Let's All Be There, Chapter Four

Actualsis’s flurry and fervour were lagging at last. Maybe her batteries had finally run down, or maybe her hope had. She met the stares of the other three.

“It was my show,” were the words which made it out. “I only wanted…”

And sinking to her knees on the floor, she buried her face in her hands.

Mini-Flash Phytolith watched a moment. Then as one decided he walked over, to stand beside Actualsis. He whipped back a leg and took aim with his toecap.

Next second Flashslip’s hands were roughly about him, thrusting him away. “What’s wrong with you?” flung the older boy.

“We had a chance, Flashslip!” Phytolith retorted in a fury. “You know for what! Not her demented television programme, but what we’re fighting for! This could have changed things! Only now it’s obvious her director’s cut must have been as drivelling and pathetic as she is. Treating it all like a game. Pretending it isn’t war. We were counting on her to manage this for us, and look what she’s led us to!”

Flashslip looked alright, but only at the boy before him. Every revelation at the latter’s film night, every truth disclosed of which Flashslip had barely dared dream, and yet the one point on which he could wonder just then was whether he knew Mini-Flash Phytolith at all.

“So what good would kicking her do?” Flashslip implored him. 4-H-N had another Earth-saying. Something about the times you had to laugh, because otherwise you’d cry.

Not that Flashslip felt much like either, or at any rate, he was suddenly so sick of those heaving red heaps that seeing the back of them topped his to-do list. He called up a dialogue-box and ordered delete for every rejection-slip.

The glowering crimson illumination mercifully vanished in a blink. Four figures, even the one still prone and weeping, must have felt at least a little better for the cool calm all-but dark.

All-but.

For there was something else, which kept it from being entirely so.

And it was green.

Mini-Flash Meteor stooped to gather up what pulsed gently beside her heel. A lone luminous letter, its pristine viridian falling on a face whose expression of wonder was mirrored in those of the two males gazing back. Meteor, tipped and tinted by the last light, held.

Then this unlikely Childlike Empress crossed the room, and placed the precious packet in Actualsis’s hands.

At a touch it melted and swelled to the shape of a little round man with a beard. His open palms and kindly eyes threw founts of soothing green to suffuse the gloom. At his ankles curled a doglike domestic animal, indigenous to whatever planet it was this pair called home.

“Down, Pepsi,” the little man chuckled to his wholly docile beast. “You know I always give a personal reply. Good manners never go out of…ah. Of course. It’s Actualsis, isn’t it?”

His smile was consoling, comforting.

“I enjoyed your production very much, for what it was,” he told her without reservation. “Lots of energy, lots of excitement. But Actualsis, you started out on a disastrous misjudgment. Reality TV, exploring first gender concerns? Has there ever been a time, in our eons of history, when the first gender could have wanted reality less? No offence to either of you females, but reality means the extinction of our kind at the hands of yours. The projected ratings don’t exactly sell themselves. But the issue is the timing not the quality, and I hope you know that.”

It seemed there was nothing more.

“Great party,” the producer added.

Unto what ensued, it was Mini-Flash Phytolith who spoke.

“Would you be interested in something else?” was his question. “Something a little closer to what the first gender might want to see?”

“Oh,” the other assured him at once. “Always happy to work with young creators. Yes, please do take my contact-details.”

And that really was all. After thanking their new industry contact the foursome bade him farewell and returned to their world, one of them dwelling ever on the discoveries her day of surveillance had yielded. Above all, Mini-Flash Meteor knew now that whatever it was that was going on between Mini-Flash Phytolith and Flashslip, the latter was senior in age alone. Phytolith had taken charge of their situation in the mailroom, although again it remained a mystery to Meteor what exactly that situation had been, and nor had she missed so much as one of the strong words exchanged prior to that.

Mini-Flash Phytolith. Maybe, Mini-Flash Meteor concluded, she’d been a little too hasty about him. It was starting to look like they might have more in common than she’d realised.

Besides their stony names.

THE END