The Los Angeles sun was already violently bright by 7:00 AM, beating down on the cracked concrete courtyard of The Pelican Motel. Inside Room 104, Elias van Kempen sat on the edge of his sagging mattress, staring at the flashing red text hovering in his peripheral vision.
[SYSTEM WARNING: DAILY MAINTENANCE FEE OF $5.00 USD PENDING.][DEADLINE: 12:00 PM.][CURRENT LIQUID CASH: $15.00]
Elias glared at the holographic terminal. Technically, he had the five dollars. He could pay the extortionate maintenance fee and avoid the penalty of projectile vomiting blood in front of half of Hollywood. But parting with thirty-three percent of his total liquid net worth for a phantom server tax physically repulsed his capitalist soul.
"I refuse to subsidize your racketeering out of my own pocket," Elias told the empty room, adjusting the collar of his faded, oversized thrift-store shirt. "If you want five dollars, I will extract it from the local economy."
He grabbed his heavy box of Amsterdam Comp Cards and walked out into the sweltering heat. He marched straight to Room 112 and hammered his fist against the peeling paint of the door.
A minute later, the door creaked open. Paul Rudd stood there, wearing a wrinkled, oversized flannel shirt over a white tee, his dark hair sticking up in erratic cowlicks. He looked like a man who had spent the entire night mathematically calculating how long he could survive on a single jar of peanut butter.
"Elias?" Paul blinked, rubbing his eyes. "Man, it’s seven in the morning. Did the manager send you to collect rent? Because I swear, my agent is mailing the check today—"
"Put your shoes on, Paul. We are going to Burbank," Elias commanded, his tone leaving absolutely zero room for negotiation. He didn’t sound like a sixteen-year-old kid inviting a friend to hang out; he sounded like a mob boss ordering a hit.
"Burbank? Why?" Paul stammered, frantically looking around as if the police were coming.
"There is an open casting call at nine for a regional retail catalog," Elias said, checking an imaginary watch on his bare wrist. "It’s bottom-tier garbage. They pay barely above minimum wage, the clothes look like they were designed by a depressed clown, and it’s a career graveyard."
Paul stared at him. "Then why are we going?"
"Because," Elias smiled, a cold, shark-like grin spreading across his impossibly handsome face, "we are currently bottom-feeders, Paul. And a bottom-feeder must eat before it can evolve. Now, move."
Ten minutes later, the two of them were standing at a sun-baked RTD bus stop on Santa Monica Boulevard. The heat was oppressive, smelling of asphalt and exhaust fumes. Paul was sweating profusely, nervously tapping his foot, while Elias stood perfectly still, his posture radiating the cool, untouchable arrogance of a European aristocrat waiting for his private chauffeur.
The bus finally hissed to a halt in front of them. The folding doors slapped open.
Elias stepped up onto the rubber mat, directly in front of the bored, chewing-gum-snapping bus driver. The fare was one dollar and fifty cents each.
Elias casually reached into his pockets. He patted his left pocket. He patted his right pocket. He let out a soft, elegant sigh of profound disappointment.
"Ah," Elias said, turning to look down at Paul with an expression of aristocratic tragedy. "It appears I have left my money clip in the pocket of my other bespoke suit. A tragic logistical oversight on my part."
Paul’s eyes bulged. "Are you kidding me? You dragged me out of bed for an audition, and you didn’t bring any money?"
"I brought the vision, Paul. You are bringing the logistics," Elias said shamelessly, stepping past the driver and taking a seat near the window. He gestured magnanimously toward the fare box. "Pay the man. Consider it a seed investment in our mutual future."
"I... you..." Paul sputtered, feeling the irritated glare of the bus driver burning a hole through his skull. Panic seized him. He couldn’t get kicked off a bus in front of twenty people. With a profound groan of defeat, Paul dug into his lint-filled pocket, pulling out a crumpled three-dollar bill combination and feeding it into the machine.
He slumped into the seat next to Elias, holding his head in his hands. "I have exactly twelve dollars left to my name, Elias. You just took twenty-five percent of my net worth."
"Don’t think of it as an expense," Elias said, staring out the window at the passing palm trees, completely unbothered. "Think of it as a masterclass in capital allocation. You just learned that whoever controls the momentum, controls the wallet. You’re welcome."
Paul let out a high-pitched, hysterical laugh. "You are insane! You’re sixteen! Why do you talk like you just foreclosed on an orphanage?"
"Because the world is an orphanage, Paul," Elias replied smoothly. "And I am the bank."
An hour later, they arrived at a non-descript, beige stucco building in Burbank. The sign out front read Apex Commercial Casting.
They pushed through the double doors and entered the waiting room. The air-conditioning was blasting, but the sheer amount of cheap cologne and hairspray in the air made it difficult to breathe. The room was packed with fifty different variations of the same guy: hyper-muscular, deeply spray-tanned, with bleached-blonde tips and aggressive jawlines. It was the fading hangover of the 1980s commercial aesthetic.
Elias and Paul stood out like sore thumbs. Paul looked like a nervous college student, and Elias—towering, dangerously thin, and possessing a sharp, mixed-race, exotic beauty wrapped in faded grunge clothes—looked like an alien prince who had accidentally wandered into a frat party.
In the center of the room, holding court on a pleather sofa, was a young man with broad shoulders, thick dark hair, and a blindingly white smile. He was casually tossing a set of car keys in his hand, laughing loudly as a few lesser models fawned over him.
Elias didn’t need his system to recognize the man. Matt LeBlanc.
Before he became a global sitcom superstar, LeBlanc was the king of the commercial hustle in the late eighties and early nineties.
"You guys see the new Cherry 7Up spot?" Matt was boasting, flashing his perfect teeth. "Booked it on the first read. The director loved my energy. Same thing with the Heinz Ketchup ad. They wanted an All-American look. A guy the audience trusts. You know how it is. It’s all about the jawline and the vibe."
One of his lackeys, a muscle-bound guy in a tight neon tank top, nodded eagerly. "Yeah, man. You’re killing it. They say this catalog today is paying a grand for the cover."
Matt chuckled, finally noticing Elias and Paul standing near the doorway. Matt’s eyes swept over Elias’s thin frame, his thrift-store jeans, and his oversized, faded t-shirt. A condescending smirk formed on Matt’s face.
"Hey, kid," Matt called out, his voice dripping with faux-sympathy. "I think you’re in the wrong building. The casting for the starving orphan charity commercial is down the block. They’re looking for beef today. All-American sellers. You look like a stiff breeze would snap you in half."
The lackeys snickered. Paul shrank back, instinctively wanting to apologize and leave.
Elias didn’t move. He didn’t get angry. He simply looked down at Matt LeBlanc with a gaze so entirely devoid of respect, it bordered on clinical fascination.
Elias slowly walked toward the center of the room. The casual, absolute dominance of his posture made the snickering die down instantly. He stopped right in front of Matt’s sofa, looking down at the commercial actor.
"The Heinz Ketchup commercial," Elias said, his baritone voice smooth and terrifyingly calm. "A masterpiece of modern cinema. You place the ketchup bottle on the ledge of a skyscraper roof, run all the way down the stairs to the street, and buy a hot dog just in time to catch the ketchup dripping from the roof."
Matt puffed out his chest, looking smug. "Yeah. So you saw it. I did my own stunts on the stairs."
"I saw it," Elias agreed, a slow, deadly smile curving his lips. "But I don’t think you understand why you were cast for it."
Matt’s smug smile faltered. "What are you talking about? I was cast because I look like a winner."
"You were cast," Elias corrected, his voice echoing in the silent waiting room, "because you look like a beautifully engineered idiot."
Paul Rudd slapped a hand over his mouth, letting out a muffled squeak of terror.
Matt stood up, his face flushing dark red, his fists clenching. "Excuse me?!"
Elias didn’t take a single step back. He utilized his Photographic Memory to completely vivisect the marketing psychology of the era.
"It’s basic consumer psychology, Matt," Elias explained, speaking to the older, larger man as if he were a slow child. "Heinz is a premium product competing in a saturated condiment market. To sell it, the agency needed a narrative of absolute, irrational devotion. They needed a character so fundamentally stupid that he would risk his life running down fifty flights of stairs for a drop of ketchup, rather than just buying another bottle."
Elias tilted his head, his glass-cutting jawline catching the fluorescent light. "If they cast a smart man, the audience questions the logic. If they cast a serious man, it becomes a tragedy. They needed a golden retriever in a leather jacket. They needed a man whose face screams, ’I have zero cognitive thoughts beyond my immediate physical desires.’ You aren’t aspirational, Matt. You’re the punchline. The audience doesn’t want to be you; they feel superior to you. That’s why you sell ketchup."
The entire waiting room was dead silent. You could hear a pin drop.
Matt LeBlanc’s jaw hung open. The blood had drained entirely from his face. A massive, glistening drop of sweat rolled down his temple. His entire reality, his carefully constructed ego as the "All-American Winner," had just been intellectually atomized by a sixteen-year-old boy in three sentences.
He had nothing to say. There was no comeback to a mathematical breakdown of his own career.
"You..." Matt stammered, stepping back, his broad shoulders slumping. He looked at his lackeys, but they were all avoiding his gaze, suddenly realizing that the kid was absolutely right. The illusion was shattered.
Elias ignored him, completely bored now that the autopsy was over. He turned his attention away from the defeated actors and looked toward the far corner of the room.
There, sitting behind a velvet rope meant to keep the talent away, was the VIP craft services table. It wasn’t the cheap water cooler and stale crackers left for the actors. This table was reserved for the casting directors and agency executives. It featured imported Fiji water, a silver platter of expensive artisan donuts, and fresh fruit.
Elias’s stomach growled, a violent reminder of his absolute poverty.
He didn’t hesitate. With the unhurried, majestic stride of a European monarch inspecting his lands, Elias walked past the velvet rope.
"Hey, you can’t go back there!" one of the casting assistants yelled from a nearby desk, leaping up. "That’s for the clients!"
Elias completely ignored the assistant. He picked up a massive, chocolate-glazed artisan donut that probably cost more than his bus fare. He picked up an icy bottle of Fiji water.
He turned around to face the entire waiting room. Fifty muscular, tanned men watched in bewildered silence as Elias van Kempen took a slow, deliberate bite of the stolen pastry. He chewed it with a level of elegance and sheer, unadulterated shamelessness that was mesmerizing. He looked like an aristocrat slumming it in a refugee camp, entirely unapologetic about stealing the only good food in the room.
Just as the casting assistant reached him to grab his arm, the heavy mahogany doors of the inner casting room swung open.
The Head Casting Director, a stressed woman with thick glasses and a clipboard, marched out. "Alright, listen up, we are running behind. I need—"
She stopped dead in her tracks.
Her eyes bypassed the sea of muscular, tanned, 1980s commercial clones. Her gaze locked instantly onto Elias.
She saw a dangerously thin, stunningly handsome boy with a mixed-race, exotic ambiguity, dressed in raw grunge clothing, standing behind the VIP rope, eating a stolen donut with the intimidating grace of a sociopath. He wasn’t smiling. He wasn’t trying to sell her anything. He was simply existing, taking what he wanted, and looking fiercely, beautifully indifferent to the rules.
It was the exact, paradigm-shifting energy the fashion world was bleeding for.
The casting director slowly lowered her clipboard. She pointed a trembling finger directly at Elias.
"You," she breathed, her eyes wide. "The boy eating my donut. I don’t care if you don’t have an agent. You’re hired. Come inside right now."
A collective gasp echoed through the waiting room. Matt LeBlanc dropped his car keys. Paul Rudd looked like his brain had just rebooted.
Elias swallowed his bite of pastry, took a sip of the Fiji water, and gave the casting director a slow, chilling smirk.
"Naturally," Elias said.
As he walked past the stunned sea of bottom-feeders, carrying his stolen food into the casting room, the sweetest sound in the world echoed in his skull.
[CHA-CHING!]
[SYSTEM NOTIFICATION: SUCCESSFUL INTELLECTUAL DOMINATION & BUFFET ARBITRAGE EXECUTED.][EVALUATION: YOU DESTROYED A MAN’S EGO AND STOLE BREAKFAST IN THE SAME BREATH. SHAMELESSNESS RATING: EXTREME.][REWARD: +5 SHAMELESS POINTS (CP)]
Elias stepped into the room. The door clicked shut, leaving the old world behind.