Morgana's Gift -- Part Seven
Intermission Three -- Mystify
When Kevin had asked Elizabeth if she knew anything about Merlin, he'd found her amazingly reluctant to believe in the existence of the wizard, despite her having spent time with a witch named Morgana Le Fey. Over the course of breakfast -- a lovely eggs Benedict -- he'd eventually gotten her to come around and accept that if Morgana was real, it made sense that Merlin was real as well.
Geoffrey's Gambit was, in fact, a legitimate bar that had existed up in the hills for over half a century, making it one of the older establishments around Los Angeles, and the owner's name was Seamus Madigan the 3
rd
, his grandfather, first of his name, having been the one to build the place after emigrating from Ireland some thirty years before the bar's founding.
Digging around on the Internet found that there weren't
any
crime reports for Geoffrey's Gambit, or any news stories at all, really. The place had never been robbed, never been damaged by an earthquake, never set on fire, not even so much as had a window broken in, as far as Kev could tell. That alone was enough to convince Kev that Merlin had done something to establish a kind of protective field around the place, especially with the window work he'd seen there.
The second most surprising thing that came out over breakfast was that Elizabeth didn't, in fact, have any way to get in contact with Morgana Le Fey. The entire gift had been set up to operate independently of her, post launch, and was self-sustaining. If something went wrong, Elizabeth had been told Morgana would swing by eventually and clean it up, but she couldn't think of any possible wrinkle in her plans that would need for Elizabeth to get a hold over her.
Morgana clearly hadn't expected her handiwork to attract the attention of Merlin.
The rest of their time over breakfast had been spent reading up a little on Morgana Le Fey, but the intense amount of conflicting information made all of their heads hurt. In some stories, she was in love with Lancelot. In others, she was a lover of either Arthur or Merlin, sometimes both. In the earliest stories, she was a mostly benevolent enchantress who sought to help Arthur, but in later works she was, in fact, Arthur's greatest adversary.
By the time they'd finished breakfast, Kev had decided to consider anything written about Morgana or Merlin to just be hearsay, and that it would be impractical to believe any one story over another. He would need to make up his own mind regarding these things, and so far, neither Morgana nor Merlin had seemed to inflict anything but kindness upon him, although Merlin's conversation had been tinged with the slightest amount of mischief, something Kev just
knew
was going to come back and bite him in the ass at some point.
While neither Ashley nor Natalie seemed to put much stock in the conversation, Elizabeth's insistence that Morgana Le Fay was real seemed to give the two other women at least a little pause, as if they were considering what that might mean, not just for them but for the world overall.
If magic was real, what else had it done in the world?
After breakfast, Kev needed to head down into Hollywood proper to meet up with Alice, so Ashley and Natalie hopped into his Tesla Model X, so that he could give them a ride down to where they needed to be -- Ashley to do more prep work on campus, Natalie to teach some aerobics classes -- while Elizabeth remained at the house to continue scheduling appointments for additional people to bring into his household. The next interview he had was scheduled for tomorrow, a candidate for his bodyguard and driver position, something he still felt was ridiculous, but that Elizabeth was adamant he get as soon as possible. Both Ashley and Natalie said they would take Ubers back to the house so that Kev wasn't tied to their schedules, but he insisted he would check in with each of them before he headed home, so that if their timing lined up, he could just pick them up instead.
It was a bunch of excess driving, but his appointment with Alice had been scheduled for early afternoon, as apparently their reshoots were being done at night, so she wouldn't be up early, although they holding their reshooting schedule today to start even later than normal, so that Kev would have time to go over the rough cut with Alice.
Studio security wasn't too strict, something he found incredulous, but then he looked at his badge and realized it not only said VIP on it, it also said CREW on it. That word hit him like a ton of bricks. He wasn't being heavily scrutinized because he belonged here, because he worked here. A page offered to show him around, but Kev just asked where his meeting was and thanked him for his time.
Half way across the studio lot, he had his first real surprise. A warm voice from off to his side said, "Hey! Aren't you Kev Bishop? I loved Truth Knife! Can I get a picture with you?" He turned to look, a smile already on his face, although that got nervous very quickly as he looked at the man running up towards him, recognizing the guy as one of his favorite directors, Robert Rodriguez. He barely had time to smile before Robert had snapped a selfie with Kev on his phone, shaking his hand afterwards. "Thanks man, I'm a big fan. Was super bummed out to heard you guys broke up. Saw you at the Viper Room last year and you destroyed that room, amigo. What are you up to now?"
"I, uh, thanks! Thanks for being a fan. I'm actually a huge fan of
your
work too, Mr. Rodriguez," Kev said, a nervous laugh escaping him as he just began talking. "You're such a great master at weaving music into your work, from 'El Mariachi' all the way up to 'Sin City,' you're just killing it. Anyway, I, uh, well, I sort of work here? I'm on contract, anyway, for Emily Rouchard's new movie that Alice Karteaux is doing. I'm going to score it for them, or so they tell me."
"That's great!" he said, shaking my hand. "What's your next project after that?"
"I, uh, you know I'm not entirely sure I have one?" Kev laughed. "I'm pretty new to all of this, I'm afraid."
The director reached into one of the pockets of his long jacket and fished out a business card. "Then I want you to have your assistant reach out to mine and set up a meeting for us, so I can set up a project for us to work on together, because you have a gift for sound, my friend, and with Rouchard being your first, I'm gonna be your second, comprende?" He laughed, giving Kev a pat on the back. "Maybe we can talk about this 'Escape From New York' remake we're in meetings about. Normally I prefer to do everything in Texas, but I'm here showing rough cuts of 'Alita' to James Cameron and the rest of the studio, plus I've got some meetings with Disney I've got to do while I'm here, but we should definitely do lunch before I head back to Texas next week. Make it happen! Set the meeting and I'll make the time! Great running into you!"
And with that, one of his favorite directors of all time walked away from him, a giant smile on his face, and a promise of scoring work for Kevin still lingering in Kev's headspace. Kev was half-Mexican and half-Caucasian, so he'd grown up watching Rodriguez's career with delight, glad to see people who reminded him of his mother on the screen. There were plenty of successful Latino musicians (if he ran into Dave Navarro on the studio lot, Kev knew he would 100%
lose his shit
), but there were nowhere near as many Latinos working in the movies. He tucked the business card in his pocket and headed on across the campus.
He was still a few minutes walk from building they were meeting in when his phone rang. He fished it out from his pocket and saw Elizabeth's orgasm face on the iPhone peering back at him, which made him grin but also answer the call as quickly as possible.
"Hey Elizabeth, what's up?"
"You
met
Robert Rodriguez?" she asked him, incredulously.
"Wait, how the
