The Haunting at Kravis School of Fine Arts

"I'm sorry, but what is the story behind why he is in a bed of a presumably deceased satanic worshipper? How are you going explain how he ended up there? What, the ghost decided that the first thing to do after possessing someone is to go and take a nap?" Professor kicks the wall absent-mindedly, all the while stoically ignoring Leigh's stare. "Actually, nevermind. People who watch this show wouldn't care about pesky thing called logic. Might as well call this whole situation us commuting with higher powers; want me to start some smoke for dramatics, Ricky, or will it mess with your vibes too?"

Ricky, laying on the bed with his eyes closed in a feigned trance, mutters, "You blow smoke up everyone's asses all day already, what's a little more smoke? It will enhance the mood."

"Like who?" Justin asks with exaggerated suaveness, sliding up beside Leigh and giving her the eyebrows!

* Cliiiiimb intoooo my beeeed, Rickyyyy. Joooooin meeee *
Mike spookily thrills through each of your headsets.

* The story is ‘Don’t think about it too much! Nobody else is!’

Make sense? *

"Alright! Let’s sell this shit sandwich!" Justin walks up, his eyes lingering on Leigh for a moment as he crosses to Ricky.

He puts his hands to the man’s shoulders, and playfully acts out his intended next scene:

"Ricky! Ricky! What are you doing? Wake up! Wake up! Don’t lie down there! That’s… Wake up! Please! Can you hear me?

Sound good? Fucking-A it does!"

Leigh takes a half-step away from Justin, eyeing him suspiciously for a moment. "I guess you'd do in a pinch," she then says, "As long as you keep your mouth shut." She's filming Ricky, even though with them talking the entire time he's doing his thing, she's not sure they're going to get any good footage of whatever the charlatan's up to. Not that she cares. To Justin, she then adds, "You're not who I was thinking of, though."

Professor snorts at the group's antics, then opens his equipment case and rummages in it for a while, eventually producing a portable smoke machine similar in size and form to a handheld vacuum cleaner. He then looks around for a power outlet, then thinks better of it and instead pulls out his own power bank. With the whole thing set up, Vonsham then marches into the doorway, aims at the bed and directs a blast of smoke straight into Ricky's and then Justin's faces. "Oops," he states unapologetically as he redirects the nozzle down so smoke instead covers the floor. "Enhanced the mood too much."

Like a kid in a candy shop, Justin’s eyes light up, and a shit-eating grin crosses his face. He crosses the room to grab Ricky by the shoulder with a renewed swagger in his step.

To Leigh, he winks, and then zips his fingers across his lips, twists the key, and flicks it away, before immediately turning to Ricky and shaking him by the shoulders and playfully asking him to wake up, readying for the next shot!

He coughs suddenly, as his face is filled with smoke. Wheezing through the haze, waving his hand in front of his face, she cough-speaks:

"Reminds me of the guys from Sigma-Delta! We got up to some craaaazy shit back then!"

Ricky uses the girly voice he had been practicing since they got this assignment. "Hello? Who's in my room?" Ricky opens his eyes with his eyes rolled back so they show mostly whites. A simple trick but very effective. He grabs Justin's hand quickly in a jump scare way.

Sounds more like a middle aged Dutch hooker than an American college student... Joe said loudly under his breath as he stood by the Professor and Leigh. But what do i know about Dutch hookers, right? he said with a bit too much of a gleam in his eye and a wry chuckle. Roll those 'R's more. I hear that's all the r-r-r-rage with the sorority girls these days.

* Jesus Christ. You actually have to sell it, Ricky. This isn’t High School Theatre anymore! *

Justin’s eyes go wide, and a hand threatens to go up to his mouth. He looks to the camera, and then to the others!

"Yes! Yes! We’re here! We’re here! Alice, is that you? We…" he looks to Leigh and beckons her over quickly. He flicks a finger at Glickmann to take up camera duty.

"We have an old friend of yours. From… from before! She’s here with us now!" he says, followed by some slightly sterner hand gestures towards Leigh to coax her into frame!

As Justin and Ricky play their embarrassing little sketch, Leigh is looking thoughtful, filming it without paying attention to it. The prof doesn't just make mistakes like with the smoke machine. Not on accident. So she wonders...

Justin calls her back to reality - if anything that is involved with Ricky's terrible acting could ever be referred to as reality - and with a sigh, she steps in closer. Filming Ricky, she decides to test something, so, out of the view of the camera in her hands, which is still pointed at the lying dutchman, she suddenly leans against Justin's shoulder as if seeking comfort from him. "Alice?" she asks in a dramatic voice, as if scared and awed, but without stepping into view of the camera. "What... what happened? To your British accent, I mean."

Joe steps in, egregiously pantomiming to Leigh to hand the camera over to him. Thus is your time to shine, kid. Get enough screen time to apply for a SAG-AFTRA card and raise your rates for dailies. Go on, get in there! I got this... How hard could it be to run a camera anyway??

"You did not pay me nearly enough to let you touch my camera," Leigh says, recoiling from Joe and bumping into Justin in the process. "Take one of those shitty ones Mike provided." She then puts her own camera down safely on the nightstand and warns, "Anyone who touches that dies."

Ricky twists on the bed as if he's in pain. "Ah! It hurts! It burns! The stupid, it burns! An accent isn't tied to the soul, it's muscle memory tied to the body! Of all the questions to ask someone from the great beyond, that was the worst question I've ever heard! Wait until my spirit friends here about this! You better hope you don't come here when you die or you'll die again of embarrassment!"

Narcissus watches the ongoing farce with barely concealed disapproval, crossing his arms - with the machine still active, surrounding him in a veil of smoke, - and tapping his foot, impatient to get out of this situation, this room and this college. Thankfully no one at least asks him to get into the frame, since he absolutely can't take Ricky's acting seriously. So he simply glowers, displeased but unwilling to interfere.

"Joe's hair gel exudes more spiritual energy than this pantomime," Professor grumbles mostly to himself, then picks up one of the tripod cameras he's been carrying around and drops it by Glickmann in a rare display of cooperation. He then moves to hover protectively over the nightstand with Kimberly's camera, although still carefully avoiding being caught on film.

Justin feels the warmth of the woman against his arm; the tender pressure of it as she pushed herself against him for the charade.

He was distracted by it. That mannish urge to protect blossomed in his chest, despite knowing the whole thing was theatre. Well, except for the camera:

"Yeah, fucking watch that shit!" he warned, backing up Leigh’s threat of death, whether he needed to or not.

Back to the show, he becomes suddenly sensitive again:

"Sorry! We… we aren’t used to this kind of thing. Forgive us, Alice. We… we’re here for answers.

If you want a more interesting question, how about this: Did you do it? For real, for real? Or were you set up?"

Ricky smiles a mischievous grin. "Oh, is that all? Just the answer to a murder mystery? Ok, I will tell you...just after this commercial break!" Ricky cackles in high-pitched laughter.

Leigh lets out a relieved sigh. "Wonderful," she says. "And that's my in-front-of-the-camera appearance done with." Considering Joe filmed her for all of maybe half a minute, it definitely would not work out to be a proper on-screen appearance. Still, she moves over to where she put down her camera just a minute ago. She could easily grab it without getting too close to its self-appointed guardian, but she doesn't. Instead, she shifts right up to the professor until her chest brushes his. As she then reaches down and picks up her camera with one hand, she whispers something to him.
She winks at him, then moves back into position to film Ricky without paying further attention to Vonsham.