A Movie Break

Gnome and Moira managed to retreat into the privacy of the Palace, John and Layla shortly behind them. Right behind the door, in the safety of the many wards and precautions of their domicile, waited Fianna.

The tiger maid was in the outfit of her station. A white, frill-trimmed cover for her chest, contrasting starkly the black of the front-tied corset and lower back of the uniform. A long, flowing skirt, the front twice slit to reveal a gorgeous amount of pale thigh, framed further by the semi-transparent length of her stockings. Her hair was as messy as ever, cascading down her back and over her shoulders. A pair of rounded, black-striped ears twitched happily upon seeing him. The rest of her, from her gorgeous features to her robotic limbs, remained militaristically still.

“Master,” she greeted him, bowing her head.

“Not ‘Sir’?” Layla investigated immediately.

“I enjoy the special privilege that comes with John having an appreciation for military hierarchy.” The sniper straightened back up. “However, I try to behave according to the uniform I wear.”

“As you prefer,” John assured her. ‘Sir’ was greater for the uniqueness, but ‘Master’ complemented the unity. Both were greatly attractive. Either or neither fit John. He was just happy to have any of his women. He tasted the metallic sweetness of her lips, then proceeded into the Palace.

As he walked, he compared the butts on offer. Layla was pretty plush, mostly owed to having wide hips on a short frame, but she was no maid. Fianna was a head taller and had wide hips of her own, leaving her with an obscenely fat ass that was the best of gelatine and marble. Compared to that deep ocean of squish, Layla’s ass was… well, it was still jiggly, hot and firm, so John didn’t have it in him to draw any negative comparison. She just wasn’t as endowed.

“What movie are we watching?” Layla asked as John reached for the handle of the door.

The surprise at her knowing his next step lasted for only a second, replaced immediately by curiosity. “Okay, I can dig that you know a lot about me, but do explain how you worked this one out.”

“Sure!” Layla jumped to the opportunity of proving how well she knew him. “You must have thought that, after we have been hanging around from morning to noon, we would run out of things to talk about. Plus, it's hot outside at this hour and gamers abhor natural light. Therefore, you would want to go inside and do something that gives us some fresh topics to fuel conversation. Playing a story-driven game together takes too long for a first date, so it had to be a movie or an escape room, and an escape room would be solved too quickly.”

All things considered, that was among the easier things to predict. “I really have to use you as a way to make myself unpredictable,” John remarked.

“In whatever way I can help you, I will!”

“At this point in my life, it’s more about you and my other women.”

“Then I will help them, all of them! Their goals are my goals, their joy is my joy, their kids are my kids!”

Fianna let out a pleased hum, then stepped through the open door first. Intrinsically drawn by the sashay of a woman in a French maid outfit, John followed her into the home cinema. Like practically all of John’s private facilities, it was marked by easily wiped surfaces and an emphasis on easy cuddling. Rather than rows of seats, there were rows of couches. The pretence of armrests that cinemas often had were removed entirely in favour of cushions, blankets and footstools that allowed actual comfort.

The room was rarely used to its full capacity of 30 people, but it saw regular usage beyond that. Small groups of haremettes or individual haremettes that had friends over were in here on an almost daily basis. Like all the other facilities in the Palace, it was incredibly well-maintained. The couches had a bit of a used look to them, but only enough to take away from the unappealing newness that freshly placed furniture could have. All of them faced a wall with the usual, white square and elaborate framing that allowed the projection from the beamer in the back to unfold in its proper intensity.

John preferred the middle of the three rows of benches. Usually he would have asked where his women wanted to sit, but with these two he knew that he was expected to just make the call. Even when he did ask, it often was more of a courtesy. In any large group, someone just had to decide stuff before the talking of the best option caused time to slip by.

“Sooooooo, what are we watching?” Layla asked again.

“The Carta Protocol,” Fianna responded for John. “It got decent reviews.”

“Professionals or viewers?” Layla asked.

“The worthwhile one.”

“Got it.”

John snorted in amusement at the little exchange. Truthfully speaking, he had picked the movie on a whim. It was an action movie about a former spy with a tragic past that got reactivated due to special insider knowledge. Generic and yet allowing for a good execution – though John secretly hoped it was at least a little bad. He liked analysing why stories did or did not work almost as much as talking about what was in them.

The opening began to play, credit after credit for studio after studio. During that time, Fianna heaped some snacks on a nearby table – the non-crunchy kind. Nothing worse than someone else’s chewing disrupting the viewing experience.

“I don’t know if I can do this again,” a gruff, male voice spoke over a slow pan shot of the Pentagon.

“We have to, Daniel,” a patient woman answered.

The scene unceremoniously switched into a small meeting room. Grey carpet, a white table, two chairs, no windows, one light, no electrical socket – nothing but a man and a woman of about equal age looking at each other. Both were conventionally attractive, actors chosen for broad appeal. “Do we?” The man, Daniel, tilted forwards, reading a name tag. “Varga… You changed your last name back.”

“Elena Cross had… implications,” she explained. Her emotional undertone drove home the point that there was a shared history.

“Ex-wife?” Layla whispered.

“I share that guess,” Fianna whispered back. “Probably divorced after a bad mission.”

“I understand… after Morocco, I-…“ Daniel petered off.

Elena stared at him for three silent seconds. Not even a hint of a background score played. When she placed the dossier on the table, the whisper of paper was as loud as a slap. “I will not explain to you the mission,” she emphasized every word.

“Sounds like someone didn’t tell their ex-wife what happened,” John whispered to Fianna.

“Mhm… I was off mark.”

“Close though,” Layla remarked.

“Close does not neutralize the target.”

The opening scene continued with the pair talking about the mission. Skilfully, the writer wove double-meanings into the institutional procedure, using the briefing as a dual conversation about their past relationship and the rustiness Daniel had towards spy work. The summary of the actual mission was simple: a former colleague of Daniel’s had been assassinated and only he had extensive enough knowledge of the man’s codes and contacts to trace what had happened.

Fianna went on a small tirade when it was made clear that Elena would be in charge of the operation. “Emotionally compromised, this violates even mercenary standards of procedure.” She crossed her arms. “Utterly reprehensible. People are dead and she insists on being the overseeing operator because it is her ex-husband?”

“We wouldn’t have a movie if they didn’t do it like this,” Layla countered.

“Then they need to redraft it until they find an excuse,” Fianna pushed back.

The movie continued on in an entertaining manner. Dialogue was snappy, scenes did not overstay their welcome, though the underlying worldbuilding left a bit to be desired. It was made a point that Daniel and Elena had chemistry both as people and as partners in law enforcement, but there were scars on their relationship that needed addressing. Every briefing session doubled as couple’s therapy and Daniel’s consistent refusal to talk about Morocco continued to prevent them from clicking back together.

At the end of the first act, they found out they were looking for a person with the codename ‘Architect’ somewhere in Columbia. Their lead was a cartel boss who had worked on a quid-pro-quo basis with US intelligence before, selling out worse people in exchange for having the agents look away on other matters. John rather liked that little detail, it showed that the whole agency was thoroughly steeped in moral greys.

When they got to the cartel boss, he was dead. Instead, Daniel found the man’s daughter, a Latina with black hair, just a bit younger than Daniel. Having not followed in her father’s footsteps, she instead manifested as a reasonable and even benevolent trauma surgeon, who quickly turned into a third in a love triangle.

Sofia was swiftly integrated into the operation, courtesy of her knowing things and because Daniel had been shot while finding her. While she performed an emergency operation on him, the second act low-point, Daniel confessed via radio to Elena what had happened in Morocco.

It was the worst part of the movie by far. Not only was it a 20-minute flashback that was plopped right into the main character bleeding heavily in enemy territory, it also left John severely confused. After a long, probably studio-mandated action sequence, the ‘sin’ committed in Morocco turned out to be that he had forsaken the extraction of a VIP in order to save a group of children from a car bomb.

“Why exactly did he not tell his wife about that?” John asked. “’Hey, honey, sorry I cocked up the job, I just decided that a group of actual kids was worth compromising it over.’”

“Maybe Elena really doesn’t like Muslims?” Layla suggested.

The off-the-cuff remark had John and Fianna almost lose it. Laughter, John could only assume, was not the intended reaction to the tearful patching up of the relationship between Elena and Daniel.

After that, the movie recovered a little but not really. They managed to get out of Columbia with the necessary data, Sofia coming with Daniel and flirting with him a bit here and there. The movie was playing it a bit mysterious on whether Elena and Daniel would only be friends or whether they would rekindle their marriage.

The plot of the movie resolved with Daniel walking into a dingy office building in Virginia and confronting a bureaucrat. Turned out that the ‘Architect’ was a codename for a small collective that ran through him. The bureaucrat begged for his life, Daniel executed him after he got a list of names, and the end of the movie was a compilation of arrests followed by Sofia surrendering with a smile to Daniel and Elena going on a date together.

“Well, that was… okay,” John gave his final opinion.

“I hated it.” Fianna’s tiger ears were rotated backwards, her arms crossed over her chest. “A horrifically messy operation for reasons of drama and drama alone. Practically all of their problems could have been avoided by giving Daniel a second operative to work with that understood current procedures.”

Layla tried a half-hearted defence of the movie, though her tone made it clear she was playing devil’s advocate, “They did say that Daniel didn’t want to disrespect the dead colleague's wishes by sharing the codes.”

“So stupid,” Fianna dismissed that counter out of hand.

“What I don’t get,” Layla changed the topic, “is why Sofia gave up in the end. Daniel was man enough for the two of them!”

“I feel the need to remind you that harems aren’t popular with most women nor the general, especially mundane, public,” John drawled.

“Psh, and? They clearly had chemistry, all three of them!”

That was true. Before and after the Morocco flashback, there had been many lines that implied things were working quite well between all of them. “One has to wonder if there was a more daring version of the script,” John hummed. “I definitely felt the hand of the studio during that flashback. They probably had to cram all the action in there because there was no big final fight.”

“I did enjoy that ending,” Fianna opined. “As well as the cartel leader plot. Trading of favours followed by arrests in controlled circumstances. That is satisfying.”

“Probably shouldn’t have shot the bureaucrat though,” John said. “I don’t think he had a license to kill an American citizen.”

They continued to talk about the movie for about twenty minutes.