Bonus Chapter: Part 5
**Bonus Chapter: Part 5**
**Hearing the loving family’s conversation** from the nearby dining room through the thick, wooden walls, the staff, who were busy eating breakfast, couldn’t help but be flustered. It was like hearing a romance story on the radio!
They hadn’t expected that monster-like man and the terror of the board of directors was acting gentle and soft like a marshmallow. A week before the scheduled shooting of the episode, they were heavily oriented by the director and the CEO’s assistant himself about how not to anger the Hades de Vries in any possible and accidental way with detailed points and illustrations. With that, they were sure that he was an absolute tyrant and that at one wrong breath, they will be handed their last paycheck.
Seeing how meticulous the company was with handling the terrifying man, some thought he was a man who could summon lightning and make the world bow down to his feet while others thought he was the typical self-entitled, overbearing man who got the lucky streak of being born with a golden spoon in his mouth and was abusing it. Hearing him being like this melted their terrifying impression on him. What a paradox!
While eating her pancake glazed with blueberries and butter, Misha, Janine’s manager, nudged her actress jokingly. “Now you think you have a chance?” she asked, wiggling her eyebrows. The latter knew she was referring to the careless words she said while they were on their way.
“Guess not,” the actress answered while glumly munching on her pancakes. She was lamenting about her career, it hadn’t started yet but it was already falling apart! No matter her label was a soaring actress with a promising career, she was still an inexperienced talent who had yet to be exposed to the larger portion of the entertainment industry. She hadn’t learned the ways of the approach of the public’s media giants and the likes, and she just made a rash comment about a fashion powerhouse owner’s way of entertaining her visitors. Her career was now considered ruined!
Not to mention her husband! News articles, pop magazines, and tabloids always emphasized how Hades de Vries was very much in love with his wife. She once heard a rumor that the moment Allison gave birth to their son, Hades went to get a vasectomy right after so she wouldn’t get pregnant and enter the throes of pregnancy and childbirth again. She found it romantic, but at the same time ridiculous since, for her, a man couldn't have their vas deferens cut off for such reason. Of all the men she had around her entire life, most of them were misogynistic pro-life dicks who always took pride in their XS to average-sized penises, and refused the option of vasectomy since they thought that the woman should be the one to adjust by taking pills. One of them was the man she hated in her entire life the most: her father.
The deranged, ambitious yet jobless man wanted to have a soccer team. He had her mother pregnant a few times and give birth to her 7 younger siblings until the latter got full of it and had her tubes tied, much to his disdain and led to their divorce and ultimately to his untimely demise by catching a fatal STD.
As the fourth child, she witnessed her older siblings struggle between school and their personal lives as they babysit her and their younger siblings because their mother was too busy with the household chores while carrying another sibling in her womb. For Janine, it was the right call for her mother to have a hysterectomy performed on her since giving birth to a handful of children from year to year while catering to a cantankerous husband and taking care of their waning household was withering her life away.
Before focusing on her passion as a creative performer, she had a number of boyfriends who were assholes and focused mostly on their own pleasure rather than both of theirs by refusing to perform oral sex on her but making her give them a head most of the time during intercourse. The pregnancy scares never failed to be absent and they’d tell her to abort it, even giving her money to do it. But she’d see them retweeting on Twitter about not killing a clump of cells unless it was produced thru rape or incest, which she found hilarious.
While Janine was busy reflecting on Hades’ undying devotion to his wife and contrasting him to the men in her life, Haroun and Zhen were busy arguing about a few revisions in the episode. At the same time, Camilla listened to them from behind, scribbling on important things mentioned in their discussion.
“We must ensure that there is nothing but pure authenticity that no viewer could ever comment that it’s scripted. So we need to make good shots, scenes, and lines that’d lead Mr. de Vries to make ad-libs… or something like that,” Haroun carefully told the nodding Zhen, who was busy typing a few revisions on his laptop while looking at the printed hardcopy of the episode’s script. It seemed that a few questions for Hades were changed as well.
“With that, I think we should revise this part right here? This seems too cringe-y to be real,” the painstaking director said, pointing at the part that articulated about the featured father and son walking on the beach and watching the sunset simmered with cringe lines.
As an INTP-T, based on the analysis of the online quiz he took, Haroun was always serious with his work, craved for constant improvement, and tended to achieve perfection. His passion for making his work “perfect” based on his daunting tastes, was the reason why despite the budget cuts, the show was still able to receive a generous amount of views and got to continue streaming to this day.
“Oh, you’re right… should we do it like this?” Zhen trailed off and began typing the idea set in his mind on his laptop. The burning spirit of ingenuity was embracing him, and it enflamed brighter as his fingers typed fastidiously on his laptop's keyboard.
“Good!” Haroun clapped his hands in approval. “Now…” he trailed off and began flipping pages on the hardcopy when the now passionate scriptwriter spoke again.
“Should we add Mrs. de Vries in several scenes too?” they had prepared several scenes with Allison involved but they kept it limited to at least 2 to 3 since Haroun was adamant about focusing the emphasis on the father and son relationship.
“It’s already good as it is though?”
“But I think it’s better to add Mrs. de Vries! It’d be good to show the audience Mr. de Vries’ affection for his wife!”
“Dude, have you ever read our show’s name? The Dadlicity, not The Famlicity. It’s supposed to be about the dad and his son!” Haroun immediately retorted. “Also, the tabloids and issues already have that covered, there’s no need to do that anymore.”
“I thought we’re looking for some authenticity, man?” Zhen raised his brows, suppressing the urge to raise his voice.
“We are.”
“That’s right. Which is WHY we need to add Mrs. de Vries! We should show how Mr. de Vries is as a family man,” he then argued.
Behind them, Camilla only sighed while the other crew members just relished their state-of-the-art five-star-hotel-produced-like breakfast. It was a normal scene for them to see these two argue, and they understood it was a battle of the two’s creative wits. They’d only argue for a bit then meet a common ground and make up in the end anyway.
“The scenes with Mrs. de Vries are already good,” the director responded before flipping the pages and showing a scene in the script which entailed Hades’ father and the legacy left by him. “Also, we need to delete this part.”
“What? No, that one’s important! It should be on record so people will know how Mr. de Vries grew up to be the man and father he currently is!” now the scriptwriter was unyielding in defending his creative nuances, standing up on his spot, and flailing his arms.
“Sure, and that’ll make Mr. de Vries appear like a wuss! The guy’s a well-known business strongman!” the prissy director now crossed his arms.
“Yeah right, and you’re talking about emphasizing authenticity when people are supposed to be wusses!” the writer took off his eyeglasses and massaged his forehead, sighing to express his frustration. “We need to capture the audience’s sentiment and show that he isn’t just a businessman who is eating the business industries with cold tyranny and sparking genius, we need to show that he’s human too!”
It was a battle between two creatives who wanted to show the masses their visualization of what kind of man and father Hades was. They glared at each other and an electrical spark imbued between their exchange of heated gazes. While everyone else just stared at the with a deadpan expression on their faces. Yep, it was a perfectly normal daily scene. There was nothing out of the ordinary happening.
“That sounds interesting.”