Konnichiwa minna san, so this is my new story that I've decided to post. And I know you all must be thinking I must be nuts to post a new story when you haven't finished your old story, well I will continue on my other stories but this one just keeps bugging me for days so I decided why not give this one a try and see what my happy readers think about this one. So there you have it! just read it and give me your reviews and tell me if I should continue with this or not.
HAPPY READING
BUTTERFLY YUNA X
"Sakura, come on", it's time to go". Tsunade's husky voice had an edge to it.
She sounded both totally wired and hugely relieved. I told her I'd be down in twenty minutes and jumped to my feet, smiling excitedly at my reflection in the mirrored wardrobe. The two of us had been chafing in the luxurious embrace of the Imperial Hotel Tokyo for the last three days. We'd demolished tinfoil's of salted cashews and tray full's of fancy chocolate, sweated in the sauna, primped in the parlour, and watched television mindlessly. All with one-eyed on the massive bay windows, down which smooth sheets of snot-coloured water had been pouring for thirty-six hours straight.
"It could be an award-winning ad for Coldarin or something," Tsunade had said, gloomily surveying the rain that morning, lying on her tummy with her chin propped up in her hands.
"One of those intense, Cannes-Lion-winning type of ads, made on a million-dollar budget. God has a thunderous phlegmy cough and a rainy runny nose. The mortals, drowning incelestial snot, spray the skies with Coldarin mist. The satanic streptococci flee, the Almighty recovers and a huge double rainbow forms in the sky and morphs into the Coldarin logo. Slow fade out." I'd shot her a concerned look - it wouldn't do for my creative director to have a nervous breakdown bang at the beginning of the biggest magazine ad-shoot of the year - and quickly handed her the Room Service menu for some light eating.
"It'll stop today, Tsunade," I said soothingly, after she'd ordered two Prawns-Pepper-Salt platters and a Triple Hot-Choc-Fudge in a tearful voice.
"We'll shoot tonight. You'll see." Sure enough, by seven in the evening the rain had reduced to a slow snivel and an apologetic-looking sun had put in a cameo appearance before drowning itself in the Arabian Sea, leaving behind a clear, star-studded sky.
And now Tsunade had called. The Zing! Magazine shoot was finally on!
Humming happily to myself, I dived into the shower cubicle at seven forty-five, and emerged in a cloud of steam at five past eight. Then I wiped the steamed-up mirror and examined my face critically. People are always saying so cute! when they see me and grabbing my cheeks and squeezing them with gusto, which is okay when you're a moppet in red corduroy dungarees but not so good when you are a working woman armed with a degree from a lesser business school, frantic to project a mature image in your job as a mid-level client-servicing executive in Tokyo's largest ad agency and twenty-four years old to boot. By that age, people should be more interested in squeezing your butt, right? Wrong.
"I don't know what it is, Sakura," Jiraiya, my boss, (a forty-three-year-old, hardened adman, not some cheeky, empty-nester uncle) once told me, "but just looking at your cheeks makes my thumb and index finger sort of spasm - I want to squeeze 'em and squeeze 'em and squeeze 'em till they pop." He got a manic gleam in his protuberant eyes when he said this and I backed away from him hurriedly, thinking, he's nuts.
Oh well, at least I'm not hideously deformed in any other way. I mean, my skin's okay, and my hair's actually quite nice - it's Pink and shiny and cascades halfway down my back in amass of bouncy ringlets. I never tie it up.
Now I shook it out and yanked open my duffel bag. It wouldn't do to be late. The call time for the shoot was nine p.m. and it was only a short drive from where I was to the location, Ballard Estate. We'd cordoned off and got police permission and protection for the entire week. We needed both because we were blocking busy roads and because we were shooting with one of the biggest stars in the country. Which brought me back to the all-important question of what cool outfit I was going to wear.
I finally settled on loose khaki cargos and a skinny black shirt. Then I fluffed out my hair, yanked on my red sneakers, grabbed my matching-matching red rucksackand slammed out of the room, hugely excited. Tsunade was waiting for me in the lobby, grinning happily, tall, blonde -haired, strong-featured (her cheekbones are fully out there) and strong-minded too. She's nursed me through not one but two major heartbreaks that I don't like to talk about. She wears fusionish clothes and writes some pretty zany scripts. She's very cranky nowadays though, being fully nicotine-deprived. Her younger son (twenty-six months old) is refusing to relinquish his rights to her Goddess-like breasts.
"I swear, Sakura," she'd said on the flight in from Tokyo, "seven whole days away from him, this time I'm going to pull the plug for good" Anyway, she said I looked nice and made some cheapie remark about how I'd duded up to meet famous stars. I beamed like a little kid!
We move our way through the crowd, holding our official CREW tags before us like talismans. The security was very tight, guards were everywhere, prodding a million curious people to stay behind the cordons. Finally, we reached the crossroads, the location for the night, and Tsunade waved to the director, Genma - handsome-ish, , hat and ponytail - who signalled to the guards to let us through.
"Hey girls," he said grinning, "What do you think?" I looked around, totally awestruck. The place was at the centre of four massive roads, black, gleaming and beautiful . Noble colonial buildings loomed behind huge lattice-leaved neem trees, their pillared corridors and Gothic balconies shining white in the moonlight. Bang in the middle of the crossroads was an old fountain and a statue of a crouching gargoyle that the art department had mocked up to exactly match the architecture of the period.
"Gotham City," grinned Genma. "Just as I promised!'", "How come I've never seen this place before?" Tsunade asked as he led us to a semicircle of blue chairs near to the place where the shooting was going to take place.
"You have," he said in answer to Tsunade's question. "It's just that it's always choc-a-bloc with traffic so you've never noticed how pretty it is.
"Uh, what's this little TV thing?" I asked pointing to a set in front of us.
"A video-assist," Genma said sweetly.
"Exactly how long have you been in advertising?''.
"Two-and-a-half years," I said defensively. "But this is my first big film shoot".
''That, my dear, is obvious," he said breathing heavily. "Kenny, come and give young...uh...Sakura here a crash course in film-making while I discuss the storyboard with Tsunade .'
An earnest looking boy in a red baseball cap hurried up and led me away even as Tsunade said, "Genma, get off my student's case. She's a good kid."
I wasn't too hassled, though. I've figured out that if you wander around looking smart and never ask any questions - stupid or otherwise - you don't learn much in life. Kenny walked me around the location. He introduced me to the cameraman, who lay flat on his stomach on the road, peering rather macho-ly down into a camera eyepiece like it was the barrel of a sub-machine gun.
"He's framing for the shot," said Kenny.
"Anything he shoots there, Genma can see on the assist where you guys were sitting."
Next, he pointed to a guy sitting hunched over some equipment, with earphones on.
"There's a sound system too, it'll play the track so everybody can lip-sync the words and these," he stopped and indicated with his arm, "Are the make-up vans." I looked up to see three big white vans the size of minibuses, lined up next to each other. A huge fourth van - a generator van, Kenny said - was parked alongside. Each van had a sheet of paper stuck to the door: DIRECTOR, AGENCY and a third that made my heart race a little faster. Uchiha.
To be continue...