….
[LIE Studios]
It has been a month since the Oscars, and everything went back to normal.
Stage 14 was deep into the Hulk shoot, six months in.
The crew had passed through every phase - the introductions, imperfect first weeks, and then finding of rhythm.
The prop tank sat in the middle of the stage floor the way it had sat for three weeks, black and chunky and scaled slightly wrong in ways only people who knew tanks would notice.
Blue crash mats at the base, the hatch rigged to pop clean on cue, cables taped down, and marks set on the floor.
John Tunnard sat in his chair, reviewing the shot list with his DP - quiet adjustments and small corrections.
The side entrance opened at 10:47.
And Regal walked in casually.
Behind him was Rock - who had been Regal's bodyguard for over three years now.
He rarely spoke and was usually an extraordinarily calm presence, but there is slight edgeness to him - more than usual.
One and half months ago, on a shoot for [I Want to Eat Your Pancreas], Tom had an accident during a stunt scene.
Even though Rock wasn't part of any of the stunt team Rock - and the incident had nothing to do with security, access, or any failure of protection - he still hadn't forgiven himself.
Regal noticed but let it be.
Today he simply said. "Come on. Let's go see how the green guy's doing." and Rock gave a single nod before they drove over.
Immediately, a production assistant spotted him first.
She froze, then whispered something to the second AD.
The second AD whispered to the first AD.
And within sixty seconds, without a single word being announced over comms, a quiet electricity crackled through the entire set floor.
Regal is here.
….
To understand the weight of this moment, you need to understand who Regal is on this set specifically.
He isn't the director here, that's John chair.
Regal came in as the story writer, the one who cracked the emotional spine of this version of the Hulk story.
He is also one of the producers, which technically gives him access to the set anytime.
But Regal almost never shows up uninvited.
He hadn't visited the set in over three months.
Which made today very, very interesting.
He found a quiet corner near the video village monitors, nodded to John, who gave him a surprised but warm grin, and simply... watched.
….
Across the floor, Karl Urban warmed up in a full mocap suit, sensors fixed to every joint, moving with the loose precision motion-capture performers develop, aware that even the smallest movement is being recorded.
He had found the Hulk's physicality months ago: the weight, the width, the way a body that size moves through space rather than around it. He was good at it. Everyone knew it, including Karl.
On his way to the tank, he passed the monitors.
Regal was sitting there.
They noticed each other and exchanged a small nod - the quiet acknowledgment of two professionals who respected each other without needing to perform it.
In that half-second of eye contact, something triggered.
It was his [Writer] skill at [World-Class] level.
Unlike before, when the unique properties of Regal's [World-Class] skills activated on their own, this time the call was deliberate.
Regal had finally managed to reach it with his own will, or at least attempt to. There was still a chance it wouldn't work, but now he could influence it, even if only slightly.
This change had happened after the Oscar ceremony.
That was also one of the reasons he was here today - to test it.
•-----[SKILL SLOTS]-----•
» [Slot-1:] Director (Rank – World-Class) [In-active]
» [Slot-2:] Writer (Rank – World-Class) [Active]
» [Slot-3:] Cinematographer (Rank – World-Class) [In-active]
» [Slot-4:] Drawing (Rank – Master)
» [Slot-5:] Actor (Rank – Master)
•--•
Ⓘ [Unique Skill:] Insight
Ⓘ [Unique Skill:] Polyglottery
Ⓘ [Unique Skill:] Eyes On Me
•----------------------•
…
•--•
» [Slot-2:] Writer (Rank – World-Class) [Active]
•--•
And this time, it was the [Writer] skill that activated.
All Regal had needed was eye contact and the intent to trigger it - though even then, it didn't work every time.
There was another detail he noticed.
He had actually tried to activate [Director], not [Writer].
Regal assumed the reason might be simple.
He wasn't the director on this set.
….
Something was different and everyone felt it before anyone could name it.
Especially for Karl who climbed up the same way he had a dozen times before.
The same route and hand placements, yet the movement had changed - heavier, not slower or labored, but weighted in a way that made the air feel denser, as if the tank had grown smaller or he had grown larger, though neither had actually happened.
John, in his chair, sat up slightly - not a jolt, just the subtle shift of a man whose instincts had sensed something before his mind caught up.
"Action."
Karl grabbed the hatch for the second take - everything should have felt the same: the rig, and choreography.
Plant the feet, grip the edges, wrench with the whole body, and throw it aside as if it weighed five hundred pounds.
He had already done it well in the previous shot, but the prop malfunctioned, so they simply needed to reset and repeat the performance.
However, that didn't happen.
It wasn't a grab but a claim - his fingers locking onto the edges with possessive fury that read even through the mocap suit and ping-pong markers, the raw release of a creature pushed past every limit after a lifetime of trying to contain what was never meant to be contained.
He ripped the hatch off.
The rig released clean, same as always. But the throw was something the rig hadn't been built for. He hurled the panel with a rotational force that sent it skidding off the mat and across three feet of bare floor where it hit a sandbag with a clang that made two people flinch.
He stood on top of the tank at full height, chest expanded, and the half-second triumphant pose built into the choreography turned into something else. There was a stillness to it, more frightening than movement - a creature standing over something it had just torn apart, the look on his face not triumph.
It was grief.
The Hulk standing on a ruined tank and the emotion underneath all of it wasn't anger. It was the sorrow of a man who knew he could never stop.
Karl held it one second longer than he ever had, then dropped to the mats.
…and everyone looked at him a bit stunned.
It wasn't the normal post-take silence where people wait for the call.
This was the silence of fifteen people who had all seen the same thing and were independently trying to work out whether they had imagined it.
John stared at the monitor as the playback ran, the data coming through clean.
"Cut."
Then, quieter: "What the hell was that."
John looked back at Karl, who stood by the tank rolling his shoulders, wearing the expression of someone who had done something he couldn't quite account for. Karl glanced at his hands briefly, then flexed them once, slowly, as if checking they were still his…
Just then someone tried to approach Karl, but he snarled like the Hulk.
Karl looked at John. "John… I think we should go for the next shot immediately. I am a bit in the zone."
Reset took five minutes, the prop department brought the rod back out - full oversized tank barrel, chunky and heavy, built to read correctly once the CGI got layered over the mocap data.
Karl picked it up, his grip tightening beyond what the choreography required. He looked down at it, his brow creasing.
"Action."
He swung.
The thwack against the tank hull rang out louder than before - not from a harder swing, since the choreography was identical, but from the commitment behind it; the physics stayed the same, yet something in it had changed, and that change had a sound.
Second swing, and this one had something the first didn't - a fractional deceleration at the end, as though mid-swing the creature had remembered something.
That the tank he was destroying had once held people, built by human hands, and that he too was human somewhere beneath it all, making the destruction feel less like triumph and more like failure.
He held the rod after the second swing, frozen, chest heaving, from emotion rather than effort, the sensors capturing everything.
"Cut."
The crew member on the mat below Karl, the one who had been in the impact zone every take, the one who never flinched, was looking up at him with an expression that was new.
He had been on this set since week one and had developed professional immunity, the guy swings, the prop hits, reset, again. That immunity wasn't there right now. He was looking at Karl the way you do when you realize you've been underestimating something.
Frank, the electrician, walked past the monitors and stopped, something he hadn't done for anything on this set in five months.
He watched four seconds of playback, then looked at Karl standing by the tank, breathing, half inside whatever he had accessed, before glancing at Regal in his chair, watching Karl with an expression that could only be described as yes.
….
Regal stood, stretched lightly, and slipped his hands back into his pockets.
He was quite happy today. Even though nobody approached him and said anything specifically, he learned his skills had done something special today.
The team is also happy that they had wrapped today's whole shot division within half a day, and are now lost on what to do.
Anyway, Regal walked over to John, said his goodbyes, received a lot of respectful nods from the other crew, and headed toward the exit.
Rock was beside him. He had not visibly moved, but he was there, which was the essential quality of Rock.
….
.
[To be continued…]
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