Maple retreated to her office, hoping for some alone time and brainstorming, when she was immediately interrupted by Semoule, the PA, who came back to let her know he'd bought his smokes. 

As she reiterated that she was not his point person, the young man told her that Cruz was still MIA. It was eight a.m. and they were set to start shooting in less than an hour. They needed their line producer!

Cruz not being at his post triggered enough anxiety in Maple that, for a few minutes, she forgot all about the flying light and Salvatore's perfect grin. It was hard because both were things she would love to obsess about. But the list of fires she had to put out kept growing, and by the time Maurice accosted her on her way to find Cruz, she'd forgotten she had almost died half an hour ago.

"What happened to Meryl?" Maurice cried out, flailing his large hairy hands in the air. "She's ruined!"

Maurice named all of his equipment after famous female movie stars and was deeply attached to them. Last October, when Judy and Viola had suffered overheating, the poor man had to go on stress leave for "emotional distress."

Maple told him most of the story—minus the part about the light floating in the air and saving her life. By the end of her tale, the gaffer was visibly more upset, albeit despair had left place for rage. He vowed to find out the how, who, and why before he left, grumbling threats under his breath for the "electric saboteur" among their mist. Maple knew he'd pursue the task with the same zeal his ancestors had demonstrated to guillotine half of their country three centuries back.

By the time Maple made it to Hair & Make-up & Costume, she only had ten minutes left to find Cruz and avoid a complete disaster. They couldn't shoot without their line producer, and if they suffered any further delays, Bōøbol people would intervene. Every time Bōøbol paid too much attention to them, budget cuts followed. Maple couldn't afford another intervention by the streamer.

Hair & Makeup & Costume had once been three distinct departments with their own teams and spaces. After the show's move to streaming and the hefty budget cuts that had followed, the departments had been merged. Worst, they'd been forced to share a single space when Ersweld Included had decided to rent their former offices to Never Enough, a political polyamorous cult.

"Jesus fucking Christ!" Loretta's hazy voice welcomed Maple as she stepped into the hangar that was now Hair & Makeup & Costume's new office. The space had been used in the 60s and 70s to store sets. The hangar had no real walls and despite the heaters installed all around it was freezing. Most of the crew had gone on set, but the few that persisted buzzed around the space like over-perfumed bees in thick jackets.

Loretta was circling a young woman who stood on a velvety crimson platform in front of a makeshift wall of portable mirrors. She wore a bikini made of scales that Loretta was examining with a magnifying glass. The woman was shivering and flinched when she noticed Maple.

"Miss Defleuvier—" she said and immediately walked to one of the innumerable hanger-on-wheels filling up the space. Amidst silk gowns and fake fur coats, the assistant grabbed a puffy black jacket tagged with Maple's name and handed it to the showrunner. "Here you go," she said, her eyes glassy with cold.

"Thank you," Maple said, happily sliding her arms into the jacket Loretta's assistant was holding for her. It was cold and the girl was shaking. "Are you alright?"

"She's fine!" Loretta dismissed Maple's worry with a wave of her hand. "Aren't you just fabulous, darling?"

The assistant tried to smile. It was painful to witness, and from the deep lines settling on her face, it wasn't a pleasant action for her either. It reminded Maple of her first day as showrunner, how insecure and scared she'd felt around legends like Loretta Kaas, the daughter of Demetria Kaas, the show's original costume designer (who'd been there since the beginning, touching up a young Daphne Dutrignon's costume between scenes when they shot the pilot for Betteraves & Betrayals in 195X). Demetria had trained her daughter who'd then taken over as head of Costume a decade prior to Maple's arrival. It was hard—impossible, really—not to be impressed in front of soap royalty. It'd taken months for Maple to gather enough courage to even think about the possibility of second-guessing some of Loretta's boldest choices.

"Loretta, please, give this poor woman a break," Maple said out loud. Then lower, so only her head of Costume could hear, "HR said they won't send another candidate if the new one doesn't last at least three months."

Loretta groaned. "Maybe if HR stopped sending me feeble creatures that don't understand the meaning of hard work, I wouldn't have to find a new Miss Twenty-Something every few weeks."

Maple glanced at the assistant who'd finally found a coat. The girl was barely a day over twenty and Maple saw a lot of herself in the young woman—or at least she saw the naive and innocent girl she'd been when she took this job. She had had a lot to prove and always felt like the odd one out. Who was she to be amongst such talented people? She'd been scared, but she also remembered thinking that her writing was going to change the world, that she was capable of everything.

"Be nice," Maple ordered the older woman as a protective instinct washed over her. Maybe if someone had looked out for her three years ago, she wouldn't be in this mess now.

Loretta slid a cigarette into her smoke holder and lit it, glaring at Maple during the entire process. She was a beautiful woman, with large, rebellious grey curls erupting from her head, always wearing the most fantastically bizarre dresses. Today, she'd picked an asymmetric orange neon latex piece that compressed together her gigantic and very much manufactured breasts.

"Did you just come here to plague my creative process," the costume designer said after taking a few sharp inhales of her poison, "or is there a reason for this impromptu visit?"

"Please, don't pay attention to her," said someone behind Loretta.

Maple shifted to see Davenport, the head of Make-up, abhorring one of his famous leather jackets—this one a bright blue with red painted letters in the back that read "Fuck me harder daddy toute la nuit."

He dropped a kiss on Maple's cheek and nodded to Loretta who sat down, crossed her legs, and found another colourful way to express disdain with her eyes.

"She's in a mood. Her alien didn't show last night," Davenport said.

As far as Maple knew, Loretta was the only human she'd met who had dated a real alien. She didn't know much more since Loretta was very secretive about it, always castigating Davenport's incessant questions about alien anatomy. (Most aliens on Earth looked like humans, but that hadn't stopped Davenport from wishing for tales of three-headed penises.)

Loretta had always refused to disclose a name or a profession to protect her boyfriend's privacy, so they'd taken to calling the mysterious suitor Loretta's Alien, a terribly unimaginative nickname on all accounts, and one that the alien consultant they'd hired for the show had decried as "highly problematic."

"What happened?" Maple asked instead of inquiring about Cruz. She was a romance girlie, and you couldn't expect a romance girlie not to use other people's love stories to avoid dealing with reality.

Loretta grunted, shook her head once.

"She doesn't know," Davenport translated while he reapplied some lipstick, a bright yellow, on his plumpy botoxed lips. "Didn't text, didn't call. She thinks fanatics kidnapped him. I think he's fucking another human, probably a model." He dropped his voice a few octaves. "I mean, look at her. I get it. If I were a sexy alien, I'd want the warm mouth of a hot girl around my balls, not the cold touch of a hag. Her fingers are like branches in the toughest of winters."

"I can hear you, you miserable vermin!" Loretta barked back.

"Good!" Davenport retorted. "It means your hearing's not all gone yet, you insufferable inflated balloon."

The diversion away from hot, intergalactic love allowed for Maple's survival instinct to kick back in. She remembered why she was here. "Have any of you seen Cruz?"

Davenport checked his flawlessly manicured nail with an air of pure disgust. "No, and even if I had, I wouldn't have noticed because I don't give a shit about that person."

Maple turned to Loretta, hoping for more information—or at the very least something constructive.

The costume designer shrugged. "Cruz is where he always is when he's not working or injecting plastic in his triceps."

"Which is where?"

Loretta took her sweet time to exhale acrid smoke. Narrowing her eyes, pouting her lips, and burrowing her brows, she said, "He's in the T.O.R."

"The what?"

Davenport huffed and the costume assistant who'd found a jacket to cover herself avoided all eye contact with Maple.

 "The Twink Orgie Room," Loretta said as her face disappeared into a cloud of smoke.