The Malicarn
It was an especially hot day when the king finally returned to the Old Village.
Prion sat on his horse, dressed in bright nickel-plated armor, a crown on his head and a flowing white cape off his shoulders.
A new scabbard holding his long broadsword hung tightly on his hip.
Behind him were the stone walls of Gregorian’s tower, and in front of him, ready to train, stood a number of famous faces whom the world had been watching onscreen, in one form or another, for decades:
Ravela, the Dark Witch of the North
Maximus, the Lost Dwarf
Kip and Jip, two drunkards
Bariol, a disgraced knight
Heloise, daughter of the Old Steward
Tristan, a defector from the Necromancer’s army
This was the Council of Heroes, the centerpiece of the entire Malicarn universe.
Nine Council-centric films had been produced over the years, and the cast had featured in dozens of other properties in different pairings and configurations.
Sometimes only one or two would be in a movie or show, sometimes as many as half.
But they had not been all together in the same film in a decade.
In fact, the character of Bariol died when the original actor wanted out of his contract.
He was only recently revived in the story after the actor received a healthy pay increase.
Glenn stood off to the side, watching them from behind a stone pillar.
The script today was clear that he needed to observe this moment, not be a part of it.
As characters, the Council heroes were impeccable.
Each of them looked and held themselves to perfectly match prior performances.
Glenn watched them closely as they filed into the square.
It was uncanny. Maximus cocked his head and squinted, Heloise stood straight with her neck slightly back, Kip waddled a bit when he walked.
One thing the Council couldn’t do very well, however, was fight.
They all remembered how to swing a sword, but the physical act of actually doing it for real, not just in short choreographed bursts for the camera, required a lot of training and conditioning that none of the scanned characters possessed.
Even Prion, though he had been scanned for longer and had already starred in one movie as a scanned character himself, was not as nimble as he would need to be to fight the animatronic demon hordes the writers planned for the new film’s final act.
“These demons are going to be really scary,” Jules had told Glenn, “but they’re programmed to react so realistically that the scanned characters will have to fight them for real. They can defeat them, but they’ll have to actually fight. It’ll look better on film.”
The swordmaster and his slew of assistants brought in to train the Council were Reals, not scanned.
They were experienced stunt people, cast as characters so the training sessions could be edited together for an inspiring montage.
Glenn found the presence of these new actors reassuring.
At least he was not the only Real in the Old Village every day.
For the most part the stuntmen kept their distance from Glenn.
They stayed in character at all times, even when Glenn was alone with them.
The swordmaster, a former marine named Brian Doyle who only ever answered to his character name of Kreek, even improvised a moment where he spit at Glenn’s feet.
Apparently in Kreek’s backstory his wife had been killed by a wizard, though Jules later admitted he couldn’t remember writing that detail.
Most of the other Reals on set had non-show-business interests, and Glenn gladly allowed them to monologue their passions.
Jacob the cobbler was obsessed with the Mets, a condition Glenn learned to pity but not emulate.
Jacob was a chronic guest star in TV sitcoms and dramas, a face you recognize but never quite remember.
His Malicarn role, where he was posted at the castle and acted as the Reals’ eyes and ears, was the first stable long-term job he ever had.
He even negotiated to bring with him his boyfriend, Darryl, and they lived together on the castle grounds.
Darryl was an engineer who specialized in agricultural irrigation techniques and acted as an in-story expert for the local farmers, someone who could talk to them “in character” about how to increase their yield, an important task considering the number of Malicarn farms that were struggling.
Darryl loved mushroom foraging and birdwatching, two activities Glenn wasn’t quite sure constituted actual hobbies until he and Lilly spent an entire day wandering the forests with Darryl and Jacob tasting yellowing fungus blooms and pointing at a series of identical-looking chirping birds.
These new Reals were all specialists in skills and tasks essential to the running of the Malicarn for which the characters themselves were ill-equipped.
Jules, in particular, dreamed of the day when the entire set was completely self-sufficient, able to run as an autonomous medieval society with no assistance or involvement from the outside world, except for whatever story beats Jules deigned to provide.
Until then, however, Reals were needed to keep things moving along without massive complications in Malicarn society.
But none of the Reals took their roles as seriously as Brian Doyle, who stood beside Prion on the platform as the king spoke to the Council, his arms gripped together behind his stocky frame.
“Sir Kreek will train you,” Prion said, pointing to Doyle, “and remind you what it is like to hold a weapon. Do not underestimate him.” Doyle was very stern. He scared Glenn a little.
It was planned that this scene would kick off an extended training montage, which Glenn was not needed for.
So he backed away from the pillar at the perfect angle for a long-lensed camera on the other side of the square to capture him falling into a shadowy corner.
Then he turned and walked toward the marketplace in search of Lilly.
She was spending the day in the Old Village doing quality-assurance inspections of new characters.
The writers planned to grow the population of the valley nearly 20 percent by the end of the current story arc, a more ambitious goal than before.
Glenn hadn’t seen Lilly in a week, as she had been too busy shuffling between implementations at the Citadel and leading field inspections at a dozen other villages, castles, and farming estates up and down the valley.
The harvests were beginning to come in and it would be a test of how well the scanned characters could farm on their own.
Glenn walked through the marketplace but didn’t see her.
With little else to do, he walked back to his tower.
He sent Lilly a text, telling her that he was in the apartment if she wanted to stop by.
Then he plopped down on the couch, opened his laptop, and started watching the previous day’s dailies.
Dailies and partially edited scenes were sent to Glenn’s computer each morning.
He spent a lot of time watching them, sifting through footage, scrolling through many moments that wouldn’t even end up in a final film.
The dailies allowed him to observe various characters in natural moments he wasn’t privy to, to see how they acted when they were alone, or how they talked to other characters when Glenn wasn’t around.
He learned a few things from this. The wizard Gregorian was not well-liked. Almost everyone, including Prion, thought he was smug and conceited. When Glenn complained, Jules just waved him off.
“Gregorian’s a bit of a prig, yes. You’re playing him that way because he’s supposed to be! But everyone will come to like you eventually, even audiences.”
Glenn also learned from dailies that the scanned characters were remarkably resilient.
They bought in to their reality wholeheartedly, and even a few slipups—a jeep that took a wrong turn and ended up driving past the Council, or a Doritos wrapper floating in a creek—did not cause much confusion.
The explanation for these anachronisms was always something to do with “the Necromancer’s Dark Power” or “Old Forest Magic.” Characters rarely breached the Malicarn borders out of fear of these legends, though the only places on the island still dense with civilians were in the southeast around the city of Funchal.
Airplanes were a constant concern, because there was simply no way to remove all the flight paths of various aircraft that crisscrossed the sky.
It did not occur to Glenn that unrelenting air traffic would be a problem for the preindustrial characters of the Malicarn until young children and old men both started screaming and pointing at the clouds.
But even that issue had an easy solution.
“Tell them they are the spies of the Necromancer,” Jules said to Glenn. “Some kind of evil bird. And if they look too long at them they will be struck dumb by his spells, or something.” In final edited scenes, extras staring in horror when a plane flew overhead were simply removed.
An alert popped up on Glenn’s screen. Another story meeting.
Most of these calls were in the morning, but today Jules wanted to follow up with all the writers after the Council’s public reception in the Old Village.
Glenn had an hour before the meeting started, so he figured he’d spend some more time on what he called his “historical research.”