Don Brinker hated imagination. Which was the perfect reason for working in the movie industry.
Actually, 'hate' might have been too strong a word. Imagination made Hollywood work, after all -- once it had been tamed. What Don truly hated was wild imagination. Creativity. Ideas sparking all over the place until one of them touched something combustible and ignited every last possible box office receipt, leaving behind only the chill ash of financial failure. Don recognized that imagination and creativity were necessary to make movies, which put him ahead of virtually every studio head in the city. But they had to be leashed. The way to get a hit movie was by pretending to take chances -- the ones every other film in the chosen genre had taken before yours.
Don told studio heads this. And they paid him for it.
What Don had done was, as with many of the world's truly bad ideas, rather simple. He had conducted a thorough analysis of multiple film genres to identify what he felt were the common elements which made them work. For example, take a crime film. How many murders does it require for the audience to be hooked into the plot without being turned away? Take every successful release in that field and get the average. Naturally, someone close to the main character has to die. What number of minutes into the movie is the ideal point to bump off the mandatory sacrificial lamb? How many days until retirement? And don't forget the ethnic background because ideally, it should not be that of the main character and unless you're dealing with a very few select studio heads in much smaller companies, the black dude does in fact die first.
Car chases? There's an ideal number of frames for them to occupy, five running gags from a master list of twelve that must be included, a minimum crash quota, and everything's funnier with a Volkswagen Beetle -- any year.
Romance? Here is the exact point where the false breakup occurs. Choose one dumb reason for splitting from Column A and the sad music playing over it from Column B, unless you can afford the hot artist of the month in Column C to do a first-release exclusive, but everyone knows soundtracks don't catch on like they used to...
And so on down the line -- which was a line, because Don ignored anything which might produce a curve. Certainly films existed which succeeded outside the rules. There was a phrase for those movies: 'non-repeating statistical errant factors'. Which studio heads took to mean things that had worked once and would never do so again, but which Don understood as Data I Don't Want To Think About Because It Keeps Me From Making Money, at least for the two seconds before he deliberately forgot it existed.
Don had created a thick file of rules. Highways which imagination would be allowed to drive down after it took a series of tests and signed a contract promising to never take an exit ramp, much less get out of the assigned car and blaze a new trail on foot while hacking through endless amounts of underbrush. And for a sliding consulting fee -- it moved based on how visibly big an idiot the person hiring him was -- he would look over any script handed to him and polish it up for the mass market. Every rule he observed for that genre would be applied. He would carefully prune away any buds which threatened to produce wildflowers. And because the studio heads had paid him and many such people only hang onto their jobs by passing on the idiocy as a top-down proposition, his non-suggestions would frequently wind up being enforced.
He would ask people if they wanted an arthouse film which the critics loved, won several awards, and took home less than two million dollars worldwide -- or a spectacle which got bashed by everyone who pretended towards the most meaningless of Pulitzer categories which everyone still showed up to see because critics didn't matter, a movie which had a line of toys still being produced twenty years beyond the actual film, and a product that ultimately outgrossed all of Ecuador. Don continued to be drastically offended by the one studio head who had said "The option where I can still sleep after releasing it."
However, those, at least for the ones who hired him and then had to justify it, were the minority. And because he consulted on films which would have been hits anyway while the ones he really changed fell apart before the filming stage, he looked like a success: after all, you can only count box office receipts on things which reach the box office. Which meant he kept getting hired.
He was working now. A moderately large room full of women (with an odd majority of blondes) was listening to him. Don ignored the frequent winces, side glances, raised eyebrows, and expressions of downright nausea which were moving around the table. It was the typical reaction to his presence among creative types who had been given explicit instructions not to scream anything during the actual meeting, and he generally assumed it had something to do with the cafeteria snacks.
Extremely disobedient screams of "Are you insane?" got filed under artistic temperament.
"I'm telling you, these are the rules," he told one of the many blondes, whom he just barely understood had something to do with the writing and therefore had to be tamed first. "I read your script --"
He had. Sort of. What Don actually did with scripts was skim through them looking for vital filming points, then make notes on how to get rid of anything which wasn't one. He also looked at production sketches and storyboards, largely because he couldn't draw any more than he could write fiction and criticizing the efforts of those who could made him feel much better about himself.
"-- and this is what you have to do. You're making an animated movie for young girls. They'll want all the resulting dolls to look more or less alike. They'll be swapping clothing between the figures. So they all have to have the exact same build. There can't be any height variations, and forget about changing measurements. Either they're identical or you'll never sell the outfit accessory packs."
"But we don't even know if we want outfit accessory packs!" called out a very rare species of redhead.
"This is a Hasbro production?"
She nodded.
"Then shut up. Identical builds." And before the redhead could fully lunge across the table at him (although she wouldn't have gotten very far, as two bordering blondes immediately grabbed an arm each), he went on. "Now, I see you've got a kid character?"
Several looks were exchanged around the table. "You mean Spike?" yet another blonde asked.
"Right. The one who's a dragon in the first world." He'd gotten that much from the script. He'd also picked up the general idea that this was based on a television show, which he had in no way watched as it only would have corrupted the total non-originality of his vision. His pre-meeting research had included learning the age of the original target audience plus the names of the main characters, followed by forgetting everything in the second category.
More glances. "Well -- yes," a slightly shorter blonde said. "We've been looking at the way the older fans react to him --"
Don snorted. Fans. Give him a random off-the-sidewalk focus group any day, paid in The Honor Of Being The First To Hear About This. People who cared about the finished product should just surrender their money and shut up about it. Caring about a work just kept you from really improving it, which was why he never cared about anything he touched until it was translated into numbers for his next sucke -- client.
"-- and they see his relationship with Twilight --"
"The main character."
"-- yes... Well, they think it's more of a sibling thing than we had originally intended. We're already putting a slightly unusual age range into the school so we can get away with having the younger characters show up. Call it sixth, maybe seventh grade through twelfth. So Twilight comes in as a late junior or early senior, and Spike will be a freshman. Because he's used to having hands of sorts and walking on two legs, he can guide her through some of the rough patches, and we're hoping that getting them as the same species for a while will let us explore their relationship in a new way --"
"Drop it."
There was a ripple of tension around the table. Don decided to blame the pink frosting.
One of the earlier blondes slowly focused on him, "You want us to drop one of the central cast members. Completely out of the script. And -- why?"
Don sensed a certain increase in the anger level of the meeting. Jelly filling did that. Also, there was truly a ridiculous number of women in the room and it was possible their periods had synced up. Besides, they had him all wrong. "No -- you can keep the character." Didn't these people know anything about editing being the process of killing their darlings? Well, that was why the studio head had seen the wisdom in getting an assassin-for-hire. "But now he's a dog."
This produced a long silence. Many of Don's orders did, as it gave people time to find pitchforks and someone who could get a torch lit. That had happened to him twice. The first had been at a meeting far too close to a Frankenstein remake and supplies had been readily available. He'd never figured out where the second batch had come from.
"A dog," the barely-restrained redhead repeated.
Don rolled his eyes. Why were creative people so stupid? "You're making an animated film with a female lead character. That means she needs a pet. No cute animal, no movie. Look at Disney. Female lead. Cute animal. Minimum of one. Are you saying Disney doesn't work?"
"No," the lone brunette in the room reluctantly admitted, "but we're not --"
"-- furthermore," Don cut in, "let's talk toys. You have a freshman high school student. No little girls are going to buy dolls for that. Girls don't buy figures of boys unless they're of rock stars or the guy who's dating their other dolls. You're making a little brother action figure. Guess how many pieces that's going to sell? Anyone here buying one?"
"Our fans are a little older," someone else said. She had the sound of a person trying to make a point, and so Don's brain automatically moved to block out everything she was saying. "We have this periphery demographic -- actually, they're the majority at this point -- and they'll --"
Good: he was now ignoring the rest of it. Besides, he couldn't let fans corrupt the facts. What kind of sick idiots tuned into a show for little girls -- and what kind of studio catered to them? It was a good thing he was still dating that one vice-president or the current crop of morons would have guaranteed themselves a flop. "He's a dog. Keep the character. Make him comic relief. Consider fleas. And then figure out how many cute dog toys you'll sell."
The next sentence only got through because it contained two of his favorite words. "But the script points he has to deliver --"
Another eye roll. "So he's a talking dog! Have any of you people ever seen a kids' movie? Look, you know who brought me in here, right? You remember that she outranks all of you put together? He. Is. A. Dog. And frankly, you should have been treating him that way from the start."
A low rumble passed around the room. In many parts of Los Angeles, that sound would have indicated an earthquake in the warmup stages. To Don, it meant he'd found a good place for a tampon-changing break -- which would also give him a chance to make sure any nearby prop department was securely locked and that no one was filming a medieval fantasy anywhere in the area. Even when the morningstars were made of plastic, they hurt.
"Talk about the ways you're going to change it," he said, standing up and heading for the door. "I'm going to take five in the bathroom. You'll all take thirty." Opened it, started through -- stopped. "And when I get back, we'll talk about why your villainess is going to turn into a monster at the end. Seriously, am I going to wind up teaching you girls everything?"
He walked out to the sound of ripping fabric as the redhead sacrificed her blouse to get free.
Turning to check out the bra almost cost him his life.
Time passed. Don received his check with added compensation for personal injury and made a note to look at the video sales of the finished product, just in case it was something he could add to his sales list of Ideas Which I Made Work In Spite Of The People Who Came Up With Them. (He wouldn't watch the film, of course. It was already using his guidance, so there were no trends to unearth. And it was made for little girls. He wasn't one. Case closed.) He broke up with the vice-president, or she broke up with him -- but he knew which way he wanted to see it, and it was the one that didn't involve ducking the vase. And then he forgot about Hasbro for a while, since one of the last things she'd done was post a picture of his face at the gate along with instructions to shoot on sight.
On the night of August 5th, Don stayed up late. He'd recently taken an interest in television sitcoms and was trying to pin down the exact IQ loss required for any modern father figure. Season binges viewed at eight times normal speed helped.
And so he slept through the morning of August 6th, right up until the point when the dragon started bouncing on his chest.
"You jerk!"
These were words Don was used to hearing, especially in bed. But the voice was male, that of a young boy whose adolescence hadn't quite gotten around to the vocal cords yet. And the weight on his ribs was -- well, not minimal: even forty or so pounds jumping up and down like that was going to make an impact -- but it certainly wasn't that of a woman pounding fists against the muscles he maintained simply because so many other men in Hollywood had them. It did, however, come with the sharp points he normally associated with fingernails. Only sharper.
"OW!" Don yelled, and sat bolt-upright on his ultra-sized mattress, the one he'd ordered for the happy (and inevitable) day when his triple play finally came to pass. "I swear I was only looking at her because --"
That was the point at which he remembered he'd gone to bed alone the previous night.
He looked around wildly for the intruder. He'd been so careful about changing his locks after each breakup, but if one of his exes had actually gotten in --
-- which meant he saw the dragon for the first time.
About three feet high, maybe a little less. Mostly purple, with some green here and there, largely in the spines and whatever those things were in the places something more normal would have had ears. Claws on hips. Glaring at him.
"A dog?" the dragon yelled. "Seriously? You said something at a meeting and I had to be a dog?"
Don stared at the dragon.
The first thing he considered was that binge-watching high-speed sitcom seasons in which male characters grew progressively stupider might have actually caused brain damage, and there had to be someone he could sue for it. But thinking about suing others over something he'd done to himself proved his mind was working at a normal movie industry level.
Second: he was having a dream. (He didn't like his dreams. They didn't follow any list of mandatory elements.) Of course, realizing that put him in control of the thing, so he concentrated and willed the dragon away.
Or not.
It -- no, he -- stood on the mattress, a little away from his left hip, and kept glaring at him.
Don pinched himself. He'd seen it in multiple movies and therefore it had to work. It didn't.
"Water," he muttered to himself. He needed something stronger than pinching. Cold water in his face should do it. Clearly he was just overworked. A little shock from the low temperature would clear his head, and then he could get back to the lawsuit idea.
"Oh, did I miss that part?" the dragon asked. "Was there supposed to be a section in the story where I doggie-paddled?"
Don ignored him and swung his legs off the bed, moving to the right so as not to knock into the dragon --
-- there was a moment when he realized what he'd just done, and then he ignored it.
The dragon jumped down from the mattress and followed him into the bathroom.
Don regarded himself in the full-length mirror he kept around for self-admiration purposes. Still late twenties. Still passably handsome in a way he tried to make as generic as possible, as research had shown there was a certain historical look which kept women on the approach right up until the moment they figured out his personality and since that personality didn't keep him from having sex once on every occasion, he never worked on it. Black hair, check. Green eyes not spinning in crazy circles. Fashionable stubble (which half the males in the city were trying out and therefore he would too), also check. Muscles improved to the same level as the majority of the gym, still there.
Dragon, in fact about three feet high and standing on his left, reflecting right along with him.
The dragon looked at Don's biceps, then flexed his own. "I'm not impressed," he told Don. "By anything."
Don got in the shower without bothering to take the boxers off first.
The water was cold. The water was almost more than he could stand. And it dripped off the dragon as they exited the shower together.
He went for his best towel. The dragon got to it first.
The dragon was sitting in his passenger seat. He'd even put the seat belt on.
Don didn't wonder about whether he should have been driving while he was hallucinating. (It had to be a hallucination. He'd run through everything else, up through and including trying to spin a top. He'd seen that in a trailer once, and it hadn't worked either.) Don was not the sort of person who questioned his actions, his thoughts, or anything else that he did. Other people existed to be questioned by Don and Don, in turn, existed to ask the questions. So yes, he was overworked or sitcom-damaged to the point where he was hallucinating. He had accepted that and would consult a lawyer later to find out how much that was worth. But just because he was seeing things which weren't there was no reason not to drive. He lived in Los Angeles. You stopped driving when you were dead and if that happened because someone who was in the middle of a hallucinatory episode ran into you, well, that was life in the big city.
Don asked questions and challenged people out of their original ideas: that was his job (and he had one to do today, consulting on a martial arts movie). The dragon certainly had an idea, one which said Don had done something horrible to him. Don could challenge that. He had done so at the end of every one of his personal relationships, hadn't he? And never mind why or how often, it was experience and there was nothing more valuable than that, at least when he wasn't arguing that a fresh new outsider perspective was what a studio needed most.
On the other hand, it would mean debating a hallucination. Even to Don, this seemed to be an idea of less than sterling value. To give the hallucination extra acknowledgment and interaction might strengthen it somehow.
Or it was possible he could just argue it into not existing. He'd certainly done it to enough previously-greenlit scripts, not to mention every last one of those relationships.
Don decided to do what he'd always done: trust his skills.
(Besides, any number of studio executives were insane: the proof was in the movie release schedule. In the worst-case scenario, there was still a chance going nuts would open doors.)
"You're not real," he told the dragon. "You don't exist. So go away."
The dragon folded his arms. "Really?"
"Really --"
"-- no, I mean, you really thought that was going to work? You'd just tell me I didn't exist and then I wouldn't? You must have rocked your philosophy classes back in whatever college you flunked out of."
"I left of my own free will to pursue a different avenue! The 1.2 average had nothing to do with it!" And certainly having his lowest grade being in Creative Writing meant nothing whatsoever in any way --
-- he was arguing with a dragon.
Don tried to comfort himself with the certain knowledge that his skills had been designed to work on humans, could be adapted, and therefore this failure was only temporary and could be dismissed the instant he inevitably won.
"I've been working too hard," he told the hallucination. "Or there should be a warning label on season sets and I'm about to be very rich. Either way, you don't exist. Once I manage to find my center, you'll go away."
"Find your center," the dragon starkly replied.
"Yes."
"Take the exit for the sewage treatment plant."
"...what?"
"You just said that when you locate a core of solid crap, you'll feel better."
The inevitable victory seemed to be somewhat slower in arriving than usual.
They rode along in silence for a while, at least for the freeway version of 'ride'.
"Is traffic always this slow?" the dragon asked.
"It's Los Angeles," Don told him. "So yes."
"And you keep the top of your car down so you can enjoy the heat and fumes?" The dragon took a deep breath and inhaled about a cubic meter of smog, held it for five seconds, then slowly blew it back out. The atmosphere was visibly cleaner on the exhale.
"No, because I have a convertible and you keep the top down so people can see you have a convertible -- wait, are you enjoying that?"
"I swim in lava," the dragon said. "Do you know what kind of fumes come off molten rock -- no, of course you don't. But this? I could breathe this all day. You?"
"I live in this town. I have to breathe it all day."
"Or you could put the top up and turn on the air conditioner," the dragon pointed out. "Use the filter as a scrubber."
"Convertibles are for being seen," Don insisted.
"Right," the dragon seemed to momentarily concede -- then went on with "Because as long as the top is down and your tinted windows went with it, anyone in the neighboring lanes can see you're talking to a dragon."
It grinned.
Don put the top up.
The meeting wasn't going well.
Of course, they never went well for certain people in the room, and those people were generally known as 'writers'. If writers were unhappy, then Don was doing his job and whether the movie ultimately succeeded because of him or failed for reasons which could be pinned on any party unable to influence whether he would be hired again, Don would still get paid. But today, he didn't seem to be having his desired effect on the assembly.
There were ten people gathered to listen, mostly against their will. There was also one dragon.
They couldn't see the dragon. Don knew that for a fact. They completely ignored his presence --
-- to a degree.
The dragon was a hallucination. He had to be. Don had hallucinated him opening and closing the car door. If the dragon had changed the radio stations and put on music Don would never listen to on his own, then either Don was imagining those sounds (something he'd never been capable of and another reason to hate imagination) or Don had somehow given the voice commands himself without noticing. Or he could be speaking in the dragon's voice...
...no, that wasn't happening. The dragon had been commenting throughout the meeting and none of the people in the room had heard a word of it. They certainly hadn't looked at Don as if he was insane, at least not for more than the usual number of reasons. But...
...Don was noticing things.
People didn't step through the dragon: they walked around him. Doors were held open a little longer than usual, just enough time to allow the tail free passage without getting caught when they closed. The dragon had chosen to sit on the table, hopping up from a chair which someone had pulled out and left empty for vital seconds -- and somehow, the part of the wood he had claimed hadn't had any papers on it. The rest of the table was covered in script notes and storyboard art, but there had been a single clear section for a three-foot dragon to sit down in.
He hadn't tried to touch the dragon yet. Even for someone whose ultimate destiny was to control the fate of every script in the city, there seemed to be places he was reluctant to go. Don hated the dragon for making him feel that way, along with not leaving at the exact moment he told it to for the reasons he had dictated. In that sense, the dragon was all of his exes put together, only much shorter.
But Don still had a job to do, and he would do it in spite of any exes -- dragon.
"Kill the female lead," he told someone who could have been the head writer, not that he cared. "Your movie won't work unless she dies."
"Or just turn her into a dog," the dragon suggested. "That trick always works. Except when it doesn't. Which it didn't. Trust me on this."
He tried to ignore that and mostly succeeded. Meanwhile, the possibly-writer tensed again. "Our concept is that of a couple drifting apart who battle a series of enemies and obstacles together and become reunited in their love," he said. "Having the female lead die might put a slight crimp in the story development."
"I'm not saying kill her at the start of the picture," Don argued, and he was arguing, he should have been dictating... "Let them have a few battles together. Of course, you have to keep her fighting inferior to his. Maybe she can get some lucky shots or -- no, just have her call out warnings once in a while for stuff he'd already seen. But then she dies about halfway through and he gets his motivation to finish all the rest himself. Now, my studies show that with martial arts films, if you're aiming for a sequel and of course you should, he has to be alone at the end of the picture so he can get a new love interest for the next one. You kill one female lead for each movie you want to make. Now if you increase the attractiveness of the actresses in that role by about twenty percent for each sequel, you can avoid some of the receipt downturn. I'm not saying start with an absolute uggo, but..."
The dragon was smirking at him.
The young voice was half-merry, all-sarcastic. "I'm sorry -- but are you actually telling them to make sure one of their stars is a real dog?"
Don blinked.
The possibly-writer's hands clenched the edge of the table, crumpling several papers which just happened to be in the way. "We are looking to tell a story! The story we planned to tell! That is the purpose of this film! A single tale, and then we find another! We are not about to change the entire story structure just to get the ending everyone has already seen!"
Don went to his standard challenge. "Do you want an arthouse success that barely clears your budget back, or a wealth-generating blockbuster that sets you up for another three to come?"
"I want to tell a story! If the viewers enjoy that story, I've done my job -- instead of doing yours! And I would rather tell my own story in my way than yours! If you wish to make that movie, then find a backer and make it yourself! Write your own script instead of rewriting ours into what you want!"
"My job is to make your job profitable," Don shouted. He never shouted, he dictated, but certainly extra volume just reflected his increased authority. "The purpose of a movie isn't to tell a story! The purpose of a movie is making money!"
The dragon quietly shook his head.
Don spun to glare at him. "And what are you saying?" he challenged. "Movies don't exist to make money? There is exactly one reason to tell a story: for the profit!"
"You're wrong," the dragon said.
"If I was wrong, Hollywood wouldn't exist!" Don shouted, going even louder this time in order to make his authority larger than ever. There might have been humans talking. If there were, he had either drowned them out or ignored them. All he could hear was --
"You think things are absolutes," the dragon told him. "That what works for one not only has to work for all, but it has to be mandatory. Making money is one reason to tell a story, and it applies to a lot of them. But not all."
"What do you know?" Don demanded. "You're just a stupid little foul-breathed dragon!"
And up until that point, he'd been okay. There had been a human sitting in the rough direction he'd been facing. He could have claimed a switch in focus, taking the battle to someone who hadn't been ready for it and by defeating them, getting the numbers in the room more on his side before returning to the main event. But now he'd said the word...
The person who was sitting on the dragon's other side stood up very slowly.
He was rather large. He looked fast. He was Asian. He turned out to be the film's battle scene consultant.
"What did you call me?" the rather large man slowly asked.
"I --"
Later, every last possible human witness would swear Don had accidentally walked into the door. Four times.
They were back in the car. Don was trying very hard not to bleed on anything which could stain.
"Your nose looks straighter," the dragon said.
"Does it?" Don asked.
"The studio nurse did a good job of wrenching it."
"Glad to hear it."
"I'd say you scream like a girl, but I know a lot of girls and you don't scream like any of them."
"Really." That one came out as flat as Don's nose had temporarily been.
"No. Their screams have dignity. Personally, as far as I'm concerned, you mostly scream like a chicken that's been cornered by a cockatrice."
And that made Don wrench on the steering wheel, cutting off three other cars on the way to the exit ramp.
The car was sitting in the first parking lot Don had been able to find. In this case, that meant McDonald's. Under normal circumstances, Don would have never parked in a McDonald's because someone might have seen him there, but a basic fact had just occurred to him: anyone who could spot him would have, by basic logic, have been at a McDonald's and be equally subject to accusation of standards violation -- as long as he parked so he wasn't visible from the street. In this case, he was basically hiding out several feet away from the menu and relying on Value Meals to save whatever was left of his reputation.
They were still in the car. Don had left the air conditioner running to battle the August heat. Also in the vague hopes that something which enjoyed swimming in lava could be chilled out of his life, but the cold shower hadn't worked and --
-- the seat was dented under the dragon's weight. His breath still had that strange odor to it, like overheated charcoal. The claws were leaving little scratches on everything they touched.
How much could he hallucinate, as far as sensory details went? What were the limits of this?
The dragon looked at the menu board. "The others got Happy Meal toys, you know."
Don hadn't, but approved. "That's just good promotion." No wonder the franchise had been successful enough to try a limited-release movie. Of course, that was still limited, but if they'd called him in during the initial series development stage... he'd never worked on a kids' TV show before, but he was sure there were rules to apply...
"I didn't have one."
Don turned to look at the dragon. He was sitting fairly still, with only two areas moving at all. His claws moving in and out. His eyelids half-closed and trying not to go all the way down.
"I get some toys," the dragon admitted. "Little plushies, that was the highlight. Build-A-Bear is supposed to be making me soon. But mostly I'm this really tiny stiff plastic figure with no joints at all and minimal detail who gets packaged with Twilight. If anyone remembers to bother. I barely exist. For the original target market... no matter how many ponies they put in who never appeared in the show, random names that I swear just get generated on a computer... they still focus on the Bearers. Those six get lots of toys. All kinds. With accessories. And do you know what I am on my best day? The accessory."
Don blinked, very slowly. He blew a clot of half-dried blood out of his nose without noticing and since it landed on the speedometer display, he never would.
"Pinkie got a boutique playset line the other day," the dragon said. "I think it might be a Target exclusive. What in Equestria would Pinkie be doing running a boutique? It's weird enough that she works in a bakery, right? Forget the cars because we all know that's just so kids can push something... but they know she's a baker. But Hasbro still made a purse which opens up into a boutique, and..."
The dragon sighed. A long silence filled the car and pushed out some of the smog.
"I'd like a boutique," the dragon softly added. "I know it makes no sense for me. But at least I'd have something." He looked up at Don, or at least as much as he could with eyelids still half-descended and tears gathering on the partially visible irises. "I did have something. And you took it away from me."
Don said words which should never come out of a consultant's mouth, whether in Hollywood or any other field. "I don't understand."
"I nearly had equality," the dragon said, and the first tears were squeezed out. "Until you showed up."
Which made Don commit an even larger industry sin. He was silent.
"You really don't understand what you did to me, I get that. And I know you don't care," the dragon bitterly added. "But... you don't know what it's like. Sometimes the show barely remembers I exist. I never get into the songs. When they have me do something, a lot of the time, I just wind up being stupid -- way too often. I handed over pet care to the Crusaders: how dumb does that make me? And that's just the tip of it. When I get to do something heroic, no one remembers. I helped save the Empire, but I didn't get invited back to do my part in getting them the Games. Usually, when I could potentially do something heroic, it's ignored before the fact. I'm not even allowed to breathe flame on timber wolves -- enemies made of wood."
"That's just stupid," Don said. Faking sympathy was not one of his skills, and that was why it surprised him when he was able to do it.
Or...
...no. He'd just managed to pull it off for once. It would work wonders with his next future ex.
"Tell me about it," the dragon sighed. "And then we get outside the show. Like I said -- not much in the way of toys. I don't get into the blind bags because people would be able to feel my shape, or at least that's the first excuse. The fanfic writers..."
"The what?" Mostly because silence was unnatural to Don and he refused to have any more of it on the personal end.
"People who just have stories which want to get out. People who write with no hope of profit -- which means they're people you can't, won't, and will never understand." (And in fact, Don didn't.) "Most of those stories aren't about me. I accept that, but... the ones which are... I fall in love with ponies I never would have considered, but we all have that problem, everyone in the cast. Personally, I get other problems almost all to myself. I destroy the town again and don't care. Some of them have me eating my friends: try living with that. They change my whole personality. They make me abusive, or the abused, or... look, I'm not saying it's all of them, and there's some good ones out there. Sometimes I even get to be the hero. But so few people see those stories, they're the minority of cases... and for so many, none of those tales ever happened. The movie -- happened. I'm sure some viewers are going to ignore it, but for most intents and purposes, it was real. And I was going to be right next to Twilight as her little brother. I could do things which weren't just sending and receiving scrolls. I wouldn't be a walking eMail client. I'd be -- part of the story. Not equal time -- I'm still a supporting character, I know that -- but closer to being sort of equal at all. I'd be there. And you -- you made me into a dog."
More tears fell.
"I think I have the right to complain about that," the dragon continued. "Barely any toys: the adult fans would grab them, but Hasbro is still adjusting and it's not there yet. I hardly show up in so many episodes and the ones where I'm being smart and doing important things are few and far between. This was my biggest shot ever. Do you know how it ended? With a dog collar. You said I wasn't her brother. I wasn't even a tag-along or team mascot. I was an animal. The cute little companion who only exists to sell toys. That was why you did it. Want to know how many toys I got out of it?"
"Well -- how popular is your franchise? Would sales of middle five digits be reasonable?"
"Try none. Because they didn't make any."
Don blinked. "I gave them that advice -- to change you for the box office and toy benefits -- and they ignored the toys?"
The dragon tearfully nodded.
And then Don wanted to cry.
They stopped at Best Buy and picked up the movie, with the sales clerk concentrating more on not looking at his injured face than wondering at the request for a movie aimed at little girls. The dragon told him he could get the first two show seasons off Amazon, but the third wasn't available yet. Don, who stole some of his best claimed ideas from TVTropes, had no inherent objections to downloading everything off the Internet instead in the name of saving time.
Many hours of binge watching followed. The dragon encouraged him to take breaks, but Don felt it was something he had to get through as quickly as possible. He was initially rather annoyed when the dragon insisted that he watch in real time so as not to lose any of the dialogue.
They saved the movie for last. The dragon could barely watch himself on the screen. Don, his aches going beyond that of a broken nose into the wounds caused by ten thousand unsold toy units -- minimum -- shared some of the pain.
The credits rolled. One last sort of pony-human-student scrolled by. They sat quietly on Don's couch, which wanted to be leather and would never quite make it.
The dragon sniffed.
"Are you okay?" Don asked. It wasn't a normal question, or at least it wasn't normal for him to have any real interest in the answer.
"What do you think?"
Don thought about it.
"I think you should be proud," he said. "You saved the story."
That got him a huge blink, one with two sets of eyelids involved: membranes flickered down, went back. "What? You just saw! I was a dog! How does that save anything? In the last battle, I got kidnapped -- dognapped -- and then I barely did anything, I didn't even get to bite anyone, and then the girls all did their Elements thing at the end -- somehow -- and I got left out like I always do --"
Don raised his right hand, put it in front of the dragon's mouth. "Look -- the big I'm Not From Here reveal scene. Think back for a second."
The dragon, surprised at the cut-off, nodded.
"Pinkie's nuts, right?" Don unnecessarily asked, and lowered his hand.
"Sometimes," the dragon admitted. "Depends on the writer."
"So -- were the others really going to buy Twilight's story after Pinkie blurted it out first?"
"Maybe..." the dragon mused. "Being stunned by Pinkie can kind of wear off after a while, and some people build up a resistance..."
Don nodded. "So -- there's a chance they would have rejected it?"
The dragon thought about it -- then shook his head. "You almost got me, but they had to buy it. In the service of the story. They would have believed anything to keep the movie running."
"Maybe," Don lied. "But ultimately, Twilight had no means of proving she was from another world. True? No magic. No pictures, and those could have been faked like they were elsewhere in the movie. Nothing to use except her stories -- and she's not a natural storyteller. They might have just assumed she was nuts."
"But in the service of the story --" the dragon argued.
"-- they had proof."
"Proof," the dragon dubiously said.
"Magic."
"There was no magic," the dragon pointed out.
Don smiled. "I'd call a talking dog pretty magical."
Another one of those double-blinks, this one harder. "...what?"
"You were the ultimate proof. As a little brother, do you know what you would have been? A little brother. Just another kid backing his crazy sister up. But as a talking dog..."
The dragon seemed to be thinking about it.
"And let's not forget some of the things that happened," Don added. "Like that endgame. Snips and Snails steal you. Do you know how much worse that would have looked, doing it to a kid? And Fluttershy needed a way to connect: what would have been more effective than echoing the first time?" Hoping the dragon wouldn't approach it as the yellow girl not so much relating to a fellow pet smuggler as the carried animal and what that prospectively meant for the Equestria relationship. But with another topic considered... "Plus Twilight could smuggle you around. One student who never goes to class, that's one thing. Two is much more conspicuous. You would have stood out too much. I'm still surprised Twilight was never dragged into an office to find out why no teacher had seen her the whole time, but a pair of perpetual truants... Yes, you could have helped her with walking on two legs. And hands -- and Dash really should have known the word just from being around you and knowing minotaurs existed. But as a small dog, you could be there the whole time. You were blackmail material for Sunset Shimmer to use against her. And you were proof that magic was real somewhere, and Twilight had come from another world -- the two of you had."
Very dubiously, but with some doubt in that state lurking near the surface, "You're just trying to justify your own bad idea."
"Maybe," Don admitted, breaking yet another commandment of the industry, along with one on a much more personal level. "Maybe it was. But maybe sometimes a bad idea can be manipulated until it does something right. It would have been a different movie with you as a human, I admit that. And maybe it would have been more fair to you. I can't do anything about the toys. You wouldn't have gotten them as a kid brother: the toy business just doesn't work that way. A limited edition run for the fans, some convention exclusive -- that was your only chance there. No general release. And I'm sorry you don't get them as you are: that's a shame. For not having them as you wound up, that is their mistake and they were stupid for missing the chance, because you were adorable. But as a dog -- for the story -- you still mattered."
More thought. Don waited. He normally interrupted anyone who was openly thinking this much because the resulting idea would invariably be opposed to his own, but nothing about this was normal.
"So -- you're admitting you screwed up a little?" the dragon asked. "But you think it worked out anyway?"
Don, robbed of his 'maybe', did the hardest thing he'd ever done in his life. He nodded. Twice. The third attempt stalled out a quarter of the way through.
The dragon sighed, looked at the Blu-Ray menu screen, listened to the repeating music for about a minute.
"I guess that's the best I'm going to get," the dragon said. "I can see it that way, I really can. I just wanted -- more."
"When all else fails," Don suggested as he invoked a golden rule of moviemaking, "lower your expectations."
"I did," the dragon told. "I lowered them to the point where I realized that was the most I would ever get out of you. I accept your apology. What there is of it. The most there could probably ever be of it." He hopped down from the couch. "Maybe I'll get better treatment next season. Or Hasbro will run a convention exclusive or two for me. I mean, even Derpy got one. I've got to be somewhere in the production order, right? And then my eBay resales will be through the roof."
"There's always hope," Don told him, and made a mental note to call Hasbro in the morning to ask about the chance. From the city's last remaining pay phone. Surely his ex couldn't have that blocked. "But -- I have to be honest with you." Which might have taken out the last commandment on city and personal tablets. "No matter how the audience ultimately worked out, you're the boy character on a show originally aimed at little girls. In that sense, you're always going to be a little bit screwed. But I'm still rooting for you to get something more than just hope, though. And --"
The dragon paused on his way to the door, waited.
"-- hey," Don grinned. "At least you're working, right?"
The dragon nodded at that. Smiled. And walked out.
When Don woke up very late the next morning -- nearly afternoon -- the dragon was still gone.
He wasn't on the bed. Or in the kitchen. The bathroom was similarly vacant. There did seem to be little scratches everywhere, but it was quite possible that a hallucinating Don had done that himself with car keys or something. Possibly not. He honestly didn't want to think about it too much, or how the dragon could have possibly known so many things about a series Don hadn't viewed during his pre-meeting research, much less learned anywhere near that much about, not unless he'd forgotten everything after more binge-watching. But he'd retained his memories from the dragon-forced run, which was going to make his lawsuit a little awkward if anyone tried to make him testify about it and then found out he'd committed perjury long after the fact.
The Blu-Ray was still there. So were the downloaded episodes. Don spent some time on his computer watching one they hadn't gotten to the previous night, then looked up some rumors on Season Four and briefly checked out a fanfic site before chuckling to himself and heading for his front door.
Fanfic. Really. People writing with no hope of profit, basically begging the more intelligent to steal their ideas and make money. No, he didn't get that at all. And full of non-understanding, he stepped into the August heat and looked at his driveway, where the passenger side car door would have scratches to ignore.
But he couldn't see the door. Or the car.
The twenty-foot tall humanoid mass of metal in front of him had a way of blocking views.
It bent down towards him. Lenses irised wider. The articulated jaw shifted.
"A scooter?" the robot yelled. "You jerk!"
