Ari & Lan | Backstage | Complete | 1/2
“Hey, those are meant for the other room. You, make sure the appetizers are ready for when the actors pass by.” Lan walked briskly behind the scenes, sometimes turning around to check on one person or another, usually with some remark of what they were doing wrong. No comments meant good performance, praises were highly overrated at that moment.
“No, I didn’t order the soup to be brought here! Just light beverages, nobody wants to start act two with a bunch of tipsy performers, fun as it might sound.” Left and right she shot orders. She wouldn’t admit it, and it certainly didn’t show but oh how she was enjoying being in charge, at least for a little while.
As she turned a corner, she would behold one of the staff, slack-jawed and frozen in place as a familiar bard picked items off his tray. Frozen in place, perhaps, because her costume was unzipped down to the small of her back, and although the bard herself didn’t appear to notice, the banquet server clearly had little experience with actresses.
As for Ari herself, she was ravenous (healing, she found, did that to a person), and there was still an entire act to go -- from the a cappella quartet to the final chorus and then into the planned encore -- and she found herself desperate to keep up her energy so as to get through it.
She relinquished the tray at last to offer a smile and a friendly wave; Lan’s voice had preceded her down the narrow backstage hall, and Ari had known she was coming long before she arrived.
Taking a few more steps towards the poor guy, Lan basically swatted him away. “I’ll take the tray in a moment, go mess something else would you.” And lo and behold, at least he did that alright. “Let a man serve food for a family and he will do great, but give him the task to do the same for an entire auditorium and he’ll suddenly forget how to walk straight.”
Turning to Ari, Lan took a moment to give her a once over. An initially unimpressed, yet increasingly amused once over. “Usually I wouldn’t just let someone hog the food like that, but you do seem to need that more than most, Miss Chiaro. Eat up while you can.” If it sounded just a tiny bit like a challenge to finish the tray, well... it probably was.
"The costumer had an emergency, apparently," Ari said, not at all fussed. She had twenty minutes yet; she'd sort herself out in time. This was by no means the quickest change she had had this evening. "A bit of assistance would not be amiss," she said, looking over her shoulder at her bare back. It wouldn't be nearly as annoying if it weren't so cool back here. "Perhaps I will make my most valiant effort at finishing off my unexpected bounty while you do."
“I have no doubt you will,” Lan commented as she set the tray somewhere safe before turning to see what she was dealing with. Nothing she hadn’t had to zip up before, apparently. “Just stay quiet now.” It was a simple matter of holding the dress in place, locating the zipper and making sure everything was where it was supposed to be as she pulled it up.
There might have been a few extra seconds of silent bare back admiration, but hey, she was helping.
“There, all set. How does it feel?”
“Perfect.” Ari ran her hands over the full skirt, figuring on five minutes to fix her hair -- which gave her at least ten more to continue moving the contents of the tray into her stomach. “Everything going smoothly out there, I trust?”