Procrastinators on Stage (Chris Kendall/crabstickz fanfic) *unedited*

Part 15- I Don't Like Decision Making

I eventually relaxed my tensed facial muscles and offered a hesitant smile to the camera’s eye, mouthing a practically silent hello in the process. Lucy smiled encouragingly at me from behind the little orange body of her camera before carrying on with her vlog.

“Those hours whilst Jamie worked have been very productive as you can probably tell…but now that our work is done, we can play!” she showed her teeth to the camera once more before stopping her filming. She glanced at me from the corner of her eye as we drew up behind the stage. “I’ll put the edited footage of me on the wheely chair in when I talk about productive work, I think,” Lucy added, adjusting some of the settings on her camera before looking through the eyepiece to the darkened area that we’d entered which was behind the stage.

“You seem very at home on camera,” I noted.

“Much like you on stage,” Lucy smirked, rolling her lower lip between her teeth as she leant towards the stage. “I won’t be allowed to film that freaky thing, will I?”

I walked round behind her, ducking down underneath the ropes which were suspended through the air like high wires and taking long steps over the electric wires which were linking round to the lights on stage. The giant form of the Wizard himself was positioned back here, the large mask fixed on its revolving metal supports in a ghoulish grin which somewhat resembled a clown’s face paint. In fact, the looming figure of the mask seemed to creep Lucy out a little, now that I paused on the idea for a short moment. Of course, she wasn’t willing to show such a fear on camera. Admittedly, the robotic face with its tarnished silver detailings and plates did look quite unnerving.

“Do you want to go on stage?” I asked her lightly, pretending to not notice her rigid frame. For once, my chatty friend was silent as she edged past the gargoyle-horror of such a face. She barely even nodded.

Like a light being switched on inside her head, Lucy cheered as we rounded the edge of the wings to stand behind the velvet curtains, which poured like cranberry juice from the ceiling to pool and spill on the chaos encased stage and set. The whole area was pitch black, hardly suitable for filming.

Nonetheless, Lucy handed me her camera and I was obliged to film her. She danced and spun on the dark stage, where the camera barely picked up her form, apart from the light which flickered on her glasses, that is. Lucy started singing the chorus of ‘You Spin Me Right Round’ by Dead Or Alive as she flung out her limbs, sub-consciously providing content for her vlog.

“Is there a way to pull the curtains back? Is that a pulley system?” Lucy said rapidly as she ran back to me in the wings to search in the slim light for the pulley system which retracted the curtain. After lots of fidgeting and hunting from both of us, whirring churned in the air as we presumably pulled back the curtains.

Lucy ran back out to the stage, staying a little further back as to not fall off the stage edge in the dark. “Echo!” Lucy called out to the audience, to where the light barely licked at the walls. “Listen, Jamie, it echoes!”

“Ec-ho,” I hummed as I walked blindly towards her, terrified that I’d drop the camera I’d been entrusted with.

Lucy giggled before saying something about finding a light switch. I thought I heard her fall once or twice in her search, to which I called out to her to ask if she was okay (she was on both occasions), and yet she seemed so cheery. How was this girl, who’d pulled an all nighter and had opened up to me about being so stressed was now singing “Where are you lighty? Come out, come out wherever you are!” to a light switch? I suppose food can work wonders on a tired person, let alone how everyone has light and dark inside of them.

Unexpectedly, lights bounced in front of my eyes in time with Lucy’s cheers of celebration. I felt like I’d been temporarily blinded in my struggled to keep Lucy’s still rolling camera steady as I recorded the light transition and the ‘big reveal’ of the theatre’s interior.