Chapter 5: The Terms of Surrender

My words dropped into the greasy air of the diner like a block of ice.

"We're throwing out the entire script."

Leo stared at me, the dawning awe on his face instantly replaced by a fresh wave of betrayal and horror. The fragile trust I had just spent ten minutes building threatened to shatter into a million pieces.

"Throw it out?" he choked out, his voice a strangled whisper. "My script? That's… that's the whole thing! That's my story! What are we even investing in if not the script?"

His reaction was exactly what I expected. The panic of a creator whose creation is about to be murdered. In my past life, I would have sympathized. I might have even backpedaled, softened the blow.

But that Ava was dead.

I didn't move. I didn't raise my voice. I held his frantic gaze with a look of absolute, unshakeable calm. It was a look that said, You are panicking because you are still thinking like a writer. I am thinking like a god.

"Your script was brilliant, Leo," I said, my voice quiet but firm. "It got you in the door. It got me in the door. Its purpose is served."

"Its purpose is served?" he repeated, his voice rising in disbelief. "It's a hundred and twenty pages of my life! My soul!"

"No," I corrected him, my tone sharpening with a razor's edge of impatience. "It's a blueprint for a performance. And performances are exactly what we cannot have. Don't you understand? The second an actor starts reciting your lines, they become an actor. They are performing. They are lying. And the audience, on some subconscious level, knows it."

I leaned forward, my eyes boring into his. "Our entire strategy, the mythos we are building online, is based on one single, powerful question: Is this real? If we want the audience to ask that question, we have to make sure the people on screen are asking it themselves."

The anger in his eyes began to flicker, replaced by the dawning light of a terrifying, exhilarating new idea. He was smart. His writer's brain was starting to connect the dots.

"We don't give them a script," I continued, pressing my advantage. "We give them a scenario. A cage. We give the actor playing Micah a single objective: 'Prove to your girlfriend, Katie, that she is not being haunted, that she is just stressed out and losing her mind.' And we give the actress playing Katie her objective: 'Prove to your condescending boyfriend that this is real and you are in terrible danger.' That's it."

I saw the lightbulb go on over his head. It was a supernova.

"You trap them," he breathed, his voice filled with a sudden, reverent awe. "You don't give them lines. You give them a situation and you just… film what happens."

"Exactly," I confirmed. "We film the arguments. We film the fear. We film the frustration and the gaslighting and the terror. We film their genuine, unscripted, human reactions to a series of escalating 'hauntings' that we will stage for them without their prior knowledge."

I sat back, letting the full weight of the concept settle over him. It was a filmmaking philosophy two decades ahead of its time.

"Your script, Leo, is our bible. It's for your eyes and my eyes only," I said, offering him a small olive branch. "It's our roadmap for the scenarios we will create. But the actors? They will never see it. They will live it. Your soul isn't being thrown out. It's being elevated from a script into reality."

He was silent for a long time, staring at the salt shaker on the table as if it held the answers to the universe. He was no longer looking at me as a crazy girl, but as something else entirely. A visionary. A prophet.

Finally, he looked up, and all the fight was gone. All the doubt. All that was left was the zealous gleam of a true believer.

"Okay," he said, his voice firm. "Let's go to my place. Let's write the contract."

My apartment was a shoebox of poverty. Leo's was a slightly larger shoebox of creative chaos.

We walked into a space dominated by towering, precarious stacks of books and scripts. Every surface was covered. Screenwriting manuals lay next to philosophy texts; biographies of old Hollywood directors were used as coasters for coffee mugs. It was the den of a man who lived and breathed stories. I felt a strange, detached pang of nostalgia for the kind of pure, artistic passion I no longer had the luxury of affording.

He cleared a space on a small desk, nudging aside a pile of DVDs. In the center of the desk sat a clunky, beige laptop that looked like it had survived a war. He flipped it open, and it whirred to life with the mournful groan of an ancient machine.

"It's not much, but it works," he said, pulling up a blank word processing document. He turned to me, his fingers poised over the keyboard, ready to take dictation. "So… what are the terms?"

Here it was. The moment I transitioned from talk to action. The moment my foresight would be legally bound into tangible power. I had thought about this for two days. My terms were not just favorable; they were brutal. They were the terms a predator offers its prey.

"Clause one," I began, my voice cool and precise. "The company, for now, will be a partnership. You and me. Once the film is sold, we will incorporate."

He nodded, typing. "Makes sense."

"Clause two: The Investment. I will provide the seed money of five thousand dollars for the production budget."

He typed. "Okay."

"Clause three: Credits." I paused for a beat. "I will be credited as Executive Producer."

His fingers stopped. "Executive Producer? Ava, I thought… I mean, a regular Producer credit is—"

"Executive Producer," I repeated, my tone leaving no room for negotiation. In my first life, I had seen how the hierarchy worked. Producers did the work. Executive Producers held the power. I was not here to do grunt work. I was here to hold power.

He hesitated, then nodded slowly, a bead of sweat tracing a path down his temple. He typed it in.

"Clause four: Compensation," I continued, moving to the heart of the matter. "After my initial investment is recouped from the first dollar of profit, all subsequent net profits from the film and any and all derivative works—sequels, prequels, merchandise, television rights, in perpetuity throughout the universe—will be split."

"Split," he repeated, his voice tense. "Fifty-fifty?"

A bitter laugh almost escaped my lips. Fifty-fifty was for equals. We were not equals.

"Seventy-thirty," I said.

He froze completely. "Seventy… for you?"

"I am providing the concept, the marketing strategy, the production methodology, the casting insights, the financing, and the distribution plan," I listed off calmly. "You are providing the original story framework which we are heavily altering. Seventy-thirty is more than fair. It is generous."

He looked like he was going to be sick. It was a highway robbery. We both knew it. But we also both knew that thirty percent of a hundred million dollars was thirty million dollars. And right now, he had zero percent of zero dollars.

He closed his eyes for a moment, surrendering. He typed it in.

"Finally," I said, delivering the killing blow. "Clause five: Creative Control. I will have final cut."

This time, he actually flinched. Final cut. The two holiest words in Hollywood. The absolute, dictatorial power to control the finished product. It was a power that legendary directors fought and bled for. I was demanding it on a five-thousand-dollar investment for my first-ever project.

"Ava, that's…" he started, his voice pleading.

"Non-negotiable," I finished for him. "The vision is mine, Leo. The strategy is mine. I cannot have it diluted by a committee or by a last-minute crisis of faith. You are either all in on my vision, or you are not in at all."

The clunky laptop hummed, the only sound in the room. He stared at the glowing screen, at the words that signed away his creation, his control, his power. He was staring at the terms of his surrender.

He took a deep, shuddering breath. Then, with the weary resignation of a man signing away his kingdom for a chance at paradise, he typed the final clause.

He hit "Print." A noisy, dot-matrix printer in the corner slowly spat out a single sheet of paper.

He signed it first, his signature a frantic, desperate scrawl. Then he slid the paper and the pen across the desk to me.

I picked up the pen. My hand was perfectly steady. My signature, unlike his, was clean, elegant, and controlled.

It was done. My first contract. My first asset. The first legal brick in the foundation of my empire.

I folded the paper and put it in my pocket.

Leo looked at me, his eyes wide with a mixture of terror and exhilaration. "So," he said, his voice shaky. "What happens now?"

I stood up, my work here finished. A cold, thrilling certainty settled in my gut. The contract was signed. The plan was in motion. There was only one piece of the puzzle left.

"Now," I said, turning to face him, a predatory smile touching my lips. "I go get your five thousand dollars."