"Which means," Maya added, "we suddenly have the entire afternoon free to do something else."

"What’s that? Practicing the flyboard for the flyboard scene?" Stan asked.

Maya’s expression sharpened instantly with excitement so open and immediate it made her look several years younger.

"Yes exactly," she confirmed, her voice practically vibrating with anticipation. "We can practice that while waiting for the actual skit to start..."

The flyboard session was, by any reasonable standard, the most fun Stan Harrison had experienced since the system had activated.

The technology itself was a water-propulsion platform that allowed riders to rise several meters above the surface, something Star Entertainment frequently used for high-impact action sequences that looked impossible and were, with the right equipment and enough padding, merely extremely difficult.

The island’s rental operation had refined the process over years of production use. Cushioned landing platforms had been installed near the glass mountain bridge, safety briefings were handled by staff experienced with professional stunt supervision, and the equipment had been calibrated carefully enough that even non-professionals could achieve surprisingly cinematic results.

It was one of the private facilities the Principal had mentioned earlier, costing five hundred dollars per session. Stan didn’t care about the price and told Maya she could practice as many times as she wanted. He planned to train as well, using it to prepare for the skit alongside her.

Stan and Maya spent the first part of the afternoon testing the setup, familiarizing themselves with the movements so they could perform the sequence convincingly during the actual sunset shoot.

Stan adapted faster than he expected.

The first attempt was rough, mostly a matter of learning where the balance point existed and forcing his body to trust the propulsion beneath him instead of instinctively fighting it.

On the second attempt, he overcorrected and crashed hard enough onto the cushion platform to make the rental staff wince in sympathetic pain.

By the fourth attempt, he was landing cleanly.

By the sixth, he had enough control that Maya, who had initially been watching from the bridge with Zoey’s camera running, stopped holding her breath between launches and started filming with genuine excitement instead.

"That’s it!" she shouted over the wind. "Do exactly that again, but extend your arms before you land. I need the silhouette to read wider!"

"You want me to jump off a flyboard with my arms spread out?" Stan shouted back.

"Yes!"

"While filming for an academic award?"

"It’s a very important award. And yes. Stop talking and go!"

Stan went.

He went approximately twelve more times. 𝒇𝓻𝓮𝓮𝙬𝙚𝒃𝒏𝓸𝙫𝒆𝙡.𝓬𝓸𝒎

With every attempt, Maya’s direction became increasingly precise. The more footage she captured, the more technical her vocabulary became as she pushed each movement closer to the exact visual she had imagined while writing the sequence.

Eventually, she joined him.

After several failed attempts and one near collision that left both of them laughing hard enough to lose balance again, they finally managed to ride the same flyboard together.

Above them, Zoey maneuvered the drone through sweeping aerial arcs, hunting for the angles that made the jumps look simultaneously athletic and cinematic, the cliff face towering behind them, golden water glittering below, and the glass mountain bridge stretching ahead like something out of a futuristic action film.

As the afternoon stretched on, the footage became genuinely spectacular.

When sunset finally began painting the western sky in the exact layered golds and deep ambers Maya had been waiting for, they were ready.

Zack and his recruited extras arrived in costume, buzzing with excitement for the skit they were about to perform. They had fully rehearsed every scene, and the confidence showed in the way they carried themselves, focused, committed, and ready to deliver.

Zack himself had read the script multiple times since the previous evening and carried himself in the charcoal suit with the easy confidence of a man who believed fate had personally prepared him for this moment.

"I was born for this role," he declared while adjusting his dark tie.

"You’re playing a mid-level corporate criminal with delusions of grandeur," Maya reminded him.

"As I said, I was born for this." He smirked.

They ran through the blocking. With that, the skit officially started.

Maya acted while directing from within the scene itself, relaying adjustments to Zoey, who handled the technical direction with the efficient authority of someone who already saw the entire sequence assembled in her head and was simply guiding everyone else toward it.

Stan took direction surprisingly well, better than he’d expected, and better than Maya had quietly hoped. The scenes between him and Maya carried a tension that barely required acting at all, because the dynamic creating it already existed beneath the surface.

The motorcycle sequence was chaotic during rehearsal but clean by the third proper take. The smoke and prop tear gas created exactly the atmosphere Maya had envisioned when she wrote the scene. Zack’s villain entrance at both the start and end was, by any honest standard, excellent.

The flyboard finale worked on the second take.

It worked so well that Zoey, watching through the drone feed, actually whispered, "Oh."

For her to react that way, everyone knew they were doing a good job.

After that, they kept filming until the last traces of daylight disappeared and the island’s exterior lights took over.

Simpler scenes, mostly. Dialogue exchanges, coverage shots, reaction angles. The kind of footage that looked ordinary on its own and almost invisible in the editing room, yet somehow made everything around it feel complete.

By the time they finally wrapped, it was well past midnight.

Everyone was exhausted in that rare, electric, deeply satisfying way that only came from pouring yourself completely into something you cared about and seeing it come together.

Zoey vanished into her room with all the footage.

She worked through the night.

The call came the next morning, mid-breakfast.

A message in the group chat, brief, uncharacteristically quiet from Zoey, who was usually more effusive in text:

Zoey: [Come to my room. Everyone now, let’s watch the fruit of our hardwork together.]

Then they came.

Zack arrived with his extras trailing him, still in various states of being fully awake, coffees in hand. Stan and Maya came from down the hall where their own room was located.

Zoey’s room had been rearranged, the desk pushed aside, chairs from the corridor borrowed and arranged in a rough semicircle facing the large wall-mounted screen that the resort’s rooms came equipped with.

Zoey was standing beside the television with the small remote in her hand. From her expression, she seemed very confident and happy.

The room settled. Conversation died. Someone put down their coffee cup with a click and Zoey picked up the remote.

The air was thick with anticipation...