Idle Days

Far Off Unhappy Things: Boys and Girls of the Reflective Age

Chapter 4: Idle Days

By Renko Chazakiël Rodenburg

I see her walking down
Down the endless street
A human form of night
A walking beauty
I see the shine of her cold, cold eyes
Enlightens the darkest souls and the darkest minds

– E. E. Cummings

Light as bright as the eiderdown pillow was soft awoke Fleur with a jolt. Through wide open windows it poured in like an avalanche. Outside, birds chittered and cars rumbled. The smell of flesh on a grill provoked a brief reaction of disgust in her, until she remembered that in this world meat did not necessarily come from human beings. In fact, it almost certainly never did.

Birds. Sheep. Horses. The zoo had a monstrous beast called an ‘Elephant’ which Fleur adored and now regularly visited. Animals. This world, covered in cities of black asphalt and towering buildings of silver and glass with all its machines and billions of inhabitants was nonetheless crawling with all manners of life completely foreign to the Lands Lost. She wondered now if the metaphysical decay of her homeworld had precipitated some ecological collapse, or if her father had simply been too lazy to add animal life to his world- or perhaps had still planned to- before his daughters killed him.

“Is that breakfast?” Fleur asked while looking around Morana’s room for her clothes. They were nowhere to be found, and she vaguely remembered getting rid of the various pieces of her outfit in different places around the house.

“Fried eggs and bacon sandwiches with plenty of salt, helps with the hangover,” Morana said. She stood behind her counter and was busy preparing the food, wearing only an apron.

“I don’t get hangovers,” Fleur replied while scavenging pieces of her outfit- underwear here, fishnet stockings there, and both her leather shorts and fishnet shirt on top of one of the bookcases, for some reason.

“You do eat, I hope? I’m making a whole stack of sandwiches here. I can’t eat them all by myself, I’ll get fat.”

“I do eat. And can you? Get fat, I mean? Aren’t you a spirit?”

“You can touch me too, can’t you?”

“That answers none of my questions.”

“You touched me a lot last night,” Morana said playfully.

“Yes yes, we had sex. Very exciting. We’re both sixteen and giggling like mad because we had sex last night.” Fleur spat.

“We’re both sixteen?” Morana asked. “I assumed that you’d be like, a thousand years old or something. On account of like, the ears and stuff.”

“Just because I have pointy ears you assu- wait what? You’re, what? No way. What? There’s no way that’s true,” Fleur muttered, panicking slightly. “No, you own an apartment and they let you into that club you’re not actually underage, right. Right?”

Morana doubled over laughing, dropping the spatula she’d been using in the process. “You are so funny, Fleur. I can’t believe that worked on you. Why did that even work on you? Aren’t you from the Lands Lost?”

“I’m doing very well adapting to liberal norms and values actually,” Fleur said. “I’m very interested in modern society and the ethics of civilization.”

“Huhuh?” Morana said while throwing her spatula in the sink. “Food’s done,” she said, throwing the last layers of eggs and bacon on a gigantic layered stack of brown bread with fried eggs, bacon, cheese and various sauces.

“Do you have a shirt or a coat I can borrow? Now that I’m sober I don’t actually want to walk around tits out anymore.”

“You think your fishnet shirt isn’t covering enough?”

“I don’t have to justify myself to you, I asked you a question.”

Morana made an odd noise. “Sure. Yeah. I have a black shirt somewhere. I’ll grab it after breakfast. I do want it back. Oh, ohh, is this a clever trick to meet up again?”

She didn’t feel like humoring Morana anymore, so Fleur said nothing and just sat down at Morana’s dinnertable.

“Here you go,” Morana said as she placed a giant stack of fried egg sandwiches on Fleur’s plate.

She ate it in silence. Morana kept trying to make conversation, but Fleur had burned out on her. Striking up a burgeoning friendship with an inhuman entity with who-knows-what motivations struck her as a bad idea, and she had left the Lands Lost specifically to get away from the endless mind games and bizarre powerplays. When they finished eating, Morana gave her a black shirt, and a little visiting card.

“If you ever feel like socializing with the kind of people who know, drop by the Cerberus Society,” Morana explained.

“Oh, will do,” Fleur lied. She had no intention of doing that. “I’ll drop your shirt there if I don’t run into you again, too,” she added, with no intention of doing that either.

“Alright,” Morana said. “It was nice to meet you, Fleur. I hope you find happiness here.”

“Hmhm,” she muttered as she waved Morana goodbye and left her apartment. Morana didn’t live extremely far from Fleur, only a single subway ride towards the center of town- but then again, that was true for basically everywhere in this city. It wasn’t that big, and the network of mechanical vehicles ferrying people back and forth along predetermined lines was quite efficient.

On the ride home, she wondered about the Lampade. What she was doing here, and why she’d recognized her so quickly. It didn’t matter, Fleur decided. It wasn’t her problem. She was done playing mystical games. Barely twenty minutes later, she was walking down the street she lived in. It was a little more crowded outside than usual, even more than usual on a Sunday. As she got closer to home, the crowd got denser, centering around something. She muscled through the mass of bodies, and arrived at a crime scene. The police were still cordoning it off, busy warning people not to get closer, unspooling tape to tape off the area. A man lay dead against the wall of a small store selling luxury nail and hair products. He had been disemboweled- most likely with a large and sharp melee weapon, Fleur thought- and a massive pool of blood was forming around the corpse. People around the area were loudly talking, holding up their phones- glass scrying devices ubiquitous in this society- to record footage. Odd, she thought. Bladed weapons were uncommon in this city. As she purged the grisly sight of the dead man from her mind and turned around to continue home, she was held standing by a particularly tall man in a black coat.

“Police,” he said. “I’d like to ask you some questions.”

“Huh?” She answered. “I only just got here, I didn’t see anything. I’m on my way home.”

“Be that as it may, I’m going to ask you some questions. I’d also like to see some form of ID.”

She sighed and ruffled through her pockets to look for her driver’s license. “Here,” she said, handing it over.

“Ms. Scarborough, huh,” the police investigator said. “This was recently issued. Have you held Dutch citizenship for long?”

“I got my citizenship last year,” she truthfully said.

“Where did you live before then?” The man asked.

“The UK,” she said.

“I don’t think that’s true,” the police investigator replied. “Occupation?”

“Actress,” Fleur said, starting to feel somewhat uncomfortable.

“Did you know the deceased?”

“No.”

“If you had to give your judgement, what would you say the deceased has been slain with?”

“I don’t know that,” Fleur said, starting to suspect some kind of trap or game. If she answered, would she be giving something away? Or was the agent genuinely suspecting her and just trying to trick her into giving away the murder weapon?

“I see. I personally think it was done with a kopesh, a curved sword from Egypt,” the investigator said. “It’s an unusual wound, you don’t see those very often on this side of town.”

Or maybe he was genuinely curious? The whole situation felt odd.

“I don’t know anything,” Fleur said. “Can I have my ID back? I want to go home.”

“Hm? Oh, sure. If you happen to see anyone with a kopesh, please call the police.”

“I euh, I will do that,” she mumbled as the investigator gave her back her driving license. She put it in her pockets, and hurried onwards to home. She needed to freshen up, because she was expected at work later in the afternoon.

Finally home, she thought. She headed up the stairs towards her apartment, straight for her bathroom and kicked off her clothes. Warm water at will was one of the most underrated luxuries of this modern world, she thought as she started to run a bath. She’d almost gotten used to being able to bathe at will at this point. It’d take a while to fill, but she could use that time to properly wash her hair under the shower. She laughed as she turned on the shower along the bath. Back in the Lands Lost it would have been a ridiculously extravagant waste of water. It wasn’t the only absurd luxury that this world’s level of industrial development had made commonplace. Shampoo, conditioner, they didn’t even exist in the Lands Lost. Even if the alchemists could mimic the chemical processes used to make them, there was simply no way to make them at scale.

After washing her hair with shampoo and properly rinsing it with water a few times, she washed her hair with conditioner. After rinsing that out properly, she stepped out of the shower and applied a leave-in conditioner. She stepped into the bath, which had filled up far enough for some unseen mechanism to have automatically shut off the faucet. How this worked she did not know, and though she assumed electronic computer trickery, she knew it was possible to construct mechanisms like this through purely mechanical means, too. Fancy plumbing was one of the ways the richest merchants and nobles in her hometown liked to show off, though that didn’t compare to the luxury even the middle-price apartment here in Amsterdam provided. Just her bathroom would’ve been worth half the treasures of the Spire back at home.

As she sat in the bath, she closed her eyes and let the experiences of the past two days wash over her. A life of mindless self indulgence. Meaningless hedonism in such amounts as to provide meaning in and of itself. She still hadn’t bought a car, she thought, despite having gotten her driver’s license a while back. It was hard to pick one and though she made quite a bit of money, the prettier cars were really, really expensive. Fuck! Murder. Someone had been killed, and in quite a nasty way right here in her street. Deadly violence wasn’t uncommon where she came from, but it was exceedingly rare here. That made it jarring. She shook her head to try and clear the images of the eviscerated man out of it. Sighing, she grabbed her shaving equipment and started working on making herself look presentable for work. Her moonstone and linseed oil body, mostly being absent of body hair, worked to her advantage. What bodily hair she did have was as blue as the hair on her head, though, and this had gotten her strange comments before, so she carefully removed every last hair from her armpits. She didn’t touch her pubes, because the blue gave her an exotic appeal that the people around her appeared to find quite erotic.

More or less done with her bathing routine, she drained the bath, dried herself off and tied a towel around her head. She still had hours before she actually had to be at work, so there was plenty of time to browse the internet to download movies and series. Copying files from the internet to her home computer was technically illegal, but not enforced and quite easy. Tonight she should finally take the time to watch the first Lord of the Rings movie, she thought, so she queued it into her torrent client. Her internet wasn’t super fast and she was often a little greedy, so her computer was still downloading the first four seasons of Bauhaus. It had apparently gone downhill tremendously around the fourth season, so she hadn’t committed to downloading the last four seasons yet. Twenty three percent done. Five seeders. She sighed and paused the download, or The Fellowship of the Ring (Director’s Cut) wouldn’t be done by the time she was back from work. Bauhaus would have to wait. The next hour she spent scrolling reviews on various websites she’d bookmarked, looking for more media to add to her ‘eventually download’ list. At times she wondered about writing her own reviews, but she worried it’d cause friction with her career. Perhaps she could switch to being a film critic someday. She had the time, after all.

Time to head to work, she thought, looking at the clock. To this day she was still amazed clocks in this world worked without an active observer witnessing them, implying some strange persistence to local reality that her own world had lacked. Whatever else that implied was beyond her, with theoretical physics never having been her strong suit. She put on some sports underwear, blue jeans, a bra and a black shirt, and then did her hair while looking in the mirror, making sure her elfin ears poked out in a neat-looking way with no loose strands of hair cluttering up her aesthetic sensibilities.

Two hours later she was a whole city over, walking along the media boulevard of Hilversum. It had been dizzying at first, the amount of infrastructure ferrying the staggeringly high population between their densely packed cities, but she’d grown to love travelling by train. The rhythm of the machine thundering along its iron road was hypnotic, meditative. Maybe she’d keep travelling by train even after buying a fancy car, she thought. Walks from the station to the studio were nice, and in the inner city a car would basically be useless anyway.

The studio wasn’t big, and it was hidden behind on the edge of the media district, behind a warehouse. She walked in, nodded as the girl behind the reception counter did the same to her, and went straight to her personal office space. It was tiny, but it wasn’t like she was going to be spending a lot of time doing administrative work or anything there. All she needed was to sign today’s waivers and read her script before heading to costuming and make-up. She sighed as she flipped the script over twice. Typecast, again. As she headed down to costuming, she kept her eyes open for Jacques, the director and owner of the studio. At some point she’d want to start working on increasing her portfolio of roles, instead of playing the same character over and over again.

“Hey,” she said to Emily, who was on costuming and makeup duty today.

“Hey Fleur,” the older woman said. “What’s good today?”

“Same as always,” Fleur answered brusquely, uninterested in discussing what exactly that entailed. She loathed the endless smalltalk the people in this country seemed so fond of.

“Read your script yet?” Emily asked as she dragged Fleur into a chair in front of the big mirror.

“I flipped it over a few times but it’s basically the same as always. Going to see if I can talk to Jacques about trying different roles soon.”

“Ah,” Emily said. “It makes sense, you have a very distinct look. Well, I’m sure you’ll do great when branching out to other roles. Can’t do advertisements for antidepressants forever. It’d be depressing if you ended up becoming the face of depression, if you, euh, get what I mean.”

“Yeah.”

Emily worked quickly and with great precision. Under studio lighting makeup needed to be slightly exaggerated to really ‘pop’ on camera, but not so exaggerated that it’d look weird on a closeup shot. She was good at it, and Fleur enjoyed the feeling of someone else lightly touching her face with brushes and pencils and sponges. Across her, in the mirror, her reflection grimaced but silently observed her, forming Autumn-knows-what kind of judgements about her.

“Well, cheese is your uncle,” Emily said, petting Fleur on the head.

“Good job, Emily. Looks great. I really like how the slight tinge of blue or purple in your blush accentuates my hair. Do you have my costume?”

“Yeah, let me, euh, let me look over here-”

Emily started rummaging through the steel wardrobe next to her table with makeup supplies, and handed Fleur a pre-packaged costume, sealed in plastic. “Thanks,” she said, as she ripped it open, tossed the clothes- rags, really- on the chair and started kicking off her own clothes.

“I’ll leave you be,” Emily said, leaving the room.

Fleur took her time inspecting her costume. It had been perfectly tailored to her proportions as always, though the fabric seemed to be cheaper than usual. Maybe Jacques had switched manufacturers? She put on the black loincloth and wrapped the black fabric to serve as a bra around her breasts and neck in a cross pattern. She jumped up and down in front of the mirror a few times to check if everything was tied up well, and put her legs in front of the other to test out her mobility without causing awkward wardrobe failure. All done, she headed onto the primary set.

It was bustling with personnel setting up the primary and secondary props and backgrounds. Recently Jacques had been experimenting with techniques from theater to quickly collapse and reassemble backgrounds, to create artsy, no-cut scene transitions. Cameramen were setting up their equipment, and co-stars Will and Anthony were standing in a corner together with Jacques Montange, the director. The three were sipping coffee and laughing about something when Fleur joined their group.

“Fleur, good to see you,” Jacques said, vigorously shaking her hand. The man was a spindly specimen, scrawny to the point you’d be forgiven if he came across more as caricature than as real man if you saw him in a picture. He wore glasses with lenses so thick they might as well have been cut from the bottoms of glass jars, and a pinstripe suit that was somehow slightly too small even for his emaciated frame.

“Hey Fleur,” Will said. He was covered in grey body paint with two big demonic horns jutting out of his curly hair. He’d be playing the demon, as was regular.

“Hmhm,” Anthony said, who was in a three-piece suit and would be playing the psychiatrist in this ad. He was new, and it was only his second role since the previous ‘psych’ had quit over some moral objections and concerns.

“Jacques,” Fleur began. “Is it possible to talk about some stuff regarding scripts and casting opportunities?”

“Tell me what’s weighing on your heart, lady,” Jacques replied.

“I keep being cast in effectively identical roles. I want to try and branch out.”

“Well, it’s hard to cast you. You have very striking looks that might become immersion-breaking in a lot of roles. I’m currently setting up the filming of an ad for laundry detergent where I want to utilize elements of entrapment and sibling rivalry, but in such a setup, your looks would be a detriment. People would wonder, “why is the sister an elf?” and that might pull them out of the suspension of disbelief entirely. They’d think “that was weird,” instead of the “I have! To! Buy! This! Detergent!” we’re aiming for.”

“I get it,” Fleur said. “But I would still like to try different things. Maybe if we get a new lineup of contracts for new products you could include me in thinking about potential scripts?”

“I have to think about that, Fleur, no promises. But I will think about it, okay?”

“Yeah,” she sighed.

“Alright. Everyone, get to your positions, I want to start sooner rather than later. Time is film, and film is money. Will, go see your assistant, and Fleur, go get yourself tied up.”

“Will do,” she said, high-fiving Will and nodding towards seemingly anxious Anthony, who was clearly still getting used to the going-abouts of his job. She headed towards the main set, and had an assistant clasp the sturdy, looking manacles that’d be restraining her around her wrists. Despite their tough looks, they were a stage magician’s trick manacles, easily ripped off when it was time for the no-cut transition to the psychiatrist’s office.

“You okay?” the stagehand tying her up asked her.

“One hundred percent,” Fleur said. The restraints allowed her just barely to sit down against the ‘dungeon cell’, with her arms held above her. Cameras were being brought in position around her, and behind her she knew the ‘office’ was being set up. Next to her, the stagehand kneeled down and put on a sterile glove and liberally coated it with lube.

“Is it okay if I touch you?” She asked Fleur.

“Hmhm,” Fleur said, nodding.

She shoved aside Fleur’s loincloth, and with almost medical detachment, worked the lube into her vagina. “You good?” She asked.

“Yeah,” Fleur said.

“Let’s go,” the stagehand said, fleeing the scene as the studio lights dimmed and the scene lights went on.

“Alright alright alright people,” Jacques yelled. “Sertraline 4-fluor-dexamphetamine, take one.”

A spotlight lit up Fleur, and she yammered “Oh, woe is me,” At her most theatrical. As soon as she was done, Jacques yelled instructions and various cameras changed their angles as the spotlight moved to the ‘entrance’ of the dungeon. Will, stark naked and hunched over while growling at his most demonic, scurried onto the stage.

“Why so down, princess?” He sarcastically growled as he crept up to her.

“Foul creature,” she cried, “You know very well why I despair!”

“Hahaha,” Will laughed, “Let me cheer you up then, princess.”

“Nooooooo!” Fleur screamed as Will crawled up on her, caressed her bound arms, and ripped off the cloth she had tied around her breasts as a primitive ‘bra’. He cupped her breasts and growled, while Jacques screamed more instructions.

“We don’t have unlimited runtime people,” he yelled. “You can caress and fondle her later if she wants to, right now you’re raping her. So get on with it.”

Get on with it he did. It was mechanical, and Fleur had to remind herself to actually act. “Aaah, no,” she cried. “Please don’t. Stop!”

It was such an absurd endavour, playing pretend-rape with a whole studio full of personel watching. The spotlights were warm, the hum-buzz of the electrical equipment distracting, and the whole ordeal decidedly unerotic even if Fleur had been into consensual nonconsent. Well, they were play-acting nonconsensual nonconsent, but on a metatextual level it was consensual, she thought.

“Try and get a better angle on camera three,” Jacques yelled as Will grunted and held onto Fleur’s shoulders with an almost painfully strong grip to support himself as he fucked her.

“Alright, alright,” Jacques said, pulling out a stopwatch. “Three, two, wait- alright, be done with it,” he yelled.

Will groaned and Fleur faked an orgasm. She always wondered why she was pretending to get off on being raped by a demon after loudly yelling no, but the clip was fantasy. It didn’t have to make sense- all it had to do was brainwash people into buying the product.

There was no way Will could ejaculate on command, but that was fine. Recent national advertisement regulations had introduced much stricter laws on pornography in advertisement, and they weren’t allowed to show semen on screen during daylight hours anymore anyway. He howled in triumph, climbed off of her, and Jacques screamed for everyone to get ready for his signature no-cut scene transition. Fleur held her breath as she mentally counted down, and the second the background of the dungeon cell came down, she yanked herself free from her restraints, and vaulted over the chair behind her with supranatural agility. The second the new set of scenery came up, she was already sitting perfectly straight across from her ‘psychiatrist,’ played by Anthony.

“What’s the matter, princess? I can’t imagine someone in your position to have much reason to feel down,” he said.

“Oh, you wouldn’t know half of it,” Fleur sighed.

“Well, luckily there’s a new medication that can treat even the worst treatment-resistant depression, no matter the source.” Anthony forcefully slammed packaging of the sertraline 4-fluor-dexamphetamine down on the table as he said it.

“And cut!” Jacques yelled. “Good work. Cameras one to three, you got that? Cameras four to six?”

When affirmative answers came in, he walked on stage.

“Good job on not bursting into laughter halfway through, Fleur. Good job on not starting to cry, Anthony,” he congratulated the two.

Fleur nodded, and noticed tears were streaming down Anthony’s face. She awkwardly covered her breasts and shuffled off with Jacques. “Do we need to shoot any extra scenes?” She asked.

“No, we’ve got plenty of footage from the multi-camera setup this time,” Jacques said. “Our editors are going to stitch a beautiful little bit of cinema together from this.”

“Good,” Fleur said, sighing and feeling somewhat dejected. She looked for Will, who she found sitting on a lawn chair next to his boyfriend, who was massaging his shoulders.

“You doing okay?” Fleur asked.

“It’s my job,” Will said as he shrugged. “You feeling down?”

“Hah,” Fleur said. “These scenes don’t affect me much.” If anything, she mentally added, they were quite fun to do. Pretending to be violated was a lot more fun than the relentless threat of actually being raped, an ever-present possibility in the court of Prince Autumn, Deer God of the Lands Lost.

“You doing anything tonight?” Will’s boyfriend- Fleur had forgotten his name- asked.

“Yeah, I’m going to be watching Lord of the Rings,” she said.

“Huh?” Will said. “You haven’t seen Lord of the Rings? I thought you’d have seen those movies as an elf-fanatic, Fleur.”

“Eh,” she said, shrugging. “It’s just an aesthetic for me.”

“Yeah, I get it,” Will’s boyfriend said. “That’s like me and skiing.”

“Sure,” Fleur said. “Well, have a good time, I’m going to clean myself and get back in my clothes, haha. It’s getting cold.”

“Have a good afternoon, Fleur,” Will said as he waved her goodbye.

Sure, she thought.

As she walked back to her the costuming room to go take a quick shower and put her clothes back on, she noticed an awfully cold chill creeping up her spine.