom reached out with his left hand, picked up his paper napkin, neatly wiped his fingers, and leaned back in his leather executive chair until the springs groaned in protest.

“A tournament,” Tom repeated, his tone completely flat. “Like… an open call. On the internet.”

“Yes.”

“Dan, do you have any earthly concept of the sheer, unmitigated ocean of unwatchable garbage that exists in the world of amateur filmmaking?” Tom threw his hands out, his voice rising in pure, operational exasperation. “Do you know what happens when we tell the global internet that Miller Studios is taking open video submissions?

“We will receive four hundred thousand hours of footage of eighteen-year-olds crying in shower stalls while reading Sylvia Plath. We will get ninety thousand student films shot on hand-cranked Bolexes about the existential dread of buying groceries. It will drown our entire development department in forty-eight hours. We’d have to hire half of North Hollywood just to empty the digital inbox.”

Daniel didn’t flinch. A faint, dry smirk touched the corner of his mouth. “Then we don’t use script readers, Tom. We don’t use development executives. We use the platform we already own.”

Tom leaned forward, his hands flat on the desk, listening now. He knew who signed the checks. More importantly, he knew Daniel never threw an idea on the table without having the engineering already figured out. “Alright. Talk to me. How do you stop the flood from breaking the dam?”

Daniel pulled a legal pad from the brass holder near Tom’s elbow, grabbed a fresh pen, and drew a clean horizontal line across the top third of the page.

“We announce the Miller Open Filmmaking Championship,” Daniel said, his tone turning crisp and authoritative. “Global. Anyone with an internet connection can enter. No entry fees. Zero. We don’t charge thirty dollars for a submission like the film festivals that treat working-class kids like an extraction racket.”

“Okay,” Tom said, his eyes tracking the pen. “How do you divide the categories?”

“We break it into two distinct tiers,” Daniel explained.

“Tier One is the Technical & Craft Disciplines. Individual categories designed to test raw competence under strict, non-negotiable constraints.”

He wrote four headers across the pad:

“Category One: Screenwriting. A thirty-page limit. A single structural prompt—an inciting incident and a specific physical location. Blind submissions only. The author’s name, agent, background, and previous credits are stripped before the file enters the database. The scripts are run through a blind grading rubric based on three things: narrative economy, scene structure, and character dialogue. The top fifty get read by our senior story editors. The top ten get published.”

Tom nodded slowly, reaching up to rub his chin. “Blind reading. Okay. That kills the nephew problem immediately. What else?”

“Category Two: Cinematography & Lighting,” Daniel said. “No multi-camera Alexa reels that prove someone’s rich uncle bought them five Cooke primes. The rule is simple: shoot a two-minute continuous narrative scene using consumer-grade equipment—a smartphone or an entry-level mirrorless camera—under available natural light or a two-point hardware store lighting setup.

“We don’t look at sensor resolution; we look at where they put the shadow. We look at how they frame an eye-line, how they move a camera without thirty thousand dollars of gyro-stabilizers, and how they motivate the light. We see who actually understands light and who just knows how to buy glass.”

Tom’s eyebrows twitched. “Audio?”

“Category Three: Sound Design & Original Score,” Daniel continued. “We pull a three-minute raw, un-scored dramatic scene out of our studio archives—clean production audio only, dialogue stripped of room tone, zero foley, zero music. We put the raw video file on the portal for download.

“Contestants have to build the entire audio landscape from scratch. The footsteps, the wind, the cloth rustle, the ambient room acoustics, and an original musical score. We see who knows how to make silence heavy, and who knows how to support an actor’s voice without drowning them in cheap strings.”

“And the technical side?”

“Category Four: Visual Effects & Practical Creature Design,” Daniel said. “A fifteen-second integration test. We give them a clean, uncompressed background plate of a real room or a real street. They have to integrate a creature or an environmental asset—digital or practical prosthetic—matched to the camera grain, the lighting direction, and the physics of the plate.”

Tom tapped his fingers against the wood, studying the four categories. The cynical, defensive posture had vanished; his executive brain was clicking through the mechanics.

“Those are the trade categories,” Tom said, looking up. “What’s the main event?”

Daniel set the pen down flat on the paper.

“The Short Film Invitational,” Daniel said.

“The flagship. Open to complete independent crews. Up-and-coming directors, writers, cinematographers, and actors working together as a unit.

“A strict runtime: minimum eight minutes, maximum fifteen minutes. Narrative shorts only—no music videos, no corporate commercials, no abstract video art. Real stories with a beginning, a middle, and an end, featuring live human performances.”

“And the filtering?” Tom asked, his voice sharp. “If fifty thousand short films get uploaded, how do you keep the servers from melting without hiring an army of screeners?”

“We use MovieFlix,” Daniel said simply.

Tom blinked. “Our streaming platform?”

“Yes,” Daniel said.

“MovieFlix has forty million active subscribers globally. We build a dedicated, authenticated tournament portal directly into the app.

“In the preliminary round, the platform’s algorithm distributes submissions into randomized, blind viewing pools across the subscriber base. A user opens the tournament tab, they get served three short films in a random bracket. They watch, they rate on three simple metrics: story, performance, and craft.

“The algorithm flags the top two percent that maintain high completion rates and consistent audience scores across diverse demographics. That weeds out forty-nine thousand terrible home videos without a single studio employee having to watch someone cry in a shower.

“That narrows the pool down to the top thousand. Then, our internal departmental leads—Our editors, our cinematographers, our story leads—take over the second round to select the top fifty. And the final twenty short films get personally reviewed by me, the studio directors, and a panel of working masters.”

Tom leaned back in his chair, staring at the ceiling for a long, quiet moment. He reached up, scratching the side of his nose, the legal pad resting between them.

“The money,” Tom said, his eyes flicking back down. “What are the prizes?”

“One hundred thousand dollars cash for first place in the individual categories,” Daniel said without hesitation. “Fifty for second. Twenty-five for third.

“For the Short Film Invitational, the grand prize is five hundred thousand dollars to the filmmaking team. Two-fifty for second place. One hundred grand for third. Cash payouts all the way down to twentieth place so every single team that makes the finals walks away with real, life-changing money.”

Tom let out a low whistle through his teeth. “That’s a multi-million-dollar purse, Dan.”

“We make that in six hours on Minecraft server subscriptions, Tom,” Daniel said, completely unbothered. “The money is sitting in commercial paper accounts earning four percent interest. I’d rather spend it buying the future of this studio.”

“And the distribution?” Tom asked, leaning in. “What happens to the films?”

“They belong to the creators,” Daniel stated firmly.

Tom’s eyes widened slightly. “You aren’t taking their IP?”

“No,” Daniel said. “Miller Studios takes zero ownership of their underlying intellectual property. But the twenty finalist short films get a three-year non-exclusive licensing deal on MovieFlix.

“We put them on the front page of the app. Every time a subscriber clicks on their film, the creators get direct backend streaming residuals calculated directly from watch time. Real money, deposited into their accounts every thirty days based on how many people watch their work.

“And on top of that, we take the top ten short films and package them into a two-hour theatrical anthology. We put them into limited theatrical release across eighty screens—Los Angeles, New York, London, Chicago, Toronto, and Sydney.

“Real DCP hard drives sent to real cinemas. These kids get to see their names on an eighty-foot screen, under real theater lights, with their friends and families sitting in velvet seats. They get an official theatrical credit before they’re twenty-five.”

Tom sat in silence for a long time.

“The agencies are going to lose their minds, Dan,” Tom murmured, a slow, wicked grin creeping onto his face. “CAA and WME are going to have an absolute hemorrhage. You are completely cutting them out of the discovery chain.”

“Good,” Daniel said. “Let them scream. They don’t make movies; they take ten percent of the people who do.”

“And the hiring?” Tom asked. “You mentioned studio contracts.”

“That’s the real prize,” Daniel said, his voice quiet and steady.

“The winner of each individual category, and the key creative leads of the top three short films—the directors, the writers, the cinematographers, the lead actors—get offered a three-year first-look production contract at Miller Studios.

“Full union scale or above. Full health insurance. Studio offices on this lot. Guaranteed funding for their next feature or pilot script, with zero interference from corporate suits. If a twenty-three-year-old kid from Manchester directs a short film that blows my hair back, I don’t want him signing a development deal at Universal where his script sits in a drawer for eight years. I want him in Bungalow 6, with a camera and a budget, making his movie.”

Tom stared at the pad for another three seconds.

Then he picked up his red pen, tapped it against his desk three times, and pulled his phone console closer.

“Alright,” Tom said, his voice dropping into that crisp, no-nonsense executive rhythm. “I’ll have our corporate counsel draft the open submission framework by Friday. We’ll need an airtight terms-of-service agreement on MovieFlix to handle fair use, music clearance indemnification, and chain of title.

“I’ll coordinate with Rowan’s web architecture team in Culver City to build the blind upload pipeline and the subscriber voting modules. We give the world ninety days to submit. We announce the tournament on Monday morning.”

Daniel stood up from the wooden chair, smiling as he looked down at Tom. “Keep the rules simple, Tom. No fifty-page legal jargon. Just tell them: show us what you’ve got.”

“Go home to your family, Daniel,” Tom grumbled, though his eyes were already darting across his notes with fierce, excited energy. “Let me go start a war with the talent agencies.”

—

By 5:30 in the afternoon, the heat had drained from the San Fernando Valley, and Daniel was driving back up through the quiet, winding residential roads of Bel Air.

The air was cool, carrying the familiar scent of damp pine needles and eucalyptus from the canyon slopes.

Daniel pulled the truck through the black wrought-iron gates of the estate, parking beside the stone garage.

He stepped down onto the cobblestones, pulled his leather bag from the passenger seat, and walked up the flagstone steps to the heavy oak front door.

The house was peaceful in that late-afternoon way that had become the normal rhythm of the estate over the last two months.

In the sunroom overlooking the pool, Florence was lying on a wide daybed, propped up against three velvet cushions, wearing an oversized faded green linen shirt over her bump. She had her phone clamped to her ear with one hand, laughing loudly as she talked to her sister Rafey back in London, her bare feet propped up on the armrest, lazily waving one hand toward Daniel as he walked past the glass sliders.

Down the east hallway, the door to the master suite was pulled almost completely shut.

Daniel peeked through the crack.

Margot was fast asleep in the center of the bed, buried beneath a light linen duvet, an extra pillow tucked beneath her knees to take the pressure off her lower back after swimming laps in the pool earlier that afternoon. Her breathing was slow, deep, and completely undisturbed, her face relaxed in the cool, shaded room.

Daniel pulled the door quietly shut, walking back down the limestone corridor into the kitchen.

The kitchen smelled of clean lemon oil, cold mineral water, and fresh herbs.

Scarlett was sitting on a high wooden barstool at the wide marble island.

She wore a soft, sleeveless black jersey dress that clung comfortably to the large, distinct curve of her twenty-eight-week belly. Her dark red hair was twisted up with a tortoiseshell clip, her bare arms resting on the cool stone counter. In front of her sat a cutting board with a small paring knife, a bowl of crisp English cucumbers, and a tall glass of iced water with three lemon slices floating between the cubes.

She was slicing the cucumbers into paper-thin rounds, seasoning them with coarse sea salt and cracked pepper, eating them with her fingers while reading through an architectural catalog of custom nursery millwork.

As Daniel walked in and set his bag on the counter, Scarlett looked up.

A slow, warm, luminous smile spread across her face.

“Hey, stranger,” Scarlett said, her husky voice low and completely relaxed. “I thought you were living in the studio.”

“Eh, my teams are working there for me,” Daniel said, walking around the island.

He leaned down, his hand naturally finding the warm skin of her bare shoulder, pressing a soft, lingering kiss to the corner of her lips. She tasted of salt and lemon.

Scarlett leaned into him, resting her cheek against his chest for three long seconds, letting out a small, contented breath as her hand reached down, taking his wrist and pulling his palm flat against the center of her stomach.

Beneath his fingers, the roundness was heavy, warm, and alive.

There was a faint, lazy shift from inside—a small shoulder or an elbow dragging slowly across the lower curve of her abdomen.

“How’s he doing today?” Daniel asked softly.

“Quiet since three o’clock,” Scarlett smiled, looking down at his hand against her dress. “He had an active morning while I was walking the garden, but now he’s just floating. He likes the cold water.”

She picked up a salted cucumber slice, holding it up toward his mouth.

Daniel took it, the clean, salty crunch refreshing after the stale coffee of the Burbank lot. He pulled the barstool beside her out, sitting down, resting his forearms on the marble counter.

“You look like you’ve been thinking about something heavy,” Scarlett noted, tilting her head, her hazel eyes scanning his face with that sharp, effortless intuition she always had. “Did something go wrong with the library visual effects?”

“No,” Daniel said, shaking his head. “The effects are fine. Dan’s face looks great. London sent the live strings for the transition, and Menken was happy.”

“Then what’s that look?” she asked, resting her chin on her hand, her fingers lightly tapping the side of her glass. “That’s the look you had when you decided to buy the rights to Beauty and the Beast at three in the morning.”

Daniel chuckled under his breath, looking down at the marble.

“I was looking at the quarterly Minecraft numbers with Rowan today,” Daniel said.

“And?”

“The kids who won the art contest,” Daniel explained, his voice conversational and quiet. “The ten community winners. One of them is a sixteen-year-old in Ohio who drew oil paintings on a broken laptop. He cleared over two hundred grand in royalties over the last four months. His dad works in an auto plant. The kid didn’t have an agent, didn’t have an internship, didn’t know anyone in Los Angeles.”

Scarlett listened, her eyes steady on him, not interrupting.

“I spent an hour in Tom’s office this afternoon,” Daniel continued, looking across at her. “We’re setting up an open tournament for filmmaking. Through MovieFlix.”

Scarlett’s eyebrows arched slightly. She set her paring knife down on the wood. “An open tournament?”

“Screenwriting, cinematography, sound design, VFX, and a short film championship,” Daniel said. “No entry fees. Anyone with an internet connection can submit. The short films get blind-screened through MovieFlix by the subscribers, the finalists get licensed on the platform with full backend streaming royalties paid to the creators, and we put the top ten into limited theatrical release in eighty cinemas.”

Scarlett sat completely still for a moment, her eyes processing the scope of what he was saying.

She took a slow sip of her iced water, set the glass down with a soft click, and looked at him with an expression of quiet, profound recognition.

“Daniel,” Scarlett said, her voice dropping into that raw, grounded tone that carried twenty years of surviving the business. “Do you have any idea what that would have meant to the kids I grew up with in New York?”

Daniel looked at her.

“When I was sixteen,” Scarlett murmured, her gaze drifting toward the canyon window, “I had friends from the professional children’s school—brilliant, hungry actors, writers who had notebooks full of plays—who had ten times more talent than half the people walking red carpets today.

“And by the time they were twenty-five, every single one of them had quit. Not because they weren’t good, but because they couldn’t afford to pay two hundred dollars for headshots, they couldn’t afford to live in Manhattan while working forty hours a week as waitresses, and no casting director would let them through the door without a referral from an agency that wouldn’t sign them until they already had a credit.”

She turned back to him, her eyes shining with fierce, passionate clarity.

“It’s a closed shop, Daniel,” she said softly. “It’s been a closed shop since the studio system was built in the 1930s. If you don’t have family in the business, or if you don’t have a trust fund to keep you afloat while you work for free, the town starves you out before you can even get a reel together.”

“That’s why we’re putting real money on the table,” Daniel said. “Five hundred grand for the winning short film. And three-year production contracts at Miller Studios for the winners.”

Scarlett let out a soft, breathless laugh, shaking her head as a wide, genuine smile spread across her lips.

“You’re going to make so many enemies, Daniel,” she whispered, her eyes dancing with warm, wicked amusement.

“Tom said the exact same thing.”

“Good,” Scarlett said firmly, reaching out to cover his hand with hers, squeezing his fingers against the marble. “Let them be mad. The agencies have been sitting on their fat percentages for fifty years doing nothing but trading favors. If you put real work in front of real audiences, people are going to see what’s actually out there. It’s brilliant, Daniel. It really is.”

From the sunroom doorway, the soft scuff of bare feet on limestone broke the quiet.

Florence wandered into the kitchen, wearing her green linen shirt, her blonde hair messy, rubbing her eyes with the back of her wrist. She had finished her phone call.

She walked over to the island, didn’t say a word, reached across the cutting board, snatched two salted cucumber slices from Scarlett’s plate, and shoved them both into her mouth.

She chewed twice, looked at Daniel with one eye half-squinted, and swallowed.

“Are you talking about indie short films?” Florence asked, her gravelly English voice thick with late-afternoon sleepiness.

“We are,” Daniel said, looking at her with a smirk.

“Ninety percent of them are absolute rubbish, Daniel,” Florence stated bluntly, leaning her hip against the island where Daniel had put his legal pad. “I sat on a judging panel for a student festival in London four years ago. I had to watch forty-two separate films about people peeling potatoes in black and white while someone played an out-of-tune cello in the background. It was complete torture.”

Scarlett burst out laughing, leaning back on her stool. “Florence, he’s not funding potato peeling. He’s running an open competition with five hundred grand for the winner.”

Florence paused.

Her other eye opened fully as she looked at the numbers on the legal pad. She looked at Daniel, her eyebrows rising up her forehead.

“Five hundred thousand dollars?” Florence asked.

“Cash,” Daniel nodded. “And a three-year studio contract.”

Florence stood there in the quiet kitchen for two seconds, processing the number.

Then she gave a single, firm, decisive nod.

“Well,” Florence said, reaching out to steal another slice of cucumber, “that ought to keep them from peeling potatoes.”

She turned on her bare heel, grabbed an apple from the wooden fruit bowl on the counter, and began padding back toward the living room to check on her nursery catalog, muttering under her breath about paint swatches.

Scarlett looked at Daniel, her hazel eyes brimming with that deep, comfortable, unhurried humor that anchored their life together.

She picked up the last cucumber slice, dipped it in the salt, and placed it gently in Daniel’s hand.

“Go wash your hands, director,” Scarlett said softly, her smile warm and steady. “The fish is in the fridge, Margot will be awake in twenty minutes, and you have dinner to make.”

Daniel looked down at the cucumber, looked at the quiet, sun-drenched kitchen, and felt the long, steady hum of the day finally settle into absolute peace.

“Yes, ma’am,” Daniel smiled.

He stood up, kissed her cheek once more, and walked over to the sink to get to work.

—

A/N: Just a heads up, there’s an unspoken, or not really unspoken rule in Hollywood that a Talent Agency can’t own a studio, or vice versa. So these two have always been separated. Well, this is a fictional world so real world agencies can suck a salted cucumber 😛

On another note, why I’m doing the judgement not on an open platform but a paid, subscription platform. The reason is obvious: BOTS.