Chapter 7 – Lighting the Board
The pen's weight stayed with him.
It was a cheap pen, if you looked at it with the eyes of a man who valued gold. Plastic. A little scratchy. The kind you could lose in a rental car and not care. But when Ivar and Louise stepped back into the Los Angeles light, the pen might as well have been Excalibur. He could feel it in his pocket, pressing through the fabric, a reminder every time his hip moved that he had signed himself into stewardship—ghosts, spines, and all.
They didn't speak in the hallway. They didn't speak in the elevator. They didn't speak in the lobby where a potted palm tried to look dignified and failed. Outside, the heat hit them like a greeting that forgot your name.
Louise slid her sunglasses on and finally exhaled. "You're pale."
"I'm loud," he said.
"Not today," she answered, and reached up to straighten the collar of his jacket. The gesture was domestic, intimate, an anchor's hand on a storm's neck. "Today you're a man who inherited a city made of ink."
He kissed her knuckles the way Stan had kissed hers, turning reverence into a private joke. "Then let's light it."
They didn't celebrate. They went to work.
---
The war room in Northern Star's borrowed L.A. office was a long table and a dozen chairs, four whiteboards leaning against walls still scuffed by previous tenants, and a smell of freshly unpacked electronics. The team—Rosa patched in from the warehouse, the community lead yawning with a grin that said she'd murdered three algorithms before breakfast, a legal consul who looked like a saint and swore like an angry priest— waited on a video tile while Ivar drew circles.
Not columns. Circles. He kept drawing them, overlapping them, concentric and messy until the whiteboard looked like a map of ripples from a boulder tossed into a still lake.
"Film here," he said, tapping the largest ring. "Iron Man, Spider-Man Begins, X-Men: Children of the Atom, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Future Foundation. We shoot all four within thirty months. Tight windows, staggered releases, post teams that share pipelines instead of duplicating waste. Cameos that mean something—threads, not confetti."
He tapped the next ring. "Television here. Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. That show is spine, not appendix. Its midseason arcs intersect the films' consequences. Directors will hate the coordination. Good. They'll get over it or I'll hire better ones. We don't 'nod' at events. We bleed from them."
He tapped a third ring. "Gaming. Launch titles that live in the same world without being homework. No retellings. New corners that teach us where fans want to go."
He drew a star through all three rings until the lines cut themselves into a symbol that made sense only if you felt it. "This is the circle," he said. "We own it or we don't bother."
Rosa's video tile flickered. "Warehouse says hi. Also we crossed ninety-eight thousand and change on preorders. We're going to need more boxes."
"Order them," Ivar said. "And send Open Play pallets to the hospital list first. If any hospital admin tries to make it PR before kids touch controllers, send me their number and a shovel."
The legal consul cleared her throat. "The Marvel term has clauses that look like landmines if you dance wrong. You want Agents to be spine, you need new format language with the network partners. ABC isn't going to play—"
"Good," Ivar said. "They don't have to play. The CW will. We already have the map there, and if they want to share, they'll get Aeolian benefits."
"Aeolian?"
"Wind that plays the harp," he said with a grin. "It'll make music whether they try or not."
Louise leaned in, a fingertip against the corner of the board where he'd crammed the word Rogue in small crooked letters, like a secret. "We should lock Rogue's arc into the spine early," she said. "Not as a romance satellite. As a thesis. Contact and consequence."
"Agreed," he said immediately, then caught himself and looked around. "Anyone here planning to accuse me of nepotism, do it now. I'll listen for a full sixty seconds and then I'll prove you wrong."
The room laughed because he'd left them no other choice, but the tension shifted—if there had been a question, he had pulled it into daylight where it could dry out and die.
"All right," he said, clapping once. "Phones. Directors. Now."
---
If there is a tone only directors recognize, it's the one spoken by a man who will give them money and freedom and then stand behind them when the knives come. Ivar had that tone. It came factory-installed with the storm.
The first call was to a man who had cut his teeth making indie films where broken men learned smaller ways to be whole. He was funny, he understood actors, and he loved machines the way a child loves magic tricks.
"Iron Man," Ivar said the moment the director picked up, no greeting. "He's not an apology for capitalism; he's a man who builds a heart and then tries to keep up with it. The comedy is a weapon; the suit is a confession. I'll keep the suits off your back if you keep cynicism off my screen."
Silence, then a breathy laugh. "That's your pitch?"
"That's the truth."
"Who are you casting?"
"A man who knows how to make his demons into charm and then wonder what the charm costs," Ivar said. "If I can get him sober enough to read pages without bleeding on them."
"Then let's talk pages," the director said.
"Tonight," Ivar said. "I'll bring a stack that looks like a blueprint and a prayer."
He hung up and dialed again.
"Spider-Man," he told the next director, a woman with eyes like she could see sound. "A kid. Not a thirty-year-old wishing his knees didn't hurt. A Queens boy who saves a bike before he saves a city. He cracks jokes because he's processing fear. He fails—a lot—and the failure is the growth, not the grief porn."
"Can I shoot the swings like dance?" she asked.
"Shoot them like joy."
"How old is the kid?"
"As young as the lawyers will let me," he said. "And then we'll hire a tutor who can keep up with him."
Another call.
"Fantastic Four is not a punchline," he told a duo who finished each other's sentences in edits and in life. "It's a story about found family in a lab coat. Reed is not a scold; he's a man who understands time the way other people understand weather. Sue is the center; invisibility is a metaphor you don't exploit for cheap gags. Johnny is fun until he isn't; Ben breaks your heart every time he smiles."
"And the villain?" one asked.
"Ego," Ivar said. "And a Latverian doctor who thinks godhood is just a better grade of permission."
They whistled in sympathy and hunger.
He made one more call and stood up for it, because some calls are better done with your blood vertical.
"X-Men," he said to a director whose last three films had been about institutions breaking children in polite ways. "Mutants are not special effects; they're the thesis. School is not a setting; it's a promise. The very first shot is a hand refusing to let go of another hand in a crowd that wants it to—then we cut to a classroom where the lesson is how to hold anyway."
There was quiet on the line, the kind that sounds like someone trying not to cry.
"Who's Rogue?" the director asked.
"Louise."
"Can she carry the heartbreak?"
"She can carry a building," he said.
"Then send me the pages," the director whispered. "I want to make a film that makes the wrong men uncomfortable in public."
He hung up and looked at Louise. She was watching him as if reading a favorite book in a new translation. "Do you ever breathe?" she asked.
"Only when you look at me like that," he said, and let himself kiss her in front of the whiteboard where the circle had started to look like a real machine.
---
They ate in the office because eating elsewhere would have felt like pretending. Burritos. Always burritos. The grease bled into the paper and left maps of decisions.
"Agents," Louise said between bites, tilting her phone so he could see a list of names. "We can get a showrunner who did miracles on a spy series and a science writer who hates pseudoscience enough to make it believable on television."
"We'll need a casting anchor," he said. "A face that reads as decent without reading as dumb."
"Coulson."
He snapped his fingers. "Coulson. A man who looks like he fills out forms and then gets shot on a Thursday and keeps going anyway."
"And Daisy," she said. "We make a hacker who grows into a quake without making the journey a montage. If we never earn it, we don't do it."
He nodded. "Find a woman who can roll her eyes and break your heart in the same breath."
"And budgets?" the legal consul asked from the corner where she was already building cages for monsters he insisted on petting.
"Reasonable," he said. "We'll spend where water hits the audience's face. We'll save where light can lie. We'll build two sets that pretend they're six. We'll partner with military surplus and a prop house two towns over, then make the stunt team our best-paid artists."
The legal consul raised an eyebrow. "You're going to spoil them."
"They're going to spoil me back with gravity," he said. "It's a fair trade."
He wrote a sentence at the top of a new page: AoS intersects with films at three meaningful beats. Not winks. Bruises. Then he underlined bruise until the paper threatened to tear.
---
Afternoon burned into the kind of late light that makes the city wear its bones. The CW dinner waited at seven; a meeting with a VFX house sat at five; somewhere between them he needed to convince a composer that brass and synth could hold hands without arguing.
He stepped into the hallway for air and almost collided with a man whose smile arrived a half-second before he did.
"Thought you might be here," the man said, sticking out his hand. "I've been running a ragged little operation keeping continuity straight for a decade. My friends call me a librarian with a budget. You can call me whatever you want as long as I'm allowed to color-code things."
"Do you like power or puzzles?" Ivar asked, shaking.
"Puzzles that become power," the man said cheerfully.
"Good," Ivar said. "I need a brain that can track five timelines, four franchises, and a television arc without losing humility."
The librarian grinned. "I have humility scheduled for Thursdays."
"Sorry," Ivar said. "We work Thursdays."
They started walking and didn't stop for two hours. In that time they reinvented the document nobody had successfully written: a living continuity bible that wasn't a spreadsheet, wasn't a legal landmine, wasn't a trap, but a story in its own right—hyperlinked scenes, character motivations that grew rather than calcified, timelines that could breathe. They built a tool instead of a rule.
Louise joined them on the third lap around the floor, adding a note in neat script: "Continuity is the shadow of character, not its jailer."
"Who wrote that? It's good," the librarian asked.
"Me," Louise said, unapologetic. "Put it at the top of every page. I want directors to see it when the coffee hits."
---
The VFX house looked like every startup that had accidentally found religion: a warehouse full of black foam panels, men and women in hoodies manipulating the light of imaginary suns, monitors flickering with previsualized chase scenes that had not, and might never, exist.
The lead—a woman with a buzz cut and a T-shirt that said YES, IT'S RENDERING—met them at the door with the exhausted authority of a battlefield surgeon.
"You're the storm," she said to Ivar. "You better be nicer to my artists than the last god-star who came through."
"I'm not nice," he said. "I pay on time and I don't ask for ten impossible things before breakfast."
"That makes you a unicorn," she said. "Come see our sins."
They did. They watched a pipeline go from storyboard to blocking to animatic to rough sim to a shot that made Ivar actually shut up for a full fifteen seconds.
"How much?" he asked finally.
"Half of what you're used to hearing for this quality," she said. "Because we don't waste your hours making producers feel important."
"Done," he said. "I want iron that looks like it weighs eighty pounds and a suit that moves like a secret. I want webbing that remembers physics and forgets it only when joy demands it. I want a stretch that feels like a violin string, not rubber. I want mutation to read as biology, not wizardry. Give me pores. Give me breath."
She stared at him, then nodded once. "Oh," she said softly. "You actually know what you're buying."
"Worse," he said. "I know what I'm selling."
They shook on it. The buzz cut stayed serious. "You bring me a producer who tries to buy time with screaming, I'll put him in a room with a render farm with no air conditioning."
"I'll lock the door," he said.
---
The composer took the meeting in a studio that looked like a church got jealous of a spaceship. Analog synths with knobs worn smooth by love. A grand piano with its lid up, strings catching light like threads of fate.
"I want brass," Ivar said, leaning on the piano like he owned good posture. "I want metal that sounds like it remembers when men built bridges with their hands. I want synth that doesn't pretend it's a joke from the eighties. I want a melody you can hum and a rhythm you can drive to, and I want the spaces between them to feel like a city breathing."
The composer blinked, then smiled. "You want a theme," he said. "Some of your competitors forgot those were allowed."
"I want a theme you can whistle walking out of the theater and then hate whistling because you can't stop," Ivar said. "And when the TV hits the midseason convergence, I want a chord that tells people the worlds have touched without dropping a banner."
"You're asking for leitmotif discipline," the composer said, mouth quirking in a way that made Ivar think he might cry in joy.
"I'm asking for love," Ivar said. "Paid love. On time."
They shook. On the way out, the composer called after him, "What does Spider-Man sound like?"
"Like a grin that got stuck in your throat," he said, and left him laughing.
---
Night gathered again. Dinners with the CW used to make Ivar feel like he was sneaking into a castle. Tonight it felt like he had designed the moat.
The head of programming sat with a glass of water held like whiskey and her jaw set like a promise. "You're back," she said. "Did you bring trouble?"
"Always," he said, and slid a folded schedule across the table. "Batwoman—pilot in nine months. Titans—pilot in six. Doom Patrol—order to series with a backdoor out of Titans episode three. Constantine—straight to series. Lucifer—first season order, ten episodes, with permission to cross at midseason."
She read. She didn't blink. "The contracts are nightmares."
"We'll hire better dreamers," he said.
"Can you get me a night team that knows how to light a face without losing the city behind it?"
"I already stole them from a crime show that forgot how to be quiet."
"And Megan?"
"She's the rooftop," he said. "We lit the fire."
"Good," she said, finally letting herself smile. "Give me a Bat who scares the right men."
"She will," he said. "And when she does, we'll hold the shot a second too long so the boys at home have time to unlearn something."
They ate. They argued about budgets like reasonable enemies. They came to terms that made both of them feel like they'd cheated the other. Which is how you know you've made a deal that might survive gravity.
When they stood, she shook Louise's hand longer than necessary. "If he forgets who he's raining for," she said, "call me. I'll bring an umbrella."
"I'll bring thunder," Louise replied.
---
In the car afterward, silence again. Not the stunned kind. The earned kind. The city slid by in a blur of neon and exhaustion. Somewhere a siren sang into the night; somewhere a street vendor wiped down a cart and counted out rent in ones.
Ivar pulled the pen from his pocket and rolled it between his fingers.
"You're going to keep that," Louise said.
"I'm going to put it in a frame and hang it in the bathroom," he said. "Over the letter from the Very Large Company. Above the toilet paper."
She snorted. "Sacrilege."
"Of course," he said. "This is Hollywood."
He tucked the pen away and leaned his head back against the seat. Exhaustion arrived like a friend who didn't bother knocking.
"Say it," Louise murmured.
"What?"
"What you won't say until I make you."
He closed his eyes. "I'm afraid."
"Of what?"
"Of deserving it," he said. "Of carrying it right. Of making the circle and finding out I left someone outside of it."
She slid her hand into his. "Then widen it."
He squeezed back. "I will."
They rode the rest of the way holding hands like an old promise.
---
Morning came with calls he hadn't scheduled. A school librarian from Bakersfield who had gotten three Open Play units and cried in his voicemail in a way that made his throat ache. A warehouse manager who sent a photo of his kid asleep on a stack of Northern Star boxes like a prince on a hard bed. A text from Megan: Cape fitting. Feels good. Rooftop when?
Soon, he sent back. You'll own the night.
He stepped into the office and found the librarian-with-a-budget already there, hair a little wilder, eyes a little brighter.
"I made something," the librarian said, presenting a tablet like an offering. "It's the continuity bible. But it's not a bible. It's a garden. We can plant, we can prune, we can harvest. It remembers every seed."
He swiped. Hyperlinks. Notes. Character arcs that curved without snapping. A calendar that looked like a storm system tracking landfall.
He grinned. "This is witchcraft."
"It's documentation," the librarian said. "With manners."
Louise came up on his other side. "Put Rogue at the center of the X-Men page," she said. "Not because we're lovers, but because it's true."
The librarian did it. The circle shifted almost imperceptibly, and everything suddenly made more sense.
"Call the indie cinematographer who paints with sodium vapor," Ivar said. "We need him for Queens at dusk."
"Already messaged," Louise said.
"Call the stunt coordinator who thinks wire work is for cowards," he added. "I want real weight in motion."
"Left him a voicemail," she said. "He texted back a bicep."
"Hot," he said.
"Don't make me fight him," she said, amused and deadly.
He laughed, then sobered. "We have to call the families," he said.
"Which families?" the librarian asked.
"The creators' families," Ivar answered. "Stan gave us the soul. The papers have the bones. But the blood comes from the people who weren't invited to boardrooms. We'll invite them now. We'll make contracts that don't read like theft. We'll add cards and checks and thank-yous that buy a porch instead of a headstone."
The librarian blinked fast. Louise's hand found his elbow and squeezed.
"Chaos incarnate," she said softly.
"In a good way," he said.
"In the only way that matters," she answered.
---
By the time the sun fell again, the board was a palimpsest of strokes and rewrites. The circle had grown; the center held. A dozen names had said yes, three had said I'll think about it, and one had said hell no in a way that sounded like a future maybe.
Ivar stood at the glass, looking down at a city that didn't know it had already changed.
He took the pen out one last time and clicked it. The sound was tiny. The world didn't hear it. He did.
"Tomorrow," he said, not to the room, not to the city, not even to Louise, though she heard him, "we start shooting the future."
"Tonight," Louise said, coming to stand beside him, shoulder to shoulder, "you sleep."
"I don't know how," he admitted.
"I do," she said, taking his hand and leading him toward the door. "Follow me."
He followed.
Behind them, on the whiteboard, the circles glowed under the lamplight like orbits settling into harmony. On the corner, someone—Louise, of course—had written in small, stubborn letters:
Affordable gaming is the best version of gaming.
Affordable stories are the best version of stories.
Make both true.