"And Cut! Great job people - that's lunch!"
Gil and Gil2 came apart, releasing each other from where they'd been grappling for the scene. In a series of staggered, mirrored movements they patted each other down, smoothed out their clothes, and reset their hair, before shaking hands, complimenting each other on the success of the scene, and turning as a pair toward the food bar. A crew hand promptly arrived to retrieve the prop-gun that had been integral to the shot, and Gil2 handed it over first, before it crumbled in the crew member's grasp; they chuckled politely, and then looked to the other Gil, who passed another prop over. This one also crumbled, and the chuckle this time was slightly less polite, and then Gil ceded the actual prop. The crew hand took it away, but not without a few moment's pause and a few sharp raps against the prop to verify it was as authentic as it looked.
Around them, beyond the set, the air began to buzz with chatter as cast and crew rushed to lunch, and the locals lingering around the perimeter of the set re-started their own conversations and clamour now that shooting had paused. 'Crestwood Hollow' had been on-location for 10 days so far, and as word got around the town after their arrival, the crowds had, at first, dramatically swelled. After a week or so the novelty had worn off, and it was now only the committed (or un-employed) fans who remained; saying this was still a disservice to the size of their impromptu audience, however, and many of the crew had expressed a surprised gratitude for how popular the show actually seemed to be, judging by the numbers still peering in from the edge after the initial groundswell had returned to their regular hum-drum.
They'd been shooting the two-parter mid-season finale, that pushed Elwood Dowd - Gil's on-screen character - into the climactic second-half of his character arc for that season, revealing the true identity of his so-far anonymous stalker and harasser: his very own evil twin, intent on reifying a combined downfall. It had been a cold and soggy shoot so far, plagued by the characteristic rain of the titular city, and right now Gil was thankful to shed his damp jacket and replace it with a warm towel draped around his shoulders. Gil2, clad head-to-toe in black in the outfit of the evil twin, had removed his own overcoat and done the same. They stood shoulder-to-shoulder at the lunch bar, holding paper plates and loading them with bread rolls, fried greens, and cold cuts. Another crew-hand approached them with a polystyrene cup in each hand, vapour rising into the cool afternoon air from the hot tea within; the Gils took a cup each and thanked him in stereo, sipping the scalding liquid and savouring every burn as it cascaded down their twin throats.
Across the set there was an exclamation that burst through the general hubbub; Gil and Gil2 turned simultaneously to see what the ruckus was about, and spotted a short, young girl - wrapped in a scarf and waterproof jacket - deftly weaving her way around production crew members and ducking through umbrellas and camera lighting rigs. She was bee-lining toward them, her face - freckled and bespectacled and framed by lightly-curled ginger locks that fell from her voluminous barnet - set with a look of ferocious determinism that would not be swayed. She waved excitedly as Gil came into her sight-line, and Gil2 waved cheerily back, which doubled the girl’s resolve. Gil, for his part, merely subtly held off the security guard en route to intercept, who raised an eyebrow before shrugging, taking a pastry from a nearby cart to chew on, and hanging back to retrieve the fan once the interaction was handled.
She was flustered and excited but ultimately steady enough to compose herself and actually manage some words. Her voice was soft and light and if the rain picked up Gil imagined he'd hardly be able to hear her at all.
"Mr. Galahad?" She started, the tremor in her hand betraying the confidence in her voice. "I'm a huge fan...I've been watching 'Crestwood Hollow' since the pilot, and Elwood is my favourite by far."
She rocked on the balls of her feet, bobbing up and down rather than swaying back and forth. She was a ball of nervous elation. Gil and Gil2 maintained easy smiles, and as they turned to face her proper, she was unsure which one to address, her eyes darting back and forth between their identical visages.
"Could I...get a selfie?" She asked, and then with a hitching inhale, dared: "...with both of you?"
Gil widened his smile and pulled out his own phone, motioning to Gil2 to circle around and position himself on the other side of the girl.
"Absolutely - but only if I can get one too!" He said, his voice warm to match his smile. They got in close, each Gil placing a careful hand on each of the girl's shoulders, and she emitted the smallest of squeaks as she reached out her arm, carefully positioned her phone, and clicked the button. As soon as she'd verified she was happy with the picture, Gil raised his own arm, and snapped a duplica-
His phone buzzed with an incoming call as the screen flickered to a photo of a gently-beautiful brunette laughing softly in dappled shade beneath a declining sun, and the name 'Elenora Baines' displayed brightly above her figure.
"Is that the Elenora? From 'Romeo & Juliet & Zombies?'" The girl asked, and Gil twitched inside at the sound of her name. "Are you still dating?" There was a hint of sad disappointment in her tone, but Gil recognized how well she had attempted to mask it.
"It is, and no," he answered, noting the girl's microscopic sigh of relief, "but we're still good friends. We like to stay in touch."
He declined the call, resolving - lying to himself - that he'd return it later, and held his phone up again to snap his own picture.
"That's a wonderful photo." He said, looking at the resulting photo on his phone, managing to convince the girl if not himself. It would be a wonderful photo after some slight touch-ups, and Gil was quite adept at in-phone editing. "What's your 'at'? I'll tag you in my story."
He looked up at the girl, who had paled quite fiercely, her eyes wide and deep beneath her glasses. Fear pooled within them, and Gil had a sudden sinking feeling like he'd done or said something quite wrong; headlines flashed before his eyes, social media comments, trending X hashtags. He looked to Gil2, who held a similar face of constrained panic, and could only offer a flustered shrug.
"Please don't post anything." The girl finally said, quiet but with a sense of urgency that unnerved the Gils. "My dad...we can't talk about..." her words were stilted, sentence fragments spilling from her mouth, but the pieces fell in place. "He doesn't even know that I'm..."
Gil nodded, putting a hand on her arm to steady her and offering a comforting smile.
"I get it. Not everyone is...accepting. Even 'Crestwood Hollow' isn't immune to it."
The girl smiled back, wiping her eye with her sleeve, pushing her glasses up to her forehead.
"It's just nice to know...that it's not the end of the world. Hypes are still good people, they can still be important. Thank you, Mr. Galahad."
"Please - it's Gil. If you ever need someone to talk to - don't be afraid to reach out. I'm just a person too, you know."
They chatted for a couple more minutes, and then crew came around about shooting resuming; Gil nodded, and said his goodbyes to the girl. He'd not asked her name, not gotten her handle, and even now, as she was escorted by the loitering security member back to the public crowd cordons, he was forgetting what she looked like, his last memory of this brief encounter the back of a black waterproof jacket and a messy ginger bun. He was back to his phone, staring at the missed call from Elle, but finding himself making excuses to avoid calling her back. Poor signal from the rain; a long day of shooting ahead of them; no time between takes. Whatever worked to soothe his conscience.
The girl would reach out to him on instagram a few weeks later, after an accidental manifestation of her own powers had resulted in her father throwing her out of the house, forcing her to refuge at her aunt's while her dad attempted to sully her name to all family that would hear it. Gil wouldn't see the message request, wouldn't check his instagram DM's, and even if he had, wouldn't recognize her from her profile photo anyway.
G I L E M O R Y G A L A H A D
G I L E M O R Y G A L A H A DLocation: The Trials, Southern Plateau - Dundas IslandHope In Hell #2.040: Ego
Interaction(s): N/A
Gil was rattled. He knew about the trials and what they usually entailed, the thrills and spills therein, the carefully-curated environment to test the student's limits and capabilities, but this was different. This was actual danger, and he cared very little for it. He was tired from his replicating, tired from fighting, tired from running; just plain tired, and bruised and afraid and now whoever had arranged this hostile takeover apparently intended to just keep on splitting the team. What was the point? Given what they'd experienced, Gil was fairly confident that if the intention was simply to kill them, that could have been achieved fairly neatly even before all the dramatics with the lights and the separation of students. Why drag it out? Was it meant to entertain some secret audience, or was the prolonged cruelty of it all its own purpose for being? Darkest of all, was it even a hostile takeover at all? That rankled, cynical part of Gil, shining especially brightly under the current circumstances, was delighted to openly wonder if this wasn't all orchestrated by the university themselves, an elevated Trials for their grand return, something to test the students even more thoroughly in the wake of Hyperion and the mess he'd left behind.
"So we just....go through our door?"
Calliope was first to break the silence, and Gil returned her nervous gaze with a steeled eye. The question hung in the air. Gil surmised it probably didn't matter which door they went through; if their surroundings were as fluid and manipulable as they seemed, they would each be walking into whatever they were intended to walk into, name on the door be damned.
Gil returned Calliope's nod, remaining silent as she and Banjo exchanged platitudes and promises; he held no such expectations for himself. Calliope forged on first, pushing through her door with familiar, stoic poise; Banjo next, brash and headstrong and assertive. Gil, alone, put a hand on the doorknob and left it there, standing in the dark of the corridor with distant crashing of metal-on-metal ringing down the hallway, frozen in the moment between the known fear behind him, and the unknown fear before him.
After a long while, the door opened of its own accord, and a crowd of hands grasped the arm that had rested upon it, and pulled him headlong into the darkness. The door slammed shut behind them, and the bang echoed and reverberated down the corridor, until the sound and hallway both faded into nothing.
Gil woke on wet grass, his hands and face slick with dew but the water-resistant A.R. suit easily shedding the water, rivulets trickling down his torso and falling to the ground from the crests and peaks of his form as he picked himself up from the ground and tried to get a grip on his surroundings.
It was dark - ever so dark - like a closed set, but for the singular orb of light, a shining pinprick some hundreds or thousands of meters above him, visible yet offering no illumination. Instead, some eerie, unearthly glow cast an aura of maybe four or five feet around him in a circle, its origin invisible and unknown, as if emanating from his very being; it moved with him perfectly, elucidating his immediate area with a spectral light, but cut off at its boundary so abruptly, into such a pure and unfathomable darkness, that it was if the world simply stopped existing beyond its circumference.
He took a few unsteady steps forward, watching as grass appeared ahead of him and disappeared behind him, rubbing his arm that still stung from the unnatural clutches of a hundred hands. He tried all directions, wandering in a slow looping circle, spiraling outwards from the flattened patch of grass where he'd awoken, but found no edge to the sprawling field, no end to the grass, heavy with droplets that clung to each blade; the reflected sparkling of the dew in the unnatural light only amplified the sinister atmosphere of the whole situation.
"Hello?" He ventured, calling out into the abyss. Only silence was returned, and the blackness seemed to swallow up his voice, like yelling out into an anechoic chamber. He thought to yell again, but was suddenly gripped with the paranoid fear that something, out there in the ink, might actually hear him.
He walked on, alone, bruised, tired. The darkness felt cloying, only barely kept at bay by the ghostly light, and the orb high above him was perfectly still, unflinching. Was the edge of the light closer now? Had it shrunk inwards, or was it merely his eyes playing tricks on him, noticing change where there was none, conjuring phantoms?
Steadily, slowly, he picked up his pace, exhaustion wiped away by a ramping terror. Was this it? He was trapped, alone, in the forever-dark, endlessly wandering for an exit that would never come, finding nothing in his travels but wet grass? He began to jog, his feet slipping slightly on the slick green, but gaining purchase as he accelerated into a run. Not alone. Not here. Not in the dark, forgotten and ignored, fading into nothing.
He didn't see the figure until it was too late, the all-black outfit springing into his vision far too quickly to do anything about; he felt his face crunch against the man's back, and he bounced off hard, reeling to the ground where the blood trickling from his newly-broken nose mixed with the wetness on the grass in an interplay of hot and cold across his features. He pulled himself up to a single knee, recovering as his head swam and vision span, trying to center his gaze on the person in front of him.
"Hello, 'Elwood'." The figure said, reaching an arm out to assist him. Gil's blood turned to ice, the blossoming painful throb from his nose completely numbed by shock and realization.
With no other recourse, Gil steeled himself, and took the hand proffered, standing. The figure pulled a handkerchief from within his coat, tutting as he held it out. Gil snatched it away and pressed it to his nostrils. He could taste the blood dripping into his mouth, and he stained his teeth with it as he licked his lips.
"Hello, Elliot." He replied.
Elliot Dowd, the evil twin, Gil's mirror. His outfit was perfect, thread-by-thread, like he'd just stepped out of costuming straight onto set. A tailored black suit, expensive and well-fitting, over a dignified black shirt and worn beneath a long woolen overcoat, all topped off with a pair of distinguished, but restrained, black gloves. Even the wig was correct, similarly dark, slicked-back with a subtle shine. Christ, he even had the eyeliner on.
"This is it then?" Gil said, his tone aggressive and accusatory. "The best they could do is myself from some years-old bit-part? I have to admit, having seen the Force tie-ins and adverts, I'd have thought the Big Bad Foundation could have conjured up something a bit more inventive."
Elliot sighed, and despite Gil's familiarity with his own face - through his copies, through his roles, through his own vanity - the way his features contorted on this doppelganger unnerved him. It was like he was mirrored the wrong way, and looking at him, Gil felt like he was the reflection.
"Do you ever get tired," Elliot began, removing his gloves and overcoat, holding them outstretched. Another pair of hands, attached to too-long arms and disembodied from any kind of visible torso or tertiary figure, appeared from the blackness and took them, slinking back into the dark. "Of hearing your own voice? Or is it only everyone else that suffers?"
Gil faltered. Elliot's manner was so far removed from Gil's usual friendly facade, which was to be expected, but there was also a hint of something else. Something Gil recognized, but didn't want to.
"I suppose, of course, that if it did bother you, you'd probably do something about it." Elliot continued. Gil took a step back, but Elliot moved with him, imperceptibly closer for the attempt. "As long as it's just everyone else, it's not worth worrying about, right? After all, we both know the only person important to you is you."
"Get away from me." Gil said, his words defiant but voice unsteady.
"No." Answered Elliot.
Gil changed tact. "Yeah, I've got a bit of an ego. Why the hell not, eh? I've earned my accolades. You'll have to dig a little deeper if you want to really sting."
"Well, that's just the problem, isn't it? There's nothing really there, after we've scratched the surface."
Gil laughed, smug and complacent. "So that's it? One weak blow and you're all out of hot air?"
Elliot chuckled, an apologetic and almost sheepish sound. "I do apologize; you misunderstand me. I mean, when we 'dig a little deeper', as you put it, underneath you're just...vacant, aren't you? As I said, there's nothing really there. I wonder if that's why we were so easy for you?"
"'We'?"
Elliot shimmered, and out of the dark stepped another Gil, dressed in jeans, t-shirt, and a nostalgic jacket. The actual Elwood, once again perfectly costumed, make-up applied, nary a trace of imperfection on his powdered face.
"Slipping in and out of us was just another layer of costuming for you, wasn't it? I remember..." Elwood paused, casting his eyes to the sky as he rested a finger on his chin, posturing as if deep in thought. "...I remember the writers saying they based Elwood on what you were like in real life. To make it more 'natural' for the screen. I remember how that made it harder for you. You had to portray a character, while also trying to act like yourself. Trying to do both at once was so tricky, wasn't it?
"In fact," came a third voice, "I recall that the less real we had to be, the easier the job was." This version held an arm towards Gil, proffering to him an open container of rich-scented sweets. Gil could see the Cachou Lajaunie branding along the side of the tin. "Ads were our favourite. A quick paycheque, and you didn't have to try and be human! Just shill the product with a smile."
Gil, justifying his retreat with a thought of 'I don't have to listen to this', and ignoring the sheer panic welling up in his chest that acted as his true motivator, turned on his heel and fled. He left behind a chorus of laughs, jeering and disdainful, but didn't get far. Those hideous pairs of hands re-appeared, pawing at his legs and arms, wrapping softly around his chest until they restrained him entirely. Gil expected them to hold him down and pull his limbs apart, drag his pieces into the dark to join them, but instead they just politely, firmly, gestured for Gil to pivot back, ushering him - again, polite but firm - back to his other selves. There was no jostling, no aggression; they just indicated the intended direction, and silently guided him back, ensuring he did not stray. As soon as he was once again stood before himself, the hands disappeared.
"Well, it was fun to watch, if inevitable and pointless. This must be what we mean by 'born for entertainment'." Elliot remarked, eliciting a chuckle from the other two.
"What do you want from me?" Gil said, exasperated and agitated. "Stand here in the dark and listen to you berate me?"
Elliot shrugged, splaying his hands out in a comical fashion. "It's more about...accepting some home-brewed honesty. As amusing as your escape attempt was, it's also rather apt given the circumstances, don't you think? Always running from the ugly truths of the self." He raised a single eyebrow, though his gaze went past Gil and to something behind him. Gil turned, and saw the figure he dreaded the most.
A younger Gil than the others, this one was clad in the formal accoutrement of a sixteenth-century nobleman. His face was pallid and gaunt, and an unidentified, off-colour liquid oozed from his mouth and stained his lips and chin.
"If it doesn't serve your ego, dump it and move on, right?" Said Romeo.
"Don't." Answered Gil, softly. Romeo just bent backwards, one hand clutching his heart, the other across his forehead, a theatrical and cheesy pose, but one flush with rancour and derision.
"If love be rough with you, be rough with love; prick love for pricking, and you beat love down." He espoused, in his best thespian dialogue.
"Shut up!" Gil hissed, vitriolic and desperate.
"The sun, for sorrow, will not show his head - go hence, to have more talk of these sad things;" the aura of light became a path, and the echoes of Gil parted around it and slunk back into the shadows, barely visible but for ghostly traces of their features.
"Some shall be pardon'd, and some punished," Romeo continued, as Gil trudged forward, no recourse but to press forward. At the very least, it put distance between him and the burdening, taunting words of his Shakespearean counterpart, that lingered after him to twist the knife.
"For never was a story of more woe."
Gil daren't look behind him for fear of what he might see; yet he understood that what - who - lay ahead of him would be infinitely more terrible a reckoning.
"Than this of Juliet...and her Romeo..."