Ari organized his thoughts before speaking. "Honey is a co-production between Marc Platt and Andre Harrell. Marc loved your take on the script, but Andre was dead set against it—he's the original creator of the story. So, your plan to hijack the Honey crew to shoot a completely different movie... failed."
"And the good news?"
"The good news is that Marc Platt is breaking away to do it independently. He's assembling a completely new crew and director from the ground up. You just have to sit tight and wait for the green light."
Ari paused, his expression turning slightly incredulous. "By the way, Jessica Alba—the girl you specifically requested—jumped ship with him. I heard that when she found out she'd be starring opposite you, she practically begged to pay the breach of contract fee just to get out of Honey."
Raphael raised an eyebrow.
"How much was the penalty?"
"Not much. It's a low-budget flick," Ari waved it off. "The point is, she didn't even read your new script. She heard you were the male lead, and she immediately said yes."
"...That's pretty reckless of her."
"Reckless?" Ari barked a laugh. "Raph, you are the most valuable new face in Hollywood right now. Do you know what that actually means? It means if you just stand in front of a camera, there are girls out there who will pay to watch you do it. She's not reckless. She's smart."
Raphael didn't say anything.
He stood up from the sofa and walked over to the floor-to-ceiling window.
Outside, the eternal Los Angeles sun beat down on the endlessly gridlocked Highway 101.
"When is the audition for X-Men 2?"
"Next Monday. 20th Century Fox lot." Ari flipped through his schedule planner. "The Matrix Reloaded audition is next Wednesday at Warner Bros. They're both massive tentpoles. Which one are you leaning toward?"
"I'm doing both."
Ari blinked. "Both? The scheduling alone—"
"We'll adjust the schedule." Raphael looked over his shoulder. "I want them both."
Ari stared at him. He suddenly realized that the quiet, unshakeable confidence radiating from this young man—a kid he'd been repping for nearly two years—was growing exponentially stronger.
It wasn't arrogance. It wasn't ego.
It was the absolute, terrifying calmness of someone who knew exactly what he wanted, and knew exactly how to take it.
"Alright!" Ari snapped his planner shut. "I'll make the calls and figure out the logistics."
Having secured exactly what he needed from Ari, a highly satisfied Raphael headed back to his apartment.
The Pacific Coast Highway was jammed as usual. He drove with one hand draped over the steering wheel, letting the Mustang's engine rumble low and steady in the crawling traffic.
The car radio was blasting some rock station, the heavy drumbeats syncing with his pulse.
Raphael's mind was racing miles ahead.
Iceman or Pyro in X-Men 2—preferably Iceman. Seraph in The Matrix Reloaded. Marc Platt's revamped teen dance movie. And Neal Moritz's Fast and Furious 2, with him anchoring the franchise.
Four movies. Four entirely different genres.
To anyone else in Hollywood, it would look like a rookie actor desperately trying to strike while the iron was hot, grabbing anything he could get his hands on.
Only Raphael knew the truth. He was playing a massive, high-stakes game of chess.
Every single movie was a new universe he could enter.
Every single universe contained unique abilities and resources he could bring back into the real world.
The debt on his system panel hadn't been cleared—twelve million dollars hung over his head like the Sword of Damocles.
Meanwhile, in his offshore account, the fifteen million he'd invested in the NASDAQ was currently enduring the most brutal, blood-soaked crash of the post-9/11 market.
Amazon had dropped from $6 to $5.50, and then cratered to $5.10.
His unrealized losses were already north of two million dollars.
Raphael didn't flinch.
He knew exactly what Amazon would look like in his past life. Twenty years from now, it would be a $1.5 trillion empire.
A two-million-dollar paper loss right now was less than a grain of sand in the grand scheme of things.
But there was a critical flaw in his timeline: He could easily wait twenty years. His system debt could not.
The deadline dictated by the panel—Balance must be paid in full between the theatrical release of Episode II and the release of your third starring film—was ticking down like a bomb strapped to his chest.
He had to find a way to generate massive capital.
And he had to do it fast.
It was pitch black by the time he finally got back to his apartment.
The place was blissfully quiet, returning to its usual bachelor-pad state. It actually took Raphael a second to readjust; that demon with the wolf eyes had been incredibly, aggressively clingy.
His physical stamina was superhuman, but mentally, he was exhausted.
The main issue was that Adriana Lima wasn't like his usual one-night stands. She actually wanted to pursue something real.
Raphael's entire operational philosophy was to glide through the flowers without a single petal sticking to his clothes.
He didn't care about going public with a relationship—Hollywood didn't have the suffocating, puritanical "no dating" rules of the K-pop industry.
But a serious, committed relationship? Marriage? Kids?
Just entertaining the thought sent a cold shiver down his spine.
Thank God the woman was a rapidly rising supermodel. The second her agency booked her for a campaign in New York, she had to hop on a plane, giving Raphael some much-needed breathing room.
He microwaved some leftovers, scarfed them down in three bites, took a hot shower, and collapsed into bed.
Right before he fell asleep, he pulled up the system panel out of habit.
[Current Debt: $12,000,000]
[Next Starring Release: Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones (Wrapped. Scheduled Release: August 2002)] [Note: Theatrical release delayed by three months compared to the original timeline.]
[Debt Deadline: $1,000,000 due before the release of Episode II. Remaining $11,000,000 due before the release of Host's third starring film.]
Raphael closed his eyes.
His consciousness began to blur, sinking heavily into the dark.
---
When he opened his eyes again, his first coherent thought was:
Where the fuck am I?
A torrential, freezing rain was coming down in sheets, instantly soaking him to the bone.
Raphael was standing in the middle of a completely unfamiliar street. Towering, oppressive Gothic architecture loomed on all sides, the dim, yellow streetlights bleeding into the heavy rain like smeared paint.
The sky was pitch black—no moon, no stars. Just an endless, punishing deluge of water.
He looked down at himself. He was still wearing the gray t-shirt and sweatpants he'd gone to sleep in. He was barefoot.
He didn't even have shoes.
"Fuck."
Raphael cursed under his breath, his eyes rapidly scanning his surroundings.
The street was dead empty. The windows of the surrounding buildings were shut tight and completely dark. In the distance, he could barely make out the silhouette of a massive, towering spire—it looked like a cathedral, or maybe a castle.
This definitely wasn't Los Angeles.
Just as he was trying to figure out which way was north, a sudden, violently cold and bloodthirsty presence slammed into his consciousness without warning.
Raphael physically recoiled.
It felt like someone had driven an ice pick directly into his temple and twisted it.
It wasn't the Force.
It was something much more primal. More feral.
A split second later—
THUD.
A figure in black dropped from the sky, landing in a crouch less than thirty feet away from him.
The impact kicked up a spray of water. As the figure slowly stood up under the dim streetlight, the sleek, form-fitting black leather illuminated the fluid, lethal curves of her body. Her long leather trench coat hung perfectly still despite the driving rain, looking like a piece of the night sky had solidified.
She looked up.
A pair of icy, glowing blue eyes cut straight through the rain, locking onto Raphael.
Raphael's pupils contracted to pinpricks.
The tall, slender build. The skintight leather armor. The terrifyingly cold aura. And those glowing blue eyes piercing through the dark.
Selene.
The protagonist of Underworld.
The literal embodiment of a Death Dealer.
Raphael's brain went into overdrive.
Underworld—a hyper-violent, gothic nightmare universe built around a thousand-year blood war between Vampires and Lycans.
Selene was the absolute elite of the Vampire warriors. Cold, overwhelmingly powerful, and harboring a pathological hatred for Lycans.
The problem was, what the hell was she doing here?
More importantly, why was she staring at him?
According to the plot of the first movie, right now, she should be tracking the Lycans who were hunting the male lead, Michael Corvin.
But instead—
Selene took a step toward him.
The rain seemed to naturally part around her. Her movements were impossibly steady, her heavy leather boots splashing softly against the flooded pavement. Click. Clack.
The sound echoed loudly down the empty, cavernous street.
Raphael didn't move an inch.
He was running a threat assessment.
With his current stats—a constitution 1.6 times that of a peak human, Dominic Toretto's lethal street brawling, the complete swordplay mastery of the Jedi Order, and the Force—
Could he actually take down a Death Dealer who had been slaughtering werewolves for six hundred years?
The honest answer: He wasn't sure.
Selene's combat specs in the movies were insane. Her strength, agility, and reaction times were fundamentally superhuman, and she was heavily armed with custom, full-auto pistols loaded with silver and ultraviolet rounds.
Most importantly—she didn't hesitate to pull the trigger.
Raphael took a slow, deep breath.
He called on the Force, letting the warm, familiar current flood through his veins, pushing his physical readiness to its absolute limit.
Selene stopped exactly ten feet away from him.
She analyzed him, her icy gaze sweeping from his soaked t-shirt down to his bare feet, before locking back onto his eyes.
"Who are you?"
Her voice was frigid, cutting through the heavy rain like a razor blade over ice.
Raphael held his hands up, palms open, adopting a perfectly non-threatening posture. "Just a guy passing through."
"Passing through?"
Selene repeated the phrase, her tone completely devoid of emotion. "It's eleven o'clock at night. In a torrential downpour. Standing in the middle of the street completely barefoot. You expect me to believe you're just a pedestrian?"
"...Insomnia. Needed to clear my head."
Selene stared at him.
Three seconds later, she spoke again. "You're not human."
Raphael's stomach dropped.
"At least..." Selene narrowed her eyes slightly, "...you're not entirely human."
Shit.
What the hell was she sensing?
Raphael immediately reached out with the Force—not to attack, but to manipulate.
Jedi Mind Trick. He just needed to plant a subtle suggestion, make her believe she had misidentified him, and convince her to walk away.
He pushed the Force out from his consciousness, extending invisible tendrils toward her mind—
And slammed face-first into a brick wall.
No, it wasn't a wall.
It was something freezing, impossibly dense, and completely impenetrable.
The second the Force made contact with Selene's mind, it reacted like water hitting a block of solid ice. It deflected, slipped off, and failed to find any purchase whatsoever.
Raphael's eyes widened a fraction of an inch.
Is the Force useless against Vampires?
No. That wasn't it.
It was more accurate to say that Selene's consciousness was fundamentally alien. Her mind was a construct of pure, crystallized darkness; there simply weren't any cracks for the Mind Trick to exploit.
"What are you trying to do to me?"
Selene's voice dropped an octave, turning instantly lethal.
She had felt it.
She might not have understood exactly what Raphael was doing, but her predatory instincts immediately registered that something had just tried to invade her mind.
Her hand dropped to the holster on her thigh.
Raphael didn't hesitate for a microsecond.
He turned and bolted.
Fuck that. Going toe-to-toe with a six-hundred-year-old Vampire assassin on her own turf? He wasn't an idiot.
He channeled the Force straight into his legs. His acceleration was explosive, blurring into a dead sprint that was so fast he was practically hovering over the pavement. The sheer kinetic force of his movement tore through the rain, pulling a massive sheet of white water in his wake.
It felt exactly like the martial arts techniques he used to read about in novels—pure internal energy converted into impossible physical speed.