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Mission: Darkstone
Episode 3:
by Toni Walker

Episode 3: Ghost of a Chance

As soon as the director yelled, "Action!" Chance Michaels was in his element. Playing super spy Nico Knight on primetime's hottest drama did as much for his ego as it did for his pocketbook.

A year after filming began, Chance found out his wife, August Rae, was having an affair. And like in Hollywood gossip rags, this affair was a shocker. Not surprisingly, the press ate it up like children scarffed up chocolate pudding or ice cream.

He had always heard about losing your wife to another woman, but usually that was restricted to television pilots and people who lived in San Francisco or L.A., not real life and certainly not in his real world. Chance found out the hard way that sometimes fiction reflects reality with an all too mind blowing reality. So, to find out that his wife was busy getting it on with a female studio executive, was more than a shocker. It was a blow to his masculinity.

About the time August Rae became his ex-wife, she also became his new boss. Life was funny that way. Just when your life seems to be going down a different road, a crossroads comes your way and suddenly you find yourself traveling down the same path again. It was just so unfair.

August was now not only the new head writer, but one of the executive producers. Chance figured this was his payback for letting August Rae's needs go unfulfilled for so long. Not that he could have actually fulfilled her needs considering she had been a closet lesbian for so long. He wondered if her sister and his co-worker, Rachel Demarco knew about August Rae's coming out. But if she didn't know, he wouldn't be surprised. Rachel and August had never been close. Rachel had always been the one to overshadow her sister's success with even more of her own. It wasn't that Rachel rubbed August Rae's face in her overwhelming vocational happiness, she just came by it more naturally than August Rae did. And being the co-star with him in Darkstone: Secret Agent was just one more slap in August Rae's face.

He assumed this was the main reason why August campaigned so strongly for the head writer position. If she couldn't get Rachel to do what she wanted, the only way to effectively 'beat her' was to literally put words into her mouth. Now August Rae held all the power and there was nothing he or Rachel could do about it.

Where August Rae was overbearing, mouthy and angry, Rachel was soft, sensuous and womanly sensitive. If it hadn't been for Rachel and her constant advice and TLC, Chance was sure he would have gone truly insane with August's many plots to ruin him. Rachel offered him her friendship and help in a time when catastrophe seemed to define his life.

Things had finally semi settled down, and Chance was ready to put himself out there again emotionally. The divorce had garnered a lot of publicity and his own sort of inner searching. He hated every minute he was under the media's microscope, but to the studio bad publicity was still publicity. Free publicity. And they milked it for all it was worth even leaking information about his and Rachel's friendship making it seem like it was more than it was.

Not that he didn't want there to be more, he did. In fact, he was already half in love with Rachel Demarco. But the closer he and Rachel became the more overtly demanding August Rae would make his and Rachel's life. It got so bad at one point August Rae tried to kill off Rachel's ever popular character, Cyn Sanders. But the studio would have none of that. The hotter their personal life became in the tabloids, the higher the ratings skyrocketed. So, August Rae had to live with the fact that she couldn't ruin her sister's life by taking away the job that she loved.

Chance was certain that August would find a way to make Rachel's life miserable. The only question was, how would she do it?

***

Meanwhile, not far from the studio, Gia Doyle and her team of agents swept the area looking for runaway computer hacker, Dexter Vargas. Finding the body of Jeffrey Sogard lying in a pool of his own blood made Gia want to pop the head off of the pesky nerd who had the gall to call himself Jeffrey's best friend. Dexter and Jeffrey had come up with an amazing technology called Wayback. It was time travel at its best. But now that device had been lost along with the whereabouts of Dexter, things around headquarters were becoming more and more dubious.

The doctors had yet to figure out what killed Jeffrey. But signs were pointing to some sort of mutant virus. If they didn't find Dexter in time and he too had contracted the virus as Jeffrey had -- they would be in for an epidemic even the best scientists wouldn't know how to cure.

The biggest problem was – Gia didn't know how to tell Ethan about Jeffrey. The kid was a genius, but Ethan was his hero and because of that bond the two of them had grown close over the years.

"If you don't find that little twirp, your life, as you know it, is over!" Gia was not known as a patient woman. And losing Vargas and a contraption worth a cool mint to the American government didn't make her any less testy.

Her chestnut hair glinted reddish fiery streaks almost as volcanic as her piercing eyes. Gia ordered the agents around with a natural authority. When Gia talked, people jumped.

She nearly lost her carefully capped cool when she found some of her agents gawking at bikini clad starlets near the studio entrance.

"Did you not hear me the first time?" she bit out. "Find me Vargas and find me that damn machine. NOW!!!"

Agents scurried in all directions. There was something to be said for seasoned agents who actually had a clue what they were doing. Why was she being tormented by all the greenhorns? She let out an exasperated sigh and headed towards the television studio lot. She hoped she found Vargas before the rogue IEA agent did. If the rogue found the computer hacker first and discovered how valuable the technology was that he carried, Dexter would definitely be dead, virus or no virus. And then another fool could go traipsing through time screwing up things for them all.

***

Dexter Vargas didn't know what to do next. Everything was in jeopardy. If the rogue spy found the Wayback device, time as they knew it would belong to the evil ones of the universe. But he didn't want Gia and the Legacy anywhere near the device either. He didn't want to put time travel in the hands of questionable people with even more questionable morals. Jeffrey Sogard had been the only one he could trust with such technology and now he was dead. Dexter wasn't completely sure if the virus was an after effect of time travel. Maybe Jeffrey had time traveled with a cold during one of their experiments, and then the cold mutated into something more awful than either of them ever imagined.

Sweat dripped from his head. Dexter had somehow also contracted the virus, but he didn't have time to find out how or go and get it treated. He needed to hide the Wayback device. A spasm racked his brain with a pain so severe he felt like dying was the only cure to take away his torment. He had never encountered such a headache before. But he couldn't worry about his poor state of health. He had to keep the Wayback device safe.

As he scurried like a rat through the maze of cars in the parking lot of Avatar Studios, he clutched the wristband-like device with a steel-like grip. He frantically glanced in all directions, his paranoia mounting. He stumbled into an area where trailers lined the outside of one of the sound stages. He'd finally made it. The Darkstone: Secret Agent set. If there was anywhere to hide such a high tech device, it was amidst other similar devices. That way, he could hide the machine in plain sight and come back for it at a safer juncture.

His luck was holding out. One of the doors in one of the trailers was open. This was his best opportunity to secure the device in a safe location.

He carefully climbed into the trailer. Spasms still flooded his brain and the pain was still unbearable but he had to complete his mission. Every movement was a subtle type of torture. He needed to be in a bed back in the hospital, but he had to finish what he had started. He had to keep the device safe so eventually he could go back and make sure Jeffrey never contracted the virus in the first place.

The trailer was smaller than it looked. The only thing out of place was a script with green fluorescent swashes accenting particular lines in a scene. As he gazed at it closer, he realized that every dialogue bit in green belonged to the actress who portrayed Cyn Sanders, director of the make-believe covert agency, AIDE.

Dexter couldn't laugh at the irony. Not only was the rogue spy trying to get the device, he was sure the female director of the Legacy was somewhere out there not far behind him. Here he was in the trailer of someone who could be considered Gia's television alter-ego, and Dexter was about to leave a priceless treasure among her things.

He wished he knew for sure if he could trust Gia, but he didn't know if he could fully trust her or anyone at the Legacy. That's why he fled the confines of the hospital earlier in the day. He couldn't let anyone get their hands on the device. A device that could potentially be used for an evil destructive end.

He placed the wristband-like device on the counter top next to a similar one used by the fictional spies of AIDE. It could be weeks before anyone noticed it so far back on the counter behind the sugar decanter. By then, he hoped he was fit enough to come back and retrieve it.

Another spasm racked his body and this time the force of it sent Dexter to the floor. He put his hand to his head and felt something thicker than sweat pooled there. When he pulled his hand back, he realized it was blood.

"NO!" he cried. "Not yet! I'm not ready to go yet."

He barely heard the gasp from behind him. As he turned to view the person behind the gasp, he lost his balance and fell to the floor. He looked up at her from the floor where it was much more comfortable and he realized how much she did indeed look like Gia Doyle. The same chestnut hair straight to her shoulders. The same concerned line between her brows.

The woman, Rachel Demarco held a towel tightly around her breasts and grabbed for a baseball bat hidden on the other side of the refrigerator. She threatened to beat him within an inch of his life, but her threats didn't seem too alarming since he could barely hear them. Her voice faded and then sounded very far away. Suddenly, he could hear nothing at all.

Rachel Demarco could feel her heart beating a mile a minute in her chest. At first the man who had infiltrated her trailer seemed sully and intimidating but now he looked more like the boy he was. He seemed to be unconscious now. She leaned down to feel for the pulse in his neck but she couldn't bring herself to do it. Touching him seemed like the wrong thing to do. Her mind ran in a million directions as she reached for the cordless phone near the bathroom door. She fumbled with it to call 911.

When the operator answered, Rachel saw the blood pooling around the fallen boy's head. Her scream was ear piercing. "Oh, my God!" she cried into the receiver. "I think he's dead!"

~~~ to be continued ~~~

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