Cockatoo Part 4
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Too Much LoveChapter 3 free porn video
Pilar might not have keyed into the fact that Nick looked strangely familiar if Connie hadn’t tried to tip her off that there was something unusual about the producer of this shoot, but now there was something about the unassuming young man that was triggering some half-buried memory.
She suspected it had something to do with the Stone family, but couldn’t say why. To answer questions about the extended family that she didn’t know off the top of her head, Pilar could always go to her cousin Inez whose knowledge on the topic was encyclopedic. As she walked past Nick on the way out of the conference room, she snapped a surreptitious picture on her phone and sent it to Inez with the message “Who is this? Do you recognize him?” It took Inez less than a minute to respond.
Inez: That looks like Nick Coyle. He just inherited Colin Grayson-Stone’s estate - billions of $$$ that have been sitting around since the nineties, gathering dust. Where are you?
Pilar: On the shoot.
Inez: Is he using his vast new fortune to creep on girls in their underwear?
Pilar: No. We’re in street clothes and he hasn’t creeped on anybody. We’re playing dungeons and dragons.
The burst of emojis that Inez sent back ran the gamut of forms of amusement.
Inez: You’re playing D&D? What class?
Pilar: Is druid a class?
Inez: It is. Have you ever been out in the woods?
Pilar: I’ve done a couple of shoots in the jungle. Does that count?
Inez: Sure. Good luck, city girl.
While she chatted with Inez, Pilar was also googling “Nick Coyle.” Having a last name helped her find a few articles in the business press and a few in a local newspaper from somewhere called Brownfield Mills. The latter had a picture and, sure enough, it was the young man she’d just met.
The different stories all quoted different estimates about the size of the late Colin’s estate, but all agreed that Nick was now a billionaire. It didn’t make him the richest of the Stones - or even the richest Pilar knew personally, but it made him a very big fish. She’d spent the ten years since her quincenera learning how to swim with the big fish of the Stone family and helped make her father’s fortune in the process both by helping him figure out who it was worth approaching and who would crush a relatively small fish like Rodriguez-Stone Building Services if they swam too close.
Nick might turn out to be a great person to know, but it seemed more likely he’d be a hazard to avoid. People who had no experience with wealth tended to wield it poorly. They could go into a big deal with the best of intentions, then back out of it and bankrupt their contractors in the process.
Pilar needed to keep a close eye on Nick Coyle. Right now, the best way to do that was to learn how to play Dungeons and Dragons.
Before Pilar could do more than the most superficial research on Nick, Kiki stepped out of the office and nodded to Pilar before heading off deeper into the office. “All yours.”
Pilar took a deep breath, squared her shoulders, and walked into the office. She rarely had time for fiction or games and hadn’t played “make believe” in twenty years, but she’d learned how to tango backwards while wearing heels. How hard could “make believe with rules” be?
Once she’d taken a seat, Hall launched into the questions. “Your character is a druid. Druids align themselves closely with nature, often live away from people, and can use magic drawn from nature. Is your character male or female?”
“Female.” Pilar didn’t see any reason to make the exercise harder for herself than it had to be...
Hall wrote something down. “Ok. She has the ability to take the form of a small or medium-sized animal once a day. Which animal does she most often turn into?”
Pilar frowned. “She can turn into an animal ... like a cat or something?”
“Maybe a cat. But, she grew up in the wild. So, she might be more familiar with a lynx or a bobcat than a housecat.”
“Could it be a panther?” Pilar asked. That winter, Jazz had flown her regular models down to Brazil, driven them out to the jungle, and had them painted like wild beasts. Pilar thought she had looked particularly fierce as a panther.
“Absolutely. Does she live somewhere that panthers are native? Like in a jungle?”
“Brazil.” Pilar offered.
“Ok. Like the jungles of Brazil, but this is another world, not Earth. What’s your character’s name?”
“Pantene?” Pilar frowned and shook her head. “No. That’s a shampoo. How about...” She drew a blank. “Can we come back to that?”
“Sure. Does she ever go into town? How does she feel about people?”
Through question and answer, they built up the character. She was a druid, born in the jungle and raised by her father, the archdruid. She’d never been to town, but she’d seen it from a distance. She didn’t hate people, but she was wary of them. Her real friends were the animals she saw every day.
The word picture Hall painted of the character was entrancing. Pilar hadn’t really thought of storytelling as a skill before. But, she could imagine the druid, spending days roaming the jungle, as comfortable in the treetops as she was on the ground, sometimes taking the form of a panther to fight or hide or climb, sometimes doing it for the sheer joy of feeling her feline muscles. As a panther, she hunted and killed prey animals, but only with the greatest respect.
She saw her father and the other druids of the jungle from time to time, sharing knowledge and training. But, she preferred her own company and days of nothing to worry about but what to eat, where to sleep, how to stay safe - no seven am on-set calls, no cell phones, no social media to maintain. It sounded wonderful.
“Sylvana,” she interrupted Hall’s recitation. “That’s not a thing. Is it?”
“Is that her name?” Hall asked. When Pilar nodded, he asked, “Okay. So, the big question is, ‘why does Sylvana leave all this to go adventuring?’”
“She doesn’t,” said Pilar. “Why would she?”
“Well, that’s the game. Your character and Kiki the wizard and the other three are supposed to be on an adventure together. Why would Sylvana leave her home to go adventure with other people when she’d much rather be spending the day as a panther sleeping in a tree or swimming in the river or...”
“Wait. Kiki’s character is also named Kiki? You can do that?”
“Your character can have the same name as you if you like? Would you like your druid to be named Pilar?”
“No. I like Sylvana. I just...” Pilar sighed. “Maybe something’s wrong with the river. Like somebody’s dumping in toxic waste upstream and it’s making her friends sick? So, she has to travel upstream, find out who’s doing it, and make them stop.”
“That’s really good,” said Hall. “So, maybe someone is dumping a magical toxic sludge that’s making the animals fall into an enchanted sleep and not wake up.”
Before she remembered it was all imaginary, Pilar felt a quick flash of anger. How dare someone poison her friends?
HangLooser: Holy shit. I didn’t know I wanted to be a billionaire until I saw this video. Guess I’d better change my major from social work to billionaire studies.
Walking with Emily and Casey from the conference room to the office they’d set up for character conferences, Nick was having a hard time thinking of them as models instead of just human beings.
He’d imagined the opposite problem - even discussed it with Max. During casting, he’d only known them as photos and a brief profile on the Carlyle Group’s website. The photos had, of course, been chosen out of thousands taken by professional photographer to capture a perfect moment when hair, makeup, lighting, costume, and everything else conspired to create a perfect fantasy. When they were discussing who to cast, the question of what the models “really looked like” came up frequently.
Now that he’d seen what they really looked like, talked to them, and watched them get ready to play Dungeons and Dragons, it was so much worse than he’d expected. Even in their street clothes, moving and talking in office lighting, they were absolutely gorgeous. If his life had gone as he’d expected and he’d gone away to college in September, he could have met any one of them, fallen quietly in love with her, and if he was lucky, become really good friends with her and her good looking, athletically-gifted boyfriend.
Instead, he’d fallen a little bit in love with all four of them at once. Worse, his nerd hindbrain was insisting that, in his role as assistant dungeon master, he could make them like him. Fortunately for his dignity, he’d already made that mistake when Arwen started playing with them, treating her much better than the other players until she caught on and told him to quit it before he ruined the game.
As he reached the office door, he turned to face the two models. “I’ll start with...” His brain locked up. There were two very different beautiful, blonde women standing in front of them and he was supposed to choose between them.
Emily was honey-blonde, tall, tan, toned, and, for lack of a better word, stacked. She was whatever goddess surfers worshipped. Casey barely came up to her shoulder and slender. Her hair was like white gold and she’d dressed like a goddess might. But, she wasn’t a goddess to Nick. She was the Banshee Queen.
And at that embarrassing realization, he said, “Casey,” not realizing Emily had already started to take a step forwards. “You’ve played before. This should go a little faster, then.”
There was a poster of Casey in Nick’s bedroom. Or, more specifically, there was a poster for Albany MMOCon 2011 - a convention for video game players Nick had very much wanted to attend when he was fourteen. That poster prominently featured Casey done up as Sylvanas Windrunner, leader of the Forsaken in World of Warcraft. She’d been painted blue, had long, silver hair, wore impractically midriff-baring armor, and carried an eldritch bow. Nick had gotten the poster from his local game shop as a kind of consolation for not going to the convention.
Nick was sitting the width of a desk away from the woman he’d played horde for and trying not to blush just from imagining the mortification he would feel if she ever learned that fact. Soldiering forward, he said, “Okay. Tell me about your rogue.”
Casey nodded. “Her name is Linnea Anessia, but she goes by Corva. She’s the daughter of a minor noble house, but left home as a teenager to avoid being married off. She goes on adventures and takes jobs because she wants to be rich enough to found her own dynastic line somewhere far away from her parents’ kingdom.” She looked up. “There’s ... more, but I don’t think it’ll come up in a one-off adventure.”
“I take it you’ve played her once or twice before?” Nick raised an eyebrow.
Casey nodded. “Yeah - once or twice. I ... have some older cousins who played when I was growing up. They let me hang out with them at big family gatherings. I haven’t played in years, though.”
Nick wondered if that was how Casey had gotten into cosplay. But, he couldn’t ask. He was just supposed to be another player. He wouldn’t know her background or have had anything to do with casting her. Tipping his hand would ruin the Big Surprise.
Instead, he focused on what he knew how to do. He thought about the backstory she’d given him. “So, Corva’s not in contact with her family? She can’t rely on them or their name to get her out of trouble if she goes all murderhobo?”
Casey laughed. “No. But, she’s not really the sort to go ... uh, ‘murderhobo.’ She’s mercenary, not psychotic. Chaotic-neutral. She likes to keep a low profile. She’s afraid her father will send someone to bring her home and lock her away if she somehow besmirches the family name.
Nick nodded. “So, the story is that Emily’s character is sent by her church to investigate a series of grisly murders. Why would Corva go with her?”
“She’s been paid?” Casey paused. “Or, maybe she got herself killed and Emily resurrected her, so now she considers it good to stay close.”
“Emily’s character isn’t high level enough to resurrect yet. Maybe she healed you at some critical moment?” Nick offered.
“That could work. Corva feels the obligations she incurs pretty keenly.” Casey nodded.
Talking to Casey wasn’t helping Nick fall out of love with her in any way. Not only was she a gamer, she’d obviously given her character a lot of thought. When she first mentioned she’d played in the past, Nick’s first thought had been that he’d ruined their little fish-out-of-water comedy by forgetting her history with cosplay. Now, he was starting to think it was the best mistake ever.
He looked down at his notes. “So ... There’s some gear on the character sheet appropriate to a level five rogue. Would you like to customize it in any way?”
Corva looked the sheet over thoughtfully. If she turned out to be a min-maxing power-gamer, people would never believe she hadn’t been a plant. But, her request turned out to be stylistic. “Instead of daggers, can she wield kukris? They’re a curved blade the Gurkha carried in the nineteenth century.”
“Same stats as a dagger?” Nick picked up his iPad to search out the weapon. “They look really cool.”
“Yes, but cutting instead of piercing.” Casey said. “A ... friend of mine once drew Corva for me and she was wielding twin kukris. She looked totally badass.”
As Casey crossed out “daggers” and wrote “kukris,” Nick said. “Corva certainly sounds like a well-rounded character. Before I ask Emily to join me, do you have any questions?”
Casey nodded slowly, then asked. “Ok. So, what’s your deal? Not your character’s, but yours, I mean.”
“I ... uh. Who says I have to have a deal?” Nick hadn’t expected to be asked quite so directly.
Casey pressed on. “Well, I understand why Hall Dunford is here. He’s a great DM. And the models are here because that’s the whole point of the video. But, I don’t know who you are. Are you some kind of famous D&D player I never heard of? You’re not sick. Are you?”
“Sick?” Nick laughed. “Do I look sick?”
“No, but you’ve got that stuff about hospitals on the back of your t-shirt,” Casey frowned. “I thought this might be some kind of Make-a-Wish thing ... which would be really sad.”
“I’m not sick,” Nick promised her. “We’re doing the video with the help of the Extra Life foundation, which raises money for children’s hospitals.”
“So, are you some kind of Internet billionaire who always wanted to play D&D with a room full of lingerie models?” Casey asked.
Nick didn’t answer for a few, long seconds. He didn’t want to ruin the big moment, but he also didn’t want to tell a bald-faced lie. He spread his hands. “Something like that. Don’t tell the other girls until the big reveal. All right?”
Casey tilted her head and considered him for a second before rolling her eyes. “Ok. I walked into that. Don’t tell me. But, I bet there’s something special about you, Nick.”
Nick managed to shrug. “Maybe there is. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.” He gestured to the door. “Could you send Emily in, please?”
Casey gave him a quick smirk over her shoulder as she left.
When Nick put out his hand to shake, Emily went in for a quick hug. As Nick had learned in the conference room, she gave great hugs - firm and soft in all the right places. And her smile was blinding, making it impossible to see anyone else in the room.
Mhairi
- 07.10.2020
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