City of IF

[DeadManWalking]

This is something I've whipped up in the spare time i've had cause NO ONE HAS BEEN READING MY OTHER SGAMES!!!!!!!!! (except for CrunchyFrog, Phantomfan and Sabriel)

so yeah. It started out less serious than it turned out to be.


Prologue.

Stealthily, quiet as a razor-sharp knife slicing through the still air of a summer night, the figure in black lowered himself slowly from the ceiling, clinging with his ankles to the black silk rope, his hands crossed before his chest, curved daggers clutched in his hands. The moonlight snuck into the building through the stained glass window, as the guard underneath snored on, unaware of the man above him creeping slowly closer and closer….

“No, No, NO. You’ve got it all wrong! Cut!” The actor in black stopped his creeping as the people lowering him paused. The guard opened his eyes wearily.


“Ok, first of all, what’s with the snoring? It breaks the scene! This is supposed to be a quiet scene, no sounds at all. It needs to gather suspense! Absolute silence. And WHAT is with the crossed arms? You look like some kinda Egyptian mummy or something. You need to evoke FEAR not laughter. And unless your audience is a 60-year-old lady who’s seen Abbot and Costello meets the Mummy three hundred times, no one’s gonna have fear in their hearts over a pair of crossed arms. Raul Lightsbane is supposed to be a dark character, a man who’s killed a hundred men without flinching once. He’s supposed to be a scary dude. Try another pose.”

Benjamin Metzger slouched in his director’s chair, his disapproving blue eyes on the actors before him. They were RUINING the script. This film was his baby; he had written the screenplay, and was directing this thing, and now the actors were ruining it. Even HE could act better than these idiots, and he had been laughed out of the auditions for a couple hundred movies by the age of twenty-three.

***

Benjamin Metzger watched the actors, as yet another awe-inspiring scene became a farce in his mind. The priestess is supposed to be pious and holy, not a slut. SERIOUSLY. And she's supposed to be begging for aid from a higher power, not sitting there looking constipated.

This time however, he kept his mouth shut. There was only so much more time they had to film, and he wasn't made of money. A crappy scene was better than no scene at all, right?

***

Benjamin Metzger slouched on his couch at home, back in the misty San Francisco air. The stale smell of truly horrendous beer laid siege to his olfactory senses, as he marinated under the large lamp. The television showed Sean Connery striding about the inside of a submarine.

It really wasn’t fair. Those damn producers. He took a swig from a bottle of something considerably stronger than beer. He had gotten past the point where that swill actually affected him anymore.

This had been HIS baby. He had written it, he had converted it to a screenplay, he had found the actors, found the producers, bribed that guards, and now….

“I’m sorry, Ben. But we’ve decided to cut this one. It showed, promise, but we’ve got a bunch of sequels coming out, and we’ve only got so much money. You know how it is….”

Oh how many times he’d heard that. You know how it is.

Another swig from the bottle.

Now what could he do? He was out of money, out of influence, out of IDEAS. How the hell was he supposed to survive? He’d have to find an apartment with a lower rent. Maybe he’d even have to move back to his parents place. San Francisco was an expensive place.

Another drink.

Oh god. What he’d give to be somewhere else. Anywhere else.

He raised the bottle for another drink, but before he could the room started spinning.

Almost like he’d been drinking too much. Although if he’d been less drunk, he would’ve noticed the cosmic flames and the ethereal lights that filled the swirling room.

But he’d had a lot.

The room stopped spinning, leaving only the couch, James Earl Jones talking to Alec Baldwin, and a beer bottle which spiraled lazily to the floor.

Where Benjamin Alex Metzger had sat, there was only a depression the couch.

This is where his story begins.


There's the prologue. I'm posting the first chapter right after this, because otherwise you wouldn't get my rationale for such a stupid name.