Chapter 6: Never Mess With a Little Girl
Jason officially joined Sunset Pictures, assigned to the Story Development team.
Sunset Pictures ran on a divisional structure — Animation on one side, Live-Action on the other. Jason landed in Animation, which made sense given the outline he'd submitted. It also happened to be where everyone wanted to be. The Live-Action division had been treading water for the better part of a decade, kept alive by a couple of streaming deals that nobody talked about with any enthusiasm.
The Story Development team broke down into two distinct groups. First, newcomers like Jason — people at the start of their careers, brought in to read scripts, write coverage, and absorb as much as possible before being trusted with anything original. Second, a handful of veteran story editors in the final stretch of their careers, moved into lighter advisory roles, their institutional knowledge still valuable even if their output had slowed. Sunset was an old studio with a union shop and a genuine sense of obligation to its long-timers. It kept people.
After completing HR paperwork and a studio orientation, Jason became a salaried story analyst.
Salaried meant regular hours, a monthly check, and performance bonuses tied to projects. It also meant he was inside the building, in the room, accumulating exactly the kind of experience and relationships that a cold submission from the outside could never buy.
The alternative — freelance — was out there, but it required a network he didn't have yet. Freelancers lived project to project, which was fine if you had connections feeding you work, and genuinely brutal if you didn't.
Jason needed the foundation. He took the staff role without hesitation.
His first day was orientation and paperwork. His second day, he started reading scripts.
These weren't spec scripts pulled from an online database. They were internal submissions — projects in development, pitches from staff writers, occasional outside material that had come through official channels. Before any of it moved forward, it went through Story Development for coverage and notes.
The routine was straightforward: mornings reading, afternoons in group discussion. Everyone shared their takes on what they'd read. This served two purposes — quality control on the material, and a rolling audition for the new hires. How you talked about a script told the room everything about how you thought about story.
Monthly formal evaluations. Weekly informal check-ins with the team lead.
The team lead was a man named Howard — twenty-eight years at Sunset Pictures, the last five running Story Development. He was the kind of person who'd clearly once had a short career and had landed softly in a role that let him mentor instead of produce. He seemed to genuinely enjoy it.
After the fifth day, Howard and his two deputy leads stayed late.
"Fifteen people on the team," Howard said, uncapping a pen. "Five veterans. Ten new hires. Five days in — let's go through them."
"Marcus isn't going to make it," said one deputy. "Strong academic background — English lit from Michigan — but he can't think laterally. Every note he gives is technically correct and completely misses the point."
Howard wrote Marcus — D in his notebook.
"Priya's growth has been slower than I expected."
"I'd push back on that. Her instincts are genuinely interesting. The technique will come — instincts you can't teach."
Howard considered. "Keep developing her." He wrote Priya — B.
They went through the list. When they got to Jason, both deputies spoke almost at the same time.
"Turner is something else—"
"Seriously, where did he come from—"
Howard listened to both of them describe what they'd seen over five days. Then he wrote Jason Turner — A and drew a small circle around it.
"Give the group a topic tomorrow," he said. "Original story outline, cold. See what they do with it."
Jason, the subject of that conversation, was at home making pasta and not thinking about any of it.
Five days in, he was comfortable. More than comfortable — he was enjoying himself in a way that surprised him. The reading was genuinely interesting. This world's animation canon was different from anything he knew, which meant he was encountering it fresh, mapping its preferences and patterns without the weight of his own assumptions. Every script he read taught him something about what this market valued.
Good stories were universal. But marketable stories were specific. Understanding the difference was the whole job.
He ate standing at the kitchen counter with the window open, the warm evening air carrying the sounds of the courtyard up to him.
Below, the kids had organized themselves into a game of Eagle and Chicks — one kid as the hawk, the others forming a chain behind a "mother hen," trying not to get tagged. Maya was the hawk.
Maya was four years old, one of the youngest and definitely the smallest. By any objective measurement, she should have been one of the chicks. Instead she'd apparently installed herself as the predator through sheer force of personality, and the older kids — including an eight-year-old boy who had six inches on her — had gone along with it.
Jason leaned on the windowsill and watched.
"You guys are so slow!" Maya announced cheerfully, darting left. "You can't escape me — I'm too fast!"
She ducked under the bigger boy's arm, cut back on a dime, and tagged the kid at the end of the chain — a clean grab — while the whole line screamed and scattered. She threw her arms up.
Jason smiled. He moved his dinner to the balcony and kept watching.
Then one of the kids looked up, pointed, and said something to the group.
Every small face in the courtyard turned upward.
"The Bad Guy!" someone announced.
And then it was a chorus — Bad Guy, Bad Guy — small voices overlapping, kids pointing and laughing, some of them adding their own embellishments. Maya was loudest. She'd clearly been doing some organizing work, because the group seemed to have a shared vocabulary about him that felt coordinated.
Jason sat very still in his chair.
He held his fork.
He breathed.
Ms. Liu heard the noise from inside and came out quickly, clapping her hands. "Okay, okay — inside, everyone. You're all sweaty, we're watching a movie."
She shepherded the kids back in with the practiced efficiency of someone who has moved groups of small children many times. Most of them went.
Maya, last in line, turned at the door and stuck her tongue out at Jason.
Bleh.
Then she went inside.
Jason sat on the balcony with his dinner, which no longer tasted like anything.
He took several measured breaths.
He was a grown adult. He was not going to let a four-year-old ruin his evening.
He finished eating — it tasted like cardboard but he finished it — washed up, and went downstairs to Ms. Carol's office to ask about Lily.
Ms. Carol was at her desk knitting something small and yellow, which she explained was a baby hat for her daughter-in-law, who was five months along and apparently going to be very well prepared.
She looked up when Jason knocked. "Lily?"
"Any update from the precinct?"
"I called them two days ago. Still working on locating family." She set down her knitting. "I'm going in tomorrow morning to see if there's anything we can do to move it along."
Jason nodded. "Let me know if you need anything."
He went back upstairs.
He sat at his desk for a moment.
Until Lily's situation was resolved, Maya was going to keep blaming him for it. That was clear. She had her own logic, it was internally consistent, and she was not the kind of kid who quietly revised her position.
He should never have grabbed her that day. He understood that now. He'd reached out trying to be helpful and had instead become the villain in a four-year-old's ongoing story.
Confucius, he recalled dimly from somewhere, had said something about never underestimating a small woman.
He was beginning to feel the wisdom of that.