Chapter 3: The Oracle in the Diner

The notebook was closed, its secrets safely locked away, but the name echoed in my mind: Leo Keller. My first target. My first building block.

Finding him, in my first life, would have been impossible. I would have had to go through agents, managers, a dozen layers of industry gatekeepers who existed solely to say "no." But this was 2005. The world was more analog, more beautifully, chaotically accessible. And I remembered a detail from a long-forgotten industry blog post about the early, hungry days of the Paranormal Footage creator: he practically lived at a place called "The Grind," a 24-hour diner in Burbank that was an unofficial office for aspiring writers who couldn't afford a real one.

I didn't bother with the pathetic costumes in my closet. I pulled on the simplest things I owned: a pair of worn-out jeans and a plain black t-shirt. I was not here to audition. I was not here to impress. I was here to deliver a prophecy. Oracles do not need to be fashionable.

The walk to the diner was a surreal journey through my own past. The cars were clunkier, the cell phones were for calls, not for consuming your entire life, and the billboards advertised movies I already knew would bomb. Every step was a confirmation. I was here. This was real. The knowledge settled not as a comfort, but as a weapon humming in my veins. My heart, which had been a frantic bird, was now a steady, cold drumbeat. This is it. The first move. Don't hesitate.

The Grind was exactly as its name suggested. The air was thick with the ghosts of burnt bacon and the bitter scent of coffee that had been stewing for hours. The sticky vinyl of the booths was cracked, weeping yellow foam. It was a graveyard of ambition, populated by the ghosts of Hollywood’s future—men and women hunched over laptops, their faces pale in the screen's glow, nursing a single cup of coffee for hours. A symphony of failure.

And I, in my simple black shirt, was the only one who knew it.

I scanned the room. My eyes passed over a dozen desperate faces until they landed on him. In the back corner booth, slumped over a pile of papers like a soldier defeated on the battlefield.

Leo Keller.

He was exactly as the blurry blog photo had depicted him, only infused with the visceral misery of real life. Balding, with a fringe of desperate, sweaty hair clinging to his scalp. Shoulders hunched in a permanent cringe. His eyes, fixed on the papers before him, were bloodshot pools of exhaustion.

The papers were his rejection letters. I could see the crisp, corporate letterheads even from the door. Paramount. Universal. Warner Bros. A neat stack of professionally printed "No's." He was rereading his own execution notices.

I felt a ghost of a pang—not of pity, but of recognition. That desperation was a language I knew intimately. It had been my native tongue for two decades.

No more.

I walked toward him. My footsteps made no sound on the grimy linoleum, but he felt my presence. He looked up as my shadow fell over his table, his eyes wary, like a stray animal expecting a kick.

I didn't ask. I didn't smile. I simply slid into the booth opposite him.

"Leo Keller?" I asked, though it wasn't a question. My voice was calm, level.

He blinked, startled by the directness. "Do I know you?"

"No," I said simply. My eyes dropped to the papers splayed across the table. "But I know them." I tapped a finger on the letter from Paramount. "They said the found footage concept is a gimmick and that no audience wants to watch 'shaky home videos'."

A jolt of raw, unadulterated shock went through him. His face, already pale, lost another shade of color. He instinctively tried to gather the papers, to hide his failure from this strange, intense woman who had appeared out of nowhere.

"The one from Warner's," I continued, my voice mercilessly gentle, "said the ending was too ambiguous and that horror requires a final girl, not just a lingering sense of dread."

His hand froze. His jaw went slack. He was looking at me now not as a stranger, but as a conjurer, a mind-reader. "How… how could you possibly know that?" he stammered.

"Because I've read them all before," I lied, the truth of it echoing from a lifetime away. I leaned forward slightly, my gaze pinning him to the back of the booth. "And I know what the next one you open is going to say. It's from Lionsgate. They're going to tell you it's 'un-filmable'."

He stared at me, his mouth opening and closing silently, like a fish gasping for air. He was caught. Exposed. His most private, professional pain laid bare on a sticky diner table by a woman he had never seen before.

He finally found his voice, a raw rasp of anger and fear. "Who are you? Is this some kind of sick joke? Did one of my 'friends' put you up to this?"

"I don't have time for jokes," I said, my tone flat, cutting through his panic. "And neither do you." I let that hang in the air for a beat. I could see the war in his eyes: the instinct to flee, versus the desperate, flickering hope that this bizarre encounter meant something. His hope was a candle in a hurricane, but it was there. That's all I needed.

I looked him straight in the eye, the oracle delivering her sermon.

"Your script, Paranormal Footage, is brilliant," I stated. It was the first honest compliment he'd probably heard in months. I saw his shoulders relax a fraction of an inch.

Then I delivered the blow.

"It's also going to be rejected by everyone. Paramount, Warner's, Lionsgate, Sony, all of them. They will all say no. You will run out of money, you will get evicted from your apartment, and in six months, you will be packing boxes to move back to Ohio and sell insurance at your dad's firm."

Every word was a hammer blow, crafted from the memory of that sad blog post. I saw the fight go out of him, his posture crumbling completely. I had just narrated his deepest, most secret nightmare. Tears welled in his exhausted eyes.

"So you are here to mock me," he whispered, his voice cracking.

"No," I said, my voice softening just enough to be a lifeline, not a threat. "I'm here to stop it from happening."

I leaned in, my voice dropping to a conspiratorial hush, forcing him to lean in as well. The world of the diner, the clatter of plates, the low hum of conversation, all of it faded away. There was only our booth. Only this moment.

"Your script is going to be rejected by everyone," I repeated, "but it's also going to make you a hundred million dollars."

The whiplash of those two sentences was glorious. His face was a mask of utter confusion. The tears in his eyes were forgotten, replaced by a stunned, disbelieving stare. He looked at me as if I had just started speaking in tongues.

"That… that doesn't make any sense," he finally managed.

"It does," I said, the icy calm of a predator settling deep in my bones. "If you let me help you."

I sat back, giving him space to breathe, to process the sheer insanity of what I’d just proposed. I let him look at my plain t-shirt, my worn jeans, my twenty-five-year-old face. I had no business card. No credentials. Nothing but the unnerving certainty in my eyes.

"Here is my offer, Leo," I said, laying out the first plank of my empire. "I will invest five thousand dollars. Cash. Enough to live on while we make this thing ourselves. In return, I get an Executive Producer credit, a percentage of the back end, and you have to make a few small changes to the script based on my notes."

He just stared. The number, so specific and yet so small in the face of the hundred-million-dollar promise, seemed to short-circuit his brain.

"Five thousand dollars?" he repeated, his voice barely a whisper. "A hundred million? You're insane. You're a child. Where would you even get five thousand dollars?"

A dangerous smile played on my lips. It was the first one I had allowed myself.

"That's my problem," I said, sliding out of the booth. I stood over him, the power dynamic now complete. I was the one standing. I was the one in control. "I'll be back at this same table, at this same time, in two days. Have your answer then."

I turned and walked away without a backward glance. I didn't need to. I could feel his eyes burning into my back, his mind reeling, his world turned completely upside down. He was a drowning man, and I had just thrown him a lifeline made of madness and gold.

He would take it. He had no other choice.