#no long game plot they just crawl around scary places and design scream houses 😌

[desognthinking]

recruitment drive. 5.3k. (or, the haunted house designers au.)

Suzanne sends the pre-meeting email just one and a half hours before the onboarding call is scheduled to begin. Beatrice knows this because her watch buzzes just as she emerges from the bathroom, wringing her hair dry after her post-run shower.

It’s still the middle of the night back in America. Beatrice thinks Suzanne just doesn’t sleep. 

She makes herself a pot of tea and carefully sets her mug down onto its cork coaster at the dining table. Her phone, face-down on the table, vibrates thrice as she boots up the laptop.

She flips it over: three texts from Lilith. That’s two too many. 

A curious sense of anticipation, and perhaps the shallowest hints of doubt, settles over the skin of her neck as she loads up her unread mail. It’s uncharacteristic of Suzanne to forward basic administrative material at such late notice. Especially since it concerns mere formalities like the Zoom link for later, and the confirmation of the meeting participants – an email that should take less than two minutes to formulate. After all, everyone already knows the team heading the expansion project.

Beatrice had mentioned this to Camila once, recently, during their weekly lunch call. Week six or six thousand into their strictly enforced remote work sojourn (the only way, Suzanne said, she could ensure that no Extra Responsibilities would be surreptitiously taken on) and she was already pacing the room from boredom and overthinking.

Camila had reminded her that, in her defense, Suzanne had just been out on that scouting trip in Peru without reliable internet. Whatever spare bandwidth she did have was probably best served hurdling over the mountains of administrative obstacles these new pop-up Houses inevitably would create. Not fretting over Zoom links.

Camila, as always, is sensible; probably the most sensible of them all. So Beatrice very seriously, and very conscientiously, takes a deep breath and runs through that one breathing exercise she’d found very helpful from her therapist.

Suzanne is a stickler. She holds her cards carefully close to her chest, arranged back and forth in some pattern nobody but she can see, and Beatrice trusts her fully. And that’s all that should matter – as Suzanne had made glaringly clear, even before she’d sat the three of them down one by one in her office, and then emailed them the remuneration clauses – that she’d wanted Beatrice for the job, had worked to convince her for it.

For an industry chest-deep in the currency of terror, Beatrice had – has never been lured by the screams. 

It is tradition for a House’s creative team to prowl the exit on opening night.  Maybe grab a drink and share a toast to the accompaniment of desperate footsteps sprinting out, or breathless, choked sobs at the gates. 

Beatrice doesn’t like that. Ever since she got personally banned by Mary from coldly going through the whole maze (yet again) with a clipboard on Night One while bona fide, ticket-purchasing customers were busy hollering their heads off, she’s preferred to go home right after the ceremony to a mug of hot chamomile and a dogeared autobiography. 

She plans to keep it that way, too. There is nothing more distasteful than cheap gore, or cultish fantasy, or whichever half-baked nightmare slough some over-excited writer could dredge up from the hallucinatory afterburn of a weekend bender.

She carefully takes a sip of her tea, gazing out into brightening but still charred-gray skies. She’d had an interview in Tales of Terror last year, and hadn’t known whether to be flattered or dismayed at the opening paragraph. 

‘You wouldn’t guess this is the home of the woman responsible for some of the most blood-curdling, spine-chilling effects, traps and rooms of the last half-decade. Nothing in her fourth-floor unit screams Creative Psycho. Every pale beige curtain in her flat is drawn wide, light flooding in. There are no letterboxd-worthy poster displays from the indie foreign films she watches religiously for research – only a framed print collection of early twentieth century European urban landscape paintings. There are no carpets, it’s almost unsettlingly clean, and there’s not a single ounce of bedragglement. Beatrice tells us, mild mannered and polite almost to a fault, that this is how she likes it.’

(Are you sure you want me?)

“Precisely,” Suzanne had said, careful and stern, “we need precisely that.” She’d been rolling a brass knuckle tightly over the surface of her desk as she spoke. Beatrice thought it produced a gorgeous, rich sound. 

“We need reinvention. Reinterpretation. Things should not be left to stagnate, for their own sake,” she’d stared at Beatrice meaningfully. “This applies to people too.” 

Beatrice had simply stared back, uncertain.

“Besides,” Suzanne turned away, the edge of her mouth twisting up like she knew something Beatrice didn’t, “As I’m sure you know by now, the workload will be shared.”

It made sense then that Suzanne had last year taken them aside to allocate them as leads to three of the flagship site’s Houses that season. Upon their successes she had allocated them, despite protests, those purely consultancy and remote assistance roles for this year’s season. 

Two years ago Beatrice and Lilith were section heads in their respective maze portions. Camila, then freshly poached by the firm, was primary set designer of the same House. That year they huddled together night after night and sixteen-hour days to cobble together something out of the most dysfunctional House of that year’s stable of nine.

The lead for said House was a man called Vincent. He was woefully incompetent to the point of unintentional sabotage. He had, of course, slunk away quietly upon the season’s conclusion, but until then the three of them had had to spend wee hours crawling up and clawing at walls and reinforcements and contractors that had been given contradictory instructions.

They built an easy partnership, eventually – disciplined and stone-smooth efficient to the extent that Beatrice reluctantly allowed herself to catch a few agonizing hours of unguilty sleep each night.

And through necessity she had come to know them as well, as only a truly nightmarish haunted house build will have you know a person.

After that wretched time they had been wrenched apart. The OCS had multiple Houses to churn out at full steam and speed every season, and a brutal reputation to maintain. The cruel prize of a job well done involved getting split up, even if for bigger, better things.

But the point is, they’re tried and tested. Beatrice likes that. She isn’t sure she would have agreed to taking on this challenge otherwise, and she knows Suzanne knows that, too. 

It is a weight on her shoulders, irregular and uncomfortably shifting across her shoulder blades; a worry that any success she has in executing such an endeavor would be largely circumstantial.

Last summer, long before everything had been set in stone, Shannon sent her a link to an Instagram post. It detailed some theories and speculations over an unnamed upcoming OCS expansion. A strategic leak, perhaps, although Beatrice worked far too distantly from the marketing team to be certain.

They were lying next to each other on the mud-streaked safety mats they put over the wooden boards beside the building site. Her building site. The one with the credits board, hooked up at the exit, that would bear her name first at the top. 

It had been the muggiest, most intolerable time of the day when Shannon, overseeing production on this half of the Houses, had come round, somehow hoisting a bulky IKEA carrier over her neck and under her left arm. She pulled out a variety of chips and buns that she’d gone down to the shops to buy, and handed them out far too cheerfully for someone who must have already half-melted in the heat. When Beatrice raised her eyebrows, glancing over behind the barriers where Mary’s motorcycle very conspicuously was parked, Shannon merely winked – poorly – and pretended to be very innocent. 

She stayed to help, afterwards, peering over the storyboards pinned up on the board like it wasn’t the thousandth time she’d gone over them. That year she’d also had her own House to take care of, in addition to the small matter of co-running the entire season’s program. So Beatrice tried to weakly bat her away, but she pulled out a banana from some back pocket, peeled it, took a large bite with a moan so obnoxiously loud Beatrice turned red, and shushed her.    

At this point construction was going ahead in full force, and Beatrice would frequently navigate every step of the maze and inspect every bolt and hidden door with a pocket-sized Moleskine in her hand and three gel pens in her pocket. Yasmine, her head writer, preferred to make notes directly onto her phone, stopwatch dangling from her wrist and an earbud in her ear as she ran over the preliminary audio cues for each section. Ambling behind them, Shannon found a nail and tried to spin it as long as she could on her fingertip. When the nail rolled off into a groove, irretrievable, she dusted off her hands very innocently on her cargo pants and off the back of her greasy tank top. Then she folded her hands behind her back and looked up very seriously to examine overhead mechanisms that Beatrice ‘might be too short to see clearly’. 

With the work lights strung up, the innards of the House did not look particularly scary. 

To Beatrice it was a purely cerebral challenge, despite the very physical layer of sweat, powder, and grime that pressed itself under one’s skin. A puzzle to fit and form and reverse-engineer under cool light; door mechanisms and false ceilings and spring-loaded foam sprays, optimized and timed within fractions of a second. Clean, clockwork.

And as if to prevent her from getting hauled fully into the vortex of her mind, Shannon accompanied the little pilgrimage around the set, pressing a water bottle firmly into Beatrice’s hands every half-hour. It made Beatrice feel like a moody little child, but she accepted it grudgingly every time. 

At the end of the day Beatrice sent everyone home twenty minutes early, and ordered dinner for her and Shannon to eat out on the boards. Fast food, Shannon insisted, and she would be paying for it, because “do you know what day it is tomorrow?”

“It’s not my birthday.”

“It’s better than your birthday.”

And to Beatrice, that was true, so she kept quiet.

After that, they lay down for a while, two cans of soda cracked open and resting on the square of wood beside them that hadn’t been covered by the mats. Shannon sent her the post, then, and when Beatrice complained limply that she couldn’t read the comments because she didn’t have an account, Shannon rolled her eyes and handed over her own phone. 

She made a peculiar dialect of eye contact with Beatrice as she did so; weighty, certainly, and telling. 

The post itself featured garish word art splattered over a mangled, heavily-filtered edited image of one of the previous seasons’ Houses – a fan favorite, actually, from the year Beatrice had first joined. Back then she was still working shifts on the engineering team, not even yet being assigned a maze section to look after its technical execution. 

There was a rumor, the post said, that the OCS was considering broadening its operations to seasonal pop-ups in different cities. All-new sets, all-new storylines, all-new takes on the haunted house experience. What do you think? The caption asked, Do you want more of the OCS brand of sleek, seriously messed-up and sickeningly chilling?

Below that a disclaimer: Not appropriate for young children! Please remember that this is not your typical carnival house of mirrors.

A staggering amount of likes and comments. Beatrice clicked to expand the latter, saw the word ‘legacy’ in the topmost one, and then quickly swiped to close the app entirely. 

Mary and Shannon grinned up at her from the home screen, half-buried in sand somewhere on their Greek island-hopping honeymoon. 

Shannon raised her eyebrows as she received her phone back, and Beatrice suddenly understood the meaningful look she’d been given. Are you ready? 

She reached out blindly for her soda can and finished the rest of the drink in one long, shuddering gulp.

At lunch the next day, Beatrice’s fifth year OCS anniversary was celebrated with some fanfare in the makeup and fittings trailer, where Beatrice had spent the whole morning hunched over fabric textures she could barely distinguish from each other.

Everyone came down from their sets, even Mary and Shannon. Beatrice thought they must have been exhausted; they had stayed late the previous night, after Beatrice had left, to thread their way softly through the OCS’ gaping campus of half-built sets. Simply looking over their modest kingdom. It had a certain wistful luster; in this summer twilight it was a garden of greenhouses, transparent and skeletal. A complex slowly unfurled over the years. Ghostly-quiet, too, in a way it could never be in the throes of peak season. 

Mary waited for Shannon at the gates of the House, silhouette sharp against the work lights, as Beatrice had gotten up to pack for the night. Up by the lockers she glanced over, but looked away when their hands fell gently together. They walked slowly away, murmuring things she couldn’t hear. 

When Beatrice bolted the gate to leave, it clacked too loudly, and they’d called over to say goodbye, dark intertwined shadows stretched grotesquely and longingly over sawdust towards her.

Nevertheless they had made it to the celebration the following day, Mary holding aloft a large creamy cake. Unlike the customary employee milestone cakes, dark and billowing and elaborately stylized with elements of houses previously worked on, Beatrice’s was plain white, with light blue frosting.

The celebration moved outside to the large, white refreshments tent, industrial fans blowing hot, coarse air. Beatrice marveled at how everyone seemed to be able to fit under its canvas. The team working on her House had all come, of course, pooling money for a hamper, and so did a surprising number of others across the other sets.

Lilith and Camila arrived together, squeezing through the throngs to the unsteady plastic table at the center. “We were not bringing your gift into this slaughterhouse,” Lilith huffed, “you’ll have to go back to the office to get it.”

“What is it?”

Lilith scoffed. “Why would we ruin the surprise?”

Camila put her hand on Beatrice’s shoulder. “What we’re really here to say is that we’re proud we’ve been able to work with you during these five years, and we hope we’ll get a chance to do it again.” Beatrice looked at Lilith, who shrugged, stabbing her paper plate.

Mary, still slicing up the cake and handing them out, stopped to meet Beatrice’s eyes. She grinned.

It was many months later, deep into November, that Suzanne had made the formal pitch in her office. By then social media was awash with rumors of possible locations where the OCS could plant their pop-ups. Names, too – there were spreadsheets and Clue-esque checklists on Reddit lining up members of every significant OCS creative team in its past iterations in vertical rows. There even were columns of ‘evidence’ For and Against each individual’s involvement in the as-good-as-guaranteed pop-ups project.

Beatrice couldn’t tear her eyes away as the online crowd reached a consensus, drawing red circles in damning permanent marker ink again and again and again around the names that everything pointed towards. She closed the browser before getting to the point where the discussions dissolved and devolved into bitter catfights over creators’ artistic styles, as they always did.

Suzanne’s office, for as long as Beatrice had worked at OCS, felt like something out of a natural history museum. It was all burnished wood, walls fully doused in dark, rich green, and glass display cases of her collection of Southern European invertebrate fossils. Symmetrical tiles underfoot and over them, a thick carpet that swallowed the clap of footsteps. In Beatrice’s early days here it had been a terrifying place; severe and gloomy even when the heavy curtains were fully peeled open to let light in. The exacting botanical sketches on the walls, too, did not help in the least. Even now she thought it would make for a wonderful basis for a section in a House – a museum, of course, or perhaps a town hall.

Some might think her an unlikely horror creator – easily spooked by many things and a fervent hater of surprises, but Beatrice thought it was a good thing, for a designer, to be able to find something genuinely terrifying in everything.

She took a seat gingerly at Suzanne’s beautiful oak desk, angled so as to always make her seem taller and larger. So that the light would fall in a certain slanted way across her face, carving a cavern of contrasts down the thin scar through her eye.

“Suzanne.”

“Beatrice.” Suzanne inclined her head, expressionless. From a drawer she took out a stapled set of papers, and flicked through the corners thoughtfully. Her leather chair let out a sigh as she leaned back and appraised Beatrice silently for a minute.

“It’s time” she said, “for a new challenge.” She placed the papers down in front and to the left of Beatrice, next to the handmade tin man figurine gifted from her son. 

For Beatrice it had never really been about the horror; the thrill of smelling blood in the water, and Suzanne knew that.

“Some details have not been hammered out yet, but you have a role here should you accept it,” she said, at the end, sliding the papers into a manila folder. “You all are ready for it.”

Beatrice bit her lip. It was hard to argue otherwise, if not for her, then for the others, at least.

Camila, who she traveled with halfway across the world on a budget airplane that rattled and croaked just to take hundreds of terrible reference pictures in poor lighting with their bad phone cameras. 

One evening, Beatrice had eaten something foul, and she’d found herself slung across Camila’s lap, cringing in the back seat of an overpriced taxi without a working AC. Groaning with each bump of the road and helplessly dipping her head further into the crook of Camila’s arm. Throughout the ride she had gently brushed her fingers through Beatrice’s damp, clumped hair, whispering things Beatrice could no longer remember, and dabbing her clammy, chattering cheeks dry every two minutes with her own sleep shirt. 

Beatrice insisted she get back to the hostel to get some rest while she was kept overnight for monitoring and IV rehydration. It had been a rocky trip, and a break would do them some good. Instead Camila had spent the next one and a half days finishing up three days worth of location scouting, and then had it all packaged into a neatly organized folder by the time Beatrice was ready to go again. 

There was nothing imaginable, Beatrice thought, that could truly faze her.

And Lilith. The most capable person Beatrice knew to spearhead the overall production and creative direction of something like this. 

Not just because Beatrice knew she would genuinely do a marvelous job masterminding and knitting together a house of horrors. Beatrice also considered it important that, if she were to join the team, a satellite unit stationed thousands of miles away from the safety of the Cat’s Cradle headquarters, the team would be led by people she trusted.

Or the equivalent of ‘trusted’. Whatever you call the thing between two people who fly desperately over to each other’s homes with some regularity to scream and claw at particularly unyielding scenes and transitions and then fall exhausted into sleep in each others’ beds.

“Take some time to think about it,” Suzanne had said, afternoon light shining harshly so that the whole room was a prism of contrast. “Let me know what you think.”

So here they are.

“Subj: OCS Halloween Pop-ups - Onboarding”. Beatrice puts down her mug, takes a deep breath, and clicks the email from Suzanne. 

Her phone rings.

“What is it?” Beatrice copies the zoom link at the top of the message and pastes it into the top of a new tab. With her other hand she holds her phone to the shell of her ear. 

“Have you seen the email?” Lilith is terse and tight, even through the phone. Her voice is faraway; Lilith has her phone on Speaker and on a table or drawer somewhere while she looks at something else. Unusual. Her calls are usually curt, succinct, and fully focused. It makes Beatrice’s ears go hot and buzz with static.

“I’m reading it now,” she says, scrolling and scanning the words. 

It’s a short email, in Suzanne’s usual clipped style. No attachments if she can help it. Below the zoom link there is a brief four-point meeting agenda, a reminder to be punctual, and finally a brisk thank you.

In-between these lines Suzanne has appointed lead and three accompanying names of the members of the steering team of the OCS’ first expansion project. 

Lilith’s name is listed second. She's not the Creative Director.

Silence.

“You’ve read it.” The statement is biting; almost a sneer. Beatrice smells the bitterness licking under the corners of its thin, cool veneer. Sticky.

Beatrice rereads the four lines. She rereads it again. She opens her mouth, then closes it.

Ava Silva.

“Who is she?” she exhales, finally. Weakly.

There is a scoff on the end of the line. Echoes of slippers marching down parquet, a door slamming, and then, quietly, an uncontrolled squeak of leather. A furious stream of mechanical clicks, as Lilith’s hands race over the keys of her expensive desktop setup. Beatrice can picture her in her room as if mirrored before her: Lilith still in her terribly fancy robe, sprawled ungainly before the expanse of her monitors in her glassy, austere, home office.

Her voice is suddenly much closer over the call, and Beatrice pictures the phone wedged to her ear by her shoulder.

“Ava Silva,” Lilith spits, in a dry, desiccated whisper.  “Is a Disney rat.”

Beatrice raises her eyebrows, pulling up the matching LinkedIn profile. The most recent post was uploaded a week ago – it seems to be an incredibly effusive Farewell-slash-Thank You post for, indeed, the Disneyland Anaheim Imagineering team and the Creative Development department. She scans the prose: candid and emoji-laden, bordering on unprofessional. 

Beatrice counts seven Disney Princess puns, and one awful Star Wars quote to cap it off. There are eight – yes, eight – images attached to the post, all full-sized so that the page runs on like a travelog blog post. 

The last image appears to be a mountain of goodbye swag. These include, Beatrice notes: a Moana beach ball, a matching Buzz Lightyear set of wheelchair spoke guards and cane covers, and a Sven the Reindeer onesie. The rest of them are all pictures of the woman who must be Ava, with her now ex-coworkers. All adorned with Mickey ears and pin-studded lanyards, in front of various rides and experiences she probably had a hand in creating. 

No, Beatrice scrolls back up to information messily hidden in the overlong farewell paragraph: Specifically, two of these are rides for which she’s been part of the main creative team. Three more that she’s played some role in creating, whether at the design phase or in later consultancy during implementation. 

One picture is a solo snapshot of Ava in a bright yellow baseball cap and remarkably tiny denim shorts, in front of a Disneyland hotdog stand. She’s holding an extra large hotdog, absolutely drenched in ketchup and mustard, high over her head like a trophy. Her smile, Beatrice thinks, is dazzling. 

She swipes down on her trackpad too quickly.

The last picture is of Ava and two others standing on a boulder in front of a massive Zootopia indoor roller coaster, while crowds in the background swarm the attraction in a snaking queue. ‘My pride and joy / baby / first full lead’, Ava has captioned it, ‘aka Great Zootopian Escape 🫡 . Just opened !!! I will be back 2 visit :’)) ’

Beatrice sighs. 

“What the hell is Suzanne thinking,” Lilith mutters, teeth gritted; tone cold. She’s shaken, and Beatrice knows it.

She herself can barely stop herself from scrolling, and scrolling, and scrolling. That’s enough, she snaps at herself, and her hand leaves the touchpad with a short jerk. There’s no point. 

//

“Good morning,” Suzanne says flatly, the moment the call holds five participants. “Thank you all for joining the call punctually.” Her face is crisp and too-sharp against the blurred-black virtual background.

Like they wouldn’t have come anyway, even if thoroughly rocked. Three stern, stiff and silent faces look straight ahead. Suzanne probably prefers them this way. 

Beatrice looks quickly through the five rectangles on the screen and finds the label that she seeks. 

🗿Ava Silva’s iPad 🗿.

“I would like to welcome a new member to the OCS.” Suzanne begins. She nods: “Ava Silva.”

There is a light smattering of the hand wave emoji reaction floating up from the toolbar from 🗿Ava Silva’s iPad 🗿. The device itself seems to be held up very close to her face so that all Beatrice can see is patchy pixelated bits of nose and cheek, shaking about as Ava presumably works to send the emojis.

Beatrice clenches a stress ball in her fist. It had been gifted to her for April Fools’ Day by Mary and Shannon. Something about clenching and unclenching, although Shannon had been laughing too hard to deliver the line in full.

“Ava has been a Creative Development Director at Disneyland and worked on numerous attractions both there and at Universal.” Suzanne pauses. “So, to put it crudely, this is something of a coup. We are very happy to have her with us to lead this creative expansion of the OCS brand.”

Beatrice’s phone, which has been relentlessly buzzing, skates across the table. She turns it over, a stormy headache already gathering steam: dozens of unread messages from Camila and Lilith, and more still on their way. Sighing, she shoots off a quick ‘Later, please.’ and then puts it on a tea towel on the kitchen island, out of reach.

“As you may imagine, it was not easy. She was… highly sought after by various studios and companies. Miss Silva,” Suzanne deadpans, “you are a difficult woman to track down and convince.”

The image of Ava’s face, very close to the camera already, wobbles further. It jostles like she’s jabbing at her screen fiercely. A good while later, after Suzanne had moved on entirely, her delayed message would finally deliver through the Zoom chat: 

🗿Ava Silva’s iPad 🗿: thats only bc i don’t read my emails lol! Glad 2 be here too 🥰

“You will all be working very closely together. In case anyone has forgotten…” Suzanne begins summarizing the contents of that fateful paper packet that she’d handed over in her office last November. The words, the clauses, are identical, but Beatrice can’t help but see it all in a different light. It sinks in more completely. 

Close collaboration to envision and map out the overall direction and themes for the pop-ups. Planning and writing for each house. Liaising with and consulting Admin back at the Cradle, yes, but otherwise almost entirely shouldering production independently. All of that now with Ava Silva thrown into the works.

For Ava’s sake, Suzanne briefly recaps the typical in-house workflow of the production of a Haunted House. Steering team meetings to establish expectations and aims; brainstorming and ideation and finalization of directions; traditionally an in-person bootcamp-esque intensive where the engine of development truly shifts into gear; followed by an ever-accelerating process of recruitment, research, sourcing, production, and testing. A process that should be second nature suddenly feels daunting.

“Now, this meeting is taking place so late because we have only just secured the venue permits for the pop-ups. I have briefed Ava already, and she will be able to explain this separately.”

Beatrice doesn’t have to turn around to hear her phone begin to rattle furiously behind her again.

“Finally, Ava,” Suzanne says, “let me introduce the rest of the team.”

First there is Camila, who Suzanne praises modestly for her extensive set design and art experience. Beatrice knows she’s always had a soft spot for her – resilient and optimistic and ready to put her teeth into anything. 

But in sharp contrast Camila’s face now is neutral and unreadable. The usually bright, tasteful splashes of color in her room are muted against the only two lamps she’s chosen to keep on, shades down and twisted away so her face sits in half-shadow. 

Lilith, then, in her icy postmodern tech den. Her arms are folded and her eyes are cast somewhere. Distant and acidic. 

Beatrice snaps back to attention when Suzanne mentions her name. She keeps it short and sweet: Beatrice’s original training was in engineering, and so, beyond her job scope, she’s best equipped to provide the team with technical and mechanical expertise. 

Ava nods. From what Beatrice can surmise from her patchy rectangle, she is not in a room at all.

No. She is, it seems, on some kind of wicker chair on a sun-dappled porch or veranda, lined by orange and beige walls and pillars veined with vines and hanging pots. A pair of sunglasses, perched on the crown of her head, keeps slipping down, and every few minutes Beatrice sees her lift a finger to nudge it back into place.

Her iPad seems to be on her lap, because it’s shuffling precariously at a strange angle focused on Ava’s chin as she flits about, constantly in blurry motion. 

When Ava holds up the iPad, there seems to be an inscrutable wall of something behind her, simultaneously metallic yet moving in dashes of color. For a moment, her video lags and freezes, and Beatrice gets a better look.

They’re birds. Dramatic plumages and muted tones of all kinds of domestic birds. In cages of every shape and size and color, decked from floor to awning, hanging off bars and resting on customized stands. The whole place is full of them. The iPad tilts as Ava adjusts herself and Beatrice finds that there’s more to the side, off-camera, too. 

Suzanne does not comment on it. “Ava, any thoughts?” 

Ava unmutes herself, grinning.

Beatrice’s earbuds erupt in utter, screaming, avian cacophony, and everybody winces at the exact same time.

Ava – muffled by bird screeching – yelps, mutes herself, and switches off her video.

The call melts into thirty seconds of stunned silence. 

“Oops sorry”,  types 🗿Ava Silva’s iPad 🗿 in the chat.

Beatrice can see Lilith physically take a deep breath and count one to fifteen out loud. Camila is in disbelief; shocked and a little delighted. Beatrice reflects on the strange, confusing mess of large feelings, and decides that she possibly wants to throw up.

Suzanne bites a lip and frowns.

Deep breath, Beatrice reminds herself. Exhale. Inhale. 

Ava’s camera switches back on eventually, and this time, she has, in each ear, one bud of a pair of half-untangled earphones. The wires are frayed and taped over with red duct tape, and the sounds of the surrounding aviary are now blessedly punched out.

This time, too, her iPad appears to be propped up on something. The earphone cord stretches dangerously taut when Ava scrambles to sit back into her chair. 

“Sorry,” her voice careens back into the call. “I’m crashing at a friend’s home at the moment. It’s also kind of a bird shop.”

“Anyway,” she takes a deep breath, grinning, “I’m so happy to join the team. I love horror, and haunted houses, so much. And like, the OCS is– wow. It’s such a dream.” 

She lifts her arms to either side excitedly to gesticulate, and Beatrice watches Lilith balk at the unabashedly kitschy Universal Monsters tie dye oversized t-shirt. Ava leans in just enough that Beatrice can see the crudely cartoonish red-and-white design on her black flask, swirling about.

Bite me I’m scared scrawled over a crude cartoonish vampire.

“So,” Ava goes on excitedly, “I have a lot of ideas, and I can’t wait to get started.”