White: Queen’s Knight b1>c3

Amelie Battier sat behind her laptop screen at an airport café. She had just transferred to a new airline in a career move most in her profession would consider downward. Hours were more, pay was less, and the risk that she gets sexually assaulted in the course of her employment was significantly higher. There were no added amenities or perks that motivated her decision - things got worse in that department as well. She wasn’t being punished for any kind of wrongdoing, and in fact, she had requested this treatment against her prior employer’s pleas. They didn’t want to let go of her, but Amelie knew how to get what she wanted, and she always does.

Amelie stood at 5’8” with a heart-shaped face in a default expression that most men read as being smugness, poise, or superiority depending on what they wanted to see in her. Her chestnut hair with blonde highlights was styled into a French braid that was neatly tucked under here navy blue stewardess cap, which matched her miniskirt and jacket. Other than the bright red of her lipstick, her makeup was extremely subtle and was applied with expert precision to enhance her already beautiful facial structure. She wore a scarf tied around her neck in the colors of the Santolinan flag, in honor of the new destination that she’d be serving – an obscure island in the Caribbean that had the tourism industry’s rumor mill abuzz. It was these rumors, of a radical uptick in traffic from shady individuals primarily based in the UK and a suspicious uptick in white female tourism from the same country that had initially made Amelie take note of the island. It was early word that the agent of pop-star icon Brittany Jennings was throwing her name around to get VIP packages and deep discounts that sealed Amelie’s interest.

Amelie was a novelist on the side, it was actually the occupation that she considered to be her main interest, although it was working as a stewardess that paid the bills. Her novels were a series that combined erotica and sleuth stories starring a flight attendant that she had modeled after herself. The wellspring of inspiration that Amelie drew from was her real work and it was starting to run dry, which is why she turned to Santolina. Her books had a lot of merits to them – the dialogue was witty and sophisticated, but realistic; the accents of the characters were true to life, but intelligible; the erotic scenes were loaded with tension; and, though it eluded the critics, the mundane details were exact to the experience of a real flight attendant. Most critics had a lukewarm reception for Amelie’s books as they found the mysteries to be contrived and convoluted. One critic in particular, a black man working for a major publication in the UK, seemed to take particular delight in tearing down Amelie’s work. He characterized her writing as being overly Eurocentric as the vast majority of the characters who appear in Amelie’s work are White Europeans and he had moral criticism of Amelie’s protagonist, whom he alternately characterized as a “trollop”, a slut, a flirt, and a tease. It felt to Amelie as though he was criticizing her simultaneously for the sex that she (and her protagonist) had and the restraint that they showed elsewhere. She hoped the change in setting, and by necessity, the change in characters would assuage her harshest critics.

Amelie wasn’t a particularly big fan of Brittany Jennings, but she had an eye for marketing and in Jennings, she saw a hook, a way to get millions of her passionate fans, who each pick up one book per year at best, to read her work. She had to get a copy of one of her books into Jennings’ hands. She knew the odds at that happening were slim and it was a longshot that Jennings would actually read her book, but if Amelie could thread the needle and make it happen, she stood to gain spots on bestseller lists, millions of potential readers, and cultural relevance that her work had not yet made any progress towards.

In the café, a woman’s voice on the loudspeaker announced that preboarding was to begin on Amelie’s first flight to Santolina. She shut her laptop, placed it in her bag, and started heading into her first flight to this mysterious island.

(Link to board: https://lichess.org/editor/rnb1kbnr/pp1p2pp/2p5/P2qpp2/3P1B2/2N1PN2/1P3PPP/R2QKB1R_bKQkq-_0_1?color=white))